- w MEN AND LETTERS First Edition of 750 copies printed April 12th, 1901. Second Edition 0/ 750 copies printed June 14th, 1901. Third Edition 0/ 1000 copies printed July 20th, igoi. Fourth Edition 0/ 1000 copies printed Sept. 16th, 1901. MEN 8? LETTERS BY HERBERT PAUL I JOHN LAM-:, THE HODLEY HEAD, LONDON AND NEW YORK. MCMI Fourth Edition Printed by Richard Folkard & Son, Devonshire Street. London, W.C. tr- a: ■c DQ Cj \ TO D. G. ■3 n iZiWVGO Most of these Essays appeared in the Nineteenth Century, and it is a pleasant duty to thank the Editor, Mr. James Knowles, for his kindness in permitting their reproduction. CONTENTS The Classical Poems of Tennyson Matthew Arnold's Letters The Decay of Classical Quotation Sterne - - - - - Gibboi 's Life and Letters The Victorian Novel The Philosophical Radicals - The Art of Letter- Writing - it Tractarian - The Father of Letter^ • The Prince of Journalists Macaulay and His Critics The Autocrat of the Dinner Tabic I 48 67 90 119 I5S 179 209 241 26l 284 j'4 MEN AND LETTERS THE CLASSICAL POEMS OF TENNYSON The most superficial reader of Tennyson, if he has any ^knowledge of the classics himself, must be struck by the \scholarship of the poet. Browning answered to Macau- lay's definition of a scholar. He could read Plato with his feet on the fender. Tennyson, like Macaulay him- self, was a great deal more than that. His honours at Cambridge were confined to the prize poem, which was English, which he afterwards regretted having written, and which some of his more zealous admirers declare to have been chosen by mistake. I do not know that Mr. Swinburne greatly distinguished himself in the schools at Oxford. Yet there are very few Ireland scholars who could have written the Greek elegiacs at the beginning of Atalanta in Calydon. But although, perhaps because, Tennyson never read hard for a classical examination, he could at any time have passed one. He was familiar with the niceties of scholarship, as well as with the \ masterpieces of literature ; he was a competent and an interested critic of the Greek and Latin verse into which B 2 MEN AND LETTERS his own poems were rendered ; he could even appreciate that elaborate ' Olympian ' which was ' rolled from out the ghost of Pindar in him ' by Professor Jebb. It is not a peculiarity of Tennyson, but a characteristic of all scholars who are neither pedants nor sciolists, that he, and they, appear shallow to the shallow, and deep to the profound. What Swift said of books in general is especially true of the classics in particular. Many men treat them as they treat lords. They learn their titles, and then boast of their acquaintance. Enthusiastic lovers of golf have been heard to justify their enthusiasm by alleging that their favourite game can be played from morning till night, from the first of January to the 31st of December, and from the schoolroom to the grave. The boy who loves Homer and Virgil makes friends for life. They are no fair weather companions. They remained with Tennyson till his death. They moulded and coloured his verse. * I that loved thee since my days began,' he says of the * Mantovano.' In his last volume, the aftermath of a glorious harvest, he returns to the old subject of Paris and OEnone. The half-century which rolled between the first CEnone and the second had not diminished the reverent affection of the author for the old names and characters, the forms more real than living man, nurslings of immortality. Quintus Calaber was not a sublime poet. He continued Homer neither well nor wisely. He is perhaps better known as Quintus Smyrnaeus, and is scarcely worth knowing at all. Tennyson was the first to describe CEnone deserted by Paris, as Ariadne was deserted by Theseus, but with no Dionysus to console her. Everybody remembers the opening lines. There lies a vale in Ida, lovelier Than all the valleys of Ionian hills. THE CLASSICAL POEMS OF TENNYSON 3 The swimming vapour slopes athwart the glen, Puts forth an arm, and creeps from pine to pine, And loiters, slowly drawn. On either hand The lawns and meadow-edges, midway down, Hang rich in flowers, and far below them roars The long brook falling thro' the clov'n ravine In cataract after cataract to the sea. Behind the valley topmost Gargarus Stands up and takes the morning : but in front The gorges, opening wide apart, reveal Troas and Ilion's column'd citadel, The crown of Troas. The Shakespearean ' takes the morning ' was probably intended to suggest the flowers which ' take the winds of March with beauty' in A Winter's Talc. The cataract re-appears in the posthumous poem, or rather in the dedication of it to the Master of Balliol.* Hear my cataract's Downward thunder in hollow and glen. It was the judgment of Paris which, according to the legend, disturbed his married life with CEnone. The subject is as familiar to a certain class of Greek poets as Susannah and the Elders to a certain class of Italian painters. Its later developments may be found in some epigrams of the Greek Anthology not quoted in the admirable selection of Mr. Mackail. Tennyson's description of Aphrodite is a marvel of delicacy and refinement. She is the Uranian, not the Pandemic god- dess. Malian Aphrodite, beautiful, Fresh as the foam, new-bathed in Paphian wells, h rosy slender fingers, backward drew Prom her warm brows and bosom her deep hair Ambrosial, golden round her lucid throat And ihoaldei • : from the violet 1 hei lijdit foot Shorn ron white, and o'< t her rounded form, Between the shadows of the vine-bunches, 1 I ated the glowing sunlight.-,, a| .she moved. • Mr. Jowett. B— 2 4 MEN AND LETTERS M. Taine considers that Tennyson could not have been a great poet, because he was a respectable man, so unlike Alfred De Musset. M. Taine might have been acquainted with an English imitator of De Musset, who would have equally disturbed his critical equilibrium. Probably the most hackneyed lines in CEnone are two which Tennyson altered, not, as I venture to think, and as I have the authority of Lord Coleridge in thinking, for the better. Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, These three alone lead life to sovereign power. So Pallas is now made to express herself, and one cannot quite say that the anachronism is as glaring as when in Troilus and Cnssida Hector quotes Aristotle at the siege of Troy. But what Pallas used to say was — Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self control, Are the three hinges of the gates of life. Why Tennyson rejected that noble and simple line one would like to know. What he would have said if anybody else had suggested the emendation, one may easily conjecture. Yet he did not always neglect the remarks of irresponsible, indolent reviewers. Iphigenia, in A Dream of Fair Women, originally described her own fate in the following words — One drew a sharp knife through my tender throat, Slowly, and nothing more. • What more did she want ? ' asked a flippant and irreverent critic. Tennyson felt the difficulty of answering that question. He gave it up, and wrote the present version : The bright death quivered at the victim's throat ; Touched ; and I knew no more. In Euripides, or what has come down to us as THE CLASSICAL POEMS OF TENNYSON 5 Euripides, the priest is about to perform the operation when a deer is miraculously substituted for Iphigenia, who mysteriously disappears and is removed by Artemis to Tauri, in the Chersonese, the modern Balaclava. But the last hundred lines of the Iphigenia in Aulis are almost undoubtedly spurious. That Tennyson was a student of Euripides can be proved from his poems. It has been frequently and truly said that Euripides was the most human of the Greek dramatists. He was also the most political and the most modern. He was the special favourite of that brightest and manliest of scholars, Charles Fox. Macaulay lived to repent, so far at least as Euripides was concerned, of his paradox that tragedy is corrupted by eloquence, and comedy by wit. It was German pedantry misunderstanding Aristophanic hu- mour that begot the idea of the inferiority of Euripides. Between Tennyson and Euripides there was the tie of restless and yet reverent speculation about the signifi- cance of life and the destiny of man. Both of them shocked the orthodoxy of their day, such as it was. In rebuking Euripides it spoke through the mouth of Aristophanes. In rebuking Tennyson it spoke through the mouth of Liddon. There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds. was repugnant to the Canon of St. Paul's. The gospel according to the great comedian was not tolerant of such sentiments as the suggestion that life was death, and that what was called death was really life. n't 4' olitv ei ftV toOO' o *«'itA>)Tat Oartlv, to ft* &* 6ytjaKtiv eo-Ti';— Fragment S30. In The Coming of Arthur there is a passage describing the King's services to Cameliard, which seems to me thoroughly Euripidean both in style and substance. 6 MEN AND LETTERS Then he drave The heathen, after, slew the beast, and felled The forest, letting in the sun. It was the special mission of Heracles i^rjfjbepwaat fyalav, to civilise the land, and the record of Arthur's exploits recalls more than one of the labours of Heracles. ' The letting in of light on this choked land ' is Mr. Browning's very free paraphrase of itjij/Aepwcrac >yalav. ' The Death of CEnone ' represents Paris wounded by the poisoned arrow of Philoctetes, ' lame, crooked, reeling, livid,' but confident that his wife would keep her promise and exercise her power. The scene is thoroughly Tennysonian. ' CEnone, by thy love, which once was mine, Help ! heal me I I am poison'd to the heart.' ' And I to mine,' she said. ' Adulterer, Go back to thine adulteress and die ! ' Homer, curiously enough, makes only a single reference, and that a very indirect one, to the judgment of Paris. In the last book of the Iliad he describes the gods as pitying Hector for the indignities cast upon him by Achilles, whom Paris afterwards slew, and instigating Hermes to steal his body away. But Here and Athene joined Poseidon in his implacable hostility to the Trojans, because ' Alexander,' that is, Paris, ' rejected those goddesses when they came to him in the inner court, and preferred her who gratified his passions in so fatal a way.' It is to be observed that these divinities displayed their charms in strict seclusion, Paris being the only male spectator. The fatal gift was, of course, Helen, eXevavs eXavSpos €Xe7TToXt<;, as ^Eschylus calls her, whose face it was that ' launched a thousand ships and burned the topless towers of Ilion,' whose form and features made the Trojans exclaim, when they saw her on the walls of Troy, THE CLASSICAL POEMS OF TENNYSON 7 oil vtfUnt T>u>a? cat. ivKVT)iJ.i.&a.t 'Axaious toijjS' an't yvkaiici irokiiv \(>6vov aKyea. na.a\tiv. That is, perhaps, the finest compliment in all literature, and may be compared with the remarks which, according to Brantome, were made upon Margaret of Valois by the Spanish soldiers of Don Juan. CEnone is not Homeric. Her marriage is too early for the Iliad to take account of it. Her death, like the death of Paris himself, is too late. The Gargarus of which Tennyson speaks in the earlier of the two poems is the Virgilian Gargara, a neuter plural. Ipsa suas mirantur Gargara messes. But Tennyson has authority for the singular, which occurs in the Iliad. He is not easily to be caught out in a classical blunder. Mr. Churton Collins has treated exhaustively the interesting subject of Tennyson's indebtedness to former poets, especially the poets of Greece and Rome. But Tennyson's utterance was always a voice, never an echo. The lovely passage in the Passing of Arthur which describes the islanrl-valley of Avilion, Where falls not nail, or rain, or any snow, Nor ever wind blows loudly, was obviously suggested by the prophecy of Proteus to Menelaus in the fourth book of the Odyssey, thus trans- lated by Abraham Moore : — Thee to the Elysian plains, earth's farthest end, Where Rhadamanthus dwells, the gods shall send, Where morl iur. '. Lingering winters there, 001 mow, nor shower, Bat Ocean, era to refresh m a nkin d. Breathes the shrill ^pirit of the Western wind. But perhaps Tennyson shines most brightly when he takes a few lines from a Greek or Roman author and 8 MEN AND LETTERS amplifies them into a poem. The Lotos Eaters, with its noble choric song, sprang, as Athene sprang from the head of Zeus, from these four verses in the earliest and the greatest among all works of travel and adventure : — riiV S' Sorts Au)TOio <£<£yoi /ueAirjSea Kapirov ovuceV aTrayyeiAai 7rd\iv iqBekev, oiSi pe'eoflai* aAA' avToO povKovro fier' avSpacri AuTO(j)iyoi(Tt.v A epeirrdixevoi ix.tvip.tv, cocttov Te ka0eirovs. Like CEnone, or rather the two GLnones, it is not Homeric. The Odyssey leaves Ulysses in Ithaca at rest after so THE CLASSICAL POEMS OF TENNYSON 9 many wanderings, at peace after so many wars. His companions had all perished. We have indeed an intimation of his death, inserted, like the death of Captain Shandy, out of its place and before its time. It is in the shape of a prophecy by Teiresias, who says that Ulysses, carrying an oar on his shoulder, will meet a man who, never having seen an oar, will mistake it for a winnowing-fan, and that then his death will come to him 'gently, very gently from the sea.' Teiresias only predicts one more event in the career of Ulysses after the slaughter of the suitors with which the Odyssey con- cludes. It is the discovery of a people who have no ships, are unacquainted with the sea, and eat no salt with their food. The familiar words in St. John's Revelation, There shall be no more sea,' seem to connect the symbol of the sea with the idea of separa- tion, as it is so often connected in the literature of the ancient world. To Horace, perhaps even more than to Homer, it was the oceanus dissociabilis. An epitaph in the old churchyard of St. Pancras, now destroyed, which dated, I believe, from the seventeenth century, contained the line — When death no more divides, as doth the sea. Perhaps the last survival of this old faith in the path- lcssness of the ocean was Lord Derby's offer to eat the first steamer which crossed the Atlantic. The prophecy of Teiresias is obscure. But there may be some plausibility in the suggestion that the famous traveller who, in the earlier editions of Tennyson's poem, ' had become a name for ever roaming with a hungry heart,' was to end his days as far as possible from the disturbing element on which he had passed so y of them. It is an odd coincidence that Tennyson in this, perhaps the most artistically perfect of all his IO MEN AND LETTERS works, should have thus described the time of the new departure from Ithaca : — The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks : The long day wanes : the slow moon climbs : the deep Moans round with many voices. For the twilight was the time when the Homeric mariner did not sail, if he could possibly help it, unless, like Telemachus, he is under the special protection of Athene. He started in the morning, and always en- deavoured to find some landing-place for the night. That Tennyson was indebted to Dante for the idea of Ulysses is sufficiently obvious. Dante shows no sympathy with ' the man of many a shift.' His rest- lessness is treated as a crime, and he is licked in hell by a wandering flame. When he told Virgil the end of his career, and how he was wrecked under a huge mountain not foreseen by Teiresias, Virgil might con- sistently have disputed the accuracy of the narrative. It is not classical. The second journey of Ulysses was told, as set forth in Miss Jane Harrison's Myths of the Odyssey, by Eugammon of Cyrene. Eugammon is said to have lived in the sixth century before Christ, and to have borrowed from an earlier work by Musaeus, whose existence, however, like William Tell's, is doubtful, called the Thesprotis. We have nothing of Eugammon's poem except some fragments preserved by the grammarian Proclus, who lived about six hundred years later. The Thesprotis is mentioned by Pausanias the antiquary, and by Clement the theologian. The schoolboy's desire to ' finish the story ' is as old as most other things. Tennyson took a noble advantage of a simple and general curiosity. Nobody ever read through the Odyssey without feeling sorry when he came to the end, and wishing that there were at least THE CLASSICAL TOEMS OF TENNYSON I I twelve more books. The Odyssey closes with the inter- vention of Athene, the « patron saint ' of Ulysses, to save the rebels of Ithaca from entire extermination at the hands of their insulted chief. But the reader feels that there must be fresh exploits in store for this gray spirit, yearning in desire To follow knowledge, like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. An interval of about twenty years elapsed between the publication of Ulysses and the publication of Tithonus. He must be a very acute and a very self-confident critic who would undertake to pronounce an authoritative judgment upon their respective merits. Tithonus was inspired by the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, which in style and genius it greatly excels. Even Mr. Gladstone, who holds manfully by the unity and common origin of the Iliad and the Odyssey, does not, I think, suggest that the Homeric Hymns were written by Homer, or by another person of the same name. The prayer of Eos (vulgarly called Aurora) for Tithonus is a melancholy example of ' ignorance in asking.' This beaming and radiant goddess became enamoured of Tithonus, and humanly speaking ran away with him. By way of a wedding present or portion to her husband she prayed Zeus to confer upon him the gift of immortality. Zeus consented as readily as George the Third when he was asked for an Irish peerage. He nodded and said it was all right, and the bride departed in the highest possible spirits. It was not the business of Zeus t<> remind her that she had forgotten the prayer against old age. She found she had married a Struldbrug — there can be no anachronism in the case of goddesses — and she did not like it. She took her own measures, and the later lot of Tithonus was not a happy one. The best of the 12 MEN AND LETTERS Homeric Hymns, the Hymn to Hermes, was admirably translated by Shelley. Tennyson took the situation as he found it in the Hymn to Aphrodite, and made out of it a glorious poem worth all the Homeric Hymns put together. The Hymn describes almost prosaically how Tithonus is constantly babbling in a weak, tremulous voice, and how the vigour which was once in his well- knit limbs has forsaken them. Aphrodite tells Anchises with unflinching frankness that if he had been like that she would not have chosen him to live for ever among the immortals, himself as immortal as them. Eos would perhaps have improved on Donna Julia, and held that it was better to have four husbands of five-and-twenty than one of a hundred. It is not a pleasant nor a romantic picture. It contrasts very forcibly with the devotion of Penelope and her prayer. M.r)Se' ti x ei P 0,/0 S avSpios citypaiVotjai vorijxa.. She prays that she may never cheer the thought of a meaner man, but carry her reverence for Ulysses into the gloom of the nether world. Tennyson, with his delicacy, his purity, the magic of his genius, lifts us into a higher sphere than the Hymn's with Alas ! for this gray shadow, once a man, So glorious in his beauty, and thy choice, Who madest him thy chosen, that he seem'd To his great heart none other than a god. I asked thee, ' Give me Immortality ! ' Then didst thou grant mine asking with a smile, Like wealthy men who care not how they give. But thy strong Hours indignant work'd their wills, And beat me down and marr'd and wasted me, And tho' they could not end me, left me maim'd, To dwell in presence of immortal youth, Immortal age beside immortal youth, And all I was in ashes. If we want to get above that level, we must go to Homer himself, or to Shakespeare. THE CLASSICAL POEMS OF TENNYSON 1 3 The influence of classical poetry may be traced almost everywhere in Tennyson. The exquisite quatrain in the Palace of Art — Or sweet Europa's mantle flew unclasp'd From off her shoulder backward borne, From one hand droop'd a crocus : one hand grasp'd The mild bull's golden horn — is an echo of Moschus, the author of the famous lines — perhaps the finest in later Greek literature — paraphrased by Wordsworth in the beautiful After-thought to the Sonnets on the Duddon. The parallel between Moschus and Tennyson is illustrated in Mr. St. John Thackeray's Greek Anthology, a book with which a man might cheer- fully face a desert island or a contested election. After Tithonus comes Lucretius, the third poem of the classical triplet or trio so justly celebrated in English poetry. We know, if possible, less about the life of Lucretius than we know about the life of Shakespeare. The story that his wife, Lucilia, gave him a philtre which drove him mad, and that in his madness he destroyed himself, has been adopted by Tennyson. But it rests upon no earlier or better authority than St. Jerome's. The De Return Nalura, as we have it, is un- finished. But it almost certainly remains as the author left it. It contains no trace of insanity, and is in- comparably the finest philosophical poem in the world, though the philosophy often gets in the way of the verse. I understand that the great men who write in Mind for an audience fit, though few, admit Lucretius to have been a real philosopher. He was undoubtedly a poet, a patriot, and a man who had tasted, like Jacques, the pleasures of life. He seems to have been haunted and beset by those sensuous and ignoble phantoms from which Sophocles in his old age rejoiced that he had 14 MEN AND LETTERS escaped. But they did not interfere with the vigour or the minuteness of his abstract speculations. Like Cicero and Catullus, and most contemporary men of letters, he hated Caesar. Perhaps they detested him none the less cordially because he was as good a judge of literature as any of them. The genus ivritabile vatum does not like a statesman and a man of the world who can turn phrases with a professional quill-driver. But whatever may be thought of the story which Tennyson has caught up, there cannot be two opinions about the intensely Lucretian character of his poem. Only a great poet, who was also a great scholar, could have so thoroughly penetrated the secret and so fully expressed the essence of those mighty and marvellous hexameters. The very rugged strength and majesty of lines compared with which Virgil seems almost tame even to Virgilians may be felt in such blank verse, at once bold and splendid, as — A riotous confluence of watercourses, Blanching and billowing in a hollow of it, or the still more tremendous Ruining along the illimitable inane. Only a consummate master of blank verse dares to write it in that fashion. The dreams of Lucretius are all suggested by passages of his own work, especially by the curious and unique analysis of love at the end of the fourth book. Lucretius was no Ovid. He abhorred licentiousness, at least in its grosser forms. But it besieged him, conflicting as it did with the plain living and high thinking taught and practised by his much- maligned master, Epicurus. He believed no more in an oread than Selden believed in a witch. But he could fancy THE CLASSICAL POEMS OF TENNYSON 1 5 how the sun delights To glance and shift about h'^r slippery sides, And rosy knees and supple roundedness, And budded bosom-peaks. Nothing, again, could be more Lucretian in tone and even in language than the denial of the sun's divinity or personality, Since he never sware, Except his wrath were wreaked on wretched man, That he would only shine among the dead Hereafter ; tales ! for never yet on earth Could dead flesh creep, or bits of roasting ox Moan round the spit — nor knows he what he sees. Or take again these verses on the Epicurean gods who haunt The lucid interspace of world and world, Where never creeps a cloud or moves a wind. Nor ever falls the least white star of snow, Nor even lowest roll of thunder moans, Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar Their sacred everlasting calm. This is an excellent paraphrase of Apparet divum numen, sedesque quietse, Quas neque concutiunt venti nee nubila nimbis Aspergunt, neque nix acri concreta pruina Cana cadens violat, semperque innubilus aether Integit, et large diffuso [amine rident. "Rut perhaps Tennyson's handling of his subject is most felicitous when he comes to deal with the famous invocation of Venus at the beginning of the De Rerun* Naturd. It has been objected that this introductory passage, with all its eloquence and grandeur, is incon- sistent with the Epicurean doctrine, not that there are no gods, but that they are careless of mankind. In Tennyson Lucretius demands of Venus whether she is plaguin;; him because he sought to deprive her of the sacrifices offered her by her votaries, 1 6 MEN AND LETTERS Forgetful how my rich procemion makes Thy glory fly along the Italian field In lays that will outlast thy deity. Epicurus was neither an atheist nor a polytheist. He was rather what is now termed an agnostic. The Venus upon whom Lucretius called was not the heroine of the Judgment of Paris, nor the love-sick temptress of Adonis, but the spirit of Nature, the generative and recuperative principle, the universal mother. Yet there is an undertone of reference to the mistress of the God of War, whom he exhorts To kiss thy Mavors, roll thy tender arms Round him, and keep him from the lust of blood That makes a steaming slaughter-house of Rome. The two best commentators on Lucretius are Tennyson and Munro. It is natural to associate the stanzas to Virgil with the lines on Catullus, which are headed Fratev Ave clique Vale. Yet they are very different in scope, in purpose, and in treatment. The history of the earlier poem — they were both afterwards included in the same volume — is instructive. It might, without much perversion of language, be called task work. For it was ' written at the request of the Mantuans for the nineteenth centenary of Virgil's death.' Yet in the truest sense it was a labour of love, as those responsible for the invitation must have known that it would be. ' I that loved thee since my day began ' was no news to anyone acquainted with Virgil and with Tennyson. To call Tennyson an English Theocritus is to my mind critically unsound. To call him an English Virgil would be misleading without a good deal of qualification. But there would be more truth and point in the remark. Virgil's life was a comparatively short one. He never revised his tale of Troy. He did THE CLASSICAL POEMS OF TENNYSON 1 7 not wish it to be published, even after his death. He was a modest man, as Tennyson used emphatically to say. But it would tax the most learned and accomplished of modern humanists to suggest what Virgil would have done to the Aincid before publication. There are some unfinished lines, and exceedingly deplorable efforts have been made by various commentators to complete them. These would of course have been rounded off. For the rest, one must have an instinct which would detect the Patavinity of Livy to perceive the roughness of the JEncii as compared with the Geovgics or the Eclogues. All the chosen coin of fancy Flashing out from many a golden phrase is as fully applicable to that ' ocean-roll of rhythm ' which ' sounds for ever of Imperial Rome,' as to the Chanter of the Tollio, glorying In the blissful years again to be, Summers of the snakeless meadow, UDlaborious earth and oarless sea. The justice and the nicety of Tennyson's critical faculty are shown in his preferring Virgil to Hesiod, but not to Theocritus nor to Homer. Landscapcdover, lord of language, More than he that sang the Works and Days. Nothing of the same kind is said about the Iliad or the Odyssey, or those wonderful idylls which, unlike Titkonus, flourish not in immortal age, but in immortal youth. 1 am WHIN times tempted to wish that Matthew Arnold had let Theoi ritus alone. So many people seem to think that Gorgo and Praxinoe are Theocritus. They might as well believe that Mi . Quickly and Doll Tear- are Shall I >uld think the rising genera- ; mu t be getting rather tired of Calverley's English and Latin puns. His sympathetic rendering into ex- c 1 8 MEN AND LETTERS cellent verse of the sweetest pastoral poet the world ever saw seems to be strangely neglected. Some super- ficial grumblers condemn Virgil because he is imitative, because, in fact, he came after Theocritus and Homer. ' A man should write his own English,' said a master of style. Virgil wrote his own Latin, though he was not ashamed of proving that he had read Lucretius. He had the same subtle power over his instrument as Paganini or Joachim. But he requires no defence. The late Professor Sellar showed, in a brilliant essay, that in all ages and in all countries men of every condition, class, and creed had found that Virgil expressed their inmost soul better than they could express it them- selves. No Englishman should be indifferent to a writer who has been quoted by illustrious Englishmen in every crisis of modern history, by Walpole and Pulteney, by Carteret and Chatham, by Fox and Pitt, by Gladstone and Lowe, by the most eminent statesmen in the northern island, Sunder'd once from all the human race. Toto divisos orbe Britannos. One of the most Tennysonian passages in Virgil is that perfect little picture of childish love at first sight which was the special favourite of Voltaire. Ssepibus in nostris parvam te roscida mala, Dux ego vester eram, vidi cum matre legentem. Alter ab undecimo turn me jam acceperat annus, Vix poteram ab terra fragiles contingere ramos : Ut vidi ! ut perii ! ut me malus abstulit error ! * Virgil copied this sketch from the wooing of Poly- phemus and Galatea in the Eleventh Idyll of Theocritus. * ' I saw you with my mother in our garden when you were a little girl, picking apples with the dew on them. I had shown you the way. I was just twelve years old. I could scarcely reach the twigs from the ground to break them. How I looked at you ! how my heart stopped ! how I caught the madness, and what a dance it led me!' THE CLASSICAL POEMS OF TENNYSON 19 But he amplified and improved it. Compare The Miller's Daughter. For you remember, you had set, That morning on the casement-edge, A long green box of mignonette, And you were leaning from the ledge : And when I raised my eyes, above They met with two so full and bright — Such eyes — I swear to you, my love, That these have never lost their light. The nine beautiful verses entitled Fratev Ave atque Vale are not the only tribute which Tennyson paid to Catullus. The hendecasyllables, • O you chorus of indo- lent reviewers,' are of course composed not only ' in a metre of Catullus,' but in Catullus's favourite metre. The galliambic rhythm of Boadicea is borrowed from one of the most magnificent of all Catullus's poems, the celebrated Attis, which the modern world admires and must admire in spite of its theme. I believe that if one wishes to be pedantic one calls these lines 'Ionics a Minore with an anacrusis.' The grief of Catullus for the death of his brother was deep, simple, and lasting. He could not keep it to himself. It broke out not only in the funeral hymn from which Tennyson took the concluding words for his title, but in other poems on other subjects, notably in the dedication to his friend Hortalus, probably Hortensius, of his translation from the Hair of Berenice by Callimachus. He there says that he loved his brother more than life, that, in the language of Tennyson, he ' loved him and loves him for ever.' He 1 on with T< onyson to declare that 'the -I arc \v,[ dead but alive.' He asserts elsewhere the- ict contrary. But his te semper amabo is emphatic, and ely Roman. 'Tenderest of Roman poets,' as 'I < nnyson falls him, he was. Strictly speaking, perhaps, the praise is not high. Horace's ode on the death of c— 2 20 MEN AND LETTERS Quintilius is not really tender. It is partly the sham stoicism of an Epicurean and partly the sham religion of a materialist, or, in his own delightful euphemism, ' parous deorum cultor et infrequens ' — as we might say, one who seldom troubled the pew-openers. Catullus is a strange and interesting phenomenon. He was ruined by a woman, the Lesbia of his poems, the Clodia of history. He found out her true character only when, as Dr. Johnson says of Pope and Patty Blunt, it was too late to transfer his confidence or his affection. He bewailed his weakness, and implored the assistance of Heaven to rescue him from the tyranny of a shameful love in verse which is but the more telling for the abrupt uncouthness of its pathos and its strength. His hold upon modern sentiment, if sentiment, or anything except ' the steamship and the railway,' can be modern, is chiefly due to his fraternal piety and to the singular affection with which he regarded his home. Sweet Catullus's all but island olive-silvery Sirmio has been celebrated in immortal strains. Mr. Robinson Ellis considers that Catullus underrated Sirmio, which seems odd. He has certainly given it undying fame. So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. "This" is the venusta Sirmio, quoted by Tennyson, and the justly celebrated passage — O quid solutis est beatius curis ? Cum mens onus reponit et peregrino Lahore fessi venimus nostrum ad Larem. Desideratoque acquiescimus lecto ? ' What is happier than release from care when the mind lays aside its burden, when, weary with the labour of travel, we have come to our own hearth, and rest in the bed for which we longed ? ' THE CLASSICAL POEMS OF TENNYSON 21 Catullus is sometimes called the most original of the Latin poets. But he borrowed much from the Greeks, and several of his poems are mere translations. The models have almost wholly perished, except the famous Ode of Sappho, and there Catullus has risen nobly to the sublime height of that passionate outburst. Catullus's powers of satire and invective were so great that even Caesar was afraid of them. But some of his shorter pieces are on a level with those graffiti at Pompeii which are judiciously concealed from the eyes of Mr. Cook's young friends. Tennyson need not fear comparison with the scholarly poets who preceded him. Jonson and Milton were very learned men. Dryden was a good scholar, and may be thought to have achieved, at least once, when he translated the Twenty-ninth Ode of the third 1 ok of Horace, the feat of surpassing his own author. Samuel Johnson, a real poet at his best, knew Juvenal as well as Tennyson knew Lucretius. But not one of them, not even rare Ben himself, was more thoroughly imbued with the spirit of classical antiquity than the author of the Lotos Eaters. Milton is sometimes the servant rather than the master of his learning. He was not un- frequently, if one may say so without irreverence, the worse for Latin. Tennyson was the better for every- thing he read. We all know his invitation to Frederick Maurice, if only because it describes Farringford, where so many able penmen, Americans and others, have described the knocker off the door. No poem could be more thoroughly Horatian in style, as 'the classical r< uler,' to whom Wordsworth appealed, at once ] rceives. While nothing can be more genially and characteristically English than the tone of these fine stanza*, with their allusions to the National Church, the 22 MEN AND LETTERS rite of baptism, and the Crimean War, ' Garrulous under a roof of pine ' is ' almost an alcaic ' as one's tutor used to say when one thought one had produced a complete example of that metre. ' The dust and heat and noise of town ' is and is not ftimum et opes stvepitumque Romce. Tennyson is always a scholar, and never a pedant. In his translations, the meaning reappears, but the idiom is changed. As ' landscape-lover ' and • lord of language,' some affinity may be discerned between Tennyson and Horace, as well as between Tennyson and Virgil. Take, for instance, the description of Tivoli in the 7th Ode of the first book : — Me nee tam patiens Lacedsemon Nee tam Larissae percussit campus opimse, Quam domus Albunese resonantis Et praeceps Anio ac Tibumi lucus et uda Mobilibus pomaria rivis.* In this ode, as in the celebrated description of Soracte under its mantle of snow, specimens of what may be called Horace's vignettes, the art is to call up a picture by a single phrase, or even a single epithet. Horace had it as well as Virgil, and though Tennyson was more indebted to Nature than to either of them, I think he was indebted to both, to ' old popular Horace,' as well as to the other * old poet fostered under friendlier skies.' It is a commonplace and a platitude to lament that we have not more of Tennyson's Homeric translation. Only two short fragments have ever been given to the world. The first is the comparison of the watch-fires kindled by the Greeks with the stars shining in the * ' Neither stern Sparta nor the rich Pelasgian fields ever struck me like the echoing temple of the Sibyl, and the rush of the Anio, and the grove of Tibur s founder, and the moist orchards with their rippling streams.' THE CLASSICAL TOEMS OF TENNYSON 23 heavens, from the eighth book of the Iliad. It is a test passage. The man who could translate that could translate anything, and Tennyson probably selected it to show what he could do. The triumph was complete. It may almost be said of these lines, as Tennyson him- self said of his friend Fitzgerald's ' Omar Khayam,' that there is ' no version done in English so divinely well.' Perhaps the best lines both in the Greek and in the English are those which introduce the simile, As when in Heaven the stars above the moon Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid, And every height comes out, and jutting peak And valley, and the immeasurable heavens Break open to their highest, and all the stars Shine, and the shepherd gladdens in his heart. The effect of the monosyllabic verb in the last line, followed by a break, recalls the famous Shook, but delayed to strike of the Paradist Lost. Tennyson firmly believed in blank verse as the proper vehicle of Homeric translation. Perhaps the most successful of modern translators is Worsley, who adopted the Spenserian stanza. In this particular instance he has achieved one effect which deserves to be compared, and not unfavourably com- pared, with Tennyson's. The last line in the original describes the horses, who Fixt by their cars, waited the gulden dawn, is Tennyson's rendering. II 1 1 by their chariots stood, waiting the dawn divine, whi< h is Worsley's, sounds more imposing, and seems to close the description with greater fon e. Homer, ear, calls the dawn neither golden Dor divine, but 'well-throned,' which may be likened to bhakespcaie's 24 MEN AND LETTERS ' vestal throned in the west,' meaning first the moon, and secondly Queen Elizabeth. Tennyson's second at- tempt, Achilles over the Trench, is less interesting. The episode of Achilles fighting under the immediate pro- tection of Athene, and vanquishing the Trojans with the assistance of supernatural fire on his head, pertains to the perishable form rather than to the imperishable essence of the Homeric epic. The god from the machine does not appeal to us as it must have appealed to the audience of the rhapsodist. The knot never seems worthy of the champion. Oddly enough there is almost the same simile here also, except that the watch-fires are this time the standard, not the subject of comparison. Achilles's private halo is compared with them. And sheer-astounded were the charioteers To see the dread unweariable fire That always o'er the great Peleion's head Burn'd, for the bright-eyed goddess made it burn. Homer knew nothing about the supposed invulner- ability of Achilles, who met his fate at the hands of Paris, as Hector told him he would. But the Trojans could not be expected to make provision against the influence of miracles upon the common trooper. Tennyson, as is well known, detested English hexa- meters and pentameters. He thought them unsuited to the genius of the language. He laughed at them. In the emphatic words of Scripture, he could not away with them. He liked the metre no better in German. He himself wrote English hendecasyllables, English galliambics, and English alcaics in his noble Ode to Milton. He must, one would think, have admired — he could not help admiring — Mr. Swinburne's Sapphics. But hexameters, especially in rendering Homer, were his soul's abhorrence. THE CLASSICAL POEMS OF TENNYSON 25 These lame hexameters, the strong-wing'd music of Homer ! No — but a most burlesque barbarous experiment. When was a harsher sound ever heard, ye Muses, in England? When did a frog coarser croak upon our Helicon ? Hexameters no worse than daring Germany ga%'e us, Barbarous experiment, barbarous hexameters ! I am not qualified to take up the cudgels for Voss. But Tennyson, when he burst out in this ferocious diatribe, can hardly have meant to include Dr. Hawtrey's beautiful translation of Helen's speech on the walls of Troy, beginning Clearly the rest I behold of the dark-eyed sons of Achaia. Tennyson is, of course, substantially right. The metre is not English, and cannot be made so. Hawtrey knew better than to try it on a large scale. He care- fully chose the scene of his experiment and succeeded accordingly. Clough wrote English hexameters, and sometimes even pentameters, with amazing fluency and cleverness. Sometimes, as in his lines on the Pantheon, he managed them with dignity and splendour. But as a rule he used them when he meant to be slipshod and dropped them when he meant to be serious. English pentameters are utterly hopeless. As Tennyson once said, ' All men alike hate slops, particularly gruel,' is a good quantitative line regardless of accent. His own published instances may be almost equalled from Catullus, whose dead songster never dies.' Schoolboys and professors are accustomed to imitate the smooth mechanical elegiacs of Ovid. But these did not begin with that amorous versifier. Cornell, ct factum me esse puta rlippocratera, is not a pretty line;, but it is pure Catullus. Take another case. Catullus made fun of a certain Arrius, or, as we might say, 'Arry, for his habitual employment of superfluous aitches. lie mentions u horrible rumour 26 MEN AND LETTERS that since Arrius went to Syria, the Ionian Sea had become the Hionian, as it was said of a late Judge that 'the Helen became the Ellen in passing through the chops of the Channell.' Jam non Ionios esse, sed Hionios is surely as bad as Barbarous experiment, barbarous hexameters. English hexameters have not always been failures. If Longfellow wrote in Evangeline such a barbarous ex- periment as Children's children sat on his knee and heard his great watch tick, he also wrote, Chanting the Hundredth Psalm, that grand old Puritan anthem, which is not unlike the 'strong-winged music of Homer.' In Charles Kingsley's Andromeda, too, there are many Homeric lines. But these are the exceptions which would not be cited if they were not exceptions, and thus prove the rule. If we ever have the ideal trans- lation of Homer in English verse, it will be in the metre of Milton and of Tennyson, not in his own. March, 1893. MATTHEW ARNOLD'S LETTERS ' It has ever been a hobby of mine, though perhaps it is a truism, not a hobby, that the true life of a man is in his letters.' So wrote John Henry Newman to his sister thirty-two years ago. Truisms, like paradoxes, must be taken with a grain of salt. Newman's own letters hardly bear out his own theory. Less than the Apology, less than the Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in Eng- land (1851), less even than some of the famous sermons, such as the sermon on the Parting of Friends, are they the man. ' Biographers,' says Dr. Newman, ' varnish, they assign motives, they conjecture feelings, they in- terpret Lord Burleigh's nods, but contemporary letters are facts.' Letters are conclusive evidence of the fact that they were written, but not necessarily of the facts which they allege. If some letters are the most natural, others are the most artificial of all human compositions. They may be written with the fear that they will be published, or with the fear that they will not. Mr. Chamberlain addressed a private letter on a public question to the editor of a newspaper. Cicero, in one of his letters to Atticus, explains that he would not have pressed himself with so much freedom if he had not frit confident that his words would never be read by any other human eyes. But if Newman's remarks are true of any one, they are true of Matthew Arnold. Hi B I :ters are, if DO Bible, more natural than his conversa- tion. In hib witty, genial, and delightful talk there was 28 MEN AND LETTERS a serio-comic pretence which people with no humour mistook for affectation. His friendly, chatty, confiden- tial letters combine the simplicity of a child with all the mental and imaginative resources of a scholar, a poet, a philosopher, and a man of the world. Mr. Arnold's family had either to deprive the public of what, apart from enjoyment, it must do every one good to read, or to run the risk of spoiling the letters by cutting out much that was most private and therefore most charac- teristic. Very few letters could have endured the severe process of excision and retrenchment to which these have been exposed. But Mrs. Arnold has rightly judged that they could stand even such a test. If she has erred at all, it is in the too scrupulous removal of affectionate references to herself. No praise can be too high for the manner in which Mr. George Russell has discharged his task as editor. He has unhappily felt himself bound, by Mr. Arnold's expressed wish on the subject, to abstain from anything like a biographical narrative ; and the letters are left to tell their own story, which it was not their purpose to do. But in a brief Prefatory Note he describes, with the knowledge of an intimate friend and the skill of a literary artist, the genuine character of Matthew Arnold. A meeting was held in the Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey soon after Mr. Arnold's death, to arrange some fitting memorial of his poetic genius and his public service. Some of the most distinguished men in England were there, and addressed the audience. There were the Dean of West- minster, Lord Coleridge, Mr. Jowett of Balliol, the fifteenth Earl of Derby, and Archbishop Thomson, all of whom are now gone except the Dean. To the elo- quence of the speeches any testimonial from me would MATTHEW ARNOLDS LETTERS 29 be impertinent. But what must have struck every one who heard them was the deep personal feeling of irre- parable loss that inspired them all — a feeling so strong that words were quite inadequate to do it justice. All the speakers were men of great intellectual power, fully appreciative of Mr. Arnold's poetry and criticism. But it was the moral beauty— the ' nobility,' as Mr. Jowctt called it — of his life upon which they almost exclusively dwelt. He was indeed a good man in the best sense of that term. As Mr. Kussell says, with equal insight and force, he was ' gentle, generous, enduring, laborious ; a devoted husband, ;i most tender father, an unfailing friend.' The sort of biography to which Cardinal New- man referred has become altogether obsolete since 1863. It used to be said that the only ' Lives' worth reading were those of actors, because they were not supposed to be respectable, and so their biographers did not mind telling the truth about them. Times have changed in- deed. Actors are now more respectable, or at least more respected, than bishops; and the new school of bio- graphy, which will always be associated with the name of Mr. Froude, aims at anything rather than the canoni- zation of what a lady called 'the biographee.' Air. Arnold's memory, though it is to be spared that ordeal, would have nothing to fear from it. ' Whatever record leap to light, he never shall be shamed.' Those who knew him best loved him most. He was a saint in his family, a hero to his publisher, and the idol of his friends. At a dinner of old Balliol men, held when, for the first time in this century, there was a really great Primate of the English Church, Matthew Arnold had to return thanks for the toa 1 ol his health. He foil • Vrchbishop Tait, an admirable speakei as well 30 MEN AND LETTERS as a true statesman, and remarked with exquisite ur- banity that after such an impressive performance it might perhaps refresh the company to see a Balliol man who had not got on in the world. The writer of a descriptive report which appeared next day translated this into the rather coarse paraphrase : • Mr. Matthew Arnold contrasted his own position and emoluments with those of the Archbishop of Canterbury.' But Matthew Arnold's spirit of cheerful content was not the least excellent of his many excellent gifts. Men with a fiftieth part of his natural capacity, who work for themselves, often realise an early competence and an ultimate fortune. Mr. Arnold worked for the country, and much of his leisure was spent in adding, by hook or by crook, to the pittance doled out to him from the Education Department. Matthew Arnold was blessed with the soundest of digestions and the sunniest of tempers. But the secret of his happiness was that self- denial was a pleasure to him, when it was endured for the sake of those he loved. He enjoyed living, even in London, and his passion for the country was as strong as Thoreau's. Whether he was at home or abroad, nature interested and charmed him. In the earliest of these letters, written to his mother on the 2nd of January, 1848, he says: — ' It was nearly dark when I left the Weybridge Station, but I could make out the wide sheet of the gray Thames gleaming through the general dusk as I came out on Chertsey Bridge. I never go along that shelving gravelly road up towards Laleham without interest, from Chertsey Lock to the turn where the drunken man lay. To-day, after morning church, I went up to Pentonhook, and passed the stream with the old volume, width, shine, rapid fulness, "kempshott" and swans, unchanged and unequalled, to my partial and remembering eyes at least.' Although Mr. Arnold was an enthusiastic fisherman and rather fond of shooting, his interest in the country MATTHEW ARNOLDS LETTERS 31 was not that of a sportsman. It was the devotion which inspired his favourite modern poet and made him as good an interpreter of Wordsworth as Wordsworth was an interpreter of nature. Of all his critical writings there is none more full of perception, as there is none more characteristic of Mathew Arnold, than the Preface to the Selections from Wordsworth. A very large number of Matthew Arnold's letters are addressed to his mother, who died in 1873 at tnc a S e of eighty-two, having survived her famous husband more than thirty years. Every one knows the poem on Rugby Chapel, and can learn from it that Matthew Arnold revered the memory of his father. His letters to his mother show that his father was rarely out of his thoughts, and he never loses an opportunity of tracing Dr. Arnold's influence upon modern thought. Dr. Arnold is chiefly known as the awful pedagogue of Tom Brown's Sclwol Days. Even in his Life by Dean Stanley the literary side of him is too much ignored. It was upon that side that his son delighted to dwell, the side presented in the History of Rome and the Thucydides. Dr. Arnold did not live to complete the History which has perhaps suffered from the popular impression that the early annals of Rome are all a myth, that Sir George Cornewall Lewis said so, and that there is no use in bothering about them. But the Kite Professor Freeman, no mean authority, was an ardent admirer of the book, and considered Dr. Arnold to be a true historian. And if anybody wishes not to study the t< 1 of Thucydides from the point of minute verbal scholarship, but to read the greatest of all historians ;li an intelligent guide-, he will find 1 >r. Arnold exactly the guide he wants. A remarkable proportion of the letters are addressed 32 MEN AND LETTERS to members of Mr. Arnold's own family. But perhaps the best of all were written to Mrs. Matthew Arnold when he was travelling. They give all the information which the most anxious wife could require, and they are never trivial or dull. It is certain, both from internal and external evidence, that no idea of publication ever entered the writer's mind. Yet every reader will cordially thank Mrs. Arnold for allowing them to appear. Among his correspondents outside the circle of the Arnolds, Lady de Rothschild must be esteemed peculiarly fortunate. In writing to her Mr. Arnold seems to have been always at his best. In these Epistola ad Familiaves literature occupies a comparatively small place. Nevertheless there is enough to throw an interesting light upon Mr. Arnold's strength and weakness as a critic. At the so-called Jubilee Dinner of the Oxford Union in 1873, the late Dr. Liddon, in proposing the toast of « Literature,' for which Mr. Arnold was to respond, remarked that the great critic had taught them to criticise even himself. Matthew Arnold's satire was never barbed. It left no rankling wound behind it, and many of his victims were among his warmest admirers. The critical quality in which he most excelled was the invaluable gift of detect- ing merit below the surface. He liked to praise rather than to blame, as all good critics do. But it may be doubted whether he had the supreme faculty of judgment. He admired more than he imitated Sainte-Beuve. The dullest man cannot read ' Essays in Criticism ' without having his mind stimulated and his views enlarged. The cleverest man cannot read the Causeries du Lundi without feeling chastened and humiliated by that vast learning, that infallible taste, that exquisite lucidity of style, that impregnable fortress of common sense. MATTHEW ARNOLDS LETTERS 33 Writing to his mother from London on the 7th of May, 184S, Matthew Arnold says : — ' I have just finished a German book I brought with me here ; a mixture of poems and travelling journal by Heinrich Heine, the most famous of the young German literary set. He has a good deal of power, though more trick ; however, he has thoroughly disgusted me. The Byronism of a German, of a man trying to be gloomy, cynical, impassioned, moqueur, etc., zWMafois, with their honest bonhommistic language and total want of experience of the kind that Lord Byron, an English peer with access everywhere, possessed, is the most ridiculous thing in the world.' Of course this is a private letter, and Matthew Arnold's real view of Heine must be sought in his essay and his poem. But they are almost as inadequate as this, of which indeed they are chiefly an expansion. The Reisebilder contains much that is foolish, and much that is repulsive. But no one would gather from the passage quoted that it was one of the wittiest books ever written, or that it contained one of the most beautiful poems in the world. Heine himself may be said to have acknowledged the difficulty about the language by re- writing the book in French. He certainly never pretended to be an aristocrat, for he dwells frequently on his plebeian origin, and he was a disciple of Sterne rather than of Byron. " Why is ' Villette ' disagreeable ? " This question was put by Matthew Arnold to his sister on the 14th of April, 1S53. And he answers it himself as follows: — ' because the writer's mind contains nothing but hunger, rebellion, ind il therefore that is all she can, in fact, put into her book. No tme « nting can hide this thoroughly, ami it will be fatal to her in the long 1 He then proceeds to contrast 'Villette' with 'My , admitting, with a simplicity which seems not to 1 f( igned, that ' Bulwer's nature is not a perfect one either.' It cei tainly was not, even according to the mun- c standard of fallen man. But an Oxford scholar like O 34 MEN AND LETTERS Mr. Arnold should have remembered hie Aristotle : to oti before to Btori. You establish your fact before you inquire into its causes. Dr. Johnson once sat down with Mrs. Hannah More before the outspread Sonnets of Milton, to consider why they were so bad. Is ' Villette ' dis- agreeable ? And what of ' Shirley,' by the same author? Does that, too, contain nothing but ' hunger, rebellion, and rage ' ? Miss Bronte was a woman of genius, and her genius forced its way through every disadvantage of material circumstances and mental training. Bulwer was a clever, highly-cultivated man of the world, with immense industry and consummate skill, enjoying all the advantages of wealth and station, but not possessing a spark of the true inward fire. ' Sublime mediocrity ' is the utmost that can be said of Bulwer, and Matthew Arnold preferred him to Charlotte Bronte. On the 22nd of September, 1864, Mr. Arnold wrote to Mr. Dykes Campbell on the volume of Tennyson's poems containing ' Enoch Arden.' He was at first inclined to write a review of it, thinking — oddly enough — that ' Enoch Arden ' was 1 the best thing Tennyson had done.' He gave up the task because he feared that if he depreciated Tennyson he would be suspected of jealousy. He wrote : — • I do not think Tennyson a great and powerful spirit in any line, as Goethe was in the line of modern thought, Wordsworth in that or contemplation, Byron even in that of passion ; and unless a poet, especially a poet at this time of day, is that, my interest in him is only slight, and my conviction that he will not finally stand high is firm.' It is not much more eccentric to put Tennyson below Byron than to put Bulwer Lytton above Miss Bronte. But there must have been something wrong with a critic who could not appreciate the greatest poet of his own age and country, a man only thirteen years older than himself. May it not be that Mr. Arnold expected from poetry something which it is not the function MATTHEW ARNOLDS LETTERS 35 of poetry to give ? Mr. Arnold did not seem to feel — what as a critic he surely should have felt — that he had to account for Tennyson, to explain how a man who was not ' a great and powerful spirit ' had leavened the speech of educated men, had be- come a classic in his lifetime, only less a part of their language than the Bible and Shakespeare. If the true poet must be always setting traps or constructing puzzles, if every poem is to prove or disprove some- thing, then 'Tithonus' is not a poem, and Tennyson was not a poet. But if the office of poetry be to ex- press the great commonplaces of life, the objection that Tennyson has not a ' line ' falls to the ground. What was Homer's ' line ' ? What was Shakespeare's ? What was Keats's ? They were on their own lines ; they were themselves. Even if we take the case of Wordsworth, it is less the argumentative verse of the ' Excursion,' than such pieces as 'A Slumber did my Spirit Seal,' that stamp him as the true poet, not merely the metrical philosopher. Lovely and melodious as so much of Matthew Arnold's own poetry is, haunting the memory like a strain of music, he is best when he is simplest : when he draws from nature, as in the ' Scholar Gypsy'; or from human experience, as in those magic verses — ' For each t Our toon choked souls to fill ; Ami we I*"", 1 because we must, And not because we will.' If Mr. Arnold liked 'metaphysical poetry,' he ought to have revelled in Browning. But he did not. His classic taste • ! i locked, as Tennyson's also was, by the 1 Imess and roughness of that undeniably 'powerful spirit.' He admired Browning just when Browning left his problems and wrote with absolute simplicity. 36 MEN AND LETTERS Mr. Arnold was justly proud of the vogue which his pet phrases had, and the readiness with which they were picked up by educated men. The writing world was, as he said, particularly fond of him. He supplied them with quotations, and they were not ungrateful, as he points out in his inimitable way. He writes to his mother : — • I have been amused by getting a letter from Edward Dicey, asking me, in the name of the proprietors of the Daily Telegraph, to give them a notice of Blake the artist, and to name my own price. I sent a civil refusal, but you may depend upon it Lord Lytton was right in saying that it is no inconsiderable advantage to me that all the writing world have a kind of weakness for me, even at the time they are attacking me.' Afterwards he wrote a good deal for the Pall Mall Gazette when Mr. John Morley was its editor, and his objection to anonymous writing, which had been very strong, disappeared. Mr. Disraeli congratulated him on the popularity of 'Philistines,' 'Sweetness and Light,' and the rest of them. This was a real compliment coming from a master of many phrases, and it was highly appre- ciated. But this sort of success was really valuable less in itself than as a proof that his books were read. ' Philistines' is from the German, « Sweetness and Light' from Swift. The description of Oxford at the end of the Preface to Essays in Criticism was his own, and will be read with pleasure, like ' Dover Beach,' while the English language endures. There is nothing more interesting in these pages than the account of Mr. Arnold's conversation with Mr. Disraeli at Aston Clinton, the late Sir Anthony de Rothschild's house in Bucking- hamshire. Mr. Disraeli, who unaffectedly liked and admired men of letters, and whose sense of humour never slumbered, was at his best with Matthew Arnold. With him he was not only courteous, as he was not MATTHEW ARNOLD'S LETTERS 37 always, but simple and sincere, as he was seldom. Those who have read Mr. Disraeli's beautiful speech in the House of Commons on the death of Cobden, quoted in Mr. Morley's biography, will find that on this occasion he expressed the same opinion in private. ' Cobden was born a statesman, and his reasoning is always like a statesman's, and striking.' Being reminded that he had met Mr. Arnold some years before, Mr. Disraeli said : — " 'Ah, yes, I remember. At tliat time I had a great respect for the name jaa bore, bat you yourself were little known. Now you an: well known. You have made a reputation, but you will go further yet. You have a great future before you, and you deserve it.' " Could anything have been better said ? Having acknowledged the compliment, Mr. Arnold referred to Mr. Disraeli's abandonment of literature for politics. "'Yes,' he replied, 'one does not settle these things for one's self, and politics and literature are both very attractive ; still, in the one, one's work lasts, and in the other it doesn't.' He went on to say that he had k'iven up literature because he was not one of those people who can do two things at once, but that he admired most the men like Cicero, who could." There is as yet no ' Life ' of Lord Beaconsfield, except Mr. Froude's little book. But among all the scattered notices of that eminent and extraordinary man in the political memories of his generation, I do not know one which exhibits him in so attractive a light as docs this spontaneous and contemporaneous letter from Matthew Arnold to his mother. When Mr. Arnold returned from the United States full of delight at the unbounded courtesy and hospitality with which he had been received, he told with glee and gusto a story of the late Mr. Barnum. The great show- ruaii, he said, had invited him to his house in the following terms: 'You, sir, are a celebrity. I am a notoriety. We ought to be acquainted.' ' I couldn't 298760 38 MEN AND LETTERS go', he added, ' but it was very nice of him.' The letters do not deal much with the private lives of public men. They are for the most part concerned either with higher or more homely topics. But there is a charming and most characteristic anecdote of Samuel Wilberforce, the famous Bishop of Oxford, which is too good to be passed over. It occurs in a letter to his mother, dated the 2nd of February, 1864, and it refers once more to Aston Clinton, a house where he always liked to stay : — "The Bishop of Oxford had a rather difficult task of it in his sermon, for opposite to him was ranged all the house of Israel, and he is a man who likes to make things pleasant to those he is on friendly terms with. He preached on Abraham, his force of character and his influence on his family ; he fully saved his honour by introducing the mention of Christianity three or four times, but the sermon was in general a sermon which Jews as well as Christians could receive. His manner and delivery are well worth studying, and I am very glad to have heard him. A truly emotional spirit he undoubtedly has beneath his outside of society-haunting and men-pleasing, and each of the two lives he leads gives him the more zest for the other. Any real power of mind he has not. Some of the thinking, or pretended thinking, in his sermon was sophistical and hollow beyond belief. I was interested in finding how instinctively Lady de Rothschild had seized on this. His chaplain told me, however, that I had not heard him at his best, as he certainly preached under some constraint." Neither bishop nor chaplain held the opinion, which a clergyman ought to hold, that the way to be a gentleman is to be a Christian. There are in these volumes no letters to the late Lord Coleridge, who was perhaps Mr. Arnold's oldest and most intimate friend. They happened to meet in America, and Mr. Arnold describes himself as embar- rassed at the unction of the eulogies bestowed upon him in public by the Lord Chief Justice of England. Lord Coleridge was a various man, a great orator, a great social personage, a man of letters even more than of law, an admirable talker, but, above all, a consummate master of irony and sarcasm. A letter from Matthew Arnold to his MATTHEW ARNOLDS LETTERS 39 wife, written in 1S54, contains a delicious reference to a review of his own poems by the future Chief Justice : — * My love to J. D. C. [John Duke Coleridge], and tell him that the limited circulation of the 'Christian Remembrancer' makes the unquestionable viciousness of his article of little importance. I am rare he will be gratified to think that it is so.' This is in the true Coleridgean style, and quite perfect in its way. But of course it must not be taken as an expression of annoyance or resentment. Matthew Arnold was never spiteful, and hardly ever angry. It was his fun, and his fun was always irresistible. Mr. Arnold's politics were rather French than English. He adopted early in life, and retained to the end, the opinion that his own country was intellect- ually below France ; that the French were logical, whereas we were not ; and that there was a serious danger in the British preference for common sense, or the rule of thumb, to principles and ideas. The sort of prejudice embodied in Mr. Disraeli's celebrated dic- tum that this country is not governed by logic, but by Parliament, he held to be mischievous clap-trap, if indeed Mr. Disraeli was not laughing in his sleeve. It is curious that with this turn of mind he should have been such an enthusiastic admirer of Burke, with whom the British Constitution was an idol, not to say a fetish. I \ 1 haps he was captivated and carried away by the and style' of that splendid and princely writer. Plow- ever that may be, Mr. Arnold, though he called himself first a Liberal and afterwards a Liberal-Unionist, never belonged to any political party. Although he liked Mr. Disraeli in private, — and no wonder, — he called him a charlatan in reference to his public career. In Mi. Gladstone he had do confidence, believing him to be rayed by ecclesiastical bias, at the mercy of fitful 40 HEN AND LETTERS enthusiasm, and opposed to real freedom of thought. While he wrote warmly in praise of Burke's attach- ment to his native land, and pointed out that the liberality of his Irish policy was unaffected by the general reaction of his opinions after 1789, he would not hear of Home Rule. The fact is, that although he took an interest in politics from time to time, and always interested others when he wrote about them, he treated them, as he was well entitled to do, piece- meal and in a desultory fashion. He made too little allowance for men who had to act and to do the best they could with the imperfect means at their disposal. 'I hold,' he said once, in a sentence printed under the clever caricature of him in Vanity Fair, ' I hold that the critic should keep out of the region of immediate prac- tice.' Fortunately for mankind he did not follow his own maxim in poetry. In politics he certainly did. But now and again, with the true critical insight, he drew the mental portrait of a statesman as no one else could have drawn it. In 1870 the University of Oxford, which he loved and served, conferred upon him an honorary degree, and made him, according to the rather absurd form in such cases, a Doctor of Civil Law. Lord Salisbury, as Chancellor of the University, presided at the ceremony, and in Mr. Arnold's opinion performed his part very well. Concerning him Mr. Arnold writes to his mother : — ' He is a dangerous man, though, and chiefly from his want of any true sense and experience of literature and its beneficent function. Religion he knows, and physical science he knows ; but the immense work between the two, which is for literature to accomplish, he knows nothing of, and all his speeches pointed this way. On the one hand he was full of the great future for physical science, and begging the Uni- versity to make up her mind to it, and to resign much of her literary studies ; on the other hand he was full — almost defiantly full — of coun- sels and resolves for retaining and upholding the old ecclesiastical and dogmatic form of religion. From a juxtaposition of this kind nothing MATTHEW ARNOLDS LETTERS 41 but shocks and collisions can come ; and I know no one, indeed, more likely to provoke shocks and collisions than men like Lord Salisbury.' All this is profoundly true, though as different as pos- sible from the ordinary praise and abuse of the present Prime Minister. People argue that Lord Salisbury is a man of letters because he can write a good style. They forget that he was a journalist when journalists were required to know the English language. If any one will turn to Lord Salisbury's address, delivered at Oxford, as President of the British Association in 1S94, lie will see how thoroughly Matthew Arnold understood the man. Religious equality has been enforced at Ox- ford in spite of Lord Salisbury ; and religion, being left to its own resources, is more powerful there than it was in the old days of compulsory and conservative ortho- doxy. Physical science is amply recognised. But one change there has been which neither Lord Salisbury nor Mr. Arnold in 1870 foresaw, — Oxford has fallen into the hands of the specialists. Philologists and physiolo- gists, historians and lawyers, geologists and theologians, have substituted for the old idea of a liberal education a multitude of narrow and technical schools for cramming the memory and starving the intellect. The old educa- tion may have been defective ; but at least it was an education, and not an apprenticeship. When he was in Rome in 1865, Matthew Arnold wrote to his mother : — ' 1 lere in Italy one feels that all time spent out of Italy by tourists in France, Germany, Switzerland, etc., is— human life being so short — time misspent. Greece and parts of the East are the only other plates to go to.' Thousands, from Goethe to Mr. Foker, must have felt the same about Italy. But Matthew Arnold discovered twenty years later that the West, as well as the East, 42 MEN AND LETTERS was worth a visit. His letters from America are perhaps the most amusing of all. One to his younger daughter, now Mrs. Wodehouse, gives a graphic account of the way in which his time was spent. It was written from the Union Club, Chicago, January 21st, 1884 : — ' We got here late last night. We are staying with a great book- seller, who is also a general, and is always called General M'Clurg. He really was made a general in the Civil War, being a brisk and prominent man, but it is odd to address a bookseller as General. We arrived at the station at eight in the evening, and drove to his house. After a hasty dinner he hurried me off to a reception at the Literary Club, explaining to me on the way that I should have to make a speech! This was the programme. The hundred members of the club were gathered together when we arrived. The president received me, and then the whole club filed out to supper, I standing by the president and being presented to each member and shaking hands with him as he passed me. The supper-table was splendidly decorated with flowers. I was put in a great chair by the president, and, having just dined, had to go through the whole course, from oysters to ice, with plenty of champagne. . . . We have had a week of good houses (I con- sider myself now as an actor, for my managers take me about with theatrical tickets, at reduced rates, over the railways, and the tickets have Matthew Arnold troupe printed on them).' Mr. Arnold gave the American people of his best. He told Mr. Russell that he would rather be remembered by the lectures he delivered in the United States than by any other of his compositions in prose. He did not altogether like lecturing. He had not been accustomed to addressing large audiences, and he had a good deal of trouble with the management of his voice. But the kindness of his reception was such that, as his letters show, he thoroughly enjoyed himself. Mr. Russell, in his Prefatory Note to these volumes, expresses the opinion that Matthew Arnold's theology, ' once the subject of some just criticism, seems now a matter of comparatively little moment: for indeed his nature was essentially religious.' Mr. Russell's Note, as he modestly calls it, is so good that one hesitates to find fault with anything it contains. But this sentence MATTHEW ARNOLD S LETTERS 43 introduces so many controversial questions, and bears so distinctly upon a most significant part of Mr. Arnold's work, that it cannot be passed over in silence. I respectfully demur to the logic. That Mr. Arnold's nature was essentially religious his life and writifgs alike prove. But does it follow that because his nature was essentially religious, his theology should be a matter of comparatively little moment ? That is rather a cynical view of the relation between theology and religion. An irreligious man could never have written St. Paul and Protestantism, or Literature and Dogma, or God and the Biblt. Matthew Arnold's theology was not original. It was the theology of Ewald and of Renan, men of great power and learning, who must be refuted by argument and not dismissed with an epithet. By his adroit use of the adjective 'just,' Mr. Russell dis- poses of three volumes in one syllable. It seems, how- ever, probable that by Mr. Arnold's theology is meant, not his opinions, but his methods; not his theology proper, but his theological style. A wider issue could hardly be raised. We have all in our youth composed more or less tedious and unprofitable essays upon the thesis that ridicule is (or is not) a test of truth. For my part I do not propose to repeat my offence. But it so happens that in one of these very letters Mr. Arnold endeavours to show, with obvious sincerity, that the criticism upon his theological manner was not 'just.' The pa age occurs in a letter to his sister, Miss Arnold. 1 1> belonged to a very orthodox family, and in religious matters his fo< were those of his own household. In 1874 he writes: — ' There is a levity which is altogether evil ; but to treat miracles and the common anthropomorphic idea 1 « .• I as what one may luse and yet ! 'I" - , courage, and \aj, ai what axe not really matter j >t life and death in the keeping or lo'ing of them, this is 44 ME N AND LETTERS desirable and necessary, if one holds, as I do, that the common anthro- pomorphic ideas of God and the reliance on miracles must and will inevitably pass away. This I say not to pain you, but to make my position clear to you. ' Nobody who reads that passage can doubt that the writer meant every word he wrote, and the irresistible inference is that in all his theological works — if indeed they are to be so designated — he intended to free reli- gion from what he considered injurious to it. The expression which, of all that he wrote, gave the deepest offence, and which need not be repeated, he withdrew on finding that it had inflicted especial pain upon the distinguished philanthropist who was asso- ciated with it. Even in this letter to his sister Mr. Arnold could not refrain from one retaliatory blow at his accusers. ' The religious world which complains of me,' he says, ' would not read me if I treated my subject as they say it ought to be treated.' When Samuel Rogers was reproached for saying disagree- able things, he replied: 'I have a very weak voice, and if I did not say disagreeable things nobody would hear what I said.' Some of Mr. Arnold's critics must have been acquainted with Pascal. The profundity of Pascal's genius was only equalled by the fervour of his piety. Yet in his Provincial Letters, which deal entirely with theological subjects, he exhausts the resources of wit and irony in making the doctrines of the Jesuits ridiculous. Mr. Russell may reply that the doctrines of the Jesuits are false, while the opinions of ' the Bishops of Winchester and Gloucester ' are true. But that is hardly the point. Many years before Mr. Arnold himself took up religious subjects he fell in with Greg's Creed of Christen- dom, and thus wrote of it to his mother in 1863: — • Greg's mistake lies in representing to his imagination the exis- matthew Arnold's letters 45 tence of a great body of people excluded from the consolations of the Bible by the popular Protestant doctrine of verbal inspiration. That is stuff. The mass of people take from the Bible what suits them, and quietly leave on one side all that does not. lie, like so many other people, does not apprehend the vital distinction between religion and criticism. 1 Those were the people whom Mr. Arnold's treatment of the Bible especially irritated. They were conventional without being serious. He was serious without being conventional. They took his humour for flippancy be- cause their own flippancy was devoid of humour. The essential connection of humour and reverence can be missed by no student of literature and of life. No one could be more nobly serious than Mr. Arnold, as in his poetry, which is the best and the most enduring part of him. But there are delusions, absurd as well as per- nicious, for which laughter is the proper cure. When Voltaire exposed religious persecution to the ridicule and contempt of civilized mankind, he did a real service to religion as well as to humanity. I remember a preacher before the University of Oxford exhorting us to hold fast to the integrity of our anthropomorphism.' I cannot help thinking that a dose of Matthew Arnold would have been good alike for him and for his con- | ratiop. Not that Mr. Arnold was without prejudices. Far from it. He did not like Nonconformists. Referring to James Montgomery, the Moravian hymn-writer, he says: 'Of all dull, stagnant, unedifying entourages, that <,i middle-class I 'i nt, which environed Montgomery, is to me the stupidest.' In his hatred of Dissent and of the middle Has:., Mr. Arnold was at least im- I For while on the <>ne hand li<- . clergy* • ei tainly bel< >nged to the middle < ' He was too fond of classification. He should have 1 mibered his own excellent saying that in England 46 MEN AND LETTERS there is no such sharp division between classes as exists in some Continental countries. The middle-class Dis- senter does not divide his time between sanding his sugar and saying his prayers. Nor do ' aristocrats ' all eat off gold plate, fare sumptuously every day, and entertain reasonable doubts of their own paternity. The House of Lords is like a dull and empty House of Commons. The working-men in the House of Commons are much the same as the rest, except that, if anything, they have rather better manners. It is true that when Mr. Arnold thus wrote of Dissent, the Dissenters were excluded from the Universities, or at all events from posts of honour and emolument therein. But Dr. Mar- tineau is a more learned man and a more subtle tilinker than Mr. Arnold. Matthew Arnold never for a moment forgot that he was his father's son. In 1855, when he was thirty- two, his mother found and sent him a letter of his father's. He acknowledged it in the following terms: — ' I ought before this to have thanked you for sending the letter which is ennobling and refreshing, as everything which proceeds from him always is, besides the pathetic interest of the circumstances of its writing and finding. I think he was thirty-five when that letter was written ; and how he had forecast and revolved, even then, the serious interests and welfare of his children — at a time when, to many men, their children are still little more than playthings ! He might well hope to bring up children, when he made that bringing-up so distinctly his thought beforehand ; and we who treat the matter so carelessly and lazily — we can hardly expect ours to do more than^ww up at hazard, not be brought up at all. But this is just what makes him great — that he was not only a good man saving his own soul by righteousness, but that he carried so many others with him in his hand and saved them, if they would let him, along with himself.' Dr. Arnold was cut off in the prime of life, leaving his History of Rome a fragment, and his work at Rugby incomplete. The true presentment of him is given by Dean Stanley rather than by Judge Hughes. His system of school management he introduced from Winchester, MATTHEW ARNOLDS LETTERS 47 adding only the sermon to the cane. His ideas of political philosophy were much more interesting and remarkable. Like his son, he was considered a heretic by the Scribes and Pharisees of his day. Dr. Stanley, who ought to know, says he was a Broad Churchman. But he held the theory that Church and State were two aspects of the same thinjr: that the Church was the State on its ecclesiastical side, and that the State was the Church on its political side. Nonconformists were erring brethren, who really belonged to the Church, although they chose to reject its ministrations. But those who were not Christians were outside the State as well as the Church, and, though entitled to pro- tection because they paid taxes, had no right to sit in Parliament, or even to vote. While Matthew Arnold travelled a long way beyond his father's theological boundaries, and was certainly not opposed to the emancipation of the Jews, he inherited and adopted Dr. Arnold's invincible faith in truth, righteousness, and innocence. No line of his poetry suggests any- thing but what is lovely and of good report. No act of his life could have been condemned by the Puritan rigour of his father. From his father also he derived much of his inbred taste and literary sense. Dr. Arnold's style is always lucid, dignified, and im- pressive. His mind was steeped in the literature of Athens, that Standard and touchstone of perfection. Plato and Thucydides were the favourites of the father; Homer and Sophocles of the son. Greece is justified of her children. January, 1896. THE DECAY OF CLASSICAL QUOTATION In Le Lys Rouge, by M. Anatole France, a work not on all grounds, or for all persons, to be recommended, there is the following passage : ' Schmoll est sans rancune. C'est une vertu de sa race. II n'en veut pas a ceux qu'il persecute. Un jour montant l'escalier de l'lnstitut, en compagnie de Renan et d'Oppert, il recontra Marmet, et lui tendit la main. Marmet refusa de la prendre, et dit: " Je ne vous connais pas." " Me prenez-vous pour une inscription latine ? " repliqua Schmoll.' The retort may have been suggested by a remark of Charles Lamb, too familiar even for quotation. It is, I suppose, directed by M. France, himself a classical scholar of equal brilliancy and learning, against the school of recondite investigators who know all the ' dead languages ' except Latin and Greek. One of them, a great authority, I believe, on Accadian seals, expressed or implied in a recent controversy the rather startling opinion that by rerpdKVK\oe very generally invited in London. The man Sterne, I ha\ ild, lias had engag mi nts for three months.' Goldsmith: 'And a very dull fellow.' Johnson: ' Why, no, sir. 1 I of my earliest recollections is a warning which I .ved from a country gentleman not to read too many books. ' For my part,' he said, ' I only read two books; but I read them over and over again. One is the Bible. The other is Tristram Shandy.' Apart from the absurdity of calling the Bible a book, and the indecorum of com- paring sacred literature with profane, there is in the writings of Sterne no obvious inspiration from on high. But there are other qualities with which a mundane critic is naturally more competent to deal. Dr. Johnson, who knew better than to call Sterne dull, declared that Tristram Shandy would perish because it was odd, and nothing odd could live. Tristram Shandy, like Charles the Second, has been an unconscionably long time in dying. It would be an exaggeration to say that Mr. Disraeli was the last man who read Rasselas, or that no man living had read Irene. But inferences to these ical compositions would in the best educated com- . fall exceedingly flat, whereas I'm le Toby's sayings Falstaf] 's, and the ' sub-acid humour 'of Mr. shandy plays, like the wit of Horace, round t: the hi lit. Jt is now a pure curio- sity of literature that men have lived who imputed V — 2 68 MEN AND LETTERS dulness to Tvistram Shandy. Goldsmith, who was not altogether incapable of jealousy, denounced it in the Citizen of the World with a bitterness unsuitable to his character, and censured its violations of propriety in language of extraordinary grossness. Horace Walpole informed Sir David Dalrymple that he could not help calling it ' a very insipid and tedious performance,' in which ' the humour was for ever attempted and missed.' That is a description which might be applied by an unfavourable critic to Walpole's own letters, except that it is not easy to understand how, if humour is always missed, there can be any humour at all. ' The great humour,' adds this great critic, ' consists in the whole narrative always going backwards.' That is like the definition propounded by a budding naturalist to Cuvier, in which a crab was called a red fish that walks backwards. ' Your definition,' said Cuvier, ' would be perfect but for three facts : a crab is not red, it is not a fish, and it does not walk backwards.' Wordsworth thought that Candide was dull, and it is possible that Voltaire might have pronounced with more reason a similar judgment upon the Ecclesiastical Sonnets. As a straightforward and consecutive narrative of actual facts, duly set forth with appropriate comments, Tris- tram Shandy must be acknowledged, as Mr. Shandy said of the science of fortification, to have its weak points. Those who find it dull will probably find The Caxtons amusing, and I recommend them to try. Mr. Percy Fitzgerald has rewritten his Life of Sterne, and has published some of Sterne's letters not previously printed. He has also reproduced the famous autograph contained in the fifth, seventh, and ninth volumes of the second edition of Tristram Shandy. When Sterne wrote for the public he was a purist in style, if not in morals. STERNE 69 When he wrote to ladies he was rhapsodical and in every sense of the word romantic. He corresponded with his male friends in a colloquial and rather slipshod fashion, which has nothing very characteristic about it except indomitable cheerfulness. Mr. Fitzgerald has disposed of Byron's charge that Sterne ' preferred whining over a dead ass to relieving a living mother.' The mother was an insatiable harpy, and Sterne did leve her on many occasions. He was a good-natured if at bottom a selfish man. lie behaved much better to his wife than Byron, which is not saying much, and was as fond of his daughter as Wilkes, which is saying a great deal. It is a strange notion that a man's private life becomes more interesting if he writes good prose or verse. The late Professor Freeman protested against setting up a Chair of English Literature at Oxford if it was only to mean ' chatter about Harriet ' — that is, the first Mrs. Shelley. Chatter about Jenny — that is, Miss Fourmantel — is equally devoid of edification. It was rather a mean sort of economy on Mr. Sterne's part to use up his old love letters to Mrs. Sterne in addressing Mrs. Draper. Nor can the tone of his epistle to Lady Percy be held up for the imitation of the married and beneficed clergy. But, as Captain Shandy exclaimed, • what is all this to a man who fears God ? ' Sterne was forty-five when he began Tristram Shandy. He had lived since his youth chiefly in York and the immediate neighbourhood. The book was 1 gun as a sort of local satire, in which the characters were well known and speedily recognised. What is the secret of its unfailing charm ? There is no plot. There U no story. There is no method. There is no order, nut even an alphabetical order, of which an eminent judge said that, though inferior to chronological order, JO MEN AND LETTERS it was better than no order at all. There are only a few characters, some eccentric, others so broadly and typi- cally human that one is startled by the familiarity and obviousness of their comments upon novel and unex- pected events. Take, for instance, the scene in the kitchen at Shandy Hall when the news arrived of Bobby Shandy's death. * My young master in London is dead,' said Obadiah. A green satin nightgown of my mother's, which had been twice scoured, was the first idea which Obadiah's exclamation brought into Susannah s head. Well might Locke write a chapter upon the imperfections of words. 'Then,' quoth Susannah, 'we must all go into mourning.' But note a second time : the word mourning, notwithstanding Susannah made use of it herself, failed also of doing its olrice ; it excited not one single idea, tinged either with grey or black — all was green. The green satin nightgown hung there still. ' Oh ! 'twill be the death of my poor mistress,' cried Susannah. My mother's whole wardrobe followed. What a procession ! Her red damask, her orange-tawny, her white and yellow hat strings, her brown taffeta, her bone-laced caps, her bedgowns and comfortable under-petticoats — not a rag was left behind. ' No, she will never look up again,' said Susannah. We had a fat, foolish scullion — my father, I think, kept her for her simplicity. She had been all autumn struggling with a dropsy. 'He is dead.' said Obadiah ; ' he is certainly dead.' ' So am not I,' said the foolish scullion. ' Here is sad news, Trim ! ' cried Susannah, wiping her eyes as Trim stepped into the kitchen. ' Master Bobby is dead and buried.' The funeral was an interpolation of Susannah's. ' We shall have all to go into mourning,' said Susannah. ' I hope not,' said Trim. ' You hope not ! ' cried Susannah earnestly. The mourning ran not in Trim's head, whatever it did in Susannah's. ' I hope,' said Trim, explaining himself, ' I hope in God the news is not true. 3 ' I heard the letter read with my own ears,' answered Obadiah, ' and we shall have a terrible piece of work of it in stubbing the Oxmoor.' [Obadiah knew that Mr. bhandy had proposed to send Bobby abroad with the money originally intended for the moor.] ' Oh ! he's dead,' said Susannah. 'As sure,' said the scullion ' as I'm alive.' Then follows the famous digression upon the drop- ping of Trim's hat. '"Are we not here now," continued the corporal, "and are we not" (dropping his hat plump upon the ground, and pausing before he pronounced the word) " gone ! in a moment ? " The descent of the hat was as if a heavy lump of clay had been kneaded into the crown of it. " Had he flung it, or thrown it, or cast STERNE 71 it, or skimmed it, or squirted it, or let it slip or fall in any possible direction under heaven, or in the best direc- tion that could be given to it ... it had failed, and the effect upon the heart had been lost." ' Sterne goes on in a style rather more fantastic than usual to treat Trim's hat as the symbol of all declamatory eloquence and histrionic effect. Nearly a hundred years after the publication of Tristram Shandy, Richard Cobden and John Bright walked home together from the House of Commons. Mr. Bright had just made the great speech linst the Crimean war, in which he exclaimed, 'The angel of death is abroad in the land. You can almost hear the beating of his wings.' It is one of the most justly celebrated passages in modern oratory. ' There s one moment,' remarked Cobden, 'when I trembled for you. If you had said " flapping " you would have been lost.' Whether Cobden had read Tristram Shandy or not, he understood the moral of Trim's hat. A great French critic, the late M. Taine, in his spirited and ingenious history of English literature, dismisses Sterne with a few contemptuous pages. He could see nothing in him but the eccentric and gro- tesque. That is to miss the whole reason of Sterne's popularity and the whole source of his power. Dr. Johnson was right in his general principle, though wrong in his particular instance. Nothing merely odd does last. Tristram Shandy is not merely odd. Its on the surface. The author has ways and 1 1 if ks which perplex some readers, and annoy others. But \ Dot of th "l his work. They are superficial. What lies below is a profound knowledge of men and women, a subtle sympathy with human , a consummate arj ol putting the great com- monplace oi life in ;i form which makes them seem 72 MEN AND LETTERS original. ' Difficile est proprie communia dicere.' It is difficult, but it is worth doing, for the prize is literary immortality. M. Taine, who so thoroughly appre- ciated and so nobly expressed the genius of Swift, could see in Sterne only a writer who ended where he ought to have begun, who prosed upon the con- jugal endearments of an elderly merchant and his wife, who had strange theories of trivial things, who dragged in legal pedantry and theological disputes and the jar- gon of the schools without reason or excuse. No such book could have lived a hundred and thirty-six years, or thirty-six without the hundred. It may be that, as Mr. Fitzgerald says, Tristram Shandy is more talked about than read. All the masterpieces of literature are. If every copy of Tristram Shandy were destroyed to- morrow its influence upon style and thought would remain. Sterne had one great quality besides humour in common with Swift. He wrote his own English. I sometimes doubt whether justice has ever yet been done to the simplicity and beauty of it. The Sentimen- tal Journey and the fragment of Autobiography are almost perfect. The familiar description of the accusing spirit and the recording angel and Uncle Toby's oath would by the slightest blunder of taste have been made ridi- culous, and the intrusion or even the misplacement of a word would have spoiled it. As it stands it is the admiration of every one who reads and the despair of every one who writes. The brief sketch of Uncle Toby's funeral, characteristically introduced in the middle of a book which leaves him perfectly well at the end of it, is a flawless and exquisite vignette in words. Sterne, like Swift, eschewed the mannerisms of his own age. There is hardly a phrase in Tristram Shandy or in Gulli- ver's Travels which would fix the date of either. They STERNE 73 wrote for posterity, and unlike the too famous ode, they have reached their address. It is, perhaps, less strange that M. Taine should underrate Sterne than that Sterne should have become the rage in the Paris of Louis Quinze. Whatever may be said of the Sentimental Journey there is no more tho- roughly English book than Tristram Shandy. But the Anglomania of 1760 was equal to anything, and the fine French ladies who thought Hume handsome found that Shandyism was just the thing to suit them. Sterne's own French seems to have been as bad as Lord Brougham's. But Tristram Shandy was translated as it came out, and the Parisians bought it, if they did not read it. Long afterwards Madame de Beaumont, whose humour was not her strong point, carried Tristram Shandy about with her among her favourite volumes in the strange company of Voltaire's Letters and the Platonic Dialogue which describes the death of Socrates. It was not all Anglomania or affectation. It was also a con- clusive tribute to the universality of the book. We know the sources from which Sterne's characters were drawn. Uncle Toby was a compound of his own father, concerning whom he says, in the autobiography, that ' you might have cheated him ten times a day if nine had not been sufficient for your purpose,' and Captain Hinde, of Preston Castle, in Hertfordshire. Yorick is, of course, himself, or one side of himself, for there is a tfreat deal of Sterne in Mr. Shandy. Mrs. Shandy is said, alas! to have been his wife. Eugenius was John Hall Stevenson, owner of Crazy Castle, which was unfortunately destroyed, and author of Crazy TaUs, which have been unini Innately preserved. Kr- nulphus is Bi bop Warburton, Dr. Slop is Dr. Bur- tun, and so forth. These facts are not without their 74 MEN AND LETTERS interest, and it is still disputed, I believe, whether Dr. Burton was really a Roman Catholic, and whether he was actually upset in the mud. The industrious inquirer who set himself to discover whether the hus- band of the nurse in Romeo and Juliet was really a merry man, or whether she was deceived into thinking him so by affectionate partiality for his memory, belonged to a class more numerous than less energetic people might suppose. ' The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.' But the shadows outlast the substance. They are too immaterial to feel the hand of death. They are like the songs of the old Greek, aiaiv 6 ttclvtcov apiraicT^p 'Ai'S^? ovtc kirl X e ^P a /3a-Xe6. There is not much superficial resemblance between Laurence Sterne and Jane Austen; but both drew their characters from their own imme- diate and not remarkable surroundings. Both drew them in such a fashion that all classes of readers can equally enjoy them. The early editions of Tristram Shandy bore on the title page a motto from Aristotle which gives the key to the whole work. Men are troubled, said the philosopher, not by facts, but by opinions about facts. Charles Lamb used to call him- self a matter of fiction man. Walter Shandy is the type and presentment of the speculati Ye mind. No- thing strikes him as it strikes other people. He judges everything by reference to a theory, and his theories have no necessary connection the one with the other. Yet his unfailing humour shines through his pedantry and, except when he lies on the bed, saves him from appearing ridiculous. Sterne laughed at his critics, and their successors have not forgiven him. Bishop Warburton, after ex- tolling him, oddly enough, as the English Rabelais, STERNE 75 excommunicated him with bell, book, and candle, as Bishop Monk long afterwards did to Sydney Smith. The result in both cases was a deplorably easy triumph for the inferior clergy. Warburton lives as Ernulphus, and the Divint Legation is dead. Monk's Euripides re- poses in the libraries of the curious. But everybody i members him in connection with those 'cephalic animalculne ' protesting against the use of small-tooth combs. It is a dangerous tiling to run across a man of genius before he is dead. When Boswell depreciated the Dunciad Johnson told him that he had missed his chance of immortality by coming too late into the world. Thackeray, who devoted half a lecture to abuse of Sterne, and many volumes to the sincerest form of flattering him, took him, if one may say so with all respect, by the wrong side. The laughter of fools, said the wise man in one of his wisest sayings, is like the crackling of thorns under a pot. To Mr. Thackeray, with his sensitive and beautiful reverence for the serious side of life, Sterne's laughter was hollow and his mockery hideous. Sterne's sentiment, which is no more exclu- sively Sterne's than it is Shakespeare's or Nature's, may be found in Esmond and The Newcomes as much as in the Sentimental Journey itself. The fascinating spirit of the htcenth century, as perilous and attractive as the Hill Venus in medkeval romance, is summed up in Sterne as in no other man. It was the century of Wesley as il as of Voltaire, and of Johnson as well as of Rousseau. Sterne and Wesley hardly seem to belong to the same We arc not all made t<> understand each other. with his aoble hatred of persecution and love <>f intellectual freedom, did undoubtedly sometimes direct terrible engine of his ridicule against 'the lasl re stiaint of the powerful and thfl lai I hope of the wreh bed.' J 6 MEN AND LETTERS Sterne did not. ' There never,' said Trim of his master, ' was a better officer in the king's army, or a better man in God's world,' and the character of Uncle Toby is a faithful portrait lovingly drawn. With the most sub- stantial charge against Sterne's writings I must deal before I conclude. It cannot without affectation be ignored. But I claim for him, in spite of Mr. Thack- eray, that the effect of his humour as of his eloquence, of his slightest sketches as of his most finished rhetoric, is to promote a large tolerance, a kindly sympathy, a broad humanity, and a rational justice. The eighteenth century boasted itself to be the age of reason rather than the age of faith. Sterne poured contempt upon hypocrisy, upon pomposity, upon pre- tence, upon that peculiar carriage of the body which is adopted to conceal defects of the mind. He took, per- haps, rather too much interest in the relations of the sexes, and undervalued the conventional respectability which at one time earned for English society the applause of an admiring universe. But he hated cruelty, and meanness, and dishonesty, and malice. He knew that it was sentiment which separates man from beast. We cannot ' call up him who left half told the story of Cambuscan bold.' We cannot finish Weir of Hevmiston, though it is not improbable that somebody will make the attempt. For my part I feel it even more difficult to bear the loss of that book which was never written, but which would have described Tristram's grand tour through Europe, ' in which, after all, my father (not caring to trust me with any one) attended me himself, with my uncle Toby, and Trim, and Obadiah, and, indeed, most of the family, except my mother, who being taken up with a project of knitting my father a pair of large worsted breeches (the thing is common STERNE 77 sense), and she not caring to be put out of her way, she stayed at home, at Shandy Hall, to keep things straight during the expedition.' One fragment only of this precious work survives to excite curiosity for ever, and leave it always unappeased. The scene is Auxerre. ' We'll go, Brother Toby,' said my father, ' whilst dinner is ing, to the Abbey of St. Germain, if it be only to see those a of which Monsieur Sequier Ins given such a recommendation. 1 1 I'll go see anybody,' qnoth my uncle Toby, for he was all compliance e\ ry step of the 'Defend me!' said my father, 'they are all mummies.' 'Then one need not shave,' quoth my unr * Shave ! no,' cried my fattier ; "twill be more like relations to go with our beards on.' So out we .-allied, the corporal lending his master his irm and bringing up the rear, to the Abbey of St. Germain. ' Every- thing is very line, and very rich, and very superb, and very magni- Gcent,' said my father, addressing himself to the sacristan, who v younger brother of the order of Benedictines ; ' but our curiosity has led us to see the bodies, of which Monsieur Sequier has given the world so exact a description.' The sacristan made a bow, and lighting a torch first, which he had always in the vestry ready for the purpose, 1 led us into the tomb of St. Heribald. 'This,' said the sacristan, laying his hand upon the tomb, ' was a renowned prince of the house varia, who, under the successive reigns of Charlemagne, Louis )e D£bonnaire, and Charles the Bald, bore a great sway in the govern- ment, and had a principal hand in bringing everything into order and discipline.' ' Then he has been as great,' said my uncle, 'in the field as in the cabinet. I dare say he has been a gallant soldier. 1 ' He was a monk,' said the sacristan. My uncle Toby and Trim sought comfort in each other's faces, but found it not. My father dapped both his hands upon his waistcoat, which was a way lie had when anything hugely tickled him; for though be hated a monk and t he very sm< I ol • than all the devils in hell, yet the shot bitting my uncle and Trim so much harder than him, 'twas a relative triumph an I iiim into the gayest humour in the world. '.And pray what do call this gentleman? 1 quoth my father rather sportingly. 'This tomb,' said the young Benedictine! looking downwards, contain, the bones of St. Maxima, who came from Ravenna on purpose to touch the body ' 'Of St. Maxiinu;,' said my lather, popping in with his saint- i fore him. 'They were two o( the greatest saints in the whole mart-. added in) lather. ' Excuse me,' said the sacristan, "twas .nil the lxjnes ol St. Germain, the buUdei ol the abbey.' 'And be gd by it?' said my uncle T"l>y. 'What doe- any >" it .-* ' said my father. x Martyrdom? replied the young lictine, making a bow down t" the ground, and uttering the word -o humMe hut decisive a cadence il thei for a ', continued the Bei , ' that St. Maxima ain in this tomb four hundred ''Tis but a slow riic, Brother Toby,' quoth my lather, 'in this bell e y& MEN AND LETTERS army of Martyrs.' 'A desperate slow one, an' please your Honour,' said Trim, 'unless one could purchase.' 'I should rather sell out entirely,' quoth my uncle Toby. ' I am pretty much of your opinion, Brother Toby,' said my father.' If Tristram Shandy were merely odd, this is just the sort of episode in it which would long ago have ceased to be read or to be readable. It is a digression upon a digression, if indeed terms of arrangement can be applied to a book which has none. It is a more flagrant violation of the unities than can be found even in Shakespeare, and to Shakespeare a man must go if he wants a purer piece of imperishable nature. Uncle Toby, ' all compliance through every step of the journey,' Mr. Shandy, whose ' remarks and reasonings upon the characters, the manners and customs of the countries we passed over were so opposite to those of all other mortal men, particularly those of my uncle Toby and Trim,' and Tristram silently observing for the future, make an even more delightful medley than that strange company which roamed through the best of all possible worlds under the guidance of M. Pangloss. This is the kind of passage which comment only spoils. But the ' relative triumph ' of Mr. Shandy is the touch of a master. It supplies in two words the whole philosophy of popular preaching, in which the most hardened sinners will re- joice, because there is alwa3's some one else whom the shot hits so much harder than them. Sterne was not very respectful in his treatment of the Church of Rome. He played sometimes to the Protestant gallery, which still hated ' Papishes and wooden shoes.' But it is to be observed that on this visit to the Abbey of St. Germain the victory rests with the young Benedictine, who is not a humourist, nor a controversialist, but only a Christian gentleman. Sterne, like Swift, held very loosely to the dogmatic theology of his Church. But STERNE 79 both of them were too great to make a cheap reputation for wit out of sneers at religion. Swift turned all the tiemendous powers of his savage irony against the shallow free-thinkers of his day, and ' that quality of their voluminous writings which the poverty of the English language compels me to call their style.' The one character in Tristram Shandy whom Sterne never allows to be made ridiculous is Uncle Toby, and Uncle Toby's rule of life is the Sermon on the Mount. His quaint simplicity, his native shrewdness, his instinctive preference of good and rejection of evil are more than a match for all the learning and all the subtlety of his bn>t her. When Mr. Shandy, in an unusually tedious mood, had begun a discourse upon learned men's solu- tions of noses, and had been driven wild by the Captain's artless question, ' Can noses be dissolved ? ' he replied — ' Why, liy the solutions of noses, of which I was telling you, I meant, as you might have known, had you favoured me with one grain of attention, the various accounts which learned men of different kinds of knowledge have given the world of the causes of long and short noses.' 'There is no cause but one,' replied my uncle Toby, 'why one man's nose is longer than other, but because that God pleases to have it BO.' 'That is Grangouskr's solution,' said my father. ' It is he.' continued my uncle Toby, looking up and not regarding my father's interruption, 'who makes us all, and forms and puts us together in such i- and proportions and for such ends as is agreeable to his infinite in ' ' Now, whether we observe it or no,' continued my father (upon another occasion), ' in every sound man's head there is a regular sue- of ideaa, of one sort or other, which follow each other in train like ' 'A train of artillery?' said my uncle Toby. 'A train t4 a fiddlestick !' quoth my father — 'which follow and succeed one another in our minds at certain distances, just like the images m the i a lantern turned round by the heat of a candle.' '1 declare,' 3|Uoth my uncle Toby, 'mine are more like a Bmoke-jack.' 'Then, r I by, I have nothing inoie to say to you upon the subject,' baid my father.' Mr. Fitzgerald has a strange theory that Tristram Shandy tmritti n v.ii h gr< tt carelessness, and at head* Ion d, resulting in u laiia;o of nonsense, iliu- 80 MEN AND LETTERS minated by rare gleams of fancy and humour. This reminds me of the Buckinghamshire farmer who, after listening to a speech from his distinguished member at a market dinner, expressed the opinion that Mr. Disraeli was a very good man, but not at all clever. With all respect for Mr. Fitzgerald, I venture to affirm that Tristram Shandy is one of the most elaborate of human compositions, that there is not a sentence in it but Sterne well knew how it came there, and that its sim- plicity is the designed consequence of the highest art. Every one must have enjoyed or suffered the experience of forgetting a single line or even a single word in a great poem. The hopeless impossibility of supplying it by any other means than memory impresses upon the mind, like nothing else, what real poetry is. Oh, the little more, and how much it is, And the little less, and what worlds away ! There is much in Tristram Shandy which approaches the pedantic and borders on the dull. Take the Curse of Ernulphus; cut out of it the running comments of Uncle Toby and Mr. Shandy's famous shake of the head: forget that Dr. Slop had to read it through him- self as a penalty for cursing Obadiah because he had cut his own thumb. The Curse of Ernulphus becomes about as interesting as an essay on Humour with the humour, as it usually is, left out. It is said that when the Rev. Laurence Sterne preached as prebendary in York Minster many good people left the sacred edifice rather than sit under him. His sermons, including the one which Corporal Trim read, and broke down in reading because it reminded him of his brother Tom and the Inquisition, are not fervidly spiritual. Sometimes, as when he warns wives against pretending to moral or physical advantages, STERNE 8 I the absence of which may be discovered in the first domestic scuffle, they may be reasonably suspected of a tendency to raise a laugh. It was, however, we are told, his life and not his sermons which scandalised his con- gregation. He kept bad company, such as his cousin Hall Stevenson and the Rev. Robert Lascelles, known as ' Panty,' from his supposed and unclerical resemblance to Pantagruel. Sterne would have done better to adopt a secular career. His cassock never fitted him, and to make love in bands is incongruous, especially for one who held that talking about love was not making it. But poor Sterne, with all his personal frailties, has been dead nearly a hundred and thirty years. Miss Four- mantel and Mrs. Draper were not difficult conquests. Sterne was, perhaps, not above enjoying la fanfaromiaJe des vices quil navait pas. We are concerned rather with his works than with him. Soundness of mind and goodness of heart are enshrined in the central figure of Sterne's masterpiece. At this time of day it is more important that one of the great writers of the world should have employed his genius upon the creation of Uncle Toby than that a clergyman of the Church of England should have written to a countess a letter which she should have destroyed. There is no episode in Sterne's writings, not even the description of the dead ass, more hackneyed than the story of Le Fevre. It has been much exposed to penny readings, and the professional reciter has done his t with it. But it remains unscathed, and it is worth all the pathetic scenes in Dickens put together. There is one touch in it peculiai to Sterne, and no more to be imi- tated than the thunderbolt of Jove. Trim is the narrator. He did Dot "fl"cr to sj)cali to me till I had walked up close to lii< bcdsiJ.e. '11 you are Captain Shandy's servant,' said he, ' you must G 82 MEN AND LETTERS present my thanks to your master, with my little boy's thanks along with them, for his courtesy to me. If he was of Levens's ' said the lieutenant. 'I told him your honour was.' ' Then,' said he, 'I served three campaigns with him in Flanders, and remember him ; but 'tis most likely, as I had not the honour of any acquaintance with him, that he knows nothing of me. You will tell him, however, that the person his good nature has laid under obligations to him is one Le Fevre, a lieutenant in Angus's; but he knows me not,' said he a second time, musing. ' Possibly he may my story,' added he. ' Pray tell the Captain I was the ensign at Breda whose wife was most unfortunately killed with a musket shot as she lay in my arms in my tent.' 'J remember the story, an't please your honour,' said I, 'very well.' ' Do you so ? ' said he, wiping his eyes with his handkerchief ; ' then well may I.' In saying this he drew a little ring out of his bosom, which seemed tied with a black riband about his neck, and kissed it twice. ' Here, Billy,' said he. The boy flew across the room to the bedside, and falling down upon his knee took the ring in his hand and kissed it too, then kissed his father, and sat down upon the bed and wept. ' I wish, said my uncle Toby with a deep sigh, ' I wish, Trim, I was asleep.' Sterne often appears to be, though perhaps he never really is, diffuse. Certainly no one could say more, and not many could say so much, in a few words. Into Tristram Shandy he put himself, as Montaigne, who was sublimely diffuse, put himself into his essays. The ser- mons are perfunctory, and Dr. Johnson, no bad judge of the article, could not away with them. The Sentimental Journey is a perfect work of art. But, or rather and, it is all of a piece ; it is a single record of fresh impressions. In Tristram Shandy are accumulated the experience, the meditations, the observant knowledge of many years. The eccentricity is in the treatment. The substance is elemental, and belongs to the broadest aspects of human nature. Sterne had an intense hatred of cruelty, of in- justice, of hypocrisy, and of Puritanism. His religion was the sentimental Deism of the eighteenth century, and he had no abhorrence of the ' lighter vices.' In politics, though he affected, and perhaps felt, indifference to party, he was a mild Whig. Brought up among soldiers and loving them, as the characters of Uncle STERNE 83 Toby and Trim show that he did, he hated war, and especially wars of ambition. My father would often say to Yorick that if any mortal in the whole universe had done such a thing except his brother Toby, it would have been looked upon by the world as one of the most rerined res upon the parade and prancing manner in which Louis the Fourteenth from the beginning of the war, but particularly that very year, had taken the field. ' Bat 'tis not my brother Toby's nature, kind soul ! ' my father would add, ' to insult any one.' Although Sterne was throughout his life the victim of dc hi ilth, and fled from death, as he himself said, through France and Italy, dying at last in the fifty-sixth ir of his age, his spirits were indomitable and his pluck dauntless. No man could be more nobly serious upon themes that moved his admiration, his reverence, or his pity. But he saw many things in odd lights, and his sense of humour never slumbered, not even when it would have been better asleep. The secret of his style, ich must, I cannot help thinking, have had some iiiiluence upon Newman's, is expressed in his own aphorism that writing is like conversation. Mr. Shandy was fanciful and fantastic, a devourer of musty rubbish which he mistook for literature, and, it must be added, of some good books along with the rest. But Mr. Shandy is a master of racy vernacular, and his most celebrated repartees are in monosyllables. Unlike Swift, Sterne was a student of Shakespeare, and once found himself under the necessity of explaining to a bishop that there were two Yoricks. This prelate — perhaps the same who declared that he did not believe a word of Gulliver's Travels — protested that he could not read ser- mons by the King of Denmark's jest< 1 . Learned men, who find out everything in time, nade tl iy that Sterne was not original. 'i beil ingenuity and industry are nut lejb laudable U ionise o— ~ 84 MEN AND LETTERS they were anticipated by the candour of Sterne himself. He does not, indeed, mention Shakespeare. I suppose that in a treatise on photography one might assume the existence of the sun. But he speaks of his ' dear Rabelais, and still dearer Cervantes.' He quotes a whole heap of philosophers from Aristotle to Locke. ' Read, read, read,' he says, and of his own reading, if Captain Shandy will forgive such a use of the word, he makes a parade. And then we are gravely told by critics whose anti-Shandian beards we can spy under their mufflers, that he did not spin the whole of Tristram Shandy out of his own inside. The worthy and laborious Dr. Ferriar is actually at the pains to point out that when Mr. Shandy heard of the death of Bobby he quoted Bacon. He did indeed. He repeated nearly the whole of the Essay on Death, and he enriched it with an exquisite stroke. ' " Caesar Augustus died in a com- pliment." " I hope it was a sincere one," said my uncle Toby. " It was to his wife," replied my father.' Mr. Shandy, upon the same mournful occasion, while Susannah's mind wandered towards green satin, quoted also Plato, Cicero, and Sulpicius. Quotation was the breath of his nostrils. He was always quoting. Excellent Dr. Ferriar. But then Sterne did not get all his quotations at first hand. He made a reprehensible use of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. Sterne was not melancholy, and stood in no need of Burton's anatomical assistance. But he found a good deal of miscellaneous feeding in the famous collections of Democritus Junior, and Sterne was a miscellaneous feeder. Dr. Arnold thought it was wrong to appropriate another man's quotations, even if you verified them first. Dr. Arnold was a Puritan. Sterne was not, and it is likely enough that he sometimes omitted even the process of verification. STERNE 85 1 What is that to any body ? ' as Uncle Toby asked when his brother tried to tell him how he came by his ideas. Moliere, so Mr. Fraser Rae tells us, did not say, ' Je prends mon bien ou je le trouve.' He said, * Je reprends mon bien,' which is so legal as to be almost flat. But if Moliere had said it he would have said a very good thing, and one which an original genius can afford to say. Sterne is not in the least like any of the writers he has been accused of pillaging. Some say that Tristram Shandy was suggested by the Tale of a Tub. It requires a more powerful imagination than I possess to under- stand the meaning of the statement. Both works might be included in a treatise on the coarseness of clergymen. But little could come of such a treatise, and it is to be hoped that none will ever be written. When Warburton called Sterne the English Rabelais, his episcopal colleagues, says Horace Walpole, did not know what he meant. The work of the Abbe of Meudon had not come their way. Sterne could speak out. George the Third would not suffer him to be promoted in the Church, and who can say that his Majesty was wrong ? Queen 1 roline would have enjoyed Tristram Shandy. One cannot imagine her grandson reading it aloud to Queen Charlotte. Sterne, however, risked nothing worse than the loss of a bishopric or a deanery. Rabelais might burnt. He wrote furtively and cryptically, ..ping hi l message to mankind in parables, in anec- . and in jokes. He was a passionate humanist, a lover of the classics, and a hater of monks. So much is clear enough to the most superficial reader. There is less profundity in Tristram Shandy, and no very definite purpose. Pedantry was ridiculous and cruelty odious before the time of Sterne, or of Rabelais. Goethe said of his own writings that a man who had 86 MEN AND LETTERS read and digested them would feel a stronger sense of freedom than before, and would be conscious of a wider range in permissible action. Sterne and Rabelais both harp on the hindrance of prudery and superstition, or, as some might say, religion and respectability, to the thorough enjoyment of life. Sterne was not a man of profound learning. He was a desultory, indiscriminate reader, and there are those who consider these adjectives to be epithets of abuse. He could hardly have been acquainted with the romance of Sir Thomas Malory, or he would not have made Mr. Shandy say that no one named Tristram had ever achieved any exploit in the world. The eighteenth century despised the Middle Ages, as may be seen in that detestable poem La Pucelle. There is, I believe, an expurgated edition of Tristram Shandy, which begins with the sixth, or it may be with the seventh chapter. I do not know where it ends, nor what the same ingenious editor has done with the Sen- timental Journey. The occasional impropriety of both works must be regretted, and cannot be denied. Every one knows the story of the lady whom Sterne asked whether she had read Tristram Shandy. ' No, Mr. Sterne,' said she, ' and, to be plain with you, I am told that it is not very fit for feminine perusal.' ' Pooh, pooh, ma'am, look at your child there, lolling on the carpet. He shows much that we conceal, but in perfect innocence, my dear ma'am, in perfect innocence.' Mr. Sterne's innocence was not perfect. It is always easy to condemn. It is often difficult to distinguish. There are passages in Sterne of which one can only say that while it would be coarse to print them now, it was not coarse to print them then. That, however, is not an exhaustive account of the matter, and does not meet the gravest part of the charge. Sterne treated delicate STERNE Sy subjects, and a delicate subject may be defined, for want of a better definition, as one which lends itself to indeli- cate treatment. By what standard and by what rules is a book like Tristram Shandy to be judged ? Mr. Ruskin once complained that he was hampered in his moral and religious teaching (though no one would have suspected it) because he could not address the British public as frankly believing or frankly disbelieving in a future life. It does not seem easy to ascertain what the accepted view of indelicacy in literature is. When M. Zola did us the honour of visiting London, a brilliant assemblage, largely composed of fashionable ladies, gathered in the hall of a learned society to hear the gospel according to the author of Nana. The English translator of M. Zola's works was, if I remember rightly, at the same time languishing in a dungeon for the offence of too faithfully translating them. If Tristram Shandy were veiled in the obscurity of the French language, no apology might be necessary for it. But there is between Sterne and Zola a difference deeper and wider than nationality. M. Zola has no humour. He deals with vice in deadly earnest, and without any reserve. When Sterne departs from conventional propriety it is always to a laugh, and never for any less avowable purpose. There is nothing so serious as passion, and laughter is quite incompatible with prurience. Thackeray contrasts the impurity of Sterne with the purity of Goldsmith. 1 ismith wrote two stanzas which an- quite as indecent uiything in Sterne, and not in the least amusing. 4 h cannot be said,' wrote Sir Walter Scott, who had stnely, among all great men of letters, the soundest and healthiest mind, 'it cannot be Baid that the licentious humour of Tristram Shandy is of the kind wIi'k h applies itself to the possiOBSj or is calculated to corrupt society. 88 MEN AND LETTERS But it is a sin against taste, if allowed to be harmless as to morals. A handful of mud is neither a firebrand nor a stone ; but to fling it about in sport argues coarse- ness of mind and want of common manners.' For his sin against taste Sterne has paid the penalty. He has alienated and repelled many of the readers who would best appreciate his humanity, his pathos, and his elo- quence. If any man cares to see what Shandean license can be without the great qualities which in Sterne's case redeem it, let him dip — he need do no more — into Hall Stevenson's Crazy Tales, which were once thought vastly witty and entertaining. A man and his work must be tried by contemporary comparison. But I do not know that a generation which reads La Terve can afford to hold up the hands of horror at the intricacies of Diego and Julia. There are some things in Tristram Shandy which would be better away. ' The knowledge of evil is not wisdom.' The tale of Slawkenbergius is tedious, and has happily ceased to be intelligible. Rhinology may not have been more absurd than phrenology, but it is more completely forgotten. The tale of the Abbess of Andouillets is low, gross, and stupid. But with these two exceptions there is hardly a dull page in Tristram Shandy. There is, moreover, this to be said for it, that the more innocent the reader, the more innocent the book. M. Zola, who has, as Dr. Pusey said of Lord Westbury and eternal punishment, a personal interest in the question, argues that a book can no more be immoral than a mathematical demonstration or a musical composition. Morality is a quality of human beings and not of books. It may be suspected that a fallacy lurks in this generalisation. It is only as the work of man that books can be regarded as immoral. The STERNE 89 essence of Tristram Shandy, as distinguished from its separable and inseparable accidents, is the triumph of moral simplicity and mother wit over metaphysical subtlety and undigested learning. But the fight is well sustained. Mr. Shandy is a man of great natural capacity and well able to hold his own in various com- panies against all comers. He is always, in his own favourite word, 'argute,' and it is no easy task to dis- pose of his polemics. Sterne was too genuine an artist to make Mr. Shandy a weak-minded man, to put up a nine-pin for the sake of knocking it down. Uncle Toby's questions and comments appear obvious enough ; but no other writer could have made him pour them with such deadly and destructive effect upon the speculative per- formances of his brother. Any serious description of Tristram Shandy is, however, so inadequate as to be almost grotesque. Those who do not feel the charm of the book cannot be taught it, and those who feel it resent being told what it is. It is impalpable and indefinable, like one of those combinations of colour at sunset for which there are no words in the language and no ideas in the mind. There have been few greater masters of conversation than Sterne, and in what may be called the art of interruption no one has ever approached him. He is among the makers of colloquial English, and thousands who never heard of Shandy I bill repeat the phrases of the Shandy brothers. Of all English humourists, except Shakespeare, Sterne is still the greatest force, and that the influence of Parson Yorick is not extinct may be seen in almost every page of the Dolly Dialogues. December, 180,6. GIBBON'S LIFE AND LETTERS The most famous of autobiographies is. in one sense of the word, patchwork. Gibbon wrote the history of the Roman Empire, or of its decline and fall, once. He wrote the history of himself, or of his rise and progress, seven times. One of these narratives is the merest fragment, so that they are usually called six. Gibbon died very suddenly and unexpectedly in his fifty-seventh year. He had not made up his mind whether he would publish his own Memoirs in his own lifetime, though it seems, in spite of some natural hesitation on his part, most probable that he would have done so. After his death his intimate friend, the first Lord Sheffield, assisted by his daughter, Miss Holroyd — ' the Maria,' as Gibbon calls her — afterwards Lady Stanley of Alderley, arranged and edited the book which has fascinated three genera- tions. It is due to Lord Sheffield's memory to say that he practised no deception on the public. In his adver- tisement to the first edition of Gibbon's Miscellaneous Works, dated the 6th of August, 1795, he says: 'The most important part consists of Memoirs of Mr. Gibbon's Life and Writings, a work which he seems to have projected with peculiar solicitude and attention, and of which he left six different sketches, all in his own handwriting. . . . From all of these the following Memoirs have been carefully selected and put together.' It is impossible for any one familiar with these old volumes to read the sumptuously complete edition of GIBBONS LIFE AND LETTERS 9 1 'it's Life and Letters now published by Mr. Murray and not be struck by Lord Sheffield's literary skill, Mr. Murray's edition cannot be too highly praised. It contains hundreds of new letters, besides all the seven versions of the Life. Mr. John Murray has himself performed the useful service of printing and explaining some brief and often enigmatical jottings appended to the Autobiography by its author. Mr. Rowland Prothero has enriched the Letters with a most interesting series of notes, which are always full enough and never too full. The present Lord Sheffield, the grandson of Gibbon's friend, acknowledges in a modest preface the assistance and encouragement he has received from Mr. Frederic Harrison, to whom, indeed, the appear- ance of these volumes is really due. The whole of the reading public, as well as Lord Sheffield, are deeply in Mr. Harrison's debt. Whatever literary treasures the 1 897 may have in store, even if they should in- clude 'some precious, tender-hearted scroll of pure' Lacchylides, they will contain nothing of profounder interest or more permanent value than this splendid picture of Gibbon painted by himself. Nevertheless, I adhere to my opinion that the first Lord Sheffield and his daughter did their work exceed- ingly well. Lord Sheffield, though an active, zealous, bustling politician, must have been a man of scholarly taste and trained judgment. It is more than interesting to see how Gibbon began, and altered, and erased, and I n again, the counterfeit presentment of the person ;ost admired. But the Autobiography as knows t.» the- public for nearly a hundred years is really his, and i artistic perfe* tion is due to the conscientiousness as well as to the ability of the editors. * The Maria's ' own letters, so recently published 92 MEN AND LETTERS are not at all in the Gibbonesque vein. When Mr. Gibbon described them as ' incomparable,' he used the language not of criticism, but of affection. They are forcible enough. ' It is too hot to swear any more,' she ingenuously remarks at the end of one of them, which was not, however, addressed to the historian. They abound in vigour and in high spirits, which are the most enviable if the least interesting of human charac- teristics. But their chief value is in their sketches of • Gib,' and they should be read, irreverent as they are, in connexion with these volumes. ' Mr. G.,' as in unconscious anticipation of another hero and another age she sometimes writes, was very much at home in Sheffield Place. He liked to be alone with the family. He hated country visitors and country dinner- parties, and the business or amusements of a country gentleman's life. ' I detest your races, I abhor your assizes,' he wrote to Lord Sheffield. He was a sworn enemy to exercise, and when his hat was removed he did not miss it for a week. If he was not reading, he liked to sit in an arm-chair and talk, while Lady Sheffield listened, and Maria yawned or informed Miss Firth in a confidential note that she was a ' D. of a cat.' Mr. Gibbon was much interested in his antecedents, if I may for once use that word in its proper sense. He wanted to know all about everyone who had been directly or indirectly concerned in bringing him into the world. He would gladly have been richer, and few men valued money more. But it was a satisfaction to him to think that the fortune which might have been his had been swallowed up in no less conspicuous a misfortune than the South Sea Bubble. He rejoiced in an ancestor who had been Bluemantle Pursuivant, and even studied the principles of heraldry, which Mr. Lowe used to say was gibbon's life and letters 93 the only branch of knowledge not worth studying. The seventh and by far the briefest of the Autobiographical Sketches contains two famous genealogical passages, one of which appears in the History, and would have immortalised Henry Fielding if Fielding had not immor- talised himself. Everybody knows the gorgeous sentence, ' The successors of Charles the Fifth may disdain their humble brethren of England, but the romance of Tom Joms, that exquisite picture of human manners, will outlive the palace of the Escurial and the Imperial Eagle of the I louse of Austria.' It is a real triumph of rhetoric to have surrounded with so grandiose a setting so homely a name. Equally familiar is another passage in the same sketch and almost in the same paragraph : " The nobility of the Spencers has been illustrated and enriched by the trophies of Marlborough ; but I exhort them to consider the Faery Queen as the most precious jewel of their coronet.' It does not, however, appear that Gibbon ' mocked at the claims of long descent,' even when they failed to include a novelist or an epic poet. He was proud of his real or supposed connexion with Lord Saye and Sele, the victim of Jack Cade, 'a patron and a martyr of learning.' But if the Shakespeare, m holder of that most picturesque title had been neither a martyr nor a patron, I think he would still have found a place in the Autobiography. Mr. Gibbon was fond of lying at the philosopher with human weaknesses. He calls a coat of arms the most useless of all coats, and he emphatically asserts his right to use one. He might be suspected of trilling if he ever trilled with so solemn a subject as himself. Even his ancestry is not sacred to the shafts of his wit. 'Our alliances by marriage,' he says in a passage of the Autobiography suppressed by the sensitive delicacy of Miss Filth's 94 MEN AND LETTERS correspondent, • our alliances by marriage it is not dis- graceful to mention. . . . The Memoirs of the Count de Grammont, a favourite book of every man and woman of taste, immortalise the Whetnalls or Whitnells of Peckham : " la blanche Whitnell et le triste Peckham." But the insipid charms of the lady and the dreary solitude of the mansion were sometimes enlivened by Hamilton and love, and had not our alliance preceded her marriage, I should be less confident of my descent from the Whetnalls of Peckham.' There can be no doubt that Gibbon liked to consider himself, in the technical or heraldic sense of the term, a gentleman. Macaulay held the sound and wholesome doctrine that any connexion with English history was better than none. His illustrious predecessor went further, and loved his pedigree for its own sake. Family pride cannot be justified by reason, and the habitual display of it is an intolerable nuisance. But it has one practical advantage. It is a safeguard, for want of a better, against that abject prostration of intellect before rank which is one of the most painful and degrading spectacles that society affords. Gibbon must have been one of the oddest boys that ever were seen, if indeed he ever was a boy. The sole survivor of a large and sickly progeny, his childhood was one round of diseases, and of remedies compared with which the diseases must have been almost agreeable. His mother died when he was very young, he did not get on with his father, he was miserable at Westminster, and his aunt, Mrs. Porten, who may be said to have saved his life, was the only friend of his infancy. His contempt for ' the trite and lavish praise of the happiness of our boyish years ' is not therefore surprising. But Lord Sheffield or 'the Maria' need not have cut ou: gibbon's life and letters 95 the quaint and characteristic remark, ' The Dynasties of Assyria and Egypt were my top and cricket-ball.' Nor is it easy to understand why the Marian pencil should have been drawn through this noble panegyric : ' Freedom is the first wish of our heart ; freedom is the first blessing of our nature; and, unless we bind our- selves with the voluntary chains of interest or passion, we advance in freedom as we advance in years.' The freedom which Mr. Gibbon extolled, or at least the freedom which he supported, was of a peculiar and limited type. It was the freedom of a few highly intelligent and cultivated persons to express themselves as they pleased about the prejudices or convictions of their neighbours. This is no doubt an essential part of freedom. But it is not the whole. Nor is it that which appeals most strongly to the masses of mankind. For the masses indeed, as we understand them, Gibbon cared little or nothing. Except so far as they supplied him with honest valets and cleanly housemaids, they were all included in the odious term ' mob.' He would not have persecuted them. He was all for letting them goto the devil in their own way. He never came in contact with them, except when he served in the Militia, and then he messed with the officers. Both the con- stituencies he represented in the House of Commons, Liskeard and Lymington, were pocket boroughs. On the 7th of December, 1763, he wrote to his stepmother: '1 . ery glad to hear of my friend [sic] Wilkes's ^deserved chastisement, and if the law could not punish him, Mr. Martin could.' Considering that Martin, whom Wilkes never injured, had deliberately provi 11 Wilkes to a din 1 alter shooting at a in. irk for weeks, and that if Wilkes had been killed, in:. lead 01 badly wounded, Martin would have been morally U v. ell as legally guilty 96 MEN AND LETTERS of murder, this is one of the strangest expressions of friendship on record. Gibbon's hatred and dread of the French revolution, which menaced his repose at Lausanne, knew no bounds ; and the most unpleasant passage in his Autobiography is the one in which he suggests that Dr. Priestley's ' trumpet of sedition ' should be silenced by the civil magistrate. Mr. Bagehot drily observes that Gibbon felt himself to be one of those persons whom the populace always murdered. He said, however, at the time of Lord George Gordon's riot, that he did not think he was obnoxious to the people. It was the people who were obnoxious to him. He voted steadily for the American war. Lord Sheffield's or Miss Holroyd's omissions have an historic interest of their own. One of them curiously attests the fame of Adam Smith. Mr. Gibbon, in citing the testimony of that distinguished man to the deplorable condition of Oxford, calls him a philosopher. This was not good enough for Lord Sheffield, who substituted ' a master of moral and political wisdom.' Gibbon prided himself upon not being disgusted by 'the pedantry of Grotius or the prolixity of Puffendorf.' Lord Sheffield would not suffer the name of Gibbon to be associated with such shocking opinions as that Puffendorf was prolix and Grotius pedantic. It was more reasonable in an editor and more pious in a friend to expurgate Gibbon's account of his second visit to Lausanne, which was paid in 1763. ' The habits of the militia,' says the historian, ' and the example of my countrymen betrayed me into some riotous acts of intemperance, and before my departure I had deservedly forfeited the public opinion which had been acquired by the virtues of my better days.' This sentence exhibits Gibbon in a new light. The future author of the Decline and Fall drunk GIBBON S LIFE AND LETTERS 97 find disorderly 19 a subject which only the brush of Hogarth could have adequately portrayed. Perhaps no man throughout his life had more perfect self- control than Gibbon, and I cannot help suspecting him of a design to show the people of Lausanne that he could get drunk as well as the worst of them. It was probably the last time. Moral scruples had never much weight with him ; but drink interfered with study, and drink had to give way. When he first went to Lausanne, dulness drove him to the gambling table. But he lost his money, and his aunt would not send him any more, and it was disagreeable to be without money, and so he left off gambling. The lett< r Irs. Porten, which did not melt her hard heart, is thus pleasantly endorsed by his step-mother, or ' mother- in-law,' as she calls herself. ' Please remember that this letter was not addressed to his mother-in-law, but his aunt, an old cat as she was to refuse his request.' But the old cat knew what she was about, and so did her nephew. The discipline was salutary and effectual. It is difficult to read of Gibbon in his teens, or even in his twenties, without being reminded of that masterly creation, the 'Wise Youth Adrian' in The Ordeal of 1 . : hard I ■' ever el. On the point of his health Gibbon showed an indifference which was positively sublime. In 1 761, when he was twenty-four, he consulted Mr. Caesar Hawkins, afterwards Sir Caesar Hawkins, the eminent surgeon, about some rather bad symptoms. Hawkins took a serious view of the case, and told him to come again. The next time he consulted a surgeon was in November, 1793, and in January, 1794, he died. But in the meanwhile he had written his History and cnj'jyed his life. When, in 1 7 s 3 , he found that the 11 gS MEN AND LETTERS distractions of London society, which he thoroughly enjoyed, were impeding the progress of his book, he turned his back on London, and buried himself with Deyverdun at Lausanne. He amused himself with fin* ladies, and liked to be considered a dangerous man. His comical indignation with M. Necker for treating him as harmless and leaving him alone with Madame Necker was probably only half assumed. But for all the fine ladies of his acquaintance put together he did not care one rap of his snuff-box. He knew what they were worth, he knew what he was worth, and he governed himself accordingly. One of his favourites was Lady Elizabeth Foster, once so famous in the flesh, now so celebrated on canvas, who became at last the Duchess of Devonshire. It was of her Mr. Gibbon said that if she were to beckon the Lord Chancellor from the woolsack in full view of the public he would be compelled to follow her. To her face, so he tells us, he called her Bess. Behind her back he called her a * bewitching animal,' and with this elegantly murderous label he consigned her to her appropriate niche in some odd corner of his mind. But fine ladies were not the only persons to whom Mr. Gibbon was indifferent. For his mother he could not be expected to feel much fondness. Some reflections on the death of his father were kindly omitted by Lord Sheffield. ' The tears of a son,' says the filial chronicler, ' are seldom lasting.' • Few, perhaps,' he adds, ' are the children, who, after the expiration of some months or years, would sincerely rejoice in the resurrection of their parents.' This is cynicism in the literal meaning of the word. It resembles rather the natural shame- lessness of the dog than the acquired indifference of the philosopher. Mr. Gibbon senior was certainly not a GIBBON'S LIFE AND LETTERS 99 model father. He did not act wisely in sending his son to Oxford at fourteen, nor, in spite of consequences he could not have anticipated, in sending him at fifteen to Switzerland. He seems to have been rather cantan- kerous, and he spent a good deal of money which Mr. Gibbon junior would much rather have handled himself. But a father's grave is an odd receptacle for bad imita- tions of La Rochefoucauld. Most of the few letters in these volumes were addressed to this unlamented parent's, second wife, born Dorothea Patton. She was devotedly attached to her stepson, and he professed the most affectionate regard for her. But she had a jointure of three hundred a year charged upon his estate, and he occasionally betrays in his letters to Lord Sheffield some anxiety to know how long she was likely to need it. She survived this anxious inquirer, and their friendly relations were only interrupted by his death. But the one blessing which her stepson did not desire for her was longevity. The other obstacle to Mr. Gibbon's possessing that opulence of which Madame Necker de- clared to him to be an adoratcur z'cle was treated in a much more summary manner. ' Aunt Hester,' or the 'Northamptonshire Saint,' was the favourite butt of Mr. G.'s sarcastic raillery. He could not away with her, and he did not conceal his impatience for adding her income to his own. 1 lis inquiries after her health • frequent without being affectionate. He desired to be informed from a sure source without noise or s< andal of her 'decline and fall.' He charged her with 1 sing the proper relations between nephews and aunts by attempting to borrow money from him. He described her as having retired to the house, ' he durst not say to the arms,' of Mr. Law, author of the Sauus Call. He ] hfl ul un inconsistent reluctance to H— 2 100 MEN AND LETTERS begin chanting hallelujahs in Heaven. But about his feelings for this lady there was no disguise. He did not make her continued existence the topic of felicitations to herself and of regrets to others. She had the decency to die before him. Mr. Gibbon was never rich and never poor. He realised, though it is to be feared that he never uttered, the prayer of Agar, ' Give me neither poverty nor riches, feed me with food convenient for me, lest I be full and deny Thee, and say, who is the Lord ? or lest I be poor and steal, and take the name of my God in vain.' He never had any profession, though for three years, from 1779 to 1782, he drew a substantial salary as a Lord of Trade. A foreigner might pause to observe that Mr. Gibbon was not a lord, and knew nothing of trade. An Englishman will rather be astonished that an anomaly so thoroughly English should, through the economic zeal of Mr. Burke, have been abolished more than a century ago. Mr. Gibbon accepted, with fortitude, the loss of an office which no successor could enjoy, and in 1783 retired to Lausanne. He was an epicure as well as an Epicurean, and never affected to despise the pleasures of the table. His theory of the merits of the middle state, now published for the first time, is ex- tremely interesting, and would have aroused the furious antagonism of Dr. Johnson. ' Few works of merit and importance have been executed either in a garret or in a palace. A gentleman possessed of leisure and inde- pendence, of books and talents, may be encouraged to write by the distant prospect of honour and reward; but wretched is the author, and wretched will be the work, where daily diligence is stimulated by daily hunger.' Gibbon did not seriously think that the work of Johnson, of Goldsmith, or of Porson, to take three of his own gibbon's life and letters ioi contemporaries, was wretched. He knew that Marcus Aurelius was an emperor in name as Julius Caesar had been in fact, and that Epictetus, like Plautus, was a slave. He could have cited scores of exceptions to his own rule. But perhaps there is no rule. Certainly no rule will account for Gibbon himself. Not even that colossal intellect, allied with that gigantic industry, can prevent the design and completion of the Dcclim and Fall within a quarter of a century from being the eighth wonder of the world. Gibbon had little education except what he gave himself. No Oxford man, and no OKI Westminster, owed less to Westminster or to Oxford. The ' monks of Oxford,' steeped in ' port ami prejudice,' took no notice of him until he was received into the Church of Rome, and then washed their hands of him. He was his own teacher and his own pupil, which seemed to have doubled the power of his extra- ordinary mind. ' Such as I am,' he wjote, and Lord Sheffield suppressed, ' such as I am, in genius or lining, or manners, I owe my creation to Lausanne; it was in that school that the statue was discovered in the block of marble; and my own religious folly, my father's blind resolution, produced the effects of the most deliberate wisdom.' Sainte-Beuve, the prince of modern critics, pronounces the impartial judgment that Gibbon's too early and complete familiarity with the French language corrupted the idiomatic purity of his English. Mr. Gibbon's first book, an essay on the Study of Literature, was written in French, and he had actually begun a French History of Swit- land, when David Hume, who hated and despised I. land with the grotesque intensity of a Galli- :, judiciously advised him to adopt in future the lingo of the barbarians. The Gallicisms gradually, 102 MEN AND LETTERS though never perhaps completely, disappeared from Gibbon's writing, and they cannot be said to have per- manently injured his style. But there is some truth in his own statement that at Lausanne he ceased to be an Englishman. Nor did the Hampshire Militia and the House of Commons ever quite restore or impart the national character. He remained a citizen of the world, bilingual, unprejudiced, or at least prejudiced only against professions of patriotism. There is no affec- tation in his statement that the militia as well as Parliament taught him valuable lessons. It was a real training that militiamen had in those days. Gibbon did not much like it, or, to use his own more accurate expression, he felt heartily glad when it was over. But all his life he was a thorough scholar. On the surface a man of pleasure and fashion, he never wasted his time. A voracious, omnivorous, incessant reader, he did not seek instruction only from books. There was something to be learnt by drilling in Hampshire, and he learned it. He acquired a knowledge of military terms and of local administration. There was much to be learnt in the House of Commons, and he learned it. He saw how the British Constitution, ' the thing,' as Cobbett after- wards called it, actually worked, and Blackstone, whom he diligently studied, could not teach him that. He never spoke, probably because he was afraid of not speaking so well as some of his inferiors. But he lis- tened, and he assured the world that Burke's speeches were reported as they had been dilivered, by which he meant that they were delivered as they had been com- posed. His politics were indefinite, and in truth he cared very little about them. He called himself a Whig. He usually, though not always, voted with the Tories. He delighted in Lord North's good humour GIBBON S LIFE AND LETTERS IO3 and ready wit.* He paid a noble tribute to the per- sonal character of Charles Fox. For himself, he only asked of Parliament and people what Diogenes asked of Alexander, that they would stand out of his light. It was at Lausanne, as all the world has heard, that Gibbon finished his History, and took that famous walk under the acacias which he himself has described with such rare and moving simplicity. It was also at I . tusanne, many years earlier, that he met Mademoiselle Curchod, who became Madame Necker. Their brief engagement was not a time of unalloyed bliss, and the assistance of no less a personage than Rousseau was invoked to mediate between the parties. But the author of La Nouvclle Hclo'ise was unfavourable to the pretensions of It nouveau Abelard. He thought Mr. Gibbon too cold- blooded a young man for his taste, or for the lady's happiness. In affairs of the heart Jean Jacques was a good judge. Mr. Gibbon's subsequent praise of Made- moiselle Curchod's virtuous pride in poverty and Madame Necker's graceful dignity in high station is the language of a philosopher and a gentleman. But it is as cold as Cadenus and Vanessa, which is as cold as a stone. Madame Necker sometimes amused herself in later life by teasing her tepid suitor. But with truly feminine benevolence she advised him, as he could not marry her, on no account to marry anybody else. Within the small circle of the very few people for whom he really cared bbon was the warmest and truest of friends. Thi are few morsels of English literature more pleasant to read than his letters to Lady Sheffield, whom, as he says, he loved like a sister for twenty years. When he heard of her death in 1793, he did not hesitate fur a * ' The noble Lord is even now slumbcrin; on the ruins of the Constitution. ' ' I vm li tO God I was.' 104 MEN AND LETTERS moment. He had projected a visit to Sheffield Place, which he might or might not have paid. He was perfectly comfortable in his house at Lausanne, and he had satisfied himself that the French, with or without breeches, were not coming to annoy him. He was obese, and physically indolent, and shrank from exertion. But he felt that his proper place was by the side of Lord Sheffield. The only consolation in such circumstances, he said, was to be found in the sustaining presence of a real friend, and he set off for England at once. Ten years earlier he had left London for Lausanne at the invitation of his friend Deyverdun, with whom he lived in unbroken intimacy till Deyverdun's death. A passion- less nature Mr. Gibbon may have had, but it must have been also a singularly amiable one. ' I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and perhaps the establish- ment of my fame.' Throughout his life Gibbon thoroughly understood his own position. As a man of letters he had no vulgar vanity. But his self-reliance and self- confidence were never disturbed. No such work as the Decline and Fall, if indeed there be such another, was ever more completely due to one imperial mind. ' Not a sheet has been seen by any human eyes except those of the author and the printer.' Half the History was composed in London, and the other half in Switzerland. But alike in ' the winter hurry of society and Parliament ' and in 'the comforts and beauties of Lausanne' the historian serenely kept the even tenour of his way. Most of his critics he justly despised. Compliments, with a few exceptions, poured off him like water off a duck's back. He welcomed the praise of Porson, despite its ' reasonable admixture of acid,' because he appreciated the value of Porson's opinion. He prized gibbon's life and letters 105 the compliment of Sheridan to his 'luminous page,' because it was paid him ' in the presence of the British nation ' at the trial of Warren Hastings.* But when the public discovered his merits, he congratulated the public, and he scarcely pretended to doubt the finality of his work. Very few of his letters allude to his historical researches. He was a solitary and an un- communicative worker. Most of his acquaintances in London were indeed about as capable of understanding what he was at as His Royal Highness the Duke of Gloucester, who greeted the second volume of the History as 'another damned thick square book,' and accosted the author with : ' Scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbon?' The Duke of Gloucester, however, was in this respect a Solon or a Solomon compared with Horace Walpole, who expressed to the historian his regret that so clever a man should write on so dull a subject. Appreciation of the Decline and Fall was not to be expected from Walpole. One might as well look for grapes from thorns or figs from thistles. But if he had been able to play with decency even his own poor part as a parasite of letters, he would have felt that that was not the sort of thing to say. It is difficult to suppose that Gibbon was quite sincere when he repudiated the presumption of claiming a place, along with Hume and Robertson, in the triumvirate of British Historians. Robertson is entitled to the most futile of all commendations. He ought to be read. If Hume's fame rested upon his History of England, and not, as it does, on the Treatise of Human Nature, he would never be mentioned i:i the same breath with Gibbon. M. Guizot, as * Mr. I 1 bis mvaluable biography has disp ed "I the ■ry that a laid, .,r saiy Mr. kj'.-, speaks of his 'voluminous pages ' in the 1 106 MEN AND LETTERS is well known, read Gibbon three times with very different impressions. After the first perusal, which must have been a hurried one, he thought his author brilliant but superficial. After the second his verdict was ' Sound in principle, but weak in detail.' The third left him with little but admiration to express. Considering the extent of M. Guizot's own historical knowledge and the rigid orthodoxy of his religious opinions, this is a striking testimonial. Macaulay bestows cold though high praise upon his illustrious predecessor. Among historians he put Thucydides first and all the others nowhere. ' The rest one may hope to rival : him never.' Thucydides is, indeed, unsurpassed and un- surpassable. But between him and Gibbon there is no common ground of comparison. You cannot, as the old saying is, add four pounds of butter to four o'clock. Thucydides wrote the account of a war between two Greek States, in which he was personally concerned. That he enriched his narrative with a masculine eloquence and a ripe knowledge of human affairs is not to the purpose. Such a work cannot be compared, cannot with any useful result be even contrasted, with the fall of an empire related a thousand years after it fell. Gibbon's History has never been rivalled. Nor, in spite of Lord Acton's grand project, is it ever likely to be. Lord Sheffield survived Gibbon twenty-seven years, so that he had plenty of time for dealing with the his- torian's letters. He dealt with them freely. Out of five he made one, and there is a curious, though not very important, instance in which he deliberately omitted a negative. His choice of letters and passages for publi- cation, or his daughter's, as it may have been, showed considerable delicacy and tact. But still he patched as well as excised, and now, for the first time, we see GIBBONS LIFE AND LETTERS \OJ Gibbon as he was in private life. The Autobiography, delightful as it is, is austere and formal when set beside the Letters. Gibbon himself, in a doubtful compliment, has described Goldoni's Memoirs as more dramatic than his Plays. Benvenuto Cellini and Lord Herbert of Chcrbury are so dramatic that they can hardly be called veracious. Gibbon's most formidable rivals as auto- biographers, at all events in his own century, would been Lord Shelburne and the Rev. Lawrence Sterne. I dare to add the name of Robert Lowe, whom it would be affectation to call Lord Sherbrooke. But their remains, alas, are fragments which provoke our interest only to mock our curiosity. Gibbon's Auto- biography, therefore, holds its place, and the Letters show that though elaborate it is honest. Mr. Gibbon did not shrink in correspondence from expressing his real opinions because they failed to coincide with those of ordinary men. His reflections upon Venice are per- haps the strangest ever suggested by the Queen of the Sea. ' Of all the towns in Italy,' he writes to Mrs. Gibbon on the 22nd of April, 1765, ' I am the least satisfied with Venice. Objects which are only singular without being pleasing produce a momentary surprise which soon gives way to satiety and disgust. Old, and in general, ill-built houses, ruined pictures, and stinking ditches, dignified with the pompous denomination of canals, a fine bridge spoilt by two rows of houses upon it, and a large square decorated with the worst archi tecture I ever yet saw,' &C. Such was Venice to Mi. Gibbon, and perhaps to no other man since the foun- dation of the Republic. But if he was blind to the art and architecture of Venice, he could appreciate the society of Paris, and what he says on that subject has not lost its interest to-day. ' Indeed, Madam,' he wrote I08 MEN AND LETTERS to the same correspondent on the 12th of February, 1763, ' we may say what we please of the frivolity of the French, but I do assure you that in a fortnight passed at Paris I have heard more conversation worth remem- bering, and seen more men of letters among the people of fashion, than I had done in two or three winters in London.' Madame de Stael said that a serious French- man was the best thing in the world, and most French- men have been serious. It might have been thought that of all Frenchmen Gibbon would have had most sympathy with Voltaire. But it was not so. On the contrary, he rather disliked him, thought him an overrated author, and laughed at his histrionic per- formances. ' He appeared to me now [the 6th oi August, 1763] a very ranting, unnatural performer. Perhaps, indeed, as I was come from Paris, I ratbet judged him by an unfair comparison than by his inde- pendent value. Perhaps, too, I was too much struck with the ridiculous figure of Voltaire at seventy, acting a Tartar conqueror with a hollow, broken voice, and making love to a very ugly niece of about fifty.' Mr. Gibbon was returned to the House of Commons as member for Liskeard at the General Election of 1774. He lost his seat at the dissolution of that Parliament in 1780. He had differed with his cousin, Mr. Eliot, on some points, and, as he put it, the electors of Liskeard were commonly of the same opinion as Mr. Eliot. Per- haps the nature of a pocket borough has never been more accurately defined. The new letters are seldom political. But there is a concise and not uninteresting reference to the debate on the Address in December, 1774, when Lord John Cavendish's Amendment, calling for further information on American affairs, was rejected by an enormous majority. ' Burke was a water-mill oi GIBBON'S LIFE AND LETTERS 109 Words and images ; Barre\ an actor equal to Garrick ; Wedderbourne [sic] artful and able.' Mr. Gibbon differed from the rest of the world in considering him- self honoured by the friendship of Mr. Wcdderburne, afterwards Lord Loughborough and Lord Chancellor, at whose house in Hampstead he attended his last dinner-party. George the Third and Junius did not often agree. But Junius said that there was something about Mr. Wedderburne which even treachery could not trust, and the King called Lord Loughborough the biggest scoundrel in his dominions. Gibbon's Letters may be said to derive more inte- rest from him than he derives from them. They have not the audacious fun and commanding force of Byron's, the full-blooded eloquence of Burns's, the manly sim- plicity of Cowper's, the profound humour and pathos of Carlyle*s. They are without the radiant geniality of M.i< aulay's. They do not touch the high literary water- mark of Gray's. They express the mundane sentiments of an earthly sage, in love, if the phrase may be pai - doned, with peace and wealth. The secret of the charm which most of them undoubtedly have is that they reveal on its inner homely side one of the richest and most massive intellects which the eighteenth century produced. Gibbon was an indefatigable student, an 1 so far as he could rise to enthusiasm, an enthusiastic admirer of Cicero. Perhaps the rather monotonous How of the Ciceronian rhythm is too evident in his prose. It is curious that another great writer, who belonged as much to the nineteenth century as Gibbon to the eighteenth, should have acknowledged his obligations to the same source. ' As to patterns for imitation,' said Cardinal Newman, 'the only master of style 1 have BV( C had (which is strange considering the differences of the 110 MEN AND LETTERS languages) is Cicero. I think I owe a great deal to him, and, as far as I know, to no one else.' But whereas Newman, who cultivated the vernacular, and liked to be familiar, must have meant by Cicero the Epistolce ad Familiares, Gibbon, who wrote in full dress, and liked to be fine, was thinking of the De Senectute and the De Amicitia. Some of Gibbon's letters, especially those for the years 1768 and 1769, deal with that worst kind of trifling called business, and may be skipped with much advantage. Of the others there is scarcely one which will not repay perusal. They come indeed only from the surface of his mind. They reveal little or nothing of that deeply dug treasure-house in which all the learning of the time was illuminated by the search- light of a penetrating intellect, flashing over the records of the ages. Gibbon, like an illustrious poet, or thinker in verse, of our own day, lived two lives. No one who heard Mr. Browning talk in ordinary society would have guessed that he was the author of Rabbi Ben Ezra, or, indeed, that he had ever written a line. Gibbon's real intellectual intercourse was with the dead, his equals and his masters. With the living he was on his guard, and he never committed the mistake of talking seriously to people for whom he had no respect. He did not disdain to be the oracle of a circle. He shrank from Dr. Johnson. He patronised Burke. If Lord Rosebery will forgive the profanity of the remark, he was bored by the younger Pitt. The one man of his own calibre with whom he seems to have been thoroughly at home was Fox, and of Fox he saw very little, though enough to make him say in memorable words that • perhaps no human being who ever lived was more entirely free from the taint of vanity, malignity, or falsehood.' But of Gibbon it may be affirmed that, as the dust of his gibbon's life and LETTERS III writings was gold, so the sweepings of his mind would have made the fortune of a letter-writer, an essayist, or a pamphleteer. He could not be dull. Lacking the highest form of humour, which is perhaps inseparable from reverence, he abounded in wit, in satire, in observa- tion, and in insight. By this time,' he wrote to Lord Sheffield on the 14th of November, 1783, from Lausanne, 1 those who would give me nothing else have nobly re- warded my merit with the Chiltern Hundreds. I retire without a sigh from the senate, and am only impatient to hear that you have received the sum which your modesty was content to take for my seat.' A malignant critic has observed that Macaulay, who would have sacrificed his ' little finger ' to save the life of Mrs. Ellis, would have ' cut off his right arm ' rather than be guilty of such a bad antithesis as Smollett's • Ambassador without dignity, and Plenipotentiary without address.' Gibbon, on the other hand, withheld from the House of Commons the sigh which he had generously bestowed upon Susanne Curchod. If, as Mr. Leslie Stephen says, his references to politics are somewhat cynical, so were the politics to which he referred. Gibbon certainly obeyed the maxim which, if we may believe Juvenal, descended (in the Greek language) from Heaven. He knew himself. It was a fashionable branch of knowledge in the eighteenth century, and Carlyle lias not failed to denounce it with his accus- tomed vigour. Hut it was even then an accomplish- ment more often claimed than possessed, and there must have been few men in any age who ordered their own lives with the calm sagacity of Gibbon. *I have always' — so he wrote to Mrs. Gibbon on the 27th of December, 1783 — ' I have always valued far above the BZternal gifts of rank and fortune, two qualities for 112 MEN AND LETTERS which I stand indebted to the indulgence of Nature, a strong and constant passion for letters, and a propensity to view and to enjoy every object in the most favourable light.' Could the art of happiness be condensed into fewer words ? Mr. Gibbon did really resemble the Epicurean philosophers whom he so much admired. There may have been some affectation in his manners. There was none in his opinions. He was, in every sense of the words, totus teres atque rotundus. He was never tired of intellectual work. When he had finished the Decline and Fall, the tenth part of which would have filled the life of almost any other man, he projected a series of historical biographies Avhich death alone pre- vented him from accomplishing. Yet he died at fifty- six, and Macaulay, whose History of England is a small fraction of what he contemplated that it should be, lived to be fifty-nine. Macaulay, however, was a practical statesman. He was a Cabinet Minister, a Parliamentary orator, and the author of the Indian Penal Code. He sank the politician in the historian too late for the interests of posterity, though not for his own fame. In one respect he resembled Gibbon. He told Charles Greville that he neglected contemporary literature, and that his mind was in the past. There are few allusions in Gibbon's Correspondence to Johnson or to Goldsmith, to Richardson or to Sterne. Strange as it may seem to the learned men of this age, he was wholly ignorant of German. He preferred the French poets to the English, and among the English poets he reckoned Hayley. He sympathised with Voltaire's estimate of Shakespeare, whom he anticipated Leech's schoolboy and the admirers of Ibsen in considering an overrated individual. With the rhetorical school of poetry, the school of Dryden and Pope, he was familiar, and he did homage to the GIBBONS LIFE AND LETTERS II3 genius of Milton. The most illustrious man of sci- ence that the nineteenth century produced confessed that absorption in his pursuits gradually diminished, and ultimately destroyed, his enjoyment of literary ex- cellence. Gibbon, though not himself scientific, attended in pursuit of knowledge the lectures of John Hunter, being apparently interested in everyone's anatomy except his own. But, perhaps, like Mr. Darwin he was restricted in the range of his appreciation by the enormous scope and magnitude of his own particular studies. His love of classical literature, however, was unbounded, and it is not the least striking proof of his marvellous powers that he should have acquired for himself a mastery of the dead languages which the ' grand old fortifying classical curriculum ' seldom imparts. Compared with the aids to learning provided for the modern student his facilities were slight indeed. Such an edition as Pro- fessor Jebb's Sophocles, or Professor Munro's Lucretius, or Professor Robinson Ellis's Catullus was as much beyond the imagination of the eighteenth century as a telegraph or a railway. A modem first-class man could hardly decipher the Greek type which was read by Gibbon. Latin he had Forcellini. But as for Greek, th«> sight uf a Liddell and Scolt would have almost induced him to believe that the age of miracles had returned. Even Porson, one of the greatest masters of English who lived, wrote his commentaries in Latin. Bentle) been < ailed the hi 1 ol philologists, and to the re ults of his 1 l" Gibl had a< ce 1 tut Bentley unfortunately persuaded himself that the best thing to do with the classic to rewrite them, and ted in peculative emendation the time which might been employed in illustrative comment. If any one will try to read Lucretius as edited before Lachmann r 114 MEN AND LETTERS had revised the text, he will realise what it was to be a scholar in the days of Gibbon. The fate of the historian's library is curious, if rather mournful. There are a few letters from Lord Sheffield to Gibbon included in these volumes, and among them is one dated the 14th of May, 1792, when Gibbon was still at Lausanne. In it Lord Sheffield protests against what he calls in his queer jargon the ' damned parson-minded inglorious idea of leaving books to be sold,' and suggests that the ' Gibbonian library ' should find a permanent home at Sheffield Place. Gibbon replied with as near an approach to asperity as he ever used to Lord Sheffield : — I must animadvert on the whimsical peroration of your last Epistle concerning the future fate of my Library, about which you are so indignant. I am a friend to the circulation of property of every kind, and besides the pecuniary advantage of my poor heirs [the Portens] I consider a public sale as the most laudable method of disposing of it. From such sales my books were chiefly collected, and when I can no longer use them they will be again culled by various buyers according to the measure of their wants and means. If, indeed, a true liberal public library existed in London I might be tempted to enrich the catalogue and encourage the institution ; but to bury my treasure in a country mansion under the key of a jealous master ! I am not flattered by the Gibbonian collection, and shall own my presumptuous belief that six quarto volumes may be sufficient for the preservation of that name. If, however, your unknown successor should be a man of learning, if I should live to see the love of literature dawning in your grandson In the meanwhile I admire the firm confidence of our friendship that you can insist, and I can demur, on a legacy of fifteen hundred or two thousand pounds, without the smallest fear of offence. Mr. Gibbon's remarks upon his friendship with Lord Sheffield are perfectly just. One more honourable to both parties never existed. But it is a pity that he did not comply with Lord Sheffield's request, or feel sufficient confidence in the future to make provisions under which the London Library would have ultimately acquired the books. For Mr. Prothero's supplementary narrative is melancholy reading. Gibbon's books did not fetch any- gibbon's life and letters 115 thing like the sum which he expected from them. In 1796, two years after his death, Lord Sheffield sold them to Beckford for ^950. Beckford gave them to Dr. Scholl of Lausanne, in whose hands they excited the admiration of Miss Berry. Afterwards the collection was broken up, and twenty years ago half of it was in the possession of a Swiss gentleman, who resided near Geneva. It might have been expected that Mr. Gibbon, who thoroughly appreciated his own services to letters, uld have perceived the interest of the collection, apart from the merits of the volumes themselves. It is said that there still exists the pen, the single pen, with which Mr. Wordy wrote forty volumes to prove that Providence was always on the side of the Tories. I should not myself greatly care to see it. That is a matter of taste. But the books which were read by Gibbon, the materials of the greatest History in the English tongue, would have been a national possession for ever, and Mr. Pitt might have had them for ^"1000. But the lost opportunities of Mr. Pitt would form matter for a separate treatise. 1 have already alluded to the series of British biographies which Mr. Gibbon contemplated writing at the close of his life. The delicate diplomacy which he displayed on the occasion forms one of the most amusing isodes in the whole of the correspondence. Lord Sheffield was of course the chosen instrument of the torian's designs, and in the month of January, 1793, he received his instructions from Lausanne. It itam [wrote the threat man] that I be solicited, and do nut solicit. In your walk through Tall Mall you may call on the bookseller [Nichols] who appeared to roe an intelligent man, and ai 1 some genera] questions al>out his edition "i Shakespeare, you maj open the British porti a u i'lea oi jroui own to which 1 am perfectly a kindles at the thought, and eagerly claims my alliai . will Ix-gin to hesitate. ' I am afraid, Mr. Nichols, that we shall 1—2 Il6 MEN AND LETTERS hardly persuade my friend to engage in so great a work. Gibbon is old, and rich, and lazy. However, you may make the trial, and if you have a mind to write to Lausanne (as I do not know when he will be in England) I will send the application.' If there is a finer bit of high comedy than this in the literary correspondence of mankind, I should be glad to know it. ' Gibbon is old, and rich, and lazy.' He was fifty-five, he earnestly desired the augumentation of his income, and his industry was without a parallel. Lord Sheffield performed his task, ' manoeuvred your business,' he says, in writing to Gibbon on the 15th of March, 1793. But Mr. Nichols had invested ^40,000 in Shakespeare, and was disposed to be cautious. ' He thought such a work would be more than you could undertake,' and so forth. Mr. Nichols's cold reception of the proposal is not very easy to understand. Gibbon was at the height of his fame. The concluding volumes of the Decline and Fall had been nearly five years before the public. The success of the book was as immediate as it has been permanent. The reputation of the author was European. The violent reaction against heterodox opinions of all sorts which the French Revolution produced had hardly yet begun. It might have been supposed that Gibbon's name would have sold anything. Perhaps Mr. Nichols did not know his own business. Perhaps he knew it too well. Lady Sheffield's death brought Gibbon to England in the following summer. But his own death in January, 1794, interrupted the negotiations so oddly begun. It would have been interesting to compare Gibbon's Bio- graphies with those admirable Lives of Johnson, of Goldsmith, of Bunyan, of Atterbury, and of Pitt, which Macaulay contributed to the Encyclopedia Britannica. The first notice of the Decline and Fall in these letters occurs on the 7th of June, 1775, within a few months from the publication of the first volume. It is GIBBONS LIFE AND LETTERS I I 7 mentioned by Mr. Gibbon as an excuse for not visiting his stepmother at Bath : I am just at present [he says] engaged in a great historical work, no less than a History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, with the first volume of which I may very possibly oppress the public next winter. It would require some pages to give a more particular idea of it ; but I shall only say in general that the subject is curious, and never yet treated as it deserves, and that during some years it has been in my thoughts and even under my pen. Should the attempt fail, it must be by the fault of the execution. 1776 was a wonderful year. In it the American Colonists declared their independence, Adam Smith published his Wealth of Nations, the first volume of Gibbon's History appeared, and David Hume, who had lived to read it, passed away. The Declaration of Independence was the greatest political event between the Revolution of 1688 and the Revolution of 1789. The creation of political economy as a definite science transformed the commercial intercourse of the world. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, though in form a narrative of past events, embodies the spirit of the age in which it was composed. It is a very great book. It is great in conception, great in execution, great in accuracy, great in learning, great in philosophic states- manship and worldly wisdom, great in the ordered pro- gress of its rolling periods, the sustained splendour of its majestic style. But it is marred, if I may humbly venture to say so, by one grave defect. Gibbon was fortunate in his clerical critics, such as Chelsum, Davies, and Travis : Who with less learning than makes felons 'scape, Less human genius than God give* the ape, at acked upon his own ground a consummate master of controversial dexterity and historical erudition. He was justified in saying that a victory over such antagonists was a sufficient humiliation. They were not worth Il8 MEN AND LETTERS breaking on the wheel. Archdeacon Travis indeed did not live in vain. For he was the unwilling recipient of those letters from Porson which associate the learning of Bentley with the wit of Junius, and with an eloquence beyond the reach of both. But neither the learning of Gibbon nor the incompetence of his assailants touches the real point. Of course no historian, not even an historian of Christianity, is bound to be a Christian. But an historian of Christianity, or indeed of any part of the Christian era, is bound, whether he accepts it or rejects it, to understand the teaching of Christ. Gibbon never understood it. He never tried. He knew no more about it, in the true sense of the term, than Tacitus or Plutarch. It was to him a subject of blank amazement, an opportunity for cheap jokes. He says himself in his Autobiography that with his return to Protestantism at / the mature age of sixteen he suspended his religious * inquiries. This is usually taken to be a sarcasm. I take it to be the literal truth. I agree with Mr. Bagehot in accepting as perfectly genuine the historian's surprise at the offence he gave to religious minds. He honestly thought that Christianity was an exploded superstition, V which some persons were well enough paid to profess, and others were ill enough informed to believe, but which had practically ceased to have any influence upon human affairs. He therefore absolved himself from con- sidering it on its merits, and among the 'secondary' or natural causes which he assigns for the victory of Christ's religion he entirely ignores the platitude, or the paradox, as the reader may please to think it, that no other teacher since the world began combined the same unfailing sympathy with human weakness and the same unerring knowledge of the human heart. February, 1897. THE VICTORIAN NOVEL ' Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the tr.idi with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another ; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other liter. ny corporations in the world, no species of composition has 1 i a so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers; and while the abilities of the nine- hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogised by a thousand pens, there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them.' So wrote Miss Austen, a woman of spirit as well as a woman of genius, at the commencement of the nineteenth century. Nobody could write so now. The eighty years which have elapsed since Jane Austen was laid to rest in Winchester Cathedral have brought no intellectual or moral revolution more complete than the apotheosis of the novel. Sir Walter Scott seriously, and with good reason, believed that if he had put his name to Waverley and Guy Mannering he would have injured his reputation as a poet, and even his character as a gentleman. If a el 1": published anonymously nowadays, the object is that the public may be subsequently informed whose identity it is which has been artfully, and but for a moment, concealed. The novel threatens to supersede the pulpit, as the motor-car will supersede the omnibus. We have a new ( lasfl of novelists who take them very seriously, as well they may. Their woiks are 120 MEN AND LETTERS seldom intended to raise a smile. They are designed less for amusement than for instruction, so that to read them in a spirit of levity would be worse than laughing in church, and almost as bad as making a joke in really respectable society. The responsibilities of intellect are now so widely felt that they weigh even where there is no ground for them. Imagination, if it exists, must be kept within bounds. Humour, or what passes for it, must be sparingly indulged. The foundations of belief, the future of the race, the freedom of the will, the unity of history, the limits of political economy, are among the subjects which haunt the mind without paralysing the pen of the latter-day novelist. The ' smooth tale, generally of love,' has been developed into a representa- tion of the higher life, with episodes on ultimate things. I dare say that it is all quite right, and that to read for amusement is a blunder as well as a sin. If people want comedy, they can go to the play. If they want farce, they can turn to politics. The serious novel is for graver moods. But those who love, like Horace, the golden mean, may look back with fondness to the beginning of Her Majesty's reign, when novelists had ceased to be pariahs and had not become prigs. Perhaps few of us realise the extent to which the novel itself is a growth of the present reign. If we put aside the great and conspicuous instances of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, of Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, and Walter Scott, there is scarcely an English novelist now read who died before Her Majesty's acces- sion to the throne. Superfine people, when they wish to disparage art or literature, or furniture, or individuals, describe the objects of their contempt as ' Early Victorian.' In other words, they consign them to the same THE VICTORIAN NOVEL 121 category as Dickens, Thackeray, and Charlotte Bronte. The immense and almost unparalleled popularity of Dickens has, as was inevitable, suffered some diminu- tion. The social abuses which he satirised are for the most part extinct. The social habits which he chro- nicled have largely disappeared. The taste for ' wal- lowing naked in the pathetic' is not what it was. A generation has arisen which can be charitable without waiting for Christmas, and cheerful without drinking to ess. But these are small points, and it is impossible to imagine a time when Dickens will not be regarded as one of the great masters of English fiction. The late Master of Balliol, a keen and fastidious critic, a refined and delicate scholar, regarded Dickens as beyond com- parison the first writer of his time. When the Queen came to the throne, Pickwick was appearing in monthly parts. The first number was issued in April, 1836, the last in November, 1837. ^ * s a curious coincidence that in June, 1637, when the crown actually passed from William the Fourth to Victoria, the death of the author's sister-in-law suspended the publication. Pickwick had burst upon the world as an entire novelty. No other English novelist who was then writing survives now, except Disraeli and Bulwer, as different from Dickens, to say nothing of their inferiority, as chalk from cheese. The imitators of Dickens, so numerous and so tire- some, are apt, illogically enough, to make people forget t he was among the most original of all writers. It is the language of compliment and not of detraction to 1 i him the Cockney's Shakespeare. In Shakespeare he was steeped. His favourite novelist was Smollett, Bui Ins ait was all his own. lie was the Hogarth of literature, painting with a broad brush, never ashamed of caricature, but always an artist, and not a dauber. 122 MEN AND LETTERS There is little or no resemblance between Falstaff and Sam Weller. But they are the two comic figures which have most thoroughly seized upon the English mind. Touchstone and Mr. Micawber may be each a finer specimen of his creator's powers. They are not, how- ever, quite so much to the taste of all readers. They require a little more fineness of palate. Sam Weller is, and seems likely to remain, the ideal Londoner. We cannot hear his pronunciation. We get his humour without its drawbacks. The defects are absent from his qualities. He has not even the appalling gluttony which distinguishes Mr. Pickwick and his friends. It seems strange to realise that Pickwick and Oliver Twist were actually coming out at the same time. Oliver Twist began to run in January, 1837, an< ^ continued till March, 1839. Oliver Twist, again, was overlapped by Nicholas Nickleby, which lasted from April, 1838, to October, 1839. Three such books in little more than three years is a feat which no other British novelist has achieved, except Sir Walter Scott. They proved to the benighted ' Early Victorians ' that in the days of effete Whiggery and Bedchamber plots a genius of the highest order had appeared. Miss Martineau could never for- give Dickens for having in Oliver Twist confounded the new Poor-law with the old. That is not literary criti- cism. But it must beadmitted that Dickens, though not intellectually a Socialist, was a very sentimental politician. He hated political economy, and he coupled with it the name of Sir Robert Peel. A gushing and impulsive benevolence, which in Dickens's case was tho- roughly genuine, is often offended by the cold-blooded temper and cautious methods of parliamentary states- manship. When Dickens began to write, public affairs were on rather a low level, and were conducted on THE VICTORIAN NOVEL 1 23 rather a small scale. Dickens's early work was a more or less conscious revolt against fashionable lethargy and conventional shams. Mis novels, unlike Thackeray's, were in a sense a part of politics. They were meant to affect, and they did affect, the political temper of the nation. 1 sometimes wonder that the Independent Labour Party do not make more of Dickens. For Dickens, though he did not trouble himself much about abstract propositions, was possessed with the idea that both political parties were engaged in preying upon the public. To Dickens as an historical novelist imperfect justice has been done. The Tale of Two Cities is said to be most admired by those who admire Dickens the least. A similar remark has been made of Esmond. The Tale of Two CitUs is founded upon Carlyle's French Revolution. It has no humour, or next to none. But it is a marvellous piece of writing; the plot, though simple, is excellent, and, whatever may be thought about the genuineness of the pathos in Dombey and Son, or the Old Curiosity Shop, the tragedy of Sydney Carton is a tragedy indeed. The use of Christ's words, especially of words which occur in the Burial Service of the Church of England, is always a dangerous experiment. But at the end of the Tale of Two Cities, Dickens has justified it by the reverence and the dignity of his tone. Barnaby Rud^e, the story of Lord George Gordon and his riots, is, I cannot help thinking, an underrated book. The execution of the executioner may be melodramatic. But nobody who has read the passage can ever forget it, and the rant of Sim Tappertit deserves immortality as much as the name of Dolly Varden. Of course Dicken's hi torical knowledge was neither wide nor deep, His mubt popular hi ;tory is David Cofperjield, 124 MEN AND LETTERS the history of himself, his own favourite among his own books, and a remarkable exception to the rule that an author is the worst judge of his own perfor- mances. I take it that the key to a proper under- standing £>i Dickens and his work is to be found in the master-passion of the man. Dickens was a born actor. When he was not performing in private theat- ricals himself, he liked best to be at the play. The famous soliloquy of Jaques expressed his philosophy of life far more thoroughly than it expressed Shake- speare's. To Dickens all the world was a stage, and all the men and women merely players. When he wrote, he had in his mind not so much the way in which things would have happened as the way in which they would act. There is no ' realism ' in Dickens, if realism means the worship of the literal. He drew, no doubt, as everybody must draw, from his own experience. He had the keenest eye for outward facts. Nothing on the surface eluded his observation or escaped his memory. He made ample use of his early opportunities as a reporter in the House of Com- mons and the courts of law. The famous debate in the Pickwickian Club, when Mr. Pickwick in his contro- versy with Mr. Blotton of Aldgate would not put up to be put down by clamour, was taken from a parlia- mentary duel between Canning and Peel. Bardell v. Pickwick is a travesty of Norton v. Norton and Lord Melbourne. I am afraid there is some truth in the tradition that Mr. Pecksniff was intended to express the sentiments of the illustrious Sir Robert. The family of the Tite Barnacles might be easily identified, if the process were worth the trouble. But Dickens's dramatic instinct was the strongest of his qualities, so strong that it overmastered all the others, except his humour, which THE VICTORIAN NOVEL I 25 was, perhaps, a part of it. For his humour hardly any praise can be too high. It has every merit except the depth and subtlety which are found only in the greatest masters of all. About his pathos there always have been, and probably there will always be, two opinions. It differs in different books, and even in the same book. Little Nell and Sidney Carton scarcely seem to have a common origin. When the old washerwoman denied that one person could have written the whole of Dot and Son, she perhaps only meant to express enthusiastic admiration. But people sometimes mean more than they know. If anyone will compare the death of Mrs. Dom- bey with the death of little Paul, he must be struck by the impressive beauty of the one scene and the harrow- ing extenuation of the other. It is hardly strange that there should be controversy when evidence can be produced on both sides. Dickens had a singularly simple and straightforward character. When he meant to be funny he was rollicking. He was irresistible even to Sydney Smith, who held out against the new humourist as long as he could. When he meant to be pathetic he piled up the agony with vigour. He kept the two things apart. There is no humourous clement in his pathos, and no pathetic element in his humour. He could not have drawn a Mercutio if he had tried, and he .. better than to try. He has been reproached with not understanding the upper classes, or uppermost class, or whatever the proper term may be. The point is not very important, though a man of genius ought, , to know everything ami everybody. Lord i lerick Verisopht and Sir Mulberry Hawk are not ( worthy of the master. [ remember a discussion in which it v. ■! l>roadly that Dickens could not draw a gentleman, and the negative instance of Sir 126 MEN AND LETTERS Leicester Dedlock was produced from Bleak House. The reply was, ' You forget Joe Gargery in Great Expectations,' and to my mind the answer is conclusive. Dickens has been called the favourite novelist of the middle classes. If the statement be true, it is credit- able to their good taste and freedom from prejudice. He certainly did not flatter them. He disliked Dissenters quite as much as Matthew Arnold, whereas Thackeray gave them the Clapham Sect, to which they are not entitled. But the popularity of Dickens in his lifetime was in fact universal. Everybody read his books, because nobody could help reading them. They required no education except a knowledge of the alphabet, and they amused scholars as much as crossing-sweepers. No man ever made a more thorough conquest of his generation. Indeed he was only too successful. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery. It is the most dangerous form of admiration. And if ever there was an exemplar vitiis imitabile, it was Dickens. His influence upon literature, apart from his contributions to it, has been disastrous. The school of Dickens, for which he cannot be held responsible, is happily at last dying out. Their dreary mechanical jokes, their hideous unmeaning caricatures, their descriptions that describe nothing, their spasms of false sentiment, their tears of gin and water, have ceased to excite even amusement, and provoke only unmitigated disgust. With their dis- appearance from the stage, and consignment to oblivion, the reputation of the great man they injured is relieved from a temporary strain. The position of Dickens himself is unassailed and unassailable. In this or that generation he may be less read or more. He must always remain an acknowledged master of fiction and a prince of English humourists. THE VICTORIAN NOVEL 1 27 The great glory of Thackeray is that the spread of education has continually widened the circle of his readers. Dickens wrote for everyone. Thackeray wrote for the lettered class. He cannot quite be said to have made the novel literary. Fielding, with his ripe scholarship and his magnificent sweep of diction, was beforehand with him. But he is essentially and beyond everything else a literary novelist. He was also a popular preacher. He preached many sermons on the same text, and that a text much older than the Christian religion. Not being in holy orders, he did not, like Sterne, incorporate one of his own professional discourses in a secular narrative, though indeed Bulwer Lytton was guilty of the interpolation without the excuse. The constant appearance of the novelist in person, the showman in charge of his puppets, is intolerable unless it be managed with consummate tact. Thackeray, of course, had tact in perfection. He was every inch an artist, and he justly felt that he was incapable of boring his readers. His alleged cynicism is only skin-deep. It is chiefly the mask of sentiment or the revolt against insincerity. Thackeray was a moralist to the backbone. He was no votary of art for art's sake, no disinterested chronicler of human folly or crime. He had, or thought he had, a mission to redeem the world from cant. Inless melancholy and indignation are cynicism, there never was a less cynical writer. It was said (if Charles the Second that he believed t people to be scoundrels, but that he thought none the worse of them for being so. Thai keray, like 1 iiefoucauld, had a very high standard, and was sho< Iced at the contrast of worldly prac tit e with religious iry. The shipwrecked mariner on an unknown shore who, at the sight of a gallows, thanked God he 128 MEN AND LETTERS was in a Christian country, is a typical example of the satire running through all Thackeray's works. His crusade against snobbishness requires no justification, because it produced the Book of Snobs. Its moral utility may be doubted. To dwell upon snobbishness is to run the risk of promoting it, because it consists in a morbid consciousness of things which have only an imaginative existence. A famous Oxford divine is reported to have put into the minds of undergraduates ideas of wickedness which would never have occurred to them spontaneously. The more people think about social distinctions, the more they think of rank. There are vices which may be spread and encouraged even by satire. Until a man has grasped the truth that there are no classes, but only individuals, he will be all his lifetime subject to bondage. Thackeray sometimes seems to have understood the truth almost as little as his victims. Thackeray died in 1862, at the age of fifty-one, nearly eight years before Dickens, who did not himself live to be sixty. With these two great men, superior to them in some respects if inferior in others, must be ranked Charlotte Bronte, a writer of commanding and absolutely original genius. Miss Bronte had a great admiration for Mr. Thackeray, and she dedicated the second edition of Jane Eyre to him. But she had written it before Vanity Fair appeared, and there is not a trace of his influence in any of her books. She and her sisters are unaccountable. They derived their power, as Burns derived his patent of nobility, straight from Almighty God. Anne Bronte would hardly now be remembered if it had not been for the others. But Charlotte and Emily were prodigies. Although their father's name seems to have been beautified from Prunty it marvel- THE VICTORIAN NOVEL 1 29 lously fitted the girls. They were indeed the daughters of thunder. Emily's poems, the best of which are among the finest in the language, do not fall within the limits of my task. Her novel, Wnthcring Heights, with its grim force, its weird intensity, and its flashes of imagi- native splendour, is like a solitary volcano rising from a dull flat plain. That love is strong as death we owe to the wisdom of Solomon. But the passion which alone redeems the inhuman ruffian Heathcliffis no more affected by death than by the weather, and the over- mastering strength of his feeling for his dead wife is not to be matched in literature. In the history of the human mind there is nothing more wonderful than Emily Bronte, who died before she was thirty. Charlotte Bronte's trilogy of novels has been the subject of as many comparative estimates as the number three admits. Mr. Swinburne, and perhaps most critics, put Villctte first. It is certain that all three belong to the very highest order of merit. Miss Bronte and her sisters, though well grounded in the beggarly elements, had few books, and saw little of the world. Charlotte Bronte's style, though sometimes scriptural, is emphatically her own. On small occasions it is apt to seem grandilo- quent. On great occasions it is superb. People in her books always request permission. They never ask leave. J 1 1 r style is, therefore, not a good one to copy. But in her hands it can do wonders. The intense earnestness and glowing ardour of her mind infused themselves into \ tiling she wrote. She could not be trivial, flippant, or dull. Yet she had little or no humour. Her satirical ription of the curates is eflfa tive, not to say sa\. 1 irdly amusing, [n one of her published letters there is a most interesting critH 1 m pied the other ? ' ' O Mr. Trollope and second- rate society,' asked a modern joker ; ' which of you copied the other ? ' His popularity was due partly to his cleverness, liveliness, and high spirits, but partly also to his never overtaxing the brains of his readers, if, indeed, he can be said to have taxed them at all. The change in the position of his books produced, and pro- duced so rapidly, by the death of the author may, I thus explained. He stimulated the taste for which he eaten 1. He en ited the demand which he su: 1 with a purpose is a product of the 144 MEN AND LETTERS Victorian age. All novels should have the purpose of interesting and amusing the reader. In the best novels no other purpose is discernible, though other and higher effects may be, and often are, produced. Dickens may be said to have begun the practice of combining a missionary with a literary object when he ran a tilt at the Poor Law in Oliver Twist, and to have continued it when he attacked the Court of Chancery in Bleak House. But Dickens was too full of his fun to be a missionary all the time. While his fame and influence were at their height, in 1850, appeared the first of Charles Kingsley's novels, Alton Locke. Kingsley — Parson Lot as he used to call himself — was a Christian Socialist and a disciple of Carlyle, who was neither a Socialist nor, in the ordinary sense of the term, a Christian. In 1850, before he became tutor to the Prince of Wales, he was rather a Chartist than otherwise. He was a real poet, and it is probable that his ballads will outlast his novels. In Yeast, perhaps his most powerful book, which contains that striking poem, 'The Poacher's Widow,' he held up to hatred and contempt the game laws and the unhealthy cottages of the poor. Kingsley had this advantage over Dickens, that he did not wait until abuses were removed before he denounced them. His novels undoubtedly had a great practical influence in the promotion of sanitary improvement. But their earnestness, often judicious earnestness, was not con- ducive to literary perfection. Kingsley was a keen sportsman, and, unlike many keen sportsmen, had a passionate love for the country in which he hunted or fished. His descriptive passages are always impressive and often splendid. His dramatic power was very great, as Hypatia shows, and still more the death of the old gamekeeper in Yeast, which is worthy of Scott. Charles THE VICTORIAN NOVEL I45 Kingsley never wrote a story for the sake of writing a story, like his brother Henry, so undeservedly forgotten. The belief, which he never lost, that something tremen- dous was going to happen about the middle of next week kept him always on the stretch, and half spoiled him for a man of letters. Another novelist with a purpose, or rather with purposes, was Charles Reade. His purposes were in every respect benevolent and praiseworthy. In Never too late to mend he exposed the cruelty which prevailed in prisons. Hard Cash, perhaps his most exciting story, was designed to effect the reform of lunatic asylums. He understood better than Kingsley how to combine a moral with a plot. He is melodramatic, and he never loses sight of the narrative in his endeavour to improve the occasion. If novels with a purpose are to be written at all, they could hardly be written more wisely than Charles Reade wrote them. Although he was for half a century, or thereabouts, a Fellow of Magdalen, his style was the reverse of academic. He carried sensa- tionalism to the verge of vulgarity, and he was no purist. He was a scholar, however, and not at all a bad one. Indeed, his best book, The Cloister and the ,th, shows not only a thorough acquaintance with the Colloquies of Erasmus, but a warm sympathy with the spirit of the Renaissance. In Peg Woffington he went for a subject to the stage of the eighteenth cen- tury, behind the scenes of which Dr. Johnson, for well known reasons, felt reluctant to go. But Charles Reade DOt make an idol of propriety. Nevertheless he seems to have fallen into oblivion, along with two of ontemporaries who made a good deal of noise in their day, Whyte Melville and Wilkie Collins. Whyte Melville was the delight of many a boyhood, lie seemed 146 MEN AND LETTERS to be showing one life. Digby Grand, the fascinating guardsman (if that be not tautology), and Kate Coven- try, who was so terribly fast that once she ' almost swore,' made one feel what infinite possibilities lurked in a larger existence. Fancy knowing a girl who almost swore ! And Digby Grand was a perfect gen- tleman, who always made his tailor and his bootmaker pay his debts of honour. Whyte Melville was great in the hunting-field, where he died, and nobody could de- scribe a race better, except Sophocles and Sir Francis Doyle. But in one book he aimed higher. He pro- duced an historical novel, a novel of classical antiqiuty. In my judgment, and in the judgment of better qualified critics, the Gladiators is a most successful book. I should put it far above the Last Days of Pompeii, and not far below Hypatia. Whyte Melville, like Esaias, was very bold. He touched a period covered by Tacitus, the greatest historical novelist of all the ages. But people do not go straight from the classics to the circulating library, and Whyte Melville could describe the character of Vitellius, which he did exceedingly well, without fear of invidious comparisons. It is a striking testimony to the permanent power of Latin literature that it should have absorbed a modern of the moderns like Whyte Melville. Wilkie Collins has been called an imitator of Gaboriau. He wrote of crimes and their perpetrators from the detective's point of view, and he fell at last into a rather tiresome trick of putting his characters into the witness-box. But he had neither the strength nor the weakness of Gaboriau. The first volume of Monsieur Lecocq was altogether beyond Wilkie Collins. He never wrote anything half so dull as the second. Gaboriau could not stop when he had exhausted the interest of his story. He had to go back and explain THE VICTORIAN NOVEL 147 how it al\ came to happen, which nobody wanted to know. In the Woman in White and the Moonstone the excitement is kept up to the end. But it never rises quite so high as in L' Affaire Lcrouge or Lc Dossier Numcro Cent-treize. Nevertheless there are precious moments for the reader of W ilkie Collins, such as Laura Glyde's sudden apparition behind her own tombstone, and the discovery of Godfrey Ablcwhite in the public-house. Are those books and others' like them literature? Wilkie Collins deliberately stripped his style of all embellish- ment. Even epithets are excluded, as they are from John Austin's Lectures on Jurisprudence. It is strange that a man of letters should try to make his books resemble police reports. But, if he does, he must take the consequences. He cannot serve God and Mammon. I have now arrived at a part of my task which is peculiarly dillicult, and which would, on the scale hitherto adopted, be impossible. I have finished, save for one brilliant exception, with those Quorum Flaminia tegitur cinis atque Latina. The number of living novelists is beyond my powers of calculation, and indeed the burden of proof rests with every wholly or partially educated woman to prove that she has not written a novel. The beneficent rule of I Ier Gracious Majesty has proved extraordinarily favour- able to the fertility of the feminine genius. All women like Mrs. Humphry Ward. This kind cometh not forth but by prayer and fasting. They cannot all have the circulation of Miss Emma Jane Worboi But others may do what Edna Lyall has done, ami there are reputations which show that there is hope : all. It is tou late, says the Roman poet quoted above, to repent v. ith one':, helmet on. JJut 1 think L— 2 I48 MEN AND LETTERS I will begin with my own sex. Mr. George Meredith has long stood, as he deserves to stand, at the head of English fiction. An intelligent critic, perhaps a cricketing correspondent out of work in the winter, said that the Amazing Marriage was by no means de- void of interest, but that it was a pity Mr. Meredith could not write like other people. I presume that such critics have their uses, or they would not be created. If Mr. Meredith wrote like other people, he would be another person, with or without the same name, and perhaps almost as stupid as his censor. His style is not a classical one. But it suits Mr. Meredith, as Carlyle's and Browning's suited them, because it harmonises with his thought. Nobody says that Mr. Meredith's strong point is the simple and perspicuous narrative of events. He is not in the least like Wilkie Collins. He is not like anybody, except perhaps Pea- cock. But he is a great master of humour, of fancy, of sentiment, of imagination, of everything that makes life worth having. He plays upon human nature like an old fiddle. He knows the heart of a woman as well as he knows the mind of a man. His novels are romances, and not ' documents.' They are often fan- tastic, but never prosy. He does not see life exactly as the wayfaring man sees it. The ' realist ' cannot under- stand that that is a qualification and not a disability. A novel is not a newspaper. ' Mr. Turner,' said the critical lady, ' I can never see anything in nature like your pictures.' ' Don't you wish you could, ma'am ? ' growled the great artist. Mr. Meredith has the insight of genius and of poetical genius. But he pays the reader the compliment of requiring his assistance. Some slight intellectual capacity and a willingness to use it are re- quired for the appreciation of his books. They are THE VICTORIAN NOVEL I49 worth the trouble. There are few more delightful comedies in English literature than Evan Harrington. We must go back to Scott for a profounder tragedy than Rhoda Fleming. The Egoist is so good that every- body at once puts a real name to Sir Willoughby Patterne. The male reader is lucky if he can give one to Clara Middleton, that most fascinating of heroines since Di Vernon. Not that Mr. Meredith's women are in the least like Scott's. They are rather develop- ments of the sketches, which one cannot call more than sketches, in Headlong Hall and Crotchet Castle, and Night- Abbey and Maid Marian. The Ordeal of Richard 1 rel is the favourite with most of Mr. Meredith's disciples, and the character of the wise youth, Adrian, cannot be overpraised. But the same could hardly be said of the Pilgrim's Scrip, and Lucy is not equal to Clara. Besides, there is Mrs. Berry, who has not Mrs. Quickly's humour, and for whom all stomachs are not sufficiently strong. A word may be put in for Mr. Mere- dith's boys, who are natural and yet attractive. There is one of the jolliest of boys in the Egoist, and the school in Harry Richmond is quite excellent. It is a pity that Mr. Meredith did not always write his own story. He , not, save perhaps in the Tragic Comedians, gain by incursions into history. The anecdote which pl;iys so large a part in Diana of the Crossways is not true, and requires all Mr. Meredith's genius to make it even credible. In Lord Ormont and his Aminta, and in the Amaxing Marriage, Mr. Meredith has incorporated historic fact or legend. They are not among his best books. It is his imagination by which he will live. He had, like Mr. Di racli, to educate a party. But politics are ephemeral, and literature is permanent. Among the strangest vagaries of criticism which I50 MEN AND LETTERS I can remember was the ascription of Far from tin Madding Crowd to George Eliot in a journal of high literary repute. Far from the Madding Crowd was not Mr. Thomas Hardy's first novel, nor yet his second. But it established his fame as an original writer of singular charm, with a grace and an atmosphere of his own. Anybody less like George Eliot it would be diffi- cult to find. But at that time there prevailed an opinion that George Eliot was more than mortal, and that she might have written the Bible if she had not been fore- stalled. If that illustrious woman had a fault, she was a little too creative. With all one's enjoyment of them and their sayings, one cannot help sometimes feeling that there never was a Mrs. Poyser or a Mrs. Cadwal- lader, as there was a Mrs. Norris and a Miss Bates. Mr. Hardy's country folk are real, and yet not so real as his country. His peasants, who seem to talk like a book, are such stuff as books are made of. Their con- versation is genuine. Nobody would have dared to invent it. But whether it be the pagan worship of nature, which is the strongest sentiment Mr. Hardy allows them, or the author's own passion for England in general and Dorsetshire in particular, the human element in Mr. Hardy's stories is ' overcrowded ' by the intensity of the inanimate, or apparently inanimate, world. I am not, I hope, underrating the tragic power of Tess or J tide. The Hand of Ethelbevta is a delightfully quaint piece of humour. But Mr. Hardy's typical book is the Woodlanders, where every tree is a character, and the people are a set-off to the summer. There is plenty of human nature in the Woodlanders, some of it no better than it ought to be. But it is the background. The foreground is the woods and the fields. Perhaps nobody is quite a man or quite a woman. The feminine element THE VICTORIAN NOVEL 151 in Mr. Hardy is his love of the country, which is neither the sportsman's love, nor the naturalist's, nor the poet's, but passion for the country as such, and that may be found in a hundred women before it will be found in one man. Mr. Hardy feels the cruelty of nature. He feels it so much that, as may be seen in Tess of the D'UrberiilUs, he can hardly bear to contemplate the country in winter. But he loves it, and his inimitably beautiful form of adoration is the secret of his power. In his later works Mr. Hardy has done what only the French nation can do with impunity. Much of the abuse lavished upon Jude the Obscure was foolish and irrelevant enough. The pity of it is much more pro- minent than the coarseness. It is, like Tess, a powerful book, and no other living Englishman could have written it. But it is far below the level of the Return of the Native and the Mayor of Casterbridge. Mr. Hardy's short stories, such as Wesscx Tales, and Noble Dames, and Life's Little Ironies, are very clever, all the cleverer because they are quite unlike his long ones. Short stories came from America. Was it Daisy Miller that set the fashion, or the Luck of Roaring Camp ? To claim either Mr. Bret Harte or Mr. Henry James as a British novelist would be an insult to the Stars and Stripes. They have shown, and so has Mr. Anthony Hope, that the English language is suitable to short stories, as indeed to every other form of human compo- sition except pentameter verse. But the English people do not take to them. Louis Stevenson, that ' young Marcellua of our tongue,' tried his genius on them. But the New Arabian Nights, though I am not ashamed to confess that I would rather read them than the old, do not reveal the author of Kidnapped and the Master of Ballantrae. Stevenson is one of the very few really 152 MEN AND LETTERS exquisite and admirable writers who deliberately sat down to form a style. He was singularly frank about it. He has told the public what he read, and how he read it, and a very strange blend of authors it was. In nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand the result would have been a disastrous failure. In Mr. Stevenson's case it was a brilliant success. Of course, every critic thinks that he would have found out the secret for himself. Certainly, Mr. Stevenson's books are the most studiously elaborate works of art. But the art is so good that, though it can hardly be said to con- ceal, it justifies and commends, itself. The reader feels as a personal compliment the immense pains which this humblest of geniuses has bestowed upon every chapter and every sentence of all the volumes he wrote without assistance. It is said that his warmest champions belong to his own sex. For while he does, like Falstaff, in some sort handle women, and while Miss Barbara Grant, or the girl in the Dynamiter, would have been the delight of any society it had pleased them to adorn, his writings teach that it is not the passion of love, but the spirit of adventure, which makes the world go round. The question whether the two influences can be alto- gether separated does not belong to a review of Victo- rian romance. There have been novels without women, even in French. Victor Hugo wrote one. Ferdinand Fabre has written another. But it is a dangerous experiment, or would be if it were likely to be repeated. Weir of Hermiston, in which the eternal element of sex was revived, is surely one of the greatest tragedies in the history of literature. It is far sadder than Denis Duval or Edwin Drood. Thackeray and Dickens had done their work. We know the full extent of their marvellous powers, But that cannot be said of Steven,- THE VICTORIAN NOVEL 1 53 son. Wiir of Hcrmiston is a fragment, and a fragment it must remain. But there is enough of it to show beyond the possibility of doubt that the complete work would have been the greatest achievement of that wonderful mind. The sleepless soul has perished in his pride. Mr. Barrie, like Dickens, has had the unavoidable misfortune to found a school. But he is entitled to be judged on his merits, and not on the demerits of his imitators. No sketch, however imperfect, of the Victorian novel would pass muster without him. He has done what greater men have failed to do. He has added a new pleasure to literature. I am not among those — it is my fault — who fell in love with • Babby the Egyptian.' Nor was I so deeply shocked as some of Mr. Barrie's admirers when the Little Minister reappeared in Sentimental Tommy as a little and trivial minister indeed. Babby and Gavin Dishart should, of course, have both been drowned, and Mr. Barrie incurred a serious responsibility in allowing them to be rescued by the editor of Good Words. It is not a case where hnmanity should be rewarded. Mr. Barrie is hardly at his best in the construction of a plot. Perhaps it is the vice of the age to abhor finality, as it is the vice of nature to abhor a vacuum. Most novels now begin U. A good beginning has become a bad sign. Few, very few, have, from the artistic point of view, a satis- factory end. Mr. Barrie is a child of old age, the old age of the nineteenth century. He has written as yet no great book, though Sentimental Tommy is very nearly one. His pathos and his humour, his sympathetic por- traiture, and his exquisite style are best appreciated in single episodes, in short stories, and in personal digres- sions. The art of description Mr. Barrie has almost overdone. It was said of a disciple of Dickens that he 154 MEN AND LETTERS would describe the knocker off your door. If there were ever any knockers in Thrums, there cannot be many left now. Mrs. Oliphant was a popular and successful novelist before Mr. Barrie was born. Few writers in any age have maintained so high a level over so large a surface. The Chronicles of Cavlingford have for the modern novel-reader an almost mediaeval sound. But the author of Salem Chapel and Miss Marjoribanks has supplied the public for half a century with stories which are always full of interest and often full of charm. Miss Broughton has produced a great deal of work since Cometh up as a Flower im- pressed the hall and the parsonage with a vague sense that it was dreadfully improper. The imputation of impropriety without the reality is an invaluable asset for an English novelist. It is not, of course, Miss Broughton's sole capital. The • rough and cynical reader,' always rather given to crying over cheap sen- timentalism, has shed many a tear over Good-bye, Sweet- heart, and Not Wisely hit too Well. The very names are lachrymatory. Then, Miss Broughton is witty as well as tragic. She first discovered the possibilities of humour which had so long been latent in family prayers. She is an adept in the comic misapplication of scriptural texts, as well as in other forms of giving vent to high spirits. The fertility and talent of Miss Braddon and Mr. Payn, who aim at giving amusement, and succeed in what they aim at, are obnoxious to no censure more intelligible than the taunt of being ' Early Victorian.' Sir Walter Besant and Mr. George Gissing are Victorian without being Early. For a novelist to be made Sir Walter is a hard trial. But Sir Walter Besant has not cultivated the Waverley THE VICTORIAN NOVEL 1 55 method, and his capital stories can afford to stand upon their own footing. Mr. Gissing's books are not altogether attractive. They are always rather cynical. They are often very gloomy. They do not enable the reader to feel at home in fashionable society. But their literary excellence is not far from the highest. They are complete in themselves. They are perfectly, some- times forcibly, actual. There is an unvarnished truth about them winch compels belief, and an original power which, once felt, cannot be resisted. A little more romance, a little more poetry, a little more humour, and Mr. Gissing would be a very great writer indeed. At nos immensum spatiis confecimus requor, Et jam tempus cquum fumantia solvere colla. It is impossible to attempt an exhaustive catalogue of contemporary novelists. The time would fail one to tell of Dr. Conan Doyle and Mr. Stanley Weyman, Lucas Malet also, and Mr. Anstey and Mr. Zangwill. Their thousands of readers testify to their popularity, and their praise is in all the newspapers. Mrs. Clifford has shown in Mrs. Keith's Crime and Aunt Anne that a really imaginative writer needs no other material than the pathos of everyday life. But a word of recognition must be given to Miss Yonge, who has treated the problems of life in a com- mi odably serious spirit. Dr. Whewell, who was at one time supposi d to know everything, usi 1 to! ay that the I r Woman i'f the Family was the first of English novels. He did not live to read Robert Elsmore. One might be inderstood if one suggested that Miss Charlotte iritual mother of Mrs. Humphry Ward. Y- t daughters are often more learned and usually less orthodox than their parents. Miss Yonge wrote stories, and even religious stories, without an exhaustive study 156 MEN AND LETTERS of Biblical criticism as made in Germany. Mrs. Ward has indulged in something very like original research, and is certainly the most learned of female novelists since the death of George Eliot. Her novels are entitled to the highest respect for the evidence of industry which they always display. They are also an interesting ' end- of-the-century ' example of the art of separating instruc- tion from amusement. The frivolous people who want to laugh, or even to cry, over fiction must go elsewhere. Mrs. Ward requires attention while she develops her theories. Since the publication of Robert Elsmere no unbelieving clergyman has any excuse for remaining in the Church. David Grieve taught married people that neither husband nor wife has any right to talk in a style which the other cannot understand. In the Early Victorian novel there may have been too much sentiment. In the Late Victorian novel there is apt to be too much of everything. The ' smooth tale, generally of love,' has become a crowded epitome of universal information. In Sir George Tressady we see the House of Commons in Committee, and tea on the terrace, and dinner in an under-secretary's room, and public meetings, and declarations of the poll. We may even notice a vast improvement in the evening papers, which report speeches delivered at ten o'clock. If novels are to con- tain everything, the world will not contain the novels, and all other forms of literature will be superseded. The Plan of Campaign was the subject of a very clever novel by Miss Mabel Robinson, which actually bore that name. Mr. George Moore's Esther Waters has as much power as any book of M. Zola's, and more artistic merit. Miss Emily Lawless has kept Irish politics out of her sad and beautiful stories of Irish life. But Miss Lawless is an exception. She is no realist. THE VICTORIAN NOVEL 1 57 When Nicholas Nickleby was employed by Mr. Vincent Crummies to write a play, it was made a condition that he should introduce a real pump and two washing-tubs. 1 That's the London plan,' said Mr. Crummies. ' They look up some dresses and properties, and have a piece written to fit 'em.' It is the London plan still. But it is now applied to novels, and not to plays. May, 1897. THE PHILOSOPHICAL RADICALS Mr. Graham Wallas's Life of Place, closely following Mr. Robert Leader's Life of Roebuck, will revive the interest even of arm-chair politicians in the public life and public men of the first half of the century. Mr. Wallas has treated his subject in a thoroughly con- scientious spirit. He has succeeded in drawing vividly and authoritatively a character of singular strength and singular roughness. Place's father was an unmitigated ruffian, who knocked his children down whenever he saw them. But Place himself managed to get the rudiments of education, and he made better use of those rudiments than most first-class men make of their degrees. He was apprenticed in boyhood to a maker of leather breeches. The trade was decaying, and Place, who married young, suffered miserable privation. His mis- fortunes, instead of breaking him down, braced and hardened him. He set up for himself as a general tailor, and acquired a lucrative business. He was a pupil of Bentham, the only man whom he regarded with un- qualified respect, and throughout his life an ardent politician. His shop was in Charing Cross, and in his back room the Radicals of Westminster used to meet. He obtained great influence with his neighbours, and became a sort of Grand Elector for Westminster. He hated and distrusted the Whigs, from Fox and Sheridan to Mel- bourne and Russell. He was an extreme Radical and pronounced Free Thinker, who regarded Whigs and THE PHILOSOPHICAL RADICALS 1 59 Tories, Churchmen and Dissenters, with almost equal contempt. Robert Owen absurdly called him the leader of the Whig Party. In the Grcvillc Memoirs there is one scornful allusion to ' Place and his rabble.' Greville erred on one side as much as Owen erred on the other. Place was an unseen power, but a power nevertheless. If he did not exactly make and unmake Ministries — his own friends were never in office — he nominated candidates, he composed the People's Charter, and he issued in 2 the famous placard 'Stop the Duke, go for Gold.' Though almost illiterate, and a writer whom even a biographer cannot read, he was consulted as an oracle by men far more highly cultivated than himself and in far higher social positions than his own. His case is sidgular, so far as I know, in English politics. He never sat in Parliament, never fought a constituency, never edited a newspaper, never wrote a book, and never suffered persecution for his opinions. Yet he wielded an authority none the less important because it was indirect, and he was chiefly instrumental in removing their grossest iniquities from the Combination Laws. He was not, however, a Socialist, but an Individualist of the most determined sort, and he had no sentimental love of the working classes. What he had was a genuine hatred of oppression, a passionate love of justice and equality. His capacity for invective was unbounded; and his best friend, James Mill, objected to his ' raving.' He was a good hater and an implacable enemy; but ::est, high-minded, and full of public spirit. Mr. Wallas deserves the gratitude of all historical students for his portrait of this extraordinary man. Mr. Leader's Life of Roebuck is a good instance of the rage for biography which struggles with gambling for possession of the human mind. The late Mr. Koc- 160 MEN AND LETTERS buck, who died in 1879, was a strenuous and promi- nent politician of the second or third rate. He did little which anybody now remembers ; he wrote nothing which anybody now reads. He was a rather clever, rather eloquent, rather noisy, rather sincere man, who made his own way in the world by dint of energy and self-reliance. A thin volume of some fifty pages would have adequately described his motives and his acts. Mr. Leader has given him nearly four hundred, with the result of dangerously diluting the essential spirit into a somewhat thin and vapid draught. I find no fault with Mr. Leader, who has done his work well. Probably he could not help himself. We are all the creatures of circumstances, and biography is the vice of the age. Moreover, there is an excuse for Mr. Leader which cannot be pleaded for all his rivals in the art. Mr. Roebuck lived too much for the day, and even for the hour, to be very interesting now. But he was con- nected in early life with a group of remarkable men, who, if their practical capacity had corresponded with their intellectual powers, might have broken political parties and altered the history of England. I mean, of course, the philosophical Radicals, the disciples of Jeremy Bentham and of James Mill, such as John Mill and George Grote and Sir William Molesworth, and Charles Buller and Joseph Hume (though he was no great philosopher), and Perronet Thompson and Mr. Wallas's hero, Francis Place, who prompted the party behind the scenes. With these men Mr. Roebuck was in his early days intimately associated. His own mind was anything rather than philosophical. His education was defective, his temper was imperious, his principles were versatile, and even his resentments were not lasting. But the course of his life brought him into THE PHILOSOPHICAL RADICALS l6l fellowship with the Mills, and, like many young men, he could not bear, when he was young, that anybody should be thought more Radical than himself. The austere doctrines of his original friends did not insure the consistency of his own public course. Consistency, if it means refusing to learn by experience, is an over- rated virtue. Those who never change their minds are, for the most part, those who have no minds to change. That Mr. Roebuck should have begun life a Radical and ended it a Tory, is no more a subject of reproach than if, like an infinitely greater man, he had begun as a Tory and ended as a Radical. But ' est modus in rebus : sunt certi denique fines.' Mr. Roebuck changed his opinions with a rapidity which would have been more meritorious if they had been shirts. I take one subject, which will do as well as twenty. In March, 1852, he spoke in the House of Commons on the Militia Bill, and caused some sensation by bluntly calling it 'a necessary defence necessitated by the jealousy of the French people — jealousy of which a bad man might take advantage, and a bad man was in power.' The bad man was Prince Louis Napoleon, then President of the French Republic. Two years afterwards, in the spring of 1854, Mr. Roebuck made a speech in favour of war witli Russia, which included a tribute tu the ' loyalty and honesty of purpose ' displayed by the same Louis Napoleon, then Emperor of the 1 rench. In 1858 he caused the sensation which he loved to cause by describing, in language of very doubt- ful taste, the recent meeting between the Emperor and tli' Q n. ' I have no faith,' he said, 'in a man who i perjured to his lips. I recollect when at Cherbourg seeing the Emperor of the French visit the Queen of England . . . but when 1 saw his perjured lips upon M 1 62 MEN AND LETTERS her hallowed cheek, my blood rushed back to my heart to think of that holy and good creature being defiled by the lips of a perjured despot.' Now, if Louis Napoleon committed perjury at all, he committed it before and not after Mr. Roebuck praised him for his loyalty and honesty of purpose. In 1865 the Emperor had again become an object of Mr. Roebuck's admiration. ' While England and France hold together,' he then declared, ' the world must be at peace. The Emperor of France employs the power which he has, and so well exercises, for the benefit of mankind.' Most men change, but they do not change like that. Whatever may be the true view of Napoleon the Third's complex character, Mr. Roebuck's alternations of flattery and abuse have neither value nor meaning. They show that he had no settled notion of the man at all, but attacked him or praised him with absolute carelessness, to serve the immediate purpose of the moment. Mr. Roebuck's judgments upon men and things are as nearly worthless as the opinions of any intelligent person can be. It is fortunate for the reputations of his contemporaries that they are so. For, like Vivien, who left neither Lancelot brave nor Galahad pure, he ran down with indiscriminate seventy almost every character which presumed to raise itself higher than his own. He accused Prince Albert of a determination that the campaign against Russia in the Crimea should not succeed, than which it would be difficult to imagine a more infamous or a more preposterous charge. Of Mr. Gladstone he said in a sentence apparently intended to be humorous, ' He may be a very good chopper, but depend upon it he is not an English statesman.' Cob- den, it seems, was ' a poor creature, with one idea — the making of county voters.' Lord John Russell was THE PHILOSOPHICAL RADICALS 1 63 ' weak, narrow-minded, obstinate, and vindictive.' Lord Brougham, on the other hand, as students of his chequered career will be surprised to find, was ' a wise, a great, and a good man.' But there was one person of whom Mr. Roebuck's high, not to say overweening, opinion never varied, and that was himself. When he was a parliamentary can- didate at Glasgow in 1838, he contrasted himself with those vile wretches who crawl to the people for their own interest. In 1S48 he used much the same language. At the close of his life he told the representative of a newspaper who came for an interview, that 'he had often thought that had he chosen to sacrifice his self- respect he might have become a leader of working men himself: they liked, as soldiers do, to be led by gentle- men.' One is irresistibly reminded of the advertiser's counsel, ' see that you get it.' 7roAAoi toi eapd>)KOopoi, BaK^oi St t« iraOpoi. If Newman was right when he defined a gentleman as one who shrank from giving pain, Mr. Roebuck belonged to the majority of the Greek proverb — to the reed-bearers, and not to the Bacchanals. The truth seems to be that he was consumed by jealousy of Mr. Gladstone and most other eminent men. He was cer- tainly a curious product of philosophical Radicalism. He never did anything by halves, and when he cei to be an advanced Radical he became a vehement Tory, For a man who passed most of his life in talking, he had a singular prejudice against the 'agitator' who talked when he ought to have worked. The incon- of politicians, however, are a trite and 1111 profitable theme. It is more interesting to examine the sources from whi< h BO Strange a character as Mi. Roe* buck's proceeded. He certainly could not be called, in M— 2 I64 MEN AND LETTERS the ordinary sense of the term, a failure. He disliked privacy, and he was almost always before the public. He turned out Lord Aberdeen's government, the second government of All the Talents, by a very large majority, when he was too ill to speak for more than a few minutes at a time. After charging Prince Albert with a treasonable endeavour to prevent the success of the expedition to the Crimea, he lived to be made a Privy Councillor, and to be thanked by the Queen for sup- porting the Eastern policy of Lord Beaconsfield. He died in the odour of political sanctity as one of those noble patriots who leave their party for their country's good. Yet his career was singularly barren of positive or practical results, and it is difficult to extract from Mr. Leader's book, or from contemporary records, any one principle to which this ostentatious purist steadily adhered. Having entered the House of Commons a Benthamite, he left it a Disraelite, and the chain has yet to be forged which can connect the fantastic dreams of Mr. Disraeli with anything so prosaically solid as the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Bentham saw in his old age the complete triumph of a system which, when he originally propounded it, was treated with neglect and derision. His works, as one of his disciples finely said, were buried in the ruins of the superstitions they had destroyed. ' The writings of Bentham,' says Mr. Roebuck, ' produced a silent revo- lution in the mode of treating all political and moral subjects. The habits of thought were entirely new, and the whole body of political writers, without (for the most part) knowing whence the inspiration came, wera full of a new spirit, and submitted all acts to a new test.' This is true, though not, perhaps, very impres- sively stated. But while the spirit of Benthamism pre- THE PHILOSOPHICAL RADICALS 1 65 vailed, the philosophical Radicals as a party in the House of Commons did little or nothing. There is in this volume an odd and unfinished letter which Mr. Roebuck wrote, but never sent, to Mr. Mill. It is the production of a candid friend in the worst sense of that term, and in the case of a man less conscious of his own moral rectitude might be called spiteful. • The temper of the House of Commons is peculiar, and of that I quickly saw you were profoundly ignorant,' and so forth. This was written in the spring of 1868, and in the autumn of the same year Mr. Mill ceased to be member for Westminster. The loss to the House of Commons was greater than the loss to himself. It is not true that he failed. He was not a brilliant orator. The House did not fill when he rose, as it filled for the late Sir Robert Peel, who never had anything to say that was worth saying. But sensible men listened to him with a deep respect and a profound attention which Mr. Roebuck seldom commanded and never deserved. By the time, however, that Mr. Mill came into the House, the philosophical Radicals had as a party been dissolved. Mr. Roebuck's own account of the Mills is not sym- pathetic, and should be taken with some reserve. John Mill was 'the mere exponent of other men's ideas,' 4 utterly ignorant of what is called society,' did not understand the ways of women, and so forth. James Mill, if we may believe Mr. Roebuck, was an arrant snob. He 'looked down on us because we were poor and not greatly allied, for while in words he was a sevt : or rat, in fact and in conduct he bowed down to wealth ant! n. To the young men of wealth and position who < ame to see him he was gracious ami instructive, while to us he was rude and curt, gave us 1 66 MEN AND LETTERS no advice, but seemed pleased to hurt and offend us.' The character of James Mill was not altogether an agreeable one. But this odious charge is new and requires corroboration. His opinions were anything rather than fashionable, and he was at no pains to conceal them. If he had been what Mr. Roebuck in- sinuates that he was, he would surely have taken some pains to push his son into society, instead of keeping him out of it. It is conceivable that the author of the History of British India may have formed a lower intel- lectual estimate of Mr. Roebuck than Mr. Roebuck formed of himself. It is hardly possible that he should have shared Mr. Roebuck's own naive horror at seeing 4 Place, Tailor,' over the door of a man admitted to share his august companionship. Mr. Roebuck's account of John Mill's relations with Mrs. Taylor, afterwards Mrs. Mill, is, though unpleasant, shrewd enough. Mill in his Autobiography attributes his quarrel with Roebuck to a disagreement about the re- spective merits of Byron and Wordsworth. Roebuck traces it to his having remonstrated with Mill on his intimacy with Mrs. Taylor, and Roebuck's theory is beyond question the more plausible of the two. It is difficult to reconcile the letters to which reference has already been made with Mr. Roebuck's autobiographical statement that his affection for Mill ' continued unbroken to the day of his death.' Nor is there much affection in the remark that 'one so little conversant with women or the world would be a slave to the first woman who told him she liked him.' But of that remarkable attachment Mr. Roebuck probably gives the true explanation. ' Mill's intellect bowed down to the feet of Mrs. Taylor. He believed her an inspired philosopher in petticoats ; and as she had the art of returning his own thoughts to him- THE PHILOSOPHICAL RADICALS 1 67 self, clothed in her own words, he thought them hers, and wondered at her powers of mind, and the accuracy of her conclusions.' The cynical maxim that all affec- tion is a form of self-love has, like most cynicism, more sound than sense in it. Mill had a very warm heart and a very affectionate nature. His father, whom he wor- shipped, and of whom he stood in great awe, starved both. His mother died when he was very young. His brothers and sisters were no companions to him. The 4 first woman who told him she liked him ' gave him the sympathy he required and had not. He had idealised women. He idolised a woman. Mr. Roebuck idealised nobody, and only idolised himself. Although Mr. Roebuck's great political achievement was the destruction of Lord Aberdeen's Ministry and the appointment of the Crimean Committee, his career is mainly, if not solely, interesting now from his connec- tion with the philosophical Radicals of the thirties and forties. They were such remarkably clever men, and they did so remarkably little, that they have both posi- tive and negative claims to attention. When Macaulay came back from India in 1S38, he found the Radical party reduced to ' Grote and his wife.' To a pure Whig that was not an unpleasant discovery. But it was, and it remains, a curious phaenomenon. Grote, and Mill, and Molesworth, and Buller were men of high charac- ter and brilliant ability. Hume and Roebuck were in- dustrious and successful Members of Parliament. From the resignation of Lord Grey in 1834 to the resignation of Lord Melbourne in 1841 the Whig government was singularly weak. But the feeble organism held its own against attack, and when it finally succumbed, it fell before the Conservative revival which had been elabo- rately fostered by Sir Robert l'cul. Full justice has 1 68 MEN AND LETTERS scarcely yet been done to the qualities of that illustrious man, whose biography, unlike Roebuck's and Place's, remains to be written. He was the father of modern Conservatism and of modern Liberalism. He was too great for one party. He carried on the financial policy of Mr. Pitt and handed it down to Mr. Gladstone. He taught Conservatives to rely upon the House of Com- mons and not upon the House of Lords. Twice in his life he yielded to intellectual conviction and confessed that he had been wrong. He accepted the Report of the Bullion Committee in favour of resuming cash pay- ments. He was converted to free trade not by the Irish famine, but by the arguments of Mr. Cobden. In 1829 there was no Francis Horner, and Richard Cobden was still obscure. On that occasion Peel yielded to necessity, and took the Duke with him. Of Catholic emancipation he said frankly, ' The credit of this measure is not due to me. It is due to Mr. Fox, to Mr. Sheridan, to Mr. Grattan, and to an illustrious and right honourable friend of mine, now no more.' He meant, I need hardly say, George Canning. Peel is not to be judged by his conduct in 1829, for what he did then was what almost any man in his senses would have done under the same conditions. In 181 2, and still more in 1846, he showed the insight of a real statesman. 1846 was of course the turning-point of his career. Only a really great man, who could see at a momentous crisis the true proportions of things, would have deliberately broken in pieces the structure he had himself so patiently and laboriously reared. Sir Robert Peel did not hesitate when he had to choose between the interests of his party and the welfare of the people. The Whigs could not form a Government, and he had to carry Free Trade himself, if it was to be carried at THE PHILOSOPHICAL RADICALS 1 69 all. lie was compared with Judas Iscariot, but he saved the nation. Sir Robert Peel was intellectually equal to the most abstrusely philosophical of his contemporaries. He was an excellent scholar, a supremely capable man of busi- ness, a brilliant debater, a man of highly cultivated taste and judgment. But first and foremost, and above all things, he was a practical statesman. Mr. Disraeli, in his wonderfully characteristic Life of Lord George Den- tin;!;, calls him ' the greatest member of Parliament who ever lived,' and says that he played on the House of Commons like an old fiddle.' He could thoroughly understand and appreciate an abstract treatise like Ri- cardo's Political Economy. But he had studied the book of the world as well as the world of books. He knew what could be done, and when the time had come for doing it. The philosophical Radicals did not know. Some of them did not seem to care. They were justly convinced of their own integrity, and fully imbued with a belief in their own principles. So long as they neither said nor did anything inconsistent with the doctrines they professed, they were satisfied to hug themselves in haughty and splendid isolation. Their mentor or insti- gator outside Parliament was Francis Place, facetiously called by them ' Father Place,' who, as already said, shocked Mr. Roebuck's youthful susceptibilities by I :ng a tailor. He was plain-spoken even to bluntness, and beyond it. He seems to have been the author of that pleasant phrase 'the shortening of Charles the First,' which I have seen described as a modern Ameri- < iism. He did not cultivate the literary graces, and 1 letters are neither polished nor polite. He was a straightforward Radical, bent on going the hog, the . Ac hog, and nothing but the hog. On the 3rd of 170 MEN AND LETTERS October, 1836, he wrote to Mr. Roebuck, • Men who think the resignation of the Whigs a reason for deserting the people are of no use to the people ; fit only to keep a truckling set of Tories, under the name of Whigs, in office, and thus to drivel down, as low as it can be drivelled down, the whole nation into a state of con- temptible imbecility.' These are brave words, and they are a fair sample of what Mr. Place wrote to his friends in the House of Commons. He accused them of sub- serviency to Lord John Russell, and when one of them attacked the Whig Government he was in an ecstasy of delight. It does not seem to have struck him that nothing came of these bold performances, that they did the Whigs no particular harm, and that beyond afford- ing personal gratification to Mr. Place they might as well not have occurred. Mr. Place and his associates, to adopt a French phrase, payed themselves with words. The Whigs left them to their amusement, and plodded on. A Liberal Member of Parliament wrote to Mr. Gladstone in 1886 begging him to withdraw the Home Rule Bill, but adding that if it were not withdrawn, he should vote for it. He is said to have been surprised that his appeal was unsuccessful. Mr. Mill, in his Autobiography, which some one described rather well as the history not of a man but of a mind, pays a warm tribute to his old friend Roebuck for services rendered to national education and to the self-government of the colonies. But both of these were Whig measures, and if the substitution of national for individual effort in elementary teaching be due to any- one before Mr. Forster, it is due to Lord Brougham. What Mr. Mill says of the philosophical Radicals in general is more accurate than what he says of Mr. Roebuck in particular. • When measures were pro- THE PHILOSOPHICAL RADICALS I 7 I posed flagrantly at variance with their principles, such as the Irish Coercion Bill, or the Canada Coercion in 1837, they came forward manfully, and braved any amount of hostility and prejudice, rather than desert the right, but on the whole they did little to promote any opinions; they had little enterprise, little activity; they left the lead of the Radical portion of the House to the old hands, to Hume and O'Connell.' Mr. Mill thought the result inevitable. 'And now,' he adds, 'on calm retrospection, I can perceive that the men were less in fault than we supposed, that we expected too much from them. They were in unfavourable circum- stances. Their lot was cast in the ten years of inevi- table reaction. ... It would have required a great political leader, which no one is to be blamed for not being, to have effected really great things by parliamen- tary discussion when the nation was in this mood.' The moods of nations are affected by the activity of indi- viduals. A philosopher may say that politics are a game not worth playing, that the mass of mankind do not understand what is good for them, but are at the mercy of office-seekers and charlatans. Probably that v. as not far from being Mr. Mill's own opinion. But it is not a doctrine which a Member of Parliament can without absurdity profess. When ' Father Place ' abused his disciples for speaking too mildly or too sel- dom, he scarcely ever gave them any practical hints. So long as they denounced the ' base, bloody, and brutal ' Whigs, he was contented, and even delighted. There was, of course, the Charter, which Mr. I 'lace, in a letter to Sir Erskine Perry, claims to have drawn, with the a distance of Mr. Lovett, and which Mr. Walla - proves that he actually drew. The Charter received the approval of the Working Men's Associations, it was 172 MEN AND LETTERS supported by the Northern Star and the Western Vindi- cator, the Chartists became a political party. Mrs. Grote assured Mr. Place that ' she would never consent to wag a hand or foot to awaken the great public up from its lethargy till those Whigs were sent a-packing.' Those Whigs were sent a-packing within three years from the date of Mrs. Grote's letter. But it was the Tories, not the Chartists, who sent them. The two great political organisations went on never minding. They behaved as if no such thing as Chartism had ever existed in the world. In 1842, after Mrs. Grote had had her wish, and the Whigs had been turned out, the House refused by an overwhelming majority to hear the Chartists by counsel. Mr. Roebuck spoke in favour of the motion. But as he took the opportunity of calling Feargus O'Connor a ' cowardly and malignant dema- gogue,' his advocacy was not of much avail. Mr. Roebuck's taste and capacity for invective were no doubt exceptional. But his unpractical and unbusiness- like methods he shared with his political allies. It is not that they were theorists. Theorists have changed the face of the world. Everybody knows Carlyle's out- burst of rhetoric against some depreciation of • mere theory.' ' There was once a man called Jean Jaques Rousseau. He wrote a book called The Social Contract. It was a theory, and nothing but a theory. The French nobles laughed at the theory, and their skins went to bind the second edition of the book.' The allusion is of course to the famous Tanneries of Meudon, to a dry his- toric fact. Rousseau was perfectly consistent, because he was a speculative philosopher. He was not, and did not pretend to be, a practical politician. The philo- sophical Radicals did. But they fell between two stools. They would rightly struggle, and yet would wrongly the rniLOSorniCAL radicals 1 73 win. Too virtuous to intrigue, they were not virtuous enough to be satisfied with the approval of their own consciences. The odd, and by no means attractive, letters from Mr. Place printed by Mr. Leader are a con- tinuous series of grumbles and growls. ' The Reformers in the House of Commons are not less deserving of censure than the Whig Ministers whom they have served.' ' I should be satisfied if I saw but six men who would despise the opinion of the House when circumstances made it necessary, and stood up for principle, i.e., for the people.' ' It would be a guinea ill bestowed in hearing fulsome praises of the Administra- tion, and resolutions ambiguously worded in the true Whig style, to secure the assent of those who may be committed by being present in supporting ministers in keeping down, as far as they can, the energies of the people, in causing them to have no confidence in public men.' These are fair samples of Mr. Place's epistolary style, though it is varied by occasional hymns of praise over some attack upon the Whig Government, for which the Whig Government did not care two straws. In one of John Bright's greatest speeches, the speech he delivered at Bradford in 1877, when the statue of Cobden was unveiled, he said, with as much truth as eloquence, that the famous League had made it impossible for any one to be starved to death through a famine made by law. The Leaguers .• their business, and did it. The philosophical Radicals, though they knew very well what they wanted to do, had no notion of how to do it. The principal item in the Charter which has been adopted, 1 mean the ballot,-. irried by Mr. Gladstone, who never had anything to do with them, and at the time of the Monster Petition was a Tory. A great Minister was 174 MEN AND LETTERS converted,' as Mr. Bright said, converted by argument and reason to free trade. More lately Irishmen have shown what power can be wielded in the British Parliament by discipline and perseverance. Home Rule is a dangerous topic, and the controversy is not yet con- cluded. But does anybody believe that if there had been no Irish Land League in 1879, there would have been any Irish Land Act in 1881 ? A letter from Mr. Roebuck to Dr. Black, written in 1848, is a good com- mentary upon the measure of success achieved by himself and his friends : — I have received [he wrote] a printed paper signed by Lovett and others about their plans. If I can do anything to assist, I shall be glad, and really believe the present not merely a good opportunity for stirring, but one which imposes on the true friends of good government the duty of making some attempt to rescue the working classes from the danger to which they are now exposed. The late doings of the Chartists have been seized by the Whigs with delight, as they have afforded them a pretext for expense, and given them a means of retain- ing office. They will now effect a junction with a large section of the Tories, and we shall have a dead-set made at the persons who endeavour to change the representation in this country. Mr. Roebuck here sums up the result, in a practical sense, of philosophical Radicalism. It led to Chartism, and Chartism perished in ridicule. There is of course another side to the question. The influence wrought by men's lives and conduct is not confined to the actions which they perform. The greatest British statesman of the eighteenth century, judged by the power which he has exercised and still exercises upon human thought, was Edmund Burke. Yet Burke never passed a statute, and seldom changed a vote in the House of Commons. The speech on Conciliation with America, perhaps the greatest ever delivered in English, did not even draw a full house. But then Burke, as Southey proudly said of himself, was ' conscious that he laboured for posterity.' So no doubt was Mill. The few years which Mr. Mill THE PHILOSOPHICAL RADICALS I 75 spent in Parliament were not the happiest nor the most useful of his honourable and beneficent life. His treatise on Liberty does not rank with the Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents, which reverses the case of the bad French poet's Ode to Posterity by combining an ephemeral title with an imperishable substance. But Mill On Liberty is worth all the speeches that were made in the first reformed Parliament of Great Britain and Ireland. Mr. Grote has a permanent place in the history of learning and literature which is not affected by his political success or failure. But the party which derived its inspiration from the Radical tailor of Charing Cross aimed at immediate objects, and were far from despising the politics of the day. It is therefore fair to contrast their brilliant abilities with their meagre achievements. The year 1S36 furnishes a typical instance of their pro- cedure. Before Parliament opened Mr. Roebuck wrote and published two pamphlets, which he called respectively Radical Support to a Whig Minister and The Radicals and the Ministers. Their object was to withdraw Radical 3 from the Government of Lord Melbourne. But, as Mr. Roebuck's candid biographer says, ' nothing practical came of the scheme. Radicals like Sir William Molesworth joined with Roebuck in insisting on a more determined and straightforward action on the part of the Ministers as the only way to obtain hearty Radical support. Yet the session ran its course, with the usual accompaniments of bitter words, but no deeds.' The session ran its course, and the philosophical Radicals ran theirs. The chief result in both instances was the lapse of tin,- . Sir William Molesworth, whose ' wealth and rank,' dazzled Mr. Roebuck almost as much as Mr. Place's occupation 1 isted him, pursued his own career. He edited the works of Hobbes, and died a I76 MEN AND LETTERS Secretary of State under Lord Palmerston in his forty- sixth year. But long before that time the philosophical Radicals had been broken up, and Mr. Roebuck was referring contemptuously to ' Molesworth and Co.' Mr. Roebuck's services to Canada are well known, and they were neither the less creditable nor the worse rendered because he was paid for them. ' Sir John ; Hanmer, in 1836,' says Mr. Leader, 'asked the House of Commons to affirm that it was contrary to its inde- pendence, a breach of its privileges, and derogatory to its character, for any of its members to become the paid advocate of any portion of his Majesty's subjects.' It is, perhaps, rather surprising that sixty years ago the House of Commons should have rejected such a motion by a majority of nearly three to one. The Canadian problem was solved by a judicious mixture of firmness and liberality. The philosophical Radicals urged upon the Whig Government the claims of Canada to what would now be called Home Rule. But they were forcing an open door. Lord Durham, who had been the most Radical Member of Lord Grey's Cabinet, receives the praise of Miss Martineau for the achieve- ment. A cool and sagacious Liberal of the last gene- ration used to observe that Lord Durham claimed credit for issuing a report which was written by Charles Buller, and for suppressing a rebellion which was put down by Francis Head. Nobody had much to say for the Colo- ; nial Office, and poor Lord Glenelg was lashed with mer- ciless severity by Lord Brougham. ' These events, my lords, must have given my noble friend many a sleepless day.' Lord Brougham had his laugh, and Lord Glenelg had his nap. But after all the dull unimaginative Whigs did put down a most formidable rising, and did give con- tentment to the French Canadians. They were too apt THE PHILOSOPHICAL RADICALS 1 77 to think that they alone could govern the country. But they could govern it. They were born with official minds, and played with red tape in the nursery. Nothing but the French Revolution could have kept them out of Downing Street for five-and-thirty years. If Lord Mel- bourne had been a real Whig and not a half-converted Tory, or if Sir Robert Peel had not been head and shoulders above all his contemporaries, they might have remained there for an indefinite period. The swing of the pendulum was not invented till 1868, the year of the first election under household suffrage. Then Mr. Glad- stone became a Radical, and Radicalism became a tre- mendous force in English politics. Time has vindicated most of the principles which the Benthamite or Utili- tarian Radicals held. But they have been carried out by different methods and by other hands. Mr. Roebuck, who survived almost all his early associates, lived to sup- port not merely the foreign policy of Lord Palmerston in 1850, but even the foreign policy of Lord Beaconsfield in 1 lie was too flighty and eccentric a person- 1 be a fair specimen of any party or any school. The moral of his career, if there be any, is hardly worth drawing. The moral of philosophical Radi- ( alism appears to be that politics may be either prac- tical or philosophical, but that they cannot be both. Qtham revolutionised English jurisprudence from his study. I I revolutioni i ! English finance in the House of Commons. The Radicals who were patron- 1 and admonished by ' Fathei Place,' produced do equences, and have I- It do mark. They have led by what Mi. < 'hand >« 1 lain would ( all a more judicious 'blend.' Since their day there Im . been two distinguished examples of philosopy in Radi- cal politics. Mr. Mill and Mr. Morley have both com- M I78 MEN AND LETTERS bined the theory with the practice of government. For Mr. Mill, though he never sat in the Cabinet, was during many years engaged in the administration of British India. Mr. Morley's conspicuous success in Ireland is a proof that the failure of the philosophical Radicals was not due to their speculative tastes, but to their political deficiences. April, 1898. THE ART OF LETTER-WRITING Mr. John' Murray's new and authoritative edition of m, prepared with his usual skill and thoroughness by Mr. Rowland Prothero, has reached the first instal- ment of the ' noble poet's ' letters. The merit of Byron's verse is still the subject of keen and vivacious contro- versv. Some critics consider him second only to Shake- peare. Others put him where sensible travellers put themselves, in the third class, because there is no fourth. I have no ambition as I certainly have no power, tanias componcrc liics. About Byron's letters there is no dispute. By universal consent they are among the best, if not the very best, in the English language. Their natural eloquence, their audacious humour, the force and spirit of their substance, the grace and purity of their style, make them the most readable letters in the world. This new volume contains, with one exception, only the letters of Byron's early youth before he had become famous, and when his manner was imperfectly formed. The exception is the admirable sketch of his old college friend, Charles Skinner Matthews, who died before him. uncle of Lord LlandaM. But even bis burned scrawls from Harrow are characteristic, and his dashing epi ;tle . from Cambridge are worth tuns of morbid seli analysis. H< re and there are touches of the re< kless fun in which : fterwards revelled, as when h<- confesses that his [writing hi character. That can hardly i. been so, as it was not absolutely illegible. Bu n- I SO MEN AND LETTERS a bad man writes good letters one need not complain. There are so many good men who write bad letters that we may even be grateful when once in a way the anti- thesis, true or false, is reversed. For my part, I think we have had more than enough both in the shape of unctuous moralising, and in the way of sophistical apology about the private vices of celebrated authors. Drunkenness is not less disgusting because Burns got drunk, and Shelley's lyrics are no excuse for conjugal infidelity. But fortunately we are not made judges one of another. Great men, like small men, are responsible to a tribunal which is not human and cannot err. If Byron boasted of his irregularities, and perhaps exag- gerated them, that has nothing to do with the value of his work. The dullest drivellers have done the same. The really interesting questions which this volume sug- gests are very different, and are not beyond the resources of mundane criticism. What is a good letter ? "Why are Byron's letters so good ? I have sometimes doubted whether any one knows how to write. If Shakespeare could have been brought before a Royal Commission, and asked how he wrote his Plays, could he have given an answer intelligible to the Commissioners? He might have said, 'The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse if imagination amend them.' And the Commis- sioners could only have replied, ' It must be your imagi- nation, and not ours.' That is the highest form of writing, the intellectual process of which even Tennyson declared that he could form no conception. A Mid- summer Night 1 s Dream is infinitely great. A letter, even a nice letter, may be infinitely little, and yet one may be almost as hard to explain as the other. Madame de Sevigne, the object of a worship which does not THE ART OF LETTER-WRITING iSl Always keep on this side idolatry, told her daughter that simplicity was everything. Such simplicity as Madame de Sevigne's is a highly artificial product. Posterity has been mercifully spared the simplicity of Madame de Grignan. No one ever felt after reading one of Byron's letters that he could by any possibility improve it. That is a test, perhaps, but it is hardly an explanation, and certainly not a guide. Byron as a letter-writer may be easily praised by negatives. He does not preach, or argue, or soliloquise, or refine. Egoist as he was, he never forgets his correspondent. His letters are not essays, or lectures, or leading articles, or even fragments of autobiography. They are just what they profess to be, and nothing more. From the vice of discretion, which spoils so many letters, they are conspicuously free. These, however, are not positive merits. It is so easy to say what things are not, and so difficult to say what they are. Like a well-known politician when he opposed the Liquor Bill, Byron was full of his subject. He dashed into the heart of his theme, and came at once to the point. He had a perfect command of the English language, which an Englishman may be ex- cused for regarding as the noblest instrument of human thought. His ideas were not often profound, but they were invariably clear and precise. He knew exactly what he meant to say before he began to say it, and as to how he would say it he was embarrassed only by the richness of his resources. But that is not all. Genius can do most things, but not everything, and unaided genius could not have produced Byron's letters. He was an omnivorous reader. As a literary critic he stands below men whose intellectual capacity was vastly inferior to his own. While he greatly admired the verges of the late Mr. Gillord, he euuld bee no merit in 1 82 MEN AND LETTERS Wordsworth and very little in Keats. He put Crabbe above Coleridge, and Pope above Milton. All the same, his mind was full of those 'jewels five words long which on the stretched forefinger of all time sparkle for ever.' He must have known an appreciable proportion of Shakespeare by heart. Of Shakespeare he sometimes wrote disrespectfully, though I doubt whether he meant what he said. His letters are full of Shakespearean quotations, always most happily applied, and it would be an instructive exercise, as well as a delightful amuse- ment, for a young man who could tear himself from Ibsen and Zola to disentangle them. He cannot describe a crush at the opera in Venice without remarking that in shouldering his way through it he almost beat a Venetian and traduced the State. He seems at times to have thought in Shakespeare, to have been unable, as Macaulay said of himself, to get away from him. It is rather the fashion to decry mere reading, and to insist that a uniform system of superficial education is worse than useless. There is truth in the weighty lines : He who reads Incessantly, and to his reading brings not A spirit and judgment equal or superior, Uncertain and unsettled still remains, Deep-versed in books and shallow in himself. The Letters of the Illiterate may be a discovery of the future. I do not myself believe in them. On the contrary, I feel sure that all the best letter-writers in the English tongue show, without the need of formal assurance, what books they have read most and know best. Byron was in no danger of becoming the mere bookworm described by Milton. His spirit and judg- ment, if not equal or superior to Shakespeare's, were quite equal to the task of preserving him against the THE ART OF LETTER-WRITING 183 loss of originality. If his originality lay rather in ex- pression than in ideas, the object of a letter is, after all, not to enlarge the bounds of human thought. It is to amuse, to please, to excite sympathy and interest, to keep up friendship and annihilate distance. The charm of a perfect letter for the receiver is the sense of private property in what would be famous if it were known. Carlyle might have praised his wife without indulging in sneers at 'scribbling Sands and Eliots.' But the publication of her letters has proved that he did not exaggerate their merits, and it was natural that when he got one he should feel her immense superiority to many popular authors. Byron enjoyed his full share of popularity, and, as some think, more than he deserved. He is, perhaps, the favourite poet of unpoetical people. If Moore and Murray realised, as no doubt they did, the transcendent excellence of his letters, they may well have been proud. Byron loved to accuse Moore, a model husband and father, of corrupting his morals. It was all, he said, those amatory poems of Thomas Little, as Moore called himself, which led him astray. He made this joke so often, that with anybody else it would be tedious. But Byron is never tedious, at least in prose. Another of his favourite butts was his mother-in-law, who ' has been dangerously ill, but is now dangerously well again.' Jests about mothers-in- law are as old as Greek literature, and are perhaps the most intolerable of all jokes. Byron could extract wit I from the degrees of affinity, and indeed from every- thing. I Mi hearing from Murray that one Johnson had an edition of his poems with the approval of the author, he observed, 'Few things surprise me, or this probably would; most things amuse me, or this probably would not.' One can almost see this sentence 184 MEN AND LETTERS shaping itself as he wrote. Yet how good it is, and how witty — a perfect example of ' what oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed.' Tous les styles sont bons, hor- mis l'ennuyeux. If that be true more particularly of one thing than another, it is especially true of a letter. There are many excellent letter- writers who do not in the least resemble Byron, and Byron's qualities are therefore not an adequate ground on which to form a theory. It can be said of them, however, that they are consummate specimens of the art. They have rivals. They have no superiors. No one, so far as I am aware, has ever attempted to imitate them, and perhaps that is as well. The calm and rational spirit of the eighteenth cen- tury, against which Byronism was a sort of reaction, fostered the most leisurely of the arts. That attractive epoch when people could be religious without fuss, and virtuous without strain, is distinguished by few things more than by the inimitable letters of Pope, Gray, and Cowper. Lady Mary Wortley, though not equal to those three, attained to a very high order of excellence, far higher in my opinion than either Lord Chesterfield or Horace Walpole. While it would be paradoxical to cite Cowper, with his terrible fits of religious mania, as a type of mental balance and repose, it is nevertheless true that so long as he was sane at all, nobody was saner than he. For a very different, but a charming specimen of easy and agreeable talk on paper, the polished and yet spontaneous thoughts of a wit, a scholar, and a man of the world, often hurried and yet never slovenly, what can be more delightful than Wilkes's letters to his daughter ? ' Jack,' said Dr. Johnson, ' is a scholar, and Jack is a gentleman.' The fact that he was writing to his daughter imposed upon him, as Sir George Trevelyan has remarked, just that amount of restraint which the THE ART OF LETTER-WRITING 1 85 natural coarseness of his mind required. One can hardly think of the eighteenth century without the ' savage and unholy genius of Swift.' Mr. Morley's fine and memo- rable phrase, which I have ventured to quote, is not too harsh. For even in the Journal to Stella, a series of 1' iters, as everybody knows, to Hester Johnson and Mrs. Dingley, there is the constant impression of a great, gloomy, cynical mind, through which sentiment, affec- tion, even friendship, ring hollow and insincere. Of Swift as a statesmen and a pamphleteer it is hardly pos- sible to speak too highly. But what had Stella and Vanessa, what had the more human instincts and the softer emotions to do with that mighty instrument of destruction and self-torture, that misanthropic humour which never smiles, and laughs only with the wrong side of the mouth ? As a narrative the Journal to Stella is beyond praise. It is a classic which criticism can no longer touch. But considering it simply as a specimen of letter-writing it seems to me to have two faults. The 'baliy language* is terribly out of character, and there 100 much of it. That is one thing. A more serious objection is that Swift would try to make love though he did not know what love meant. The man who best understood him, who felt for him the sympathy of genius, whose own moral character was so beautiful that it almost dwarfs his intellectual eminence, has told the truth about Swift better than it had been told before, or can be told again. I have never been able to under- rid why Sir Walter Scott's Life of S-.'ift does not rank with the great biographies of the world. Letters not be understood without the character which they . and Swift's character was thoroughly appreciated by that wholesome, tolerant, manly soul. Cowper's Letters, the ^lory of the English Ian- 1 86 MEN AND LETTERS guage, are, as models, above even Byron's. I do not say that they have been, or could be, copied. In their apparent simplicity there is exquisite art, and their style is almost perfect. They are the joint product of the age and the man. Some men, of whom Swift was one, have an individuality too strong to be affected by their sur- roundings. Others, like Lord Chesterfield in his Corre- spondence (not in his statesmanship), are mere echoes of their time. Cowper belongs to neither class. He had of course no sympathy with the mocking scepti- cism which disfigured the eighteenth century, and which becomes almost wearisome even in that prince of letter- writers, Voltaire. Yet he was emphatically the man of the period, when, as has been acutely said, the world for the first time since the days of Pliny had leisure to con- template virtue. His humour was quite as genuine as his piety. His judgment in the affairs of the world was keen and sure. Even in religion, which, by a strange irony of fate, wrecked the peace and destroyed the mind of as true a saint as ever lived, he would probably have kept his balance if it had not been for the evil influence of John Newton. Cowper was an hereditary Whig, who took the strongest interest in politics, and whose political opinion is always worth having. When Prussia and Austria declared war against France to put down the Revolution, thereby causing the September massacres, the death of the King, and the reign of terror, Cowper protested in an admirable letter against an unjustifiable interference with the rights of the French people. Fox could not have analysed the situation with more force and sense. Pitt would have agreed with every word, and would have continued to act upon Cowper's prin- ciples if he had cared for anything more than power. But of course the interest of Cowper's letters is not THE ART OF LETTER-WRITING 1S7 mainly political. He was, when not under the cloud of a melancholy falsely called religious and really phy- sical, the most genial and social of men. Women delighted in his conversation and correspondence, as he delighted in theirs. He could even, if the phrase may be used of a man, flirt, and his humour has perhaps been underrated because it had no sting. When Samuel Rogers was asked why he said such ill-natured things, he replied, ' I have a very low voice ; and if I did not say ill-natured things, no one would hear what I said.' Cowper was never ill-natured, but the humour which produced John Gilpin overflows his letters, and is one secret of their charm. He was full of affection, and he wrote to those he loved. He thought of them more than of himself, and that is a greater quality than style. Who cares for a letter written in haste to fulfil an obligation or occupy a spare half-hour ? It is no compliment, and it gives no pleasure. A telegram or a postcard would be equally flattering and equally interesting. The eighteenth century was not troubled with those particular abomina- tions. But it abounded in conceited coxcombs who wrote to show their cleverness and to amuse themselves. What did Walpole care for Sir Horace Mann? As much, or as little, as Lord Chesterfield cared for his son. Cowper's affection for Lady I lesketh and Mrs. Unwin is one of the prettiest episodes in literature. Heine said, with mordant wit and singular brutality, that every woman wrote with one eye on the public, and the other on some man, except the Princess Halm- 1 lahn.who had only on«- eye. He did not say where that was. Cowper r had one eye on the public when he was writing to In , friend . It would be going too far to assert that no ; letters have evei been written fur publication. 1 88 MEN AND LETTERS But the excellence of public letters, such as Sydney Smith's to ' Peter Plymley ' and Archdeacon Singleton, is of a different kind. They are letters only in name. They are essays or state papers in reality. Sydney Smith's own familiar correspondence is quite another thing, and a very good thing too. The father of letter- writing was Cicero, and he had two styles. There is the formal style of the Epistle to his brother Quintus, which is what we ordinarily mean by Ciceronian. There is the familiar style of the Letters to Atticus and to various other friends, from which all formality has disappeared. These are, I suppose, by common consent, the best letters in the world. Whether grave or gay, whether lively or severe, they reflect the changing moods of a versatile, ingenious, sensitive, subtle, powerful, and cultivated mind. Except comparison with the letters of Cowper there are few tests to which one could not fearlessly submit the letters of Gray. Dr. Johnson seldom said a stupid thing. But if it be true that he called Gray a ' barren rascal,' he did as much to injure his own critical reputation as could be done by a single phrase. ' Why should I be always writing ? ' asked the doctor himself in a more compact and rational frame of mind. Gray was not always writing. It is enough for his fame that he never wrote without writing well, and that cannot be said of the really great man who scolded him. The author of that immortal Elegy whose classic perfection no ignoble use can soil, and which all who love literature love, has suffered, like • Single-speech Hamilton,' from the splendour of one performance. Hamilton made other speeches, but the world ignores them. Few remember that Gray was a satirist of almost the highest order, and Mr. Gosse's edition of the Letters revealed him in a new THE ART OF LETTER-WRITING 1 89 character, if not to men of reading, at least to men of the world. They want the ease, the sparkle, the refined colloquial grace of Cowper's. They reflect the mind ot a scholar and a recluse. Cowper's classical attainments were considerable, though the public do well to forget that he tried his hand upon Homer. But Gray's scholar- ship was far more accurate and his learning far more solid. He might have been a Professor of Greek or Latin, and Porson himself had not a more passionate love of the classics, or a keener appreciation of their beauties. He wrote at his best when he was writing to scholars like Mason and Warton, who shared his enthu- siasm and sympathised with his tastes. ' The Sicilian expedition, is it or is it not the finest thing you ever read in your life ? ' So he asks after reading again the Seventh Book of Thucydides, and indeed it is not an easy question for any one to answer. Yet Gray could discuss public matters with sense and spirit, as, for in- stance, the Great Commoner's peerage. ' What shall I say to you about the Minister ? ' he writes to Dr. Warton on the 26th of August, 1766. ' 1 am as angry as a com- mon council man of London about my Lord Chatham : but a little more patient, and will hold my tongue to the ' of the year. In tin; mean time, I do mutter in secret and to you, that to quit the House of Commons, his natural strength, to sap his own popularity ami grandeur (which no one but himself could have don< ) by assuming a foolish title, and to hope that he could win by it and attach to him a Court that hate him, and will dismi him 1 soon as ever they dare, was the weakest thing that ei done by so great a man.' ten* > • an- an < ellent illustration of what r-writir I be. They are i li 1 mal, 1 are- . artistic in arrangement '1 do I9O MEN AND LETTERS mutter in secret and to you.' Horace Walpole did not mutter in secret to Sir Horace Mann. He wrote for his friend as he wrote for the public, twisting and torturing the English language with the help of foreign idiom to express the pompous triviality which he mistook for worldly wisdom. Gray was not addressing the nation, he was addressing Dr. Warton. Yet he gave him of his best, he paid him the true compliment of writing to him what was not meant for publication, and yet was quite good enough to be published. When Cicero told Atticus at the end of a letter that he would not have written so freely if he had not been convinced that Atticus alone would read what he wrote, he was quite sincere. It was only at the end of his life, when he knew that Tiro had been making a collection of his letters, that he thought of their being published after his death, and then it was happily too late for him to change his style. The suspicion that a private letter is not really private deprives it of more than half its interest. One immediately (such is human nature even among Chris- tians) begins to imagine that this is how the author would like us to believe that he wrote to his friends, which is just what the most inquisitive reader does not want to know. Eminent men must, I suppose, often reflect upon the possibility that after they have gone their private correspondence, or part of it, may go to the printers. Even love-letters are not sacred, at least in France. Prosper Merimee can hardly have contemplated the pub- lication of his Lettres a une Inconnue. Yet the world is much indebted to Mademoiselle Dacquin, and Merimee's reputation is none the worse. After Mirabeau's letters to Sophie de Monnier, Merimee's have the coldness and the chastity of a cloister. Merimee was such a con- THE ART OF LETTER-WRITING IQI summate master of epistolary French that he may per- haps have wondered whether some of his correspondents, such as Panizzi, would publish them or not. But that is quite a different think from designing the publicity of a particular letter. Pope was the most artificial of men. His tricks and dodges were so numerous and so unpleasant that the most learned of his biographers, Mr. Whit well Elwin, gave up in disgust the task of ferreting them out. Yet Pope could write naturally enough to Teresa and Martha Blount, mysterious as his relations with them were. At the end of one of the earliest letters, however, there is this significant pas- sage : • When this letter is printed for the wit of it, pray take care that what is underlined be printed in a different character. 1 The injunction has been obeyed, though the passage is quite unworthy of italics. In the same letter, which is addressed to the elder sister, Teresa, he writes : You are to understand, Madame, that my violent passion for you yourself and your sister has been divided with the most wonderful regularity in the world. Even from my infancy I have been in love with one after the other of you, week by week, and my journey to Bath fell out in the three hundred and seventy-sixth week of my sovereign lady Martha. At the present writing hereof it is the three hundred and eighty-ninth week of the reign of your most serene Majesty, in whose service I was listed some weeks before I beheld her. This information will account for my writing to either of you hereafter, as she shall happen to be Queen Regent at that time. This is a pretty specimen of a style in which Pope, almost alone among Englishmen, excelled. His letters to the Miss Blounts are, I think, the most interesting 1 tuse the most characteristic part of his correspon- dence. When he wrote to Swift or Arbuthnot he wrote . indeed, but well in a fashion neither difficult nor I, Win 11 Ik; wrote to these ladies, with whom 1 intimacy never ceased, he adopted a tone which is perhaps the most trying of all tones to keep up for a 192 MEN AND LETTERS long time. His choice between the sisters was soon made. It was Martha to whom he gave his heart, or such substitute for a heart as Nature had given him. But his correspondence with both of them was what some people call romantic, and others gallant. Sir Walter Scott compares it with the Journal to Stella, which, he says, contains no such element. I am not concerned with the decency of Pope's mind or the morality of his life. I am dealing with him simply as a letter-writer, and these letters seem to me exquisite specimens of love-making on paper. With Lady Mary Wortley, Pope was always affected and insincere when he was not coarse and insolent. With the Blounts he is tender, sympathetic, playful, and affectionate. Nothing can be less tolerable than this sort of letter unless it be composed with extreme skill and tact. No kind of letter is, as a rule, less suitable for publication. There are perils on every side — perils of absurdity, perils of exaggeration, perils of false sentiment, perils of bad taste. It is Pope's glory that he has surmounted them all. The ' portentous cub,' as Bentley called him, was so amazingly clever that he could act the part of a chival- rous gentleman. If anyone were to call Pope the cleverest man who ever lived, it would be easier to contradict than to disprove the assertion. He wrote the Essay on Man without knowing philosophy ; he trans- lated Homer without knowing Greek. But it was per- haps as a letter-writer that his cleverness was most conspicuous. Self-absorbed egoist as he actually was, he wrote as if his correspondent were the only person for whom he cared. You have asked me news [he writes to Martha] a thousand times at the first word you spoke to me ; which some would interpret as if you expected nothing better from my lips : and truly it is not a sign, THE ART OF LETTER-WRITING 1 93 two lovers arc together when they can be so impertinent as to inquire what the world does. All I mean by this is that either you or I cannot be in love with the other : I leave you to guess which of the two is that stupid and insensible creature, so blind to the other's excellences and charms. Many people may say that this kind of letter is not worth writing. But few will deny that Pope could write it admirably well. The mere story of the Rape of the Lock was certainly not worth telling. It is the way of telling it that makes the poem. Nine hundred and ninety-mne love-letters out of a thousand are the most insipid of human compositions, fit only to be read amid • roars of laughter ' in a court of justice, facetiously so called. The thousandth, or perhaps the hundred thousandth, is from some one who can write like Pope or Merimee. Which is the more important, what people do or how they do it ? The question is older than Pope, and has not been answered yet. Victor Hugo says, in one of his letters, that there is no such thing as good English prose. Men of genius are colossal even in their blunders. The illustrious Frenchman, however, had an obvious excuse. When Cardinal Newman pronounced the shield of the spirit to be the one safeguard against German criticism, Dr. Martineau observed that another was ignorance of the German language. If Victor Hugo had known English, his statement would have been more interesting, though it would not have been less ridiculous. There is a curious superstition, not confined to Frenchmen, about the unique excellence of French prose. To depreciate it would indeed show deplorable barbarity. But it is a poor sort of criticism which can only praise one tiling at the expense of another. For the countrymen of Hooker and Bacon, of Shakespeare and Milton, of Dryden and Swift, of Sterne and Hume, of Burke and Goldsmith, o 194 MEN AND LETTERS of Charles Lamb and Sydney Smith, of Newman and Ruskin, to admit their own inferiority, ' has all the in- vidiousness of self-praise and all the reproach of false- hood.' There is no branch of English literature in which the ease and grace of our mother tongue are more con- spicuous than they are in the familiar correspondence given by chance or piety to the world. Two women of strong character and great mental capacity, separated by more than a century of time, as well as by infinite diversity of circumstances, temper, and pursuits, have shown that here, at all events, there is no disqualification of sex. I mean Lady Mary Wortley and Mrs. Carlyle. Lady Mary Pierrepont, afterwards Lady Mary Wortley, and finally (but life is short), Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, had the classical education received as a matter of course by Queen Elizabeth and Lady Jane Grey, and now revived at Girton and Newnham. She was indeed a far better scholar than most educated men of her own and the next generation. She had a thorough knowledge of Latin and Greek. They were content with a knowledge of Latin and a hazy inspection of the Greek alphabet. But it was not her education alone that was masculine. She said herself that there were only two sorts of people, men and women. She was an illustration in her own person of the truth that there is a masculine element in almost every woman, as there is a feminine element in almost every man. She abounded in the manly virtues, and she was not intolerant of manly vices. Some of her letters from Turkey, to which she accompanied her husband when he became ambas- sador at Constantinople, would furnish a very misleading clue to the sex of the writer. She loved travel and adventure as much as she loved reading and writing. She had the keenest appreciation of beauty in her own THE ART OF LETTER-WRITING 1 95 sex, and was never jealous of a pretty woman. As a letter-writer she has almost every merit except perhaps humour. Her descriptions of scenery, of persons, of customs, but above all of men and women, are what would now be called realistic, except that the literary form is never wanting. She drew with a free hand and painted with a large brush. There are in her work no fine shades, no nice distinctions, but broad effects cleverly conceived and vigorously rendered. It is difficult to quote from letters so flowing and so complete that taking out a sentence is like taking out a brick. But there is a passage in her letter to Pope from Adrianople, dated the 1st of April, 1717, that exhibits all the qualities of her style. The delicate flattery which leads her to suggest that she was dependent upon Pope for her knowledge of Homer is not of course serious. She was a far better scholar than he. I read over your Homer here [she writes] with an infinite pleasure, and find several little passages explained that I did not before entirely comprehend the beauty of; many of the customs and much of the dress then in fashion being yet retained, and I don't wonder to find more remains here of an age so distant than is to be found in any other country, the Turks not taking that pains to introduce their own manners as has been generally practised by other nations that imagine them- selves more polite. It would be too tedious to you to point out all the ages that relate to the present customs. J Jut I can assure you that the princesses and great ladies pass their time at their looms, embroider- ing veils and robes, surrounded by their maids, which are always very numerous, in the same manner as we find Andromache and Helen described. The description of the belt of Menelaus exactly resembles those that are now worn by the great men, fastened before with broad lea clasps and embroidered round with rich work. The snowy \t il Helen throws over her face is still fashionable, and I never see (as I 1 \<-ry often) half a dozen of old pashas with their reverend beards, basking in the sun, but I recollect good King Priam and his counsellors. '1 heir manner of dancing is certainly the same that Diana is said to meed on the bink^ of the Eurotas. The great lady still leads the dance, and is followed by a troop of young girls who imitate her , and if she . e Up the chorus. ili! evet tranblator a more deliciously appreciative correspondent ? o — 2 I96 MEN AND LETTERS Lady Mary's letters have long been celebrated, and her quarrel with Pope has not diminished her fame. That imp of genius had the knack of conferring immor- tality alike upon his enemies and his friends. When Boswell took upon himself to criticise the Dunciad, he was authoritatively told that he had missed his chance by not being alive when it was written. Mrs. Carlyle quarrelled only with her husband, which is dull, domestic, and seldom worth while. It may be accident, it may be Mr. Carlyle's literary eminence, it may be the extravagances of his posthumous worship and pitiful remorse, but I cannot help thinking that Mrs. Carlyle has never received the public gratitude which her letters deserve. They seem to me some of the best we have, and that on account of qualities by no means common. Her powers of observation were singularly searching, and her insight almost supernaturally keen. No weak- ness escaped her, no pretence imposed upon her, no form of human folly was too evanescent for the quickness of her eyes. Her humour was almost as rich, racy, and varied as his. They were too much alike for their own happiness. The forbidden degrees of similarity would make a new table more useful than the old. Mrs. Carlyle's letters do not give one an altogether cheerful view of life, or leave a wholly pleasant taste in the mouth. They make one want to read the thirteenth chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, and, indeed, one might at any time do worse. Mrs. Carlyle had not the charity which thinketh no evil, which suffereth long and is kind. Her humour was almost as sombre as Swift's, who, as Macaulay said, gives utterance to the most ludicrous fancies with the air of a man reading the Commination Service. But though she sometimes wrote a disagree- able letter, she never wrote a dull one. She was one of THE ART OF LETTER-WRITING 1 97 those women who cannot be stupid if they try. A dis- tinguished lawyer and scholar, the delight and ornament of every company that he honoured with his presence, described her as c an excellent woman, with almost too great a passion for insecticide.' Even that painful theme, however, became in her hands a source of amusement and a topic of interest. For those who prefer, the natural pathos of a humourist to the forced humour of a melancholy escaping from itself, there are few letters so beautiful and impressive as that in which Mrs. Carlyle, in 1S49, after her father's death, narrates her solitary visit to Haddington. At Haddington she was born, and in the ruined abbey near the waters of the Tyne she is buried. It was difficult for me to realise that the people inside were only asleep, and not dead — dead since many years. Ah ! one breathed freer in the churchyard, with the bright morning sunshine streaming down on it, than near that (so-called) habitation of the living ! I went straight from one to the other. The gate was still locked, for I was an hour before my time ; so I made a dash at the wall, some seven feet high I should think, and dropt safe on the inside — a feat I should never have imagined to try in my actual phase, not even with a mad bull at my heels, if I had not trained myself to it at a more elastic age. Godefroi Cavaignac's ' Quoi done, je ne suis pas mort ! ' crossed my mind ; but I had none of that feeling. Moi was morte enough, I knew, whatever face one might put on it ; only, what one has well learnt one never forgets. Never were letters less prepared for publication than Mrs. Carlyle's. Their spontaneity is part of their charm. They are full of references to phrases and stories of which she and her husband were fond. No one understood the art of allusion more thoroughly, and it is a great art. Charles Dickens was perhaps the most consummate master of it in fiction, and Abraham Lin- coln in real life. There is no tendency which requires stricter control. A forced reference, the violent intrusion of a totally irrelevant anecdote which the writer is burn- ing to tell, would spoil the best of letters or the best of I98 MEN AND LETTERS talk. The old grouse in the gunroom was a nuisance before Goldsmith's time, and is a nuisance still. On the other hand, the story or incident which, differing in all its external circumstances from the topic of the mo- ment, touches as with a needle the real point, is the sauce of conversation and of letter-writing. It should never be explained, because it should never require explanation. In that storehouse of wit and wisdom, Selden's Table Talk, it is told how a rider asked a countryman whether he could get to Oxford that even- ing. The countryman replied, ' Yes, if you don't ride too fast.' Selden drew no moral. He left his hearers to point that for themselves. There are few injunc- tions which deserve so well to be obeyed as the French N'appuyez pas. If Mrs. Carlyle has not received her due as a graphic and powerful letter-writer, she has suffered in good company. The two greatest historians who have written in English were both admirable corre- spondents. Until Lord Sheffield permitted last year the publication of Gibbon's remains in full, the world had an imperfect opportunity of appreciating the high and rare qualities of his familiar style. His Autobio- graphy, with all its singular beauty and charm, par- takes of the pomp and grandeur which, like the band at a soldier's funeral, accompany the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. His letters are simple, natural, and amusing. The humour which seldom suffers the stately periods of the History to overstep the narrow line between the sublime and the ridiculous sheds a sympathetic ray over his delightful correspondence with his stepmother and with Lady Sheffield. Like his talk, which attracted men and women quite in- capable of appreciating his vast erudition, his letters THE ART OF LETTER-WRITING 1 99 are perfect specimens of a great mind at ease. They are never careless, they are always the best he can do. He had too much courtesy and too much self-respect to become slovenly when he had not to think of pos- terity or the printer. All the resources of his imperial intellect were for the time at the disposal of his cor- respondent, man or women, relative or friend. There is no appearance of effort, and yet the dust of his writings is gold. Gibbon's letters are too fresh in the recollection of every one who reads anything to justify a critical panegyric. Macaulay's may perhaps be less remembered, if not less known. It is twenty- two years since Sir George Trevelyan published his classical biography, and proved that his uncle was something besides an orator, a scholar, a statesman, and an historian. This is certainly not the place for a formal vindication of the greatest of the Whigs. It is the fashion to say that Macaulay's History is a misplaced eulogy of a second-rate Dutchman, that his Essays are only fit for schoolboys, that his verse is mere rhetoric, and that he wrote a style in which the truth could not be told. He appealed to Caesar. When he was composing his unfinished narrative, he had the year 2000 in view. He abides the judgment which cannot be reversed. Those who learned from him in their youth the ineradicable lesson that history is politics and that politics are history, share his con- fidence in the result. It seems to be certain that* the idea of his letters, or any of them, being published never crossed Macaulay's mind. They are therefore the spontaneous Utterance of a man who when he was v.nting for the public gave his whole energy to the composition of every sentence. They show that he thou-ht in good English, but an English quite diilcient 200 MEN AND LETTERS from the formal language of his essays and speeches. It is a platitude that Macaulay was the most sensitive of literary artists. He was as incapable of undue familiarity with the public or the House of Commons as of writing an essay to his sister, or of making a speech in his own dining-room. He did not show off to his correspondents, he told them what he thought they wanted to know. A good essay would always make a bad letter, even if time meant as little to busy men and women in a strenuous age as it meant to Harriet Byron and Clarissa Harlowe. Macaulay's letters are less subtle and more obvious than Gibbon's. But they are fresher and simpler. Most of them abound in high spirits and good temper. Not one of them contains a sentence which is either slipshod or obscure. Mr. Jowett, as may be read in his Life, was a great lover of Boswell, and especially fond of the inimitable passage in which the prince of biographers describes Dr. Johnson's meeting with Wilkes at Mr. Dilly's. He challenged those who thought meanly of Boswell's intel- lectual powers to attempt a similar description of any entertainment, and then to compare the two. For the immortal narrative in question the company as well as the narrator were required. But the descriptive faculty is a large part of a letter-writer's mental furniture, and it was in this line that Macaulay excelled. He was neither fanciful nor given to speculation, and though not without a robust sense of fun which felt the stimulus of anything odd or absurd, the quaint and incongruous elements of life did not strike him as they strike the born humourist. What he could do was to describe the results of his keen observation with unrivalled tenseness and accuracy. A single example will suffice : THE ART OF LETTER-WRITING 201 Since I wrote to you [he tells his sister Hannah on the 4th of July, 1S31,] I have been out to dine and sleep at Holland House. We had a very agreeable and splendid party ; among others the Duke and Duchess of Richmond and the Marchioness of Clanricarde, who, you know, is the daughter of Canning. She is very beautiful, and very like her father, with eyes full of lire, and great expression in all her features. She and I had a great deal of talk. She showed much cleverness and information, but, I thought, a little more political animosity than is quite becoming in a pretty woman. However, she has been placed in peculiar circumstances. The daughter of a states- man who was a martyr to the rage of faction may be pardoned for speaking sharply of the enemies of her parent, and she did speak sharply. With knitted brow and flashing eyes, and a look of feminine vengeance about her beautiful mouth, she gave me such a character of Peel as he would certainly have had no pleasure in hearing. Not one of these plain sentences looks, or perhaps is, beyond the capacity of any educated person, and yet observe how completely the writer achieves his purpose. He wanted to give a girl in the country an account of a dinner party at Holland House, and of his own share in it. That may appear simple enough. But, as Mr. Jowett said in the case of Boswell, How many people can do it ? There is none of the egoism so often im- puted to Macaulay. Egoists may write very good letters, as, for instance, Byron and Pope. But this kind of letter, the kind of letter in which Macaulay excelled, would be spoilt by it. Hannah Macaulay knew all about her brother, and the way he talked. She knew nothing about Lady Clanricarde. In the letter, therefore, Lady Clanricarde is everything, and he is nothing. There is a time for self-suppression, and a time, though not so often as most of us suppose, for self-assertion. What is implied need not be asserted, and in description there is implied the personality of the describer. He is, so to speak, the point of view. The reader sees with his eyes, hears with his ears, and thinks with his mind. II Macaukiy's letters are not in the highest class of all, it is because they are almost exclusively descriptive. 202 MEN AND LETTERS They have great interest and value. As fragments of contemporary history written in ignorance of the event they can hardly be overrated. But — if there must always be a ' but ' — they are too much of one kind, and too much of a piece. We miss the irregularity of Sydney Smith, to whom ludicrous fancies occur as he writes, and who follows them without scruple when they come. Macaulay's individuality was too strongly marked, and so was Sydney Smith's for that matter, to let him take the colour of his correspondent's mind. If the aim of a letter be to give pleasure, the best letters are joint compositions. The charm of reading a letter which you feel that you have half written yourself is as real as it is indescribable. A one-sided correspondence is a con- tradiction in terms, and yet it is all that we usually get. Writing, like talking, ought to be mutual. No man, and certainly no woman, could go on in actual life writing a series of letters which were never answered. As a jest lies in the ear of him that hears, and not only in the mouth of him that utters it, so a letter must depend upon the person to whom it is addressed. I can imagine no more conclusive proof of excellence in letters than that they disclose the character of the recipient as well as of the author. For fear I should seem to be reck- lessly paradoxical, I will give an instance of what I mean. Fanny Burney's affectionate epistles to Mr. Crisp, • Daddy Crisp,' as she called him, have that quality. They give one a Very good idea of what that strange, acute, benevolent victim of wounded vanity was like. They tell us more about him than about the author of Evelina. Apart from letters of circumstance or occasion, which are seldom interesting or charac- teristic, it takes two to write a letter, as it takes two to make a quarrel. THE ART OF LETTER-WRITING 203 There ought surely to be a collection of the few famous letters which are works of art in themselves, or to which historical circumstances give a peculiar interest of their own. They are a class apart. Dr. Johnson's letter to Lord Chesterfield is perhaps the best known example. The Doctor did not shine as an ordinary correspondent, but he was a master of satirical invective, and rage improved his style. The letter in which Lord Melbourne explained why he did not re-appoint Lord Brougham in 1835 ' s an absolutely perfect specimen of courtesy, dignity, and truth. He had to say that his reasons were first Brougham's character, secondly his conduct, and he said it without offence. Mr. Gladstone's letter on the character of Lord Aberdeen, printed in Lord Stanmore's Life of his father, is a singularly noble and impressive tribute to a high-minded and unselfish states- man, not wholly unlike the great closing passage of the Agricola. English literature is enriched by these mem- orable documents, which are letters, though letters of a special type. They are complete in themselves, re- quiring neither introduction nor sequel. Matthew Arnold, in one of those curious outbursts of exaggerated emphasis from which an English Academy of Letters might perhaps have saved him, pronounced Shelley's letters superior to his lyrics. The errors of genius are often more valuable than the stolid accuracy of unimaginative critics. The Skylark and the Stanzas written in Dejection are in no danger. They are not, as Shelley himself said of Adouais, destined to everlasti oblivion. The letters, on the other hand, cannot be praised too highly except by adopting Mr. Arnold's hasty paradox. If he meant, as he probably did mean, that they were underrated, he was perfectly right. Could Victor Hugo have read them, they would have been quite 204 MEN AND LETTERS enough to show him the absurdity of his sneer at English prose. The work of a man who was nothing if not a poet, whose thoughts naturally shaped themselves in a poetical form, they have the just measure and the true value of a language in which everything can be expressed. If Shelley had not written them, or if they had not been preserved, we should never have known the full powers of that original and fertile mind. Rich cadence and subtle harmony might have been assumed in Shelley. But there is more in the letters. There is consummate mastery of the English tongue, there is perfect dis- crimination between the scansion of poetry and the rhythm of prose, there are eloquence, and wisdom, and insight, and humour. Nobody understood more tho- roughly than Shelley the complex character of Byron, and from his letters a far more vivid idea of the man may be derived than from all the obsequious homage of Moore. Rome has been described out of all recognition by a thousand pens. • The grave, the temple, and the wilderness ' is nowhere so truly and at the same time so imaginatively portrayed as in Shelley's incomparable letters written from the spot. Shelley and Keats are for ever associated in the noblest personal elegy since Lycidas. But that was not Shelley's only service to his brother genius. His letters about Keats are the best criticism upon the poet of whom Tennyson used to say that if he had lived he would have been the greatest of them all. Among the many interesting anecdotes and extracts contained in the diary of Sir Mountstuart Grant-Duff there is none, I think, more valuable than the remarks written by Bulwer Lytton in the fly-leaf of Herman Merivale's Historical Studies. The best criticism, says Bulwer, is enlightened enthusiasm. Few epigrams are so absolutely true, and no phrase could be more THE ART OF LETTER-WRITING 205 completely applicable to Shelley's criticism of Keats. Shelley protests that it is useless to come to him for facts, and things of this world. You might as well, he says, g° to a gin-shop for a leg of mutton. But his lawyers, oddly enough, found him a good man of business, and however eccentric his behavour might sometimes be, even where women were not concerned, he had a sound appreciation of human nature. What are letters without the personal element ? They are like history without events, poetry without invention, Blue Books without dates, or novels without love. Shelley travelled about the world in as odd company as Candide and Dr. Pangloss, real flesh and blood as they were. If he had not Voltaire's wit, he had qualities, such as sympathy and imagination, in which the great Frenchman was deficient. Shelley's letters are not his only prose. His exquisite translation, which he called The Banquet of Plato, is even now the best English rendering of that inimitable and imperishable master- piece. But one must go to his letters to feel and under- stand how he entered into the meaning and thought of Plato and Sophocles. He did not speak the literal truth when he said that having been in love with Antigone in a previous state of existence preserved him from merely human passion. But what is literal truth compared with the realisation of a poetic ideal ? Charles Lamb who professed that he could not understand Shelley, and thought his poetry ' thin sown with profit or delight,' reed with him in dislike of the literal. To understand Lamb literally was to misunderstand him, and accord- ly, after the fashion of this world, he was frequently imsiini; 1. It was his himd Barton, if I remember, and not himself, who, having ordered a ' Prometheus Unbound,' received an iEschylus without a binding. 206 MEN AND LETTERS Lucky for him, said Lamb, that he did not order Elf rida in sheets. The preposterous delusion that the inhabi- tants of Scotland have no sense of humour originated, I believe, in Lamb's story of the four Scotsmen who, when he expressed a wish for the presence of Burns's sons at some festival in honour of the poet, simultaneously assured him that it was impossible, because they were dead. A true wish is always for the impossible, but even Englishmen ignore this principle. If the nineteenth century had no other title to remembrance, it would deserve distinction for having produced the letters of Charles Lamb and Edward Fitz-Gerald. Lamb, though born in 1775, owed less to the century of his birth than to the century in which he died. The literature of the eighteenth century interested him less than either the Elizabethan Plays or the Lake Poets. But, indeed, he was not the child of any age, but the spiritual heir of all the ages, and in his letters simply himself. They are not in the least like any one else's. They defy classification, and escape analysis. Humour and fancy run through them all, but it is Lamb's fancy and Lamb's humour. Nothing occurs in them but the unexpected. Almost everything he said was irapa TrpoaSoKiav, contrary to what reasonable men would have confidently reckoned upon his saying. When his sonnet was rejected he said, ' Damn the age, I will write for antiquity.' When his friend Dibdin was at Hastings, he advised him to go to the little church, which is a very Protestant Loretto and seems dropt by some angel for the use of a hermit, who was at once parishioner and a whole parish. It is not too big. Go in the night ; bring it away in your portmanteau ; and I will plant it in my garden. It must have been erected in the very infancy of British Christianity, for the two or three first converts ; yet with it all the appurtenances of a church of the first magnitude — its pulpit, its pew, its baptismal font ; a cathedral in a nutshell. Seven people would crowd it like a THE ART OF LETTER-WRITING 207 Caledonian Chapel. The minister that divides the Word there must give lumping penny-worths. It is built to the text of ' two or three assembled in My name.' It reminds me of a grain of mustard seed. If the glebe-land is proportionate, it may yield two potatoes. Tithes out of it could be no more split than a hair. Its First Fruits must be its last, for 'twould never produce a couple. It is truly the strait and narrow way, and few there be (of London visitants) that find it. The still small voice is surely to be found there, if anywhere. A sounding board is surely there for ceremony. It is secure from earthquakes, not more from sanctity than from size, for 'twould feel a mountain thrown upon it no more than a taper-worm would. Go and see, but not with- out your spectacles. One is reminded of Sydney Smith on the marriage of the stout lady. But Lamb is infinitely more various, and though he may be less funny, there is less strain in the process. Sydney Smith meant to exaggerate, and not to invent, when he said that any man could make himself a humourist by working at it for four hours a day. There is a mechanical element in his humour, delicious as the effects are. In Lamb's letters there is nothing of the sort. He is no more mechanical than Touchstone or Mercutio. He gives, like his master, to airy nothings a local habitation and a name. Fitz-Gerald's celebrated translation or paraphrase from the Persian has unduly and unluckily overshadowed his other work. Tennyson considered the truly Platonic close of his Platonic dialogue Euphranor to be one of the finest passages in English prose. As a letter-writer he is so good that one really cannot want anything more. I im not going to quote him. I have quoted enough already, and his letters ought to be read straight through from the beginning to the end. He did not write often or much, or from a sense of duty, or to get an answer, or to discharge a debt. He did not even write because he had something to say — a fatal habit. He wrote beta : e he could not help writii To the classical scholar hi letters are feasts. 11<' lived with the classics, and a hint from him is worth more than a page of 208 MEN AND LETTERS average commentary. But their charm is universal. The world had no effect upon Fitz-Gerald. If he was in it — and he hardly seemed to be — he was certainly not of it. He lived with the distant and the unreal, with the books of the past, with the characters of fiction, with his own ideas. There is a perfect symmetry of careless ease in the style of his own correspondence, more agree- able to the intellectual taste than the most consummate elaboration of literary art. He was so steeped in that glorious literature which must fill every Englishman with personal humility and national pride that he never had to think about his phrases. He could not go wrong. He knew Greek and Latin and Spanish and Persian, if not French and German and Italian. Yet no trace of a foreign idiom can be found in him. The irregular beauty of his letters, like irregular beauty of another kind, is a refuge and refreshment from all weary and dreary things, such as the gossip of Parliament, the anecdotes of the Bar, the humour of the frivolous, and the conversation of the discreet. July, 1898. THE GREAT TRACTARIAN The ninety ' Tracts for the Times,' or ' Tracts against the Times,' as Mrs. Browning called them, have fallen into deserved oblivion. The greatest tracts in the English language, the Character of a Trimmer and the A natomy of an Equivalent, are the victims of unmerited neglect. It would be hard to say why; for no such accident has happened to the fame of their author. George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, the idol of Macaulay, who describes him as the real author of the Revolution, was a conspicuous figure in the poli- tics of his day, and the great Whig historian has done him ample justice. With every advantage of birth and fortune he combined a singularly acute and subtle intellect, oratorical power of the highest kind, a humour at once exquisite and profound, and a thorough knowledge of the world. His Life has at last been written by the learned and accomplished lady whose article in the English Historical Rcviciv for October, 1896, was so generally appreciated and ad- mired. Miss Foxcroft has read and studied the manu- scripts at Devonshire House and at Althorp. She has seen correspondence unseen by Macaulay, and her volumes probably contain all that will ever be known about Halifax. No other statesman of the seventeenth century is so like a statesman of the nineteenth. He had, as Macaulay says, a peculiar gift for anticipating the judgment of posterity. Miss P 2IO MEN AND LETTERS Foxcroft traces his foresight to his love of abstract speculation, which was undoubtedly strong. But there was more in it than that. The famous saying about Voltaire, ' II a plus que personne l'esprit que tout le monde a,' might be applied to Halifax in modified form. He was more thoroughly imbued than any other Englishman with the English spirit of compro- mise. He was a born critic, and all objections oc- curred to him at once. William the Third, who more than once paid Halifax the compliment of calling him- self a Trimmer, rebuked him in council for indecision. It was, no doubt, his fault. In 1688, when the Prince of Orange was on the point of actually sailing, Halifax drew back, and began to think, as was his wont, that there was something to be said for the losing side. He hated the insolence of triumph and always sympathised with the unsuccessful. Once, and only once, was he cruel to the fallen : when he went to tell King James that his Majesty must leave Whitehall he showed un- usual harshness. But the King had made a fool of him, and ridicule, of which he was a master, was a thing he could not bear. And, indeed, the man who never lost his temper with James the Second could have had no temper to lose. The eloquent and accomplished Trimmer was born in 1633. When he was eleven years old his father died, leaving him the head of an old Yorkshire family, and the inheritor of a baronetcy created by James the First. His great grandmother was a Talbot and his grandmother a Wentworth. His mother was a daughter of Lord Keeper Coventry, and from that great judge he may have derived his natural vigour of expression. In the year of his father's death his mother, then expecting her confinement, was besieged by the Parliamentarians THE GREAT TRACTARIAN 211 at ShefTield Castle, and the barbarity with which she seems to have been treated as the widow of a noted Royalist may have given the boy the horror of violence which remained with him through life. He had the singular honour of protesting against the execution of Lord Stafford, the last victim of Oates, and against the execution of Russell and Sidney, judi- cially murdered by the triumphant Tories. Halifax believed neither in extreme courses nor in the extreme punishment of those who adopted them. He had not much sympathy with enthusiasm, but he did not hate enthusiasts. He had, indeed, a remarkable power of understanding, and even sympathetically understanding, opinions which he did not hold. He was himself in theory a Republican. Of the hereditary principle he made open fun. No one, he said, would engage a coachman because his father had been one before him. Yet he respected the British Constitution almost super- stitiously, and the British Monarchy as part of it. The republicanism of Halifax, which did not prevent him from serving Charles the Second and William the Third, or even from corresponding with James the Second at Saint-Germains, is not very difficult to explain. He was not, like Algernon Sidney, a Republican in the Cromwcllian sense. He was a thorough aristocrat. The oldest republic then existing in the world, the Republic of Venice, was an intensely aristocratic insti- tution, and Halifax was a firm believer in the natural authority of a governing class. He argued that even in the Navy, where skill and experience must count fol ting, command should usually be given to men of high social station. Mr. Disraeli's description of the Whigs as a Venetian oligarchy was inspired by the lurid insight of hatred. Applied to the Whigs of his V— 2 212 MEN AND LETTERS own time it was grotesque. In the eighteenth, and still more in the seventeenth, century the phrase was not inapplicable, and I doubt whether the Whigs of the Revolution would have repudiated it. But of course the Dutch Republic was always present to Halifax's mind. A cynical Tory said of a late eminent lawyer, c Coleridge is a perfect specimen of a natural Radical. He never could bear the idea of any one above himself.' Lord Halifax did not much like it either, and I suspect that much of his reluctance to bring the Prince of Orange over may be thus explained. He knew that the Prince, whatever else he might be, would be no King Log. James the baffled oppressor would have been much easier to manage than William the trium- phant deliverer. In the eyes of Halifax a monarchy was made far less mischievous by the weakness of the monarch. His public life began with the Restora- tion, and he sat in the Convention of 1660 as member for Pontefract. He was then twenty-seven, Sir George Savile, the owner of a splendid estate, and had been four years married. He was no sportsman, and cared nothing for horses or dogs ; but he was devoted to the country, and for Rufford he had a peculiar love. It was not want of ambition, nor indifference to office, which drew him so often from the house he had built in St. James's Square to his Nottinghamshire woods. Although he described the work of Government as a rough thing compared with the fineness of speculative thought, he liked being in the centre, and enjoyed the conscious exercise of his great parliamentary powers. It was love of nature that drew him to Rufford, and not hatred of business or weariness of the world. The Convention was the only Parliament in which Sir George THE GREAT TRACTARIAN 213 Savile sat as a commoner. In 1668 he became Viscount Halifax, and a Commissioner of Trade. The House of Lords, which was not much larger then than the American Senate is now, exactly suited him. For a quarter of a century he delighted the Peers with his eloquence, his shrewdness, and his wit. Like the pre- sent Prime Minister, he saw the ridiculous side of every- thing, and if a ludicrous image presented itself to his mind, he always gave his audience the benefit of it. He had his joke and yet kept his estate. Bishop Burnet was a favourite theme of his pleasantry. He liked the Bishop's latitudinarian theology, but the Bishop's statesmanship always excited his merriment. Burnet once referred to his own speech as the salt which he had contributed to the debate. It was not, replied Halifax, of the sort which seasoned all things. For in that case there would have been less of it, and it would have been more to the purpose. Both in public and in private his humour was unmanageable and indiscreet. It is said that Danby never forgave Halifax's comment upon his reluctant refusal of a speculative offer for the privilege of farming the taxes. The Lord Treasurer, observed Halifax, reminded him of a man who, being asked for the use of his wife, declined in terms of great politeness. One of his comments has passed into a proverb. When in 1683 Lord Rochester was deprived of the Privy Seal, then an office of importance, and appointed to the dignified sinecure of Lord President, Halifax said that he had never before seen a man kicked upstairs. If any member of the present Cabinet were created a Peer, at least three newspapers would say the next morning that he had been kicked upstairs. Against the Test Acts Lord Halifax both voted and spoke. It was this which enabled him afterwards 214 MEN AND LETTERS to address the Dissenters with so much effect against accepting the proposal of the King to include them in the dispensation from these statutes. He could say, and he did say, ' I am against all religious disabilities. But it is better to endure unjust exclusion from office than to put the King above the law.' It is more re- markable, considering his subsequent opposition to the Exclusion Bill, that he should have supported Lord Carlisle in providing against the marriage of Catholics with heirs to the throne. Charles, who at this time probably was a Catholic, though Halifax did not know ii, disliked him at first, and was with difficulty persuaded to nominate him on the Council of Thirty in 1679. But once there, he soon became a prime favourite with Charles, and was ' never from the King's elbow.' The King, though from always telling the same stories he came at last to be regarded as a bore, knew good com- pany as well as any man in his dominions, and in all his dominions there was no better company than Halifax. His intellect was extraordinarily subtle, his wit was marvellously keen ; he had studied, as Matthew Arnold says, in the book of the world rather than in the world of books. He took the King's measure accurately enough, as his famous Character shows. But nobody could amuse the King more, and there was nothing the King liked more than to be amused. The same year that he joined the Council Halifax was raised to an earldom, and obtained a still higher post of vantage from which to launch his satire against hereditary dis- tinctions. He brought to that disreputable Court, and he did not lose in it, the rare and priceless gift of urbanity. Though essentially good-natured, and not in the least vindictive, he allowed no man's feelings to stand in the way of a jest, and his mocking spirit might THE GREAT TRACTARIAN 215 have made him many enemies. But it was almost im- possible to be angry with Halifax. His own temper was so imperturbably serene, his breeding so perfect, his politeness so engaging, that he could say what he liked — and he always said what he liked— without giving offence. His manners, like all manners which are really good, were the reflection of a kind heart and a genial disposition. Cruelty and revenge were abhorrent to him. The greatest of Halifax's parliamentary triumphs was his successful resistance to the Exclusion Bill in 16S0. He was opposed to the first Lord Shaftesbury, the most adroit and versatile statesman of the age, a great lawyer, but not a mere lawyer, the ancestor of many able men, and by far the ablest of them all. When the House of Lords was in Committee on the Bill, Shaftesbury and Halifax spoke sixteen times in succession. Such a rhetorical duel has never been fought in Parliament since, not between Pitt and Fox, not between Peel and Russell, not between Gladstone and Disraeli. No word of it is left. But just as the chief debaters of the nineteenth century have always been told that they could not hope to rival Lord Plunket on the Union, so the future Earl of Chatham was assured that he could not equal the performances of Lord Halifax on the Exclusion Bill. The Bill was rejected, as the Habeas Corpus Act had been passed nearly twenty years before, by a very small majority. There were sixty Contents, and sixty-three Not Contents. There is an old tradition, or superstition, that speeches never change votes ; but considering the closeness of the numbers, and the com- parative looseness of party tics in the seventeenth century, the loss of the Exclusion Bill may fairly be attributed to the eloquence of Halifax, the Gotham of 2l6 MEN AND LETTERS Dryden, ' endued by nature, and by learning taught, to move assemblies.' The supreme importance of the vote is obvious. If the Exclusion Bill had passed both Houses and received the royal assent, which was then no fiction, the Crown would have devolved upon Mary at the death of Charles, the Prince of Orange would have been nominally no more than the Prince of Denmark was in the reign of Anne, and the country would have been spared the worst reign in English history. So at least it now seems. History, said Sir Arthur Helps, is spoiled for us by our knowledge of the event. Lord Halifax could predict events better than most people. But he was not infallible. He believed that conditions could be imposed upon James which James would be forced to accept. He underrated William of Orange. He held, perhaps correctly, that public opinion was not ripe for the exclusion of Catholics from the throne, and that a too militant Protestantism would lead to civil war. His views prevailed, and James marched without impedi- ment to his doom. Jeffreys and the Bloody Assize did what the Arguments of Shaftesbury had failed to do: they made England a Protestant country and Dutch William an English king. Reaction against the villainies of Oates, and repentance for the scandal of the Popish Plot, were powerful allies of the Duke of York. The stupidity and bigotry of James the Second wiped them out of existence, and Halifax himself could not, if he had tried, have explained away the trial of the seven Bishops. He stood by the Bishops, and visited them in the i-^ower. But he would not concur in the invitation to William. He was certainly not wanting in courage. The defence of unpopular causes and of still more un- popular persons had never had any terrors for him. But he would not, perhaps from temperament, go all lengths. THE GREAT TRACTARIAN 21 J with any faction. He played a leading part in the Revolutionary Settlement ; it was he who, in the name of both Houses, offered the crown to William and Mary. His cavalier blood and his philosophic temper dis- qualified him for a revolutionary hero. As Halifax held office under Charles the Second, it was natural, and perhaps inevitable, that he should be offered a bribe by the French Court. The agent employed was Barillon, the French Ambassador. But the attempt was futile. Although Halifax had not the contempt for worldly honours which he professed, was as anxious as Sir Walter Scott for the perpetuation of his family, and was rather fond of money than other- wise, he was above pecuniary corruption. Very few of his contemporaries were. He was certainly under no special temptation, for his estates were ample and they were not embarrassed. But crescit amor nummi quantum ipsa pecimia crescit, There is no greater fallacy than to assume that rich men cannot be corrupted and will not steal. The poor go to prison, but that is another story. It is one of Lord Halifax's many titles to respect and esteem that, in an age of low and coarse venality, he maintained a high standard of personal honour. His designs for the future failed. His son, the second Marquis, did not long survive him, and the peerage became extinct, though it was immediately afterwards revived for the benefit of Charles Montague. The baronetcy reverted to a distant kinsman, and descended in the middle of the eighteenth century to an eminent Whig universally esteemed. Lord Halifax's daughter, for whom he wrote his cele- brated Advice, became the mother of Lord Chesterfield. ] 1- r husband is said to have inscribed upon his copy of the letter, Labour in vain,' and the marriage was not 2l8 MEN AND LETTERS a happy one. Stanhope appealed to his father-in-law, and Miss Foxcroft has printed Halifax's reply. It is the letter of a wise and kind man, full of sense and tact. Miss Foxcroft throws doubt upon the tradition, accepted by Macaulay, that Halifax was the father of Henry Carey, and consequently the ancestor of Edmund Kean. She suggests that the real father was the second Marquis, but her reasons are inconclusive. Lord Halifax was not long in office under James the Second. No two men in the world could have had less in common. Halifax was graceful, subtle, dexterous, sceptical, and humane; James was dull, dogged, super- stitious, and cruel. Halifax was a rigid and formal Constitutionalist ; to James the Constitution was an impertinent check upon power which he believed himself to have derived from God. He at once set about to repeal the Test Act, which stood in the way of his religion, and the Habeas Corpus Act, which stood in the way of his tyranny. Halifax opposed him, and was at once, notwithstanding his services in the debates on the Exclusion Bill, struck off the Council. He was thus relieved of further responsibility for the most dismal and disastrous of all failures to enslave the English people. Dryden's Hind and Panther is commonly said to have been the one great literary work which the reign of James the Second produced. I venture to say that the Character of a Trimmer, the Anatomy of an Equivalent, and the Letter to a Dissenter are far more valuable con- tributions to the English language and to speculative thought. Dryden, though a great poet and a magnificent writer of English prose, was no theologian. He cared no more for the differences between Protestants and Catholics than the Vicar of Bray himself. The Hind THE GREAT TKACTARIAN 219 a:.i the Panthcy, though it contains many fine verses, is far below the standard of Absalom and Achitophel . Halifax, on the other hand, was a thorough master of his subject. He understood the art of politics as well as Richelieu, and the philosophy of politics as well as Montesquieu. He was equally at home in the abstract and in the concrete. His principles, though broad and comprehensive, were always capable of immediate application to the problems of the day. The great mistake of his life, his gran rifiuto, was his delay in joining the Revolution of 1688. It was certainly not made per vilta. The unpopularity of a cause, or of a man, always attracted instead of repelling him. When the world was turning from James to William, Halifax instinctively turned from William to James. He would rather not go far enough than go too far. He thought that anybody could be taught anything, and that therefore James the Second might be taught to keep his word. But James, as his Memoirs show, was the most logical of men. He held that there could be no binding obligation from a king to his subjects. He was a king, and could release himself from any promises he might make. Nothing could restrain him except fear, and the moment the fear was over the restraint was at an end. Happily for English freedom, nobody could help James. His obstinate folly confounded the wisdom of Halifax, as it had paralysed the power of Louis. He left Halifax in the lurch, and that was a thing which mortal man never had the chance of doing twice. The flight of James made Halifax a Williamite, not because it proved William to be victorious, but because it proved James to be a fool. When the peers met for consultation on the 21st of December, they chose Halifax to be their chairman. In the Convention Parliament he was 2 20 MEN AND LETTERS elected Speaker by the House of Lords, and William made him Lord Privy Seal. He did not long retain either place, and in 1693, two years before his death, he finally retired from official life. He attended the House of Lords to the last, and he signed a protest sgainst renewing the Censorship of the Press. His Essay on Taxes and his Maxims of State appeared in 1693. In 1694 he wrote, or at least published, his Rough Draft of a New Model at Sea. In the last few weeks of his life he drew up his Cautions Offered for the Consideration of those who are to Choose Members to Serve in the Ensuing Parliament. He did not live to see the result of the General Election of 1695, which was favourable to the Government, and in which his old enemy John Hampden lost his seat. His final tract, not Number Ninety but Number Six, was written for once on the winning side : the Parliament of 1695 was loyal to the Revolution. Miss Foxcroft, differing with Macaulay, argues that Halifax retired in 1693 of his own accord, and against the will of the King. I think that she has made out her case, and that Macaulay exaggerated the importance of a hasty exclamation which came from William in Council, that the Marquis could never make up his mind. William was what we mean by a practical politician, and Halifax, with all his shrewdness, was not. But, on the other hand, the King, as became his position, was neither Whig nor Tory, and Halifax proclaimed himself a Trimmer. The great enemy of trimmers was Judge Jeffreys, and it was to the fury with which he railed at one of them from the Bench that he owed his recognition in disguise, his capture, and his death in the Tower. The private cause of Halifax's retirement was domestic affliction. The public cause was the ascendancy of the Lord Treasurer Carmarthen. But indeed his THE GREAT TRACTARIAN 221 natural place, though he did not know it, was in Opposition. Some interesting and valuable notes made by Lord Halifax upon the Murder Committee have been pre- served, and are now printed in Miss Foxcroft's book. The Committee, which inquired into the judicial murders of William Russell and Algernon Sidney, exonerated Halifax from all blame. But he did not like the attacks made upon him, and he was sick of public affairs. Macaulay says that the one stain upon his career is his correspondence with James through Peter Cook, a Jacobite agent, in 1691. This is an obscure and rather mysterious transaction. From the language in which Halifax speaks of a similar charge, afterwards made against Bishop Sprat by a scoundrel called Young, it may be inferred that he saw no particular harm in making the best of both kings. He thought himself ill- treated by the triumphant Whigs, who suspected him because he would not go the whole way with them, and in the reign of William the Third discontent with the Court of St. James usually meant correspondence with the Court of Saint-Germains. Halifax died seven years before King William, and it was not till the death of Queen Anne that the Jacobites threw away their last chance. The equilibrium of ' little Hooknose's ' throne of the kind which mathematicians call unstable, and Halifax may have contemplated the possibility of James's return under conditions. The charm of Halifax's character is more easily felt than explained. He was, it must be confessed, rather a selfish man, a refined, well-bred, tolerant voluptuary. In a gross age he was without grossness, and he was entirely free, like the Prince of Orange, from the cruelty of which neither Whigs nor Tories can be acquitted. 222 MEN AND LETTERS Consistent he was not. In theory a Republican, making the hereditary principle the subject of merciless ridicule, he procured for himself in rapid succession a Viscounty, an Earldom, and a Marquisate. For a man brought up in the Court of Charles the Second his morals were singularly pure, and he indignantly repelled the charge of Atheism, adding that he did not believe in the existence of Atheists. He seems to have been a sincere Christian, with a contemptuous dislike for dogmatic theology, and a feeling as near hatred as his temper admitted for the Church of Rome. He loved to feel that he had turned a Cistercian Abbey into a comfortable manor house. He liked the Church of England because she trimmed between the excesses of Romanism on one side and the excesses of Puritanism on the other. But he had the strong distaste for clericalism in politics which has been characteristic of the Whig party for the last two hundred years, and of which Sir William Harcourt is to-day the typical impersonation. Halifax himself was hardly a true Whig ; for the Whig and Tory parties were formed by the debates on the Exclusion Bill, when Halifax was the leader of the Tories and Shaftesbury the leader of the Whigs. Yet, while the extreme Whigs always denounced the illustrious Trimmer, and he him- self never assumed the Whig name, he was nearer to them than to their opponents. It said, I know not upon what authority, that Mr. Froude's confidential servant, on being asked what his master's politics were, replied, ' When the Liberals are in, Mr. Froude is sometimes a Conservative ; when the Conservatives are in, he is always a Liberal.' That was very much the case with Lord Halifax, allowance being made for the fact that the system of party government was then in its infancy. He hated the parade and pomp of power. He was dis- THE GREAT TRACTARIAN 223 gusted by ostentation, by vengeance, by triumph, by insolence, by every other quality which the Greeks included in the word il(3pi<;. But though he opposed Whig intolerance, he opposed it because it was in- tolerance, and not because it was Whig. His intellect, as Macaulay says, was always with Milton and Locke. England was to him a republic with an hereditary president, and with all his lukewarmness in politics he loved England from the bottom of his heart. He was not given to enthusiasm, but he was an enthusiastic patriot. Our Trimmer is far from idolatry in other things ; in one thing only he conies near it — his country is in some degree his idol ; he does HOI worship the sun, because 'tis not peculiar to us, it rambles about the world, and is less kind to us than others ; but for the earth of England, though perhaps inferior to that of many places abroad, to him there is Divinity in it, and he would rather die than see a piece of English grass trampled down by a foreign trespasser. Halifax was not called upon to die for his country, and he would certainly not have died for any political interest. Perhaps he was too well off. He came early into the possession of large estates, and his fortune throughout his life was ample. His public career was one of almost uniform prosperity, for it was not an adverse circumstance to be dismissed by the worst of English kings. He was an affectionate husband, an indulgent father, a sympathetic and generous friend. He was not formed of the stuff which goes to the making of heroes and martyrs. His temper was epicurean, and he enjoyed, as if he had not been a philosopher, what rather vulgarly called the good things of life. He was habitually considerate of others, and he took care on his death-bed to prevent the knowledge of his con- dition from putting oil the marriage of his son. Like Sophocles, he was gentle in death, as he had been gentle 224 MEN AND LETTERS in life. Even his wit seldom wounded, it was so perfectly urbane. One cannot think of Halifax without thinking of Burke. Swift, it is true, came between them, and these three may, I suppose, be called the greatest of British pamphleteers. But Burke owed very little to Swift and a great deal to Halifax. Swift, indeed, cannot be imitated. It would be as hopeful to imitate Pindar. His humour is profound ; but it is savage, unholy, and unclean. His style is clear, racy, and powerful ; but it offers no points for the aspiring essayist. Its perfection is, if not uninteresting, at least uninstructive. Burke had neither the wit of Halifax nor the humour of Swift. He produced his effects by the vastness of his knowledge, the splendour of his eloquence, the energy of his passion, and the loftiness of his tone. Halifax had none of Swift's brutality and none of Burke's magniloquence. J He wrote as a highly cultivated man of his day would talk — with more correctness, indeed, but with the same absence of formality and the same dignified ease. He had not Burke's earnestness. If he hated anything except the Church of Rome, he hated a bore. Burke, as we know, emptied the House of Commons, and his pamphlets are very like his speeches. Both are now regarded as standards of classic oratory and storehouses of political wisdom. In his lifetime he had less influence than Halifax, until he hit the temper of the middle class by his diatribes against the French Revolution. Halifax knew exactly what people would read and what they would not. He always amused them, he never wearied them, he did not leave them for a moment in doubt of his meaning. He had the art, essential to a good advocate, of making readers or jurors think that they have arrived at their conclusions for themselves. Burke THE GREAT TRACTARIAN 225 lectures and scolds even while he is reasoning with con- summate force ; Halifax smiles and persuades. ' In such company,' he writes at the end of his famous tract, ' our Trimmer is not ashamed of his name [the 'company' in- cludes the Creator of the Universe], and willingly leaves to the bold champions of either extreme the honour of contending with no lsss adversaries than nature, religion, liberty, prudence, humanity, and common sense.' Burke was indebted to him for the luminous tranquillity with which in his best days he applied the eternal principles of justice to the passing controversies of the hour. If Halifax had a fault as a controversialist, it was that he indulged with too much freedom in the priceless and permanent luxury of intellectual contempt, which money cannot purchase and custom cannot stale. The combination of terseness and fulness, of wit and sense, of logic and fancy, are the principal charac- teristics of Halifax. His works are perfect examples \ of the hard writing which makes easy reading. No doubt he wrote so that any one should be able to understand him. But he contrived also to excite and to retain the admiration of all who love the English tongue. His most famous tract, the Character of a Trimmer, written, but not printed, in the reign of Charles the Second, is a frank and full confession of his own political faith. It is a plea for moderation. Halifax never, so far as I know, mentions Aristotle. It was against his principles to make a display of learning or of anything else, and his classical scholar- j) ship was probably superficial. But the Character of a Trimmer is the philosophy of the mean teaching by ex- ample. It is full of political wisdom, and of condensed thoughts upon which whole treatises might be composed. Take, for instance, the following : 2 26 MEN AND LETTERS If it be true that the wisest men make the laws, it is as true that the strongest do often interpret them : and as rivers belong as much to the channel wherein they run as to the spring from which they first rise, so the laws depend as much upon the pipes through which they are to pass, as upon the fountain from whence they flow. Charles the Second's sheriffs and judges might have impressed that truth upon a less susceptible mind than the mind of Halifax. The most infamous of all James's tools, who never had a criminal before him, except perhaps Oates, half so bad as himself, raved with even more than his usual indecency against that ' strange beast called a trimmer.' Many paradoxes are inverted platitudes, and Halifax only stated in plain words the doctrines upon which most men act. It was indignation which made the prose of Halifax, as it had made the verse of Juvenal. When he saw both factions join in giving a bad name to the only men in the country who deserved a good one, he spoke out and struck home. Although he sometimes hesitated in Council, there is no hesitation in his writings. It was in a thoroughly uncompromising spirit that he defended the spirit of compromise. Sometimes he reminds one of Bacon, as in the sentence : ' He that fears God only because there is a Hell, must wish there were no God ; and he who fears the King only because he can punish, must wish there were no King.' None, says Bacon, deny the existence of God but those for whom it maketh that there were no God. Halifax agreed with Bacon that Atheism was unthinkable ; but he was the reverse of superstitious, and in his Notes on the Life of Bishop Williams he says he wants no further evidence against Charles the First's understanding than his Majesty's belief in lucky days. Bacon's two celebrated Essays on Atheism and Superstition sum up the religion of Halifax as of many other contemplative minds. There is a THE GREAT TRACTARIAN 22 7 passage in the Trimmer which may be compared with the picturesque simile of a modern orator. Everybody remembers the scathing irony with which Canning com- pared the Pitt Club to the barbarous worshippers of eclipses. Halifax, in arguing against the Duke of Monmouth's suspected association in the Monarchy, asks the King to reflect upon the story of certain men who had set up a statue in honour of the sun, yet in a very little time they turned their backs to the sun and their faces to the statue.' In his delightful letter to Cotton, the translator of Montaigne, Lord Halifax refers to the great Frenchman's mmortal work as the book in the world he is best entertained with. The two cheerful and genial epicureans had indeed much in common. But there was another admirer of Montaigne who seems to have had some influence upon Halifax. The Provincial Letters appeared about fifteen years before the Character of a Trimmer was written. In the first of these immortal satires Pascal asks whether the five Jansenist propositions condemned by the Sorbonne are really to be found in the writings of Jansen, and gravely observes that mankind have become too sceptical to dispense with the evidence of their eye- sight for the existence of visible objects. ' Now,' says Halifax, ' the world is grown saucy and expects reasons, and good ones too, before they give up their own opinions to other men's dictates, though never so magisterially delivered to them.' The grave and temperate irony of Pascal would have exactly suited the taste of Halifax, who shared his hatred of the Jesuits. Pascal was no Protestant, and Halifax was a Protestant to the back- bone. But the Provincial Letters have always had a singular attraction for the Protestant mind, which assimilates the Thoughts with more difficulty. I cannot Q—2 2 28 MEN AND LETTERS help believing that Halifax read and enjoyed the Provincials. He would have specially appreciated the apology for the length of the sixteenth Letter on the ground that Pascal had not time to make it shorter. Halifax aimed always at terseness, and spared no pains to achieve it. ' 111 arguments, being seconded by good armies, carry such a power with them that naked sense is a very unequal adversary.' A prize of some value might safely be offered for a condensation of that sentence. If some of Halifax's sentences appear to be long, it is because, like most writers of his time, he was care- less of punctuation, and used commas indiscriminately with full stops. A more interesting peculiarity is his employment of the old biblical form in the third person singular of the present tense, which even in his time was almost obsolete. I have not attempted in my quotations to preserve his antiquated and rather uncertain spelling. He had no mind for trifles. One of the few things which really moved his indignation was the recklessness of those who, in foreign policy, trusted to the chapter of accidents, ' not considering that fortune is wisdom's creature, and that God Almighty loves to be on the wisest as well as on the strongest side.' The Anatomy of an Equivalent is specially addressed to the Protestant Dissenters, and is an attempt to dis- suade them from acting with the Church of Rome against the Church of England. The offer of James was plausible, and if it had come from an honest man it might have been accepted. ' You,' he said in substance to the Nonconformists, ' suffer from the same disabilities as the members of my own Church. The Test Acts are directed against you and us alike. Support me in dis- pensing Catholics from them, and you shall also be dispensed yourselves.' Halifax could not very well take THE GREAT TRACTARIAN 229 the line that the King was not to be trusted. Nor, indeed, were particular and personal arguments suited to the temper of his mind. The ' fineness of speculative thought ' was his master passion, and though he lamented that politics were too rough for it, he loved to refine them by means of it whenever he could. Yet the A natomy of an Equivalent is not altogether abstract. There are other ways of indicating people besides their names. Take, for instance, the following passage : I f men have contrarieties in their way of living not to be reconciled ; as if they should pretend infinite zeal for liberty, and at that time be in great favour and employed by those who will not endure it. If they are affectedly singular, and conform to the generality of the world in nothing but in playing the knave. If demonstration is a familiar word with them, most especially when the thing is impossible. I do not know that Halifax anywhere mentions William Penn ; but it is impossible to doubt that this description is meant for him. Of all the agents whom James could have chosen for his purpose, Penn was probably the best. Although he was not at that time regarded as a saint, and had not yet become the eponymous hero of a great Christian community, which was originally called after his father the Admiral, his talents were conspicuous, and his character stood high. He was a courtier, and to be a courtier was not altogether consistent with his religious belief. His defence was that he used his influence with the King on behalf of humanity and religion. If the King's religion was a cruel superstition — if his heart, as Marlborough said, harder than the chimneypieces at Whitehall — so much the more did one need softening and the other enlightening. Macaulay denounces Penn as a hypocrite and a time-server. That Macaulay, for some reason or other, detested Quakers is, I think, abundantly clear. Like Dr. Johnson, he never loses an opportunity of 23O MEN AND LETTERS sneering at them. To have dealings with James the Second, and not to be the worse for them, required a stronger man than Penn. It is less likely that he con- sciously deceived others than that he unconsciously deceived himself. But it is interesting to observe that the estimate of Halifax does not materially differ from the estimate of Macaulay. As a political philosopher, Halifax stands a head and shoulders above all his contemporaries except Locke. He saw through forms to substance. He perceived the essential realities which the outward trappings of con- stitutional government conceal from ordinary politicians. In this very treatise, which was on the face of it a pamphlet discussing a question of the hour, he finds space for an analysis of sovereignty which anticipates the rather pretentious work of John Austin : There can be no government without a supreme power. That power is not always in the same hands, it is in different shapes and dresses, but still, wherever it is lodged, it must be unlimited. It hath a jurisdiction over everything else, but it cannot have it above itself. Supreme power can no more be limited than infinity can be measured ; because it ceases to be the thing ; its very being is dissolved when any bounds can be put to it. The argument is that the power which dispenses can revoke the dispensation, and cannot be controlled by any promise for the future. But it is characteristic of Halifax that he escapes from the actual circumstances of the case into a disquisition upon the nature of power. In his capacious intellect things assumed their true proportions. If he was not — for no man can be — a spectator of all time and all existence, like the ideal philosopher in the Republic, he at least looked beyond the controversies of his time to the central truths by which all controversies must in the long run be decided. Halifax would not have been deceived by the fantastic though convenient theory of the Social THE GREAT TRACTARIAN 23 1 Contract. He pointed out to the Dissenters that a contract was worthless unless one party could enforce it against the other. There may, of course, be contracts which the law will not compel men to discharge, such as bets under the law of England. But the payment of bets is secured by social usage and public opinion not less effectively than if it were secured by law. The Stuarts required a revolution to make them keep their word, and for revolutions Halifax had as strong a dis- like as Pym. 'That cannot be called good payment,' he tells the Nonconformists, which the party to whom it is due may not receive with ease and safety. It was a king's brother of England who refused to lend the Pope money, for this reason — that he would never take the bond of one upon whom he could not distrain.' A curious inversion of this argument may be found in the Irish politics of the nineteenth century. John Mitchel the Repealer received some support in ' loyal Ulster ' because of his advanced views on agrarian reform. In the course of a speech on the land laws he adroitly introduced an attack upon the Union. He was met with cries of 1 Down with the Pope ! ' Gentlemen,' said Mitchel, ' I am a Protestant, like yourselves, and I have no more love for the Pope than you. But there is one thing his Holiness cannot do : he cannot issue a writ of ejectment in the county of Antrim.' Halifax, though suspected of lukewarmness by zealots and accused of heresy by the orthodox, was a true Protestant, if ever there had been one, and he gained the ear of the the Dissenters. They had good reason to distrust the King. But Penn might have won them over, if it had not been for the incom- parable tracts of the witty and persuasive Marquis. There is no man, save William of Orange himself, to whom the people of England are more indebted for their 232 MEN AND LETTERS freedom. Even now, when two hundred years of parliamentary government have obliterated the memory, and almost removed the meaning, of despotism from the minds of Englishmen, the closing words of the Anatomy of an Equivalent make the great struggle of the seven- teenth century seem as vivid as the events of yesterday. Thus I have ventured to lay down my thoughts on the nature of a bargain and the due circumstances belonging to an equivalent, and will now conclude with this short word. When distrusting may be the cause of provoking anger, and trusting may be the cause of bringing ruin, the choice is too easy to need the being explained. It is no wonder, as Macaulay says, that Halifax should be the special favourite of historians. He has saved them so much trouble. He has anticipated their verdict, and told them what to think. There is some- thing almost uncanny, and suggestive of the second sight, in the dispassionate judgment which was formed by a civil war and stood the test of a revolution. The * Constitution of England,' says he in the days of James and Jeffreys, ' is too valuable a thing to be ventured upon a compliment.' The sentence is from the Letter to a Dissenter on the gracious Declaration of Indulgence. No man hated religious persecution more than Halifax. He hated all persecution. There was neither malice nor resentment in his nature. But he saw that there could be no liberty without law, and that the Test Acts were a smaller evil than the arbitrary power of the Crown. If the King could abrogate a bad Act, he could abrogate a good one, and the Parliament of England would be, like the Parliament of Paris, a machine for the registration of the royal will. This Letter to a Dissenter is in every way superior to the other treatise with the same name, which was despatched from the Hague and signed ' T. W.' These initials, which probably stood for ' The Writer,' were supposed at the THE GREAT TRACTARIAN 233 time to be an inversion of Sir William Temple's. But the style is the style of Halifax, and therefore altogether beyond the reach of Temple. It contains, moreover, an allusion to Penn which stamps it with the same authorship as the Anatomy of an Equivalent. Penn must have had a peculiarly irritating effect upon Halifax, who becomes almost bitter in writing of him. Yet how delicious the irony is ! The Quakers, from being declared by the rapists not to be Chri.-tians, arc now made favourites, and taken into their particular I tion ; they are on a sudden grown the most accomplished men of the kingdom in good breeding, and give thanks with the best grace, in double refined language. So that I should not wonder though a man of that persuaiion, in spite of his hat, should be Master ol the Ceremonies. This is a masterpiece of delicate satire ; Lord Halifax must have had the picture in his eye when he wrote. ' In spite of his hat ' is a perfect touch, given with inimitable skill. The effect is deadly. There is so much insinuated, so little said. An inferior artist would have denounced Penn as a hypocrite, and accused the Catholics of tampering with the most sacred of all truths. In the year 1695, the last of his life, Halifax wrote a pamphlet on the duties of voters at the forthcoming elections. He called it ' Some Cautions offered to the Consideration of those who are to Choose Members to serve in the ensuing Parliament.' It is marked by all his habitual humour and somewhat more than his wonted cynicism. The franchise was not then con- sidered high, and it underwent no change till 1832. Halifax had no very exalted opinion of the electors, and of the candidates his view seems to have been still lower. ' I doubt,' he says, ' it is not a wrong to the present age to say that a knave's is a less important 234 MEN AND LETTERS calling than it hath been in former times. And to say truth it would be ingratitude in some men to turn honest when they owe all they have to their knavery.' La Rochefoucauld himself never said anything better than that. Of whom was Halifax thinking ? Perhaps of John Hampden. Perhaps of Jack Howe. The feeling that it is not fair to close a life of successful roguery with an easy show of cheap integrity is common enough. But Halifax alone has given it the dignity of a maxim > When Miss Sharp said that it was easy to be virtuous on five thousand a year she expressed the sort of virtue at which Halifax's satire was aimed. He would have said three thousand, we should say seven. But these are contemptible details. There never was a more thorough man of the world than Halifax. Always in it, but always above it, he could judge it from within and from without. One of his judgments upon it was this : ' There is no age of our life which doth not carry arguments with it to humble us : and therefore it would be well for the business of the world if young men would study longer before they went into it, and old men not so long before they went out of it.' Halifax came very young into the world of fashion, pleasure, and business. He did not live to be old. It may have been a con- sequence of his early apprenticeship to affairs that he survived his illusions so soon. Certainly no man had fewer at fifty, and at sixty he had not one left. Whether his penetrating lucidity made him happier may well be doubted. Naked truth is seldom either decent or pleasant. But that it made him more attractive and entertaining there can be no doubt whatever. Still more cynical, and much less gloomy than this satire upon the lingering veteran who will not quit the stage, is the following reflection upon rumours and reality. THE GREAT TKACTARIAN 235 u Common fame is the only liar that deserveth to have some respect still reserved to it ; though she telleth many an untruth, she often hits right, and more especially when she speaketh ill of men." It is rather melancholy that this should be Halifax's last word upon human nature and human life. But wc must recollect the circumstances in which it was written. He is practically recommending his countrymen at a grave political crisis to be on the safe side. To think too ill of a candidate is less dangerous, though it may also be less Christian, than to think too well of him. But, all the same, it must be feared that Halifax would have agreed with Sir Peter Teazle that it is a bad world (Sir Peter said a particularly bad world), and that the fewer people you praise in it the better. The ' Rough Draft of a New Model at Sea,' which was written in 1694, is justly celebrated for a famous phrase, such as Halifax knew well how to coin. The success of the New Model on Land had not been al- together agreeable to the young George Savile, who was anything rather than a Cromwellian. But the success was undeniable, and the name stuck. The Dutch navy which sailed up the Medway after the Restoration would have had no chance of performing such an exploit in Cromwell's time, and if any historical origin can be definitely assigned to the British command of the sea, it may be said to date from the Long Parliament. Halifax, who saw most things, perceived with his usual clearness of vision, that England had its root in the sea. ' It may be said now to England,' he wrote ' Martha, Martha, thou art busy about many things, but one thing is necessary to the question, What shall we do to be saved in this world ? There is no other answer but this — look to your moat. The first article of an 236 MEN AND LETTERS Englishman's political creed must be that he believeth in the sea, and without that there needed no General Council to pronounce him capable [? incapable] of salvation here.' The moat is, of course, Shakespeare's, and Halifax must have been thinking of — This precious stone set in a silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall, Or of a moat, defensive to an house, Against the envy of less happier lands. Nearly two hundred years after the death of Halifax Mr. Gladstone, writing on ' England, France, and Germany' in the Edinburgh Revietv, referred to the ' silver streak ' which protected Great Britain from the entanglements of Continental politics. There is no new thing under the sun. The ' Maxims of State ' were not published in the lifetime of Halifax. They appeared for the first time in 1700, five years after his death. They are intensely characteristic, as the communings of a mind with itself must be. There is perhaps a Baconian tinge in them, but they are substantially original. ' Arbitrary power is like most other things that are very hard, they are also very apt to break.' We cannot doubt whose sinister career suggested this maxim. Marlborough, who had good cause to know him, said of James the Second that his heart was as hard as the mantelpiece of Whitehall. Happily for the English people his head, as frequently happens, was a good deal softer than his heart. ' He who thinks his place below him will certainly be below his place,' is a saying which must come home to every student of history, and to every practical politician. The Minister who thinks he ought to be in the Cabinet is always dangerous, unless he is stupid. It has been truly and nobly said of the Duke of Wellington that he THE GREAT TRACTARIAN 1%*] was the greatest man who was ever content to serve. 1 A people,' says Halifax ' may let a king fall, yet still remain a people ; but if a king let his people slip from him, he is no longer king.' This is perhaps as near to a truism as Halifax ever came. The chief interest of the last maxim lies in its being the quintessence of Whiggery, and the condensation of Burke. It is a thousand pities that Burke, who passed so magnificent a eulogy upon the Savile of his own day, did not bequeath to us the estimate he was so well qualified to form of the man who made the name illustrious. Burke learnt much from Halifax, and he might have learnt much more. Something must, in conclusion, be said of Lord Halifax's Advice to a Daughter. The daughter married the third Lord Chesterfield, who had neither the ability nor the politeness of his son. The marriage, as I have said, was not a happy one. Even the tact and good humour of Halifax were unequal to the task of recon- ciliation. But the advice was excellent, whatever the results may have been. Halifax was a devoted father, and this letter is composed in his most serious vein. Sometimes his cynical wit breaks out, as when he says that though drunkenness may be an odious vice, a drunken husband is easier to manage than a sober one. But Ear more often he writes with grave dignity, especially on the subject of religion. The following passage is thoroughly characteristic in its combination of reverence and good sense : Take heed of running into that common error of applying God's judgments upon particular occasions. Our weights and measures are riot competent to make the distribution tit 1 n t oi His mercy or of His justice. He hath thrown a veil over these things, which makes it not only an impertinence, hut a kind of sacrilege fur us to give sentence in them without His commission. 238 MEN AND LETTERS One thinks of the tower of Siloam. But how few people do ! Halifax knew, as well as any man, what the material advantages of this world were worth. He enjoyed them all his life. He was very desirous that his children should have them after his death. No man was less like a morbid recluse, and what he says of money may be trusted. What does he say of it ? ' If it was well examined, there is more money given to be laughed at than for any one thing in the world, though the purchasers do not think so.' There is more depth and meaning in that closely packed apophthegm than in Juvenal's trite and obvious tag about the ridiculousness of poverty. Poverty excites the mirth only of those who have no sense of humour. But misapplied wealth has furnished the satirists of all ages with a practically inexhaustible theme. And the beauty of it is that ' the purchasers do not think so.' They never did : they never will. Halifax did not know what it was to be poor. His life was passed in affluence, and much of it in splendour. But his intellect was quite untainted by vulgarity or prejudice. If he had been a country parson, and his daughter had been engaged to the curate, he could not have given her better counsel about economy. The word necessary is miserably applied ; it disordereth families, and overturneth Governments, by being so abused. Remember that children and fools want everything because they want wit to distinguish ; and therefore there is no stronger evidence of a crazy understanding than the making too large a catalogue of things necessary, when in truth there are so very few things that have a right to be placed in it. There is plenty of social satire in this letter for those who relish it. I feel, for my part, that though it is admirably done, it is too easy for Lord Halifax, too much within the range of inferior minds : • Vanity maketh a woman tainted with it so top full of herself that she spilleth it upon the company.' The image is droll THE GREAT TRACTARIAN 239 enough, but Halifax was capable of better things. As be warms to his subject, and becomes fascinated with his own idea of the vain woman, his style improves, and the end of the description is perfect. She is faithful to the fashion, to which not only her opinion, but her senses, arc wholly resigned : so obsequious she is to it, that she would be ready to be reconciled even to virtue with all its faults, if she had her dancing master's word that it was practised at Court. Like all really great humourists, Halifax directed his humour against the follies and vices, never against the virtues and pieties, of mankind. Such, then, was George, Lord Halifax — Consti- tutional Revolutionalist, Conservative Republican, pious freethinker, philosophic politician. No finer intellect was devoted in the seventeenth century to the service of the State. Mentally he was above his contemporaries, and in advance of his age. If his moral conviction and his personal enthusiasm had been on a level with his speculative powers, he would have been the greatest man of his time. His temper was too critical, his taste was too fastidious, his wit was too little under restraint, for the rough work of troubled times. His attitude towards the Revolution resembled the attitude of Erasmus, a kindred spirit, towards the Reformation. He understood both the disease and the remedy, but he could not rid himself of the fear that the remedy might be worse than the disease. ' Prosperity,' says Bacon, * doth best discover vice' ; and to the vices of prosperity Halifax was pitilessly severe. He was no worshipper of success. On the contrary, it moved his suspicion and prompted his censure. He could no more live with a party than liurke could live without one. When a number of people began to shout for a thing, Halifax began to ask himself whether it could be so good as it 240 MEN AND LETTERS seemed. As a political pamphleteer he says more in one page than Burke says in twenty, and his style, if less gorgeous, is incomparably purer. We have no specimens of his oratory, but in the House of Lords the fear of all men was lest he should make an end. Charles the Second, a thoroughly competent judge, considered him the best talker in England. As a writer he is usually wise, often witty, and never dull. His own favourite author was, as he tells us, Montaigne. In his delightful letter to Mr. Cotton, Montaigne's translator, he describes the illustrious Frenchman in terms not inapplicable to himself : He let his mind have its full flight, and sheweth by a generous kind of negligence that he did not write for praise, but to give to the world a true picture of himself and of mankind. He scorned affected periods, or to please the mistaken reader with an empty choice of words. He hath no affectation to set himself out, and dependeth wholly upon the natural force of what is his own, and the excellent application of what he borroweth. It is impossible to read the works of Halifax without being struck by the intellectual affinity between him and the present Prime Minister. The aristocratic temper, the Conservative instincts, the audacious indiscretion, the irrepressible humour, the contempt for the solemn plausibilities of the world, even the epigrammatic turn of the phrases are common to the great Trimmer and the great Unionist. But Lord Salisbury has outgrown the love of minorities which Lord Halifax never lost. March, 1899. THE FATHER OF LETTERS The great edition of Cicero's Correspondence, begun nty years ago by Professor Tyrrell of Dublin, has at been completed by Professor Purser and himself. A i a monument of acutcness and erudition it is an honour to the scholarship of the United Kingdom, and especially of Ireland. If we do not always find in it the perfect taste which distinguishes all the work of Pro- fessor Jebb, also an Irishman, though a transplanted one, we must be grateful for the sound learning, the sympathetic enthusiasm, and the indefatigable industry which have supplied the intelligent reader of these unique letters with all the assistance he wants. Cicero did not, as the schoolboy said of Caesar's Commentaries, write them for beginners in Latin. They are difficult because they are elliptical, because they are familiar, because they were addressed for the most part to men who knew what was in the writer's mind. It was not till the closing years of his life that Cicero began to think about theil publication, and he never published them. For my part, I < m Qi . < r forget the sensation of reading as a boy in a crowded railway carriage the confidential note which Cicero tell i Attii us that he would not have sent but for ! ib "lute certainty that it would be seen by no other eyes than his. Haben fata libelli. Except Trajan's celebrated epistle to Pliny, there is now hardly a remnant of all the imperial rescripts in which the rulers of the .in wurld expounded their policy and disclosed their K 242 MEN AND LETTERS ambition. Of Cicero's familiar correspondence, from the stately treatise on colonial government written for his brother Quintus to the hurried and scarcely coherent scrawl in which he declared, and perhaps rather exag- gerated, to his friend Basilus his delight at the death of '. Caesar, we have more than eight hundred specimens. Quite apart from their literary excellence, they have more historic value than almost any other relic of antiquity, that antiquity which seems to us so strangely modern. Not even Horace tells one so much about the life of his time, and Horace wrote in the next genera- tion, when the agitated world had settled down into a rather dull and monotonous peace. Cicero lived through the greatest civil war that has ever disturbed mankind. He took a prominent part in it, not as a soldier, but as a statesman. He was on terms of friendship both with Pompey and with Caesar. He was never really out of public life from the proud day when he suppressed the conspiracy of Catiline to the dark hour when Octavius turned against the Republic and delivered over the author of the second Philippic to the vengeance of the worthless Antony. The Emperor Augustus has come down to posterity as the patron of literature, the friend of Horace and Virgil and of the ' picturesque historian ' Livy. But a dark stain rests upon his memory, which even the rolling waters of time cannot efface. He consented to the death of a man as much superior to himself as the mind is superior to the body. Antony acted after his kind. Shakespeare has put into Antony's mouth, as he put into the mouth of Claudio, some of his noblest verse. But the real Antony was a drunken illiterate boor, whose answer to the eloquence of Cicero was the hired assassin. As Plutarch says with crushing severity, it was not Cicero's hands THE FATHER OF LETTERS 243 and head that the Roman people saw nailed to the plat- form from which he had so often addressed them, but Antony's soul. Octavius was made of different stuff. He could appreciate men of letters though he was not one, and even in his youth he was a judge of human nature. He understood the value of Cicero and the worthlessness of Antony. His sacrifice of the former was the calculation of cold-blooded selfishness, and if Augustus afterwards became outwardly magnanimous, it v.ms only because he had no longer anything to gain by the meaner vices. He crushed down the recollections of the past, and inaugurated a new era. He had his court poets and his obsequious chronicler. The name of Cicero was never mentioned, and the Republic was ignored. But Cicero could afford to wait. ' Longum illud tempus quum non ero magis me movet quam hoc exiguum.' In these words of dignified and pathetic superiority he appealed from the rancour of faction to the ultimate verdict of the ages and the slow justice of time. He lived, as Tennyson so grandly said of himself, in the distant future. Even in his forensic speeches, as, for example, in the plea for Archias, he often forgi t the Praetor, and remembered only the cultivated intellects of all succeeding generations. His philosophic treati which he frankly admitted to be no more than paraphrases from the Greek, have perhaps had more influence than they deserve. It is impossible to over-estimate his letters. It does not matter very much to us whether Cicero took the right or the wrong side of the revolution \\ hi< b ended, eight y. iter his death, with the battle of Actium. Students of Roman histor] are apt to be mi by names. When they read that Caesar tried to u] the Republic, and that Cicero defended it, they jump to k —2 244 MEN AND LETTERS the conclusion that Caesar was the representative of arbitrary power, and Cicero the champion of popular rights. Then perhaps they read Mommsen, and swing round to the belief that Caesar was the people's darling who came to deliver them from a corrupt aristocracy, of which Cicero had made himself the tool. If there be a third view of the situation more remote from the truth than these, I am not acquainted with it. Caesar was an aristocrat of the aristocrats. He cared as little for the people as Louis the Fourteenth, and as little for legal restraints as Napoleon. He was a born ruler of men, and if he had lived to be sixty, he would have died a despot. Cicero was a Conservative Republican, belong- ing to the middle class, a lawyer by temperament as well as by profession, and as passionate a constitutionalist as Burke. Whether the Republic which he wished to preserve was worth preserving is a question that may be discussed till the crack of doom. It rested upon slavery, and upon exceedingly strict distinctions of class. But nevertheless it opened the highest offices to • new men ' like Cicero ; and, in short, he had done very well with it, and he wished it to continue. But by the middle of the century before Christ, the machine had got hopelessly out of gear. Nothing except force could restrain the rabble that had poured from all quarters into Rome, and force was not in the hands of the con- stituted authorities. So the Republic perished, and with it perished the very little that was mortal of Cicero. He did not live to see Philippi. He left Brutus struggling desperately against overwhelming odds. But whatever we may think about the merits of the war, of its trans- cendent interest there can be no doubt. The whole future of the world has been affected by the result, and in the letters of Cicero we can trace the events of almost THE FATHER OF LETTERS 24^ every day. If the artificial rhetoric of Lucan, who lived a hundred years afterwards, can make the coldest reader thrill over the death of Pompey, it is equally true that the great lyric poet who complimented Cicero and satirised Caesar while they were all three living would hten the records of a much duller period than this. There have been many civil wars, but there has been only one Catullus. History, says Sir Arthur Helps, is spoiled for us by our knowledge of the event. I venture to dispute this proposition. It is the peculiar charm of contemporary documents, like these letters, that we read them knowing what the writer did not know. So you think Hirtius and Pansa will get the best of it, do you ? How very little foresight you must have, with all your learning.' Probably few of us put it quite so crudely as that. But a feeling of superiority which costs no effort is agreeable to the natural man. Cicero had no reticence. ' I talk to you as I talk to myself,' he says to Atticus, and there can be no doubt that he spoke the truth. He was not sitting for his historical portrait, but pouring out his hopes and fears from day to day. If he has suffered for his frankness in the estimation of German professors, he has won the regard and esteem of every one who can understand the most lovable of characters. Cicero was vain in the sense of liking praise, and showing that he liked it. But from envy he was abolutely free. He was jealous of no man's reputation, and as he advanced in years he became more appreciative of young men, such as Brutus or Octavius. If he could hate, and indulge his powers of invective to the full, as against Catiline and Verres and Antony.it was always on public grounds. His intemperate exuberance over the Ides of March appears to us indecent. But no one iu that 246 MEN AND LETTERS age disapproved on principle of political assassination. It was a matter of expediency. Dean Merivale has well said that the measure of our admiration for Cicero is the high standard by which we claim to judge him. we have to remember by an effort that he was not a Christian. He had no personal grudge against Caesar: they had been on friendly terms, and Caesar regarded the friendship of Cicero as an honour. They were the two most cultivated and accomplished men of their age. But Cicero honestly believed that Caesar was a danger to the State, and ought to be removed. His own turn was not long in coming, and he himself was forced to acknowledge that the murder at the foot of Pompey's statue was a useless crime. His letters after the deed are full of laments that, in getting rid of the tyrant, they had not freed themselves from the tyrant's in- fluence. ' We are still governed by the dead man' is their constant refrain. A preacher or a moralist could find no better theme for a discourse on the futility of doing evil that good may come than Cicero's letter after the Ides. Cicero died before what is called the golden age of Latin literature had well begun. The name of Augustus has imprinted itself upon the generation of Horace and Virgil. The consummate perfection of their literary art has overcome the difference of language and the lapse of years. But the essence of Latinity is to be found not so much in the epic or the lyric poet as in the comedies of Plautus and the letters of Cicero. There are lines of the Eclogues which have been translated, and not always correctly translated, from Theocritus. Horace, as we know, copied Greek odes which are lost. Even Terence, who lived in the great days of the Republic, is believed to have followed Menander word THE FATHER OF LETTERS 247 for word. Cicero, though an excellent Greek scholar, was a Latin purist. In idiom and phraseology he was almost pedantically faultless. He was fond of writing to Atticus about good and bad Latin, about solecisms and admissible varieties of phrase. We have in his latest letters, as Mr. Tyrrell and Mr. Purser put it, ' the high-water mark of Latin prose.' In all of them, late and early, we have racy, idiomatic, almost vernacular Latin. The correspondence of Cicero contains letters from other persons besides himself. There are some from Brutus, of which the authenticity has been doubted, but which modern criticism accepts as genuine. They do not throw a favourable light upon the character of Plutarch's and Shakespeare's hero. They are vain, and tiresome, and shallow. There are a few, too few, extracts from Cajsar's letters, admirable alike in style and substance, the work of a true scholar and a great man. There is the famous and really eloquent epistle in which Sulpicius endeavours to console Cicero for the death of Tullia. Cicero did not even as a letter-writer stand alone. He lived in an age of letter-writers and of highly cultivated men. But just as Shakespeare's greatness appears the more plainly from being contrasted with the other great dramatists of his day, so Cicero shines with the more lustre for having lived among those who could all do well what he could do superbly. If not primus inter pares, he was primus inter niagnos. When we try to analyse the merits of his letters, we find the difficulty of weighing the impalpable. It is not merely the interest of the subject. Only after the death of C '..1 sar does the progress of events become really ting. Many of the most delightful notes to Atticus are on ordinary, even trivial, subjects of the clay. It Luj been well buid that the difference between ono 248 MEN AND LETTERS person's conversation and another is not what they talk about, but the way in which they talk about it. What is true of conversation is true of correspondence. Just as the most important events seem, when Horace Walpole deals with them, to be trifles, so the most trifling things, when Cicero touches them, appear im- portant. And yet ' important ' is not quite the word. ' Attractive ' would perhaps be nearer the mark, though no single epithet suffices to express what I mean. Whatever he may be in his philosophical treatises, Cicero in his correspondence is never dull. Nor is he in the least verbose. He is not even Ciceronian, as we usually understand the term. Mr. Tyrrell and his colleague promise a translation. It is much wanted, for the rendering affixed to Middleton's justly celebrated Life leaves much to be desired.* The one fault which I should venture to find with the specimens in the notes to this edition is a too frequent use of slang. Cicero is colloquial enough. But such a sentence as ' The petit caporal has had a staggerer ' does not give the English reader an idea of what Cicero's playfulness was like. Cicero had no very deep sense of humour, and his formal jests are rather curious than amusing. What he had was an infallible taste and judgment in literary matters. He could play tricks because he knew when to stop. Just as the charm of Shakespeare's heroines, Portia, or Beatrice, or Rosalind, lies in the delicate freedom which is always sure of itself, so Cicero's art, which was a second nature, is most conspicuous when he is apparently letting himself go. It is almost, perhaps quite, impossible for a translator to reproduce * Since this was written there has appeared the first half of an excellent translation by Mr. Evelyn Shuckburgh, of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. THE FATHER OF LETTERS 249 this quality, and therefore it is safest for him to avoid slang altogether. And indeed there is in these letters a charm far deeper and higher than any grace of manner. Cicero had one of the warmest hearts that ever beat in a human bosom. There never was a better friend. The more his friends were out of his sight, the less they were out of his mind. Vain he was, and egoistical in the measure of his vanity. But of all the Romans we know he was the least selfish. If he loved praise, he gave it. All his geese were swans. Possessing an almost morbidly critical intellect, and moved at times to passionate invective, he always took a sympathetic and indulgent view of the conduct of those he loved. Cruelty he abhorred, and his gratitude was almost excessive. It is a commonplace that Cicero was the most modern of the ancients. Apart from mechanical inven- tions, which have no more real influence upon life than soap has upon character, there is very little in our social customs that would have seemed strange to him. What he would have said to the Christian religion we can of course only guess. He would not, we may feel sure, have confounded it with Judaism like Tacitus, or regarded it with distant scorn like Pliny, or ignored it like Plutarch and Marcus Aurelius. He would have examined it with the candour of an enquiring mind, for he could not fail to have been struck by the curious parallel between the moral teaching of Christ and the • ulilime ethics of his own master Plato. The Platonic Socrates in the Gorgias is nearer to the Sermon on the Mount than any other character in literature, ancient or modern, and Plato was Cicero's Bible. Cicero's humanity r slumbered, unless it became, in his opinion, ne- cessary to remove an enemy of the Republic. Although 250 MEN AND LETTERS he accepted, as St. Paul accepted a century after him, the institution of slavery, which has only disappeared from Christendom in our cwn day, he was the kindest of masters, and his slaves were devoted to him. His views on the treatment of subject races were substantially the same as have been adopted by the best administrators of British India. His statesmanship was high and austere. Lord Melbourne was never tired of quoting that noble sentence • Mihi semper in animo fuit ut in rostris curiam, in senatu populum defenderem ' — It has always been my policy to defend the senate on the plat- form, and the people in parliament. Considering that representative government was then utterly unknown, and that there were no constituencies to satisfy or to cajole, this is a singularly lofty and dignified profession of faith. The modern tone of Cicero's letters is almost startling. He quotes Greek as we should quote French. He finishes ' in haste ' for fear of losing the post, in the shape of his correspondent's messenger or his own. He delighted in the exchange of gossip, social no less than political. Sometimes, not too often, he condescended to ' shop,' and discussed points of law with his learned friends. His disposition was extremely sociable, and in one fascinating letter he enforces the duty of dining out. He dined at much the same time as ourselves, and it was the only meal he cared for. He hated to consume it in solitude. His work was over by the evening, his mind was free, and dinner was the social event of his day. Though strictly temperate, with a horror of drunkenness which even Sir Wilfrid Lawson could not surpass, he liked good wine, and was something of an epicure. Without the sordid avarice of Brutus, he was, it must be admitted, rather too fond of money for a philosopher. But he wanted it Till: FATHER OF LETTERS 25 1 to spend, not to hoard. He lavished it on his library, on his country house, and in a splendid hospitality. Parsimony disgnsted him in fact, if not in theory, and the meagre table of Atticus was the subject of ex- postulations in which he used all the freedom of a friend. He detested the barbarity of gladiatorial games and shows. His Greek is not the easiest part of his letters. Passionate Platonist though he was, it is by no means Platonic. It was the Greek of his own day, and more like the Greek of the Empire than what we regard as classical. One out of the many words employed by him occurs in the great chapter on charity in the First Epistle to the Corinthians. • Charity vaunteth not her- self,' says St. Paul, ov Trep-nepeveTai. Cicero did vaunt himself, as he frankly tells us, o>? eirep-rrepevcrdpLriv. The virtue of humility, like the sanctity of marriage, is dis- tinctively Christian, or at least had no place in Ciceronian ethics. Cicero's private life was what we should call eminently respectable. We may repudiate with scorn the infamous libel of Pliny, to which, if I may respect- fully say so, Cicero's latest editors pay far more attention than it deserves. It is inconsistent with the whole tone of his letters to Tiro, his favourite slave and freedman, which are fortunately extant. But his idea of 1. e, though not perhaps lower than Paeon's, was essentially a low one. He regarded it as a matter of busine We do not know all the causes of his gradual l ;rangement and final separation from Terentia, though we can see that she was a tiresome and extravagent man. We do know that immediately after their divor< e lie married a mere girl who happened to be his \. ird, and that he married her avowedly for her fortune. Nothing, on the other hand, can be pleasanter than Cieeio'i 252 MEN AND LETTERS relations with the wife and daughter of Atticus. They are like Gibbon's with Lady Sheffield and Miss Holroyd. But women played a very small part, either for good or for evil, in Cicero's life. From profligacy he shrank, and, feminine in many respects as he was himself, he was too thorough a Roman to believe in the equality of the sexes. He did indeed come into passing contact with the great and too notorious lady who wrecked the life of Catullus. Catullus made Clodia the subject of an invective compared with which Pope's attack on Lady Mary Wortley is tame and cold. Terentia did not like her husband to visit so dangerous a woman, and no wonder. But, though Clodia's husband Metellus was absent from Rome at the time, the object of Cicero's intercourse with her seems to have been entirely political, so that Terentia's jealousy had no foundation in fact. Cicero's correspondence with Caecilia is unhappily lost. But she was his senior by many years, and their friendship was purely intellectual. The warmth of Cicero's heart went out to his daughter and to his male friends. The death of Tullia broke him down completely. Cold in physical temperament he may have been, but there was no coldness in his personal affections. With the exception of a few phrases, which are probably corrupt, there is nothing obscure in Cicero's letters. If they are often elliptical, they are never cryptic, and, like all the best correspondence, their style varies with the persons to whom they are addressed. M. Gaston Boissier, in the delightful and really erudite volume which he calls Ciceron et ses Amis, compares them with the letters of Madame de Sevigne. The compli- ment is the highest a Frenchman can bestow, and with- out it no French eulogy would be complete. It was Sainte-Beuve, I think, who said in a country house on a THE FATHER OF LETTERS ■53 wet day * Lisons tout Madame de SevigneV But it would be difficult to imagine two great letter-writers more utterly different. They resemble each other only in the consummate perfection of their literary art. The Roman had always more to say than there was time to say it in, ink to write it with, or wax to scratch it on. The genius of the Frenchwoman lay in writing incom- parable descriptions of trifles light as air. Like her country's cooks, she hardly wanted material. She wrote partly, no doubt for the love of her daughter, but chiefly for the pleasure of writing. Her French is, I suppose, though I speak as a fool, on the same unapproachable level as Cicero's Latin. Her style is tout ce qu'il y a de plus Francais, and even in expressing admiration of it a foreigner feels almost presumptuous. Cicero's corre- spondence, on the other hand, is sometimes as full of matter as Bacon's Essays. Everything interested him, and his thoughts ran naturally into words. Some may dislike letters with a motive, as some dislike novels with a purpose. But both are popular, or at least both are read. The old-fashioned comparison of Cicero with Pliny had more substance in it, and Dr. Middleton did not fail to draw the moral in favour of Republican Rome. He points out, with his good old English love of freedom, never stronger than in the half-century which preceded the French Revolution, that Pliny had to keep oil' the forbidden ground of politics, and could only write about his prival 01 course, tl i the famous letter to Trajan, but that was official, comparison, however, is unfortunate for Pliny. i : ii Lain literature had aot been in its decline, his prose would have been ;u inferior to Cicero's as Addi- son s- No leader of Professor Moinmscn's brilliant and 254 MEN AND LETTERS learned History of Rome can forget the forced tone of artificial scorn in which he always speaks of Cicero. He is especially severe on the Correspondence. * People,' he says, ' are in the habit of calling it interesting and clever ; and it is so, as long as it reflects the urban or villa life of the world of quality ; but where the writer is thrown on his own resources, as in exile in Cilicia, and after the battle of Pharsalus, it is stale and empty, as was ever the soul of a feuilletonist banished from his familiar circles.' Prodigious ! That Cicero wrote best when he had most to write about must in candour, and can with safety, be acknowledged by his admirers. But that the author of the treatises On Friendship and On Old Age had ' the soul of a feuilletonist ' I deny with none the less confidence because I feel myself imperfectly ac- quainted with the nature of a feuilletonist's soul. When, however, Dr. Mommsen (in the authorised version of Pro- fessor Dickson) calls Cicero ' a journalist in the worst sense of that term,' I begin to feel at home, and I must express my humble gratitude for the most magnificent compliment ever bestowed upon a class more accus- tomed to kicks than to halfpence. Mommsen is in truth blinded by his idolatrous admiration of Caesar. Cicero opposed Caesar and rejoiced at his death. There- fore he had the soul of a feuilletonist, and was ' poor beyond all conception in his ideas.' The Professor triumphantly quotes Cicero's modest deprecation of originality in his philosophic treatises. He only found the words, he says. The ideas were Greek. This may be true enough of the Tusculans and the Offices. Cicero never meant it, never thought it, and it would be ab- surdly untrue of the Catilinarians, the Verrines, or the Correspondence. Professor Mommsen has no sense of measure. With all his accomplishments, and there THE FATHER OF LETTERS 25^ is not a more profound scholar in Europe, he lacks that balanced adjustment of intellectual perception upon which the French so justly pride themselves. Imagine a Frenchman saying that Caesar was * the entire and perfect man'! As well compare him, like Mr. Froude, with the Founder of the Christian Religion. Thus to be praised confers no honour. It rather excites ridicule. Forgetting that Cicero was a journalist, and a bad one, the judicious historian proceeds to describe him as 'no- thing but an advocate, and not a good one.' 'As to Cicero,' he adds, ' every unbiassed person will soon make up his mind.' Bias, or prejudice, is more likely than the want of it to produce hasty conclusions, and if Mummsen is an impartial historian, give me honest partiality. This notion of Cicero as a mere frothy rhe- torician who played no practical part in pontics, is the most preposterous nonsense to which a great writer ever put his name. It is on a par with the theory, which Mommsen also accepts, that he was a coward. Cicero was for more than twenty years a man of weight and influence in the counsels of Rome. He was not banished for doing too little, but for doing too much. Although he served as a lad in the Marsic war, he was not a soldier, and fighting was not his business. He was not adven- turous. He did not court danger, nor expose himself unnecessarily to lawless ruffianism. But he did not shrink from risk in the fulfilment of his duty to the State. In his youth he defended Roscius of Amelia against a prosecution which was really set on foot by Sulla, and Sulla did not stick at trifles. Assassination v. is a recognised method of political warfare throughout his public career, and his tongue made him hosts of enemies. The second Philippic cost him his life. He published it, though he did not deliver it, and he knew 25b MEN AND LETTERS when he published it that Antony was thirsting for his blood. In 43 B.C., the year of his death, he was at the head of affairs after the Consuls had left the city, and he was then the soul of the resistance to the Caesarians. He bore his exile badly, no doubt. He loved comfort, and he loved his friends. Livy, in a fragment of his lost books, preserved by Seneca, says that he met no misfortune with dignity, except the last. It is a great exception, and we must remember that Livy was a courtly historian writing for Augustus. None of Cicero's contemporaries made the surprising discoveries reserved for Mommsen. Catullus did not call him a bad advocate, but the best in the world, and the most eloquent of Romans. Juvenal, in that prince of satires which may be called by a pardonable anachronism the Vanity of Human Wishes, points his moral and adorns his tale by con- trasting the harmlessness of Cicero's bad poetry with the fatal result of his immortal prose. ' Ridenda poemata malo ' — Every one knows the grand old lines. And it is Juvenal, in a less familiar passage, who, looking back a hundred and fifty years and regretting the suppression of the great Republican's name by the short-sighted policy of the earlier Emperors, exclaims, ' Roma patrem patriae Ciceronem libera dixit.' It might have struck Professor Mommsen and his school that there was a man, not unconnected with Cicero, of whom everything they say of Cicero is true. Titus Pomponius Atticus, whose name is linked for ever with the name of Marcus Tullius Cicero, did make through meanness the great refusal. He really was a cold-hearted, poor-spirited person, who, observing the perils of public life, resolved to avoid them. A selfish and penurious safety seemed to him better than patriotism and cold steel. ' I like not such grinning honour as Sir THE FATHER OF LETTERS 257 Walter hath : give me life : which if I can save, so ; if not, honour comes unlookcd for, and there's an end.' It never came to Atticus. He got what he wanted, he saved his skin. After Cicero's death he showed no regard for his memory, it would have been such an unpopular thing to do. He is the man with whom Cicero may profitably be contrasted. Comparing Cicero with Ca?sar is like comparing Talleyrand with Napoleon, or Halifax with William the Third. The feeling with which Caesar himself regarded Cicero was certainly not contempt. On the contrary, the great soldier did all he could to keep the great civilian on his side, and if we may believe Plutarch, he acquitted Ligarius in the teeth of the evidence because he could not resist the eloquence of Cicero. Whether Caesar was really overcome by the pleadings of this • bad advocate,' or whether he only pretended to be so that he might keep on good terms with the pleader, is immaterial. For neither hypothesis is reconcilable with the theory that Cicero was of no practical account, and that his public career consisted in ' knocking down walls of pasteboard with a loud din.' Historians should not blind themselves with the passions of a past age. But even that is better than indulgence in excesses of personal abuse from which any sane contemporary would have shrunk. Cicero boasted too much of his publi< ices, and especially of his Consulate. His literary was better than his ral taste, and his vanity sometimes broughl him into ridicule. His bitterest enemy, Antony himself, did not SU' that it was all a delusion, that Cicero was a mere phrasemaker, that the work was done by otheis, while he merely talked. Mommsen denies that Cic( put down the conspiracy of Catdine. But he does not plain why Ci' banished, and why Catilini s 258 MEN AND LETTERS friends exerted themselves to procure his banishment. ' Rempublicam fovi adolescens, non deseram senex. Contempsi Catilinas gladios, anne pertimescam tuos ? ' The words are as familiar as ' Friends, Romans, country- men.' Where do the Mommsenites suppose that we were all brought up ? Cicero wrote and published this passage in the face of the world, and in defiance of Marc Antony. Antony had his head for it, which was no use to anyone except the owner, and earned himself an immortality of shame. Mommsen and Froude would have us believe that the author of the second Philippic was like the fly upon the wheel, imagining that his efforts had raised the dust. There is no credulity like the credulity of malice. If Cicero's letters were interesting for no other reason, they would be valuable for their originality. The imitative character of Latin literature is com- memorated in the well-known precept of Horace that Greek models should be studied by day and by night. Virgil copied successively Theocritus, Hesiod, and Homer. The very names of Horace's metres remind us of his debt to Sappho and Alcseus. Only two of Sappho's odes have come down to us complete, and one of them has been literally translated by Catullus, who translated from Callimachus also. There is reason, as I have said, to believe that the plays of Terence are not paraphrases but literal renderings of Menander, and even Plautus took his plots, if not his language, from the Greek. Cicero himself turned Aratus into Latin hexameters, which are good enough to have been imi- tated by Lucretius, and his philosophical works are almost entirely derived from Plato. But his letters, though sprinkled with Greek, are emphatically his own, and they show us what the cultivated talk of Roman THE FATHER OF LETTERS 259 society in the last days of the Republic was like. One feature of it is curious. So far as we can see it was neither religious nor irreligious. Cicero was no scoffer. The official religion of the State he passed over in decorous silence. It had ceased even then to be taken seriously by any educated man. But Cicero, though he sometimes used the language of what is now called Agnosticism, was a sincere believer in immortality and in God. As Bayle truly and nobly says, his religion was in his heart, and not in his mind. He could not prove it. He did not want to prove it. He felt it, and if it did not always sustain him under the stress of calamity, it prevented him from sinking into the abysses of materialism. He had the natural faith which springs from a sense of human dignity and moral grandeur. A letter from Cicero to Atticus on the 7th of March, B.C. 45, ' essentially private,' is the pathetic record of a manly struggle against the burden of almost intolerable suffering. He never quite recovered his daughter's death. But public duty did at last restore him to active interest in political affairs, and his sanguine temperament prevented him from despairing of the Republic until Octavius joined Antony. Then he sub- mitted to the inevitable, but he did not live to see the final overthrow of Roman freedom. He parted, at the turning of the tide, the most illustrious victim of the second Triumvirate. It illustrates the continuity of history and the nothingness of time, that some of Cicero's latest epistles might well have come from a porary Frenchman who had heard rumours of a junction between the Due d'Orlcans and General Zurlinden. Editors have I trange liberties with the text of Ci' pondei e. In one lettei they deliberately inserted the word H )2 to 1895. It is the old dilatory plea against expecting everything at once, wanting the millennium, as Mr. Anthony Hope says, in a Pickford van, but expressed with a plausible and persuasive subtlety that takes in almost everyone, except the author. Yet even then, when his object was to conciliate the country and allay dissatisfaction with Lord Oxford, Swift could not refrain from irony. Eminent statesmen, he remarked, had sometimes told him that politics were only common sense. It was the one thing they told him that was true, and the one thing they wished him not to believe. More delicate, and not less deadly, is the account of the Minister who, because he can judge better than the public when he knows more than they, thinks that he must be wiser than the rest of the world when their information is the same as his own. In practical sagacity Swift may be compared with the favourite object of his aversion, Sir Robert Walpole. He had one of those intellects which no sophistry can delude, and which are incapable of deviating from the path of reason. When the nation was mad over the South Sea Bubble, Swift, in a few simple stanzas, exposed the whole !al>ric of deception in a manner intelligible to a child. What they do in hi iven, said Swift, we know not; what they do not we know. They neither many, nor are ^iven in marriage. Chatter about Harriet was the late Professor Freeman's epigrammatic summary of literature on Shelley. There is nothing new to id alwut the relation, between Swift and Stella. Sir Henry Craik, in his exhaustive biography, h , Lected the evidence in favour of the marriage. Mi. Churton Collins has argued with great ability the 27O MEN AND LETTERS negative case. Every detail of Swift's career is interesting. But as the alleged marriage was a nominal, and not a real one, it is possible to ex- aggerate the importance of this particular incident. Upon the general subject of Swift's conduct to women Sir Walter Scott has said Ihe last, or the last profitable, word. With exquisite delicacy, and with true insight, he has shown that Swift's passions were of another kind, and that he was incapable of falling in love. Unfortunately he could inspire feelings which he could not return. But that is a subject which Thackeray has made his own for ever. It is, of course, to Swift's friendship for Stella, whatever its precise nature may have been, that we owe the celebrated Journal, with its ' baby language,' its unflinching revelation of character, and its great historical value. I cannot see the tender- ness which some have found or thought they found in it. It was written at the happiest, or least unhappy, period of his life, and yet it is full of gloomy pride, of obstinate isolation, of implacable revenge. For acute observation of men and manners, for lurid insight into hidden motives, for a haughtiness of temper which no despot could have surpassed, it is singular in the docu- ments of autobiography. It was Swift's curse that nothing mean or vile or low or nasty ever escaped the pitiless keenness of his penetrating eye. He employed his unrivalled powers of ridicule and invective on the side of religion and virtue, but of decency he did not know the meaning. Even the ' troughs of Zolaism ' contain nothing fouler than some of Swift's so-called poems. These are only fit to be burned by the common hangman, and it is wonderful that they should have been preserved. Some of his best and gravest work contains expressions from which most laymen would THE PRINCE OF JOURNALISTS 2~ I have shrunk, and of which any clergyman should have been ashamed. But Swift was ashamed of nothing. He was exempt from moral and apparently even from .1 nausea. No idea was too disgusting for his imagination, no image too loathsome for his pen. The > la owes, I cannot help thinking, some of its charm to its freedom from this disfiguring grossness. For this must be said of Swift, whether it be against him or in his favour, he neither conceals what is re- pulsive nor varnishes what is foul. Filthy he often is, prurient never. He cannot have made vice attractive to man or woman. He was, in sober truth and earnest, a real cynic and misanthrope. Born with a temper which was a greater misfortune than any corporal defect, he nursed and cherished the sava indignatio of which he boasts on Ins tomb until it subdued his will, overpowered his reason, and left him to expire a driveller and a show. He is the only great writer who did actually hate his fellow-men. The ordinary characteristics of human nature were to him odious in themselves. And when they appeared most fair, his terrible fancy transformed them. He could not see a beautiful woman without fancying how coarse her skin would look under a micro- scope. Gulliver's Travels has been called a political satire. It is a satire and a libel on humanity. More and more savage does the author grow with the progress of his work, until in the last part he is like the demoniac raging among the tombs. Critics have praised the veri- similitude of Gullivif, and told the story of the Irish I who said he did not 1 a word of it. There i humourous exactne i il in tint wildest lion, no doubt. Hut Swift had not it ot Dcioe. He doc not inspire belief 272 MEN AND LETTERS in everything he says, like that most imaginative and unscrupulous of romancers. To do so a man must have his prejudices and passions under control. Swift could govern himself well enough when he was writing on politics or upon any abstract question. It is in dealing with mankind that his fury carries him away. Only such an intellect could have been proof so long against such a temper. Only such a temper could in the end have ruined such an intellect. It was said of a former Speaker that he always flew into a passion in Parliamentary English. Swift's irritability, to use a mild word, did no injury to his style. Of Swift's prose it seems to me almost impossible to speak too highly. It has not the splendour of Milton's, or Dryden's, or Burke's. But as a method of conveying thought it is perfect. Nothing once said by Swift could ever be said again without being spoiled in the saying. Absolute and utter simplicity is the distinguishing mark of his style. No doubt this simplicity is a highly artificial product. It is the result of pruning, of trimming, of cutting down. The result and the object of these pro- cesses is to leave the reader face to face with the precise idea which the writer wished to convey. There is no veil, however thin, between the mind of the author and the mind of the public. Clearness and force could not be more harmoniously combined. Swift's reasoning faculty, when he used it at all, worked with consummate accuracy and without the slightest friction. There were very few things he could not understand, and whatever he could understand he could explain to the humblest capacity. His mind supplied him with an endless succession of ludicrous images, but he used them only when they assisted the point he wished to drive home. Tricks and mannerisms he discarded and abhorred. THE PRINCE OF JOURNALISTS 273 After the lapse of nearly two hundred years his best work shows little or no trace of obsolete phrases and idioms. It was the choicest English then, it is the choicest English now. The Drapicr's Letters deal with the coinage of Wood's halfpence. Nobody except an historical student cares any longer for Wood, and the copper coins he introduced into Ireland under contract with the Government. But the Drapiers Letters can be read with delight by all who enjoy masculine reasoning, simple eloquence, and racy humour. Swift's prose masterpiece is now, I think, commonly admitted to be the Argument against the Abolition of Christianity. The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit is almost equal to it. The Drapier's Letters are as much superior to Junius as Junius is superior to Wilkes. The Dean's own judgment upon the Tale of a Tub is well known. 'What a genius I had when I wrote that book!' he said in his clouded and declining years. The Tale of a Tub has passed beyond criticism and become a standard of satirical excellence. It is from no affectation of singularity that I prefer the later produce of that ' savage and unholy genius ' to this early effort. There is genius in the Tale, of course. Swift was right in that. It is an exuberant genius, bursting all bounds of taste and con- gruity, with all Voltaire's license and none of Voltaire's tact. As one grows older one comes back to 1 [orace ! I it modtu in rebus, sunt certi dentqae fin With all Swift's admiration for '1 he J ale of a Tub, he did not repeat the experiment. Me had, in a literary sense, sown his wild oats. He began to curb not his irony, but his fancy, and the soberer he grew the more deadly he lx;camc. Under the frown or smile of that irony everything pretentious shrivelled up and dis- T 274 MEN AND LETTERS appeared. The Dean detested hypocrisy so bitterly that he railed even against ordinary devotion. The tears of a widow weeping for her husband were to him a cloak for her wish to find another. He could not believe in purity of motive or unselfishness of aim, Yet he was not without virtues of his own. He gave away money to the needy, though no professional miser loved money more. He risked the loss of his own liberty in order to fight, if not for the liberties of Irishmen, at least for the liberties of Ireland. His patriotism was genuine and incorruptible. If he sometimes trampled on the weak, he never stooped to flatter the strong. Although his early opinions were liberal, there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of his later Toryism. The truth is that as Burke bowed down and worshipped the British Con- stitution, so Swift bent the knee to the Established Church. Both may have been wrong, but one was as honest as the other. Swift taught by example, and not by precept. It may be doubted whether he had any theories of style. He was a sound classical scholar, though, like most men of his time, especially Pope and Addison, he studied Latin rather than Greek. Ignorance of the Greek language accounts for Sir William Temple's belief that the The Letters of Phalaris were genuine, and Bentley's monumental treatise was out of Swift's depth altogether. But he knew Horace and Virgil a good deal better than he knew Shakespeare or Milton. He had the classical standard of taste, with a rooted dislike of anything tawdry, showy, or ' flash.' His criticisms on Bishop Burnet exhibit an equal abhorrence of the Bishop's politics, which were Whiggery of the purest water, and the Bishop's English, which was anything but pure. He was the master, not the servant, of language, and he THE rRINCE OF JOURNALISTS 275 could always make it do exactly what he wanted. For slovenly writing, as for slovenly knowledge, he had an irrepressible contempt. The most accomplished way [he say?; in the Tale of a Tub] of using books at present is two-fold: either, first, as some men do ds, learn their titles exactly, and then brag of their acquaintance. Or secondly, which is indeed the choicer, the profounda and polite method, to get a thorough insight into the index, by which the whole book is governed an ,i turned, like fishes by the tail. For to enter the palace of learning by the great gate requires an expense of time and forms. Therefore men of much taste and little ceremony are content to get in by the back d One is reminded of the well-known couplet : F>ir index-learning turns no student pale, Yet holds the eel of science by the tail. 1 As some men do Lords ' cannot, I suppose, be gram- matically defended. Like other masters of English, such as Newman and Froude in our own day, Swift is occasionally careless of minute accuracy, and his dullest editors have an obvious satisfaction in pointing out these trivial defects. A mistake showing real ignorance is not to be found in Swift. It was from the Battle oj the Boohs, not one of Swift's happiest efforts, that Matthew Arnold took one of his most successful and popular phrases. The Battle of the Boohs is, we may be thankful to reflect all that remains of the foolish controversy over the rival merits of ancient and modern literature. The disputants might as pro- fitably have employed themselves in comparing the relative excellence of Virgil and Dryden, or of Home! and Pope. Swift, in gratitude to Temple, who oddly 1 h the side of authors he could not read, came forward as their champion. A fori . the ancients [lie wrote], we arc content with the bee to pretend to nothing of oui own oni wingl and OUT voice; that ay, our Ilights and our language. Fa the rest, whatever we have '., has been by Infinite labour and search, and ranging through cveiy T--2 276 MEN AND LETTERS corner of nature. The difference is that instead of dirt and poison we have rather chose to fill our hives with honey and wax, thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest things, which are sweetness and light. There is an imaginative beauty in this passage to which Swift seldom attains. His habitual vein was irony, which came as surely and as naturally to him as the rhymed couplet came to Pope. There is scarcely a better specimen of this, his favourite weapon, to be found in all his works than the final sentences of the strange and sinister Argument, to which I have so often referred. He had already asked what young men of wit and fashion would have for the object of their raillery if the Christian religion were abolished ; how Freethinkers could gain a reputation for learning; and what could hinder Popery from being put in the place of religion. Then comes the climax : — To conclude, whatever some may think of the great advantage to trade by this favourite scheme, I do very much apprehend that in six months time after the Act is passed for the extirpation of the Gospel the Bank and East India Stock may fall at least I per cent. And since that is fifty times more than ever the wisdom of our age thought fit to venture for the preservation of Christianity, there is no reason why we should be at so great a loss merely for the sake of destroying it. That seems to me finer than anything in Voltaire. Voltaire always appears to be conscious of his own clever- ness, to be showing what he can do. Very wonderful his performances are. But in Swift's best work, this Argument for example, the strokes descend upon the victims with the grim, relentless force of circumstance or fate. It is not so much Swift as the naked truth of things, stripped of all subterfuge and disguise, speaking through Swift's mouth, while upon Swift's face there is never the flicker of a smile. In his Thoughts on Various Subjects Swift displays a lighter and, if such a word may be used of such a man, a more genial mood. The sarcasm is there, as indeed it THE TRINCE OF JOURNALISTS Tff* is everywhere. But it is of a less cruel and more human sort. ' The reason why so few marriages are happy is because young ladies spend their time in making nets, not in making cages.' For exquisite felicity of diction that little apophthegm is unapproached and unapproach- able. Like all the best verbal wit, it is not merely verbal. It is worth, to my mind, half a dozen essays from the Spectator. Somewhat grimmer is the following : — Venus, a beautiful, good-natured lady, was the goddess of love; Juno, a terrible shrew, the goddess of marriage ; and they were always mortal enemies. But, after all, this was the last subject on which Swift could pose as an authority. Here is a judgment more in his line : — As universal a practice as lying is, and as easy a one as it seems, I do not remember to have heard three good lies in all my conversation, even from those who were most celebrated in that faculty. From the friend of Pope this is much. But we could wish that the Dean had given us the two. True genuine dulncss moved his pity, Unless it offered to be witty. So wrote Swift with truth and sincerity, in the most celebrated of all his poems. The Dean's most shining merit was his hatred of cant. Carlyle attacked the cant of philanthropy, forgetting that there was a cant of misanthropy as well, and that malevolence may be quite as sentimental as its opposite. Hut Swift detested shams in general, not merely the shams obnoxious to himself in icular. His loathing of his own kind was not affectation. It was an awful reality. In more whole- some ways, and from more manly motives, he despised from the bottom of his soul all who pretended to gifts or virtues which they did not possess. Intellectual con- tempt was at the root of his animosity against superficial dcibin and against the false wit which would amuse no MEN AND LETTERS one if it were not profane. His Letter to a Young Clergy- man shows that he applied the same principle with strict impartiality to those of his own cloth. Swift indeed felt for the clergy as Johnson felt for Garrick. He would not suffer any one else to criticise them without rushing to their defence, and yet no one criticised them more severely than himself. His advice to this young man might have been read and pondered with advantage by the contemporary school of divines, whose sermons Archbishop Tait once described as like essays from the Spectator without the Addisonian elegance. I cannot forbear warning you in the most earnest manner against endeavouring at wit in your sermons, because by the strictest computa- tion it is very near a million to one that you have none ; and because too many of your calling have made themselves everlastingly ridiculous by attempting it. I remember several young men in the town who could never leave the pulpit under half a dozen conceits ; and the faculty adhered to those gentlemen a longer or shorter time, exactly in proportion to their several degrees of dulness. Accordingly I am told that some of them retain it to this day. I heartily wish the brood was at an end. About Swift's own sermons there is some uncertainty. There are not many of them extant, and it is doubtful whether they were preached. The religious or spiritual element is as conspicuously absent from most of them as it is from Sterne's. With all his staunch Protestantism, and his not less resolute High Churchmanship, in which may be traced a curious resemblance between bim and Archbishop Laud, Swift could be coarser than Rabelais, and profaner than Voltaire. Men have been convicted and imprisoned in this country for treating sacred sub- jects less offensively than Swift treats the Holy Communion in the Tale of a Tub. The only distinction which could have been drawn by the most ingenious counsel for the defence is that the ostensible object of Swift's satire was not the Christian religion, but the Church of Rome, and the essence of blasphemy is not so TIIK PRINCE OF JOURNALISTS 279 much its objects as the methods by which those objects are attempted or achieved. The following passage from Swift's sermon on the fate of Eutychus, though it may be unsuitable to the pulpit, is not unfit for publication, and is certainly neither ' conceited ' nor dull : — The accident which happened to this young man in the text hath r t been sufficient to discourage his successors ; but because" the preachers now in the world, however they may exceed St. I'aul in the art of setting men to sleep, do extremely tall short of him in the work- ing of miracles, therefore men are become so cautious as to choose more safe and convenient station^ and po.stures for taking their repose without hazard of their persons ; and upon the whole matter choose rather to entrust their destruction to a miracle than their safety. That has all the best qualities of Swift's humour with- out any of the faults which sometimes disfigure it. The ideas are intensely ludicrous, and the images by which they are conveyed excessively comical. And yet there is all the appearance of grave reasoning, of flawless logic, and of an obvious reflection which almost apologises for being a platitude. The little phrase ' upon the whole matter' is inserted with admirable artifice. It suggests the imperturbable demeanour of a dignified judge, calmly weighing the reasons on both sides, and con- cluding that it were better to sit in church upon a bench from which there was no possibility of falling. Swift was not only a statesman and a satirist. He was also the father of what is now called Society Verse. It is curious that before he hit upon the form which best suited him, and in which the inimitable stanzas on his own death were composed, he should have perpetrated some of those crazy Pindarics which were fashionable when he was young. The 'Odes' to Archbishop Sancroft and to Sir William Temple, particularly the r, are not to be matched for badness among the worst imitations of Cowley. It was a strange theory that because Pindar wrote Greek poetry of the highest 280 MEN AND LETTERS excellence in a rather difficult and complicated metre, therefore English poetry could be written in no metre at all. Fortunately the error came to a speedy and ignominious death at the hands of Swift himself. Well might Dryden, who died in 1700, say, ' Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet.' Swift could not forgive the insult, and he says, in the Tale of a Tub, with a malignity which for once was stupid, that Dryden would never have been taken for a great poet if he had not in his own Prefaces so often made the assertion. But he profited by the condemnation, and wrote no more Pin- darics. In 1698 he produced the first of the poems, if poems they are to be termed, which will be read with pleasure and copied with freedom so long as English verse remains a vehicle of thought. I mean the famous lines, Written in a Lady's Ivory Table-Book. Here you may read, ' Dear charming saint ;' Beneath, • A new receipt for paint ; ' Here, in beau spelling, ' Tru tel deth,' There, in her own, ' For an el breth ; ' Here, • Lovely nymph pronounce my doom I : There, ' A safe way to use perfume ; ' Here, a page filled with billet-doux; On t'other side, * Laid out for shoes ; ' ' Madam, I die without your grace,' 'Item, for half a yard of lace.' Two years afterwards, when chaplain to Lord Berkeley in Ireland, Swift wrote Mrs. Harris's Petition, which as a bit of low comedy is unsurpassed in literature. Has Dryden's prophecy been fulfilled ? That depends upon the definition of poetry, which has never yet been and perhaps never will be, authoritatively defined. But those who deny the title of poet to Swift must deny it also to Pope. They stand and fall together. Pope was Swift's avowed model. He never, he said, could read a line of Pope's without wishing it were his own. Is there such a thing as the poetry of common sense ? Horace thought THE PRINCE OF JOURNALISTS 28 1 there ■was, and by his judgment I am content to abide. Swift, like Pope, creeps on the ground. He does not strike the stars. He has no height of imagination, no depth of passion, and, even in his verses to Stella, no store of tenderness. Few lines of his are more characteristic than his playful exposure of the South Sea Bubble : — A shilling in the bath you fling ; The silver takes a nobler hue By magic virtue in the spring, An I seems a guinea to your view. But as a guinea will not pass At market for a farthing more, Shown through a multiplying idass, Than what it always did before, So cast it in the Southern Seas, And view it through a Jobber's Bill, Put on what spectacles you please, Your guinea's but a guinea still. This is quite conclusive, and entirely prosaic. Swift became with practice a perfect master of form in verse, and the lines on his own death are flawless from be- ginning to end. In this respect he far excelled his contemporary Prior, and has not been outdone by his successor Praed. Cowper was his admiring student, and Johnson's birthday odes to Mrs. Thrale were modelled on Swift's to Stella. The consummate mastery which Swift gradually obtained over his instrument, and the perfect ease with which he wielded it, are perhaps the secret of its permanent charm. The satiric humour, which in his prose is apt to be savage, ami in the Legion Club is ferocious, is mellowed and chastened with social playfulness in Cadcnus and Vanessa, or Baucis ami l hihmon, A Rochefoucauld from nature drew Hi rim I lieve them true ; Th'-y argue DO corrupted mind In him, the l.iuil i, in mankind. 282 MEN AND LETTERS Swift's estimate of the illustrious Frenchman is sound and just. The cynicism of La Rochefoucauld was the cynicism of an outraged sentimentalist. He expected too much of men and women. Because they were not angels, because their lives did not square with their theories, he believed the mass of them to be utterly base. But he always recognised that there was a noble remnant. He stopped far short of Swift's universal misanthropy. II y a peu d'honnetes femmes, he says, in the bitterest of all his maxims, qui tie soient lasses de lew metier. There were a few, and to La Rochefoucauld it was the minority that made the world fit for human habitation. It was not a high standard of morals, nor a small capacity for belief, that drove Swift into cursing and railing. It was constitutional distemper and despair. If Archbishop King knew the secret of the Dean's misery, he kept it like a gentleman and carried it to the grave. The death of Stella, as Thackeray says, ex- tinguished his last ray of hope, and almost his last gleam of reason. ' After that, darkness and utter night fell upon him.' If one cannot truly say ' What a noble mind was here o'erthrown,' one may at least feel that a gigantic intellect sank suddenly into the abyss. There was no warning. Until Swift became a lunatic, his mind cut like a diamond through the hardest substances in its way. No sophistry ever deceived him. No difficulty ever puzzled him. There was nothing he thought which he could not express. The pellucid simplicity of his style, both in prose and in verse, came of clear thinking and sound reasoning, assisted by the habit of daily explanation to unlettered women. It is easy to understand him, because he understood so easily himself. A great deal of time is wasted by the 1 general reader,' in guessing at the meaning of authors THE PRINCE OF JOURNALISTS 283 who did not mean anything in particular. Uncertainty is the fruitful parent of obscurity, and many people write obscurely in the hope that they will bethought profound. Like the subaltern who would not form his letters dis- tinctly lest his correspondents should find out how he spelt, there is a class of writers who will not be plain lest the poverty of their thoughts should be exposed. Swift, it must in fairness be admitted, did not treat of questions which transcend the powers of human language. His prose is never metaphorical, and his poetry could always be translated into prose. He had what the ich call an esprit positif. Philosophical speculation did not attract him, and if he inwardly cultivated any religious mysticism, he kept it entirely to himself. Eloquent he was not. He seldom rises and seldom falls. What made him the prince of journalists was his mental tact. He had the public ear. He knew precisely when the anvil was hot, and where he ought to strike it. To say that he never took a bad point would be to exaggerate, though there are not many controversialists who took so few. When he turned Bishop Burnet's - of a Jacobite restoration into ridicule, he merely showed that the worthy Bishop knew the danger, and that he did not. That any one should ever have thought Harley a greater minister than Walpole seems incom- prehensible to us, and though it may have been true friendship, it was false judgment. But Swift's particulaar errors are quite unimportant now. 11;; value to posterity lies in his matchless humour, his statesmanlike loin, his hatred of pr< rod ham, his intellectual rity, and above all the sustained perfection of his English style. January, 1900. MACAULAY AND HIS CRITICS Macaulay was born on the 25th October, 1800. His hundredth birthday fell, therefore, during the last year of the nineteenth century. Some of his contempo- raries — Mr. Charles Villiers, for instance, and Cardinal Newman — are familiar personages to the present, even to the rising generation. Macaulay has been in his grave more than forty years, during which his fame and popularity, sometimes greater, sometimes less, have never been for a moment obscured. Fifteen years after his death appeared Sir George Trevelyan's classical bio- graphy, which by general consent ranks with Boswell's "Life of Johnson" and Lockhart's "Life of Scott." That book for the first time revealed Macaulay as a man to the public who had only known him as a writer, and in doing so made for him a new circle of admirers. Upon the virtues of his private life there cannot be two opinions. There never lived a more dutiful son, a more affectionate brother, or a more faithful friend. Nor has any one impugned the honourable integrity of his politi- cal career. In early life he was a vehement partisan, unable or unwilling to see the merits of Sir Robert Peel and the faults of Lord Grey. After his return from India his politics, like his conversation, became less violent, and though he always continued to call himself a Whig, he died something very like a Conservative. But for such change as he underwent malice itself could suggest no sinister motive, and he lost his seat in Edin- burgh because, though the staunchest of Protestants, he MACAULAY AND HIS CRITICS 2S5 thought it just to vote for the endowment of a Catholic college. It is not, however, as a politician or as a patriot that Macaulay will be remembered. His sturdy pat- riotism may excuse his pride in having been born on the anniversary of Agincourt. But if he had been merely an eloquent speaker, a brilliant talker, or, as Sydney Smith less kindly called him, a book in breeches, his name would already have been more than half for- gotten. It is as an author, and, above all, as an his- torian, that he belongs to the permanent heritage of mankind. We have to judge Macaulay by a colossal frag- ment. He died, so to speak, with his pen in his hand. The History which was to have embraced the long reign of George III. breaks off at the Peace of Ryswick. The real addition to it is not the death of James, nor the death of William, which have little value without their context, but the admirable life of Pitt which he con- tributed to the Encyclopedia Bvitannica. This was the last of his completed writings, and in all his life he never wrote anything better. His History could not have been finished by any one of less vitality than Methuselah, if the original design had been pursued on a uniform scale. Four large octavo volumes do not suffice for the events of seventeen years. J Jut it is fair to assume that the critical periods which immediately preceded and immediately followed the Revolution / 302 MEN AND LETTERS him as an historical painter may have been an ignorant mountebank, but in this particular instance he was not far wrong. Macaulay painted in rather glowing colours, and drew rather startling contrasts. He loved to show the contradictions of human nature, exhibited, as they so often are, in the same individual. It became a trick with him, almost a vice. But what serious historical event has this habit perverted or disturbed ? When the History was a new book, Walter Bagehot, a keen and by no means enthusiastic critic, referred to the almost universal ignorance which prevailed among the educated classes in England concerning the close of the seventeenth century. Such an idea seems to this gene- ration absolutely incredible. No period is better known now. Macaulay has formed and instructed the national opinion of events from the death of Charles II. to the Treaty of Ryswick. Is not that opinion substantially sound ? There is still an apologist of Jeffreys. There may be apologists of James. There are men and women, loyal subjects, who call themselves Jacobites, but the bulk of the nation, whether they have read his history or not, are on the side of Macaulay. Macaulay personified and almost exaggerated the Englishman's love of compromise, his abhorrence of despotism, his passion for liberty, his independence, his adherence to ancient usage and ceremony. A humbler and less accomplished person than Macaulay might have taught that substance was more important than form, that tyranny justified rebellion, that the best revolution was a bloodless one, and that to let a king run away is wiser than to cut off his head. What Macaulay did was to clothe these obvious truths in the most attractive shape, to illustrate them by splendid examples, and to display them in a narrative which can never be obsolete. The MACAULAY AND HIS CRITICS 303 trial of the seven bishops, though it raised legal points which are not without interest even now, really resolved itself into the question whether the jury would find for the king or for the people. Macaulay, while never losing sight of the main issue, has developed the course of the struggle in the King's Bench with such consum- mate art that knowledge of the event does not interfere with the enjoyment of the reader. No previous writer had done justice to William of ^ Orange. If Macaulay has done him rather more than justice, he has at least supplied a grave defect. The King was not a man who blew his own trumpet. His faults, unless we adopt the atrocious libels of Jacobite pamphleteers, were all on the surface. His manners were ungracious, his sagacity was concealed, and his only conspicuous virtue was a courage at which the bravest men sometimes marvelled. His campaigns were unfortunate, and what Marlborough did after his death he had himself failed to do. But William was the pioneer. The great danger to Europe at the end of the seventeenth century was Louis XIV., as the great danger to Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century was Napoleon. William III., in a fuller sense than William Pitt, was the pilot who weathered the storm. He realised before any other contemporary statesman that the base and ambitious charlatan who sat upon the throne of France, and was served by generals of whom he was quite unworthy, would de- stroy the liberties of mankind unless he were confronted by a Protestant coalition, which even he would be powerless to withstand. It was not love of England \ but hatred of Louis which animated the policy of the great King, the last Foreign Minister to wear a crown. Yet he was faithful to his trust, and was a far truer / 304 MEN AND LETTERS benefactor to the country of his adoption than the Plan- tagenet conquerors of the Middle Ages. Modern England has been said to date from the Civil War. It really dates from the Revolution which destroyed the personal power of the King. William's position was peculiar. A King with a recent and a Parliamentary title can afford to assert his legal prerogatives without exciting the suspicion that he is hostile to Parliament. William III. vetoed Bills, which was more than George III. ever ventured to do. But his influence was derived from the force of a strong character and the memory of recent benefits, not from the kingly office, which the Stuarts had degraded beyond hope of restora- tion in its old form. Macaulay had to trace the origin of the Cabinet, that secret committee which has become the governing body of the Empire. The King presided at Cabinets, and so did Queen Anne. The accident that George I. knew no English gave to the Ministers without the Sovereign the power which they have exercised ever since. The Sovereign is entitled to be informed of what passes in Cabinet, and to demand the collective opinion of the Ministers in writing. But by that opinion the Sovereign is bound, subject to the chance of finding another set of Ministers who will be supported by the House of Commons. Mr. Cotter Morison, who acquits Marlborough of treason and convicts Macaulay of misrepresentation on the utterly irrelevant ground that the French knew of the intended attack on Brest before Marlborough told them, was much delighted with a sentence he dis- covered in a letter from the historian to Macvey Napier : * I shall not be satisfied,' Macaulay wrote, ' unless I produce something which shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies.' MACAULAY AND HIS CRITICS 305 Mr. Morison triumphed greatly over this mare's nest. 1 This, then,' he exclaimed, 'was Macaulay's polestar by which he guided his historical argosy over the waters of the past — young ladies for readers, laying down the novel of the season to take up his History of England.' Prodigious. But does ' I shall not be satisfied unless ' mean ' I shall be satisfied if ? Did Mr. Morison ever read that other passage in which Macaulay said that he wrote with the year two thousand in view ? Mr. Mori- son was a great admirer of Gibbon. Gibbon, in his Autobiography, boasts that his first two volumes were on almost every toilet-table. Gibbon, then, I suppose, wrote exclusively for young ladies, especially the Greek quotations in the notes, and would have been quite satisfied to supersede the Castle of Otranto in its ephemeral fame. To such nonsense are clever men led by the fallacy which associates dulness with learning. No book serves better the functions of a mirror than Macaulay's History. To the shallow and superficial it appears superficial and shallow. But the more a man studies the period which Macaulay chose for his own, the more will he be struck by the historian's in.tstery of the most obscure episodes and the most m inute details. Even such well known works as the Lives of the Norths, and the political tracts of Lord Halifax, will show the mingled fidelity and skill with which Macaulay availed himself of his materials. Mr. Morison was unfortunate. He came, as Sancho Panza says, for wool, and went away shorn. He never lets poor Macaulay oil. In the diary of his travels in Italy Macaulay says of the church of Santa Croce at Florence that it had ' an ugly, mean outside,' and that ' there was UOt mui n to adiniie in the architecture within.' That this is so any one can bee for himself, and perhaps the x / 306 MEN AND LETTERS remark was not worth making. But Mr. Morison, thinking that all Italian churches were beautiful, or that Macaulay must be wrong on a matter of taste, prema- turely invoked ' the shade of Mr. Ruskin.' This was particularly unlucky. For, as Mr. Rawson Gardiner pointed out at the time, Mr. Ruskin has said, with pardonable exaggeration, that Santa Croce is the ugliest Gothic church in the world. It was not often that Ruskin and Macaulay agreed. The Essays stand, of course, upon a different foot- ing. A historian cannot complain of any criticism, however searching, relentless, and minute. But Essays are not history. Macaulay's Essays have secured a permanent place in literature against his will, and almost without his consent. Some of them, such as the Essay on History, the Essay on Mirabeau, and the Essay on Barere, were not republished, and never would have been republished, while he lived. For permitting the re-issue of the others he pleaded the appearance of an incorrect version in America over which he had no control, and he made a special apology for the Essay on Milton, which he wrote when he was twenty-five, but which made him famous. They were, in fact, what would now be called pot-boilers, and their author originally designed for them a life of three months each in the pages of the Edinburgh Review. But habent sua fata libelli. The blind Fury with the abhorred shears did not present herself at quarter-day, and the Essays have now survived the writer forty years, without any perceptible diminu- tion of their popularity. Some of them have been submitted to an exhaustively scientific dissection such as no similar works have ever been called upon to endure. The late James Spedding was one of the most learned and accomplished men of his time. He dedicated him- - MACAULAY AND HIS CRITICS 2>°7 self with passionate and disinterested enthusiasm to the study and defence of Bacon, whose works he edited, and whose Life he wrote. Mr. Spedding devoted two octavo volumes to an attack upon the first part, and the first part only, of Macaulay's Essay on Bacon. This book was written in the lifetime of Macaulay. It was not published till after the death of Mr. Spedding. It is called ' Evenings with a Reviewer.' Was such a com- pliment ever paid to a reviewer before or since ? Mr. £ hiding's principal object was to vindicate Bacon's memory from the charges of betraying Essex and of taking bribes. How far he has succeeded it is not for me to say. A more readable and instructive contribution to historical research it has seldom been my good fortune to meet. But it has, I think, one artistic defect. The form is that of a dialogue between A and B, the real persons being Spedding and Macaulay. It is, how- ever, a sham fight. The fictitious Macaulay has little or nothing to say for himself. The real Macaulay would have had a good deal. Mr. Spedding points out that Bacon took money from both parties to a suit, after which he decided in accordance with the law. This apology strikes me as rather ingenious than sound. To Macaulay's argument that Bacon must have known the difference between right and wrong as well as the House of Commons who impeached him and the House of Lords who condemned him, Mr. Spedding replied that bribery at elections was denounced in public and loned in private. But the moral difference between giving bribes and taking them cannot be altogeth? igno: The Essay thus treated by the first, though not tne most impartial, oi all authorities on Bacon was written in India by a busy Member ot Council with \eiy X — 2 308 MEN AND LETTERS imperfect materials at his command. The same cannot be said of the Essay on Warren Hastings, against which Sir James Fitzjames Stephen directed his heavy guns. Sir James was jealous for the purity of the judicial ermine, and he resented Macaulay's aspersions upon Sir Elijah Impey. This led him incidentally into a defence of Hastings, who was accused by Burke and Sheridan of conspiring with Impey to procure the conviction of Nuncomar. Fitzjames Stephen's two volumes are not quite so amusing as Mr. Spedding's, and the fact of their existence is perhaps not quite so complimentary to the Essayist. But they contain a very able attempt to prove that Hastings had nothing to do with the prosecution of Nuncomar, that the nominal prosecutor, a native, was also the real one, and that Impey, who had three puisne judges sitting with him, did no more than he was bound to do. It seems to me that a large part of this judicial apology for a judge is vitiated by the fallacy known as ignoratio elenchi. Most of the first volume is occupied with an elaborate argument that Nuncomar was guilty of felony by English law, which Macaulay does not deny. What Macaulay says is that it was monstrously cruel to hang a Hindoo for forgery, and it must be remembered that the judges had by statute the power of respiting the sentence. That Hastings instituted the proceedings against Nuncomar, Macaulay asserts without proving, and it cannot now, if it ever could, be proved. I think it must be admitted that in this Essay Macaulay assumed the Managers of the impeachment to be right, that he wrote, if one may say so, from their brief, and that he did not verify the facts by much original re- search. This would be a serious charge to bring against any part of the History. In reviewing Mr. Gleig's MACAULAY AND HIS CRITICS 309 book, Macaulay may pardonably have felt that a general and honest belief in the truth of the accusations against Hastings and Impey did not require to be substantiated by fresh and specific evidence. Sir Alfred Lyall has given the fairest account of the greatest man who ever ruled India. It was not the business of Hastings to be a saint or a hero, and he was unquestionably a statesman. Matthew Arnold disputed Macaulay's claim to be a poet, and most of his verses, such as the celebrated * Lays of Ancient Rome,' are undoubtedly rhetorical. But a definition of poetry which excludes the ' Epitaph on a Jacobite ' can hardly be sound. The lines which Macaulay composed after his defeat at Edinburgh in 1S47 are unequal, and may perhaps be open to the criticism that they exaggerate the loss of a seat. But their manliness and dignity, touched as they are with sincere emotion, give them a peculiar and personal interest of their own. Macaulay certainly had the poetic gift when he was young, as his Byronic ' Sermon in a Churchyard ' is enough to show. He was twenty- five when he wrote it, and one stanza will be read with interest, if only for the closing line : Here learn that all the griefs and joys, Which now torment, which now beguile, Are children's hurts, and children's toys, Scarce worthy of one bitter smile. Here learn that pulpit, throne, and press, Sword, sceptre, lyre, alike are frail, That science is a blind man's guess, And history a nurse's tale. Macaulay's cynicism was skin deep, and did not last long. Though he felt private griefs, and even such things as the marriage of a sister, which most people would not regard as griefs at all, with peculiar intensity, he was an incorrigible optimist in public affairs. This 3IO MEN AND LETTERS optimism pervades his History, and perhaps annoys more readers than his Whig principles or prejudices. It led Miss Martineau to make the blunt remark that he had no heart. How affectionate was his real nature every one now knows. His reflections on the death of Monmouth show that he felt, with the old Roman poet, how things had their tears. I mean, of course, the description of St. Peter's Chapel in the Tower, where Monmouth was buried. In truth there is no sadder spot on the earth than that little cemetery. Death is there associated not, as in Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's, with genius and virtue, with public veneration and imperishable renown ; not, as in our humblest churches and church- yards, with everything that is most endearing in social and domestic charities ; but with whatever is darkest in human nature and in human destiny ; with the savage triumph of implacable enemies ; with the inconstancy, the ingratitude, the cowardice of friends ; with all the miseries of fallen greatness and of blighted fame. Thither have been carried through successive ages, by the rude hands of gaolers, without one mourner following, the bleeding relics of men who had been the captains of armies, the leaders of parties, the oracles of senates, and the ornaments of courts. Thither was borne, before the window where Jane Grey was praying, the mangled corpse of Guilford Dudley. Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset and Protector of the Realm, reposes there by the brother whom he murdered. There has mouldered away the headless trunk of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester and Cardinal of St. Vitalis, a man worthy to have lived in a better age, and died in a better cause. There are laid John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, Lord High Admiral, and Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, Lord High Treasurer. There, too, is another Essex, on whom nature and fortune had lavished all their bounties in vain, and whom valour, grace, genius, royal favour, popular applause, conducted to an early and ignominious doom. Not far off sleep two chiefs of the great house of Howard, Thomas, fourth Duke of Norfolk, and Philip, eleventh Earl of Arundel. Here and there among the thick graves of unquiet and aspiring statesmen lie more delicate sufferers: Margaret of Salisbury, the last of the proud name of Plantagenet, and those two fair queens who perished by the jealous rage of Henry. Macaulay was a great historian, but he was not a historian alone. His History is a noble lesson in the principles of Constitutional freedom and respect for civil justice. The moral of it is contained in the celebrated MACAULAY AND HIS CRITICS 3 I I reply of Sergeant Maynard to the Prince of Orange. 'You must,' said William, 'have survived most of your contemporaries in the law.' ' Yes, sir, and if it had not been for your Highness I should have survived the law too.' Macaulay's life as a writer and as a politician was consecrated to the service of freedom. His style is far from perfect. It has often a hard sound and a metallic look. To say with Matthew Arnold that it has the per- petual semblance of hitting the right nail on the head without the reality is in my judgment absurd. Macaulay habitually hit the right nail on the head, and he did not, as Mr. Arnold sometimes did, knock out two tacks in the process. But there is always the semblance as well as the reality, and it is the reality without the semblance which charms us in the greatest writers of all. It would have been better for Macaulay if he had written less like Gibbon and more like Swift. But it was hard writing, and therefore it is easy reading. He worked to save his readers the trouble he took himself, and he deserves their gratitude as well as their admiration. •Mr. Scarlett a great lawyer? ' said the honest York- shireman, discussing the leaders of the Northern Circuit, ' why, he always has such easy cases.' To make a simple thing complicated will attract more praise from some critics than to make a complicated thing simple. Thackeray has described Macaulay's labour and its results with exquisite felicity. Take [he says] at hazard any three pages of the ' Essays, or the ry,' and shimmering below the stream of the narrative, as it were, y>u, an average reader, see one, two, three, a liall-scuri' of allusions that historic facts, characters, literature, poetry, with which jrou are acquainted. Why is that epithet used? Whence is that simile drawn f llnw does he manage, in two or three words, to paint an ridoalt oi to indicate a landscape? Your neighbour, who has his reading, and his little stock of literature stowed away in his mind, shall detect more points, allusions, happy touches, indicating not only the 312 MEN AND LETTERS prodigious memory and vast learning of this master, but the wonderful industry, the honest, humble, previous toil of this great scholar. He reads twenty books to write a sentence ; he travels a hundred miles to make a line of description. In one class of writing Macaulay was easily first. The short biographies of Atterbury, Bunyan, Goldsmith, Johnson, and Pitt, which he contributed to the Encyclo- pedia Britannica, are perfect models of artistic conden- sation. Yet, if I may say so, I can never forgive Macaulay for his cruel and unaccountable injustice to Mrs. Thrale. There is one point in which Macaulay, who had otherwise small reason to complain of fortune, did not receive his due while he was alive. Apart from his books, his chief service to mankind was the Indian Penal Code. Yet even after his death Miss Martineau could write : The story of that unhappy Code is well known. It is usually spoken of by Whig leaders as merely shelved, and ready for repro- duction at some time of leisure ; but the fact is that there is scarcely a definition that will stand the examination of lawyer or layman for an instant, and scarcely a description or provision through which a coach and horses may not be driven. All hope of Macaulay as a lawyer, and also as a philosopher, was over for any one who had seen that Code. Macaulay's Code is now the law throughout the length and breadth of British India. It is so clear that few legal difficulties have been raised on it, and hardly any amendments have been made in it. It has been pronounced by high authority superior in all essential particulars to the Penal Code of France, to the North German Code of 1871, and to Livingstone's famous Coda of Louisiana. The Code was drawn up by a Commission, of which Macaulay was only chairman. But no intelli- gent person can read a paragraph of it without perceiving from internal evidence that Macaulay was its real author. Few men of letters have done a more important bit of MACAULAY AND HIS CRITICS 313 practical work. But, of course, it is not as a legislator that Macaulay will be remembered. Sir George Trevelyan speaks of the sacrifices which he made to literature. They have been well repaid. One could as well imagine European history without Napoleon as English literature without Macaulay. March, 1900. THE AUTOCRAT OF THE DINNER TABLE •Y The seventy years of John Selden's life began with the England of the great Queen, and ended with the England of the great Protector. Mark Pattison re- garded him, not without reason, as a typical English- man. He was never out of England, but, as Ben Jonson said of him, though he stayed at home, he knew the world. His learning was prodigious, even for a learned age, and yet he was conspicuously practical, even in the practical art of politics. He was one of the few lawyers who attained great eminence in the House of Commons, and one of the few statesmen who ever held their own in an assembly of divines. His published writings, except the History of Tythes, are dead, and even the History of Tythes is only consulted by professional students. He wrote a style which can never have been read with pleasure, and can scarcely now be read at all. Stilus optimus magister dicendi, says Crassus in the De Oratore — ' The pen is the best master of speech.'* It was so with Cicero, it was so with Burke, it was so in our own day with Macaulay. But in Selden's case it was far otherwise. His pen had to be taken away from him before his mind could flow clearly and easily through natural channels. He lived, of course, long before the days of Parliamentary report- ing. But by the general consent of his contemporaries * The exact words are Stilus optimus et prce stantissimus dicendi effector et magister. They have the air in the dialogue of a familiar quotation, but I cannot indicate their original source. THE AUTOCRAT OF THE DINNER TABLE 3 I 5 he was one of the most powerful and effective debaters in Parliament. So, among others, says Clarendon, an unsparing critic of his books, and himself a consummate master of all the rich resources of our English tongue. Selden's speeches have perished, like Strafford's, and Eliot's, and Pym's. The happy accident which has preserved his Tabic Talk enables us to see for ourselves the immeasurable superiority of his spoken to his written word. Scarcely any book in the English language has a value so utterly disproportionate to its size. The duodecimo edition of 1847 can be carried comfortably in the pocket. The larger and more elaborate volume, brought out by the late Mr. Harvey Reynolds in 1892, contains only two hundred pages. These pages show us how an accomplished man, famous for his conver- sation, entertained his company more than two hundred and fifty years ago. The knowledge is priceless, and would be so even if the publication of the book thirty- four years after Selden's death had led to no direct result. But it is impossible to read Selden's witty aphorisms and brilliant illustrations without perceiving how much the great talker of the eighteenth century was indebted to the great talker of the seventeenth. It is no disparagement of a strong man's original force to say that Samuel Johnson derived his colloquial manner from John Selden. If Selden had lived in ordinary times, his career would have been uneventful, for he was neither adven- turous nor ambitious. Civil troubles forced him into prominence, and when he was compelled to take an active part in public affairs he showed that he was no timeserver, but a man of principle. He had the intel- lectual honesty which is to some men what morality or enthusiasm is to others. lie would not make a fool of 316 MEN AND LETTERS himself by saying what he knew to be untrue. In deference to King James he expressed regret for having argued that tithes were not payable by divine law. To retract the argument, to acknowledge himself in the wrong, he absolutely refused. Selden belonged to the middle class, which in this country more than in any other answers Aristotle's description, and acts as the bulwark of the State. He was a native of Sussex, and received his early education at the free school of Chi- chester. From Chichester he went to Oxford, with which for the remainder of his life he was destined to be connected. He matriculated at Hart Hall, and it is curious that this great scholar, who represented the University throughout the Long Parliament, took no degree. He was called to the Bar at the Inner Temple, and, so far as he adopted any profession, he adopted the profession of the law. But his heart was in study, and in the larger affairs of State. Two views of the law of England have come down to us from the seventeenth century. To Sir Edward Coke it was the perfection of human reason, to Oliver Cromwell it was a tortuous and ungodly jumble. Selden was too much of an anti- quary to agree with Cromwell, and too much of a philosopher to agree with Coke. He must very soon have mastered whatever the law-books of those days could teach him, and in legal learning he had no superior at the Bar or on the Bench. He was a conveyancer, and had a large amount of chamber practice. But he is said to have appeared in court only when his vast knowledge was required by some case of unusual character and special importance. He became, when he was quite a young man, steward to Henry Grey, ninth Earl of Kent, and his close connection with that family only ended with the death of the Countess, three THE AUTOCRAT OF THE DINNER TABLE 3 I 7 years before his own. One consequence of this appoint- ment was that he spent his vacations at Wrest, in Bedfordshire, Lord Kent's country house. Another was, that after the Earl's death he came to live at Lady Kent's townhouse, the Carmelites, in Whitefriars, where he kept his splendid library and his choice collection of Greek Marbles. If he was ever married at all, he was privately married to Lady Kent. Sir Edward Fry, from whose admirable article in the Dictionary of National Biography I have taken the facts of Selden's life, does not believe the story of the marriage. In any case, there was no scandal, which is creditable to the some- what censorious society of the time. Like Lord Mansfield, who in his youth ' drank champagne with the wits,' Selden enjoyed the best of good company from the first. He was the friend of Ben Johson, of Camden the famous author of Britannia, and of Sir Robert Cotton the antiquary, at whose house in Palace Yard he read and studied. His History of Tythes from the days of Melchisedec appeared in 16 17, and he soon discovered that England was not a free country. For denying what was called the jure divino- ship of the clerical tenth be was haled before the High Commission, and apologised lest worse should happen to him. He did not follow the example of Galileo by rai ting as error what he believed to be truth, but he submitted to the jurisdiction. The incident is thoroughly characteri tic Selden had a profound contempt for 'both the great vulvar and the small.' He did not care two straws what the High Commission thought about a matter of which th<-y knew nothing. He felt all the dilierence between his own learning and the learn- ing of King James. Lut he sincerely respected law and 01 • His mind Dot naturally speculative! 318 MEN AND LETTERS like the mind of his illustrious friend Thomas Hobbes, but practical and historical. If the Commissioners chose to talk nonsense, that was their affair. He sub- mitted to their authority without prejudice to his contempt for their understandings. Nor was he cast (few men are) in the heroic mould. When it was his duty to express an opinion, he never shrank from expressing it because it was dangerous or unpopular. But to go to prison for a theory of tithes he regarded as absurd, and as the times grew more turbulent he may have thought that the supply of martyrs was likely to exceed the demand. He was not, however, timid like Hobbes. He braved the wrath of King Charles by acting as a manager in the impeachment of Buckingham, and risked the vengeance of a Parlia- mentary majority by opposing the impeachment of Strafford. Nor did he always escape the penalty of his boldness. In 1629 he was committed to the Tower with Eliot, Holies, and six other Members of Parlia- ment. He was shifted from prison to prison, and was not finally released till 163 1. But it is a curious fact, as Sir Edward Fry points out, that he bore no malice against the King. He must have been a man of singularly even temper, cold but placable, never carried out of his way by enthusiasm or resentment, or by that passion for notoriety which has been the motive of so many otherwise inexplicable acts. Selden sat in Parliament successively for Lancaster, for Great Bedwin, for Ludgershall, and for the Univer- sity of Oxford. Soon after the meeting of the Long Parliament his colleague in the representation of the University died, his place was not filled up, and Selden became the sole representative. Never, before or since, has Oxford been better served. Devoted to the interests THE AUTOCRAT OF THE DINNER TABLE 3IQ of learning and education, he regarded with a jealous fondness the noble institution to which he belonged. In days of fierce faction, of revolution, of civil conflict, he preserved a judicial calmness almost inhuman in its austere severity. He would have liked to see the dispute between the King and the Parliament decided by four judges sitting in banc, if only the judges had been, as they afterwards became, independent of the Crown. lie had had the honour to be counsel for Hampden in 1627. He had the courage to refuse security for good behaviour when he and other Members where arraigned for words spoken in the House of Commons in 1629. But if he had had his way, he would have protected the legal rights of the Sovereign against the encroachments of the Commons, as he pro- tected the rights of the subject against legal tyranny. When politics sank into what he called a scuffle, and both parties appealed to the sword, Selden withdrew into privacy, and left them to fight it out. Even in 1642 he refused an offer to join the King at York. He was then fifty-eight, well provided with this world's goods, a lover of ease, and, as Clarendon says, would not have made a journey to York or slept out of his own bed for all the preferment at the disposal of the Crown. He was content and proud to have been ' one of the Parliament men imprisoned tertio Caroli.' That was as near martyrdom as he got or desired to get. He never held any office, and in 1645 he refused, perhaps from loyalty to Oxford, the Mastership of Trinity Hall, which has often been held by a lawyer, almost always by a layman. At the Westminster mbly of 1643 he was a prominent, if not alto-ether pular figure. He knew more theology than Lord Melbourne, and was even fonder of flinging it at the 320 MEN AND LETTERS heads of the Bishops. He had, with far deeper erudi- tion, the same caustic humour, and he played havoc with the Westminster Divines. • Perhaps it may be so,' he used to tell them, ' in your little pocket Bibles with gilt edges ; but the Hebrew (or the Greek) is so and so.' And so and so it remained to them, for very few of them could meet him on his own ground. They did not like to be taught by a scholar and a man of the world, who studied the Bible as he studied the classics ; but they had to put up with it, and the constitution of the Church which Parliament adopted from the Westminster Assembly is chiefly due to John Selden, Esquire, M.P. Selden was a Churchman, and I see no reason to doubt, with Mr. Harvey Reynolds, that he was, as Sir Matthew Hale described him, a ' resolved, serious Christian.' But he had more sympathy with the Presbyterians than with the High Church, and it was a fundamental principle of his creed that no eccle- siastical system was of divine origin. Christ, he held, taught religion and morality, not forms of discipline and administration. So far as they were concerned, all was as the State pleased. In short, he was a consistent, logical, unflinching Erastian, as all upholders of the connection between Church and State must, consciously or unconsciously, be. Selden's Table Talk covers the last twenty years of his life, from 1634 to 1654. It is probable that during most of that time he resided under Lady Kent's roof, occupying his own sumptuous apartments in her large and beautiful house near the Temple and the river. Though himself a man temperate in all things, he was extremely hospitable, and famous for his good dinners* His guests had better entertainment than food and wine, for there have been few such brilliant THE AUTOCRAT OF THE DINNER TABLE 32 I talkers as Selden. The crabbed English, and the still more crabbed Latin, of his books present a strange contrast to the racy vernacular of his delightful con- versation. A shrewd, cynical, sarcastic, but not un- kindly observer of men and things, he always went straight to the heart of his subject, and his command of humourous illustration was scarcely surpassed by Swift. I cannot help thinking that Mr. Reynolds was too severe upon his indecency. There are perhaps half a dozen passages which a delicate taste might censure. But we have no reason to suppose that they were uttered in the presence of women, and they are purity itself when compared with the habitual converse of the succeeding age. Of his alleged impiety there is no trace, though he handled ecclesiastical subjects with a homely freedom. From the superstitions of his time he was absolutely exempt, and nothing can be more delicious than his own account of the way in which by means of an amulet he cast out sham devils from a self- tormented friend. His secretary, Richard Milward, to whom we are indebted for these flashes of a master mind, observes that the origin of the sayings will be proved to all Selden's acquaintance by ' the familiar illustrations wherewith they are set off.' One of the most justly famous occurs under the heading of ' Bishops.' Selden's habitual tolerance broke down at Bishops. He had no use for them out of Par- liament, and even went so far as to deny that they were a separate order in the Church. One can easily imagine how a man like Selden must have been irritated by the fussy, domineering arrogance of the man whom Carlyle profanely calls W. Cant. The Long Parliament never did a more foolish thing than when they made a martyr of Laud. Y 322 MEN AND LETTERS ' The Bishops,' says Selden, * were too hasty, else with a discreet slowness they might have had what they aimed at. The old story of the fellow that told the gentleman he might get to such a place if he did not ride too fast would have fitted their turn.' And not their turn only. The apologue should be hung up, framed and glazed, in every public office, from the Colonial Office downwards. That is the best of Selden. He always sticks to the point, and yet he throws out pregnant hints for general application to human affairs. Festina lente looks like a frigid paradox, though it is not so. The story of the fellow that told the gentleman is • the wisdom of many, and the wit of one.' Selden's mind was essentially political — even more political than legal. He was under the personal in- fluence of Hobbes, though his ideal of constitutional monarchy was entirely opposed to Hobbes's absolute doctrines. Selden was certainly no democrat. He believed in the natural supremacy of the leisurely and educated classes, and he probably held that, as Bishop Horsley put it, more than a century later, the mass of the people had nothing to do with the laws except to obey them. Of Parliamentary freedom he was a devotee, but to the notion of self-government in its widest sense he was a stranger. Like a good Erastian, he desired the retention of the Bishops in the House of Lords, and stoutly maintained against all comers that they sat there by as good a right as the hereditary peers. • To take away Bishops' votes,' he said, ' is but the beginning to take them away ; for then they can be of no longer use to the King or State. 'Tis but like the little wimble to let in the greater auger.' It is amusing to find our old friend, the thin end of the wedge, in this early and rudimentary form. Selden's conception of a Bishop was rather like that of Lord Westbury, who said in the Judicial Committee, of Bishops Gray and Colenso, ' Both these ecclesiastical persons are creatures of the law.' For apostolical succession he did not care a rap. A Bishop not a Lord of Parliament was to him no Bishop at all, which of course implied that he had no faith in Episcopacy as a divine or even as a human institution. As a matter of historical fact he was right, and he lived to see it; for in 1646, by ordinance of Parliament, the ' name, title, style and dignity of Arch- bishop and Bishop were wholly taken away.' It is true that there are now Bishops, suffragans and others, who have no seats in the House of Lords, and that the Bishop of Sodor and Man never had a vote. But they are exceptions, and, in the true meaning of the Latin proverb, the existence of exceptions proves the existence of a rule. On another occasion Selden declared his own views with a dogmatic severity unusual in him. ' They are equally mad,' he exclaimed, who say Bishops are so jure divino that they must be continued, and they who say they are so anti-Christian that they must be put away. All is as the State likes.' It would have been a strong thing to affirm that all Roman Catholics and all Presbyterians were mad, or even unreasonable, which is what Selden meant. But he was a staunch Church of England man, regarding the Church as part of the Constitution, and he spoke as an ecclesiastical lawyer. The popular theology of his time was by no means to Selden's taste, and that is no doubt why he was accused of irreligion. He suffered in that as in other respects for \)f sing in advance of his age. He belonged as a theologian rather to the nineteenth century than to the seyenteenth, and would have found himself in perfect v — 2 324 MEN AND LETTERS agreement with Thirl wall or Stanley. His contrast between Christianity and Mahommedanism is curiously modern. The Turks tell their people of a heaven where there is a sensible pleasure, but of a hell where they shall suffer they do not know what. The Christians quite invert this order. They tell us of a hell where we shall feel sensible pain, but of a heaven where we shall enjoy we cannot tell what. Neither Milton nor Bunyan can be said altogether to have escaped the application of this caustic criticism. Selden had what the French call the positive spirit, which is sensible of its own limitations, and will not go beyond them. The imagination of his time, especially the Puritan imagination, ran riot in the wildest fancies of future woe for the enemies of the saints, and Selden, though a man of high character, must have been cons- cious that he was no saint. He was one of those who would rather live up to a comparatively low standard than fall short of a comparatively high one. He must have secretly sympathised with the young man in the parable who went away sorrowful because he had great possessions. He took the Englishman's love of com- promise into religion as well as into politics, and with the whole force of his nature he hated extremes. There are traces in his Table Talk of the Baconian temper, the grave, dignified, philosophic calm with which an intellect, unclouded by passion or prejudice, contem- plates the wild surging of ignorant enthusiasm in its desperate efforts to find truth where there is no road. 1 The laws of the Church are most favourable to the Church, because they were the Church's own making ; as the heralds are the best gentlemen, because they make their own pedigree.' This is an invaluable text for the Erastian in all times. It is also a perfect specimen of Selden's best manner. There is not a word THE AUTOCRAT OF THE DINNER TABLE 325 too much in it ; it condenses a whole theory into a couple of sentences, of which one is fact and the other illustration. In a regular treatise it would have to be expanded, or to be followed by a formal essay. In talk it is just as it should be. Selden had a singular gift of conversational completeness. He could sum up and dismiss a subject in a phrase which adhered to the memory while memory remained. Perhaps the talker who most resembled him in this particular was Talley- rand. The Duke of Wellington was once asked whether he considered Talleyrand to be good company. He replied that in the ordinary sense of the term he was not. * He would often,' added the Duke, sit silent for hours. But once or twice in an evening he would say something which you could not forget as long as you lived.' We do not know how large a share Selden took in the talk at his own dinner table. Probably it was much larger than Talleyrand's, and we only have scattered fragments of it in Mr. Milward's record. But we have quite enough to show us of what sort it was. It did not burst out in a torrent, like Johnson's, or flow in a rich volume like Coleridge's. Johnson owed much to Selden, but his own natural eloquence swept away all barriers. Selden kept his temper, and was not easily moved to sympathy or to indignation. He must have been, I think, a good listener, not be- cause he was patient of contradiction or ready to be convinced, but because he wished to have the last word. When he said a thing it was to be so. His natural dignity and acquired information gave him a legitimate advantage of which he must have been fully aware. Having compared Convocation with a court leet, Selden, like a good Protestant, turned his guns upon the 326 MEN AND LETTERS General Councils of the Church of Rome. ' They talk (but blasphemously enough) that the Holy Ghost is President of their General Councils, when the truth is, the odd man is still the Holy Ghost.' By the odd man he meant of course the majority. The charge of blasphemy might perhaps be retorted, though I think without reason, by those against whom it was directed. Selden, in com- mon with many men whose religion lies altogether below the surface, was disgusted by its unseasonable intrusion. It affronted his sense of reverence as much as it irritated his intellect to hear men say that an issue would be determined by inspiration when they knew that it would be determined by numbers. But it is true of this as of almost all his wise and pithy sayings, that they have an application far wider than that which he originally gave them. There is not much outward resemblance between a Council of the Church and a political convention in the United States. But a belief in the infallibility of the odd man is a political as well as a theological superstition. Those who support representative and democratic government merely as the fairest and most convenient method yet discovered for carrying out the will of a free people are beyond the reach of Selden's sarcasm. Yet it may be useful even for them to be reminded that the rule of majorities is an arrangement, not a principle, and that truth must often be on the losing side. Selden had too much of Horace's contempt for the unholy mob, who, after all, may be presumed to know their own minds and understand their own busi- ness. He did not always remember, though he knew, that there might be men as learned as himself without a hundredth part of his practical sagacity, and that, on the other hand, shrewd mother-wit is a safer guide through life than learning. A Conservative will not get THE AUTOCRAT OF THE DINNER TABLE 327 much good out of Selden, who will only strengthen him in his prejudices. But as a cooling medium for enthu- siastic democrats I venture to recommend the Table Talk. It would be interesting to know what Selden thought of James the First. He often quotes that highly edu- cated monarch, with whom he argued about the divine right of tithes and other matters. The right divine of kings to govern wrong was His Majesty's favourite tenet, and he believed also in the divine right of Episco- pacy, because, as he tersely said, ' No Bishop, no King.' Indeed. James's nation of his own attributes and of the sacrosanctity of the system which made him possible left little scope for the Governor of the Universe. Selden had old scores to pay off against the King, and he laughed at him after his death in a characteristic fashion by telling an anecdote. Henry the Fourth of France was killed, observes Selden, according to some, for his apostasy ; according to others, for his debauchery. ' No,' says King James (who could not abide fighting), 'he was killed for permitting duels in his kingdom.' •Commonly,' adds the table talker, 'we say judgment falls upon a man for something in him we cannot abide.' That is the secular and mundane version of the moral drawn for all time in the Gospels from the fall of the Tower of Siloam. In a homelier vein is ' Old friends are best. King James used to call for his old shoes; they were easiest for his feet.' That is all. Selden did not often elaborate, if we may trust, as surely we can trust, his constant friend and companion, Mr. Milward. He had not the fault of our English nation that when they have a good thing they make it too common. The wo; i most tiresome talkers are those who worry a subject to death. Selden threw out a hint, sometimes 328 MEN AND LETTERS shot a Parthian arrow, and passed on. He knew better than to deliver in conversation an essay on friendship. Everyone feels the comfort of old shoes. Selden was too fond of old shoes, too worldly a sage, too fond of peace and wealth. As he grew older he became more and more impressed with the sinfulness of being uncom- fortable. I can hear the impassioned moralist declaim against the low view of friendship which Selden's apophthegm implies. It was not intended to be ex- haustive, but to be suggestive. It was table talk. ' No man,' says Selden, • is the wiser for his learning.' He had a right to this paradox, and, as in all paradoxes worthy of the name, there is some truth in it. But it is difficult to conceive Selden apart from his learning, or to suppose that the inexhaustible wealth of illustration with which it supplied him did not suggest new ideas, besides enriching and adorning the old. Yet, on the other hand, we may say with confidence that Selden's wisdom is often most manifest in the homeliest images. Like Bacon he took a low view of marriage ; he called it a 'desperate thing,' and he had little respect for the minds of women. The frogs in ^Esop, he tells us, were exceeding wise, because they would not venture themselves into the well, although they longed to drink. That is rather a cheap form of cynicism, and below Selden's powers. On the other hand, nothing can be better than his example of the old truth that we measure the excellency of other men by some excellency we conceive to be in ourselves. ' Nash, a poet, poor enough (as poets used to be), seeing an alderman with his gold chain, upon his great horse, by way of scorn, said to one of his com- panions, " Do you see yon fellow, how goodly, how big he looks? Why, that fellow cannot make a blank verse." ' Selden goes on to preach a little sermon THE AUTOCRAT OF THE PINNER TABLE 329 against what is or was called Anthropomorphism, the only answer to which is that if we do not think of God in human terms we cannot think of Him at all. We know too well from daily experience that blank verse of a sort can be made by anyone, and we have had not only Aldermen but Lord Mayors who could ride to hounds. After Tennyson poverty can no longer be safely predicated of poets, and Ben Jonson, the admir- ing friend of Selden, was in easy circumstances. But poor Nash and irrelevant contempt are as perennial as human nature itself. Most of us have far more respect for Nash than we should have if he had envied the Alderman his great horse and his gold chain. He at least respected himself, and a blank verse of Shake- speare's or Milton's is worth all the gold chains in the world. Others of Selden's contemporaries were illogical besides poor Nash. Selden was an attentive critic of sermons, which he did not always hear with humble submission. ' Preachers,' says he, ' will bring anything into a text. The young Masters of Arts preached against non-residence in the University ; whereupon the Heads made an order that no man should meddle with anything but what was in the text. The next day one preached upon these words. Abraham begat Isaac; when he had gone a good way, at last he observed that Abraham was resident, for if he had been non-resident he could never have begot Isaac ; and so fell foul upon the non-residents.' Queen Elizabeth was a stickler for relevancy in sermons. She loved to tune the pulpits, and her famous * Stick to your text, Mr. Dean,' is historical. It is not perhaps unnatural that the clergy, having to connect their thoughts with a verse of scripture, which after all is limited, should sometimes 33° MEN AND LETTERS be in sore straits. * Hear the Church ' was very tempt- ing, and to leave out the condition as easy as lying. Archbishop Whately's pungent comment, ' I should like to hear that young man preach on " Hang all the law and the prophets," ' was quite in Selden's vein. I suspect that Selden, like many laymen, would have liked to preach himself, and that when he attended the Westminster Assembly the pent-up energies of years broke out in a flood which astonished the divines. ' For a man of the world,' said Burke, in reference to religious questions — ' for a man of the world, I have thought of these things.' Selden had thought, and read, and written on many ecclesiastical subjects. He was not to be taught by parsons, who were, as he reminded them, only 'persons' differently spelt. Mr. Reynolds has pointed out that he contradicted himself about their learning, which in one place he extols and in another denies. But substantially he agreed with Clarendon that they had bad judgment, and were unsafe guides in mundane affairs. Selden practised his own theories. One great merit of his talk is that it always goes straight to the point. His stories, like Lincoln's, are always told for a purpose, and never because he had a story to tell. Abraham Lincoln was probably the best story- teller known to fame. There may have been mute, inglorious Lincolns, who equalled him in that respect, if in no other way. But of Lincoln it was said, and of Lincoln only could it be said, that he illustrated by a story every argument he used, that he invented every story he told, and that he never told the same story twice. Selden's stories were not invented. He had a wonderful memory, upon which he drew freely, but he never dragged his anecdotes in by the head and ears, nor did he dilute them or spin them out. They are THE AUTOCRAT OF THE DINNER TABLE 33 I short, pithy, pointed, easy to remember, and impossible to misunderstand. The man who is determined to tell his favourite story or the last story he has heard, whether there be a legitimate opening for it or not, destroys conversation, and ought to be destroyed him- self. There should be a heavy social penalty for the use of the phrase ' By the way, that reminds me.' If a story does not explain itself, if its connection with the subject is not at once seen, both it and its narrator are social solecisms. Soli is their native town, although they never heard of it. The most profound and searching of all Selden's utterances is partly characteristic of his age, but far more characteristic of him. ' Aye or no never answered any question. The not distinguishing where things should be distinguished, and the not confounding where things should be confounded, is the cause of all the mistakes in the world.' One would give a good deal to know the precise occasion on which this deep and subtle remark was made. The when and the why, as Mr. Milward justly observes in his dedication to the Execu- tors, give these sentences the more life and the smarter relish. Unfortunately he did not supply the want, and to guess is futile. All we know is that a 'doubt' of some kind had been ' propounded.' It may have been whether monarchy was the best form of government, or whether a subject was justified in resisting his sovereign, or whether faith without works was more salutary than works without faith. But tantalising as our ignorance is, we can fall back upon the general truth of the ftpophthe 111. There are questions which answer them- selves, because they are questions only in form. Where there is a real dispute, aye or no raises more difficulties than it solves. It is easy to lay down universal propc- 332 MEN AND LETTERS sitions. The difficulty arises when we come to apply them. Selden lived in stirring times, full of action and speculation, when erroneous opinions might at any moment lead to some blunder which was worse than a crime. The impartial historian, if such a superhuman being were possible, could not acquit either the Court or the Parliament of serious and even fatal errors. They were both always answering aye or no to every question, until Charles lost his crown and his head because he would be a despot or nothing, and Cromwell, the vindi- cator of national rights, had to rule England without a Parliament by military force. They both confounded things which ought to be distinguished, and distin- guished things which ought to be confounded. In an age of political philosophy the voice of the philosopher was unheeded. It is, I am afraid, arguable that Selden was a luke- warm patriot. No man more thoroughly enjoyed that pleasure of looking down upon the errors of the vulgar which Lucretius has so magnificently described. Not that he had any ill-will to either party. He bore no malice, he harboured no feeling fiercer than contempt. Non quia vexari quemquam est jucunda voluptas, Sed quibus ipse malis careas quia cernere suave est. There is a tradition, not authentic, that at the close of Selden's life he wished he had been a justice of the peace, and in that humble way useful to his neighbours. He would certainly have been the wisest justice on the banks of Trent, or Thames. Such wishes are not to be taken seriously. But Selden might have had a great career as a sagacious statesman, guiding the counsels and moderating the zeal of the Parliamentary party. He deliberately turned from what became in his eyes a vulgar brawl. The 'great refusal* has never been THE AUTOCRAT OF THE DINNER TABLE 2)33 made with more dignity. Selden retained the respect of his old colleagues, and his funeral in the Temple Church was attended by the judges of the land. He died, as he had lived, plain John Selden, while his intellectual inferiors filled high offices of State. He wanted a quiet life ; he got it, and he paid for it. He has painted the situation in a quaint allegory : Wise men say nothing in dangerous times. The lion, you know, called the sheep to ask her if his breath smelt ; she said aye ; he bit off her head for a fool. He called a wolf and asked him ; he said no ; he tore him in pieces for a flatterer. At last he called the fox and asked him. Truly he had got a cold and could not smell. Selden's cold was chronic. During the period of these conversations the last civil war in England (except Monmouth's trumpery rebellion) was waged, Charles the First was executed, Oliver Cromwell became Protector of the realm. But to none of these events is there the smallest allusion in the talk of Selden's table. Such silence in private is amazing, and of course we do not know how much the secretary suppressed. But one can imagine that Selden, having definitely abandoned public life, would not care for such a pale simulacrum of it as talking politics with his friends. He had filled a great place, and there is nothing less dignified than a partial retirement ; or it may be that men of very different opinions came to his house, and that to content them all he adopted a cleanlier shift than Sir Robert Walpole's by talking of universal truths. Posterity would be un- grateful to quarrel with the result. Except Bacon's Essays there is hardly so rich a treasure-house of worldly wisdom in the English language as Selden's Table Talk. Some of it, indeed, is thoroughly Baconian, as ' Wit and wisdom differ ; wit is upon the sudden turn, wisdom is in bringing about ends.' But most of it is entirely his own, the mature thought of a princely intellect equally 334 MEN AND LETTERS at home in the book of the world and in the world of books. Johnson compared it with French collections of ana, such as the Menagiana, but it is intensely and charac- teristically English. Although Selden asks, Is there not enough to meddle withal upon the stage, or in love, or at the table, but religion ? ' religion was seldom out of his thoughts. He considered it as a statesman, not as a pietist, but he recognised its all-pervading influence on human affairs. An Erastian of the Erastians he was no materialist, like his friend Hobbes. He was indeed a typical Church of England man, as far removed from Geneva as from Rome. He did not shrink from the free handling of sacred subjects, and there was an element of brutality in some of his sledge-hammer attacks on cur- rent superstition. But if he had been the scoffing sceptic that some in fear of his knowledge dubbed him, so saintly a man as Sir Matthew Hale could not have called him a resolved, serious Christian. Coleridge complained of the lack of poetry in Selden, and this complaint is just. He was too much under the influence of reason, he had little or no imagination, and he underrated the force of senti- ment, religious or otherwise. The ridiculous aspect of things struck him so forcibly that it sometimes blinded him to their graver significance. Every man has his limitations, and these were his. But those who know best what good talk is will be the readiest to admire the incomparable excellence of Selden's. April i 1900. RECENT POETRY EOOKS BY STEPHEN HIILLIPS. 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