LIBRARY 
 
 -R- TY OP 
 
 C "J'A 
 
 S . i 3O 
 
 V..
 
 
 LITERARY TYPES
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 ESSAYS AND STUDIES, LITEBAEY AND HISTORICAL. Sm. 8vo., 
 1891. Wordsworth and Coleridge French Revolution Early English 
 Composers Goethe The Duke of Buckingham Historical Research, 
 etc. 
 
 " Well written and scholarly." Morning Post. 
 
 THE LIFE OF CHARLES I. FROM 1600-1625. 8vo. 1886. Portraits. 
 
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 "Evidently the result of extensive and profound studies." .SY. James' 
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 " With a thoroughness that is entirely admirable, Mr. Chancellor traces the 
 story of Richmond back to very remote days." Ccurt Journal.
 
 LITERARY TYPES 
 
 BEING 
 
 ESS A YS IN CRITICISM 
 
 V 
 
 E. BERESFORD CHANCELLOR, M.A. (Oxon.) 
 
 T. R. HIST. SOC. 
 
 "We cannot look, however imperfectly, upon a great man without gaining 
 something from him." Carlyle. 
 
 LONDON 
 
 SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO. 
 
 NEW YORK : MACMILLAN & CO. 
 1895
 
 PREFACE 
 
 I HAVE applied the title of " Literary Types " to 
 the following essays in criticism, because each 
 writer that I have treated of seems to me to 
 develop a particular phase in literary history. 
 
 Landor I have termed " Dramatist," not because 
 he wrote one or two plays, but because all the 
 literary work he did was essentially dramatic in 
 intention and execution. 
 
 I have appended the epithet of "Man of 
 Letters" to De Quincey for the reason that no 
 narrower term seems able to adequately express 
 his compass or versatility. 
 
 The words " Essayist," " Philosopher," and 
 "Novelist," apply naturally, without need of any 
 explanation here, f to Lamb, Carlyle, and Dickens. 
 
 A word is, perhaps, necessary to explain why I 
 have set down the name "Poet" as an epithet 
 distinctive of Coleridge, considering what I have 
 said of him in the following pages. I have done 
 so because he not only was a pre-eminent poet,
 
 vi PREFACE. 
 
 but because this is the title by which he is best 
 known. It is a fact, however, that he can be in- 
 cluded in so many other realms of thought that 
 this title is hardly sufficient to describe his claim 
 as a great man ; but if not a perfectly logical 
 definition, it is at least sufficient to distinguish 
 him from the others who here bear him company. 
 
 The great men I have here essayed to study 
 appear to me to have all had some higher aim 
 than the mere desire for literary fame, for they 
 all seem to hold with Marmontel that, "Le plus 
 digne objet de la litterature, le seul meme qui 
 1'ennoblesse et qui 1'honore, c'est son utilite' 
 morale ; " nor are they that sort of men who 
 sometimes, as Montaigne quaintly has it, " expect 
 to derive reputation and applause from little 
 knacks and frivolous subtleties." 
 
 In what I have said in criticism I have en- 
 deavoured not to be unduly partial, and as the 
 opinions I have ventilated have been inspired by 
 something more than a mere passing admiration 
 for the works of the great men I have written of 
 I trust that I shall not be accused of the opposite 
 fault of being, as Landor terms it, " a hasty 
 
 observer or a cold chronologist." 
 
 E. B. C. 
 
 ORCHARD ENE, 
 BEDFORD PARK, W.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 I. THOMAS DE QUINCEY MAN OF LETTERS . I 
 
 II. CHARLES LAMB ESSAYIST . . . . 29 
 
 III. THOMAS CARLYLE PHILOSOPHER . , . , 68 
 
 "WOTTON REINFRED" (A NOTE) ' : .- no 
 
 IV. WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR DRAMATIST 114 
 V. CHARLES DICKENS NOVELIST . . . 140 
 
 THE PATHOS OF, .DICKENS (A NOTE) . . v 164 
 
 VI. SAMUEL TAYLOR OOLERIDGE POET . . 172
 
 MY WIFE.
 
 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 MAN OF LETTERS. 
 
 '' He alone is worthy of respect who knows what is of use 
 to himself and others, and who labours to control his self- 
 will." Goethe. 
 
 DE QUINCEY'S personality is at once the most ex- 
 traordinary and the vaguest of any in the world of 
 English letters. He comes before us in his works 
 more distinctly than any other writer ; he is, as it 
 were, always present, and yet he is so shadowy, so 
 misunderstood, that; he seems to be at once the 
 medium and the spirit of his own literature. The 
 reason is less obvious than it would appear at first 
 sight. To say that he is too near us, that we 
 should get more distance on him, that we ought to 
 draw back and have the whole of his work and 
 character within the compass of our vision, is to
 
 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 use but empty phrases, mere commonplaces of 
 criticism ; others are nearer than he, and others are 
 better known ; they have no more distance on 
 them, and yet we understand them more accurately. 
 Neither is it that he is so overwhelmingly great, 
 although in this respect he is sufficiently formid- 
 able, and his light will shine brightly though fit- 
 fully when greater blazes have died out. What we 
 see of him is so fragmentary and so inconclusive 
 that he may not inaptly be termed the Will-o'-the- 
 wisp of literature. Doubtless it is well, as Goethe 
 once said, " If we want to understand and enjoy 
 the whole, that we should see it in its smallest 
 parts ; " but then we must be allowed, if we would 
 accurately estimate its value, to complete our in- 
 vestigations by viewing the object afterwards as a 
 whole ; and it is this that forms our chief difficulty 
 when we would adequately comprehend the life 
 and character of the " English Opium-eater." 
 
 Our materials are not inconsiderable, for, putting 
 aside the recognised Autobiography, which in 
 itself fills two volumes of Professor Masson's final 
 edition, 1 we have the man himself in all kinds of 
 reviews and essays, of his own and other men's 
 
 1 Besides this edition, which runs to fourteen volumes, 
 Mr. Hogg has edited two volumes of hitherto uncollected 
 writings of De Quincey's
 
 THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 3 
 
 writing; we have, moreover, Mr. Masson's mono- 
 graph and Mr. Page's "Life," both authoritative from 
 the fact that both writers were intimate with De 
 Quincey, and both interesting and instructive from 
 the personal abilities of the authors. So that what 
 is to be gleaned from facts and dates is easily 
 procurable, and were these all that is wanted, we 
 should not be unduly prepared to make the journey 
 into the unknown regions of De Quincey's life and 
 work ; but this is not all that constitutes the 
 necessary apparatus for setting out on the voyage 
 of discovery of a man's character and personality. 
 
 Autobiography is always the most untrustworthy 
 source to which we can go ; in fact, there is hardly 
 on record an autobiographical account of a man's 
 life which can be at all reckoned as wholly accurate ; 
 and apart from the works of art they produced, 
 Goethe and Cellini have done their worst in this 
 respect. A man may write down nothing that is 
 untrue of "his own life, indeed what he does set 
 down, if he follows truth sedulously, will be more 
 accurate than a mere biography could well be, but 
 he will almost inevitably suppress much that, were 
 it known, would materially alter our opinion of 
 the man and our estimate of his character. 1 Auto- 
 
 1 The writer does not mean these words to apply to that 
 extraordinary literary curiosity, the Autobiography of Marie
 
 4 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 biographies are, too, in another respect, misleading, 
 for there is in them such a glamour of truth notice- 
 able throughout that it is doubly difficult even 
 putting aside what is suppressed to estimate what 
 credence one should give to what is set down. 
 
 It is therefore rather to what has been written 
 about him than to what he has written about him- 
 self that the student of De Quincey's life must go, 
 if he would gain an accurate knowledge of the 
 actions and works of this great writer. 
 
 From his birth, in 1785, till the year 1803, in 
 which he went to Oxford, his life was a succession 
 of restless wanderings; throughout his career it 
 ceased to be little else, nor with such a tempera- 
 ment could it have failed to be. Changes of school, 
 a tour in Ireland, excursions into Wales, and 
 vagrancy in London ; all these different aspects of 
 life, not unaccompanied by adventures more or less 
 dramatically hit off in the Autobiography, gave a 
 colour to his imagination and a force to Lis in- 
 dependence which is generally the result of an 
 early encounter with the world under all kinds of 
 varied circumstances. 
 
 But as it is with De Quincey's works rather than 
 with himself, so far, of course, as the two can be 
 
 Bashkirtseff, a replica almost of the memoirs (written by 
 herself) of the "grand Mademoiselle," cousin to Louis XIV.
 
 THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 5 
 
 separated from one another, that we here have 
 more particularly to do, a quiet desultory glance 
 through his actions is only what is necessary, and 
 is all that will be attempted. 
 
 His father was a cultivated merchant, 1 travelling 
 much abroad, as was necessitated by the exi- 
 gencies of his profession, and for the same reason, 
 making prolonged stays in foreign countries; his 
 mother, if not exactly literary, was, at least, an 
 intelligent woman, perhaps to be reckoned intel- 
 lectual. So much misapprehension arises from the 
 hasty designation of a woman as literary, that it 
 seems almost necessary to be particular about the 
 precise adjective used. Whatever her higher gifts 
 may have been, she appears to have been lovable, 
 wise, and sensible, and the life at Greenhay, De 
 Quincey's early home, seems to have gone on 
 sufficiently smoothly until the day on which the 
 elder De Quincey returned home somewhat sud- 
 denly to die ; then all was hushed and still, and it 
 was Thomas who was selected to sifc by the couch 
 of his dying father, as his quiet manners and gentle 
 voice were peculiarly suited to the sick chamber. 
 
 1 He may probably be considered as literary since he wrote 
 a book an account of a tour he made in the Midland 
 Counties, in 1772, which was published three years later. 
 It forms an 8vo volume of 108 pages.
 
 6 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 First a tutor, the Rev. Mr. Samuel Hall, then Bath 
 Grammar School, and later a private seminary at 
 Winkfield in Wiltshire, were the educational centres 
 which prepared the way for Oxford. At all of 
 them he surprised by his eccentricity and astonished 
 by his aptitude. 
 
 The anticipation of Oxford fills him with a 
 grave sort of excitement, and we find him at first 
 determining to enter his name on the books of 
 Christ Church, but this resolution, through unfore- 
 seen circumstances, had eventually to be cancelled, 
 and he became an undergraduate at Worcester 
 College. 1 Of his life here very little is known ; he 
 is remembered chiefly as a quiet, studious man, 
 much frequenting the society of a certain German 
 named Schwartzburg, whose influence and society 
 may have given the bias to his mind which in- 
 duced him to study so fully the literature of the 
 Fatherland. But the most noticeable fact of his 
 academic career was the first use of that opium 
 which was destined to become so indissolubly con- 
 nected with his name. An internal disorder which 
 had eluded all attempts made to cure it, and which 
 
 1 His bust in marble, a replica of the one by Sir John 
 Steell, R.S.A., belonging to John Ritchie Findlay, Esq., 
 now forms one of the interesting objects in the dining-hall 
 of that college.
 
 THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 7 
 
 threatened to become chronic, was De Quincey's 
 reason for taking the drug in 1804, and what was 
 primarily used for the alleviation of pain was con- 
 tinued in response to, for a time at least, an uncon- 
 querable craving. He has left us, in the shape of 
 his " Confessions " of the phantasmagoria produced 
 by the fascinating narcotic, one of the most extra- 
 ordinary classics in the English language. 
 
 "The Confessions of an English Opium-eater" 
 first appeared in book form in 1822 (the enlarged 
 edition following so late as 1856). It had come 
 out in the previous year under the wing of the 
 London Magazine, in the form of three separate 
 articles, and, as was anticipated, had attracted 
 something more than a passing notice, no less from 
 the strange bizarrerie of the contents, than from 
 the anonymous position assumed by their author. 
 
 Seldom, indeed, if ever, have the sensations been 
 so minutely analysed or so graphically described. 
 In this work De Quincey appears as a kind of 
 spiritualised Rousseau, and the indescribable charm 
 which he could throw over everything he touched 
 gave to his " Confessions " an interest which, when 
 added to the strange nature of the work, became 
 quite vital and absorbing. 
 
 In a thousand ways De Quincey rivets our at- 
 tention ; the charm of style which is here is
 
 8 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 common to all his productions, but in this book the 
 unique nature of the matter gives it a more than 
 ordinary significance. No other writer can talk in 
 so easy and conversational a way, more clearly de- 
 monstrate the most abstract propositions, or clothe, 
 on occasion, his thoughts in more oriental imagery. 
 If he has a fault, it is that he is too diffuse, but 
 this which appears so marked in the autobiography 
 is subordinated or else introduced so skilfully in 
 the " Confessions " that its presence is in no part 
 felt to be a drawback. Whether he is enunciating 
 some abstract truth, as that, "the dread book of 
 account which the Scriptures speak of is, in fact, 
 the mind itself of each individual," or whether he 
 is tracing the sudden development and change in 
 his visions and their causes, as when he shows that 
 the study of Livy, and a minute acquaintance with 
 the times of Charles I. produced a vision in which 
 the beautiful ladies dancing at the court of the Stuart 
 monarch suddenly gave place to the " heart-quak- 
 ing sound of Consul Romanus," he is equally 
 felicitous and equally elaborate. For applying apt 
 quotations, and for introducing fitting poetical 
 commentary, he has as perfect an aptitude as 
 Charles Lamb himself. 
 
 The book is characterised throughout by that 
 eloquence and thorough knowledge and grasp of
 
 THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 9 
 
 the subject which is the hall-mark of all De 
 Quincey's work ; he never loses by breadth of 
 treatment what he possesses in depth of insight, 
 and it is his wide, nay, almost universal knowledge, 
 coupled with the sound and thorough way in 
 which he applies it, that makes him so perfect a 
 writer and so trustworthy an authority. De 
 Quincey's method proves, as has been said of the 
 eighteenth century essayists, that " Tis possible 
 to be eloquent without adjectives, and elegant 
 without affectation ; that to be brilliant you need 
 not necessarily be extravagant and conceited ; that 
 without being maudlin and sentimental it is not 
 beyond mortal capacity to be pathetic." l 
 
 Had the personality of its writer been a less 
 assertive one, the " Confessions " would still have 
 been a very curious and valuable \vork. 
 
 De Quincey used not only to highly elaborate 
 his original work, but to, as it were, embroider it 
 by numerous smaller additions in the shape of 
 short stories or dissertations. It is by no means a 
 unique attribute. It has certain advantages, but, 
 at the same time, it is apt to puzzle and bewilder, 
 and can hardly be said to fix the mind as a con- 
 tinuous narrative would not fail to do. 
 
 In the curiously oriental tale entitled "The 
 1 W. E. Henley in Views and Reviews.
 
 10 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 Daughter of Lebanon," De Quincey had intended 
 further to illustrate and amplify the " Confessions " 
 in this way ; the conclusion, however, having been 
 accidentally burnt or otherwise destroyed, this 
 story, which may be regarded, says Professor 
 Masson, "as a visionary transfiguration of that 
 poor Anne of Oxford Street, who is in a sort the 
 central personage of the ' Confessions,' " was placed 
 by De Quincey deliberately at their close as a kind 
 of not irrelevant sequel. There is, however, a want 
 of cohesion which greatly militates against the 
 success of this plan, and what he succeeded in 
 doing with another piece, " Suspiria de Profundis,'' 
 he has hardly been able to achieve with the 
 " Daughter of Lebanon." 1 
 
 A still more appropriate sequel to the " Con- 
 fessions " was, however, found in " Suspiria de 
 Profundis." 
 
 The " Suspiria " is divided into six sections, en- 
 titled respectively, " Dreaming," " The Palimpsest 
 of the Human Brain," "The Vision of Life," 
 " Memorial Suspiria," " Savannah-la-Mar," and 
 "Levassa and our Ladies of Sorrow." It is em- 
 
 1 The wonderful piece of word-painting called " The Eng- 
 lish Mail-coach " was originally intended to have formed part 
 of the same collection, an idea which was eventually aban- 
 doned.
 
 THOMAS DE QUINCEY. II 
 
 bellished by all the gorgeous word-painting and 
 glorious allegorical imagery which give such a dis- 
 tinctive character to the " Confessions." " The ob- 
 ject of that work was to reveal something of the 
 grandeur which belongs potentially to human 
 dreams," says its author. The " Suspiria " would 
 seem to have the intention of giving the clench to 
 the argument so ably formulated in the earlier 
 work. " Levassa and our Ladies of Sorrow," a par- 
 ticularly beautiful symbol or dream- legend, helped, 
 to use De Quincey's own words, to rehearse or pre- 
 figure the course of the " Confessions " ; and by in- 
 ternal evidence in his works, he seems to have 
 attached a particular value to this mythological 
 conception. 
 
 If the publication of the " Confessions " and the 
 " Suspiria de Profundis " astonished the reading 
 public, the articles which their author some time 
 after wrote, with the strange-sounding title, 
 " Murder considered as One of the Fine Arts," may 
 be said to have still further startled that public by 
 the nature of their subject, no less than by the 
 peculiar breadth of their treatment. It showed to 
 the world a humorist with a pen as trenchant and 
 an irony as bitter as ever Swift possessed. In a 
 rapid sketch, De Quincey gives a resume of some 
 celebrated cases of murder, and of the distinctive
 
 12 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 features of their perpetration, and then goes, with 
 the elaborate detaiJ which he alone had at com- 
 mand, into the cases of the Williams and M'Kean 
 murders. He touches lightly on the fearful Burke 
 and Hare crimes, which at one time spread terror 
 throughout the land, and he gives an amusing 
 account of a dinner given by the so-called 
 Dilettante Murderers. Who is not familiar with 
 that most exacting of amateurs " Toad-in-the- 
 Hole " ? But the height of terrific detail is reached 
 in the description of the baker creeping downstairs, 
 and seeing the villain Williams at his horrible 
 work ; when, paralysed with unspeakable terror, 
 the wretched man can neither shriek out, run to 
 his companion's help, or fly, even when a turn of 
 the murderer's shoulder ' would have exposed 
 another victim to his sight. As the author him- 
 self says, " The situation was tremendous, beyond 
 any that is on record." 
 
 We may imagine what a harrowing supplement- 
 ary chapter De Quincey would have added to what 
 he had already written had the atrocious Waine- 
 wright perpetrated his crimes at an earlier date ; 
 nothing in the annals of criminals could so have 
 appealed to a proper sense of the fine arts in this 
 direction, and, indeed, later (in 1848), in an article 
 on Charles Lamb, De Quincey devotes some pages
 
 THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 13 
 
 to the soi-distant litterateur and erstwhile profli- 
 gate and poisoner, the brilliant Janus Weather- 
 cock, with whom the gentle Elia was so favourably 
 prepossessed. 
 
 The connection with the London Magazine, 
 which commenced in 1821 with the " Confessions," 
 was in every way a profitable undertaking ; with 
 the exception, however, of an exceedingly able 
 paper on the writings of Jean Paul Friedrich 
 Richter, together with a translated specimen of his 
 work, followed later by the "Analects" from Richter, 
 De Quincey allowed more than a year to elapse 
 before he put forth anything more in its pages ; 
 but such had been the success of his original ven- 
 ture, that the proprietors of the Magazine were 
 only too glad to take an} T contribution he chose to 
 send them under his original nom-de-plume of 
 " The English Opium-eater," and in 1823, a re- 
 newed activity on De Quincey's part gave them 
 the opportunity. In the beginning of that year 
 appeared the first of the " Letters to a Young Man 
 whose Education has been neglected," a series of 
 epistles which was continued with but a single 
 break till the following June. The letters are in 
 all respects admirable, alike in their penetrating 
 and acute criticisms on literature as well as for the 
 large views and original suggestions in the matter
 
 14 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 of general education. They have, as well, an 
 amusing connection, for Lamb, a friend of, and 
 fellow contributor with De Quincey, was so struck 
 by what seemed to him the whimsical title of the 
 letters, that he wrote a parody on them, entitled 
 "Letters to an Old Gentleman whose Education 
 has been neglected," which likewise appeared in 
 the London Magazine of January, 1825, and are 
 now to be found collected in " Eliana." 
 
 The "Letters" were followed by "Notes from 
 the Pocket-book of a late Opium-eater," under 
 which general heading, " Walking Stewart," " Mal- 
 thus," " English Dictionaries," etc., had a place ; a 
 notice of Herder, under the title, " The Death of a 
 German Great Man," had appeared in the April 
 number, and filled up the gap caused by the 
 temporary discontinuance of the "Letters to a 
 Young Man." 
 
 In the following year, the " Inquiry into the 
 Origin of the Rosicrucians," and other papers, led 
 up to the more important article on Goethe, in 
 which De Quincey attempted to obscure the fame 
 of the greatest of literary Germans, and to sully 
 the reputation of his young translator, for the 
 paper was provoked by Carlyle's version of 
 "Wilhelm Meister." Personally friendly to 
 Carlyle, as he has owned himself, the critique was
 
 THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 15 
 
 a singularly ill-timed obstruction to one entering 
 on the path of literary life, but for us its main 
 interest lies in the attempt to traduce Goethe, and 
 to blacken the intentions of the man and the 
 tendency of his works. 
 
 In what he calls the " Gallery of Female Por- 
 traits," De Quincey examines each of the women 
 who figure in the novel, and finds them all frail 
 and faulty ; and from this argument he enunci- 
 ates the grossly irrelevant conclusion that the 
 " Wilhelm Meister " is the most objectionable of 
 books, and its author the most immoral of men. 
 
 It would be strange if, in the course of a long 
 review, even when that review is unfriendly, a man 
 like De Quincey did not find much to say that is 
 both original and true. At the same time, our 
 regard for the writer must not induce us to over- 
 look the fact that there is also much in it that is 
 mistaken and misleading. 
 
 It will be long before the English reading public 
 will be able to rightly estimate the debt they owe 
 to De Quincey in opening up the hitherto sealed 
 book of German literature. In this direction his 
 fame has become somewhat obscured by what 
 Carlyle has more recently done in the same direc- 
 tion. The difference in the methods of the two 
 men is striking. Carlyle wrote on German litera-
 
 16 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 ture, and translated German writers as we should 
 expect a German who had been most accurately 
 trained in our tongue, to do. De Quincey, on the 
 other hand, with an equal degree of knowledge, and 
 a similar love for his subject, wrote like an English- 
 man who had been profoundly impressed by the 
 beauties which he found in the Teutonic literature. 
 Carlyle seemed to work in this field because he was 
 overwhelmed by the ignorance of the English 
 people in this respect, De Quincey because he was 
 impressed by the charm of the literature itself. 
 
 With the publication of articles on " Kant's Idea 
 of a Universal History," on the "Falsification of 
 English History," and on a German novel, " Wai- 
 lad mor," a soi-distant production of the author of 
 "Waverley," De Quincey's connection with the 
 London Magazine seems to have suddenly 
 terminated, and after some wanderings between 
 London and Westmoreland, he got, through the 
 influence of Wilson, the Christopher North of the 
 "Noctes," a post on the staff of Blackwood's 
 Magazine. In this periodical he made his first 
 appearance with an article on " Lessing's Laocoon," 
 which was followed by "The Last Days of 
 Immanuel Kant," the famous essay on " Murder," 
 the " Toilette of a Hebrew Lady," another essay 
 on Kant, and his " Miscellaneous Essays."
 
 THOMAS DE QUINCEY. I? 
 
 The "Toilette of a Hebrew Lady," a curious 
 attempt to bring one phase of the vie-intime of 
 those far distant times within the ken of present 
 mental perception, illustrates at once the intimate 
 knowledge of the subject which De Quincey 
 possessed, as well as his graphic power of reproduc- 
 ing the reflex of that knowledge before our eyes. 
 From the close acquaintance he shows with the 
 usages and details of the costume of that period, 
 we might believe that we were reading a transcript 
 that had come down to us from a thousand years. 
 
 In his treatment of Kant he is at once perfectly 
 at home, and judiciously critical. He liked his 
 subject (to say he understood it would be but to 
 publish the secret of success of all his writings), 
 and he wrote thoroughly and well on it. He cannot 
 conceive how Kant should ever fail to interest the 
 world. " To suppose a reader thoroughly indif- 
 ferent to. Kant," he says, "is to suppose him 
 thoroughly unintellectual." " Peace be to his dust," 
 are his concluding words, " and to his memory ever- 
 lasting honour." 
 
 From a careful study of his works, we shall find 
 that the power of criticism was developed in De 
 Quincey in a greater degree than is usually the 
 case with men of purely original genius ; and if he 
 seems so " grossly irrelevant " in his estimate of
 
 1 8 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 " Wilhelm Meister," and so particularly biassed in his 
 admiration for Kant, we may be quite certain that 
 what he says on both these subjects, adverse or 
 otherwise, arose only after a thorough weighing of 
 the evidence on both sides, which left him perfectly 
 satisfied that what he wrote was only what was 
 just and true, and did not originate, as is so often 
 the case with critics, from any personal animosity 
 on the one hand, or any idea of irrelevant reclame 
 on the other. 1 It is this thorough straightforward- 
 ness and singleness of purpose in his writings 
 which makes his recollections of contemporary 
 writers at once so interesting and so valuable. 
 
 It was in 1807 that he first met Coleridge, 
 " Metaphysician, Logician, Bard," as Lamb calls 
 him, and by the profundity and range of the poet's 
 talk, De Quincey was astonished and delighted 
 beyond all his previous expectations. What we 
 learn from his writings on Coleridge, we are also 
 told by his biographer that "his veneration became 
 a kind of filial affection," and the " God-like fore- 
 head" of Coleridge, as Wordsworth called it, seemed 
 to De Quincey to belong to a God. Anyone who has 
 read the chapter on Coleridge in the Autobiography, 
 
 1 We must not, however, assume that because a man, how- 
 ever great, believes his own judgment to be correct, that it 
 is necessarily correct.
 
 THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 19 
 
 or the paper on "Coleridge and Opium-eating," will 
 not need to be told of the awe and reverence with 
 which he regarded the author of "Kubla Khan." 
 " This astonishing man, be it again remembered," 
 he says, " besides being an exquisite poet, a pro- 
 found political speculator, a philosophic student of 
 literature through all its chambers and recesses, 
 was also a circumnavigator on the most pathless 
 waters of scholasticism and metaphysics." 
 
 With what different feelings he first encountered 
 Wordsworth is observable in his paper on the 
 Lake Poets (erroneously so called). He had per- 
 haps anticipated too much ; he had prefigured, as 
 he himself tells us, an image which should crush 
 his faculties as before Elijah or St. Paul. This 
 was, indeed, but a commentary on his feelings for 
 the poet, which, if always informed with awe, were 
 never really sustained by veneration or love. The 
 harshness which so often characterised Words- 
 worth's demeanour, brought about the gradual 
 estrangement of which De Quincey has left a 
 written record. " Men of extraordinary genius 
 and force of mind," he concludes, " are far better as 
 objects for distant admiration than as daily com- 
 panions," and it was for this very reason that what 
 had primarily caused him to anticipate so much 
 enjoyment from the companionship of a great man
 
 2O LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 was in reality the very reason for that feeling of 
 despondency and unrest which he experienced on 
 his return to the lakes. 
 
 In his connection with another literary man, De 
 Quincey was more fortunate, and in the peaceful 
 good-humour and unselfish lovableness of the 
 gentle Elia, he found himself at once in the genial 
 element which Lamb seems to have invariably 
 spread around himself. "Amongst the earliest 
 literary acquaintances I made was that of the in- 
 imitable Charles Lamb ; inimitable I say, but the 
 word is too limited in its meaning," thus did De 
 Quincey in 1838 speak of the most exquisite of 
 essayists and best of men. 
 
 With Sou they he was on equally good terms, 
 for he equally understood the innate goodness of 
 the man, his thorough kindliness and love, which 
 " the air of distance and reserve " about him was 
 quite unable to shake or dispel. While allowing 
 that this reserve was perhaps a little too freezing, 
 he detects in it the elements of a "lofty self-re- 
 specting mind." How lovingly too he notes the 
 incessant toil and unwearied method to which 
 Southey subjected himself, and which has left him 
 the most industrious of literary men on record. 
 
 With a knowledge of the greatest of its inhabi- 
 tants, De Quincey combined a love for the Lake
 
 THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 21 
 
 District itself, which peeps out in all kinds of 
 affectionate recollections or passing notices; and his 
 paper on the dialect of that part of the country 
 which he contributed to the columns of the West- 
 moreland Gazette (he had previously offered it to 
 Wordsworth for insertion in his " Guide to the 
 Lakes," and it had been refused), shows how thor- 
 oughly he had made himself acquainted with this 
 phase of its social life, and in the " Confessions " 
 he tells how that little mountainous district had 
 for him " a secret fascination, subtle, sweet, fantas- 
 tic, and even from (his) seventh or eighth year 
 spiritually strong." 
 
 It is difficult, notwithstanding these words, to 
 estimate adequately what effect the scenery and 
 manifold associations of this beautiful country had 
 on De Quincey. That it was in no way inconsider- 
 able is very obvious ; for what had left so palpable 
 a mark on the-mental visions of Wordsworth and 
 Southey would Jmrdly fail to touch deeply the 
 sensibilities of one whose mind was equally im- 
 pressionable to all such influences. 
 
 To notice what results De Quincey has achieved 
 in the purely imaginative portion of his writings 
 is rather to develop our knowledge of another 
 side of his literary character than to open up any 
 particular interest in the productions themselves.
 
 22 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 Of the chief of them, " Klosterheim," the plot 
 and machinery are sufficiently extraordinary, but 
 they have, at the same time, with all their ex- 
 aggerated surroundings, a force and vigour which, 
 if not of much consequence when compared with 
 what Scott has left us, yet show an amount of 
 facility in this mode of writing which is in itself 
 another sign of the wonderful versatility which 
 its author possessed. 
 
 " Klosterheim," as does all De Quincey's work, 
 shows remarkable care in its style, and what Pro- 
 fessor Masson calls " a marble beauty of sentence" 
 attracts our attention and appeals rather to our intel- 
 lectual faculties than to our more cursory interest in 
 a work of fiction. Of his tales and novelettes, " The 
 Incognito " and " The King of Hay ti " are full of 
 clever humour. " The Dice : a Tale of Black Art 
 and Witchcraft," "The Fatal Marksman," which 
 has some not remote resemblance to "The Dice," 
 seems, with that tale, to have had its origin in the 
 German; but "The Avenger," a strange fantastic 
 story of secret murder, quite after its author's own 
 heart, is as original as it is bizarre. 
 
 "The Spanish Military Nun," founded on a 
 historical basis, is in De Quincey's best manner; 
 the happy mixture of mirth and earnestness which 
 he had so well at command makes it a tale which,
 
 THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 23 
 
 as has been remarked, has all the fascination 
 of one of the best of the picaroon romances of 
 Spain. 1 
 
 De Quincey seems to have left no branch of 
 literature untouched by the power of his treatment 
 or the beauty of his style. Whether he is examin- 
 ing the labour of others, as in his criticisms on 
 Schiller, Goethe, Lessing, Kant, and Landor; 
 whether he is formulating theories of criticism or 
 style, as in his papers on rhetoric, and his " Letters 
 to a Young Man ; " whether he is writing biography 
 or disentangling history ; whether he is immersed in 
 the depths of political economy, or raised up to the 
 altitudes of speculative philosophy and latter-day 
 theology, he is equally at home; and the success 
 with which he has brought to bear his universal 
 knowledge on every subject he has handled is only 
 equalled by the grace and tact with which he has 
 touched and ornamented them all. 
 
 As we commenced by observing, few men have 
 had their personal character so reflected in their 
 works as De Quincey. The same thought has been 
 suggested in the case of Landor, but here it is 
 evident in a much greater degree, and " the multi- 
 
 1 At a moment when most English romances gave the 
 idea that they were translated from the German, and badly 
 translated, this is good praise.
 
 24 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 fariousness of his matter is, in fact, but a mani- 
 festation of that peculiar personal character which 
 chanced in his case to be brought into the business 
 of literature." Setting out with a mind endowed 
 with an unusual degree of receptivity, he enhanced 
 its vigour and added to its capabilities by a course 
 of extensive reading in every branch of knowledge 
 which is almost without its parallel. It is not, 
 therefore, surprising that we find an American 
 reviewer marvelling at his " exquisite refinement 
 of mind, the subtleness of association, and the 
 extreme tenuity of the threads of thought, the 
 gossamer filaments yet finally wearing themselves 
 together, and thickening imperceptibly into a 
 strong and expanded web." 
 
 In himself he combined the attributes of several 
 individuals ; but this led to what is his chief fault 
 (there are those who consider it his greatest 
 charm), discursiveness, and with a mind endowed 
 with peculiar analytical power and an inventive 
 genius no less vigorous, he often so far allowed 
 himself to be carried beyond the pale of his subject 
 and permitted the subsidiary element to over- 
 whelm the primary motive, that some readers find 
 no little difficulty in following him. But if his 
 path makes so many detours, they are only detours, 
 and always come round, although, perchance, after
 
 THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 2$ 
 
 many windings, to the original destination he 
 had in view at starting. 
 
 If an analogy may be instituted between writers 
 and musicians, we should style De Quincey the 
 Mendelssohn of letters, for he strikes us as having 
 the same perfect command of his subject, the same 
 remarkable versatility, the same wonderful tech- 
 nique as the great composer ; a command, versa- 
 tility and technique which have given to 
 Mendelssohn the reputation of being the most 
 perfectly cultured of all musical exponents. 1 
 
 De Quincey's personal appearance has been often 
 described, and, as is not frequently the case with 
 such pen-portraitures, these descriptions tally with 
 one another in a very satisfactory degree. Cari- 
 cature, in writing as well as in drawing, gives us 
 often a better idea of the subject than we should 
 get by a more faithful delineation, and in this 
 respect the " Papaverius " of Burton's " Book 
 Hunter " is an untying portraiture of our author. 
 In this description we note the attenuated figure, 
 relieved in a remarkable degree by the wonderful 
 expression of the face with its broad and high 
 forehead, the cheeks crimsoned by a bloom, at first 
 
 1 " De Quincey's style is superb, his powers of reasoning 
 unsurpassed, his imagination is warm and brilliant, and his 
 humour both masculine and delicate," said the Quarterly 
 Beview.
 
 26 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 sight suggestive of youth, but by nearer scrutiny 
 found to be the result of " countless little wrinkles 
 which engrained his skin, gathering thickly round 
 the curiously expressive and subtle lips," but 
 which could be more remotely traced to the use of 
 opium. Other personal recollections dwell upon 
 the strange, misty dark eyes with their dilated 
 iris, curiously belieing the powerful sight which 
 remained intact till De Quincey's death. 
 
 A short man, for he did not stand more than 5 
 feet 3 or 4 inches, yet in this " strangely fragile, 
 unsubstantial and puerile figure " resided one of 
 the most potent and original spirits that ever 
 frequented a tenement of clay. 
 
 In his manner, he curiously combined the eccen- 
 tricity usually associated with genius and the 
 kindness and urbanity of a highly polished nature. 1 
 " No one who ever met De Quincey could fail to 
 be struck, even after the briefest intercourse, 
 with the extreme sweetness and courtesy of his 
 
 1 Professor Wilson has not infelicitously caught De 
 Quincey's conversational manner in the 23rd of the "Noctes," 
 and the " Shepherd " is made to describe the " Opium-eater" 
 by the two words, urbanity and amenity, " meaning by the 
 first," as he says, " that soft bricht polish that a man gets by 
 leevin' among gentlemen scholars in towns and cities, and 
 by the ither, a peculiar sweetness, amaist like that o' a 
 woman, yet sae far frae bein' feminine, as masculine as that 
 o 1 Allan Ramsay's ain ' Gentle Shepherd.' "
 
 THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 2/ 
 
 manners," says Mr. Findlay in his " Personal Re- 
 collections " of the writer. 
 
 His conversation must have been of that 
 exquisite kind which consists in possessing, in an 
 equal degree, the rare power of listening patiently, 
 and of talking well. He did not dogmatise like 
 Johnson, or monopolise time and attention like 
 Macaulay. He was not always preaching like 
 Coleridge, or punning like Lamb. Never rising to 
 declamation, or descending to tragic diminuendo, 
 his talk seems to have flown on in a gentle ripple, 
 teeming with apt metaphor, loaded with apposite 
 illustration, full of learning and genius, but so 
 simple and direct that only the clever knew how 
 learned it was, and even the dull confessed it 
 pleasing. As it has been expressed, " When he 
 ended he did not seem to pause so much as to 
 perorate." 
 
 The position w.hich De Quincey holds in the 
 literature of this land is a high and an assured 
 one, but it is probable that for the general public 
 he will be admired without being thoroughly 
 understood. He is too apt to make us dissatisfied 
 with our own knowledge by unconsciously bring- 
 ing forward so many evidences of his own vast 
 learning. 
 
 It is for this reason that his true worth will
 
 28 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 only be adequately recognised by the esoteric 
 audience which such a man cannot fail to gather 
 round him ; by it he will be fully appreciated, 
 because the nearer one approaches De Quincey, 
 the greater will be one's admiration, and the 
 stronger one's love.
 
 Charles Xamb, 
 
 ESSAYIST. 
 
 " Beloved beyond all names of English birth, 
 More dear than mightier memories ; gentlest name 
 That ever clothed itself with flower-sweet fame, 
 Or linked itself with loftiest names of old 
 By right and might of loving ; I, that am 
 Less than the least of those within thy fold, 
 Give only thanks for them to thee, Charles Lamb." 
 
 Swinbtirne. 
 
 IN the whole range of English literature we shall 
 hardly find a single writer who, with so little 
 apparent effort, charms us so much as Charles 
 Lamb. De Quincey may be more elaborate, 
 Macaulay more grandiose, Leigh Hunt more 
 polished, and Landor more " marmoreally empha- 
 tic," but none can stir our intellect more than the 
 gentle Elia, and none can so surely touch our 
 hearts. It is now over a hundred years ago since 
 he first saw the light. " I was born, and passed 
 the first seven years of my life in the Temple. Its 
 church, its halls, its garden, its fountain, its river I 
 had almost said, for in those young years, what 
 
 was this king of rivers to me but a stream that 
 
 29
 
 30 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 watered our pleasant places ? These are my oldest 
 recollections." It is over a hundred years, we say, 
 and yet his memory is as green, and our love for 
 him as tender as if he belonged to our own time. 
 We speak of him as we should of some dear 
 friend who was, indeed, lost to us, but who, 
 when living, had done us all individually some 
 kind action, who had continually raised some 
 laugh of merriment, or alleviated some sigh of 
 grief. This tender feeling of regard which he 
 inspires chiefly arises from the charm and sim- 
 plicity with which he communicates his thoughts, 
 and in a lesser degree from the semi-autobio- 
 graphical garb in which they are clothed. We say 
 advisedly " in a lesser degree," for these autobio- 
 graphical notices, beginning with the passage we 
 have quoted, and running almost continuously 
 throughout all the essays, have a literary, but 
 hardly a true, historical value ; undoubtedly, the 
 personal element forms so large a proportion of 
 them that an interesting biography might alone 
 be compiled from these materials ; but Lamb so 
 modified and transformed his experiences in order 
 to produce a good artistic effect, that it is a some- 
 what difficult matter to properly discriminate 
 between what may be received as true and what 
 discarded as false. But apart from this regular
 
 CHARLES LAMB. 31 
 
 autobiographical aspect, few men's lives have been 
 so accurately reflected in their works as that of the 
 kindly essayist whose days were o'ershadowed by 
 the burden of as great a sorrow as man can be 
 destined to bear. 
 
 If we are ready to acknowledge that too full an in- 
 dulgence in sorrow is often selfishness, and that too 
 much grief has in it a spirit of irreverence, then we 
 shall be more able to properly estimate the true worth 
 of Lamb's private life. There is always a flavour 
 of melancholy running, sometimes, it is true, well- 
 nigh imperceptibly, through his writings, but it is 
 a melancholy so tempered by sweetness and 
 humour that we hardly realise it ourselves, and we 
 feel that its presence was almost unconsciously the 
 outcome of its author's inmost feelings. 
 
 We hear a good deal of Lamb's levity of manner, 
 and of his turning whatever was suggested by 
 conversation into -quips and jests. But when we 
 know his story, his t life of noble unselfishness, his 
 more than fraternal love, we shall find something 
 pathetic in these little innocent attempts to stifle 
 remembrance or to obliterate the ever-present 
 sorrow. We shall certainly not agree with Carlyle, 
 who, more than once, found fault with Lamb for 
 his misplaced levity and irreverent jests, as being 
 an ill example to younger men, who had to live
 
 32 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 their lives in a world that was altogether serious. 
 But the sage of Chelsea was not always fair in his 
 judgment. The young men he speaks of must 
 have been singularly wicked young men if the 
 harmless jokes of the gentle essayist created a dis- 
 turbance in their feeble minds; a very dangerously 
 combustible young man forsooth, who would be 
 hastened away into nether darkness by the inno- 
 cent facetiae of Elia ! Such a young man, indeed, 
 as we hope never existed outside the atrabiliar 
 mind of Carlyle himself. 
 
 There was, too, another reason for what seemed 
 to many of Lamb's intimate friends ill-timed jest- 
 ing. Like many constitutionally nervous people, 
 he had a way, particularly in the presence of 
 strangers, of trying to disguise his real feelings 
 concerning any topic that might turn up in con- 
 versation, by making jests upon it, and oftener by 
 directly attempting to lead away the talk to alien 
 subjects of a frivolous nature. In fact, this phase 
 of his character was rather the outcome of an in- 
 firmity than of a fault. Very unfortunately, so 
 much has been written about Lamb by people who 
 had seen him under these disadvantageous circum- 
 stances, 1 that to those who had not studied his 
 
 1 " Often as his sportive sallies seemed to border on what 
 appeared irreverent, and to some rigid people the verge of
 
 CHARLES LAMB. 33 
 
 mind more deeply, these little idiosyncrasies ap- 
 peared to reveal the real nature of the man, whereas 
 they were in reality a form of nervous eccentricity, 
 brought about by certain circumstances acting too 
 forcibly on a particularly nervous temperament. 
 It was this tendency that moved him to delight 
 in innocently perverting the real incidents he 
 writes on, in his Essays and elsewhere, and Canon 
 Ainger has recorded how, " There was a certain 
 waywardness or love of practical joking in Charles 
 Lamb that led him often to treat matters of fact 
 with deliberate falsification." As an illustration 
 of this eccentricity as it affected him in his rela- 
 tions with his friends, the immortal story of the 
 " Comptroller of Stamps," will be remembered ; for 
 an example of how it occurs in his writings let the 
 curious read that delightful bit of literary fooling, 
 called " Postscript to the Chapter on 'Ears,' " which 
 is included in " Elhina." 
 
 It was of no small advantage to the poor honest 
 household of the Lambs when Charles obtained, 
 through the kind offices of a gentleman by name 
 of Yeates, a presentation to Christ's Hospital. He 
 remained a Blue-coat Boy from 1782 till 1789. 
 
 profanity, I am disposed to acquit him of all intentional 
 offence of that kind," says the Quaker Barton in a letter to 
 a friend. 
 
 c
 
 34 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 A day school kept by one Bird, who is spoken of 
 as " an eminent writer and teacher of languages," 
 prepared him, but, as it seems, in a very perf unc- 
 tionary way, for the public school, since Lamb's 
 comment afterwards on this elogium on Bird's 
 school was : " Heaven knows what languages were 
 taught in it then ! I am sure that neither my 
 sister nor myself brought any out of it, but a little 
 of our native English." 
 
 In " Recollections of Christ's Hospital," and 
 more particularly in " Christ's Hospital Five-and- 
 Thirty Years Ago," Lamb has left probably the 
 most accurate of his autobiographical writings, 
 and with a list of exhibitioners before us we are 
 able to verify his school companions by name, 
 which in the Essays are mostly only conjecturable 
 by initial. 1 In another essay, that " On Witches 
 and other Night Fears," he tells us how alive to 
 
 1 Thus the " Th." who "since fulfilled with ability vari- 
 ous diplomatic functions at the Northern Courts," was 
 Edward Thornton. The "0. V. Le G." of the "Wit 
 Combats," was Charles Valentine Le Grice, who was living 
 near Penzance so late as 1837. The junior "Le G." and 
 "F." were respectively young Le Grice and Farell, both of 
 whom died in the Peninsular War ; and, finally, in the fine, 
 frank-hearted "F." we are able to recognise Frederick 
 William Franklin, some time Master of Hertford School, and 
 in "Marmaduke T.,' J mildest of missionaries, Thompson, 
 who graduated at Pembroke College, Cambridge.
 
 CHARLES LAMB. 35 
 
 nervous terrors he was, and how sensitive and 
 superstitious. Nothing could more truly paint the 
 gentleness and charm of his manners than the fact 
 that he who was " small of stature, delicate of 
 frame, and constitutionally nervous and timid," 
 should have found the favour he did with his 
 school companions. How he looked at this period 
 has been well described by a contemporary. 
 " Lamb was an amiable, gentle boy," says Mr. Le 
 Grice, the schoolfellow mentioned in the footnote, 
 and of whom Lamb makes affectionate mention in 
 his " Recollections of Christ's Hospital," " very 
 sensible and keenly observing, indulged by his 
 schoolfellows and by his master on account of his 
 infirmity of speech. His countenance was mild ; 
 his complexion clear brown, with an expression 
 which might lead you to think he was of Jewish 
 descent. 1 His eyes were not each of the same colour; 
 one was hazel, the other had specks of grey in the 
 iris, mingled as we see red spots in the blood- 
 stone. His step was plantigrade, which made his 
 walk slow and peculiar, adding to the staid appear- 
 ance of his figure." In Lamb's recollections of his 
 own school days, he could not resist a little bit of 
 
 1 His well-known remark on Braham the singer, that he 
 was a compound of the Jew, the gentleman, and the angel, 
 might apply to Elia himself.
 
 36 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 humorous pleasantry for having written his first 
 paper on Christ's Hospital under his own name in 
 1818, and afterwards considering that it had been, 
 perhaps, too one-sided, he supplemented it by a 
 second essay, two years later, under his nom-de- 
 plume of Elia, in which he pretends to correct and 
 otherwise modify the work of " Mr. Lamb." 
 
 What makes the school days of Elia so interest- 
 ing to us now, and what at the time gave so de- 
 cided a bias to his mind, although in this connec- 
 tion Talfourd goes, perhaps, beyond the mark 
 when he assigns to its influence all that Lamb has 
 added to the world's source of pleasure, was his 
 friendship, carried on almost uninterruptedly till 
 the poet's death, with Coleridge. No two minds 
 could, in most essentials, have differed more thor- 
 oughly, yet no two men have been drawn together 
 by closer bonds of sympathy and love. Their 
 religious belief and those opinions which turn the 
 higher philosophy into a kind of idealised religion, 
 were identical; both were Unitarians, believing 
 in the writings of Priestley and his doctrine of 
 necessity. No impulse produces so sure a connec- 
 tion between men as identity of religious belief, 
 and we can imagine the effect of one of Coleridge's 
 dissertations on " fate, free will, fore-knowledge 
 absolute," on the simple-minded, sensitive Elia.
 
 CHARLES LAMB. 37 
 
 " Did you ever hear me preach, Charles ? " once 
 asked the metaphysician. 
 
 " I've never heard you do anything else," was the 
 humorous reply. 1 
 
 What Coleridge's influence may, without ques- 
 tion, be credited with, was its quickening power on 
 the latent genius which lay hidden in his friend's 
 mind. As the poet himself had been touched by 
 the sonnets of Bowles, so Lamb was charmed, and, 
 more particularly in his excursions into verse, in- 
 fluenced by the subtler intellect and nobler thought 
 of Coleridge. 
 
 Almost immediately after his removal from 
 Christ's Hospital, Lamb entered a post of some kind 
 in the South Sea House, concerning which period 
 no authority remains to us except his essay entitled, 
 " The South Sea House." " A magnificent relic," he 
 calls it, and its clerks, he adds, " partook of the 
 genius of the place." Not long after, however, he 
 went to the East India House, and there remained 
 a sober and diligent worker, with a continually in- 
 creasing salary till within about nine years of his 
 death. 
 
 1 This is what De Quincey means when he speaks of 
 Lamb's " talent for saying keen, pointed things, sudden 
 flashes, or revelations of hidden truths, in a short condensed 
 form of words."
 
 38 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 Of his relations, his bedridden mother, his 
 superannuated father, " a very tyrant at cribbage," 
 as he himself has recorded, his brother, twelve 
 years older than himself, and his sister Mary, the 
 afflicted companion of his life, Elia has told us in 
 more than one delightful essay. Of all his recol- 
 lections of his earlier years, there is nothing more 
 pathetic than his account of the terrible calamity 
 that so suddenly befell him. " God has preserved 
 me to my senses," he says, as if that power of 
 realising his misfortune was the one attribute 
 saved from the general wreck of a lifetime's as- 
 sociations. " My poor, dear, dearest sister, the 
 unhappy and unconscious instrument of the 
 Almighty's judgment on our house," is the affecting 
 way in which he on another occasion refers to her. 
 Time, the great consoler, did for him what no 
 human aid could have effected, and if he could not 
 say in the words of Spenser, 
 
 " Time and sufficed fates to former kynd 
 Shall us restore," 
 
 yet he could bear witness to the fact that it had 
 enabled him to anticipate with patience the ever- 
 recurring phases of madness in his beloved sister, 
 and to remember with fortitude the grief con- 
 sequent on the death of his mother ; and the self-
 
 CHARLES LAMB. 39 
 
 devotion with which he watched over his sister to 
 the exclusion of all thoughts of self-interest or of 
 pleasure, affords a picture without its parallel in 
 the annals of literary history. Who can forget the 
 tale which tells of how, on one occasion, Charles 
 Lloyd met the brother and sister, in the fields near 
 Iloxton, walking hand in hand, and weeping bitterly, 
 for the fatal madness had given its usual premonitory 
 signs, and they were going towards the asylum. 
 
 Lamb's poetical works, although it was in this 
 branch of literature that he took his initiating 
 step, were never calculated to stamp their author as 
 a poetical genius. What he owed to Coleridge 1 
 was probably more reflected in his verse than in 
 anything else ; although, as it has been remarked, 
 " it was no faint reflection of Coleridge's, but was 
 streaked with delicate yet distinct traits, which 
 proved it an emanation from within." But this 
 can only be accurately predicated of some of his 
 choicest pieces, and although his verse was un- 
 doubtedly too unjustly sneered at by the reviews, 
 the criticisms of which about this period were a 
 good deal more personal than critical, 2 yet it is to 
 
 1 The influence of Coleridge is particularly noticeable In 
 the sonnet, " Written at Midnight by the Sea-side after a 
 Voyage." 
 
 2u We deal not in reasonings, but in assertions," says
 
 4O LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 some of his miscellaneous pieces such as " Hester," 
 with its more than beautiful eight concluding lines, 
 " The Farewell to Tobacco," written, as he con- 
 fessed to Wordsworth, in the metre and, to a great 
 extent, in the manner of his favourite, Withers, 
 " On an Infant Dying as soon as Born," written 
 over twenty years later than these, but especially 
 to that most beautifully tender and touching piece 
 called, " The Old Familiar Faces," in which every 
 verse (curious three-lined unrhymed stanzas) seems 
 to bring before our eyes some particular scene from 
 the life of its author, that we must turn, if we 
 would properly estimate his true position among 
 the minor poets. The lines, 
 
 " I had a friend, a kinder friend has no man, 
 Like an ingrate I left my friend abruptly ! " 
 
 refer to a momentary difference which had for 
 some time estranged him from Coleridge. Canon 
 Ainger thus gives the cause of this temporary 
 quarrel : " When Coleridge was on the eve of his 
 visit to Germany, a foolish message of his, ' If 
 Lamb requires any knowledge, let him apply to 
 me/ had been repeated to Lamb by some in- 
 
 Professor Wilson in the Edinburgh Review. He says it, it is 
 true, facetiously, but it is a case of there being " many a true 
 word spoken in jest."
 
 CHARLES LAMB. 4! 
 
 judicious friend, and did not tend to improve 
 matters. Lamb retaliated by sending Coleridge a 
 grimly humorous list of 'Theses qusedam Theo- 
 logicee,' to be by him ' defended or oppugned (or 
 both) at Leipsic or Gottingen.' Numbers five 
 and six in this list may be given as a sample 
 ' Whether the higher order of the seraphim illum- 
 inati ever sneer ? ' ' Whether pure intelligences can 
 love, or whether they can love anything besides 
 pure intellect ? ' The rest are in the same vein, 
 and if they have any point at all, it cannot lie in 
 an allusion to certain airs of lofty superiority in 
 which Coleridge had indulged to the annoyance of 
 his friend." " The friend of my bosom, thou more 
 than a brother," seems to have been Lloyd, who for 
 a time filled the place in Lamb's regard left vacant 
 by Coleridge. 
 
 In spite of Coleridge's friendly note, in the 
 volume of. poetry published conjointly by the 
 friends in 1796, to the effect that the " effusions 
 signed C. L. were written by Mr. Charles Lamb of 
 the India House. Independently of the signature, 
 their superior merit would have sufficiently dis- 
 tinguished them," Lamb was ever far from 
 joining in the confidence of his friend, nor could 
 his self-distrust be overcome by Coleridge's en- 
 couragement ; and Talfourd notes with what slow-
 
 42 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 ness and at what long intervals his poems were 
 produced. 
 
 In 1798 appeared a small volume of " blank 
 verse," by Charles Lloyd and Charles Lamb. In 
 this second venture, Lamb's most successful effort 
 was the piece called " The Grandame." Like most 
 of his poetical works, it has a personal basis, a 
 characteristic which is not irreconcilable with the 
 epithet of " plaintive," which has not inaptly been 
 applied to his work as well as to that of Lloyd. 
 
 Lamb, who was always uncertain of himself in 
 the poetic vein, and who did not greatly benefit 
 by the publication of his verse, determined to try 
 another field, and in the same year as the publica- 
 tion of the book of " blank verse," he produced the 
 little story, or, as Talfourd calls it, the " Miniature 
 Romance," entitled " Rosamund Gray." 
 
 The elements of the tale are as unreal and im- 
 probable as they well could be ; of plot, properly 
 so-called, there is practically nothing, for Lamb, 
 neither in his romances nor his dramas, could ever 
 rise to this necessary machinery, and he has said 
 in another connection that he could do the dialogue 
 (of his play " The Pawnbroker's Daughter"), " but 
 the plot; I believe I must omit it altogether." 
 There are also too many traces of the influence of 
 the authors Lamb had lately been reading, such as
 
 CHARLES LAMB. 43 
 
 Richardson and Mackenzie, to allow of its being a 
 perfect or original work ; but what makes it at 
 once so interesting and beautiful is the indescrib- 
 able charm with which its author so well knew 
 how to accentuate its merits and to hide its faults. 
 It is valuable in another way, however, for we see 
 in it the development and gradual change working 
 in Lamb's mind at this time, since it is as personal 
 as anything he ever penned ; and in the allusions to 
 such authors as Walton and Withers and Burns, 
 we know as well to whose literary predilections we 
 are listening as to whose judicious quotations we 
 are indebted. " What a lovely thing is ' Rosamund 
 Gray ! ' How much knowledge of the sweetest 
 and deepest part of our nature in it ! " writes 
 Shelley from Leghorn in 1819, with what will 
 seem to some people exaggerated praise ; and 
 Dowden, in his life of Shelley, records how " Rosa- 
 mund Gray " had given the poet " a high sense of 
 the writer's familiarity with the deepest and 
 sweetest parts of our human nature." 
 
 The groundwork of the story turns on the ruin 
 of a village maiden by a villain endowed with the 
 sinister name of Matravis, a name suggested to 
 Lamb by that of one of the murderers of Edward 
 II. in Marlowe's play. The scene is laid in the 
 village of Widford in Hertfordshire, and the
 
 44 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 cottage in which the heroine is supposed to have 
 dwelt is still, according to Canon Ainger, pointed 
 out. That her counterpart really existed is more 
 than probable by the tradition which still holds 
 that in " Rosamund Gray " we have the image of 
 Lamb's first and only love, " the fairest among 
 women" of the "Old Familiar Faces." 
 
 Lamb made a few pounds over this venture, and 
 the Monthly Review, which had been bitter against 
 his poems, reviewed " Rosamund Gray," though 
 tardily, yet more tolerantly, calling it " a 
 pathetic and interesting story in which the 
 reader who has a mind capable of enjoying 
 rational and normal sentiment will feel much 
 gratification." 
 
 Notwithstanding the air of country-life which 
 pervades " Rosamund Gray," and which might al- 
 most lead the ignorant to imagine that its author was 
 country-bred and a lover of nature, the case is 
 altogether the reverse, for Lamb loved London, 
 and only London, with a devotion as true as ever 
 Dr. Johnson had towards the Metropolis, and no 
 part of London was regarded with so tender a 
 feeling as the precincts of the Temple ; indeed, the 
 Temple was to him what Canonbury Tower was to 
 Goldsmith, or Rydal Water to Wordsworth, and 
 Mr. J. Fuller-Russell has told us that he " hated
 
 CHARLES LAMB. 45 
 
 the country, and loved to walk on the London 
 Road (when he was living at Enfield), because then 
 he could fancy he was wending thither." And 
 there are many other evidences extant, both his 
 own and his friends, which go to prove this ; thus 
 we find him in the year 1800, joyful at being 
 settled with his sister' in Mitre Court Buildings. 
 " I live at No. 16 Mitre Court Buildings, a pistol- 
 shot off Baron Maseres. . . . He lives on the 
 ground floor for convenience of the gout ; I prefer 
 the attic storey for the air." Nine j'ears later he 
 had moved to No. 4 Inner Temple Lane, " where I 
 mean to live and die," he writes to Manning, and 
 he gossips on in his own inimitable strain of his 
 surroundings and of his intentions. 
 
 It is not surprising that Lamb, who so dearly 
 loved the play, even in his earliest childhood, when 
 he and his sister used to save up their odd shillings 
 in order to indulge in seats in the pit, and forget 
 themselves and thoir surroundings in the witchery 
 of the scene, should have turned dramatic author 
 himself. Immersed in the study of Beaumont and 
 Fletcher and Massinger, not yet having published 
 his " Specimens of English Dramatic Poets," but al- 
 ready critically acquainted with much of their 
 work : it was not strange that his first attempt 
 should be in most things a replica of their
 
 46 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 style, and that Godwin, happening to come across 
 the two lines, 
 
 " To see the sun to bed and to arise, 1 
 Like some hot amorist with glowing eyes," 
 
 should have asked in which of the Elizabethan 
 dramatists they were to be found. 
 
 " John Woodvil " 2 was, however, at least two 
 hundred years behind the times, and then it lacked 
 plot. Lamb did not see that even though contem- 
 porary drama was in a bad way, yet that way can- 
 not be ameliorated by retrograde movement. 
 " Hang the age ! " he once exclaimed, " I'll write 
 for antiquity." He did so, and his play was never 
 acted. He had shown it in its earlier form, when 
 its name was " Pride's Cure," to Coleridge and 
 Southey, and they with one accord dissuaded him 
 from publishing, but he longed to see it on the 
 stage, and at Christmas of that year he sent it to 
 Kemble, the manager of Drury Lane, where it 
 eventually got lost, and Lamb was obliged to pro- 
 vide another copy ; but the play was declined as 
 unsuitable. It was not strange that it should be, 
 
 1 Probably a reflection of the line of Titania, " To have 
 my love to bed and to arise," as in TJie Midsummer Night's 
 Dream. 
 
 2 He lost 25 by "John Woodvil," which, in conversa- 
 tion with Mr. J. Fuller-Russell, he called his best effort.
 
 CHARLES LAMB. 47 
 
 for it is a curious medley of lines tuned from 
 Shakespeare's lyre, and of passages of the veriest 
 bathos, and while, as has been remarked, that 
 though " it is impossible seriously to weigh the 
 merits of ' John Woodvil ' as a drama, it is yet of 
 interest as the result of the studies of a young 
 man of fine taste and independent judgment, in a 
 field of English literature which had long lain un- 
 explored." 
 
 Where, however, Lamb committed a great mis- 
 take, was in making the action of the play take 
 place at the time of the Restoration, when all the 
 characters are obviously modelled on the work of 
 the Elizabethan dramatists ; in fact, the author 
 himself has confessed as much. " When I wrote 
 ' John Woodvil,' " he tells us, " Beaumont and 
 Fletcher and Massinger were then & first love, and 
 from what I was so freshly conversant in, what 
 wonder if my language imperceptibly took a 
 tinge ? " It was thus by too closely following the 
 literary guidance of the old dramatists, without 
 properly taking into account the historic influences 
 and material conditions, as Mr. Archer phrases it, 
 under which their plays were produced, that he 
 was led into errors, both as a critic of this period, 
 and as a follower in this school. The material 
 value, however, of Lamb's discoveries in this par-
 
 48 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 ticular field of English literature more than com- 
 pensated for his sometimes partial criticism or his 
 defective play-writing. 
 
 The reviewers of the time were unconscious of 
 such a possibility. Ignorant themselves of this 
 period, they either resented an alien being the first 
 to break ground in these new fields, or they under- 
 estimated the significance of the labour. To them 
 it seemed that the author of " John Woodvii " was, 
 if not a vulgar plagiarist, at least a blind follower 
 of methods and metre which had long been done 
 away with. The anti-Jacobin, curiously ignorant, 
 as it seems to us now, of Lamb's political, or as one 
 ought more correctly to put it, non -political 
 opinions, took the opportunity of bracketing his 
 name with those of Coleridge, Southey and Lloyd, 
 in a revolutionary quartette, whose members took 
 unto themselves the credit of being champions of 
 French socialism. 
 
 Lamb's jeu d'esprit, for it can hardly be called a 
 play, which he named " Mr. H ," had the ques- 
 tionable benefit of one night's representation, and 
 got summarily condemned. It was too slight and 
 wire-drawn for the theatre, and the climax, in 
 
 which Mr. H 's real name is discovered (a very 
 
 vulgar name, by the by), is neither clever nor amus- 
 ing. It is characteristic of Lamb's philosophy that
 
 CHARLES LAMB. 49 
 
 though the failure of " Mr. H " meant some- 
 thing more to him than merely a wound to his 
 amour propre, he thus writes to Hazlitt after the 
 performance : " Mary is a little cut at the ill-suc- 
 cess of 'Mr. H ,' which came out last night and 
 
 failed. I know you'll be sorry, but never mind. 
 We are determined not to be cast down. I am 
 going to leave off tobacco, and then we must 
 thrive. A smoky man must write smoky farces." 1 
 It is matter for wonder that its author, whose keen 
 critical perception led him to join in the hissing of 
 his own play, had not sufficient acumen to abstain 
 from putting his production on the boards. Even 
 when read, it so largely depends on puns and 
 somewhat vulgar pleasantries, that it is difficult 
 to reverse the popular verdict. Critics often err 
 in their estimate of original composition, but the 
 public seldom go wrong on such matters. 
 
 Lamb made two other attempts at dramatic 
 writing, "The Wife's Trial, or The Intruding 
 Widow : A Dramatic Poem," which the author 
 declared to be founded on Crabbe's tale of " The 
 Confident," and " The Pawnbroker's Daughter." 
 Neither rises above the level of the average farce 
 of that period, except that here and there are to be 
 seen strokes of Lamb's native wit, which, without 
 
 1 Ainger's " Lamb." 
 
 D
 
 50 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 being sufficient to drag the plays from the sloughs 
 of mediocrity, only serve to accentuate their 
 faults. 
 
 From authorship to criticism was with Lamb a 
 long cry. The critic is essentially the thinker and 
 observer ; he can detect faults although, being 
 similarly placed to the author, he might no more 
 than he have been able to avoid them ; he can 
 recognise beauties although he may not be able to 
 create them. Thus it was with Lamb, and we have 
 never had a more acute or more loving critic of 
 the Elizabethan dramatists than the author of 
 "John Woodvil." 
 
 How thoroughly and accurately he was ac- 
 quainted with the plays of our greatest dramatist 
 is evidenced by the " Tales from Shakespeare," 
 which, in 1807, he, conjointly with his sister, pub- 
 lished in Godwin's series of books for children. 
 How truly they caught the popular taste is shown 
 by the rapidity with which a second edition was 
 called for. 
 
 Mary Lamb has left a delightful little record of 
 their habits of working at this congenial task. 
 " Charles," she writes, " has written ' Macbeth,' 
 'Othello,' 'King Lear/ and has begun 'Hamlet.' You 
 would like to see us, as we often sit writing on one 
 table (but not on one cushion sitting) like Hermia
 
 CHARLES LAMB. 51 
 
 and Helena, in the ' Midsummer Night's Dream/ or 
 rather like an old literary Darby and Joan, I tak- 
 ing snuff, and he groaning all the while, and say- 
 ing he can make nothing of it, which he always 
 says till he has finished, and then he finds out he 
 has made something of it." 
 
 By the very construction of the book, however, 
 it is impossible for Lamb to show in it anything 
 but his thorough grasp of the situations and 
 intricacies of the plots of all the plays he illustrated. 
 Although his perfect and critical knowledge of his 
 great original made his taste a congenial and ap- 
 propriate one, his sister did her part as ably and as 
 well; indeed, Charles always affirmed (but that 
 was his way) that hers was the better part. How 
 great his critical acumen was, and with what a 
 tender love he had studied the older dramatists, is 
 made at once obvious by his " Specimens of English 
 Dramatic Poets Contemporary with Shakespeare." 
 " It is to have notes," he says, writing on this pro- 
 ject to Manning, and he more largely formulates 
 his ideas in the preface to the " Characters " of 
 these dramatic writers. "When I selected for 
 publication in 1808 specimens of English dramatic 
 poets who lived about the time of Shakespeare, 
 the kind of extracts which I was anxious to give 
 were not so much passages of wit and humour,
 
 52 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 though the old plays are rich in such, as scenes of 
 passion, sometimes of the deepest quality, interest- 
 ing situations, serious descriptions, that which is 
 more nearly allied to poetry than to wit, and to 
 tragic rather than comic poetry." 
 
 " The very idea of the collection was a bold one," 
 says Canon Ainger. " When we cast our eyes over 
 the list of now familiar names, Marlowe, and Peele, 
 Marston, Chapman, Ford, and Webster, from whom 
 Lamb chose his scenes, we must not forget that he 
 was pleading their merits before a public which 
 knew them only by names, if it knew them 
 at all." 
 
 The value of this publication lies in the fact that 
 it practically headed the renaissance of the study 
 of this period in the literature of England. Lamb 
 had not the philosophical depth of thought which 
 later on Coleridge brought to bear on the same 
 subject. Taking the dramas as wholes, he may not 
 have equalled Hazlitt in critical perception ; look- 
 ing merely at the more learned side of the question, 
 he may not have possessed the scholarly bent of 
 Dyce ; but in sympathy with his subjects, and in 
 love for their work, he more than equalled those 
 who followed in his wake. Lamb, although he 
 does not anywhere hint it, seems to feel that it is 
 in the beauty of isolated passages that a dramatist
 
 CHARLES LAMB. 53 
 
 must be judged, and there are few critics who have 
 had so peculiar a power in selecting the most 
 beautiful passages or the choicest gems. But in 
 reading them we must never forget that it requires 
 something beyond mere extracts to influence our 
 perception, and more than love to sway our judg- 
 ment. 
 
 It can hardly be denied that Lamb is sometimes 
 unduly partial in urging the claims of his 
 favourites. There were two excuses, however, for 
 this exaggerated criticism. In the first place, the 
 contemporary stage had sunk so deeply into senti- 
 mental insipidities, and other narrow limitations, 
 that Lamb, gazing back upon the masculine and 
 vigorous treatment of the older dramatists, saw 
 even in their superhuman horrors and startling 
 crudities the acme of proper play-writing. Thus, 
 Webster does not surprise him with his horrors in 
 "The Duchess of M'alfi," or "The White Devil," nor 
 do the "virtues cladnn flesh and blood," as he him- 
 self calls them, of Ford or Tourneur fail to draw from 
 him words, as it will seem to many, of hypercritical 
 commendation. In the second place, as a pioneer 
 into the primeval forests of this branch of our 
 literature, it was almost necessary for him, if he 
 would make headway and clear a path for others, 
 to exaggerate the beauties he disclosed, in order
 
 54 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 that his followers might be attracted to them. It 
 was, to use another figure, necessary to caricature 
 their beauties, since nothing attracts the notice and 
 compels the attention so truly as this method. We 
 gain, it is true, an imperfect knowledge of each 
 particular feature, but we carry away with us a 
 lasting remembrance of the whole. 
 
 The dramatic essays of Lamb are not among the 
 least interesting of his literary productions. Who 
 can forget the charm of " My First Play," with its 
 reminiscences of Drury Lane : or the more critical 
 paper, " On Some of the Old Actors : " or that on 
 " The Artificial Comedy of the Last Century:" or 
 even the essay on Shakespeare's plays, the bio- 
 graphical notices of Liston, Munden, and Elliston, 
 or the letter on " Hissing at the Theatre " ? All 
 show the joyous nature of the essayist ; all present 
 him as a happy creature endowed with the critical 
 powers of a man, together with the boyish excite- 
 ment of a youth. 
 
 We have headed this paper " Charles Lamb, 
 Essayist," for it is in this character that Lamb 
 stands unrivalled among literary types. In the 
 August of 1820 the first essay of Elia 1 that on 
 " Recollections of the South Sea House " appeared 
 
 1 " The ' Essays of Elia ' are as exquisite a gem amongst 
 the jewellery of literature as any nation can show." De 
 Quincey.
 
 CHARLES LAMB. 55 
 
 in the pages of the London Magazine, a periodical 
 which had only been started in the previous 
 January. Three years later the first series ap- 
 peared in a collected form. 
 
 We have the essays immortal book ! open 
 before us. What is there new that can be said of 
 their inexhaustible charm, what of their invariable 
 good humour, what of their sparkling fun ? How 
 long could we not linger with Mrs. Battle in her 
 opinions on whist ! How often could we not smile 
 (not unkindly) at her predilection, declared sub rosa 
 for Hearts ! Must we not all respect her little 
 idiosyncrasies, and her home-made logic ? Must 
 we not all have a fellow feeling, albeit we do not 
 all in our hearts agree, with her opinions of crib- 
 bage, with its, to her mind, vulgar "go," or " that's 
 a go," or again, " two for his heels," a determination 
 not to enunciate which form of words brought 
 about the. forfeiture of a rubber, but left her 
 
 conscience clear ? 
 
 i 
 
 Then what a perfect mixture of whimsicality 
 and pathos is the chapter on " Ears." How the 
 gentle Elia owns up as frankly as Lord Macaulay 
 to having no ear for music, but then how patheti- 
 cally he tells what airs have affected him, and by 
 whom played, l " the gentlest sure that ever merited 
 1 This, by-the-bye, is in " Eliana."
 
 56 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 the appellation of gentlewoman." Then his vain 
 attempts, as fruitless as his endeavours, to like 
 Scotchmen (as told in one of his most perfect 
 essays, that on " Imperfect Sympathies "), to hum 
 with the necessary accuracy, " God save the King," 
 although he went about all his life, as he tells us, 
 "whistling and humming of it over to myself in 
 solitary corners." 
 
 The same pleasant self -depreciation opens the 
 essay entitled "The Old and the New School- 
 master," and the writer consoles himself in the 
 conclusion that " a man may do very well with a 
 very little knowledge, and scarce be found out in a 
 mixed company." But if deficient in a proper 
 appreciation of geographical boundaries or histori- 
 cal truths (so-called), Lamb was, on most subjects 
 in which the ordinary run of men little trouble 
 themselves, a perfect mine of information, and then, 
 with such a man as he, a natural genius was little 
 likely to be troubled by the slight defects in learning 
 of which he has so humorously reminded us. 
 
 His way of telling a tale or an anecdote is so 
 inimitable that we doubt if in all literature it can 
 be rivalled. Who does not know his two memor- 
 able examples of the thickness of a Scotchman's 
 intellect to appreciate a sarcasm or a joke, in the 
 essay on " Imperfect Sympathies " ? He is perhaps
 
 CHARLES LAMB. 57 
 
 unnecessarily, if not unjustly (if such a word can 
 be applied to his criticisms), severe on those north 
 of the Tweed ; but then, how witty he is ! 
 " Above all, you must beware of indirect expression 
 before a Caledonian," he says. "Clap an extin- 
 guisher upon your irony, if you are unhappily 
 blest with a vein of it. Remember you are upon 
 your oath. I have a print of a graceful female 
 after Leonardo da Vinci, which I was showing off 
 
 to Mr. . After he had examined it minutely, 
 
 I ventured to ask him how he liked my beauty (a 
 foolish name it goes by among my friends), when 
 he very gravely assured me that ' he had consider- 
 able respect for my character and talents ' (so he 
 was pleased to say), 'but had not given himself 
 much thought about the degree of my personal 
 pretensions.' The misconception," adds Lamb, 
 " staggered me, but did not seem much to discon- 
 cert him." 
 
 Here is the other, perhaps even better known, 
 anecdote from the same essay : " I was present not 
 long since at a party of North Britons, where a 
 son of Burns was expected, and happened to drop 
 a silly expression (in my South British way), that 
 I wished it were the father instead of the son, 
 when four of them started up at once to inform 
 me that ' that was impossible, because he was dead.'
 
 58 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 An impracticable wish, it seems, was more than 
 they could conceive." 
 
 How startling sometimes seem his prejudices ; 
 but then, how kindly put they always are. Listen 
 to what he says of the Jewish race. " I have, in 
 the abstract, no disrespect for Jews. They are a 
 piece of stubborn antiquity, compared with which 
 Stonehenge is in its nonage. They date beyond 
 the pyramids. But I should not care to be in 
 habits of familiar intercourse with any of that 
 nation. I confess that I have not the nerve to 
 enter their synagogues. Old prejudices cling about 
 me ; I cannot shake off the story of ' Hugh of 
 Lincoln.' " And again, in his more whimsical 
 mood, he speaks of a moderate Jew as being "a 
 more confounding piece of anomaly than a wet 
 Quaker." But does he here in reality wish to 
 imply any particular disrespect for Quakers any 
 more than for Jews ? Not so, for he says further 
 on, " I love Quaker ways and Quaker worship ; " 
 and when Barnard Barton was somewhat offended 
 at Lamb's reference to Quakers, which to the 
 Friend seemed unseemly ridicule, Elia particularly 
 excused himself, and explained that Quakers were 
 in reality as dear as other men to him, and some of 
 them perhaps dearer, and by the affectionate refer- 
 ences to Lamb in a letter of Barton's to Keymer,
 
 CHARLES LAMB. 59 
 
 the Quaker seemed to have been quite satisfied of 
 the truth of the assertion. 
 
 Who does not know, and knowing love, the im- 
 mortal "Dissertation on Roast Pig," l or the beauti- 
 ful allegory of the " Dream-children " ; the delight- 
 ful essay on " Old China," or the touching one on 
 " Poor Relations " ; the recollections of " Mackery 
 End in Hertfordshire," or the observation in the 
 essay on " Chimney-sweeps " ? 
 
 In his feminine delicacy of touch and perfect 
 command of human sympathy, together with the 
 intellectual gifts which are sometimes more than 
 human, he is in a way the Schumann of literature. 
 
 With the autobiographical element which so 
 largely runs through the essays, the egotistical 
 almost necessarily comes in ; but it is an egotism 
 as different from the egotism of Addison or Steele, 
 or, in fact, of any writers in the same style (except, 
 perhaps, Montaigne), as it is an egotism without a 
 touch of vanity or self-assertion ; and, indeed, in 
 this class of writing, egotism is a necessary con- 
 comitant. " The essayist," says George Eliot, 
 " must be personal, or his hearers can feel no 
 manner of interest in him." 
 
 1 It has been suggested in no deprecating spirit that Lamb 
 drew his idea for this essay from a tale that occurs in the 
 " Turkish Spy."
 
 6O LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 Lamb's style in the essays defies both criticism 
 and analysis ; but what strikes us more particu- 
 larly is the entire absence of affectation, and it is to 
 this that it is in a great measure due that, as a true 
 essayist ought to be, he is the friend of all, a 
 friendship only more closely assured by his invari- 
 able good-humour, for " humour makes men 
 brothers, and is perhaps more influential in an 
 essay than in most places else," as Henley says. 
 In short, the " Essays of Elia " is a perfectly good 
 book ; for a good book is like a fine sunset look 
 where we will, we shall find transcendent beauties 
 and infinite variety, with every element capable of 
 being combined into one perfect and harmonious 
 whole. 
 
 Comparisons are generally either unfair or in- 
 accurate, for unless the two personalities, which are 
 thus brought into juxtaposition, are almost identi- 
 cally the same, we cannot fail to obtain an exag- 
 gerated estimate of the one, and an incomplete 
 picture of the other, for one of those compared 
 must almost necessarily be the loser by it. There 
 are certain cases, however, where one may venture 
 to employ the use of comparison, from the fact of 
 the embroidery, as we may term it, of two men's 
 lives being particularly similar, without going too 
 curiously or too deeply into their more immediate
 
 CHARLES LAMB. 6 1 
 
 inner characters. It will not then, perhaps, be 
 considered as over-stepping the mark if some com- 
 parison of this kind be instituted between Charles 
 Lamb and the great father of essayists, Montaigne. 
 As essayists, in which character alone the compari- 
 son is drawn, the two men seem to have a peculiar 
 analogy. 
 
 In the first place, both wrote with the greatest 
 simplicity ; we shall find in neither exaggeration of 
 detail or pomposity of diction. Both, again, wrote 
 in an autobiographical style ; neither tells us so 
 much what a man should love or hate, admire or 
 fear, as what he particularly, whether it be Mon- 
 taigne or Lamb, loved or hated, admired or feared. 
 Both are gifted in an almost equal degree with 
 that delightful power of taking their reader so 
 entirely into their confidence, that when one has 
 finished reading an essay of either, one feels as if 
 one had left off listening to the familiar voice of a 
 friend. Both possess pre-eminently that sure sign 
 of true genius : the unconsciousness of being clever ; 
 both have the same simplicity which is child-like 
 without being in the least childish. How each 
 loves his books ! How each shares with his readers 
 confidences concerning his favourites ! How pre- 
 pared both are to bring forward apt quotations or 
 anecdotes to uphold their opinion or to strengthen
 
 62 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 their reasoning ! How each is obviously pointing 
 a moral, while seeming only to adorn a tale ! 
 Finally, how many things in Lamb's essays seem 
 to belong to Montaigne ! And might not this trans- 
 lated bit from the Frenchman's " Essay on Books," 
 "And whoever shall take me tripping in my 
 ignorance will not in any sort displease me, for I 
 should be very unwilling to become responsible to 
 another for my writings who am not so to myself 
 nor satisfied with them " belong to Elia ? 
 
 Most people recognise the united efforts of 
 Charles Lamb and his sister 1 in the pleasant little 
 tales, called, when collected together, " Mrs. Leices- 
 ter's School," as well as in the " Poetry for 
 Children," 2 which formed a kind of sequel to it ; 
 but how many children who have read with ab- 
 sorbed interest the " History of Prince Dorus," or 
 
 1 By the latest rescued letters of Lamb and his sister, we 
 find that the latter was the authoress of a small book of 
 poems, entitled " Poems by a Sister," and published in 1812, 
 which had hitherto eluded the search of collectors and biblio- 
 graphers. By the same collection of epistles, we are, too, 
 happily made the possessors of a letter of Lamb's himself, 
 which rivals almost in wit and humour the essay, " To 
 Distant Correspondents," and the immortal letter addressed 
 to Manning, preserved by Canon Ainger in his monograph on 
 Lamb. 
 
 2 The first recovered copy of this missing bibliographical 
 treasure turned up in Adelaide, New South Wales of all 
 places !
 
 CHARLES LAMB. 63 
 
 " The Adventures of Ulysses," have known that 
 for these charming tales, the amusement of the 
 nursery and the solace of the sick-room, they are 
 indebted to one of the kindliest and best of English 
 writers ? Lamb understood children thoroughly : 
 an anomaly, since he had none himself, nor was he 
 blessed, as it appears, with nephews and nieces; 
 yet no one knew better than he the difference 
 between children's books and childish books ; it is 
 for this reason that the two works just mentioned 
 have become classics of the nursery. 
 
 De Quincey calls Lamb " inimitable," and then 
 confesses that the word " is too limited in its mean- 
 ing." " When I think of such a mind as Lamb's," 
 says Shelley, in a letter to Leigh Hunt written in 
 1819 from Livorno, "when I see how unnoticed 
 remain things of such exquisite and complete per- 
 fection, what should I hope for myself, if I had 
 not higher objects in view than fame ? " Even 
 Macaulay, not always the most amiable of critics, 
 says, " We admire his genius ; we love the kind 
 nature which appears in all his writings ; and we 
 cherish his memory as if we had known him 
 personally." 
 
 It is known with what respect and affection 
 Wilson, the Christopher North of the "Noctes 
 Ambrosiauise," speaks of Lamb in his " Twaddle on
 
 64 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 Tweed side," notwithstanding Elia's candid avowal 
 of his want of sympathy with North Britons ; a 
 criticism which drew words of praise from the 
 mouth of Coleridge. 
 
 Lamb's power as a critic stands only on a less 
 sure foundation than his geniality and unselfish- 
 ness as a man. Whether he is discoursing (in 
 more than one essay) on the beauties and merits 
 ? of Hogarth, whom he knew and loved so well, or 
 whether he is treating in his trenchant way of 
 Elizabethan tragedy, or of comedy of a later date, 
 he is talking about what he thoroughly understands 
 and is handlinghis subjects with a vigour and acumen 
 which few critics have brought to bear on them. 
 / De Quincey once, in his quaint way, congratu- 
 lated the admirers of Lamb's works, on the fact 
 that they would always be a select few ; a judg- 
 ment which is being surely reversed by the flight 
 of time, and perhaps was not very accurate when 
 it was first formulated. 
 
 The opinions which have been passed upon the 
 man himself, by contemporaries, are of the kind 
 we might expect from those who have delivered 
 them. Thus Oarlyle found his conversation "poor 
 make-shift for wit," and himself " a sorry pheno- 
 menon," 1 Macready was struck by a remark so 
 
 Canon Ainger has shown how substantially just such a
 
 CHARLES LAMB. 65 
 
 merely humorous and trivial that it certainly was 
 not intended to leave any lasting impression ; but 
 those who really knew the man thoroughly, recog- 
 nised his intrinsic worth below the more shallow 
 exterior of the wit and the inveterate punster ; 
 and in the opinions of Coleridge and Shelley, 
 Hazlitt and Southey, Godwin and Wordsworth, 
 we shall not fail to recognise how noble a self- 
 devotion, how true a friendship, and how genial a 
 nature made up the character of Charles Lamb. 
 
 It is not frequently the case that a man is 
 enabled to win at once the love and esteem of such 
 illustrious contemporaries as these. The secret 
 probably lies in the fact that so few writers have 
 possessed in an equal degree such humanity of ex- 
 pression or such kindliness of feeling as Lamb; 
 gentle he was no less in his writings than in his 
 actions, and, to use a line of Shelley's, " he owned 
 all sympathies an3 outraged none." 
 
 De Quincey, of all his contemporaries, has 
 written most exhaustively on his character and his 
 works. In his " Recollections of Charles Lamb," 
 
 verdict was. IC It is only too probable," he says, ' ' that the 
 presence of the austere and dyspeptic Scotchman (one of 
 that nation Lamb had all his days been trying in vain to 
 like) made him more than usually disposed to produce his 
 entire stock of frivolity ; " and he adds, ' ' he had a perverse 
 delight in shocking uncongenial society." 
 
 E
 
 66 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 he notes his princely hospitality, princely, not in 
 the magnificence of his entertainments, for he was 
 a poor man, but in the opulence of his spirit ; he 
 perpetuates, too, the " peculiar emphasis and depth 
 of his courtesy," a quality which, De Quincey adds, 
 was to him " a really chivalrous feeling springing 
 from the heart, and cherished with the sincerity of 
 a duty." Another point in his character is spoken 
 of one, indeed, not too frequently prevalent i.e., 
 the habit of " hoping cheerfully and kindly on 
 behalf of those who were otherwise the objects of 
 moral blame." Indeed, his charity went so far in 
 this respect that a man only required to have been 
 the object of injustice or calumny to at once lay 
 claim to his sympathy and support, and be sure of 
 obtaining it, no matter whether the injured man 
 was a dull man, or, for the matter of that, a bad 
 one. 
 
 " He was not, as a man of genius, in the first 
 rank, simply because his range was a contracted 
 one ; within that range he was perfect," adds De 
 Quincey, speaking of the literary side of Lamb's 
 character. But if to teach high moral lessons com- 
 bined with wit, which could conjure up laughter 
 holding both his sides, if to alleviate suffering by 
 the power of words, if to be at once gentle and un- 
 selfish, noble and good, in work as well as in life,
 
 CHARLES LAMB. 67 
 
 constitute the elements of a great writer, then 
 Charles Lamb is worthy to occupy a foremost rank 
 among those who have already obtained niches in 
 the Valhalla of Literature. 
 
 Carey's lines may still be read in the churchyard 
 of Edmonton, on the tomb which covers his re- 
 mains, as well as those of his much beloved sister ; 
 but his noblest epitaph is in his life of unselfish 
 sacrifice and loving devotion, and in his works and 
 the gentle spirit which inspired them ; for, as 
 Wordsworth has written : 
 
 " Oh, he was good, if e'er a good man lived ! ''
 
 Gboma0 Cartyle, 
 
 PHILOSOPHER. 
 
 ' The stormy sophist with his mouth of thunder, 
 Clothed with loud words and mantled in the might 
 Of darkness and magnificence of night.'' 
 
 Swinburne. 
 
 IN applying the epithet of Philosopher to the great 
 man whose name heads this chapter, we have acted 
 in no way hurriedly or unadvisedly, as the readers 
 of Mr. Froude's work would possibly suppose. 
 Carlyle has been likened to Diogenes without his 
 tub ; and this, in a more felicitous way than might 
 at first be assumed, very sufficiently describes the 
 " Sage of Chelsea." For, as the tub may be con- 
 sidered a kind of metaphorical cover to the inmost 
 feeling of the wise man who dwelt in it, since 
 much as we have heard of Diogenes' content and 
 surliness, we have never been able to come at 
 what his home life really was like, so the philo- 
 sopher who has no tub will undoubtedly display 
 to those who take pleasure in such interviewing 
 
 kinds of investigation the same infirmities as those 
 
 68
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE. 69 
 
 of the most ordinary mortals born with very much 
 the same amount of patience. Shakespeare has 
 said that no amount of philosophy will make a 
 stand against the torments of toothache. 
 
 " For there was never yet philosopher 
 That could endure the toothache patiently, 
 However they have writ the style of gods, 
 And made a push at chance and suflerance." x 
 
 Now, metaphorically, Carlyle had toothache of 
 one kind or another all his life, and in conse- 
 quence, notwithstanding his philosophy, most of 
 his friends who happened to come in his way at 
 the time knew when he was enduring the worst 
 twinges. 
 
 So, as it would require a brave man to apply 
 exclusively the above title to any individual, the 
 term is used here in reference to the author of 
 " Past and Present " and " Sartor Resartus," and is 
 in no way to be applied to Thomas Carlyle the 
 man. 
 
 " The present is a noisy and affected age," says 
 a recent writer ; " it is given overmuch to clamor- 
 ous devotion and extravagant repudiation ; there 
 is an element of swagger in all its words and 
 ways ; it has a distressing and immoral turn for 
 
 1 " Much Ado About Nothing," Act v., sc. 1.
 
 ?O LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 publicity." No one saw this more plainly than 
 Carlyle, and no one raised his hand more obsti- 
 nately or more untiringly to do away with the 
 shams and falsities in the world. He went along 
 the road of life, as Longfellow somewhere says : 
 
 " Gathering from the pavements' crevice, as a floweret of the 
 
 soil, 
 The nobility of labour the long pedigree of toil." 
 
 As Dickens and Thackeray worked from their 
 several standpoints, so Carlyle laboured according 
 to his lights in the same fields and for the same 
 objects. 
 
 In the midst of the chaotic phrasing in which all 
 his thoughts are clothed, we cannot fail to be 
 touched by his overwhelming earnestness ; and by 
 this very earnestness, much that, through its vague- 
 ness of metaphor, fails to reach our heads, without 
 difficulty goes to our hearts. 
 
 A mind thus naturally directed in the right way 
 was backed up by an amount of perseverance and 
 energy and a faculty of "taking infinite pains," 
 called by Goethe the secret of genius, which seems 
 almost incredible. In the Edinburgh University, 
 of which, however, he thought so little that he has 
 referred to it in his " Sartor Resartus " as " the 
 worst of universities hitherto discovered out of
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE. 71 
 
 England and Spain," he got through a prodigious 
 amount of study on all subjects and in many 
 languages. But the varied nature of his reading, 
 and the shrewd observation and analytical dis- 
 crimination he brought to bear on everything he 
 had studied, is too apparent in all his works to 
 need historical witness. 
 
 Carlyle was one who considered that a man's 
 works should be but a commentary on a man's life. 
 " He who would write heroic poems," he once said, 
 "should make his whole life like a heroic poem." It 
 is for this reason that all he has done has been 
 fraught with a zeal and earnestness, which alone 
 come from a firm and settled conviction of the 
 truth ; and from the days when he rummaged out 
 old books in the University of Edinburgh, till the 
 time when he lived, one of the greatest literary 
 figures of the age, in Chelsea, his life presents one 
 consistent and harmonious whole of earnest work- 
 ing and deep thought. For indeed he was beyond 
 most men who have lived, a thinker, and what he 
 has left us are not merely fine writings, but rather 
 written thoughts, in which his mind is as surely 
 reflected as is a body in a pool of water, in which 
 we shall find the most perfect reflections in the 
 deepest places. 
 
 And in another way, there is an analogy between
 
 72 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 the stillness of the pool and the depth of the 
 philosopher's thoughts and convictions. What he 
 did was ever done quietly and earnestly. He never 
 wrote for the sake of writing ; he, as it were, was 
 forced to do it, and what he undertook he carried 
 through without blustering or noise ; for, as he has 
 himself written, " the deepest force is the stillest," 
 and in another place, " as calmness is the character- 
 istic of strength, so the weightiest causes may be 
 the most silent." 
 
 Again, without very often the appearance of 
 being so, he is in reality one of the most tolerant 
 of writers, and if he is no better an historian than 
 Macaulay, it is this tolerance and impartiality that 
 make him a much more reliable chronicler. "If 
 we really desire to understand the truth on any 
 subjects, tolerance may be regarded as the most 
 indispensable of all pre-requisites ; " and again, 
 " intolerance, animosity, can forward no cause." 
 
 Quite as well to Carlyle may be applied the 
 phrase which was originally used in reference to 
 one to whom he has no remote likeness, Martin 
 Luther, " whose words," it was once said, " were 
 half battles." 
 
 Carlyle was so continually warring against sham 
 and cant that it would have been strange indeed 
 had he not come into collision with many who
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE. 73 
 
 thought themselves personally attacked. "No man 
 lives without jostling and being jostled," he says 
 in his essay on Scott ; " in all his ways he has to 
 elbow himself through the world, giving and re- 
 ceiving offence." But in spite of offence he went 
 on with a set purpose, never ceasing to raise his 
 voice strenuously against all kinds of hypocrisy. 
 Many, many times the student of his works will 
 find the same thoughts reiterated, for, as Oliver 
 Wendell Holmes says, " a thought is often original 
 though you have uttered it a hundred times." 
 
 But Carlyle did something more than this, 
 though such a fight as he made was the life work 
 of an ordinary man ; he introduced to us German 
 literature, that literature which, as he himself has 
 recorded, it is so difficult to know thoroughly. In 
 England, about the year of grace 1820, it was hardly 
 supposed, incredible as it may seem, that Germany 
 had a literature. Schiller was known in a vague 
 way, certainly, by the translation Coleridge had 
 made of " Wallenstein." Scott had seen the charm 
 which lay in Burger's ballads, and had opened in- 
 deed his literary career by a version of Goethe's 
 " Goetz von Berlichingen," which was published as 
 early as 1799, but the mediocre Kotzebue was 
 considered the literary representative of a country 
 where Goethe, Schiller, Heyne, Lessing and
 
 74 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 Richter were at the height of their renown. What 
 Carlyle did to make known the power and 
 beauties of these writers to the English thinking 
 people cannot be over-estimated, and what ac- 
 knowledgments he afterwards received from 
 Germany, and more particularly from its great 
 literary chief, were neither exaggerated nor un- 
 merited. 
 
 In looking through his books and essays we 
 shall hardly find a single great man of the Teu- 
 tonic race, who has not received, in one way or 
 another, something more than a passing notice, and 
 oftener deep study from him. What he did to 
 spread the fame of Goethe must be more particu- 
 larly noticed later on, but in glancing through his 
 collected essays, we shall find how carefully and 
 critically, how lovingly, and how well, he has 
 examined the works of Richter (one of his more 
 particular favourites), of Werner, Heyne, Novalis, 
 and Schiller ; we shall notice how accurately he 
 has discriminated the relative position of German 
 literary life in his essay on the " State of German 
 Literature," and how painstakingly he has inves- 
 tigated its dramatic claims in his paper on 
 " German Playwrights." 
 
 In 1823 and 1824, Carlyle contributed his " Life
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE. 75 
 
 of Schiller " to the London Magazine. Later on 
 the work was reprinted with additional chapters, 
 to avoid the booksellers of " the pirate species," 
 who were preparing to reprint it for their own 
 benefit. But the author himself always under- 
 valued the work, even going so far as to term it 
 " this somewhat insignificant book," in its preface. 
 It is not, however, quite clear why he should so 
 have under-estimated the worth of the production. 
 It is written in a bold, fearless, accurate, and par- 
 ticularly clear manner, clearer, indeed, than much 
 of his other work. On every page we have evi- 
 dence of his analytical power of criticism, and of 
 his careful weighing of evidence, together with a 
 love of his subject and an amount of knowledge 
 that gives it a breadth and unity which can come 
 from no other source. However, authors are so 
 often the -worst -judges of the value of their own 
 works, that perhaps no other reason is necessary ; 
 certainly, it seems hard to arrive at any. 
 
 " It is admirable in Carlyle," once said Goethe in 
 conversation with Eckermann, " that in his judg- 
 ments of our German authors he has especially in 
 view the mental and moral care ; " and again, 
 " What an earnest man he is ! and how he has 
 studied us Germans ! He is almost more at home 
 in our literature than ourselves." Such, indeed,
 
 ?6 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 was nearly literally the case. Carlyle had 
 thoroughly mastered not merely the writings and 
 sayings of the literary men of the fatherland ; he 
 had thoroughly saturated himself in their very 
 thoughts and motives. Their literature appealed 
 to him in a way in which no other people's litera- 
 ture, not even his own, had affected him. He 
 always commenced by investigating a man's ethi- 
 cal capabilities ; he began by studying his subject 
 as a thinker before he attempted to see him as a 
 writer or poet. The Germans are essentially a 
 nation of thinkers, just as the French are a nation 
 of pleasure-seekers, and we English, according to 
 the famous Napoleonic dictum, which was not 
 original, and therefore doubly true, are a nation of 
 shopkeepers. There was thus something so con- 
 genial to Carlyle in the minds of the German 
 writers, that it would have been sufficiently 
 strange if one had not attracted the other. 
 To say that he discovered German literature is not 
 quite so accurate as to affirm that he was irresis- 
 tibly drawn to the study of it, for one cannot 
 properly be said to discover that which is already 
 known, although it be known in but a shadowy 
 and inconclusive way. 
 
 Every man of genius, in what state or condition 
 he be, turns naturally to some more pre-eminent
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE. 77 
 
 genius than himself whom he may honour and love. 
 Hazlitt worshipped Napoleon. Mr. Swinburne 
 still has a sort of esoteric cult for Victor Hugo. 
 In this relation Goethe stood to Carlyle. He 
 might have said with Von Ense, " Goethe ? 
 When I think of him tears come into my eyes. 
 All other men I love with my own strength ; he 
 teaches me to love with his." 
 
 It is difficult, if not impossible, to properly esti- 
 mate the extent of the influence which the great 
 German exercised on the mind of his English 
 admirer. It was, undoubtedly, that kind of in- 
 fluence which most of us in the budding of our 
 knowledge have instinctively felt for the name of 
 some great man, although we may be almost 
 wholly unacquainted with his life or his works. 
 It is something which seems to tell us that here is 
 an individual of greater power, of more unbounded 
 aspirations, and more recognised genius than any 
 that we have hitherto been accustomed to associate 
 in our minds with splendour ^of action and origin- 
 ality of thought. 
 
 One looks back nowadays with a pity, not un- 
 mixed with scorn, at that blatant, thick-headed 
 fellow who called himself a critic he alone knew 
 why who found Goethe's " Wilhelm Meister," which 
 Carlyle had translated in 1824, " eminently absurd,
 
 78 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 puerile, incongruous, and affected . . . almost 
 from beginning to end one flagrant offence against 
 every principle of taste and every rule of com- 
 position." One feels less concern with the out- 
 landish pleasantries of Maguire, who attempted to 
 prove that he knew something of Goethe by 
 practically affirming that Carlyle knew nothing at 
 all. We are unhappily obliged to add De Quincey's 
 name to those who found serious fault both with 
 the original and the translation, and in his " Gallery 
 of Female Portraits," taken from " Wilhelm Meister," 
 he is almost vulgarly unfair to the book and its 
 English exponent. Carlyle, who it is but right to 
 say had his own misgivings of the work, which 
 were, however, gradually, and as he came to know 
 Goethe more thoroughly, effectually dispelled, was 
 exceedingly angry at what he called "a very 
 brutish review," written by " a cockney animalcule;" 
 but on the whole he bore the attack with more 
 magnanimity than could have been expected from 
 one just setting out on his literary career, a career 
 which might have been wrecked by such an ad- 
 verse influence as that of the opium-eater. De 
 Quincey himself eventually so far recognised the 
 wrong he had done both the work and its trans- 
 lator as to do all he could to retract his adverse 
 criticism, and to make an amende honorable to
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE. 79 
 
 Carlyle, with whom he afterwards became friends. 
 Such an attack could hardly have been forgotten, 
 and it is probable that Carlyle never entirely for- 
 gave its author. 
 
 Notwithstanding such an unpromising opening 
 to his attempt to enlarge the understandings and 
 open the minds of his countrymen, for man is ever 
 prone to accept and believe in the novelties he finds 
 out for himself, and to question and distrust those 
 that are hunted out for him by others, Carlyle 
 persevered, and in 1827 appeared his " Specimens 
 of German Romance," being selections translated 
 from the works of Tieck, Hoffmann, Kichter, Goethe, 
 and others. He was endeavouring by such work 
 to open up to English readers the mine from which 
 he himself had so largely profited. " I could tell 
 you much," he writes to Murray as early as 1820, 
 " about the new heaven and new earth which a 
 slight study of German literature has revealed to 
 me." But with the general public the case was 
 very different ; for those who knew anything at all 
 of this literature, and they were few, regarded it as 
 a mere hot-bed of mysticism, transcendentalism, and 
 indeed of any attributes which were likely to 
 render it vague and unknowable. Not satisfied 
 with what he had already done, and which had 
 met, to use Carlyle's own phrase in reference to
 
 80 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 the world's reception of Werter, with " vehement 
 acceptance " from Goethe himself, whose epistolary 
 connection with Carlyle, and appreciation of what 
 he had done, are among the most memorable in- 
 cidents of his life, Carlyle contributed a large num- 
 ber of essays and reviews, chiefly to the Edinburgh 
 Review and Foreign Review, on Goethe and his 
 works, on Richter, Heyne, Schiller, etc. Each 
 one is marked by a grasp of the subject and a 
 vividness of word-painting which are unequalled 
 in this style of writing; the essay on Goethe's 
 " Helena " being particularly remarkable for the 
 accuracy with which the translations incorporated 
 in it are rendered, and for the love and reverence 
 for its author which throughout is apparent, but 
 which in no way serves to bias the critical per- 
 ception of the writer. 
 
 Landor has written, " Great men lose somewhat 
 of their greatness by being near us ; ordinary men 
 gain much." This was in no way the case with 
 Carlyle's nearer acquaintance with the German 
 writers, like Goethe and Schiller, Richter and 
 Novalis ; for like those who approach a statue, the 
 nearer he got the more significant they appeared ; 
 and they were certainly no ordinary men.
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE. 8 1 
 
 Chief of the other essays from his pen which 
 appeared at this time were those on Voltaire, 
 Diderot, and Mirabeau, on Scott and on Burns ; he 
 also reviewed Boswell's Johnson, and wrote the 
 marvellous sketch of the " History of the Diamond 
 Necklace." Voltaire he treats as we should expect 
 him to, conscientiously but frigidly, yet, on the 
 whole, which is surprising, sympathetically. He 
 notes his charity and his good nature, but he com- 
 plains of " his inborn levity of nature, his entire 
 want of earnestness," which militates, is Carlyle's 
 inference, against his being " a great character." 
 " There are things in this world to be laughed at, 
 as well as things to be admired ; and his is no com- 
 plete mind that cannot give to each sort its due. 
 Nevertheless, contempt is a dangerous element to 
 sport in ; a deadly one, if we habitually live in it." 
 To suit Carlyle's standard of rectitude and usef ul- 
 ness, Voltaire was, not earnest enough ; he was 
 merely " one of the best politicians on record the 
 adroitest of all literary men." 
 
 The essay on Diderot is a masterpiece. From the 
 pen- stroke which shows us the town of Langres, 
 where the encyclopaedist was born, with its fifteen 
 thousand inhabitants, "mostly employed in grinding 
 knives," to the words which tell of his quiet though 
 lingering death in July, 1784, the whole paper is an
 
 82 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 elaborate review of the man's life and work, in 
 which we learn more of the causes of the French 
 Revolution, than we can glean from most books 
 written for that very purpose. Diderot was not 
 so much a sceptic as a Denier, according to Car- 
 lyle's formulation of phrase, and this is certainly 
 only too apparent in his works, which are all more 
 or less polemical. He treated of all things, and 
 most things well, whether it be the novel, the 
 drama, or criticism; and in " Le Neveu de Rameau," 
 in " Pere de Famille," or in the " Salons," we find 
 proof that he was, as Carlyle justly says, "gifted 
 by Nature for an artist ; '' " for strangely flashing 
 through his mechanical encumbrances are rays of 
 thought, which belong to the poet, to the pro- 
 phet." 
 
 In writing on Mirabeau, that remarkable man 
 who, had he lived, might have " directed the storm " 
 of Revolution, and saved a nation a crime the more, 
 Carlyle treats of one who in every way was worthy 
 to be classed among his later heroes. He finds him 
 a man of the most startling power of character, of 
 quite a pre-eminent genius, yet so unfortunate in 
 his times and his surroundings, that " candid his- 
 tory will say, that whatsoever of worst it was in 
 the power of art to do against this young Gabriel 
 Honors', was done." A thundering man this, so like
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE. 83 
 
 a lion as he shakes, with a mdvement of his head, 
 the dew-drops of hate, slander, and petty spite 
 from his mane. 
 
 Burns is the subject of one of Carlyle's finest 
 essays, and in his own words he " uniformly treats 
 him as the high and remarkable man the public 
 voice has now pronounced him to be;" and it is on 
 reflection matter of some little surprise, when 
 we remember Carlyle's questionable critical faculty 
 with regard to poetry, that the author of " Tarn o' 
 Shanter," and the " Lines to a Mouse," should have 
 been one of the three men selected later on by him 
 as examples of the hero as writer. No one was 
 more capable of enthusiasm with regard to true 
 genius, and no one could estimate so skilfully the 
 value of the life's work of such a one, as Carlyle, 
 and in Burns he saw at once the greatest genius, 
 coupled withal with misery and temptation which 
 would bave ruined a more moral man. It is for 
 this reason that he says, " We love Burns, and we 
 pity him," and again, " It is not chiefly as a poet, 
 but as a man, that he interests and affects us." 
 
 With Scott he is equally sincere, almost equally 
 impartial ; he notes every mood in the man, and in 
 spite of small weaknesses which none are without, 
 he finds him not only " a noted but a notable man." 
 He remembers the incident of the glass out of
 
 84 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 which George IV. had drunk, but he also recollects 
 his true goodness of heart ; he recalls his large and 
 perhaps somewhat improvident expenditures, but 
 he none the less brings to mind his boundless hos- 
 pitality and his large-minded charity. But though 
 he can find in him beyond most others, " a love of 
 the picturesque, of beautiful, vigorous, graceful 
 things," he can discover little else, and he fails to 
 discern that Scott was really great, though he 
 allows that " since Shakespeare's time there has 
 been no great speaker so unconscious of an aim in 
 speaking." 
 
 The superficial will be apt to consider the essay 
 too conscientious a one to bo a good one, and even 
 deeper thinkers will turn from it with less satis- 
 faction than from many of the others. 
 
 Taking the four volumes of " Critical and Mis- 
 cellaneous Essays " as a whole, 1 we shall find in 
 them enough of varied criticism and deep thought 
 to last, in this form of study, for what Mr. Ruskin 
 calls " a life's liberal reading." To estimate them 
 by the usual standard of this form of writing 
 would be as ridiculous as unfair, for they have 
 nothing in common with the works of such masters 
 
 1 Carlyle wrote essays on Pitt, Nelson and Montaigne, as 
 well as others, which were incorporated in the "Edinburgh 
 Encyclopaedia " when conducted by Sir D. Brewster.
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE. 85 
 
 of the style as Montaigne and Lamb, Leigh Hunt 
 and Hazlitt; they are rather in the nature of 
 reviews ; and the only works we can call to mind 
 to which they can be adequately compared are the 
 Essays of Lord Macaulay, and they are as far 
 above them in depth of thought and intensity of 
 expression as they are in impartiality of statement 
 and fairness of treatment. It is sufficient to study 
 side by side the different manner in which the two 
 writers have treated Dr. Johnson and his biographer, 
 to properly realise the truth of this. 
 
 Under the date of October 28th, 1830, Carlyle 
 has this entry in his diary : " Written a strange 
 piece on Clothes. Know not what will come of it." 
 And Mrs. Carlyle, on reading the manuscript, laid 
 it down with the remark, " My dear, this is a work 
 of genius." 1 
 
 Eight years later, after many vicissitudes, many 
 disappointments, deducible principally from the 
 short-sightedness of the critics and the want of 
 confidence of the booksellers, the " Sartor Resartus," 
 one of the most inspired and remarkable works in 
 the English language, got itself published. 
 
 1 " Being regarded," says Mr. Hodge, "as a piece of 
 incomprehensible jargon by several publishing firms, he 
 (Carlyle) was forced to issue it piecemeal in Frazer's Maga- 
 zine, where" it appeared in 1833-4, and was not published 
 geparately for some time thereafter."
 
 86 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 Ostensibly a review of a book by one Professor 
 Diogenes Teufelsdroeckh, it masks, under an as- 
 sumed treatise on "Clothes: Their Use and Origin," 
 the transcendental philosophy of Fichte, by which 
 we are to consider all outward things, even man him- 
 self, as so many symbols or clothes under which is 
 concealed "the divine idea." Taking this as the 
 mainspring of the work, Carlyle builds round it 
 another section, in which he fulminates with the 
 thunder of his irony against all kinds of shams 
 and hypocrisy, which are merely so many outer 
 garments, and which, being done away with, leave 
 the man in his original poverty and nakedness. 
 In places the work rises to epic heights, particu- 
 larly such as the chapter entitled " The Everlasting 
 No"; and throughout it is notable for the tone 
 of tremendous earnestness which runs unbroken 
 through it. 
 
 Carlyle so thoroughly believes in himself and in 
 everything he asserts that he cannot fail to carry 
 his readers with him, even though he may lead 
 them through what they cannot always appreciate, 
 and though he shows them what they cannot en- 
 tirely understand. For nothing so wins the hearts 
 of men or touches their imagination as singleness 
 of purpose and earnestness of aim. With a wealth 
 of singular expressions, of telling epithets, and of
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE. 8/ 
 
 strangely coined words, he produces effects and 
 images never before quickened by the hand of so 
 potent a wizard. 
 
 As is not astonishing, when we remember the 
 fate of " Paradise Lost " and " Kubla Khan," the 
 " Sartor Resartus " excited universal disapproba- 
 tion; for a writer to succeed, he must not be beyond 
 the comprehension of his readers. In course of 
 time, however, a purpose was discovered in this 
 quaint garb ; it was apprehended that there was a 
 metaphorical significance in the theory of old 
 clothes. Vestiges of the flashing irony of Swift 
 were to be found hidden under the more meta- 
 physical utterances of Goethe. The "Tale of a 
 Tub" seemed to be in a way linked with " Wilhelm 
 Meister/' and finally the world discovered that 
 " Sartor Resartus " was a wonderful creation, and 
 Carlyle discovered himself to be a famous man. 
 
 It is characteristic of him that he should, in 
 solemn meditation* before the study fire at Craigen- 
 puttoch, or in thoughtful abstraction on a pony's 
 back, riding over the bleak moors around his little 
 cottage, have produced such a result as that of 
 " The Patcher Repatched." 
 
 The book can be adequately compared with no 
 other work in the language, for it is unique ; but 
 for pungent irony, for direct and telling satire, it
 
 88 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 approaches, as we have hinted, Swift's "Tale of a 
 Tub," to which, however, it is immeasurably 
 superior by reason of its decency of detail and 
 earnestness of endeavour. Indeed it is in these 
 attributes that its author chiefly differs from Swift. 
 For unlike him, he is never savage for the mere 
 sake of savagery, and he is never foul and in- 
 decent. Where Carlyle is bitter, it is with the 
 bitterness of sorrow rather than the bitterness of 
 rage. He does not point the degradation of man 
 to shew that he hates him for it, so much as to 
 make the man hate his own low and trivial nature. 
 There is perhaps an equal force in the castigations 
 of both writers, but Carlyle is infinitely more 
 tender and immeasurably more pitying. 
 
 In the " quality of verbal fitness, this power of 
 so charging a phrase with energy and colour as to 
 make it convey the emotion of the writer at the 
 instant of inspiration," Carlyle has an analogy to 
 Cyril Tourneur, of whom these words are enunci- 
 ated by Mr. Henley. He strikes us as being the 
 most earnest of all writers, but, like most re- 
 formers, he often exaggerated what he would criti- 
 cise in order to attract his reader's attention, and 
 that he might the better enforce his own opinions. 
 He is, above all, a great artist ; for whoever does 
 what he has to do to the best of his ability, is, at
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE. 8p 
 
 least as far as he himself is concerned, a great 
 artist. 
 
 There are three aspects under which we must 
 investigate the possibilities of Carlyle, if we would 
 be accurately informed of his work and character. 
 We must look upon him as historian, as politician, 
 and as lecturer or historian by word of mouth. 
 
 Under the first heading it will not be without 
 some difficulty that we settle his claims. 
 
 Carlyle himself calls history "Philosophy teaching 
 by Experience ; " and under this banner he led his 
 readers to an entirely new conception of what the 
 record of facts ended and done with, ought to be. 
 
 It was not surprising that those who had re- 
 velled in the " luminous page " of Gibbon, those 
 who had been content with the dull mediocrity of 
 Robertson, who had since received with avidity 
 the falsified facts and magnificent periods of 
 Macaulay, should be startled by the flashes of 
 lightning, the winged words, the peals of cathartic 
 thunder which rolled with increasing force as the 
 history of the French Revolution gradually un- 
 folded its powers and its splendours to them. 
 
 Carlyle's manner is as variable as the feelings 
 and opinions of the people he so ably treats of; at 
 one time so minute that not a button on a coat or 
 a scar on a face escapes him, at others telling the
 
 9O LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 history of an event in a sentence, or describing tlie 
 character of a man by a word. 
 
 To those who would know all the details of the 
 French Revolution, who would follow every act 
 chronologically, or assign to every circumstance a 
 date, 1 Carlyle's history will be insufficient ; but to 
 those who wish to be imbued with the very spirit 
 of the time, and who would see the actual scenes 
 taking place before their eyes, who would be 
 among the crowd who rush " with a sound terrible 
 and absolutely like thunder" from the death-bed 
 of Louis " the unforgotten," and who would really 
 see the smoke and hear the rattle of the " whiff of 
 Grapeshot " which ended the Revolution to these 
 Carlyle's great work will prove history in its 
 widest and best sense. 
 
 In places his power of description is well-nigh 
 unparalleled, and he dashes off a picture with the 
 certainty of Turner, but also with as much pains. 
 
 1 Notwithstanding this, it is marvellous, in comparing 
 Carlyle's great work with the contemporary memoirs, such 
 as Campan's and Weber's, how amid that riot of words with 
 which the historian has shrouded the staple of his argu- 
 ment, there is to be found the most exact resemblance in the 
 accounts, not only of the great deeds, but also of the 
 smallest events of the Revolution ; there is noticeable a most 
 conscientious verisimilitude, which in reality makes the 
 work no less accurate as a history than great as a piece of 
 literary art.
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE. 91 
 
 If we compare the taking of the Bastille with the 
 Battle of Sedgemoor, we shall be able to estimate 
 the relative value of the work, and we may gain some 
 insight into the methods that severally produced 
 effects of so entirely an opposite character. Carlyle 
 is the Gericault of literature, Macaulay its David. 
 
 The " French Revolution " 1 was published in 
 1837, and marks an era in Carlyle's life. It circles 
 continually round the old text that " the wages of 
 sin is death ; " and the writer's influence was spread 
 broadcast among those who troubled themselves to 
 seriously consider what analogy the present time 
 had to that fearful final decade of the eighteenth 
 century. 
 
 It is, as Emerson has happily termed it, Carlyle's 
 " stereoscopic imagination " which so ably detaches 
 the salient points of a picture from the background, 
 and concentrates -every energy on the particular 
 point to which he wishes the mind of the reader to 
 be drawn. 
 
 Magnificent as are the epithets with which he 
 has so plentifully besprinkled the book, and for 
 which reason Robespierre will ever be "sea- 
 
 1 Its influence is particularly noticeable in Ruskin and 
 Browning, and Dickens was an ardent admirer of the book, 
 and its influence, as he himself notes in the preface, is 
 apparent throughout the pages of " A Tale of Two Cities."
 
 92 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 green," Mirabeau, always "swart, burley-headed," 
 and Lafayette ever " Scipio Americanus," yet this 
 very characteristic has given him an opportunity 
 for often unfairly blackening the characters of 
 those he dislikes, and adding an adventitious glory 
 to those he admires ; for epithets are the satellites 
 of partiality. 1 
 
 The " Taking of the Bastille " is the concentrated 
 essence of the whole work ; it is but the realised 
 type of the destruction of the old order and of all 
 such institutions. In this alone lies its terrific 
 significance. In treatment it is one of the most 
 perfect examples of Carlyle's style. Such sign- 
 posts of his manner and intention as the unfore- 
 seen coming together of " Georget of the Marine 
 Service " and the " King of Siam's cannon," such 
 instances of his power of word-painting as when 
 he notes " How the great Bastille clock ticks (in- 
 audible) in its inner court there, at its ease, hour 
 after hour, as if nothing special for it or the world 
 were passing ! " or when he draws the living picture 
 
 x lt is generally known that the first volume of the "French 
 Revolution " in MS. had been lent to a Mrs. Taylor through 
 the kindness of a friend of Carlyle's, and that her maid burnt it 
 for waste paper. Carlyle, with little more than a murmur, 
 sat down and wrote the whole over again. One's mind 
 naturally reverts to the somewhat similar accident which 
 occurred to Newton, which was borne with equal fortitude.
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE. 93 
 
 of the old De Launay, " sitting, from the first, with 
 lighted taper, within arms-length of the powder 
 magazine, motionless, like old Roman Senator or 
 bronze lampholder, coldly apprising Thuriot, and 
 all men, by a slight motion of his eye, what his 
 resolution was," strike the keynote of this new 
 conception of history which will peal loud and long 
 through the ages. 
 
 In 1845 a book, scarcely less remarkable in its 
 way than the " French Revolution," was published. 
 This was " Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, 
 with Elucidations." Hardly had it appeared be- 
 fore the waves of controversj^, which always surge 
 round any remarkable opposition to public preju- 
 dice, burst with angry vehemence upon it. Some, 
 it is true, regarded it as a piece of tardy literary 
 justice; others, refusing to upset their preconceived 
 judgment of the man Oliver, looked upon it as an 
 absurd attempt to t whitewash an atrocious char- 
 acter. 
 
 In fact few historical personalities have been re- 
 garded with so much varied interest of one sort 
 and another as that of the Protector ; not many 
 men have had so many detractors and so much 
 individual praise. That the former constituted a 
 large and influential majority irritated a man like 
 Carlyle, and he set himself to work to minimise, if
 
 94 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 not to entirely eradicate, what he considered to be 
 a great historical injustice. 
 
 The amount of labour he went through, the un- 
 remitting toil of investigation into every little 
 detail that could throw a fresh light on the much- 
 debated character of Cromwell, is as characteristic 
 of the man as is his half -humorous complaint at 
 the amount of his own labours, uttered when they 
 were over, and not till then. "The authentic 
 utterances of the man Oliver himself," he says in 
 his preface, " I have gathered from far and near ; 
 fished them up from the foul Lethean quagmires 
 where they lay buried. I have washed, or en- 
 deavoured to wash, them clean from foreign stupi- 
 dities such a job of buck- washing as I do not long 
 to repeat." 
 
 The book is a remarkable attempt to show us 
 the true lineaments of the "Great Usurper" washed 
 clean, as its author testifies, from the mud of false 
 accusation which had been so largely and unceas- 
 ingly thrown upon them, and it is in the main a 
 successful attempt. But preconceived opinions are 
 so powerful that advocacy often only tends to 
 strengthen them, though that advocacy be ever so 
 powerful or ever so just. Apart, however, from its 
 mere controversial aspect, the work is singularly 
 valuable as a piece of authentic historical biography;
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE. 95 
 
 and what are modestly called elucidations, are, in 
 reality, pictures in word-painting, which are some- 
 times hardly to be equalled in any other of Car- 
 lyle's books ; notably the account of the Victory of 
 Dunbar, and of the Protector's death on its anni- 
 versary. 
 
 Cromwell's character was in every way a con- 
 genial subject, and Carlyle has not failed to treat 
 it as such. He saw in it, as all must see, whether 
 they be partisans or not, a striking example of suc- 
 cess achieved by a man's own energy and persever- 
 ance ; he perceived in Cromwell the archetype of 
 all self-made men. The Protector was thus a hero 
 after his own heart, added to which was the con- 
 viction inspired in his mind, it is said, by his 
 mother, that English historians had done but scant 
 justice to the memory of the great man. That in 
 this labour of -love Carlyle should have en- 
 countered many opponents is not surprising. As 
 Matthew of Paris has said : " The case of historical 
 writers is hard, for if they tell the truth they pro- 
 voke man, and if what is false, they offend God." 
 
 The reason why Carlyle undertook the other 
 great historical work with which his fame is con- 
 nected, is as characteristic as is his partisanship of 
 Cromwell. It was because Frederick, called the 
 Great, " managed not to be a liar and a charlatan,
 
 96 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 as his century was." The subject was undoubtedly 
 impressive and engrossing. As a type the King of 
 Prussia stands forth from a background of medi- 
 ocrity in company with Napoleon and Cromwell ; 
 he is as typical of the man of action of the 
 eighteenth century as Goethe is of the man of 
 thought. But the labour was more than colossal. 
 When we consider that two thick volumes only 
 bring us to the threshold of Frederick's reign ; 
 when we remember the time and care expended 
 over collecting materials ; the visits paid to all the 
 chief battlefields, Leuthen, Zorndorf, Molwitz and 
 Liegnitz, and to other spots innumerable, connected 
 with the warrior's life ; the room fitted up with a 
 collection of over 2000 volumes, besides portraits 
 and drawings 1 wholly referring to this period, one 
 can hardly imagine how a man of Carlyle's tempera- 
 ment, given to fits of despondency and dissatisfac- 
 tion, could have persevered to the end with such a 
 work, did we not also recollect the indomitable will 
 
 1 Speaking of his method of work, he told Sir Gavan 
 Duffy that " it was his habit to paste on a screen in his 
 workroom engraved portraits, when no better could be had, 
 of the people he was then writing about. It kept the image 
 of the man steadily in view, and one must have a clear image 
 of him to the mind before it was in the least possible to 
 make him to be seen by the reader." " Conversations with 
 Oarlyle"
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE. 97 
 
 which recorded the French Revolution, and advo- 
 cated the claims of Cromwell. 
 
 But there were times when even this will seemed 
 ready to bend under the immensity of the labour. 
 Carlyle speaks of the work as "a task that I 
 cannot do, that generally seems to me not worth 
 doing, and that yet must be done. No job 
 approaching to it in ugliness was ever cut out for 
 me; nor had I any motive to go on, except the sad 
 negative one, 'Shall we be beaten in our old 
 days ? ' No satisfaction in it at all ; only labour 
 and sorrow." " What had I to do with your 
 Frederick ? " he asked on another occasion of 
 Varnhagen Von Ense, and he was certainly not the 
 only person who asked that question. One is 
 irresistibly reminded of the groans of old Burton 
 of the " Melancholy," when he personates the 
 objectors to his work and says : 
 
 " This is a thinge of meere Industrie ; a collec- 
 tion without wit or invention ; a very toy. So 
 men are valued. Their labours vilified by fellowes 
 of no worth themselves, as things of nought ; who 
 could not have done as much ? " 
 
 But Carlyle might have remembered while he 
 querulously bemoaned his fate that his task was a 
 self-imposed one, and much of it superfluous. It 
 has been called his crowning work ; this is hardly 
 
 G
 
 98 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 an accurate implication except in point of date, 
 for it has neither the epic grandeur of the "French 
 Revolution," the originality of the "Sartor Resartus/' 
 or the finished drawing and perfect colouring which 
 go to make up the portrait of " Oliver Cromwell." 
 
 It is mosaically unequal, here falling into all 
 but unintelligible jargon, as in the latter part of 
 the scene describing the death-bed of Frederick 
 William L, there rising to heights of unequalled 
 word-painting, as in the immortal portrait of 
 Frederick II. 
 
 The mannerisms which have caused a new style 
 to be initiated in English prose the Carlylian 
 and which disfigured parts of the " French Revolu- 
 tion," are accentuated to such an extent in the 
 " History of Frederick " that, as has been re- 
 marked, the work in places seems to be written 
 in a peculiar sort of shorthand. 
 
 It is probable that few persons have read 
 through all Carlyle has to say of the King and 
 his surroundings ; it is still more possible that 
 those who have done so have long before the end 
 become as heartily tired of it as the author was 
 himself. As history it is too verbose ; as mere 
 literature it is too historical, and it will ever re- 
 main one of the really great unreadable books of 
 the English language.
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE. 99 
 
 During the eight years which elapsed between 
 the publication of the " French Revolution " and 
 the appearance of " Oliver Cromwell," Carlyle was 
 engaged in a task which, although not by any 
 means unsuccessful, yet seems to have been suffi- 
 ciently uncongenial the delivery of courses of 
 lectures on various subjects. Mrs. Carlyle, at the 
 suggestion of her friend, Miss Wilson, seems to 
 have initiated the idea and to have carried out all 
 the necessary arrangements. The first course 
 (which proved a success) was on German litera- 
 ture, a theme not only thoroughly understood by 
 the lecturer but exceedingly interesting to the 
 man ; and Caroline Fox has told how " his manner 
 is very quiet, but he speaks like one tremendously 
 convinced of what he utters, and who has much 
 in him that is unutterable." The learned Bunsen 
 says of the lectures that " they are very striking, 
 rugged thoughts, , not ready made up for any 
 political or religious system ; thrown at people's 
 heads; by which most of his audience are sadly 
 startled;" and Leigh Hunt, an entirely opposite 
 character, testifies to the delight and interest he 
 felt in them. 
 
 This first course of lectures was followed by two 
 series, one on " The History of Literature," the 
 other on " The Revolutions of Modern Europe."
 
 100 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 Extracts from the latter have been pub- 
 lished by Professor Dowden in the Nineteenth 
 Century, and they were somewhat imperfectly 
 reported at the time by Leigh Hunt in the 
 Examiner. The fate of the former has been 
 more fortunate, for, with the exception of one 
 grave lacuna, they have not long since been 
 brought out under the able editorship of Pro- 
 fessor Reay Greene. They owe their perpetu- 
 ation to the painstaking care of the late Mr. 
 Thomas Chisholm Anstey, who took full reports 
 of each lecture, with the exception of that on 
 French literature, which embraced the literary 
 work of that country from Francois Rabelais to 
 Jean Jacques Rousseau. 
 
 Carlyle divides his subject into four periods, be- 
 ginning with the vague and misty records of earliest 
 antiquity, and ending with the consummation of 
 literary activity in the superlative genius of Goethe. 
 True to his own initiative suggestion, the lecturer's 
 first object is to come at " what these men thought 
 before he enquires what they did." 
 
 In his, perhaps, necessarily brief sketch of Greek 
 and Roman literature, he does not seem to speak 
 with that conviction which is generally the hall- 
 mark of all his work. It did not require the 
 assertion of the Chelsea sage to inform us that the
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE. IOI 
 
 is far inferior to the Iliad, nor does he much 
 improve the truism by telling us that he himself 
 thought so. What, however, could adequately 
 be said in two pages on Herodotus, Carlyle has 
 said ; and he admires in him " that spirit of 
 order which has constituted him the prose poet 
 of his country;" while of Tacitus he seems to 
 have formulated opinions which are both just 
 and discriminating. " He stood," says Carlyle in 
 a fine figure, " he stood like a Colossus at the 
 edge of a dark night, and he sees all events hurry- 
 ing past him, and plunging he knows not where." 
 
 What are called the works of Homer, following 
 the supposition of the German Wolff, he considers 
 to have been the production of several authors, 
 and he produces a curiously apposite analogy be- 
 tween their fate and that of the " Robin Hood 
 Ballads." , 
 
 ^Eschylus he defines as a " truly gigantic man, 
 one of the largest characters ever known." He 
 notes, too, that " striving after effect " which is the 
 key-note of Euripides' style, but, at the same time, 
 he recognises in him " a man of deep feeling and 
 morality." 
 
 Concerning those two streams, the meeting of which 
 was so pregnant of confusion and disaster Christi- 
 anity and Paganism Carlyle deals at some length,
 
 IO2 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 and he ably contrasts the selfish doctrines of the Stoics 
 and the Cynics with the large-minded faith and noble 
 self-abnegation of the Christians. He properly in- 
 sists on that great secret of Christian polity the be- 
 lief in one's self as an instrument in the hands of 
 God, in contradistinction to the popular and purely 
 selfish idea of the Cynics, inherited from the Stoics, 
 that man was above all accidental circumstances, 
 and that good and bad affected him indifferently 
 quite another thing from the proper self-respect 
 which arises from our conviction of whence we 
 come and to whom we belong. 
 
 And so down to the immortal Goethe Carlyle's 
 criticisms, whatever their significance or whatever 
 their extent, are at least characterised by a large- 
 minded appreciation of all that is good and true, 
 by a hatred of all that is mean and false. 
 
 As he nears the end of the eighteenth century, 
 he is more at home with his subject as a whole; for 
 which reason the three last lectures are possibly 
 the most luminous and the best, although such great 
 names as Mahomet, Dante, Cervantes, Luther, and 
 Shakespeare call forth isolated bits of criticism 
 which are hardly to be surpassed for soundness of 
 judgment or energy of treatment. Thus of Luther 
 he says, " He was a man of the largest intellect
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE, IO3 
 
 and learning born in that century, put down by 
 nature, as it seemed, for the lowest sphere of life, to 
 beat out a little lead ore in his capacity of miner, 
 but it was not so appointed." In Shakespeare he 
 sees " a man in whom that era (the era of Elizabeth), 
 as well as other eras, have found a voice one who 
 gives utterance to many things silent before him, 
 and worthy to be called the spokesman of our 
 nation ! " Of Goethe he has a beautiful metaphor. 
 " Goethe,'' he says, " was a strong man, as strong 
 as the mountain rocks, but as soft as the green 
 sward upon the rocks, and, like them, continually 
 bright and sun-beshone." 
 
 The last series of lectures which Carlyle gave 
 are far the best known, because in their incor- 
 porated book form they have become a standard 
 work ; we mean those on " Heroes and Hero 
 Worship." 
 
 What scheme, the lecturer had formed on this 
 subject, he tells us himself in his opening words : 
 " We have undertaken to discourse here for a little 
 on great men, their manner of appearance in our 
 world's business," he says, " how they have shaped 
 themselves in the world's history, what ideas men 
 formed of them, what work they did." 
 
 The six lectures were divided into a study and 
 estimate of the value and influence of the hero
 
 IO4 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 considered as divinity, prophet, poet, priest, man of 
 letters, and king. 
 
 The ground covered, as may be supposed, is the 
 flooring of all the ages; the men treated of, the 
 pre-eminently great ones of all times ; Mahomet, 
 Dante, Shakespeare, Luther, Knox, Johnson, 
 Rousseau, Burns, Cromwell, and Napoleon. 
 What a wealth of information and imagery, 
 critical acumen and appreciation is included in 
 these lectures, only those who are acquainted 
 with Carlyle's capacity of judgment and force of 
 reasoning can well estimate. " We cannot look, 
 however imperfectly, upon a great man without 
 gaining something by him," he says ; and it would 
 be idle to reiterate how much can be gained from a 
 careful investigation into what Carlyle himself has 
 here to say of the great ones he treats of, from 
 Mahomet to Napoleon. 
 
 His matter is, however, more open to exception. 
 He lays it down as a fundamental law, that when 
 a great man is wanted, he appears. To harmonize 
 the influence of the individual with general laws 
 was not a problem that he troubled himself to 
 investigate or solve. Then again, by the nature 
 of the work, he could hardly avoid treating his 
 heroes individually, and such worship is by the 
 nature of itself apt to be intolerant. But
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE. 105 
 
 the work remains, when all is said and done, 
 a remarkable effort of genius ; and a small- 
 sized volume might be made up of a collection 
 of the " wise saws and modern instances " with 
 which it is filled. 
 
 To speak seriously of Carlyle as a politician is 
 out of the question. His contempt for contem- 
 porary legislators of all persuasions was too pro- 
 nounced to allow him to take his stand for any 
 length of time beneath the banners of either Radi- 
 calism, Democracy, or Toryism. The fact is, he loved 
 the more isolated post of prophet, and had he been 
 endowed in a like degree with the same noble philo- 
 sophy and toleration as the great Seer of Judah, he 
 might have been regarded as the Jeremiah of the 
 Nineteenth Century ; for he was possessed of the 
 same earnestness, the same noble endeavour, the same 
 god-given wish for the amelioration of his fellowmen. 
 
 In much of his literary work he acted the part of 
 the sign-post, directing the way to the betterment 
 of the people, but in his so-called political works he 
 was more ready to point out abuses than to suggest 
 remedies thinking, perhaps, that an ill recognised 
 is already half-rectified. 
 
 What is best in his political utterances will be 
 found in " Past and Present," in " Chartism," and in 
 his " Latter-day Pamphlets"; what is least important
 
 106 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 is incorporated in "Shooting Niagara," and, to a 
 certain degree, in his essays on the "State of 
 Irish Affairs.' 
 
 Although in all these works the same note is 
 touched again and again i.e. his entire want of 
 faith in the methods for the amelioration of the 
 people's condition undertaken by the social re- 
 formers of the day, yet all have beyond the well- 
 meaningness of their intention, a large literary 
 value; and the utterances of a man of such a potent 
 personality as Carlyle could hardly fail to excite a 
 widespread interest, although that interest was as 
 often as not turned into ridicule by the nature 
 of his opinions and his manner of enunciating them. 
 He took for his text, that " all is vanity," and he 
 acted up to it and wrote upon it all his life. The 
 laughter of the fools was more to him as "the 
 thorns crackling under the pot," than to any 
 since Solomon. "Man by the nature of him is a 
 great owl," he once wrote, and where he does not 
 so phrase it one has no difficulty in telling that he 
 still thinks it. He was not so much a good hater 
 as an " uncompromising castigator " ; he pitied too 
 much to hate, and despised too much to love, and 
 the isolated position in which he was thus left is 
 in a great way responsible for the reasons he held 
 and the opinions he ventilated.
 
 ' 
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE. IO7 
 
 " The public," he said in a characteristic criticism 
 of his own time, " had become a gigantic jackass, 
 literature a glittering lie ; science was groping aim- 
 lessly amidst the dry, dead clatter of the machinery 
 by which it means the universe ; art wielding a 
 feeble, watery pencil ; history stumbling over dry 
 bones in a valley no longer of vision ; philosophy 
 lisping and battling exploded absurdities mixed 
 with new nonsense about the infinite, the absolute, 
 and the eternal." And his estimate of the men 
 who had to meet these crises was not more hope- 
 ful. 
 
 With a " Life of John Sterling," written in 1851, 
 to do more justice to its subject than he 
 thought Hare had succeeded in effecting in his 
 biography ; and a history of the early kings of 
 Norway, showing much of his old capacity and fire, 
 Carlyle's literary life closes. 
 
 As a man, Carlyle was one of that hard-working, 
 honest, albeit sometimes querulous, band which does 
 a good deal of superfluous blushing for other people, 
 and is continually mourning beyond most persons 
 " over the sinfulness of little sins." A hater of 
 shams and simulacra, like many men he seemed 
 to be their most intolerant enemy, simply because 
 he was always telling the world so. He has com- 
 pared Goethe to a rock covered with moss; he
 
 108 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 himself has no small resemblance to the rock 
 without the moss. 
 
 Rough and morose as he oftenest seemed, yet he 
 had in him to a large extent that attribute without 
 which few men can attain what Dr. Johnson calls 
 " civil greatness," we mean humour. It was not 
 the bubbling, mirthful humour of Scott; it was not 
 the sententious Olympian wit of Johnson ; it was 
 not the sardonic, satirical humour of Swift ; it was 
 essentially the "humour of Carlyle"; and of its sort, 
 it suited the rugged, imperfect nature it informed. 
 It was, too, more noticeable in the man himself 
 than in his works, although at times flashes of it 
 penetrate the gloom that so often envelopes the 
 latter. Very unfortunately for his critical acumen, 
 he held poetry of no account, at least poetry that 
 was not of a didactic nature ; were its votaries not 
 utilitarians he would have nothing of them; and 
 though in his criticisms on such giants as Dante, 
 Shakespeare and ^Eschylus, this does not appear at 
 first sight to be the case, yet if we look deeper we 
 shall find that his admiration for them arises 
 primarily from the fact that, though more or less 
 unconsciously, they were all great moral teachers 
 and great social reformers. 
 
 Of his writings we need hardly say more here. 
 His style will probably always be a stumbling-
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE. IOp 
 
 block to the many, and not a little surprising to 
 the few; 1 and though what Macaulay says of Ben- 
 thara may not, with some reservation, inaptly be 
 applied to him, that " he has had blind flatterers 
 and blind detractors flatterers who could see 
 nothing but perfection in his style, detractors who 
 could see nothing but nonsense in his matter " yet 
 he remains one of the chief among those who, while 
 doubting the efficiency of their efforts, have nobly 
 attempted the regeneration of their fellowmen. 
 
 1 Macaulay once wrote of one of his articles, "As to 
 Carlyle, he might as well write in Irving's unknown tongues 
 at once." No better description of Carlyle's peculiar and 
 bizarre methods of writing has been given than that which 
 Mr. George Meredith affords us in a chapter of "Beau- 
 champ's Career." " A style," he says, " resembling either 
 early architecture or utter dilapidation, so loose and rough it 
 seemed ; a wind-in-the-orchard style, that tumbled down 
 here and there an Appreciable fruit with uncouth bluster; 
 sentences without commencements running to abrupt endings 
 and smoke, like waves' against a sea-wall, learned dictionary 
 words giving a hand to street slang, and accents falling on 
 them haphazard, like slant rays from driving clouds ; all the 
 pages in a breeze, the whole book producing a kind of 
 electrical agitation in the mind and the joints.''
 
 1 10 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 NOTE ON 
 "WOTTON REINFRED." 
 
 So great an admiration have we for Thomas 
 Carlyle that it is with pain we read his so- 
 called novel, " Wotton Reinfred," and with some 
 reluctance that we here say a few words as 
 an appendix to what we have formulated about 
 the man and his writings, concerning it. 
 
 A very casual glance by the most superficial 
 of readers will show that Carlyle wanted almost 
 every attribute necessary to make a good novelist, 
 and the man who could inform the French Re- 
 volution with a new life, and give immortality to 
 the opinions of Herr Teufelsdroeckh, has writ- 
 ten what has been generously termed a novel, 
 as if he believed in Faraday's definition of the 
 writing of such a work : that it was " to make any 
 means produce an end." Dr. Johnson calls a 
 novelist an " innovator " or " assertor of novelties," 
 and in this connection Carlyle fully deserves the 
 name, but in no other. 
 
 "Wotton Reinfred" is as full of faults as an egg 
 is of meat, to use an ancient simile ; from bad
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE. 1 1 1 
 
 English to an immoral delight in mysticism, as 
 Mr. Henley would say. It is so dull that one hardly 
 notices the entire absence of anything like plot. 
 We cannot even call Wotton Reinfred himself 
 the hero, although he seems, for some other reason 
 than the fact of his name serving as the title to the 
 book, to merit in a way that distinction. The 
 only really interesting point about him is the 
 flavour, sufficiently faint it is true, of autobio- 
 graphy which in the earlier part of the book 
 pervades him. But his ridiculous embarrassment 
 on first meeting Jane Montague is as unlife-like as 
 it is uncalled for ; and we cannot .help feeling that 
 the description of his state of mind on first seeing 
 her is rather that of a man who has gone too long 
 without his dinner than of a person who is first 
 introduced to one he loves. Wotton Reinfred's 
 character is as inconsistent as it is dull, and in his 
 hypochondriacal rhapsodies his prototype Werther 
 is as apparent as is the influence of the German 
 school throughout the entire tale. The waiter at 
 the inn where Wotton and his friend stay, speaks 
 like a Frenchman who has just mastered the elemen- 
 tary forms of English conversation. The House of 
 the Wold, with its innumerable inmates, is like the 
 retreat of Boccacio's men and women, where, in- 
 stead of Italy, we have Wales, and in place of the
 
 112 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 delight produced by beautiful and witty tales we 
 are mystified by abstruse propositions and wearied 
 by interminable arguments. 
 
 " Wotton Reinfred" is like a picture seen through 
 a dusty glass ; it is all in shade. Everyone talks 
 alike ; all the men are prigs, and all the women 
 blues there is no contrast whatever. The mystic 
 Dalbrook is like the atrabiliar philosopher Bur- 
 ridge ; Maurice is like Wotton ; Jane similar to 
 Elizabeth. Bernard's character is well drawn in a 
 single line : " That he wished a thing to be true 
 was ever with him a strong persuasion of its 
 truths," and there are as many aphorisms enunciated 
 in the book as would set some modern novelists 
 going for years ; what Maurice says of Homer's 
 teaching and of Shakespeare's is not the least of 
 them worthy of repetition. " They taught us to 
 know the world, and yet to love it." But such 
 isolated bits of criticism or philosophy do not make 
 a successful novel, and Carlyle shows in every line 
 of " Wotton Reinfred " that he was a mere tyro at 
 such work. 
 
 In a word, the book reads like a bad German 
 tale indifferently translated. That Carlyle never 
 published it is not surprising. Had he been ill- 
 advised enough to have done so, we may well be 
 sure, that though his want of experience in this
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE. 1 1 3 
 
 particular branch of literature might not have 
 caused him to see any defects in the matter, yet 
 his love of accuracy and literary perfection would 
 certainly have induced him to largely revise the 
 ' style. 
 
 Carlyle is sufficiently great without requiring 
 the adventitious glory of a successful novelist to 
 be added to his other distinctions, nor can we 
 believe that his fame will suffer any diminution 
 from such a failure. We can only grieve over the 
 fatuity of those who were responsible for the 
 republishing of a deservedly forgotten work.
 
 Walter Savage %anbor, 
 
 DRAMATIST. 
 
 " Come back in sleep, for in the life 
 Where thou art not 
 
 We find none like thee. Time and Strife 
 And the world's lot 
 
 " Move thee no more; but love at least 
 And reverent heart 
 May move thee, royal and released, 
 Soul, as thou art." 
 
 Swinburne. 
 
 AMONG writers of eminence we shall now and 
 again find certain individuals whose personality 
 breaks through the surrounding bulwarks of their 
 literary creation, and makes these, as it were, sub- 
 servient to it, or, in other words, causes the un- 
 spoken mind to domineer over the uttered word. 
 
 Such a character is not unusual, and when it 
 appears it nearly always happens that the creations 
 of the mind are almost entirely superseded by the 
 force of the personal attributes. But it is rarer to 
 
 find both the individuality of the man and the 
 114
 
 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 11$ 
 
 character of his writings partaking of an almost 
 equal amount of authority and power ; yet it is by 
 no means unprecedented, and one of its best and 
 most typical examples is that of the " unsubduable 
 old Roman," as Carlyle called him Walter Savage 
 Landor. 
 
 Landor holds a peculiarly anomalous position 
 among English writers. Working for a few chosen 
 ones, and, as has been remarked, chiefly for him- 
 self, he was tied by none of the unities by which 
 more dependent men have found themselves 
 shackled, and in consequence he is one of those in- 
 tellectual giants who are so often rendered power- 
 less by the very weight of their own personality. 
 
 The " Olympian Schoolboy," although, perhaps, 
 not quite just in its implication, still has truth 
 enough (for epithets as well as epigrams are " at 
 best half-truths that look like whole ones ") to 
 describe sufficiently his literary tendency, and what 
 Mr. Henley cleverly calls a " monumental skittish- 
 ness " is the badge of all his work. His indi- 
 viduality was too great to allow him always to be 
 a faultless artist, and so it is not surprising that 
 in his chief work, a journey through which has 
 been described as " the adventure of seven volumes, 
 which are seven valleys of dry bones," there is very 
 much that is uninteresting, much that is tiresome,
 
 Il6 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 and much that is even mediocre. But when 
 Landor is at his best, not many are so perfect as 
 he, and if he is not always so good as the few who 
 can be compared to him, he is on occasion much 
 better. It has been objected that all his characters 
 are too much after one model, and that a Landorian 
 model, 1 but only an imperfect knowledge of the 
 " Conversations " would prompt such a verdict. 
 When Hannibal receives the dying words of Mar- 
 cellus, we feel almost inclined to say with the 
 Carthaginian, " What else has the world in it ? " so 
 pathetic seems the end of the noble warrior ! 
 " How suddenly," exclaims the agonising Mar- 
 cellus, " may the most powerful be in the situation 
 of the most helpless," and he adds a little 
 further on, " We feel ourselves the most exempt 
 from affliction when we relieve it, although we are 
 then the most conscious that it may befall us." 
 How perfectly, too, has Landor caught the relations 
 of the church and court of France in the conversa- 
 tion between " Louis XIV. and Father La Chaise," 
 when the young King confesses the greatest of 
 crimes and his confessor imposes the slightest of 
 
 1 Carlyle said the "Conversations" were all more or less 
 Landor, but acknowledged that there were fine touches of 
 character in his statesmen and poets which Wilson or Lock- 
 hart could not match. " Conversations with Duffy"
 
 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 117 
 
 penances. How just are his strictures on Charles 
 I. in the conversation in which Cromwell tries to 
 justify himself and his conduct. " Charles," says 
 Cromwell, " was always more to be dreaded by his 
 friends than by his enemies." Who has not shud- 
 dered with the Princess Dashkof when she listens 
 with Catherine of Russia to the murder of Peter, 
 and hears the blood dripping through the bed- 
 clothes? How perfectly characteristic is the 
 Empress's reply to the Princess's remark, that 
 Europe may be more easily subjugated than 
 duped. " She shall be both, God willing," exclaims 
 Catherine. Is there anything in literature more 
 touching than Lander's treatment of Anne Boleyn, 
 when Henry comes disguised as a yeoman to see 
 her? And is there not something very pathetic 
 in her womanly desire once more to see the young 
 Elizabeth? "Ceuld I, could I kiss her but once 
 again ! it would cpmfort my heart, or break it." 
 
 How charming to walk with Epicurus, and talk 
 love and philosophy with Leontian and Ternissa ; 
 the very air seems to breathe the balmy atmo- 
 sphere of sunny Italy, and while they wander 
 among violet beds and shady groves, it seems a 
 land where " it is always afternoon." What more 
 beautiful than the conversation between Leofric 
 and Godiva? How gigantic the satire in that
 
 Il8 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 between Peter the Great and Alexis. How true, 
 if a little sententious, is this aphorism of Richard 
 Hooker when he talks of religion and philosophy 
 with Lord Bacon : " Wisdom consisteth not in 
 knowing many things, nor even in knowing them 
 thoroughly; but in choosing and in following what 
 conduces the most certainly to our lasting happi- 
 ness and true glory. And this wisdom, my Lord 
 of Verulam, cometh from above." 
 
 But not merely in these pictorial and imaginative 
 effects do the " Conversations " appeal to us ; and 
 in the remarks of Southey with Landor himself we 
 shall find an estimate of Milton as solid, and an 
 acumen as perfect, as any criticism on the poet 
 has yet produced. How acute, too, is Lander's per- 
 ception of Milton's grandeur in another place, his 
 conversation with the Abbd De"lille, and what a 
 perfect analogy he draws between the sublimity of 
 the poet and the rugged majesty of the Alps. 
 Quite the gem it seems to be of the whole work. 
 " Milton," says Delille, " is, indeed, extremely diffi- 
 cult to translate ; for however noble and majestic, 
 he is sometimes heavy, and often rough and un- 
 equal." " Dear Abbe 7 ," replies Landor, " porphyry 
 is heavy, gold is heavier ; Ossa and Olympus are 
 rough and unequal ; the steppes of Tartary, though 
 high, are of uniform elevation ; there is not a rock,
 
 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 1 19 
 
 nor a birch, nor a cytisus, nor an arbutus upon 
 them great enough to shelter a new dropped lamb. 
 Level the Alps one with another, and where is their 
 sublimity ? Raise up the Vale of Tempe to the downs 
 above, and where are those sylvan creeks and 
 harbours in which the imagination watches while 
 the soul reposes, those recesses in which the gods 
 partook the weaknesses of mortals, and mortals the 
 enjoyments of the gods ? " 
 
 This is criticism, and what is much more, 
 eloquent criticism : such eloquence, indeed, as few 
 besides Landor have written. Nor is his estimate 
 of Voltaire's remarks on Shakespeare less poignant. 
 He speaks of him as a " woodpecker sticking to an 
 old tree, in order that he may pick out the rotten 
 pieces, and even then," says our author, "he has 
 brought home but scanty sustenance to his starve- 
 ling nest." 
 
 Lander's criticism was as extensive as it was 
 forcible, and the "Conversations" alone bear witness 
 to an amount of book-learning and synthetical skill 
 which, had the author done nothing else, would, 
 under any circumstances, have claimed our ad- 
 miration. In the vastness of his subject he has 
 covered ground which, in the ordinary run of things, 
 would have provided life work for many men. 
 
 From Plato to Person, from Hannibal to Hume,
 
 120 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 from Seneca to Southey, he has treated of them 
 all, sovereigns, statesmen, men of letters, and men 
 of science, of all ages and of all types. That he has 
 been accused of marking so many of them with his 
 own individuality is not astonishing, that he should 
 in certain instances have deserved the accusation 
 is not less surprising. Were it not an acknow- 
 ledged fact, according to Carlyle, that " biography 
 is by nature the most universally profitable, uni- 
 versally pleasant of all things, especially biography 
 of distinguished individuals," it might also be a 
 matter of wonder that Landor did not feel the strain 
 of writing a work of the same continuity as the 
 "Imaginary Conversations," for here, indeed, is 
 biography in the truest sense of the word. It 
 is for this biographical reason that the work has 
 such an indisputable value, for " we cannot look, 
 however imperfectly, upon a great man, without 
 gaining something by him," and it is the history of 
 the better part of the world that we touch when 
 we lay our hands on this work. 
 
 Landor is, like better men before and since, 
 least trustworthy when he gets on political 
 matters, especially contemporary politics. It was 
 such a sore subject with him that it would have 
 been difficult, perhaps impossible, to have avoided 
 venturing on the delicate ground of party 'strife.
 
 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 121 
 
 In doing so he was bearing Shelley and Leigh 
 Hunt company. All men have their prejudices ; 
 they are to a man's character what the lights and 
 shadows are to his portrait ; but not many have 
 enforced them on other people with the sledge- 
 hammer-like persistence of Landor. His hatred 
 for Castlereigh and Canning was a kind of 
 mania, and the unhappy objects of his wrath 
 are held up to his sneers and sarcasms in a 
 thousand guises. Even in such an unlikely 
 place as the conversation between Epicurus 
 and Ternissa, there are two long passages, 
 both of them violent attacks on Canning. In 
 the conversation between Demosthenes and Eubu- 
 lides, the statesman figures under the disguise of 
 Ansedestatos, a demagogue with a questionable 
 predilection for appropriating the public funds ; an 
 implication, however, as uncalled for as it is untrue ; 
 and in Canning's conversation with Pitt, the whole 
 object of the piece seems to be the making of the 
 former ridiculous and abhorrent. 
 
 Landor was, like Dr. Johnson, " a good hater " ; 
 he had also the great lexicographer's (as dear Miss 
 Betty in " Cranford " used to call him) tenacity of 
 purpose and intolerance of opinion. A grand old 
 pagan he has well been called, for he was too good 
 a man for a world which has no moral laws and
 
 122 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 too wilful a man for one that has. He hated any- 
 thing like opposition, and the Boythorn of " Bleak 
 House" is in every characteristic the Landor of 
 Llanthony. He would fulminate the most fearful 
 threats while fondling a pet, and the tale of his 
 having, when abroad, in a fit of passion, thrown his 
 man-cook out of the window, immediately after 
 exclaiming, " Good God ! I forgot the violets," does 
 not seem to be founded on any apocryphal basis. 
 The fact was that, as I. Disraeli somewhere says : 
 " The modes of life of a man of genius, often tinctured 
 by eccentricity and enthusiasm, maintain an eternal 
 conflict with the monotonous and imitative habits 
 of society, as society is carried on in a great metro- 
 polis, where men are necessarily alike, and in 
 perpetual intercourse shaping themselves to one 
 another." 
 
 As we frequently recognise the inherent wicked- 
 ness of a man by the few acts of goodness which he 
 has perpetrated, so we may often see the real great- 
 ness of a writer by his few defects. These have 
 been here sufficiently pointed out (at best an un- 
 gracious task) to enable the student of Landor to 
 recognise the points which really constituted the 
 great man in him. 
 
 The "Conversations" is his monumental work, 
 but the other productions of his pen are so nearly
 
 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 123 
 
 akin in form and intention to them, that all he did 
 in prose may be classed under the dramatic head- 
 ing. 
 
 The chief of these other books is undoubtedly 
 "Pericles and Aspasia," his longest work. It is 
 written in the form of letters between Aspasia and 
 her friends, chief of whom is Pericles. Into this 
 book Landor has brought together all his anti- 
 quarian knowledge, all his jewels of oratory and 
 imagery, all his patriot-like love for the earlier 
 and more glorious Greece ; throughout this noble 
 work the characters have a continuity, and are 
 sustained with a vigour which is surpassed by 
 their author in none of his other books. Pericles 
 is always thoughtful and just ; Aspasia ever noble 
 and womanly. 
 
 It is hardly to be wondered at that Landor, 
 who wrote out of his head, and did not verify 
 his work by the, authorities he had previously 
 been acquainted with, should have fallen into 
 error and anachronism, but as " he did not trouble 
 himself about considerations of this kind, ob- 
 serving, rightly enough, that dialogue was not 
 history, and that in a work of imagination 
 some liberties might legitimately be taken 
 with fact," he fell through this conclusion 
 into a graver fault, and in loading his work
 
 124 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 with learned disquisitions and abstruse proposi- 
 tions, he puzzled the general reader without 
 benefiting the student. It is a sufficient proof of 
 his charm of manner that, in spite of these defects, 
 " Pericles and Aspasia " still remains an engrossing 
 book, from the moment when the Grecian beauty 
 first meets the great General at a performance of 
 " The Prometheus Bound," to where it so finely 
 ends with Pericles' dying opinions of life, which 
 had sometimes seemed as of but a moment's length 
 to him, "at another time, as if centuries had passed 
 within it ; for within it have existed the greater 
 part of those who, since the origin of the world, 
 have been the luminaries of the human race." 
 
 To " Pericles and Aspasia " Landor appended 
 two long epilogues : one literary, which, for the 
 time, got lost through the carelessness of an 
 American gentleman (giving Landor an oppor- 
 tunity of writing a characteristic allusion, and of 
 practically shutting his doors henceforth to any of 
 that nation) : and the other political, which, under 
 cover of treating of Athenian legislation, gives the 
 author's own ideas on modern politics, and some- 
 what inappropriately enunciates his opinions on 
 the desirability of Church and State Reform in 
 England and Ireland. 
 
 The first part of that remarkable trilogy of
 
 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 125 
 
 books which appeared between 1834 and 1837, and 
 of which "Pericles and Aspasia" formed the second 
 part, was "The Citation and Examination of 
 William Shakespeare for Deer-stealing," a book, 
 which, according to the epigram of Charles Lamb, 
 " only two men could have written the man who 
 did write it, or he of whom it was written." Like 
 all exaggerated praise, it is not improbable that 
 this has done the book some little harm by raising 
 expectations which are not destined to be ade- 
 quately realised. 
 
 The fact is, that Landor's peculiar genius did not 
 lend itself sufficiently to the treatment of the 
 lighter moods (for which reason it is that the more 
 playful sallies in the conversation between Epi- 
 curus and Ternissa are the worser part of that 
 production), and " where, in painting the humours 
 of a rich and massive nature, Landor was incom- 
 parable ; he had ^not the light hand which is 
 needed to paint the humours of a fool." If we 
 disregard the temerity (owned by the author in a 
 letter to Southey) of bringing Shakespeare, of 
 whose personality so little is known, upon the 
 scene at all, Landor, from his personal acquaintance 
 with Warwickshire, and especially that part which 
 is so peculiarly associated with the Bard of Avon, 
 seemed particularly fitted to treat of such a theme.
 
 126 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 But the wit, from whoever's mouth it issues, is the 
 heavy, elephantine wit of Landor. The satire is 
 in a happier vein, and the words in which Sir 
 Thomas Lucy points out the sacredness of " bucks, 
 swans, and herons," are excellently well chosen. 
 The work, too, is rich, as are all Lander's, whatever 
 else be their faults, in " wise saws and modern in- 
 stances," of which, as an example, we may give 
 Shakespeare's remark to Sir Thomas Lucy, that 
 " Even bad men are not bad men while they praise 
 the just"; and among the verses interspersed 
 throughout it, that entitled the " Maid's Lament " 
 is well nigh perfection. 
 
 The last work of the trilogy, the constituent 
 parts of which were written during the happiest 
 years of Landor's life, when he wandered in 
 the grounds of his own Villa Gherardesca, or 
 through the " citron groves of Fiesole," was " The 
 Pentameron." 
 
 Goethe has said, " To finish is not the scholar's 
 care ; it is enough if he improves himself by 
 practice," and Landor has sufficiently applied this 
 rule to himself in this work. All circumstances 
 seemed to combine to make it a worthy result. 
 Written on the very spot where the scene of " The 
 Decameron " had partly been laid, it treated of the 
 two writers, with whose work Landor had most
 
 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. I2/ 
 
 intimate knowledge, and whom he mostly loved, 
 Boccacio and Petrarch. In " The Pentameron," all 
 Lander's power, knowledge of human nature, 
 critical perception, and eloquence are brought into 
 play. It is, perhaps, the most uniformly good of 
 all his works ; it is certainly the most beautiful. 
 Whether we linger in memory with the greatest of 
 story-tellers himself, "the most imaginative and 
 creative genius that our Italy, or indeed our world, 
 hath in any age beheld;" as Petrarch is made so 
 rightly to call him ; whether we think of Laura's 
 lover, and exclaim with him, " Love, Giovanni, 
 and life itself, are but dreams at best;" or whether 
 we remember the charming Assuntina, who is no 
 child, but for whom there is a place in heaven, or 
 Frate Biagio, the priest, we cannot but recognise 
 that to have made all these the living embodiment 
 of our hopes and fears is the work of true genius. 
 There are spots on the sun, and "The Pentameron" 
 is disfigured by one or two long and tedious stories 
 with no merit and less point, but all such defects 
 are more than compensated for by the beautiful 
 allegory of Petrarch's dream a dream of love, and 
 sleep, and death. Mr. Colvin justly considers it 
 "an example, unmatched in literature, of the 
 union of Greek purity of outline with Florentine 
 poignancy of sentiment"; and it indeed shows,
 
 128 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 better than any criticism on Landor could do, what 
 a power he possessed to touch as lightly as with a 
 feather, he, who could on occasion smite as with 
 a rod of iron. 
 
 There is something very pathetic about the pro- 
 duction of this book, for what had been commenced 
 in happiness among his most cherished associations, 
 was only destined to see the light when its author, 
 driven by family dissensions, had returned to his 
 native land and was living a solitary hypo- 
 chondriac in England. 
 
 Like so many great prose writers who have 
 attempted poetry, Landor, though he showed both 
 vigour and versatility, was never destined to rank 
 among England's great poets. He had in his com- 
 position neither the love of nature, which helped 
 to make Wordsworth the chief of a school, nor the 
 passionate feelings of Byron; he was no dreamer like 
 Coleridge, nor was he a born poet like Burns. Yet 
 his almost maiden effort was not without merit, and it 
 is no secret that Landor expected great things of it. 
 
 An accident suggested the poem, for he found 
 what was afterwards its groundwork in the form 
 of a slight Arabian sketch at the end of a romance 
 which had been lent him by Miss Rose Aylmer. 1 
 
 1 Immortalised in the beautiful little poem which bears 
 her name.
 
 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 1 29 
 
 The plot has been described as "shadowy and 
 chaotic," and in the preface its author terms " Gebir " 
 " the fruit of idleness and ignorance." 
 
 As is frequent with Landor, this poem fails in 
 being a perfect work of art from a proper want of 
 continuity, and its best passages have acquired an 
 exaggerated value from the fact of their isolation. 
 But at the same time there are very remarkable 
 instances of tine poetical writing, so fine, indeed, 
 that they may often with propriety be compared 
 with the productions of the greatest masters of 
 English poetry ; * but the best commentary on the 
 ultimate success of the poem is the fact that the 
 lines on George III. are probably the best known 
 portion of it, from the fact alone that Byron has 
 transcribed them in a note to his " Vision of 
 Judgment." 
 
 " Gebir " had, however, one great merit. It stood 
 forth as one of tjie surest precursors of the re- 
 vival of English poetry. As a herald, it was not 
 necessary to be of the same sterling merit or 
 
 1 In " Gebir,'' as in his prose work, Landor shows the in- 
 tensity of his admiration, and the fierceness of his hate. 
 The lines on George III. are ferocious in their satire, 
 while Napoleon, who is included among the descendants of 
 Tamar, is described as "A mortal man above all mortal 
 praise." 
 
 I
 
 130 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 overwhelming grandeur as those which it intro- 
 duced. 
 
 De Quincey, in his amusing way, speaks of him- 
 self at the time of its first appearance as being its 
 " one sole purchaser and reader," a title which he 
 found himself bound, soon after, to share with 
 Southey. The anecdote shows how little the work 
 was known, " for," says De Quincey in another place, 
 " had Mr. Landor been read in any extent answering 
 to his merits, he must have become, for the English 
 public, an object of prodigious personal interest." 
 
 Although "Gebir," published anonymously in 
 1798, was written when Landor was only twenty- 
 three years of age, it was not his first poetical 
 attempt, and "The Poems of Walter Savage 
 Landor," which had been published as early as 
 1795, whether from an increased critical perception 
 in the author, or an almost inevitable dearth of 
 readers, was speedily withdrawn from circulation. 
 
 Three years after the appearance of " Gebir," 
 Landor put forth a small pamphlet entitled 
 " Poems from the Arabic and Persian." It was 
 written under the influence of one of Sir William 
 Jones' recent publications of similar work ; but this 
 little venture made no stir at the time, and was 
 followed soon after by " Poetry by the Author of 
 1 Gebir.' " Chief among the contents of this latter
 
 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 131 
 
 volume are the poems called respectively "Chrysaor " 
 and " The Phocseans." The former is probably Lan- 
 dor's finest piece of narrative- writing in blank verse ; 
 and it is known what an impression the other 
 made on Wordsworth. By his latter-day poems, 
 the " Hellenics " and the " Heroic Idyls," partly in 
 English and partly in Latin, his poetical work 
 was bounded. 
 
 It is probable that Lander's verse will be repre- 
 sented for posterity by the one or two small lyrics 
 which have hardly been surpassed in their style 
 for simplicity of diction and beauty of thought. 
 Among the best of these, that to " Rose Aylmer " 
 is the most widely known ; but " Twenty Years 
 Hence," " One Year Ago," and " Sympathy in Sor- 
 row," and above all, his lines, touching beyond 
 expression, to Mary Lamb on her brother's death, 
 are all beautiful examples of his best manner ; 
 while this single stanza : 
 
 " I strove with none ; for none was worth my strife. 
 
 Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art ; 
 \s I warmed both hands before the fire of life ; 
 It sinks, and I am ready to depart, " 
 
 which is prefaced to one of his last works, quite 
 mirrors Lander's life and aims in four lines.
 
 132 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 His more particularly dramatic 1 works yet re- 
 main to receive some notice. Of them, " Count 
 Julian " holds deservedly the first place. De Quin- 
 cey calls it " a great conception." " The story," he 
 says, " is wrapt in gigantic mists, and looms upon 
 one like the Grecian fable of the CEdipus." This is 
 high praise indeed, but, although it is not bestowed 
 so partially as at first sight it appears to be, yet 
 many will be inclined to be biassed rather by 
 Charles Lamb's more sober remarks on the play. 
 " I must read again Lander's ' Julian," " he says in 
 1815 ; " I have not read it for some time. I think he 
 must have failed in Roderick (one of the characters 
 in the play), for I remember nothing of him, nor 
 of any distinct character as a character, only fine- 
 sounding passages." 
 
 The fact seems to have been that Landor was 
 tied down by his own severe rules ; and the result 
 of his theory that the passions in poetry should 
 " go naked like the heroes and the gods," is, that 
 they do not seem always to have been in this 
 natural state, but appear rather to have lost their 
 clothes. 
 
 Southey, with his vast knowledge of all things 
 Spanish, gave Landor invaluable help during the 
 
 1 " More particularly," for, as has been remarked before, 
 all his works have the dramatic spirit.
 
 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 133 
 
 writing of " Count Julian " ; it, however, with 
 difficulty found a publisher, and in a moment of 
 passion at the news that Longman had refused it, 
 Landor burnt a tragedy entitled " Ferranti and 
 Guilio," in which, as he said himself, he imagined 
 he had " acquired the right tone of tragedy, and 
 was treading down at heel the shoes of Alfieri." 
 
 " Count Julian " abounds in fine passages often 
 more than merely rhetorical, and, as has been 
 observed, is " not poor in solid and profound 
 reflexions upon life." There are in it, too (to use 
 De Quincey's somewhat high-sounding praise, in 
 this case not unmerited), " passages to which, for 
 their solemn grandeur, one raises one's hat as at 
 night in walking under the Coliseum ; passages 
 which, for their luxury of loveliness, should be 
 inscribed on the phylacteries of brides, or upon 
 the frescoes of Ionia." 
 
 " Count Julian," as is, too, the case with " Gebir," 
 stands an almost solitary exception, however, to- 
 wards proving Lanclor a true poet. Had all he has 
 written in verse the beauty, continuity, and clear- 
 ness of this work, he might have taken his stand 
 at least among the English poets of the second 
 rank ; but this was, unfortunately, not the case, and 
 he knew it ; for, while he regarded himself as the 
 first of living prose-writers, he acknowledged that
 
 134 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 there were better contemporary poets ; and when 
 
 we consider the nature of the man we cannot but 
 
 feel sure that such an allowance was only made 
 
 after the most positive proof and the most matured 
 
 conviction. 
 
 The trilogy of " Andrea of Hungary," " Giovanni 
 of Naples " and " Fra Rupert," and the " Siege of 
 Ancona," the last of his complete plays, hardly 
 help to raise Landor in the position of " a great 
 dramatic poet," as Browning in the dedication of 
 " Luria " calls him. 
 
 This will possibly not be the verdict of the 
 majority of Landor's readers, because the majority 
 of Landor's readers are worshippers of Landor. 
 Yet it is in reality more than true, for though he 
 treated his subjects in a singularly powerful and 
 dramatic way, " Count Julian " is the only one of 
 his plays that has really any just pretence to be 
 regarded as a perfect dramatic work of art. 
 
 His two last works, productions of his old age, 
 bear the curiously bizarre titles of " Last Fruit off 
 an Old Tree," and " Dry Sticks, fagoted by W. S. 
 Landor." They are both a somewhat miscellaneous 
 collection of conversations, letters, epigrams, poems 
 and essays, together with some lampoons, which, 
 in contradiction to his written engagement not to 
 insert, he had printed in the latter book, bringing
 
 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 135 
 
 him fresh trouble, and obliging him once again to 
 leave England. 
 
 Both these works, but more particularly the 
 latter, as was perhaps to be expected when the age 
 oi' the author is considered, show signs of decaying 
 powers and worn-out vigour. The " Last Fruit " 
 is disfigured by one of those long, nay, almost in- 
 terminable conversations on grammar and spelling 
 which Landor seems to have elaborated with such 
 painstaking zest. It is the conversation between 
 Landor himself and Archdeacon Hare, and together 
 with the two between Dr. Johnson and Home, 
 Tooke shows the truth of what De Quincey says in 
 his exceedingly clever and amusing article entitled 
 " Orthographic Mutineers " : " As we are all of us 
 crazy when the wind sits in some particular 
 quarter, let not Mr. Landor be angry with me for 
 suggesting that he is outrageously crazy upon the 
 one solitary subject of spelling." He shows, 
 as readers of the essay are aware, how dangerously 
 near inconsistency Landor often sails, and how 
 unavoidable this is ; for it is an acknowledged fact 
 that prejudice, intolerance and error are nearly 
 always closely allied. 
 
 To come to the man himself, with all his im- 
 petuosity and waywardness, the charm of Lander's 
 manner must have been irresistible, and many are
 
 136 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 the evidences which bear witness to the fact. 
 Southey, who had so many opportunities of judging 
 the character of his friend, has left this tribute to 
 his memory a tribute that has called forth a 
 sneer from Byron : " Of its author (the author of 
 ' Gebir ' and ' Count Julian '), I will only say in this 
 place, that to have obtained his approbation as a 
 poet, and possessed his friendship as a man, will be 
 remembered among the honours of my life, when 
 the petty enmities of this generation will be 
 forgotten, and its ephemeral reputation shall have 
 passed away." 
 
 Shelley was no less enthusiastic, at least over 
 one of his productions, " Gebir " (De Quincey 
 seemed unaware of this), which Hogg tells us he 
 would read aloud or to himself with a tiresome 
 pertinacity. 
 
 De Quincey, Carlyle, Dickens, and Lamb have 
 all combined in their various ways to render 
 affectionate tribute to " that deep-mouthed Bostian, 
 Savage Landor," as Byron calls him in " Don Juan." 
 Browning dedicated, as we have seen, his " Luria " 
 to him, and Mr. Swinburne has written one of his 
 most melodious poems to the " old lion's " memory. 
 How lovingly he refers to him ! 
 
 " I found him whom I shall not find 
 Till all grief end,
 
 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 137 
 
 In holiest age our mightiest mind, 
 Father and friend." 
 
 It is given to few to inspire such love among 
 friends 1 or such fear among enemies. When he 
 smote he struck out in front ; he would have no 
 hitting a man from behind. He was a satirist, but 
 his satire, though trenchant, was ever kindly. He 
 had prejudices, but when the strife was o'er, he 
 was ever ready to " call a truce to battle." The 
 fact was that there were in him two distinct 
 personalities, one full of pugnacity, always apt to 
 see offence in the least matter; the other of the 
 kindliest and most fatherly character. 
 
 He strikes us as a man of great intellectual 
 powers, which, had they had a greater analytical 
 basis, might have placed him in a position to do 
 work far more useful and far more popular, though 
 it could not well Jiave been more enduring or more 
 solid. 2 A link between two literary ages, he 
 
 1 " On the 15th of May I dined," says Emerson, " with Mr. 
 Landor. I found him noble and courteous, living in a cloud 
 of pictures at his Villa Gherardesca, a fine house command- 
 ing a beautiful landscape. I had inferred from his books or 
 magnified from some anecdotes, an impression of Achillean 
 wrath an untamable petulance. I do not know whether 
 the imputations were just or not, but certainly on this May 
 day his courtesy veiled that haughty mind, and he was the 
 most patient and gentle of hosts." English Traits. 
 
 2 " What I write is not written on slate ; and no finger,
 
 138 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 stands a herculean figure, towering above his 
 contemporaries, and ever as ready to do battle 
 with sham and fraud as Carlyle was to fight the 
 battles later on. 
 
 Landor's stj'le has been spoken of as " marmore- 
 ally emphatic;" no other epithet could perhaps 
 describe it with an equal felicity. To no one does 
 Buffon's dictum (somewhat erroneously formulated 
 as le style c'est I'homme) apply with so great a 
 semblance of truth. His writings were more than 
 most people's the reflex of his mind, and in his own 
 conduct he had himself acted a hundred times tbe 
 sentiments and propositions which give so startling 
 and Landorian an individuality to all the characters 
 in his works. " I claim no place in the world of 
 letters," he once wrote to a friend. " I am alone, 
 and will be alone so long as I live, and after." It 
 is his truest epitaph ! 
 
 " Every man," says King Alfred, " must say what 
 he says and do what he does according to his 
 ability." Landor, above most men, did this, and 
 what must always be placed to his credit, was the 
 fact that the circumstances of his life did not make 
 it imperative that he should have done more than 
 Sidney Smith once said he had succeeded in eflfect- 
 
 not that of Time himself, who dips it in the mist of years, 
 can efface it," once said Landor.
 
 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 139 
 
 ing himself, viz., doing little harm in the world, and 
 bringing up his children. 
 
 To Landor more than to any other writer, when 
 we remember his long career of energetic labour, 
 tormented by the petty squabbles of friends and 
 the unceasing torments of enemies, 1 may be applied 
 these two lines in the last verses of Chaucer, 
 
 " The wrestling of this world asketh a fall ; 
 Here is no home, here is but wilderness." 
 
 1 Claire, in his Journal, gives a characteristic, if some- 
 what unpleasant, picture of Landor among the odd English at 
 Pisa. "Landor, who will not see a single English person, says 
 he is glad the country produces people of worth, but he will 
 have nothing to do with them." But the best commentary 
 on the man's nature is his well-known letter to Lord 
 Normanby.
 
 Cbatles Dicfcens, 
 
 NOVELIST. 
 
 " Chief in thy generation born of men ; 
 Whom English praise acclaimed as English bora, 
 With eyes that matched the world- wide eyes of morn 
 For gleam of tears or laughter, tenderest then 
 When thoughts of children warmed their light, or when 
 Reverence of age with love and labour worn, 
 Or god -like pity fired with god-like scorn, 
 Shot through them flame that winged thy swift live pen." 
 
 Swinburne. 
 
 SOME years ago, M. Zola, in speaking of English 
 literature and English writers, included the name 
 of Charles Dickens among the four or five leaders 
 of prose-fiction, whom he (M. Zola) considered, if 
 not absolutely worthless, at least of no considerable 
 value. 
 
 There is to be found, doubtless, this consolation 
 for such a literary holocaust by some particular 
 critics, in the fact that, as Frederick von Schlegel 
 
 somewhere says, " The approbation of the many 
 140
 
 CHARLES DICKENS. 14! 
 
 has no greater intrinsic value than that false 
 glitter of intellect, that luscious emptiness of heart, 
 for which it is given in exchange." 
 
 But in spite of adverse critics, for there have 
 been others besides M. Zola, and notwithstanding 
 exceptions taken to his manner, his methods and 
 his matter, Dickens remains, if not the first of 
 English novelists, at least the most popular. 
 
 We are somewhat tenacious of applying the 
 epithet of " novelist " to the author of " Pickwick," 
 however, for in the strict sense of the word he was 
 not a novelist. "He was a poor story-teller he was 
 not a great plotter," says Mr. Lang ; and this is 
 only too apparent in most of the work he did, in 
 " Martin Chuzzlewit " no less than in " Pickwick." 
 " Our Mutual Friend " and " Great Expectations " 
 show, indeed, an effort not wholly unsuccessful to 
 combine intricacy of plot with their author's 
 peculiar genius for. character sketching; but parti- 
 cularly in Dickens' earlier work, all such attempts 
 are sadly to seek. It is for this reason that the 
 small tale he wrote in collaboration with Wilkie 
 Collins 1 has more claim to be considered in the 
 light of a novel, according to strict rules, than any 
 of the larger works which emanated from his pen 
 alone ; for no greater English master of plot and 
 1 " No Thoroughfare."
 
 142 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 sensation has lived than the author of " The Moon- 
 stone." 
 
 But Dickens has been accused of other de- 
 linquencies besides that of being defective in the 
 more important attributes of the novelist proper. He 
 is called vulgar ; he is said never to have succeeded 
 in drawing a lady or a gentleman ; he is attacked 
 for want of true pathos, of being, in other words, a 
 maudlin sentimentalist. 
 
 Nowadays, it seems to have become an accepted 
 proposition, that anything to do with the lowest 
 classes is necessarily vulgar, for which reason 
 " Oliver Twist " is attacked on this head with more 
 asperity than " David Copperfield," or " Bleak 
 House." Nothing is so absurd. Vulgarity, using 
 the word in its more extended signification, has its 
 home almost entirely among the middle classes, 
 more particularly the higher middle class, and often 
 among those of a still more elevated standing. To 
 pretend to be what one is not, to ape one's betters, 
 to be ashamed of one's poorer relations, in short all 
 the forms of snobbery which are nowadays so ram- 
 pant, really form a vulgarity of the worst and most 
 \ virulent type. 
 
 Now there is no instance on record of a writer 
 of fiction who set himself more sturdily to show up 
 the falsity and baseness of such conduct, with the
 
 CHARLES DICKENS. 143 
 
 exception of Thackeray, than Dickens. It is there- 
 fore absurd on the face of it to accuse him of 
 harbouring that which he attempted to destroy. 
 
 Those who accuse him of failing ignobly, when 
 he attempted to draw the portrait of a lady or a 
 gentleman, are either those who have no real ac- 
 quaintance with his works, or those (and the class 
 is a much more numerous one) who consider that 
 much wealth and a title constitute the requirements 
 necessary to ensure their owners being enrolled 
 among this privileged class. Who is there that 
 dares assert that the Agnes of " David Copperfield " 
 is not a lady, or the Esther of " Bleak House," or the 
 Florence of "Dombey and Son," or "Little Dorrit"? 
 
 Do those who say he never succeeded in drawing 
 the portrait of a gentleman, forget Traddles, who, 
 from the moment he shouts out, " Shame, Steer- 
 forth," in school, to when he assures Copperfield, 
 over a luncheon table crowded with everything 
 but what ought to be there, from Dora's guitar 
 case to Jip's pagoda, that he has " oceans of room, 
 I assure you, oceans," is never anything else ? Do 
 they fail to remember the generous self-devotion of 
 Sidney Carton, or the lovable nature of Mr. Jarn- 
 dyce ? 
 
 / Then again his power, once so potent, of drawing 
 tears from the eyes of his readers, is said to be de-
 
 144 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 creasing. But is that any fault of the novelist ? 
 Has the same hand lost its cunning, because it fails 
 to do now what was so easily effected fifty years 
 ago ? It is the generation which is at fault ; there 
 is no time for sentiment nowadays, and if such a 
 thing is indulged in at all, it surely ought to be 
 managed vicariously. This is the age of Ibsen ; 
 the decadents have a vogue. Dickens is old- 
 fashioned, and Thackeray passe, and the majority 
 of us seem to be coming round to Zola's verdict. 
 But there are still those who cannot read of the 
 death of Dora, or of Sidney Carton on the scaffold, 
 with undimmed e}*es. The man who is ashamed 
 to confess to what is called " such weakness," you 
 may depend is not a good man. He is possibly 
 that excellent nineteenth century substitute, " an 
 -. awfully 'cute fellow." 
 
 It is refreshing to find, when these captious ones 
 have been impatiently heard and happily done 
 with, that Dickens' works, especially among the 
 " vulgar " class, still hold a sway as extended as it 
 is unquestioned. 
 
 From statistics n we find that " Pickwick " 2 is, 
 
 1 Down to the end of the year 1890, Messrs. Chapman & 
 Hall had published and sold 900,000 copies, besides those 
 editions which have been brought out since the expiration 
 of the author's copyright. 
 
 2 The author's son has lovingly and exhaustively told us
 
 CHARLES DICKENS. 145 
 
 beyond all doubt, first in the field. But "Pick- 
 wick," much as we love the book, seems to us, as 
 Dickens himself thought, and Forster, a par- 
 ticularly competent judge, with him, "crude and 
 juvenile ;" indeed, not a work by which a writer's 
 reputation should stand or fall. Necessarily with 
 the form of its publication, and the peculiarity 
 of its original intention, it is scrappy and dis- 
 connected. This was certainly ameliorated to- 
 wards the end of the work, for which reason 
 the latter half is by far the better, artistically 
 speaking. 
 
 It has been designated a comic middle-class epic, 
 and in its delineation of character, wherein to our 
 mind its chief value lies, in forecasting the event- 
 ual successes of Dickens in this particular line, it 
 is on occasions unrivalled even by the author him- 
 self. We take Sam Weller and Jingle to be two 
 of the finest creatipns in the language, for neither, 
 often as this has been doubted and denied, is an 
 exaggeration. Pickwick himself is, however, incon- 
 sistent, and at the end of the book we hardly take 
 leave of the same individual with whom we started 
 at the commencement. The trial scene is excellent 
 
 all there is to be told of the topography of the book in an 
 excellent article which appeared some time since in the 
 Etiglish Illustrated Magazine.
 
 146 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 both in intention and execution ; and as lights of 
 lesser magnitude, Buzf uz and Justice Stareleigh are 
 drawn to the life. 
 
 The law has received a good many blows from 
 Dickens, but nothing to equal the good-humoured 
 sarcasm which he has brought to bear against it 
 here. The favourite form of brow-beating re- 
 sorted to at the time, the ridiculous importance 
 attached to written evidence bearing no relation to 
 the case, the affected pathos of Mr. Buzfuz, and the 
 unaffected boredom l of Mr. Justice Stareleigh, are 
 all really incidents taken from actual life accentu- 
 ated by a master-hand. Jingle is epic ; there is no 
 other word to describe him; always calm, collected, 
 and insolent ; he is a perfect type of the thorough- 
 going scamp who lives by his own wits and the 
 credulity of other people. The first meeting with 
 Sam Weller ; the Eatanswill election ; Mr. Pickwick 
 on the ice ; life at Bath, and the Fleet Prison, are 
 all incidents which rise to the heights of perfect 
 humour or pathos. Dickens had studied these 
 things thoroughly, but no amount of mere know- 
 ledge would have been sufficient to inform such 
 circumstances with the certain immortalities which 
 he has given to them. 
 
 1 " With this beautiful peroration Mr. Sergeant Buzfuz 
 sat down, and Mr. Justice Stareleigh woke up." " Pick- 
 tmcfc."
 
 CHARLES DICKENS. 147 
 
 What makes " Pickwick " a book for all time, 
 beyond its mere interest as a collection of tales 
 connected by a running narrative, is its royal fund 
 of humour, its keen observation, its unsullied 
 delight in all that is good and true, and its genial 
 love of fun, its absolute want of all elements of 
 cant and snobbery ; and this, too, is what makes 
 it so perfect a picture of its author's own mind and 
 character. In these points it is a great book, and 
 the man who can properly appreciate it will not 
 be the man who is infected with latter-day 
 morality or Jin de si&cle boredom. 
 
 It is for these reasons that "Pickwick" is so 
 pre-eminently a book to be picked up at odd 
 moments and dipped into ; reasons which make it 
 as difficult to put it down as it is delightful to take 
 it up. With such attributes it will stand in goodly 
 company with gentle " Don Quixote " and witty 
 " Gil Bias," witk the Eastern glories of the 
 " Arabian Nights/' and the stirring adventures of 
 " Robinson Crusoe," with the humours of " Tris- 
 tram Shandy " and the satire of Gulliver. But it 
 will ever have an individuality of its own, and it is 
 difficult to properly estimate amongst what sort of 
 books it ought accurately to be classed, for by 
 design it is a^uasi-sporting novel, by execution it 
 stands the Iliad of facetiae.N
 
 148 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 It would be difficult to say in which of his books 
 Dickens has put his best work. It is possibly, 
 whichever it be, not what most people would con- 
 sider his finest novel. The most popular, after 
 Pickwick, is, undoubtedly, " David Copperfield," 
 and in many respects justly so. There are pages 
 in it which, either for humour or pathos, have 
 never been equalled. David Copperfield and the 
 Waiter, and the death of Dora are incidents 
 which stand at the remote ends of Dickens' genius; 
 all other scenes and attributes lie between them./ 7 
 
 A great crowd of figures comes before us from 
 this book, all endowed with special note from 
 their own individual attributes, or from the quasi- 
 autobiographical interest which surrounds them. 
 There is Mr. Micawber, with his constant expec- 
 tations of " something turning up," unabated by 
 many disappointments ; there is Mrs. Micawber, 
 with her reliance on the genius of her husband ; 
 Traddles, with his self-devotion and quaint ways ; 
 the brilliant, treacherous Steerforth ; the noble- 
 minded, rugged Peggotty ; the too-confiding little 
 Emily ; the gentle Agnes ; Dora, the child- wife, 
 and Mr. Dick, the child-man ; Miss Trotwood, 
 honourable and good, but always stiff; Mrs. Steer- 
 forth, lonely and infatuated, but always proud ; 
 the fierce, passionate Miss Dartle, and the low,
 
 CHARLES DICKENS. 149 
 
 villainous Uriah Heep. All these and many others 
 come before us grouped round the central figure of 
 David Copperfield ; and we feel in reading the book 
 that we are perusing the actual life of its author. 
 
 What is most surprising about Dickens, and what 
 redounds most to his credit, is the fact that he, who 
 from the very commencement enchanted the world 
 with hardly an effort, should have taken such 
 infinite pains to improve. For there is scarcely 
 an instance of a really great writer who, during the 
 earlier part of his career, was on occasions so 
 unequal to himself, being oftenest worst when 
 he was trying to be most impeccable, and in at- 
 tempting to accentuate some particular character- 
 istic not unfrequently degenerating into a mere 
 caricaturist. It is for this reason that it is so sur- 
 prising that he who sketched Dombey should have 
 drawn Sidney Carton and immortalised Peck- 
 sniff. 
 
 i 
 
 He was, however, so true an artist, that, as Mr. 
 Henley remarks, from writing newspaper English, 
 he went on to become an exemplar. That he 
 practised Millet's dogma " Dans 1'art il faut sa 
 peau," what stands written by him to one who 
 asked for literary advice, will sufficiently show. 
 
 " When one is impelled to write this or that, 
 one has still to consider : How much of this will
 
 150 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 tell for what I mean ? How much of it is my own 
 wild emotion and superfluous energy how much 
 remains that is truly belonging to this ideal 
 character and these ideal circumstances ? It is in 
 the laborious struggle to make this distinction, 
 and in the determination to try for it, that the road 
 to the correction of faults lies." And in another 
 place he describes himself as " in the first stage of 
 a new book, which consists in going round and 
 round the idea, as you see a bird in his cage go 
 about and about his sugar before he touches it." l 
 
 If Martin Chuzzlewit is the most elaborate of his 
 works, " Our Mutual Friend " is, to our mind, un- 
 doubtedly the best. The book, like all human 
 work, has its faults. People will consider the 
 motives and action of Mr. Boffin, if not actually 
 impossible, still sufficiently improbable. We may 
 be of opinion, too, that the Dolls' Dressmaker, by 
 design a charming character, is by execution rather 
 a lower middle-class idyll than an actual being. 
 Fledgeby is over-drawn, and Twemlow inconsistent. 
 But then what are these defects when contrasted 
 with the unbending majesty of Mrs. Wilfer, or the 
 excellent portrait, with its lights and shadows so 
 skilfully managed, of her daughter Bella ; with the 
 
 1 See Mr. Henley's " Views and Reviews," the best book 
 of literary criticism that has been published for many years.
 
 CHARLES DICKENS. I$I 
 
 lovable Mrs. Boffin or the patient Riah ; above 
 all with Eugene Wrayburn and Bradley Head- 
 stone ? 
 
 The characterisation of the Lammles is perfect, 
 though we are not quite sure whether it is not 
 the man we should have expected to show signs 
 of repentance instead of the woman. For if a 
 woman is once thoroughly steeped in vice, she is 
 ever more consistent in it than a man. 
 
 All the circumstances attendant on the river life 
 are so marvellously life-like, that had nothing else 
 survived from his pen, these scenes would have 
 been sufficient to show the wonderful power of 
 observation which Dickens possessed in an almost 
 superhuman degree, and which make the immortal 
 line of Terence probably more true of him than of 
 any writer who has ever lived. 
 
 " Martin Chuzzlewit," a book, by the by, with 
 which he took more pains than with any of his 
 other work, which with Dickens is implying more 
 than mere words can express, is on occasions better 
 than anything in " Our Mutual Friend," but is not 
 so consistently good. His tendency to caricature 
 often gets the bit between its teeth and bolts. 
 But with such a masterpiece as Jonas Chuzzlewit, 
 with such immortals as Pecksniff (the nine- 
 teenth century Tartuffe), and Mrs. Gamp, no
 
 152 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 one could have held the reins so gently or more 
 firmly. 
 
 For mere word-painting, the earlier part of the 
 second chapter is equal to anything its author has 
 done in this direction, and the " leaves " in Martin 
 Chuzzlewit forms a companion picture to the 
 " footsteps " in " A Tale of Two Cities." Indeed, 
 this power of what may not inaptly be termed 
 typifying inanimate objects, is one of Dickens' 
 most unique attributes. More or less he 
 makes use of it in all his works, and in the 
 "Christmas Books" one comes upon it again and 
 again. 
 
 In nearly everything Dickens wrote he set him- 
 self to bring into ridicule, and so to get done away 
 with (for nothing brings about reform like ridi- 
 cule), the defects which were so characteristic of 
 most public business in his time, and which is not 
 wholly unknown in our own days. 
 
 Thus in " Bleak House " he attacked the Law, 
 and showed in the person of Miss Flite what its 
 delays would do, and in the character of Richard, 
 what its contact could cause. In " Little Dorrit " 
 it is the " Circumlocution office " run by the Tite- 
 Barnacles, and the "Marshalsea" with its "father" 
 and its " little domestic advantages." In " Hard 
 Times " it is the " strikes," with the popular crav-
 
 CHARLES DICKENS. 153 
 
 ing for " facts " on the part of the Gradgrinds of 
 the time. 1 
 
 The works which do not affect to touch on these 
 social evils, are nevertheless engaged in noting the 
 failings of particular individuals, so that we may call 
 pride the keynote of " Dombey and Son"; crime that 
 of " Oliver Twist " ; hypocrisy of " Martin Chuzzle- 
 wit," and meanness of " A Christmas Carol." 
 
 But in spite of these characteristics, hardly any 
 works of fiction hide so artistically the fact that 
 they are written for a purpose. Dickens rarely, if 
 ever, breaks off his narrative to moralise like 
 Thackeray, nor is he akin to George Eliot, who 
 seems rather to break off her moralising to continue 
 her narrative. We occasionally come across such 
 aphorisms as this in " Great Expectations " : 
 " Throughout life, our worst weaknesses and mean- 
 nesses are usually committed for the sake of the 
 people whom we most despise," which sounds like 
 one of La Rochefducauld's maxims before revision ; 
 but this is seldom the case, the tale itself being 
 held sufficient, as it invariably is, to point out 
 social abuses or private weaknesses. 
 
 Dickens looked upon the novel, as Moliere did 
 the drama, as a lay-pulpit from which all sham 
 
 1 The influence of Carlyle, to whom this book was dedi- 
 cated, is plainly visible.
 
 154 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 and falsity ought to be denounced and ridiculed, 
 and he is probably the only writer, with the ex- 
 ception of Thackeray, who, in this respect, made 
 as equally potent an instrument of the novel as the 
 great Frenchman did of the stage. 
 
 "A Tale of Two Cities" is the only one of Dickens' 
 books which seems to make everything subordinate 
 to the continued interest of the story; probably 
 for which reason it is with many people his most 
 popular work. It abounds in wonderful delinea- 
 tion of human character, and in marvellous pictures 
 of word-painting, to which no other period in the 
 world's history has given an equal opportunity. 
 The chapter entitled " Echoing Footsteps " is an 
 instance of Dickens' power of what we have before 
 called typifying inanimate objects; the footsteps 
 which are heard echoing round the corner where 
 the Doctor lived, bringing back to Lucie the whole 
 of her young life. 
 
 Tremendous that scene where Madame De'farge 
 is brought face to face with Miss Pross, " a Briton 
 and desperate," as she herself tells the French- 
 women ; epic, almost, that struggle, quite a typical 
 struggle, which puts an effectual end to the 
 knitting. 
 
 In the 22nd chapter of the second book there is 
 a description of the Paris mob during the first days
 
 CHARLES DICKENS. 155 
 
 of the Revolution, equal in word-painting to any- 
 thing in Carlyle's great work, that "wonderful 
 book," as Dickens called it; and few things in fiction 
 approach the last scene of all, where Sidney Carton 
 stands upon the scaffold with his young comrade's 
 hand in his, while she timidly asks him whether 
 the Republic is really doing good, and whether she 
 will have to wait long on that distant shore for her 
 friend and cousin. Holy that last kiss, while the 
 knitting women count " twenty-two"! And then 
 " The murmuring of many voices, the upturning of 
 many faces, the pressing on of many footsteps in 
 the outskirts of the crowd, so that it swells forward 
 in a mass, like one great heave of water, all flashes 
 away. Twenty-three." It is like the fall of the 
 guillotine's axe itself that " twenty-three"; it cuts 
 short the sentence in a way that is quite typical of 
 that which cut short so many lives. The whole 
 scene is " too deep for tears." 
 
 Throughout the master's works we see the same 
 hatred of sham and cant, the same pity for poverty 
 and oppression, the same noble endeavour to do his 
 utmost to lighten the burdens of the poor by 
 making them a bye-word and a scandal. " Un 
 honnete homme que la vue des iniquite's humaines 
 faisait bondir," as a writer in the Figaro (of April, 
 1886), once described him. In the man himself,
 
 156 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 what we find of kindly generosity, of large-hearted- 
 ness, of tender sympathy, of joyous good-humour, 
 of inexhaustible fun and unostentatious simplicity, 
 is recorded by those who knew him best and loved 
 him most. Sala and James Payne, Rimmer and 
 Ward, Langton 1 and Dolby, have all told us how 
 the more intimate the association the more lovable 
 he became ; and Thackeray has paid to him in the 
 " Four Georges " one of the noblest tributes which 
 a writer can pay to a brother author who is being 
 set in continual opposition to him. But, above all, 
 it is in Forster's " Life," and in Dickens' own 
 letters and speeches, that the true features of 
 the man are best revealed. 
 
 With less sterling qualities, few men could have 
 come through the ordeal of applause and adulation 
 which left Dickens unsullied. Like all pre-eminent 
 men, he was self-made ; but equally like every true 
 
 1 It is sufficient to glance through Mr. Langton's book on 
 Dickens' childhood, to learn how large an autobiographical 
 debt is due to nearly all his works. These references, Mr. 
 Langton, with a loving appreciation and painstaking care, 
 which is quite phenomenal, has gathered together in his in- 
 teresting volume. And although many will doubt the utility 
 or advantage of searching too curiously into the exact 
 position Dickens occupied when at school, together with 
 minute investigations into other matters hardly less trivial, 
 yet no one will question the sincerity of the intention or the 
 success of the result.
 
 CHARLES DICKENS. 157 
 
 leader, he was by birth and nature a gentleman. 
 He was not a snob as Thackeray was, since he 
 was not always imagining himself one. He 
 was florid in his tastes, and sometimes flashy in 
 his dress, as he often was in his style ; but it was 
 the period in which much jewellery and obtrusive 
 cravats were in vogue, in literature as well as in 
 social life. But everything in his outward appear- 
 ance became, we are told, subservient to the power 
 of his eyes. " Eyes," says one who knew him, " of 
 the bluest blue ; eyes which danced and sparkled 
 with sunniest merriment and yet which quickly 
 softened into serious sympathy ; eyes which were 
 brilliant and searching, and seemed always to be 
 kindly, though keenly, reading the person to whom 
 he was talking, yet which never hardened into 
 sternness ; eyes in which especially you could dis- 
 cern all the humanity and humour, the noble 
 intellectual possibilities and the manly tenderness 
 of their possessor." 
 
 His extraordinary sense of the ludicrous, his re- 
 markable power of imitation, and his keenness of 
 observation he inherited, together with much of 
 his personal beauty, from his mother ; and the like- 
 ness between her and Mrs. Nickleby is not quite 
 accurate in its implication. Probably, too, Mr. 
 Micawber, for whom Dickens' father is popularly
 
 158 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 supposed to have been the model, is made up 
 from some exaggerations of slight peculiarities 
 which the observant Dickens had noticed in the 
 paternal mind and manner. 1 
 
 It is always unfair to assume that Dickens 
 modelled his characters from any particular in- 
 dividuals ; he simply noted some salient character- 
 istic in a person, and from an accentuated form of 
 this, built up his character. "Je reprends mon 
 bien ou je le trouve," he might have said with 
 Moliere, with whom he has so much akin that he 
 may not inaccurately be termed the Moliere of 
 prose-fiction. 
 
 His method of working was like the man himself, 
 earnest and diligent. " I get up at seven," he says, 
 writing to a friend, " have a cold bath before 
 breakfast, and then blaze away until three 
 o'clock or so, when I usually knock off for the 
 day." 
 
 What pains he took in alteration and correction 
 is attested by the manuscripts, written in his 
 inevitable blue ink, and now resting peacefully, 
 their work being done, in the South Kensington 
 
 1 He is spoken of as having been " a fellow of infinite 
 humour, chatty, lively, and agreeable ; capable to have im- 
 parted to his son Charles materials for some of the char- 
 acteristic local sketches of men and manners, so graphically 
 hit off in the early chapters of ' Pickwick.' "
 
 CHARLES DICKENS. 159 
 
 Museum. Not only in the manuscripts, however, 
 was the work of revising largely resorted to, but 
 the first proofs were also much and carefully 
 corrected, and in some cases largely augmented; 
 and in this connection we are reminded that Mr. 
 Dick's trouble about the head of Charles I. was an 
 after-thought, and that in the first instance he was 
 in a state of perpetual agitation anent " the bull in 
 the china shop." 
 
 Dickens, like Thackeray, died in the fulness of 
 his powers, and in harness to the last ; and the 
 " Mystery of Edwin Drood " has- a double signifi- 
 cance, for it remains but a fragment, an unsolvable 
 mystery in spite of the many ill-advised attempts 
 to work out the plot. 
 
 We have seen the room in which Dickens was 
 struck down but two hours after he had written 
 the last page in the little chalet at the end of the 
 Gads Hill garden;* and there seemed to us no small 
 analogy between his desire to get back to his 
 beloved home, on the occasion of his assisting at 
 some theatricals at Lady Freake's only a week be- 
 fore his death, and that wild longing of Sir Walter 
 Scott to reach, before he died, his cherished 
 Abbotsford. 
 
 Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, in a recent lecture on 
 Dickens, gives what seems to us one of the most
 
 160 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 characteristic sketches of his personal appear- 
 ance yet published. 
 
 " The first time I met him," says Mr. Fitzgerald, 
 "was at a railway station ; he was standing at the 
 open carriage door, reading his paper, quite careless 
 or unconscious of the many eyes that were bent on 
 him. He wore a little round hat, set rather 
 jauntily on one side, over a little curl, and a 
 light shooting-suit. His face seemed weather- 
 beaten and a good deal worn, like a seaman's. 
 But a most expressive face it was. Every line and 
 muscle seemed to do humorous duty. You saw 
 the glimmer of the anticipated jest working among 
 the very creases of his forehead ; it then twinkled 
 in his brilliant eyes, and crept down to his finely- 
 cut nostrils, which quivered sensitively ; while 
 under his moustache, in the recesses at the corners 
 of his mouth, there lurked a whole crowd of mirth- 
 compelling fancies, crumpling up the skin in folds 
 from the enjoyment. Thus from his whole face 
 there flashed a general halo of mirth. Add to this 
 a cheery voice, with hearty bursts of, ' Lord bless 
 you, no ! ' or, ' Bless you, yes, to be sure ! ' which 
 imparted a genuineness to all that he said. He 
 was, in truth, a delightful creature, one of those 
 picturesque, natural, interesting figures of which 
 only half a dozen at most appear in a generation."
 
 CHARLES DICKENS. l6l 
 
 In 1853, on his return to England from America, 
 Dickens gave his first public readings in Birming- 
 ham. To venture on this latter nineteenth 
 century product, the giving of readings or lectures, 
 was determined on after some misgivings of his 
 own, and assurances from his friend, Forster, that 
 the thing was infra dig. 1 
 
 Dickens was, however, just suited for the work. 
 Without a trace of nervousness, as he himself has 
 told us, eminently qualified by his theatrical pro- 
 clivities to act the gin-soddened Sarah Gamp or the 
 murderous Bill Sikes, the gentle Bob Cratchit or the 
 bombastic Buzfuz, his efforts were crowned by the 
 most unquestionable success, and the lectures were 
 probably the most remunerative of anything under- 
 taken in this direction. He is calculated to have 
 received over 90,000 for the delivery of them in 
 England and America. Here is what he himself 
 says of them in a letter : " We have done exceed- 
 ingly well since we have been out, with this re- 
 markable and pleasant incident, that whatever I 
 read twice, the turn-away is invariably on the 
 second occasion. They don't quite understand 
 beforehand what it is, I think, and expect a man 
 
 1 "His public readings, which were a pitiful pursuit 
 after all, were, in fact, acting, and very good acting too." 
 Carlyle's " Conversations ivith Duffy." 
 
 L
 
 1 62 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 to be sitting down in some corner, droning away 
 like a mild bagpipe. In that large room at Clifton, 
 for instance, the people were perfectly taken off 
 their legs by 'The Chimes,' started looked at 
 each other started again looked at me and 
 then burst into a storm of applause. I think the 
 best audiences I have yet had were at Exeter and 
 Plymouth. At Exeter, the best I have ever seen ; 
 at Plymouth I read three times, twice in one day. 
 A better morning audience for ' Little Dombey ' 
 could not be. And the ' Boots,' at night, was a 
 shout all through. I cannot deny that I shall be 
 heartily glad when it is all over, and that I miss the 
 though tfulness of my quiet room and desk. But 
 perhaps it is best for me not to have it just now, 
 and to wear and toss my storm away or as much 
 of it as will ever calm down while the water rolls 
 in tbis restless manner." 
 
 The hint about longing for the quiet of his own 
 desk had not been thrown out without some pre- 
 monitions of fatigue incident on such unwonted 
 exertions, and there is little doubt but that the 
 immense pecuniary remuneration, and the universal 
 applause of two continents, was purchased at the 
 sacrifice of Dickens' health and inclination. 
 
 In closing this paper, we take leave of the 
 author of "David Copperfield" with something
 
 CHARLES DICKENS. 163 
 
 more than regret. Personally we regard Dickens 
 as one of the truest of men ; one in whom we hail a 
 hatred of all kinds of affectation and cant ; one 
 whose works were never sullied by prurient 
 thought or unclean suggestion. 
 
 It seems, unfortunately, no less characteristic of 
 the present times that the sexual-problem novel 
 should have a vogue, than that there should be 
 found those who think Dickens " vulgar," and 
 Thackeray " tiresome." As there is probably not a 
 writer living, at least in England, who approaches 
 the one for humour, or the other for pathos, the criti- 
 cal acumen, if these detractors ever possessed it, has 
 probably got jaded and rusty from long disuse, and 
 it would be more charitable, if it were possible, 
 to suppose that those who say they cannot read 
 Dickens are probably those who have never been 
 taught to read at all.
 
 THE PATHOS OF DICKENS. 
 A NOTE. 
 
 IT has become the fashion nowadays for struggling 
 mediocrity to attempt a kind of relative advance- 
 ment by pulling to pieces the hitherto accepted 
 reputations of great writers. In this experimental 
 overthrowal of our idols, Dickens has been one of 
 the first to be attacked. So hard is it, however, to 
 do away with an old affection, when it has as deep 
 a root as that which the genius of Dickens struck 
 in the hearts of his readers, that it has been found 
 difficult to attack him advantageously, except in 
 some particular phase of his work ; so his pathos, 
 or rather, as his detractors say, his want of it, has 
 furnished the occasion. 
 
 Nowadays, the emotional in literature has become 
 so confounded with the sentimental, that critics 
 have been prone to mistake an exaggeration of the 
 one for an insufficiently vigorous rendering of the 
 
 other. Sentimentalism reached an epic height in 
 164
 
 CHARLES DICKENS. 165 
 
 Werther, and has been declining ever since, 
 luckily perhaps for omnivorous novel-readers, 
 until it has merged its individuality in terrorism, 
 and has raised to itself a power which dominates 
 the book-stalls. It is busied chiefly with the 
 lachrymose youths who are perpetually in love, or 
 the sighing maidens who are ever on the verge of 
 suicide and bad poetry. It aims at going straight 
 to the heart, or one should perhaps rather say the 
 eyes, and troubles itself very little about the mind 
 or the intellect. It is, in short, the dissipation of 
 young ladies and the last resource of old maids, 
 and it has, as Mr. Swinburne would phrase it, 
 added a new terror to life. 
 
 Although by no means confined to literature, it 
 is in that capacity alone that we speak of its 
 connection with the modern novel here. 
 
 The emotional in literature is in reality a very 
 different thing. Its object is, as it may be ex- 
 pressed, to make the soul weep without necessarily 
 suffusing the eyes ; it touches the mind through the 
 intellect, almost wholly. In it there is nothing 
 forced or out of place ; it is produced by the sim- 
 plicity of sorrow rather than by the magnificence 
 of mourning. It has no connection with what is 
 generally termed the luxury of woe. We feel it 
 in the death of Colonel Newcome and in the
 
 166 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 description of Emma Sedley on the night before 
 Waterloo ; we feel it in the " Only a woman's 
 hair" of Swift, and in the " Et tu Brute" of 
 Caesar. 1 
 
 Here we have simply the death of an old man, 
 just a few words of a wife to her husband, an 
 inscription on a bit of hair, and the last utterance 
 of a dying monarch. . This is all on the surface ; 
 but what a wonderful substratum of finer feeling, 
 of nobler thought, of pity, sorrow, emotion. 
 
 Take tliat, at first sight, cynical cruel line of 
 Swift's "Only a woman's hair"; but what does 
 this not denote: " onty," as Thackeray has told us 
 in words almost as pathetic, " only love, only 
 fidelity, only purity, innocence, beauty; only the 
 tenderest heart in the world stricken and wounded, 
 and passed away now out of reach of pangs of hope 
 deferred, love insulted, and pitiless desertion ; only 
 the lock of hair left; and memory and remorse, 
 for the guilty, lonely wretch, shuddering over the 
 grave of his victim." 
 
 Mr. Andrew Lang, 2 who generally has such a 
 
 1 The fact of this last being apocryphal does not detract 
 from its pathos. 
 
 2 It is amusing to see the way in which Mr. Lang goes 
 round and round his subject as if unsatisfied at hia own 
 cavils, but yet honestly feeling that he ought to raise a
 
 CHAkLES DICKENS. 167 
 
 love and reverence for Dickens, accuses him of 
 deliberately saying, as it were, " Now, let us have 
 a good cry," and so declines to sbed tears over Little 
 Nell or mourn over Little Dombey ; but as it seems 
 to us, this generally acute critic has here mistaken 
 the intention of the master, and imagines him en- 
 forcing his lachrymosial dose where in reality there 
 is no such intention at all. 
 
 Because the death of Little Nell has made whole 
 myriads of readers weep, are we to believe that 
 Dickens wrote only for this end, and must we come 
 to the conclusion that he who could draw tears 
 from the heart by a few words would have ex- 
 pended pages to do the same thing ? Hardly so, 
 for if the pathos of Dickens is to be judged merely 
 by what he writes descriptive of the actions and 
 thoughts of dying persons, we shall find him no 
 greater in this connection than hundreds of other 
 writers who are in other respects not worthy to 
 hold a candle to him. 
 
 Beneath his pathos sometimes lies a root of merri- 
 ment ; what more pathetic character than the Dolls' 
 Dressmaker, and who so happy as she ? What 
 sadder figure than Florence, yet who so unselfish and 
 contented ? What shall be said of Tom Pinch, and 
 
 voice against what he considers to be Dickens' false pathos. 
 It is almost pathetic in itself.
 
 168 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 are there not incidents in his life, the recital of 
 which bring both laughter and tears to the eyes ? l 
 And then for particular incidents, what will the 
 cavillers say to that scene where the Peggottys 
 learn of the flight of little Emily, or that tragic 
 ending of the first part of David Copperfield's life 
 the death of Dora ? Who can think of the sorely 
 stricken husband sitting brooding and melancholy 
 over the fire, while the dog moans out its life at 
 his feet, or can picture to himself that solemn 
 figure which announces that Dora is gone that 
 sobbing, half-incredulous, interrogative " Agnes ! " 
 without feeling something like a choking sensation 
 in the throat ? Think how Smollett or Richardson 
 would have treated such a scene, and then estimate 
 what emotional power Dickens possessed. Or take 
 the moment of Sidney Carton's death, and repeat 
 again those questions which his companion puts 
 to him ! 
 
 But, indeed, there are so many instances that 
 might be adduced in this connection that one can, 
 as it were, afford to throw overboard the cases of 
 Little Nell and Little Dombey to satisfy the hyper- 
 
 1 Instances might so easily be multiplied. Let the re- 
 conciliation of Dr. Strong to Annie, the love of Little 
 Dorrit, Riah's beautiful unselfish devotion, and the mention 
 of the emigrants in "The American Notes," be remembered.
 
 CHARLES DICKENS. 169 
 
 critical, who seem to have fallen foul of these two 
 characters in particular. 
 
 All emotion is so purely relative that the reason 
 why Dickens is said by some people not to succeed 
 in it, is, as it appears to us, because he is so fre- 
 quently sailing close to it, and consequently he does 
 not get as much contrast on it as other writers who 
 are invariably more cynical or more commonplace. 
 
 One of Dickens' biographers, after noticing and 
 meeting in the fullest way the cavillings of critics 
 and others with regard to this writer's want of 
 pathos, says, " Dickens, working at his best, was one 
 .of the greatest masters of pathos who ever lived," 
 and he adds, "My conclusion is that, though he 
 failed with Little Nell, yet he succeeded elsewhere, 
 and superbly." And this is the verdict oL- no 
 partial judge, for what in other connections he has 
 said of Dickens proves that this judgment is formed 
 after mature consideration and with the fullest 
 knowledge of the subject. 
 
 But allowing that the adverse critics are mis- 
 taken, how comes it that this class should have 
 arisen at all ? How does it happen that the char- 
 acter that once, we are told, drew tears from 
 Jeffrey, should now well-nigh create ridicule in 
 those even who are professed admirers of the 
 author ? It is possibly the times which are " out of
 
 170 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 joint." Nowadays it is difficult for emotion to be 
 taken seriously ; not that we are not as serious as 
 hitherto, but we try to disguise the fact, and like 
 those miserable consumptives, while feeling the 
 pangs of approaching death, we would avoid all 
 mention of the matter and think that in deceiving 
 ourselves we are throwing dust in the eyes of our 
 fellows. 
 
 The age has, in fact, become too commercial for 
 much lingering over the finer feelings, and we are 
 ever prone to disallow the accuracy of that which 
 we are unable to understand or appreciate. It has, 
 too, become the age of " ' odious ' comparisons." If a 
 man fails in some particular, we do not say he falls 
 short of our private conception of the matter, or 
 that he is many degrees below the accepted stand- 
 ard ; we say he is not so good as " So-and-So," 
 when in reality " So-and-So " may only be the ideal 
 of ourselves, and perhaps of the majority of people, 
 which is often tantamount to saying that he is the 
 wrong ideal. So many poets have suffered in- 
 justice from a purely irrelevant comparison with 
 Shakespeare and Goethe ; so many musicians have 
 had their fame diminished by the superlative 
 genius of Beethoven and Bach ; so many painters 
 have fallen short when brought into juxta-positiou 
 to the pre-eminence of Michael Angelo and
 
 CHARLES DICKENS. 17 1 
 
 Raphael, that one would have imagined that those 
 who are fond of judging in this way had been 
 sufficiently taught that it is as. impossible to form 
 an ideal for one man out of the work of another as 
 it would be for that man to achieve fame in ex- 
 actly the same direction, and by exactly the same 
 means as his more or less illustrious contemporary. 
 It is for this reason that the comparison so often 
 instituted between the relative merits of Dickens' 
 pathos and that of Thackeray is so greatly to be 
 reprehended. There is room for Sidney Carton as 
 well as for Colonel Newcome, there is place for 
 Agnes as there is for Emma; and it is no reason, 
 because Thackeray has written in the "Four 
 Georges," as well as in " Vanity Fair " and " The 
 Newcomes," some of the most pathetic lines that 
 have ever come from a novelist's pen, that we 
 should refuse to see the merits of what Dickens, in 
 "David Copperfield," and in the "Tale of Two 
 Cities," has done in the same direction.
 
 Samuel Gaoler 
 
 POET. 
 
 " To only have conceived, 
 
 Planned your great works, apart from progress, 
 Surpasses little works achieved !" 
 
 Browning. 
 
 IF we except Shakespeare, there is hardly another 
 individual in the ranks of English literature who 
 can, in any appreciable way, be placed in the fore- 
 most position as a man of pure genius. We have 
 had great poets like Milton and Wordsworth ; we 
 have had pre-eminent prose-writers like De 
 Quincey and Thackeray ; but the former have 
 been nothing if not poets, the latter little except 
 prose- writers. 
 
 In Coleridge we come face to face with one who 
 was nearer Shakespeare than any other that can 
 be named ; the formation of whose mind was more 
 complex, and the phases of whose genius were 
 more various than any other writer's in the whole 
 field of English letters. 
 
 Had Coleridge's claim to this great position 
 172
 
 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 1/3 
 
 rested solely on what he has done for poetry, these 
 claims might with justice be disallowed, and his 
 right to rank next the greatest genius we have 
 ever possessed might with every show of reason 
 be questioned. This is, however, in no wise the 
 case, but, unfortunately, it is by this phase of his 
 work that he is apt only to be judged. For the 
 general public (we know what Carlyle said of it), 
 he remains a poet, a poet only, and a poet of whom 
 comparatively little is known, for it may be as- 
 sumed very reasonably that his claims in this 
 direction are based upon one of the three immortal 
 poems he wrote. We mean "The Rime of the 
 Ancient Mariner." 
 
 It is certainly not without precedent for a man 
 to be known by one particular effusion, but it is 
 without parallel that a poet should be recognised 
 as such to the extent that Coleridge is by this 
 poem. The general public has to busy itself about 
 so many different matters, that it can hardly be 
 expected to do more than, as it were, skim the 
 productions of its great ones. It is left for in- 
 dividuals to go more deeply into a writer's person- 
 ality and aims, and it seems to be entirely owing 
 to the amount of interest a man awakens in such 
 particular minds, whether or no he can be said to be 
 largely read or widely appreciated
 
 1/4 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 Coleridge, except in one or two instances, did 
 not possess this power, or else his possession of it 
 has not been sufficiently recognised. 
 
 A poet, to be duly appreciated, must be either 
 purely didactic or seem very obscure. In the first 
 instance he appeals to a large number of people, 
 because he, oftener than not, enunciates the 
 obvious in an agreeable form ; in the second place, 
 he interests those who only enjoy those fruits 
 which they have been at infinite pains to gather. 
 Wordsworth may be taken as an example of the 
 former class, Browning of the latter. 
 
 Coleridge, on the other hand, was neither 
 didactic nor obscure ; in short, he did not provide, 
 in any sense, wares which would be able to give 
 their purchasers, on the one hand, the credit of 
 common sense, or, on the other, that of painstaking 
 industry. Yet, notwithstanding these drawbacks, 
 he is still regarded essentially as a poet ; in fact, 
 that particular attribute, concerning which so little 
 comparatively is known, is looked upon as his only 
 claim to fame, and the unappreciated has become 
 the universal. No sadder fate could have befallen 
 greatness. 
 
 In the commencement to his " Biographia 
 Literaria," a work which is priceless for its dis- 
 criminating criticisms on the proper aims and
 
 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 175 
 
 achievements of poetry, just as the "Aids to Re- 
 flection " is quite invaluable for its moral teaching, 
 Coleridge has left us a sort of apologia for his 
 manners and his methods, and we are able to 
 estimate how many delinquencies he was at first 
 accused of, by the exhaustive nature of his defence; 
 we are able, too, to judge how adversely that was 
 originally received, which is nowadays often but 
 coldly tolerated. Our author's fate has gone from 
 bad to worse. 
 
 When we thus consider the nature of the man 
 himself, what will at once strike us with surprise 
 and admiration is his amazing versatility. To go 
 properly into all the protean changes of his mind, 
 and to accurately estimate all the various phases of 
 his apathetic activity, if one may so term it, we 
 should have to consider him in a hundred char- 
 acters, as journalist, poet, critic, metaphysician, 
 logician, preacher,* philosopher, and discourses 1 
 He assumed all these characters, but to say he filled 
 
 1 " Let the dullest clod that ever vegetated, provided only 
 he be alive and hears, be shut up in a room with Coleridge, 
 or in a wood, and subjected for a few minutes to the ethereal 
 influence of that wonderful man's monologue, and he will 
 begin to believe himself a poet." Christopher North, 
 " Essays." Coleridge was, above all other men, a disc6urser ; 
 a good conversationalist he could hardly be termed, for the 
 secret of great conversational power is to possess the faculty 
 of listening as well as of talking.
 
 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 them would be misleading. It is for this reason 
 that his contemporaries, and the literary world for 
 many years after his death considered him to be a 
 so much greater man than is the case with the 
 general public to-day, for it judged him by what it 
 thought he could do, rather than by what he did. 
 
 Probably it assumed too much in that direction, 
 as partisanship is often inclined to do ; but, on the 
 other hand, the revulsion of public feeling has 
 brought with it a less just estimate still, and from 
 those who thought Coleridge could do all things 
 well, to those who doubt if he really could do any 
 pre-eminently, has been but a step. 
 
 Few things can be so detrimental to a man's 
 final position in the Valhalla of Literature as an 
 exaggerated reputation during his life-time, and 
 there is hardly an individual of the first rank on 
 record who has not achieved fame gradually and 
 against strenuous opposition. 
 
 To detect the failings of great men is the delight 
 of dunces, and there is nothing more absurd and 
 pathetic than the sight of loathsome maggots eating 
 their way into the tawny coat of a dead lion. The 
 exaggerated fame of a man has, however, another 
 class of foes to fight against ; those, indeed, who 
 attack his reputation because it has been lauded by 
 his contemporaries, and for no other reason. A
 
 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 177 
 
 third and more dangerous class of enemies- are those 
 who seek to gain a reputation for themselves by 
 pulling to pieces the renown of a great man ; and 
 this has become as sure a way of attracting public 
 notice as the seeking to gain an adventitious 
 glory by bringing into notice and making ridiculous 
 by hyperbolic praise some third or fourth-rate poet. 
 Nothing is too high or too low for the literary 
 interviewer, nothing too obvious or too sacred. 
 
 That Coleridge's fame, however, as a man of 
 pre-eminent genius should not have received that 
 general recognition, which is undoubtedly its due 
 does not arise solely from a want of proper appre- 
 ciation of his aims or productions ; it happens, in 
 a large measure, from the peculiar constitution of 
 the man himself. Those who are in any way 
 acquainted with his life will not have failed to 
 recognise how much sterling metal lay deep in the 
 recesses of his mind unused and even unsearched 
 for. 
 
 It has been the misfortune of many great men 
 to combine with the highest natural gifts a quite 
 extraordinary feebleness of will for making use of 
 these gifts, so that had this more material power 
 existed in any measureable extent with the more 
 spiritual, many of those who have shown great 
 promise, but have perpetrated little, might have 
 
 M
 
 178 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 been classed among the great ones of the world. 
 To some extent this may be predicated of Coleridge. 
 In him there seemed, more than in any other on 
 record, to be combined the most god-given natural 
 genius with the most mortal incapacity for making 
 any appreciable use of it. By what fragmentary 
 work he has left, however, in all branches of 
 literature and natural science, we are sufficiently 
 able to gauge the bounds of his capacity of mind 
 and intellect ; those, too, who knew him personally 
 have attested the vast extent of his genius. 
 
 Emerson, who, when in this country, appears to 
 have gone about interviewing the chief celebrities, 
 and drawing conclusions from a single visit, whether 
 propitious or no, has given us a somewhat un- 
 satisfactory although a not wholly uncharacteristic 
 account of Coleridge; but if we would judge 
 accurately of the man himself out of the mouths 
 of his contemporaries, it is to such men as Words- 
 worth and Lamb and De Quincey that we must go, 
 and we shall at once see in what high estimation 
 and love those who were most capable of 
 understanding him held the author of " Kubla 
 Khan." 
 
 Did we receive with full belief Goethe's somewhat 
 arbitrary and misleading dictum, that " genius is 
 the art of taking infinite pains," we should be com-
 
 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 179 
 
 pelled to reluctantly allow that Coleridge could not, 
 under such circumstances, be considered a man of 
 genius. But what Goethe probably means to 
 infer is that talent is the art of taking infinite 
 pains, a very different conclusion. For genius is 
 a god-given possession which neither man's vain 
 endeavour can assume, nor human feebleness of 
 will entirely take away. 1 
 
 But it is rather Coleridge's possession of the 
 divine gift of this genius that we would insist on, 
 than the use which he made of it ; for looked 
 upon in this latter aspect, he remains, when all 
 is said and done, the most disappointing of all 
 truly great men. 
 
 It must by no means be supposed that by what 
 we have here said, we wish to infer that Coleridge 
 has not done much in each and every realm of 
 thought in which he busied himself. What we 
 would urge on is that what he has done, although 
 it might stand for the life-long labour of an ordi- 
 nary individual, is in his case but a tithe of what he 
 might and ought to have done, and that he has 
 been judged accordingly. 
 
 1 Coleridge has himself thus expressed the difference. 
 " Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited ; 
 genius, being the action of reason and imagination, rarely or 
 never."
 
 180 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 To most men it is given to gain a name by hard 
 work ; they have to hew out of the solid block of 
 their life labour, a reputation. From Coleridge 
 hardly such an effort was necessary, and that what 
 comes to most people by dint of concentration of 
 energy, came to him without an effort in dreams 
 and such like forms of divine afflatus, is attested 
 by the history of " Kubla Khan." Yet it happened 
 that an entire lack of moral strength rendered him 
 too enervated to turn such propitious circumstances 
 to an account at once worthy of their origin and of 
 himself. " All other men I have met," says 
 Southey, somewhere, " are mere children to him, 
 and yet all is palsied by a total want of moral 
 strength." 
 
 The poetry of Coleridge is mainly so fragmentary 
 that it is difficult, if we have not adequately esti- 
 mated the character of the man, to believe that it is 
 the production of one in whom the logical sequence 
 of thought was greater than in almost any other 
 individual who has ever lived. 
 
 Knowing what we do of his life and of the 
 reasons which tended so surely to emasculate his 
 intellect, we can hardly be surprised at the unsatis- 
 factory result, and we gaze in awe on the terrible 
 picture of one phase of a great mind, fated to con- 
 tinually war against the weaker half of itself, like
 
 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. l8l 
 
 the (Edipus of the Greek poet continually fighting 
 against inexorable fate. 
 
 The general public, as we commenced by saying, 
 has not done justice to the many-sided greatness of 
 Coleridge's intellect, in fact there are few men of 
 equal consequence who have suffered so much in 
 this respect ; on the other hand, not many in- 
 dividuals with equal gifts, have had those gifts so 
 liberally acknowledged by the few contemporary 
 eminent men who were, after all, the most adequate 
 and most trustworthy judges in such matters. 
 This was probably, however, not a salutary circum- 
 stance for his renown. Enthusiastic friends are 
 often as great a drag on a man's reputation, as poor 
 relations are on his purse. To insist to the public 
 with sledge-hammer like persistence, that a man 
 who is living in their midst, a man moreover who 
 seems to have more than an ordinary share of 
 human frailty, ppssesses a superlative intellect, is 
 likely to awaken an opposition that otherwise had 
 slept peaceably and harmlessly. It is difficult to 
 have even an immortal, and such his friends in- 
 sisted Coleridge was, thrust, as the common phrase 
 has it, down our throats ; we are apt to regard him 
 much as schoolboys do the prig who is always 
 being held up by the master. The large school- 
 room of the world is in no way more tolerant than
 
 182 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 the pedagogue's class-room ; and in very opposi- 
 tion to an otherwise harmless individual, we are 
 apt to throw in the faces of his eulogisers, the fact 
 that though he may be great at Greek hexameters, 
 yet he is less than the worst in the cricket-field or 
 the gymnasium. Coleridge's admirers were, and 
 are, still met in this way, and although it is allowed 
 that he may have been a good poet and a great 
 metaphysician (which it is hinted others have 
 been too), yet, we are reminded, he was entirely 
 lacking in moral force, and, as it were, became the 
 voluptuary of literature (which others have not). 
 
 It happened that the present writer was on a 
 certain occasion at a dinner-party, when the con- 
 versation happened to turn on the author of 
 " Kubla Khan." He (the writer) dropped a remark 
 " in his silly South-British way," as Lamb has it, 
 to the effect that he considered Coleridge per se 
 one of the greatest of English intellects, making a 
 reservation, if he remembers aright, in favour of 
 Shakespeare, Bacon and Newton ; when he was 
 confronted by no fewer than three individuals, 
 who not only declined to allow that Coleridge was 
 a pre-eminently great man at all, but (somewhat 
 contradicting themselves after the manner of most 
 intolerant persons) asserted that Byron had a 
 much greater mind.
 
 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 183 
 
 The anecdote serves to illustrate the position 
 held by the majority of people with regard to the 
 subject of this chapter. 
 
 It is a question whether the man who does few 
 things well and very little ill, is a greater man 
 intellectually than he who does many things well 
 and very much badly ; but the supporters of Lord 
 Byron will have little doubt about it, and they 
 will be apt to condone much of the matter of " Don 
 Juan " for the sake of the ingenuity of its rhymes. 
 
 Considering what of poetical work Coleridge 
 left behind him, we cannot conscientiously say 
 that his industry was great, but we may on the 
 other hand console ourselves in the conclusion that 
 little of it was worthless. Not that he, like many 
 men who have left behind them a small legacy 
 after a long life's work, was always polishing and 
 correcting, for had this been the case, he might 
 have been termed industrious in the truest sense 
 of the word. No; what he did seems to have 
 been done because, as it were, he could not help 
 perpetrating it. Some inner voice, like the Dcvmon 
 of Socrates, arose within him, and he appears 
 merely to have transcribed what it told him. 
 How else can we account for the mystic beauties 
 of " Christabel," or the Oriental splendour of 
 " Kubla Khan " ?
 
 184 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 It is not difficult to understand how impossible 
 a man the world found Coleridge to be ; nor is it 
 to be wondered at that it refused to take at the 
 valuation of his friends, a being who added to such 
 a poetic temperament, irregularity in fulfilling 
 duties, absence of mind, and infirmity of purpose. 
 
 It must not, however, be assumed that because 
 the world did not share the individual opinions 
 held with regard to Coleridge, that it refused to 
 see any merit in his intentions, or tried to boycott 
 his works. On the contrary, the public has re- 
 ceived him with open arms as a poet, even as a 
 great poet, but it is with open arms, not on bended 
 knee. He has been hailed as Southey has, or 
 Campbell, or Thomson ; he has not been regarded 
 as the pre-eminent man he so undoubtedly was. 
 
 In the completeness of his genius and the 
 breadth of his intellect, Coleridge approaches 
 nearer, and is more akin to, Goethe than any 
 other individual we can name. 1 Where, however, 
 he fell short of the immortal German, was in 
 lacking the power to concentrate his energies, or 
 to thoroughly work out the immense resources of 
 
 1 De Quincey, in an essay on Herder, says the best idea he 
 can give of him is by calling him the " German Coleridge," 
 having the same all-grasping erudition, the same spirit of 
 universal research, the same disfiguring superficiality and in- 
 accuracy, the same undeterminateness of object, etc.
 
 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 185 
 
 his mind. What he did, although exquisite of its 
 kind, was not done continuously or with any 
 settled purpose, but was created spasmodically, and 
 to a certain extent aimlessly. Everything Goethe 
 did, on the other hand, even if we are to believe 
 his own words, his love affairs, was all undertaken 
 for the final definite object of self -education and 
 self-repression; no other man of genius has so 
 lived by rule, and it has thus come to be an al- 
 most universally accepted maxim, that irregularity 
 is a sign of genius and eccentricity a form of 
 divine afflatus. There is, of course, some truth in 
 this, for it seldom happens that a really great man 
 can combine the attributes of genius with the 
 energetic business-like habits of a commercial man. 
 Coleridge certainly did not do this, and more than 
 one contemporary has left on record that he who 
 
 discoursed 
 
 
 
 " Of providence, free knowledge, will and fate, 
 Fixed fate, free will, free knowledge absolute, 
 And found no end in wandering mazes lost," 
 
 was he alone who ever fulfilled their estimate of a 
 man of genius. 
 
 If we turn from the man himself to what he 
 has done in the realms of poetry, we shall find this 
 same want of continuity; we shall perceive that
 
 1 86 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 what are called his poetical works are in reality 
 fragments fragments, indeed, as noble as the torso 
 of the Venus of Milo, and we shall catch in them 
 glimpses of their author's mind, a ruin glorious as 
 the moonlit Coliseum. 
 
 " The Ancient Mariner" is one of the most dramatic 
 songs in our language, for which reason probably 
 it has been offered up, together with one or two 
 other almost equally fine productions, as a sacrifice 
 to the commonplace. There is something tremen- 
 dous about a tale which is so absorbing in its 
 interest, so gruesome in its details, so unearthly in 
 its effect, that it can hold three wedding-guests 
 spell-bound and immovable, within hearing of the 
 festival's din j there is something uncanny about 
 the teller of the tale, whose wild glittering eyes 
 seem to cast such a spell on his listeners. 1 But 
 this is merely the raison d'etre of the story, and 
 
 1 The Monthly Review for May, 1799, thus speaks of " The 
 Ancient Mariner " : " ' The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere,' 
 in imitation of the style as well as of the spirit of the elder 
 poets, is the strangest story of a cock and bull that we ever 
 saw on paper ; yet, though it seems a rhapsody of unintel- 
 ligible wilduess and incoherence (of which we do not perceive 
 the drift, unless the joke lies in depriving the wedding guest 
 of his share of the feast), there are in it poetical touches of 
 an exquisite kind ! " The same Review for January, 1817, 
 after hacking " Christabel" to pieces, speaks of "Kubla Khan "
 
 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 187 
 
 when we come to the manner in which Coleridge 
 has clothed these ideas with his own immortal 
 poesy, criticism is mute, and captiousness stands 
 abashed. 
 
 The few lines that tell of the skeleton ship with 
 its fearful freight of the spectre-woman and Death, 
 how they play for life, and she, the Mother of all 
 sin, throws the dice and wins, are so perfect in 
 their design and execution, that we doubt if there 
 are many things in poetic literature to equal them. 
 And to this there is that marvellously beautiful 
 companion picture of the " Seraph Band." 
 
 ' ' This seraph band each waved his hand ; 
 
 It was a heavenly sight ! 
 They stood as signals to the land, 
 Each one a lonely light ; 
 
 " This seraph band each waved his hand, 
 
 No voice did they impart 
 No voice ; but oh ! the silence sank 
 Like music on my heart." 
 
 Is not that, in the words we have italicised, a 
 lovely 6gure ? It is really beyond the reach of 
 criticism. 
 
 It is, however, in that wonderful relic of a vast 
 
 as a poem "below criticism." And it was writers of such 
 reviews as this who set themselves up as judges of our 
 literature !
 
 1 88 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 mind, wrecked by the weight of its own personal- 
 ity, " Kubla Khan," that Coleridge's genius is best 
 pictured. The poem has a curious resemblance to 
 its creator. It breathes the same marvellous 
 melody of rhythm with which he was informed, it 
 has the same depth of sentiment and beauty of 
 expression ; but it is, like the intellect which 
 begot it, incomplete. 
 
 One half of Coleridge's mind seems to have been 
 Oriental and the other half German ; but the 
 Eastern held the more dominant sway, and when 
 we read of Xanadu and its sacred river, our mind 
 reverts to the Oriental glories of the " Arabian 
 Nights " and the good Haroun Alraschid, magnifi- 
 cent in his simplicity. 
 
 What mind that was not steeped in such Eastern 
 imagery could have imagined that enchanted bird 
 with 
 
 " His eyes of fire, his beak of gold, 
 All else of amethyst ! " 
 
 or could have dreamed of seeing with "cheek 
 aslant," 
 
 " rivers flow of gold 
 
 'Twixt crimson banks." 
 
 To Germany, as we have said, we are indebted 
 for the matter, to the East for the manner of his
 
 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 189 
 
 poems, but transcending both influences rises in 
 majestic glory the magnificence of his own genius, 
 making the philosophy of the one seem deeper and 
 the beauty of the other greater ; for the combina- 
 tion of love and intellect is alone capable of engen- 
 dering the divinest poetry. 
 
 In the first of the Introductory Aphorisms to the 
 "Aids to Reflection," Coleridge says, " In Philosophy 
 equally as in Poetry, it is the highest and most 
 useful prerogative of genius to produce the strong- 
 est impressions of novelty, while it rescues admitted 
 truths from the neglect caused by the very 
 circumstance of their universal admission." In 
 these words we have in the shortest of epitomes, 
 what their author attempted himself to put into 
 practice both as a Poet, a Logician, and a Meta- 
 physician. 
 
 By nature the facets of his mind were already 
 cut ; by depth of observation and by diligence of 
 study he had himself polished them to an extra- 
 ordinary degree, but the jewel was so badly set 
 that much of the surrounding metal hid its natural 
 glories, and stones of lesser beauty and of smaller 
 worth have shone more brightly because more 
 carefully adjusted. 
 
 Everything in poetry that Coleridge wrote seems 
 to have been derived from direct inspiration, and
 
 LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 when this inspiration stopped the poem was dis- 
 continued. Thus it is that he has left so little that 
 is not able to be placed in the first rank. He is, in 
 this connection, as he is in his poetical capacity, 
 the direct antithesis of Pope, and indeed of all 
 those who have made their verse subservient to 
 their will. 
 
 " Christabel," which, with the " Ancient Mariner " 
 and " Kubla Khan," constitutes his chief claim to 
 poetical fame, as far as the general public is con- 
 cerned, is but a fragment; because when he had 
 finished what he has left us of it, the divine in- 
 spiration suddenly deserted him ; and the poet him- 
 self used to say that should ever the divine ray recur 
 to him, he would attempt the completion of the 
 poem. He has even left a sketch of how he in- 
 tended, under these happy circumstances, to finish 
 the work. It will not surprise those who have 
 read what we have had to say of the man and his 
 character to learn that not only was it never com- 
 pleted, but that no effort appears to have been 
 made to lure back the necessary inspiration. 
 
 There is no sadder sight in the annals of English 
 literature than that of this great genius wearing 
 itself out in fragmentary effusions, as if it found 
 nothing in this world worthy the concentration of 
 its vast energies ; as if, believing that its very be-
 
 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. lI 
 
 ginnings were of more worth than most men's 
 entire productions, it was content in the conclusion. 
 
 " Ah ! piteous sight it was to see this man 
 When he came back to us, a withered flower ! 
 Or, like a sinful creature, pale and wan, 
 Down would he sit, and, Avithout strength or power, 
 Look at the common grass from hour to hour ; 
 And oftentimes, how long I fear to say, 
 When apple-trees in blossom made a bower, 
 Retired in that sunshiny shade he lay, 
 And, like a naked Indian, slept himself away." 
 
 No life of Coleridge, in the proper sense of the 
 word, exists. 1 Material does not lack, for even if 
 we disregard the autobiographical nature in which 
 most of his prose work is clothed, his collected 
 " Table Talk " and the Biographia Literaria, we 
 have notices of him from the hands of all the 
 eminent men who were his contemporaries, and all 
 of whom knew the man, and loved him. 
 
 All that seething turmoil of passions and per- 
 sonalities, of which he once formed the central 
 
 1 We do not forget the excellent monographs of the 
 poet by his friend Gillman, or those by Messrs. Trail & 
 Hall Caine, nor the prefatory notice of Mr. Ashe, affixed 
 to his edition of Coleridge's works, as well as the innumer- 
 able essays which the genius of the man and his works have 
 given rise to, nor particularly Mr. Dykes Campbell's most 
 excellent biographical memoir.
 
 192 . LITERARY TYPES. 
 
 figure, is stilled. But it will require a brave man 
 to attempt to do justice to the many-sided char- 
 acter of the individual and his writings. It will 
 be necessary to possess something more than mere 
 biographical materials to set forth finally the true 
 aspects of Coleridge as critic, metaphysician, 
 philosopher, logician, poet, 'and man. .And he who 
 will effectually do so will be he who brings to 
 his work the discrimination of a philosopher, the 
 exactitude of a logician, and the love of a poet. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 Printed by Cowan & Co. t Limited, Perth.