ESSAYS OF POETS AND POETRY
ESSAYS OF
POETS AND POETRY
ANCIENT AND MODERN
BY
T. HERBERT WARREN, D.CL.
VICK-CHANCKLLOR OF r ORD, AND PEESIDBNT OF MAGDALEN
AUTHOR OF " PRINCE C'T IAN VICTOR," " BY SEVERN SEA," ETC.
LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
1909
5-11
PREFACE
It is needless to say that no one of the nine Essays
contained in this volume has been written within
the last two years and a half.
The earliest, that on the "Art of Translation,"
was first published as long ago as 1895, in the
Quarterly Review, the others in the same periodical,
or in the Monthly Revieiv, at intervals extending
over some ten years. The latest, that on "In
Memoriam after Fifty Years," appeared in the
Edinburgh Review early in 1906, shortly after the
first, and separate publication by Lord Tennyson of
this poem with his father's annotations. I had
hoped to have reprinted these Essays, as I am now
doing, in book form, before the present date, but
delayed to do so, promising myself more oppor-
tunity of rehandling than I have ever found time
to accomplish. When in 1906 I became Vice-
Chancellor, all hope of considerable retouching in
any near future entirely disappeared. I was con-
fronted with the alternative of allowing them to
wait still longer, or of reprinting them as they were,
with such limited amount of revision as had been,
or was now, possible.
I have to thank my old friend and publisher,
Mr John Murray, for much consideration and
kindness added to that for which I was already
largely in his debt, and I must express my
vi PREFACE
acknowledgments to Messrs Longmans for allowing
me to reprint the Edinburgh article. I am
inilebted to not a few friends who, at the time
when the articles first appeared, or since, have
furnished mo with valuable corrections or sugges-
tions, notably to Dr Paget Toynbee, who read
through for me the article on " Dante and the Art
of Translation," both when it first appeared and
again in the proofs a short time ago.
I am further under much obligation to Lord
Fitzmam'ice, who wrote spontaneously to tell me
that Gray's copy of Milton was to be found in his
brother's Library at Bowood, and to Lord Lans-
downe himself, for being at special pains to enable
me to inspect this most interesting relic, which
deserves more thorough study than I have yet
been able to give to it.
A word of sincere gratitude is also due from
me to Professor Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Mollendorf
for letting me use the long and interesting extract
from his letter on the article about Sophocles, an
informal but, as I think scholars will agree, very
valuable contribution toward our realisation of
that ever-interesting figure.
Finally, I have to thank Mr George Stuart
Gordon, one of the junior Fellows of my College,
for most kindly reading through the whole of the
proofs as they were passing through the Press.
T. H. W.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. Sophocles and the Greek Genius ... 1
II. Matthew Arnold ...... 44
III. The Art of Translation ..... 85
IV. Dante and the Art of Poetry . . .134
V. Virgil and Tennyson : A Literary Parallel . 172
VI. Gray and Dante 217
VII. Tennyson and Dante ..... 243
VIII. Ancient and Modern Classics as Instruments
OF Education 270
IX. "In Memoriam" after Fifty Years . . 290
Appendix — Extract from a Letter of Prof. Ulrieh von
Wilamowitz-Mollendorf 326
ESSAYS
I.
SOPHOCLES AND THE GEEEK GENIUS.
" Fortunate Sophocles ! with wealth and wit
Together blest^ he lived, and full of days
He died ; his many tragedies were fair,
And fair his end, before the evil hour."
So, at the death of the great Attic tragedian,
sang the comic poet Phrynichus, one of his younger
contemporaries ; and after-ages have always dwelt
on the same characteristics, which are indeed
singular and significant.
The *' lives" of "the poets" are only too often
some of the saddest reading in the world. Truly
they seem to have "learned in suflPering" what
they have "taught in song," and to have poured out
their bitter-sweet notes, like the legendary nightin-
gale, with their bosom against the thorn. Want,
exile, passion ill-assorted, unhappy marriage, feuds
with friend and foe, melancholy and madness,
sceva indignatio, the pangs of envy or of sensitive-
ness, an early or a tragic end — these have been
not seldom their lot. Glory is theirs, but purchased
at what a price !
Some exceptions there have been — Sophocles,
A
2 SOPHOCLES AND THE GREEK GENIUS
Virgil, C-haiu'cr, Shakespeare probably, Ariosto,
Goethe, Wordsworth, Tennyson. But conspicuous
among the exceptions is Sophocles. Both the
ancient and the modern world have agreed to
account him among the very happiest of all poets,
happy in his era, happy in the circumstances of
his life, happiest above all in his own sweet and
sage temper ; '* the happiest of all Greek poets on
record," as Swinburne called him long since ; the
"gentle Sophocles," as, by a felicitous transference
of Ben Jonson's well-known epithet for his im-
mortal friend, he styled him the other day.
Other contemporaries who were able to look
back on the career of Sophocles echo the same
note as Phrynichus. Aristophanes, whose glorious,
graceless comedy spared no one else, spared him.
The motive of the " Frogs " is, as every one knows,
the proposal to recover for Athens, now sadly
shorn of poets, one of the great tragedians of the
generation which had just passed away.
" Why do you not bring Sophocles back from
the grave, if you want one of the dead poets on
earth again ? " says Heracles to Dionysus.
"Because, my dear sir, he will not come. He's
too happy where he is, his sweet temper, his
honhomie, make him welcome everywhere. When
he arrived in the lower regions he found his old
friend and rival ^schylus enthroned. He only
kissed him and clasped his hand, bidding him keep
the throne, and so preserves his character still,
' Serene in life and after life serene.' "
And Plato, no lover of the poetic temperament,
in the ever memorable opening of the "Republic,"
says the same, and uses the very same untranslat-
able epithet. He introduces Sophocles as an
SOPHOCLES' SERENITY 3
example of one who in his May of life had enjoyed
gustful youth to the fall, but who could grow old
charmingly, with a resignation worldly at once and
unworldly. Well balanced and " serene," when
one asked him, "How is it with you and Love,
Sophocles ? Are you still the man you were ? "
" Hush ! hush ! " he said, " we must not use such
talk. Rather I have gladly escaped from the
tyranny of a wild and mad master."
Doubtless he had escaped from other tyrannies
and torments. Even he must have had his struggles.
Good fortune brings its own enemies, its own
friction of envy and detraction. Life had not
always been smooth. He had not always been
successful. His greatest play only won the second
prize : once the Archon would not grant him a
chorus at all. Gossip and scandal had gabbled
and hissed around him. Lesser men, minor poets
and interviewers, had presented him in their
belittling mirror. It may be his own kin had
sought to push him from his throne and try on his
royal crown before his death. One of the comic
poets called his poems literally "dog rimes," and
said he seemed in writing his plays "to have
collaborated with a barking hound."
It is true that the details of his life must remain
dubious, for the record is scanty and mainly tradi-
tional. But, on the whole, tradition, in such
matters once discredited, has rather recovered
than lost authority. Such evidence as that of
Plato and Aristophanes gives fixed points of light ;
and the broad facts remain, especially that of his
relation to the evolution of the Greek drama.
^schylus, with his magniloquence, nobly
4 SoniOCLES AND THE GREEK GENIUS
^M-aiuliusc, like "the hiv^j^c uttenmce of the early
gods," .Ksc'hylus, whoso
'• IhMiizr-tluo.il r.i<j;l« -l)ark .it blood
Has somehow spoilt my tnstc lor twitterings;"
Sophocles, with the perfection of his art ; Euripides,
with his romance and novelty — tliey are all Greek,
and they are all great. It is, however, of the
essence of Sophocles, it is the secret and the sum
of his happiness, to hold in everything the middle
position. He was born just at the right moment.
The peculiar glory of Athens falls entirely wnthin a
single century — the fifth before Christ. The date
500 B.C. found her still undeveloped, 400 r,.c. left
her ruined. The first two decades were decades of
gloom and struggle. Marathon staved off the onset
of the East ; but it was only after Salamis and
PlatfEa that the Persian peril ceased to be an ever-
present overwhelming terror. It was between the
two naval battles, Salamis and ^gospotami, that
the brief splendid day of Athens flamed and faded.
The fifty years between the Persian and the
Peloponnesian wars were its high noon. These
years are the years of Sophocles. Salamis, the
greatest land-mark in the political history of
Athens — in some ways of the ancient world — is
also the most notable in her literary history.
" From Marathon to Syracuse
Are seventy years and seven ; for so long
Endured that city's prime which was the world's."
In the battle of Salamis, and in the van of the
fray, ^schylus fought, as he had fought before at
Marathon. Its glorious agony lives for ever in the
suiging, glittering rhythms of the Persse, which
THE IDEAL GREEK BOY 5
ring as though Marlowe had sung the story of the
Armada in the " mighty line " in which he had, the
year before that great fight, given to the stage
" Tamburlaine the Great." On the day of the battle,
Euripides, according to tradition, was born. And
what of Sophocles ? His part was neither purely
active nor purely passive, but eminently notable
and appropriate. Neither the woes nor the throes
of the victory were his. He was chosen for his
beauty and his promise, as the prize-boy of the
class - room and the playing - field, to lead the
choristers who sang and danced in celebration of
the crowning mercy. The picture is one which
appeals to the imagination. Sophocles, afterwards to
be the ideal Greek man, is here the ideal Greek boy.
" There the ancient celebration to the maiden queen of fight
Led the long august procession upward to the pillared height :
There the hearts of men beat faster while the glad Hellenic
boy
Ran and wrestled with his fellows, knew the struggle and the
joy;
From the deep eyes in his forehead shone a radiance brave
and fair,
Flashing down his shapely shoulders ran the splendour of his
hair."
It is thus he first comes upon the world-stage ; and
the appearance is significant.
For one thing is certain, that he had received
that first of gifts, a good education. It seems
probable that his father Sophillus ^ was of a middle
station in life. Some have put him too low and
called him a blacksmith or ironmonger; others,
on the ground that his son in later life held office
^ Or Sophilus ; possibly a variant of Theophilus, " God-
loving."
6 SOPHOCLES AND THE GREEK GENIUS
in the State, have imagined that he must have been
of goDil faniily. rr()bal)ly he was neither, but was
a well-to-do bounjeois, keeping a small manufactur-
ing business, such as Demosthenes' father kept a
century later. In Athens, as elsewhere, the sons
of such men have had perhaps the best of all starts
in life. What is clear is that Sophillus gave his
son the completest training then available. In
particular his master in music and dancing,
Lamprus, was the first and most fashionable
teacher of the time.
That the young poet w^as beautiful and
clever, that he was graceful, agile, and athletic, is
vouched for by the story we have recalled. It is
vouched for ai^ain later on in his life. He sus-
tained the title-role in his own piece "Nausicaa,"
embodying the story of that most delightful of
Homeric heroines. In a charming scene, as every
one remembers, she leads her maidens in a com-
bination of dance and ball-play. Sophocles threw
the ball, as the Greek expression w^as, in con-
summate style. In another of his own pieces,
"Thamyris," he played the lyre; but he gave up
acting because his voice was thin and weak. All
this, however, came later in his career. Mean-
while his boyhood was like that of any other
Athenian gentleman's son. His home was the
most beautiful spot in the neighbourhood of
Athens, a "garden" not *' wholly in the busy
world nor quite beyond it," the Horseman's Knoll,
as it was called — the "White Knoll," as he himself
styles it^ — a low mound of light-coloured earth,
swelling from the Attic plain, and covered with a
boskage of laurel, olive, and vine, through which
EARLIER MANHOOD 7
trickled the unfailing rills of the little Kephisus,
nourishing the daffodil, " a gariand for the gods,"
and the gold-gleaming crocus, and keeping fresh
the green dells in which a crowd of nightingales
sang sweetly and unceasingly.
Of the poet's earlier manhood, from 480 to 468,
we know nothing. He is called the pupil of
^schylus, as a great Italian painter is often called
the pupil of his chief predecessor. That ^schylus
gave, or Sophocles received, lessons, is not to be
believed; but that, as a happy reverent spirit, he
fell at first much under the influence of ^schylus
and learned from him, there can be no doubt.
The "Ajax," one of his earliest plays, is full of
^schylean words, taken mainly, as Professor
Jebb notices, from the Persse ; and it was perhaps
with mingled feelings that he found himself
preferred at the age of twenty-seven to his master.
The story of the victory is well known, although of
doubtful authenticity. What it emphasises is, that
from this time Sophocles undoubtedly held the
foremost place among Athenian poets. So much
is clear from Aristophanes. The old men might
prefer ^schylus, the young men Euripides, but
Sophocles was hors concours. Such was doubtless
the judgment of the generals, even if the story of
their award is not true. It was, as Professor
Phillimore well puts it, the judgment of " the man
in the street of Athens."^ It was also the
1 Aristophanes ("Peace" 531) makes one of his Chorus
include, as one of the blessings of peace, "the songs of
Sophocles." The scholiast says that Aristophanes praised
Sophocles only to damn Euripides, whom he hated. But
Aristophanes no doubt also represents the popular taste.
8 SOPHOCLKS AND THE GREEK GENIUS
jii(lL;iiieiit of Xonophon and, perhaps we may
divine, of Plato. And it was to be the judgment
of Cicero ami Viriijil, and of that still more popular
critic, Ovid.
Sophocles acquired, too, a public position. He
was made, as we know from inscriptions, Helleno-
taniias in 443 or 442. He was sent as a general
to Samos about 441. It has been argued that
this means little, especially as regards his poetry.
It is not so clear that this is the case. Profes-
sions were not then so much dififerentiated as
they are to-day. Every Greek gentleman was
bred to arms and familiar with the simple conduct
of war as at that time carried on. Sophocles
might well have been, if Greek comedy is to
be trusted, as good a general as Pericles. It
is true that Ion of Chios, in his "Remi-
niscences," entitled perhaps "Celebrities I have
met," gives a gossiping, and not unscandalous,
account of his encountering Sophocles at a dinner-
party in Samos, and how he displayed his general-
ship in manoeuvring at the dinner-table. "I am
practising tactics," he said, "because Pericles says
I am a good poet but a bad general." But Ion,
Plutarch tells us, also described Pericles as " stiff
and proud," and indeed thought it right to show
the seamy side of great men. It is said more
specifically that Sophocles was defeated in a naval
skirmish by the famous atomic philosopher
Melissus. Fancy a campaign conducted by
Gladstone and Tennyson, in which Tennyson
should be defeated at sea by M. Pasteur ! But
M. Berthelot held a portfolio in a French ministry,
and a suggestion was made in the Boer War
A POLITICAL PERSONAGE 9
that Mr Rudyard Kipling should have a command.
And is not Mr Haldane, the author of *'The
Pathway to Reahty," Minister of War? Professor
von Wilamowitz-Mollendorf, indeed, lays more
stress than other scholars have done on Sophocles'
public and official career. He maintains that his
holding these offices was neither accidental nor
ornamental, but shows him to have been definitely
a leading politician, and even a party man and
important supporter of Pericles.
A figure and a personage, then, in Greek
society, the compeer of Pericles, the friend of
Herodotus, to whom he addressed an Ode, he
ranged among the foremost men and minds of his
day, interchanging with them, doubtless as an
equal, ideas on the events and movements of his
time. Whatever he was in the field, it is certain
that his poems contain much political wisdom.
Such passages as the famous
" Stone walls do not a city make, but men ; "
or again,
" Whereas
Nor fort noi* fleet, empty, is anything,
Desert of men to be its complement,"
have passed into proverbs for every age and time.
They gave him the reputation for that aphoristic
eloquence or mastery of phrase which Plutarch
attributes to him. He held a position not unlike
that of Tennyson, who could venture to advise
Gladstone about the extension of the franchise, and
whose phrases or "sayings" are the crystalHsation
of the political wisdom of his time. It was the
same cause, doubtless, which led to his being made
a "Lord of the Treasury," and being employed, like
10 SOPHOCLES AND THE GREEK GENIUS
a Frencli ur Anieriean man of letters, Chateau-
briaiul, or Hawthorne, or Motley, or Lowell, on
various embassies. In tlio last years of his life,
when, after the awful calamity of Syracuse, the
democracy was discredited, and an attempt was
made to frame a new constitution with a more
restricted franchise, an assembly was summoned,
not in Athens, but at his own Colonus, by which he
is said to have been appointed one of a Committee
of Ten, to devise a new constitution and submit it
to the people. The result was the appointment
of the famous or notorious Four Hundred, The
identification is not absolutely certain, but there
is no real reason to question it, and the story
preserved by Aristotle, that Sophocles defended
the course adopted by saying that it was not indeed
ideal, but the best under the circumstances, is
quite in keeping with his character.
For he was probably a moderate in politics
as in everything else, and meant the Four Hundred
to be merely an executive committee and not the
tyrannical junta which it proved. As R. A. Neil,
of lettered memory, writes, in his most suggestive
introduction to the " Knights," the spirit of Attic
literature is in the main that of moderate, not
extreme, democracy. Sophocles was in any case
a patriot, and even when Athens had seen her best
days remained faithful to her. Euripides, also a
democrat, but disillusioned — "exacerbated" by the
jingoism, as Dr Murray implies, though he cleverly
avoids saying it, of the Athenian democracy — fled
to the court of Archelaus of Macedonia, which was
like a Radical taking refuge with the Czar of Russia,
and there composed that swan-song, strangely,
HIS PASSING 11
wildly beautiful, which Dr Murray has reproduced
with so much genius and sympathy, the " Bacchae."
Sophocles was also invited by the despot, but he
would not go. Then came "the sombre close of
that voluptuous day." Euripides died. When
Sophocles heard it he put on mourning and bade
his chorus appear without the usual wreaths. The
scene is admirably given by one of Euripides' best
lovers, Mr Browning : —
" Enters an old pale-swathed majesty
Makes slow mute passage through two ranks as mute.
Priest — the deep tone succeeded the fixed gaze —
Thou carest that thy god have spectacle
Decent and seemly ; wherefore I announce
That, since Euripides is dead to-day.
My Choros, at the Greater Feast, next month,
Shall clothed in black appear ungarlanded.
Then the grey brow sank low, and Sophokles
Re-swathed him, sweeping doorward ; mutely passed
'Twixt rows as mute, to mingle possibly
With certain gods who convoy age to port ;
And night resumed him."
His own end followed just in time, "before the
evil hour." The story of the manner of his death
and of his burial are both significant. The better
versions of the first are pretty, the legend of the
last is lovely, but chronology pronounces it apo-
cryphal.
It was indeed time for him to depart. His
domestic relations were too probably not happy.
Like Goethe after Schiller's death and the shock and
sequel of the battle of Jena, marrying Christiana
Vulpius, then flirting and quarrelling with Bettine,
incurring the contempt and censure of his family,
the aged and over-amorous Sophocles had perhaps
}'2 SOPIKXM.ES AND THE GREEK GENIUS
fallen into the hands of an old man's young wives.
They preyed npon him, perching on his house, as
tlie forcible Greek saying had it, " like owls on a
tomb." Whether his sons ever really brought that
famous action (l(^ inn.atlco hiquiremh which was
ilismissed upon St)phocles reciting the song from
the " CEdipus at Colonus," is doubtful, though
Cicero, a lover of a good story, accepted it. It
is very probably a scene from a comedy, based
perhaps on an exaggeration of the real state of
Sophocles' relations with his family.
Browning's verses strike the true note of his
passing, a note first heard nowhere else but in the
CEdipus itself. For Sophocles was a many-sided
character. He was not only a soldier and a states-
man ; he was also a priest, or something very like
it, in the technical sense. Like Dante, who was
inscribed of the Guild of Apothecaries, he seems
to have had some connexion with medicine ; he
reared an altar, and wrote a hymn, to Asclepius, the
god of medicine, which long remained famous. But
he also held a sort of private prebend or priesthood
in connexion with Alcon, a brother hero with
Asclepius. He was even supposed to have enter-
tained Asclepius, and after death was himself
canonised as "The Entertainer."^
This, too, is appropriate to his character. For
not merely was he religious, but he was definitely
pious. A poet, and especially a dramatist, must
not be judged by isolated passages or sentiments
put into the mouths of his characters ; but the
whole temper of Sophocles shows this, and the
^ See Professor Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Mollendorf's letter
at the end of this volume.
MYSTIC AND PIETIST 13
tradition that he came into collision with the
esprits forts of his day, and offended them by his
avowed orthodoxy, is verisimilar enough. We
know little about the so-called "Mysteries," or the
place they held in actual Greek thought and life.
But one of the most famous passages about them
is a fragment of Sophocles, in which he attributes
to them a saving grace.
"Thrice happy," he sang, "are they among
mortals who have looked on these rites before they
pass to the world below. They alone will have
life ill the next world, the rest will have there
nought but misery."
It is said that Diogenes asked, " What do you
mean ? Will the thief Patsecion, if he dies a
mystic, have a better chance than Epaminondas,
because he has been initiated ? " — thus anticipating
the famous dispute between Cardinal Newman and
Canon Kingsley over the Church's lazy and ragged,
but religious beggar-woman and the State's pattern
man.
The eminent German scholar, Ulrich von
Wilamowitz-Mollendorf, lays special stress on
Sophocles' piety as emphasised by these stories,
and thinks it the key to the understanding of
the "(Edipus Tyrannus."
"We" (he says) "are smitten to the ground by
the awfulness of the story. Sophocles was not so.
He had a warm piety in the heart of a child. The
weakness of m.an was to him only God's oppor-
tunity. He believed in the gods as he believed in
the oracles. Such piety is not found in ^schylus.
Can we doubt that Augustine would have found in
Sophocles, and not in his two comrades, a kinsman
of heaven ? "
14 SOPHOCLES AND THE GREEK GENIUS
Such his own generation certainly held him. He
was beyond all others, they said, tlie darling of the
gods. He ret<iined, in fact, not a little of the older-
fashioned piety which belonged to the aristocratic
leaders of his day, to Pericles and to Nicias.
Is such a character, so practical, so sensuous
at once and saintly, intelligible or realisable by
us to-day ? The poetic temperament sometimes
takes this cast. On this side, as in other points,
there is not a little resemblance betw^een the
" gentle " Sophocles, and the tender, pious Virgil,
a wizard in his own and immediately succeeding
days, a saint in the Middle Ages. But Virgil,
studiis Jlorens ignohilis oti, though full of practical
sense, was not a man of action. We have
compared Sophocles, too, with a poet who has
much in common with Virgil, Lord Tennyson.^
He has more points of contact with another
poet, very different from either of these. It
is said that Sophocles has no modern parallel,
and strictly speaking this is true. The nearest
perhaps, on the whole, or at least the most
suggestive, as we have already hinted more than
once, is Goethe. The differences are very great.
Germany is not Greece. Neither Frankfort nor
Weimar, nor both combined, are Athens. Yet in the
man Goethe, in his temper, in his physique, there
is much that helps us to understand Sophocles.
Born in a middle station, yet a natural aristo-
crat, strikingly handsome alike in youth and in
age, mingling passion and reason, familiar with
1 Professors Campbell, Butcher, and Phillimore, have all
pointed out the similarity of Sophocles' style to that of Virgil
and Tennyson, especially in its trick of giving to a word a sort
of aura of association, and thus many meanings at once.
PARALLEL WITH GOETHE 15
afifairs as well as with books, prosecuting art and
culture and science, and all amid the storm
and thunder of a national struggle and mighty
battles, minded ever " Im Ganzen, Guten, Schonen,
resolut zu leben," to him also may be applied
Matthew Arnold's famous lines about one
"Whose even-balanced soul
From first youth tested up to extreme old age,
Business could not make dull, nor passion wild,
Who saw life steadily and saw it whole."
Nor is it unlikely that their author in writing them
had, perhaps unconsciously, in his mind both his
artistic and literary heroes. The picture of Goethe
with his sunny playfulness of wit and temper, as
portrayed for us by Eckermann, may help us to
understand the picture of Sophocles, which has
already been alluded to, preserved by a less
flattering witness than Eckermann, Ion of Chios.
The famed combination of Heiterkeit, *' blithe
serenity," with AUgemeinheit, or "breadth of
view," makes in both, though in very different
forms, a complete ideal ; while the deeper side
of Goethe, that piety which all his sensual
worldliness could not entirely obliterate, may be
found in the treatment of religion in "Wilhelm
Meister," both in the story of the Schone Seele, and
still more in the symbolic and mystic interpretation
of Christianity which concludes the miscellaneous
phantasmagoria of that strange book.
The social status of the two poets presents a
further parallel.
" Placed midway between the perilous extremes
of affluence and want, Goethe's whole career
received a modifying impulse from this position.
16 SOPHOCLES AND THE GREEK GENIUS
He never knew adversity. Tliis alone must neces-
sarily have deprived him of one powerful chord
which vibrates tlirou*::;!! literature. He never knew
the gaunt companionship of Want, whispering
terrible suggestions. He never knew the necessity
to conquer for himself breathing-room in the world ;
and thus all the feelings of bitterness, opposition,
and defiance which accompany and perplex the
struggle of life, were to him almost unknown ; and
he was taught nothing of the aggressive and
practical energy which these feelings develop in
impetuous natures. How much of his serenity,
how much of his dislike to politics, may be traced
to this origin ? "
So writes, in the opening pages of his book, his
English biographer, Mr G. H. Lewies.
Goethe, again, had his acquaintance with
affairs, both civil and military.^ He was a Privy
Councillor at five-and-twenty ; and, just before
he wrote his '* Iphigeneia," he was appointed
President of the Military and Causeway Com-
mission for the Duchy of Weimar, so that he
composed that famous piece, as he said, with " one
foot only in the stirrup of Pegasus." He was
interrupted in its composition by the riots among
the starving weavers of Apolda. When it was
first acted, he played the part of Orestes himself,
and in the handsome prime of his young manhood —
he was then just thirty — was likened to Apollo de-
scended from heaven to present in bodily form the
beauty of Greece. Truly a Sophoclean apparition !
It is of no little importance that both poets were
practically and personally acquainted with the
^ His latest and most complete biographer, Dr Bielschowsky,
lays great stress on his official and " business " career, and his
political instinct and insight.
COMPARISONS WITH GOETHE 17
details and difficulties of staging and presentation.
In this respect Sophocles was pre-eminent. His
famous introduction of the third actor, his breaking-
down of the practice of writing "tetralogies," or
cycles, rather than single plays, like his improve-
ments in dress and decoration, owe, doubtless,
something to this conversance with the actual
possibilities. It is noticeable that Goethe, in
criticising Sophocles, lays special stress upon this
acquaintance with the stage, as shown in both the
" Philoctetes " and the "CEdipus at Colonus." It
is pretty clear too that, like Aristotle, nay, prob-
ably following both Aristotle and Lessing, he
took Sophocles as the norm and canon of Greek
tragedy. Thus in his critique of " Cymbeline,"
the reviewer of Shakespeare, he says, should con-
sider "how Sophocles would have handled the
same material."
Finally, Goethe reminds us of Sophocles in his
blending of reason and passion. He was eminently
susceptible of beauty, and he yielded often, too
often, to its spell. He was aware of this himself.
Is not his confession,
"Ich konnte viel gliicklicher sein
Gab's nur keinen Wein
Und keine Weiberthranen,"
in the same key as Sophocles' famous answer
already quoted? And might not Sophocles have
replied to Ion in Goethe's line,
" Wird doch nicht immer gekiisst, es wird verniinftig
gesprochen ?"
Goethe resembled Sophocles, too, in his
magnanimity and sweetness to other artists and
poets, first and foremost to Schiller, but also to
B
18 SOPHOCLES AND THE GREEK GENIUS
lesser lights, Herder and Wieland, Jacobi and
others. " How could I write songs of hatred
without hating," said Goethe. Yet he wrote the
XrnU'n. *' Such was vSophocles' charm," says his
biographer, "that everywhere and by every one
he was beloved." Yet he could be satiric on
occasion ; and did we possess all his works we
might find perhaps that he too not only could have
written, but actually wrote his occasional Xenien;
or perhaps, like Tennyson, he only composed and
did not publish his epigrams on his foes.^
The luck of some men seems to follow them
even after their death. Their happy star shines
over their graves. This has been the case with
Sophocles. It is true, of course, that the bulk
of his plays has been lost, that only seven have
survived. But they are all masterpieces. Time
does not always scatter his poppy so blindly as is
supposed. Macaulay raised the issue, whether
Euripides would not have been rated more highly
had only the seven best of his dramas come
down to us ; and much as we must deplore the
loss of many a famous piece by Sophocles, yet
when we read the list of the hundred and
fifteen whose names survive, we cannot avoid the
surmise that, were they all more than names, we
might better have understood that " unevenness "
and that "artificiality" at which great ancient
critics stumbled. It is true also that Sophocles'
fame has not perhaps stood always equally high.
He was too essentially Hellenic, nay, too Attic,
for the cosmopolitan Hellenistic days which
followed the break-up of old Greece. Euripides,
1 An epigram on Euripides attributed to him is still extant.
FAVOURITE OF THE CRITICS 19
far easier to understand, had probably a much
wider vogue throughout the semi- Greek world.
It was the "Bacchee," and not the "CEdipus"
or the "Antigone" that was being acted at the
Parthian court when the head of the unfortunate
Crassus was brought in and snatched up by the
strolling player to point the wild Bacchante's re-
frain. But while ^schylus and Euripides have had
at times more passionate partisans, Sophocles has
been persistently the favourite of the best critics, of
Aristotle and Dionysius, of Halicarnassus and Dio
Chrysostomus, of Cicero and Virgil, of Lessing
and Goethe, of Matthew Arnold and of Edward
Fitzgerald.
It is true that his luck has not been absolutely
unbroken. It is a misfortune that Lessing never
completed his work upon him. Lessing, in the
prime of his powers, meditated a great study of
Sophocles, whom he wished to hold up as a model
to German dramatists. It was to consist of four
books. The first was to contain a life of the poet,
which was to be followed by a critical analysis of
the plays and a translation. Lessing began with
the life, and commenced printing it in 1760 ; but
he had not enough material ready, and the printing
was discontinued with the seventh sheet. Fourteen
years later he took it up again, but once more
failed to complete it. Even now, after the lapse
of a century and a half, we must regret that
Lessing did not achieve what he projected, for he
combined, what are so rarely combined in adequate
measure, passion and erudition. He was not a
poet who had failed, but rather a critic who had
succeeded, in creative literature ; and the author of
20 SOPHOCLES AND J^HE GREEK GENIUS
•* Minna von Barnliolm " and the " Hamburgische
Draniaturgie " might have given us in a Hfe of
Sophocles a supplement to his own "Laokoon"
and a complement to the ** Poetics."
Lessing was not a Sophoclean character; few
have been less so ; but he would have treated a
great poet as only a great poet can. His obiter
dicta upon Sophocles are excellent. His general
attitude and feeling are best expressed in his own
noble words : —
"Let us," he says, "once fall in love with an
ancient author and then the most trifling detail
which concerns, or which can have any reference,
to that author, ceases to be indifferent to us. Now
that I have once begun to regret having studied
the * Poetics ' of Aristotle without first studying
the pattern from which he derived it, I shall pay
more attention to tlie name of Sophocles, let me
find it where I will, than to my own. How often
have I sought him, how much useless stuff have
I read for his sake ! To-day my thought is. No
trouble is in vain which can save trouble to
another. I have not read the useless uselessly, if
it prevents one and another from having to read it
hereafter. I may not be admired, but I shall be
thanked. And imagined gratitude is as pleasant
as imagined admiration ; or we should have had
no grammarians, no scholars."
But if Sophocles was unlucky in the eighteenth
century, he has been lucky in the nineteenth and
twentieth. Neither ^schylus or Euripides, strange
to say, has yet found a great or even an adequate
editor. Famous scholars have dealt with single
plays. Person meditated at different times, editing
both an ^schylus and a Euripides, but admirable
as is his work on both authors, he had in his short,
SIR RICHARD JEBB 21
ill-starred life neither the time nor the resolution to
achieve either task. Sophocles has been happier.
He has found an editor, of whom it is not too
much to say that he is not only ideal, but also
ideally appropriate to his author; and he has
found him at the right moment.
Of scholarship in the literary and linguistic
sense, Sir Richard Jebb was a past-master, and he
had been trained in the best school. Classical study
may progress on various lines, in comparative
philology, in palaeography, in archaeology. New
materials may be unearthed. In these ways there
may be an advance, but in another direction there
may very well be a decline. It may be doubted
whether the command of Greek verse composition,
with all it implies, will ever be carried higher,
or indeed maintain itself so high, as it stood
among the Oxford and Cambridge scholars of
Sir Richard Jebb's day. Sir Richard was himself
one of those men with a gift for language such as
comes perhaps twice in a century, and he had
practised it carefully and long. He was a con-
summate composer of Greek verse. He could, as
Tennyson said, "roll an Olympian," that seemed to
come from some very "ghost of Pindar" within
him. His iambic translations of Shakespeare show
a wealth and command of Greek diction which are
marvellous. But he was more than a mere composer,
rhetorician, or versifier. He was much of an orator
and a poet. He was also a practised literary critic.
He had enjoyed the friendship of living poets, the
intimate friendship of the foremost and most artistic
of his day. He possessed what Dryden so well
said was necessary to give a really correct under-
22 SOPHOCLES AND THE GREEK GENIUS
standiiiix of stylo, and to "wear off the rust con-
tracted by learning," a knowledge of men and
manners. Nay more, he was conversant with affairs ;
nor is it extravagant to say that, as Gibbon found —
the reader, says Gibbon, may smile — "the captain
of the Hampshire grenadiers not useless to the
historian of the Roman Empire," so the Royal Com-
missioner and the Cambridge Member of Parliament
may have been useful to the Camliridge Professor of
Greek, regarded as the editor of the Attic dramatist
who was also a soldier and a statesman. Diligent,
accurate, w^ell-balanced, judicious, sane, sympathetic,
Sir Richard Jebb well fulfilled Lessing's canon.
He loved his author, and he spared neither time nor
pains in elucidating him.
Sir Richard Jebb's most famous predecessor in
the Greek chair at Cambridge was a lover of
Euripides. It is the custom at Cambridge that
the candidates for the Greek chair should deliver,
like Scotch ministers on trial, a pubHc lecture in
the schools upon some Greek author. Porson,
when a candidate in 1792, chose Euripides for
his theme, or perhaps the theme was proposed to
him. Whichever was the case, the choice was
most fortunate. The lectm*e, brilliant both in
matter and expression, is far less well known than
it deserves to be. To the general reader it is,
indeed, not know^n at all, for it is written in
Latin, and general readers do not read literary
criticism in Latin. The pity is that the author
of the ''Letters to Travis" did not write more
in English ; for Porson was, like most really great
scholars, like Conington or Munro, a man of letters
as well as a scholar, a master of literary as well as
EURIPIDES 23
of textual criticism. He was also like not a few
men of genius, procrastinating. The lecture was
scrambled together, it is said, in two days. With
consummate oratorical art, Porson apologises for
making it a popular discourse which may possibly
please the undergraduates — after all, perhaps, not
the worst of judges. It treats interestingly of all
three tragedians, but culminates in a comparison
of Sophocles and Euripides, which concludes by
declaring the great scholar's own predilection.
"I," he says, "derive greater pleasure from the
natural beauty and unaffected simplicity of Euripides
than from Sophocles' more elaborate and artificial
diligence. Sophocles may have indited the more
correct tragedies, but Euripides wrote the sweeter
poems. Sophocles we approve, but Euripides we
adore ; we praise the former, but we peruse the
latter. Hunc magis probare solemus, ilium magis
amare; hunc laudamus ; ilium legimus"
To this opinion of Porson Sir Eichard Jebb would
not have subscribed. He has praise for Euripides.
" All honour to Euripides," he says, " for no one is
capable of feeling that Sophocles is supreme, who
does not feel that Euripides is admirable." But
his love is for Sophocles.
And to the grande amore he added the lungo
studio. The history of this edition is of high inter-
est. As a young don of Trinity, six and thirty years
earlier, he first edited two plays, the " Electra " and
the "Ajax." Already he meditated a complete
edition of Sophocles on a large scale. But he saw
that he must first master Greek rhetorical prose. His
work on the Attic orators was thus an interlude
and a preparation for the edition of Sophocles. In
24 SOPHOCLES AND THE GREEK GENIUS
its pages will bo t\)iiiui some of his best general
critical writing upon Sophocles. Only in 1883 was
he able to publish the first volume of the larger
edition. Thirteen years later, he once more gave
to the world the second of the two plays with
which he had begun, the "Ajax." With this the
series of the plays was complete. It still remained
for the eighth volume to be produced, which would
contain the "Fragments,"^ "Essays on subjects of
general interest in relation to Sophocles," and an
Index. It was to be hoped that it might also include
a discussion of the life of Sophocles, for the notices
about him are not few, and, sympathetically and
scientifically treated, as Professor Jebb could have
treated them, might be made to yield more than they
have yet done.
But meanwhile Professor Jebb had a right to
regard his task as, in a sense, achieved, and to
inscribe it with a " Dedication " which is singu-
larly appropriate. Whatever may be thought of
Sophocles' faihngs in a pre-Christian age, not
notable for either chastity or chivalry in the modern
sense, Sophocles' women, the tender and the strong
alike, are eminently noble and chivalrous creations ;
and the fact that he created them, and that they
were so much admired in his own day, should go
far to redeem the Periclean age from the imputa-
tion of a low opinion of the sex. It was then happy
and not insignificant that this monumental edition
should receive as its finishing ornament a dedica-
tion to Lady Jebb, "to whose sympathy," writes
^ The editing of these was entrusted to Dr W. Headlam of
King's College. Alas ! " How soon has brother followed
brother ! " Uttde parent invenias ?
"THOROUGHNESS OF INTERPRETATION" 25
her husband, " it has owed more than to any other
aid."
What, it may be asked, are the general character
and aim of this edition ? They could not be better
described than they are in the quiet and modest
profession made in the preface to the second play
edited, the lovely "CEdipus at Colonus."
"It will be a sufficient reward," it was there
written, "for much thought and labour if this
edition is accepted by competent critics as throwing
some new light on a play of great and varied
beauty." And again, "One distinctive aim of the
edition is thoroughness of interpretation in regard
ahke to the form and to the matter. . . . Rash conjec-
ture constantly arises from defective understanding."
" Thoroughness of interpretation," conservatism,
and sobriety in textual criticism — these are certainly
its distinguishing marks. "Rare as epic song,"
says the doyen of our living creative writers, himself
no mean scholar, Mr George Meredith, " is the man
who is thorough in what he does. And happily
so; for in life he subjugates us, and he makes
us bondsmen to his ashes." Professor Jebb
spared no pains to be thorough. There is no
Sophoclean question which he has left untouched,
few which he has not adorned. But, if the most
thorough, he is also the most patient and modest, of
commentators. With the richest gift for rewriting,
the amplest powers of composing in the Sophoclean
vein that any scholar ever possessed, he has been
the most self-restrained of editors. Where he has
emended, his suggestions carry all the more force.
He has been most generous to the suggestions of
others. But, as Professor Kaibel said long ago,
26 SOPHOCLES AND THE GREEK GENIUS
his aim is to understaiul his author, not to gain
repute by novelty. Occasionally he is content not
to undersUind, to suspend his judgment; but this
is only when all means of illumination have been
tried. PaUx^ography, metrical science, grammar,
prosody, are pressed into service in the determina-
tion and elucidation of the text ; history, archae-
ology, geography, even botany, all contribute to the
full interpretation and presentment of the author's
meaning. The result is that we recover Sophocles,
and understand him with a fulness unknown before.
Indeed, as the second of Professor Jebb's
brilliant young successors in the Glasgow chair of
Greek, Professor Phillimore, generously writes, his
great edition is so complete and judicious that,
for years to come, all Sophoclean criticism must
be expressed in terms of dittering or agreeing with
him. And let those who are tempted to differ
think many times, for it is only by degrees that
the reader perceives how intimately penetrated with
the Sophoclean spirit his editor is, how nice and just
is his sympathy, how exhaustive his consideration.
What, then, is the Sophoclean spirit? What
are the Sophoclean characteristics ? Perfection of
detail, yet subordination of the parts to the whole ;
calculation and rule, yet the freedom which rule
alone can give ; " triumphant art, but art in
obedience to law." It is of the essence of
Sophocles that he is an artist, and a critical and
self-conscious artist. Here, again, he is like Goethe,
who said he had never written a single page without
knowing how it came there. " You do what is right
in poetry," said Sophocles to ^schylus, "but with-
out knowing why." This was not, as some ancient
HIS STYLE 27
pedants supposed, because ^schylus was addicted
to drink, ^schylus was indeed intoxicated at times,
but not with wine. In a famous passage in the
" Poetics," Aristotle divides poets into two classes
— the "finely gifted," who are sympathetic and
touched to fine issues, and the " finely frenzied,"
who are swept on by overmastering inspiration.^
^schylus belongs to the latter class, Sophocles
emphatically to the former. Not, indeed, that
^schylus is not a great artist, or that Sophocles
is uninspired ; but, like Shakespeare, and even
more than Shakespeare, Sophocles is "a great
poet, made as well as born," He has thought out
his art. That this was so as regards both his style
and his general management, we know. His style
is described by the great critic Dionysius as the
"middle style," a mean between the austere and
the elegant. And it was a mean arrived at
deliberately. In his youth he used to say he
had amused himself by travestying the pomp of
JEschylus ; then he had experimented in the other
extreme with his own inclination to incisiveness
and hard elaboration ; finally, he had exchanged
both for a third style, which was the most sym-
pathetic and the best.' So Shakespeare, as Mr
Swinburne has admirably shown, halted between
the following of Marlowe and that of Greene.
Still more significant is his use of the chorus.
1 It is satisfactory to think that, as Professor Butclaer shows
in the preface to his new edition, the text in this important
passage has now, thanks to Professor Margohouth and the
Arabic version, been placed beyond a doubt.
2 Virgil's style was described, by his enemies, in almost
exactly the same terms, as being " neither swelling or meagre,
but a subtle and mannered manipulation of ordinary language."
28 SOPHOCLES AND THE GREEK GENIUS
Originally the Greek play was all chorus. At first
only one actor, then two, then three, but never
more than three, except as mute personages,
appeared at one time upon the stage. What the
early Greek plays were like, may still be seen in that
ai-chaic drama the " Suppliants " of ^schylus, or,
though less markedly, in the "Pers?e." ^schylus
made the drama, Sophocles perfected it. His chorus
was another person in the drama, a "collective
actor," but something more than an actor. In the
chorus the spectator sees himself brought into the
scope of the piece, and his sympathy is strongly
drawn out. Aristotle takes Sophocles' use as the
model of perfection. But Sophocles did not attain
to it without careful study. His evolution of the
chorus was probably one of his earliest efforts,
very possibly his first great artistic struggle.
Perhaps the most interesting point in the very
scanty record we possess of Sophocles is that he
wrote a prose treatise about the chorus referring
to and combating the views and practice of the
older writers, Thespis and Choerilus. The state-
ment has, it is true, been doubted, but it seems
credible enough,^ for Sophocles' use of the chorus,
as contrasted with that of Euripides, is one of the
points on which Aristotle lays special stress in the
" Poetics " ; and there can be little doubt that the
well-known passage in Horace does little more
than reflect the view of Aristotle.
We know so little about Sophocles, or about
^ Lessing thinks, with probability, that it was in this same
prose treatise that he recorded the evolution of his own style,
Aristotle may well have had it before his mind when writing
the passage alluded to.
"THE ATTIC BEE" 29
the modes of literary work in his day, that it is
difficult to check many statements as to his studies
or writings. It is probable, however, that the ways
of poets and artists then were not very diflFerent
from what they have been since his time.
Sophocles was said to cull the beauties of all his
predecessors, and to exhibit at once, daring variety,
appropriateness, and sweetness.^ He was called
"the Attic bee," some say for the last-named
quality. That he was sweet is very true. He
knew how necessary sweetness is to the best
poetry. Nee satis est pulchra esse poemata^
dulcia sunto. But he was not too sweet. Here,
as ever, he hit the mean. A story, perhaps
apocryphal, used to be current about Mr Swinburne,
generous sometimes of his blame, but ever still
more generous of his praise, and consequently as
potent in criticism as in creation, that he said of
Tennyson, Browning, and himself, "Browning
has body, and I have bouquet, but Tennyson
has both." An ancient poet- critic said by a
similar metaphor of Sophocles, "He is a wine
neither luscious nor watery, but at once dry and
cordial."
But the name was probably given to Sophocles
as Horace gave it to himself, not so much for his
sweetness, as for his industry ; for he was accused,
as all careful and learned poets have been, of
plagiarism ; and indeed Philostratus of Alexandria
wrote a book on his thefts. The charge, it is true,
has not clung to Sophocles as it has to Virgil,
perhaps because we have not the authors from
^ Aristophanes alludes to his honeyed sweetness ("Frag.,"
231). ^0<f>OKX(OV<S TOU fMeXlTt KiXpUTfliVOV,
30 SOrilOCLES AND THE GREEK GENIUS
wlioin lie could be said to have drawn. For
him the prayer of the Roman wit has been realised,
'' Perif'n/Nt ijul ante Sop/toclem Sophoclea dixere."
But it is additional proof that he was a careful and
a learned poet, and Sir Richard Jebb^ is all the more
to be thanked for the assiduity with which he has
sifted the dust-heap of scholia and dldascaliai
to discover the previous treatment of Sophoclean
themes, and thereby demonstrated Sophocles' know-
ledge and originality.
The main characteristics of Sophocles' dramatic
genius may, of course, best be seen by taking one
of the plays as edited in this series. It might
seem natural, perhaps, to select the "CEdipus
Tyrannus," for this, as readers of the "Poetics"
are aware, is the model and typical Greek play.
Its strength consists in its wonderful arrangement,
to use Leonardo da Vinci's phrase in its symmetria
prisca. The movement passes through a perfect
and absolute cui've, in which no point, not the
smallest, is out of place, so that it is Httle exag-
geration to say, that not a line could be lost with-
out disturbing the balance of the whole. That
"dramatic economy" of which Porson spoke,
is here displayed at its highest.^ But the
"(Edipus Tyrannus," eminently typical though it
is, is perhaps not so well suited for displaying
Sophocles' merits as is the "Antigone," the play
' Professor Jebb's many parallels from previous writers,
e.g., from Theognis, are, in this connexion, very suggestive.
2 In fact it exactly fulfils that precept of Voltaire in which
Mr A. B. Walkley finds the " ideal of modern drama." " Tout
doit etre action dans la Tragedie; chaque scene doit servir k
nouer et a denouer I'intrigue, chaque discours doit etre prepara-
tion ou obstacle."
ANTIGONE 31
after all which has most impressed the modern
world. ^
The " Antigone " is one of the earliest of
Sophocles' plays preserved. It is not perfect in
style. It exhibits a certain amount of harshness.
But it belongs to the maturity of the poet's powers,
to the centre of his active life. What then are its
characteristics ? The story is of the simplest. A
great situation, few motives, few actors ; the conflict
of a lesser duty, local, expedient, human, with
one which is paramount, universal, divine ; con-
sistency, simplicity, fine psychology, these are its
notes. The famous Dramatic Unities, reduced to rule
by the French classical theatre, were not, as every
one is now aware, known to the Greek theatre as
rules. They are not contained in Aristotle. They
are merely the result of that simplification which is
of the essence of the best Greek tragedy, and which
is nowhere better seen than in the ''Antigone."
Sophocles, in what, as Goethe pointed out, was
his usual manner, did not invent, he found the
story. But his treatment of it is, as Sir Richard
Jebb emphasises, his own. And notably his own
is the happy use which he makes of a motive speci-
ally interesting to Athens, the burial of foemen
slain in war. A sister, Antigone, insists on burying
her brother who has come sword in hand against
his native city, has been defeated and slain, and
lies under the ban of what the Greeks would have
considered a harsh and high-handed, but not illegal
or unpatriotic decree. It is her uncle, the father of
^ " If I lived for a hundred yeai-s, the study of the Greeks
alone would be enough for me. I am reading the ' Antigone.'
What an admirable man M'as Sophocles! " — Benjamin Constant.
32 SOPHOCLES AND THE GREEK GENIUS
her lover, who has issued the edict, and he forbids
her under pain of death to bury the corpse. The
City's law is against her, but a higlier law bids her
go forward. She persists, openly performs burial
rites, is brou«:;lit to justice and is doomed to die.
Her lover sides with her, and pleads with the
father, but in vain. She is condemned and haled
away to be immured in a living tomb. Too late the
f^ither relents, and going to release her, finds that
she has hanged herself, and that her lover, his own
son, has killed himself upon her dead body, while,
as a crowning woe, his wife, the queen-mother,
on hearing the news, herself commits suicide.
These are the factors, simple, elemental. To
the Greeks the mere situation in itself was even
more powerful than it is to-day. The great natural
" moments " of man's earthly career, birth, marriage,
death, had for them a predominance which we do
not in all moods realise, although burial, even now,
is a question w^hich not seldom stirs feelings deep
and universal. But even for us, and for all time,
the situation remains profoundly touching. It pos-
sesses the universality of the greatest masterpieces.
Antigone is one of the very greatest characters
in literature because she is so natural and so com-
plete. She is a queen in tragedy, but she is no
tragedy queen ; she is a heroine, but a human
heroine ; for, as Professor Jebb says, " no other
woman in Greek tragedy is either so human or
so true a woman as the Antigone of Sophocles."
She is the strongest of strong characters where
character needs strength, but she is not in the
smallest degree ''strong-minded." She is only, as
Goethe wrote, ^^ Die schwesterlichste der Seelen."
ANTIGONE'S NATURALNESS 33
It is because she is so very woman, so true a sister,
that she is also so true a sweetheart. Duty is
paramount, but light and life and love are sweet,
sweet with all the physical sweetness which they
had for a healthy and honourable Greek girl, and
she does not conceal her natural feelings. She
says in eflPect —
" I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honour more."
But she is under no illusion. When the chorus
launches the keenest dart of all, the taunt of her ill-
starred heritage, she admits its sting. It is the sin
of her house which has brought her into this terrible
dilemma and forces her to this choice of evils ; for
she sees with awful clearness that it is truly a choice
of evils, and that there is much to be said for the
sentence which dooms her. She will hold fast to
the one thing that is certain, duty to a brother.
That gives her, like Jephtha's daughter, "strength
that equals her desire " ; but, like Jephtha's
daughter, mourning because "no fair Hebrew boy
shall smile away her maiden blame among the
Hebrew mothers," she is not ashamed to weep, and
bewail, that death, not Haemon, will be her groom.
So, with surpassing power, with the reticent con-
centration of passion which marks a master's work,
Sophocles focuses the clash of forces, brings into
sharp contrast the bride-bed and the grave, throw-
ing, in an unrivalled lyric, the flush and rosy light
of love across the pallor and dark of death —
" Love, that no man conquer may.
Making goods and gear his prey ;
Love, whose bivouac is laid
In the blush of dreaming maid ! "
C
34 SOPHOCLES AND THE GREEK GENIUS
Then tV)llows the tragic denouement already
described.
Such is the "Antigone." It contains many
memorable beauties, great tirades, lovely lyrics,
grand lines, the immortal speech about the
"unwritten laws M'hich are not of to-day or
yesterday," the apostrophe to the living tomb,
the famous chorus on the ingenuity of man, the
noble phrase, sweet, eminently characteristic of
Sophocles, an admirable example of what the
ancients dwelt upon, his power of indicating a
whole individuality in a word or two,
" But I was born
A sister to men's love and not their hate."
Yet, it is not in these details in themselves, but in
the great simple situations and movement, and the
living force of character w^hich bursts forth at
every shifting touch of circumstance and situation,
that the grandeur of the play consists.
The details of this display and disengagement
of character, the pressure of the environment and
the interaction of the persons, the subtle mani-
pulation of the plot by an original master, the
role of Ismene, an amiable and conventional foil to
her sister, like Chrysothemis to Electra, such
touches as the heightened isolation given to the
maiden Antigone by the chorus being composed
entirely of men — the contrast between the handling
of the story by Sophocles and that by Euripides, in
which the motive of love for Hsemon is allowed to
dominate — these and other points Professor Jebb
brings out with a delicate but convincing thorough-
ness all his own. It is the same with the other
plays, so different and various in their mood, the
NOBILITY OF SOPHOCLES^ DRAMA 35
chivalry of the " Philoctetes," the unearthly majesty
of the transfigured CEdipus, walking literally by
faith and not by sight, vanishing and passing, none
knows how or when — "he was not, for God took
him "■ — with each of these in turn Sir Richard shows
himself equally skilful.
But marvellous as may be a great dramatist's
mastery of detail, the interest of the drama lies
mainly in character. And this is the case with
Sophocles. Passion and nobility, the intensity of
passion, the elevation of generosity, these are his
prevailing notes. These are what have attracted
other poets at all times.
" The world may like, for all I care,
The gentler voice, the cooler head,
That bows a rival to despair.
And cheaply compliments the dead.
Thanked, and self-pleased : ay, let him wear
What to that noble breast was due ;
And I, dear passionate Teucer, dare
Go through the homeless world with you."
(lonica : " After reading AJax.")
"Antigone, the most sisterly of souls"; "Dear
passionate Teucer " : — Sophocles indeed moves the
heart. His characters are men and women, not
realistic, but idealistic, not indeed, as he himself
said, men as they ordinarily are, but as they ought
to be, as sometimes, in moments of exaltation,
they would wish, nay, even do attain to be, yet men
and women still. "There is nothing in Euripides,"
wrote William Cory, the author of the lines just
quoted, "comparable with the Neoptolemus of
Sophocles." Sophocles is rhetorical, of course.
Rhetoric and drama are near akin. The secret
36 SOrilOCLKS AM) THE GKEEK GENIUS
of oratory is "acting"; and one of the most
striking characteristics of Shakespeare is his ahiiost
intokn'able and bhnding eloquence. The Greek
drama was specially prone to rhetoric. " It is in
this," said Goethe, "that the very life of the
dramatic in general consists ; and it is the very
thing in which Sophocles is so great a master."
But Khetoric in Sophocles is kept under control.
" Sophocles never ^aitJ^ philosophy in the midst of
passion : all his speeches advance, instead of
retarding it," said Edward Fitzgerald. Goethe
noticed exceptions, and thought that the famous
and disputed sophistical passage in the "Antigone,"
which he hoped would be proved spurious,^ was
one. And there are not wanting instances in
which, just as Tennyson was apparently, at one
period of his career, influenced by the realism of
Browning, Sophocles has caught the rhetorical
note of Euripides. But the verdict of Fitzgerald
was the verdict of Athens, and is in the main
true.
In yet another aspect in which Sophocles
appeals to universal feeling and moves the heart, he
holds again this middle place, namely, in his religion.
He stands just at the point where superstition and
1 Professor Jebb's treatment of this is an admirable instance
of his fair and exhaustive method. May not the solution be
that which is very probable in the case of the analogous passage
in Sophocles' Roman parallel Virgil — the passage about Helen
in the Second yEneid — that it represents a rough draft of a speech
by Sophocles, which he did not himself insert, but which was
found in his remains, and introduced, perhaps also retouched, by
a later and lesser hand ? The lately discovered lines of Juvenal
are very likely, as Professor Robinson Ellis suggests, yet another
instance of this same phenomenon.
FAITH AND REASON IN SOPHOCLES 37
free-thought meet. His is a rational religion. The
happiest of men and poets, he has yet written some
of the saddest of strains. "Even when life has
been at its best," he sings, *' 'twere something better
not to be." Not that this was necessarily his own
feeling, but he understood the bm-den of this unin-
telligible world — unintelligible, almost unbearable,
without some kind of accepting faith. This it was
that made him dear to Matthew Arnold, whose
airy persiflage concealed so many pious sighs, so
much spiritual yearning. It might well have been
expected that '* Euripides the human" would have
approved himself more to the " liberalism " of the
author of " Literature and Dogma." But this was
not so. The "Note-books" recently published
confirm the evidence of the language and the
allusions and imitations scattered up and down his
works, his prose and his poetry alike, that it was
Sophocles who "propped in these bad times his
soul." Matthew Arnold, indeed, underestimated
Sophocles on the religious side.
"Perhaps," he writes, " in Sophocles the thinking
power a little overbalances the religious sense, just
as in Dante the religious sense overbalances the
thinking power."
This would hardly seem to be the truth. ^ But
whichever way the balance inclines, Matthew
Arnold is in the main right. Sophocles is a
strongly religious poet, and a notable and a
reasonable teacher of the soul.
The greatest Greek art at all epochs in Greek
^ Dr von Wilamowitz-Mollendorf takes quite the opposite
view. See letter already alluded to.
38 SOPHOCLEJ^ AND THE GREEK GENIUS
history was popular. It was national ; it was
human ; it appealed to national predilections, to
the root-instincts of mankind, to their passions, to
their "admiration, hope, and fear." It took common
ground. To be simple, vigorous, even popular, is to
be most truly Greek, not to be academic, ingenious,
precious, bizarre. Alexandrine tliis may be, it is
not Homeric or Attic. And such pre-eminently
is Sophocles, one of those "moderate" spirits,
walking the middle way ;
" A leather of the lawless crown
As of the lawless crowd " ;
a lover in all things of the Greek doctrine of "the
limit," the "neither too much nor too little";
asking in all things,
" Why should a man desire in any way
To vary from the kindly race of men,
Or pass beyond the goal of oi'dinance
Where all should pause, as is most meet for all ? "
in religion, accepting, doubting too, it may be, yet
" cleaving to the sunnier side of doubt," in every-
thing shunning "the falsehood of extremes." Such
characters are by extreme men, in rehgion, in
politics, in art, disliked ; they are condemned as
timid compromisers, dealers in common-place, time-
serving. But the wise at the top in other walks of
life, taking broad views of men and things, the
multitude at the bottom, with its elemental
emotions, its innate piety and good sense, the
" subliminal conscience " of mankind in both,
approves them. Chaucer, Raphael, Moliere,
Mozart, are all Greek in this sense.
For the Greek genius at its best shows, alike
in literary and in plastic creation, one predominant
GREEK IDEAL OF THE "GOLDEN MEAN" 39
characteristic, the happy blending of art and nature.
For it, virtue, truth, beauty, all equally consist in
the juste milieu, the golden mean between extremes.
Proportion, rhythm, geometrical structure, are its
distinguishing marks, sculpturesque self-repression,
architectiu-al balance, chiselled precision.
" Come leave your Gothic worn-out story
San Giorgio and the Redentore,
I from no building gay or solemn
Can spare the shapely Grecian column.
Maturer optics don't delight
In childish, dim, religious light,
In evanescent vague effects
That shirk, not face, one's intellects ;
They love not fancies just betrayed
And artful tricks of light and shade,
But pure form nakedly displayed,
And all things absolutely made."
So, long ago now, in a characteristic little piece which
deserves to be read in its entirety, wrote Clough.
It is true, and yet it is not all the truth, either in
architecture or literature. Greek architecture was
not, any more than Greek sculpture, so bare and cold
as is often supposed. It was, in its living heyday,
like that of our old Gothic cathedrals, rich and
warm with colour. Greek sculpture had "pure
form"; it had "all things absolutely made"; but
it was instinct with natural play and freedom too.
In one of the many illuminating passages in his
book upon " Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine
Art," which we have quoted already — a truly
classic presentation of a classic — Dr Butcher
dwells on this double characteristic of the Greek
writers from the other side. "Few nations," he
says, " have taken more delight in weaving airy and
40 SOPHOCLES AND THE GREEK GENIUS
poetic ficticHi apart from all reality, made out of
nothing and ending nowhere." But if few have
been more full of fancy, few have been less fan-
tastic. Lamb's " Sanity of True Genius," he goes on
to say, is as conspicuous in the Greek drama as in
Shakespeare. M. Maurice Croiset's verdict is just
the same. '' Sophocle, dans la poesie lyrique, comme
ail/curs, est toujonrs Pffelldne par excellence, chez
qui la raison apparatt daiis tout ce que creent
rimagination et le sentiment."
The effect of Sir Richard Jebb's edition is to
give us Sophocles as the type of this genuine Greek
genius, in restoring him to us once more as he
really was, no impossible ideal, but a genuine poet
among poets, a living man among men, the child
yet the master of his age. It is the fashion to
think of Sophocles as impersonal, statuesque, chaste,
cold,
" Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null,
Dead perfection, no more."
He is nothing of the kind. " Beneath the marble
exterior of Greek literature," to use Professor
Jowett's words, "is concealed a soul thrilling with
spiritual emotion." Sophocles has been called
" classical in the vulgar sense." Classical in no vulgar
sense indeed he is ; classical with the classicism
that is romantic too. He is romantic, as I'omantic at
times as Spenser, if not as Shakespeare. Professor
Phillimore, in his masculine and forcible introduc-
tion, brings into prominence his freshness, but
speaks of him as impersonal, and ascribes this to
the fact that his individual character is merged in
that of his age and people. But in truth he some-
what exaggerates the impersonality which he
SOPHOCLES' STATUE IN THE LATERAN 41
explains so ingeniously. Sophocles is in reality a
very personal and living character.
" Euripides is human, but Sophocles is more
human. He is so in the only way in which a Greek
could be so, by being more Greek. . , . True sim-
plicity is not the avoidance, but the control of
detail. In Sophocles, as in great sculpture, a
thousand fine touches go to the delineation of the
great primary emotions. Sophocles is the purest
type of the Greek intellect at its best. Euripides is
a very different thing — a highly gifted son of his
day."
That is the final word. So Sir Richard Jebb wrote
more than a quarter of a century ago. What he
then wrote he demonstrated point by point in this
great edition which he had completed.
And another past-master of English scholarship,
whose study has been hardly less intimate and pro-
found, says, and says well, the same thing, when he
combats the view of those who pass Sophocles by
with a disappointed feeling that what is so smooth
and finished cannot be otherwise than cold. To
study Sophocles, writes Professor Campbell, is like
studying his statue in the Lateran Museum. " The
first glance may show us only a statesman or general
of handsome presence but moderate calibre, but as
we continue gazing on the harmonious figure, a
grave and sympathetic humanity is seen to breathe
from every line."
High, then, as Sophocles stood before, this
edition Hfts him higher still, not so much as against
^schylus or Euripides — for in raising Sophocles
Professor Jebb raises the whole Greek drama with
him — but absolutely, as one of the most consum-
mate artists of all time, as a joy and a standard of
42 SOPHOCLES AND THE GREEK GENIUS
joy for ever. What, after all, does Greek tragedy
teach us ? That to attain the highest success in
poetry a man nuist be himself, and his best self;
for, as a Greek critic says, he who would be a good
poet must first be a good man ; he must have
simplicity and naturalness, faith, optimism, idealism.
Chez les Grrecs riddal passait dans la vie, parce
qu'ils savdlent tout simpJiJier, mcme le honheur.
And idealism has at least this advantage, that it
gets more out of human nature, and rouses it to
greater effort, than realism. Modern taste is some-
times drawn to Euripides because it finds in him its
own pleasant vices, and finds them in a glorious
form. But the real Greek type is Sophocles. And
it is in his drama that the real secret and the real
success of Greek tragedy are to be found. It is
this that has made him the touchstone of the
critics, of Aristophanes and Aristotle, of Lessing
and Goethe, of Fitzgerald and Arnold and Mackail.
If, then, the world were ever to give up Greek
as a part of the general culture of its most culti-
vated minds, the greatest treasure it would lose
is Sophocles, and for this reason. He is the least
translatable, the least imitable, the most Greek of
the Greeks. The romance of Homer, the histories
of Herodotus and Thucydides, the great thoughts
of Plato and Aristotle, would survive and affect
mankind, as indeed they have ere now done, even
at second-hand. Some equivalent to the effect of
^schylus might be found in the book of Job or
the Hebrew prophets ; something of the fun of
Aristophanes, of the sweetness of Theocritus,
might still be reproduced and preserved. The
realism, the neurotic sentimentalism, the emphasis,
VALUE TO THE MODERN WORLD 43
the rhetoric, which mingle with the dazzling
allurement of Eiu'ipides — these are elements less
necessary to the modern world, which possesses
enough of them already. But the sage sanity,
the sculpturesque serenity of Sophocles, the just
blending of philosophy and passion, thought and
expression, wedded like soul and body in a form
of breathing, sentient, mobile beauty — this only
Sophocles can give, and only Sophocles in his own
incomparable tongue.
II
MATTHEW ARNOLD
" Ah ! two desires toss about
The poet's restless blood ;
One drives him to the world without.
And one to solitude."
For a celebrity to say nowadays that he will not
permit his life to be written after his death is about
as wise, and about as effective, as for him to say
that he will not permit his portrait to be taken during
his life. If the celebrity will not be taken sitting,
he will be "stalked" or "snap-shotted." Some
portrait of him for general use will be secured. It
is the same with his biography. If he does not
write his own story, or allow it to be written from
authentic materials by friends, some " Life " will be
written, tant Men que mal, from such materials as
can be reached by fair means or by other means.
Tennyson, "a shy beast," as he called himself,
who disliked the idea as strongly as any one could,
recognised the necessity and bowed to it, happily
for himself and the world.
That Matthew Arnold should have objected to
the process seems a little strange, for he was not
at all shy, but, on the contrary, liked recognition,
and was even, innocently enough, rather vain.
However, he did so object, and tried to prevent
MANY "SKETCHP:S," BUT NO "LIFE" 45
it. His dislike was part of his paradoxical attitude.
But written, of course, his life has been, and
will be again. Besides the admirable articles in
the "Dictionary of National Biography," by Dr
Garnett, and in the "Encyclopaedia Britannica,"
by Mr Watts-Dunton, three biographical sketches
have been produced, by Professor Saintsbury, by
Mr Herbert Paul, and, more recently, by Mr G. W.
E. Eussell. All three are, as they were sure to
be, done with much skill. Professor Saintsbury is
himself an excellent scholar both in ancient and
modern tongues, and has an unique acquaintance
with the history of criticism. Mr Paul is a man
alike of letters and affairs, a politician, a journalist,
and an historian, a master of wit and epigram,
and full of keen appreciation for the Greek and
Roman winters. Mr George Russell was an Under-
Secretary of State, and is a practised writer, besides
being a staunch churchman and a lay-preacher.
Politically, Professor Saintsbury is a Conservative,
Mr Paul and Mr Russell are Liberals. All three
are Oxford men. Between the three, with all these
qualifications, it might be thought that ample
justice would have been done to their common
subject. But it is not so. Neither individually or
combined, do they give an adequate presentment.
Professor Saintsbury treats Arnold too much as a
man of letters who strayed into the pulpit ; Mr
Paul too much as a poet who was betrayed on to
the platform. Mr George Russell comes nearest
to what is wanted ; and his book, so far as it goes,
merits warm praise and gratitude. He has the
best conception of the variety, range, and relation
of Matthew Ai*nold's interests, and the fullest
46 MATl^HEW ARNOLD
sympathy with thorn. But something more is still
required. We still want the man as a whole. He
does not sUind out as what he was, well-defined
and complete. And the reason is not far to
seek ; it is want of material. No one of these
biographers has been at the pains to collect
materials for a real "Life."
Yet in truth this ought to be done, and done
soon, before it is too late. There are not a few still
living who knew Matthew Arnold well, though
every year some one disappears who could tell us
much at first - hand about him. There must be
in existence many letters besides those included
in Mr George Russell's well-known collection.
Indeed, in his latest book, Mr Russell quotes at
least one such letter of great value. Even the
existing materials have hardly been properly used.
The "Lives" of Arnold's contemporaries contain
many letters and many notices which are interesting
and elucidative. What is to be desired is that the
bulk of these letters should now be collected and
given to the world ; and that, while the tradition
of the living man is still itself alive, a biography
should be w^ritten, with due reticence and reserve,
but sufficiently full and definitive.
" What is there to write ? " it may be said.
"Surely Matthew Arnold's life was, even more
than that of most poets, uneventful." But the
evolution of a poet's genius is always instructive ;
and in Matthew Arnold's case the peculiar conflict
of attractions and repulsions, and the somewhat
erratic orbit which he ultimately traced, are in-
tensely interesting. Why did he produce so little ?
yet why did he produce so much ? for his total out-
DR ARNOLD 47
put, though small, is a good deal larger than is often
thought. Why did he publish, and why, having
published, did he immediately withdraw, his first
volume of poems? Why, stranger still, did he,
three years later, repeat this odd process with
" Empedocles on Etna " ? What was the mean-
ing of his sudden excursion into Italian politics in
1859, seven or eight years after he had apparently
given up all idea of a wider public, and settled
down to school-inspecting ? Some hints in answer
to these questions, and to others of the kind, Mr
Russell gives ; but much remains a mystery.
The main outhnes of Matthew Arnold's life are
pretty well known. He was the eldest son of the
famous Dr Arnold, a man whose genius and variety,
like those of his son, transcended the bounds of his
profession and expressed itself alike in history, in
politics, and in religion. To be the child of such a
man meant much to Matthew Arnold. It meant
that he was brought up in the love of letters,
especially of the Greek and Latin masterpieces, in
the love of history, in the love of nature, though not
of Natural Science ; in the love, therefore, of travel
and of scenery alike for its natural beauty and its
historic associations. It meant again that he was
nursed in the keen air of a strong if limited
LiberaKsm, not seldom refreshed by the breezes
and, at times, the storms, of poHtical and religious
controversy. At the same time, Dr Arnold, though
theoretically a Latitudinarian, retained in practice
not a little of the old-fashioned churchman, and,
like the Lutherans, clung to a certain order and
ceremony. Matthew, "papa's continuator," as he
quaintly called himself, did the same. Further, he
48 MA'ITHEW ARNOLD
was nut. only the son of his father, but the godson
of his father's friend, the author of " The Christian
Year." As a boy at Winchester, he used to visit
INIr Keblc at Hurstley. As an undergraduate at
Oxford, he was at home, not only with the then
Broad Church party, but also with the Tractarians,
and found in Newman not merely " the voice which
from St Mary's thrilled the hour," but his god-
ftither's near friend and ally. Thus he was emphati-
cally a disciple, even if at times he appeared a
truant disciple, of the English Church.
To be the son of Dr Arnold meant, again, that
he was the child, not only of Rugby, but also of
"Fox How," reared amid the scenery and the spirit
of the Lakes and the Lake poets. Of Southey,
indeed, he could only say ^'Vidi tantum'" ; but
Southey's greater compeer, Wordsworth, was a
familiar figm'e from his childhood. "It is not for
nothing," as he wrote himself, "that one has been
brought up in the veneration of a man so truly
worthy of homage ; that one has seen and heard
him, lived in his neighbom^hood, and been familiar
with his country." The Lake poets, again, were
eminently critical poets ; and to the formative influ-
ences of Arnold's youth must be added the philo-
sophic tradition of Coleridge, the literature of
De Quincey, and the boisterous badinage of
"Christopher North." Poetry, then, and criti-
cism, education, and religion, separately and in
combination, with their influences keen and high,
were around him from the first.
Dr Arnold was a generous and wide-minded
spirit. He had no bigoted belief in his own
methods. He was a good Wykehamist, and loved
BOYHOOD AT WINCHESTER 49
liis old school. He thought "a period at Win-
chester would do his boys no harm " ; and he
sent "Mat" and "Tom" to be under Dr Moberly.
Tom, in that naif smd sincere narrative, "Passages
in a Wandering Life," gives us some glimpses of
both the successes and the faua; pas of his brother's
boyhood. " Mat," he says — and we can well believe
it — " always talked freely," and once, when at break-
fast with the headmaster, spoke, in the presence of
another bigger and stronger boy, of his form-work
as being too easy. The result was that Dr
Moberly naturally increased the tale of bricks, and
the other boy and his friends, equally naturally,
" took it out " of " Mat " after school. On the other
hand, he distinguished himself by gaining the school
prize — it was in the year of Queen Victoria's acces-
sion — for a recitation, choosing Byron, his favourite
poet, the favourite of most youthful poets of that
time. From Winchester he went back to Kugby ;
and from Rugby, the most strenuous and stimu-
lating school of that day, he passed to the most
strenuous and stimulating of Oxford colleges,
having won "the Balliol," as the open classical
scholarships of Balliol College were already
called.
The set at Trinity, Cambridge, in which Tenny-
son moved, the coterie of "In Memoriam," is ever
memorable ; but even with that the Balliol coterie,
in which Arnold found a place, need not fear com-
parison. The list of scholars who were his con-
temporaries is nothing short of extraordinary.
Edward Meyrick Goulburn, Stafford Northcote,
Arthur Hugh Clough, Frederick Temple, John
Duke Coleridge, James Kiddell, Edwin Palmer,
50 MATTHEW ARNOLD
Theodore Walrond, Francis Palgrave, William
Sellar, Henry Smith, Alexander Grant — could a
dozen names be found more honourable to any
seminary whose function was, in the language of
the "bidding-prayer," to supply "persons qualified
to serve God in Church and State " ?
No wonder that Principal Shairp was inspired
to catch and fix the portraiture of this academic
company in his charming " Remembrances." Some
of its members worked hard for the schools,
most of them, indeed, very hard, and took the
highest honours. The two Rugby poets, Clough
and Arnold — not, perhaps, for quite the same
reasons — both found their way into the second
class, affording thereby consolation to many a subse-
quent similarly unlucky competitor. For both
later, an Oriel fellowship redressed the balance
of the University examinations. Arnold was
undoubtedly a good undergraduate scholar. He
was ""proxime accessii " for the Hertford scholarship,
being only vanquished by a rival to whom any one
might well have run second, Goldwin Smith. He
won the " Newdigate " too, with a strong but
rather dull poem on a subject perhaps not very
congenial, Oliver Cromwell. Probably he did not
read hard, or not, at any rate, upon the lines
recognised in the schools. Shairp's vignette
portrait is well known.
" So full of power, yet blithe and debonair,
Rallying his friends with pleasant banter gay.
Or, half adream, chaunting with jaunty air
Great words of Goethe, catch of Beranger :
We see the banter sparkle in his prose.
But knew not then the undertone that flows,
So calmly sad, thro' all his stately lay."
TASTES, LITERARY AND SPORTING 51
His brother Tom gives almost the same
account. Their father died, it will be remembered,
in the early summer of 1842, just at the end of
Matthew's freshman's year. Tom went up to
Oxford that autumn, and for the next three years
the brothers were together.
"During these years" (writes Tom) "my
brother was cultivating his poetic gift carefully,
but his exuberant versatile nature claimed other
satisfactions. His keen bantering talk made him
something of a social lion among Oxford men ; he
even began to dress fashionably. Goethe displaced
Byron in his political allegiance ; the transcen-
dental spells of Emerson wove themselves around
him ; the charm of an exquisite style made him,
and long kept him, a votary of George Sand."
A contemporary at Oxford, afterwards a
country clergyman, and fond, in a not unbecoming
clerical way, of sport, would often recall with
pleasure how he and Mat Arnold used to go
rook-shooting together as undergraduates. The
poet, indeed, always liked shooting, though a poor
shot. " Need I say that I am passionately fond of
the Colchian bird," he writes in one of his letters.
His own account of his Oxford time bears out this
and similar reminiscences. "I and my friends,"
he used to say, "lived in Oxford as in a great
country-house." It was not altogether a bad way ;
it was a way, moreover, more natural and possible
in the little old unreformed Oxford of those times
than in the residential, many-villa'd city of to-day.
It is not difficult to imagine what Arnold's life
at this period was. The sons of the aristocracy, of
the country gentry and the clergy, with a sprinkling
52 MAITHEW ARNOLD
of the sons of tlie well-to-do professional men,
bankers and men of business, who were within the
Anglican pale, "Lord Lmnpington" and "the
Rev. Esau Hittall," as Arnold afterwards called
them, and their set, but without "Mr Bottles,"
who was still confined by the " Tests " to " Lycurgus
House," and "Dr Silverpump" — these made the
society of the Oxford of that era. And the place !
The pleasant country still ran up to the walls and
gates of the colleges. No fringe of mean or
commonplace suburbs interposed between the
coronal of spires and towers and its green setting.
It was the Oxford of William Turner's paintings
and Ingram's Memorials ; the Oxford still un-
spoiled, which Mr Mackail so charmingly describes
in his "Life of William Morris," where children
gathered violets within bow-shot of Magdalen
Towner. There were "our young barbarians all at
play " ; and Arnold played a good deal with them.
" Bullingdon and hunting " were well known to him.
" See, 'tis no foot of unfamiliar men
To-night from Oxford up )'^our pathway strays :
Here came I often, often, in old days,
Thyrsis and I : we still had Thyrsis then."
The " Hurst in spring," the " lone alehouse in
the Berkshire moors," the "causeway chill," the
"line of festal light in Christ Church Hall," seen
from the Cumner slope, the " wide fields of breezy
grass " above Godstow, " where many a scythe in
sunshine flames " :
" What white, what purple fritillaries
The grassy harvest of the river-fields
Above by Ensham, down by Sandford, yields,
And what sedged brooks are Thames's tributaries " :
"CLASSIC GROUND"— BALLIOL TO ORIEL 53
the "wood which hides the daffodil," "the frail-
leaf d white anemone," the "red loosestrife and
blond meadow-sweet," the "Fyfield elm" and the
" distant Wychwood bowers " — these last not
known as a rule, even to poetical under-
graduates — Arnold knew them all; and it was
now that he learned to know them, roaming
on foot with "Thyrsis" or some other congenial
studious friend, but also at times "rejoicing in life
and the sunshine," as Thyrsis himself sings, and
joining the jovial and merry bands of Oxford
riders and oarsmen.
In later days his visits to these haunts grew,
perforce, more rare, though his letters tell us that
he always loved them, especially what he has called
so delightfully "the green-mufifled Cumner Hills."
It was now that he became Oxford's poet pai"-
excellence. For Oxford, most poetical of univer-
sities and cities, has produced, strangely enough,
few poets. She had few, indeed, worthy of the
name until the last century. In the earlier half of
the last century she "turned out," as Mr Swin-
burne says, " in more senses than one " — two at
least, of real note. In the last half of that
century, and at the present time, it is true, she
was and is comparatively rich. But if she had to
wait long, she was at length rewarded when she
found in Arnold a poet who made her territory
literally "classic ground," teaching her sons to love
her, and giving a language to their love.
Arnold, however, did not linger in Oxford,
though, had he chosen to do so, the opportunity
offered. From Balliol and its distinguished under-
graduate company he passed to the distinguished
54 MATTHEW ARNOLD
graduate company of Oriel, the other college at
that time most alert and alive, becoming a member
of the same common-room with Newman, Church,
Clough, and Poste. Now, indeed, the fortunate
youth seemed to have the ball at his feet. He had
not determined on a career, but what he incHned
to was public life. For a few months he taught
a low Form at Kugby ; but this was a transient
episode. "Attach yourself to some great man,
sir ! Many have risen to eminence in that way,"
said old President Routh, speaking with the voice
of the eighteenth century, a year or two later, to
Conington when he was leaving Magdalen. It
was still a recognised precept, and Arnold follow^ed
it. He became private secretary to Lord
Lansdowne, then President of the Council, and
was launched into the great world. He had the
run of Lansdowne House ; he was asked down to
Bowood, the rallying-ground of Whig wisdom, wit,
fashion, and society. The path of intellectual and
discriminating and very enjoyable and prosperous
Whiggery, smooth, but not too smooth for mental
health, lay before him. He had only to go forward on
it with fair diligence and caution to be sure of success.
What, then, were the first steps of the young
and brilliant debutant? They were characteristic
enough. He set out with head erect and jaunty
confident pace. "The mountain tops," as he has
sung, shone " bright and bare," and " short the
way appeared to the less practised eye of sanguine
youth." Soon, however, he wearied of the beaten
track. Furtively he stepped aside into the flowery
meadows and sequestered by-paths, then hastily
darted back into the high road. In other words,
PUBLISHES FIRST VOLUME OF POEMS 55
he put out his first volume of poems ; but they
were published anonymously, and he called them
in almost as soon as they appeared. In many a
young man such a course would have been natural
enough. Had Arnold not been a true and high
poet, had the poems been less good, there would
have been little remarkable about the matter.
But, in truth, both the volume and the action
were prophetic of his whole singular career.
Taken alone, this first suppressed collection of
poems is, indeed, extraordinarily interesting. It
shows what Arnold was before he made the
plunge, which he shrank so much from making,
into practical life. The germ of much of his
subsequent work and writing is here. His loves
and his dislikes — hatreds in one so amiable and
urbane they should hardly be called — his attrac-
tions and repulsions — Sophocles, Shakespeare,
the blatant Nonconformist minister, the Republican
friend, youth's bitter-sweet melancholy, his "sad
lucidity of soul," his feeling of the irony of fate,
above all, his hesitancy, his sense of the "some-
thing that infects the world " — all appear in it and
appear impressively. For this slender first volume,
so short-lived, so little noticed, contains some of
his very best work, some of those pieces by which
he will always be remembered^ — " Mycerinus " and
the "Forsaken Merman," the sonnet on "Quiet
Work," the "Sophocles" and "Shakespeare"
sonnets, the " Sick King in Bokhara," In
utrumque paratus, the " Strayed Reveller," and
the " New Sirens."
Yet it shows only half his character ; the other
half was perhaps to be seen in its suppression.
56 MArniKW ARNOLD
lie wiis iiuloiHl ii sinj^ular inixture, a paradox, or
ratlier a bundle of paradoxes, ever hesitating,
vacillatintj:, oscillating, between the worldly and the
unworldly. Handsome, athletic, elegant, fashion-
able, loving (as he said himself) the ways and
sports of the "barbarians," full of a superficial
levity and even flippancy, calculated to shine in
society, to adorn and enjoy it — this was what he
appeared on the surface. " A very briUiant person
was Arnold in those days," wrote, somewhat later,
Mr Ellis Yarnall, that pious and kindly pilgrim
from Pennsylvania — one of the very few recently
survivincr who could recollect Wordsworth and
Keble ^ — " but of sweet and winning manner ; as an
especial mark of eminence he was singularly urbane
and gracious. Exquisite was he in dress ; and his
black hair and fine eyes, his easy bearing and
pleasant talk, made him altogether fascinating."
But, as Mr Russell well remarks, he was, like his
own description of poetry,
" Radiant, adorn'd outside : a hidden ground
Of thought and of austerity within."
Underneath were the "sad lucidity of soul," tender
passion, dissatisfaction with the pleasures of this
world, a mastering sense of duty at war with his
lighter nature.
Much of this contradiction was indeed physical.
"The lofty Mat" he had been called at school;
and what he was as an undergraduate. Principal
Shairp has recorded. His erect carriage, his
manners like those of Milton's "affable archangel,"
^ Mr Ellis Yarnall, who was still living when this essay was
first published, died in 1905 at the age of 86.
HIS AIRS AND GRACES 57
his Count d'Orsay poses, his waving handkerchief
and airy gesticulation, were natural to him, as
natural as were
" The comely face, the cluster'd brow.
The cordial hand, the bearing free,"
which he has described so tenderly in those ex-
quisite lines on his brother, most happily transferred
by Mr Arthur Galton to himself. Equally natural
were his sallies of wit and raillery. He was aware
of it himself. "You'll like her," he said of his
wife ; "she has all my graces and none of my airs."
These last, indeed, were proverbial among his
friends. " Please say whether you liked Matthew
Arnold and his airs," writes Lord Acton to Mary
Gladstone. Arnold " laughed till he cried " when
he read Frederic Harrison's description of himself,
"me, in the midst of the general tribulation, hand-
ing out my pomicet-box." "Dick will do," he
said, when he was about to take his son up to
matriculate at Balliol, "Dick will do. He has
that invincible insouciance which has always
carried me through the world." "Invincible
insouciance;'' indeed he had need of it. Many a
man has need of more than a little to carry him
through the daunting stress of life. Arnold
certainly found, as will be seen, his double portion
very convenient and helpful. Yet, strange to say,
it hardly appears in any line of his poetry.
His own ideal was to miite the grave and the
gay. This combination was what he admired alike
in his ancient and his modern exemplars, Sophocles
and Goethe, spirits whom "business could not
make dull nor passion wild," minds that " saw life
68 MAITHEW ARNOLD
steadily aiul saw it wliole." Again and again the
ideal appears in his verse, but he could not compass
it himself.
" Years hence, pcrliaps, may dawn an age
More fortunate, alas ! than we,
Which without hardness will be sage.
And ^ay without frivolity."
In his own poetry the gay found no outlet.
Perhaps poetry was too sublime and serious an art.
Certainly life itself, when he was in the poetic
humour and looked beneath the smface, was too
serious a matter. The world in these moods was
a vain and passing show ; pleasure and knowledge
were alike hollow ; the white-robed slave whispers
at the Great King's elbow amid the flowers and
over the cups ; the philosopher scales the heights
of science only to sink palsied on the summit.
" Ah, what a spasm shakes the dreamer's heart
I too but seem."
In real life also he felt this serious side. It was
ever returning upon him. He had, as his letters
and note-books abundantly proclaim, a deep inner
existence, fed by communings with his self-chosen
directors, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, the
Bible, the "Imitatio," and Bishop Wilson.
"From his earliest years" (wrote Lord Coleridge
to Mr Ellis Yarnall just after his death) "sorrow
or trouble always calmed or sobered him ; his
persiflage disappeared, and you saw and, what is
more, you felt, the warm generous heart, the just
judgment, the tender sympathy which was as
natural to him as to breathe.''
But in real life he had this double nature, one -half
of which alone appears in his poems. The gay and
PROPHET OR FRIBBLE? 59
lively were always bubbling up through the grave
and severe. He could not resist the chronic
tendency to banter. The world, in consequence,
did not know, to use a vulgar phrase, "where to
have him," whether to treat him as a mocker or
as a mystic, a Socrates or a Scarron. He seemed
an impossible and provoking combination of
opposites, a living contradiction in terms, a
Christian Voltairian, a voice poking fun in the
wilderness, an "elegant" from the cloister, a
"Jeremiah," as some one said, "in white kid
gloves." By a natural reaction, when he was
most in the world the desire to escape and cultivate
his miworldly side was strongest. It was when
he was cut off from the world that his thirst for
it returned.
A born critic of others, he was a born critic
also of himself Few yomig men at the opening
of life have judged themselves better. There is a
striking passage in a letter written to his sister in
1851, just before he "ranged himself," which, as
a human document for the poetic temperament
at this critical period of transition, may be com-
pared with Keat's preface to "Endymion."
" The aimless and unsettled, but also open and
liberal state of our youth, we must perhaps all
leave, and take refuge in our morality and character ;
but, with most of us, it is a melancholy passage,
from which we emerge shorn of so many beams
that we are almost tempted to quarrel with the
law of nature which imposes it on us. I feel this
in my own case, and in no respect more strongly
than in my relations to all of you. I am by nature
so very different from you, the worldly element
enters so much more largely into my composition,
60 MA'rrHEW ARNOLD
that, us I become /ornied, there seems to grow a
gulf between us which tends to widen till we can
hardly hold any intercourse across it. But, as
Thomas a Kempis reconnnended, frequenter tibi
ipsi violentiam fac ... so I intend not to give
myself the rein in following my natural tendency,
but to make war against it till it ceases to isolate
me from you, and leaves me with the power to
discern and adopt the good which you have, and I
have not."
So he writes to his sister. But an influence
more potent than a sister's was at hand. It has
not been revealed, and perhaps it would not be
right to ask, whether there is any special reference
in the well-known pieces, published, as he himself
M'ould say, "by divers portions and in divers
manners," but the first of which is found in the
first volume and obviously goes back very early.
Who were the fair figures appearing and vanishing
in so charming, so perplexing a manner in the
" Memory Picture " (called also " To my Friends "),
and the "Modern Sappho," the "Dream," and the
two series entitled "Switzerland" and "Faded
Leaves?" Marguerite and Olivia ; Marguerite before
all, had she any individual existence ? Where and
when did he meet her ? " Mitte queer ere ; "
" The mists are on the mountain hung,
And Marguerite I shall see no more."
Dreams, indeed, in a sense, in any case, they are ;
dreams in which passion and coquetry mingle ;
dreams and day - dreams of a chivalrous young
heart and a gay insouciant spirit, blended with
the romance and illusion of first travel and care-
less roving hours by the Bhine and in the Alps.
CHOOSES WIFE AND PROFESSION 61
Enough that, as may be said of many young im-
pressionable natures, before they find the hour
"When round one fairest face shall meet
Those many dreams of many fair,
And wandering homage seek the feet
Of one sweet queen, and linger there,"
Nondum amahat : amare amabat. It is customary
to speak of Arnold's poetry as wanting in passion.
But passion enough is in these pieces ; and in con-
sequence they contain some of the best and strongest,
as well as the lightest and happiest, of his lines.
Two years after the publication of his first
poems he found, like so many young men, if not
the solution, at least the determination, of his
doubts. He married for love, and he became a
School-Inspector. Being what he was, it is in-
finitely characteristic, and much to his credit, that
he should have taken these steps. It was an
unworldly match and an unworldly choice of a
profession. He seems to have dreamed at first of
keeping leisure for his own poetic life, possibly
even of retiring to Italy on 200/. a year, but he
soon found that this was an empty vision.
The career of a school-inspector was perhaps
not necessarily so laborious as might appear.
Some years later another distinguished poet, critic,
and thinker, F. W. H. Myers, deliberately chose it
as giving the maximum of free time for private
research and writing. Myers undoubtedly justified
his choice by his contributions to literature and to
psychical inquiry. Possibly things were more
difficult in the earlier days. As Arnold lived it,
it was a hard life, and he was assuredly Pegasus in
harness. Was it a mistake, was it all a mistake,
62 MATTHEW ARNOLD
was it more tlian a mistake, the ruin of great
possibilities ?
Good poetry is so lovely, so delightful, above
all, so rare, a thing, that we are always tempted to
wish that the poet mi<j;ht have given us more. In
IMatthew Arnold's case this is certainly true. In
reading his "Life" it is impossible to avoid a
certain sense of a vie manquee. At times he himself
seemed to feel this too. When he compared
himself with his old friends and contemporaries,
risen to be judges, cabinet ministers, ambassadors,
and archbishops, it was difficult for him not to do
so. To any worldly ambitions that he might have
cherished he had certainly given the death-blow.
*' He is a Balliol man who has succeeded in life,"
he said of Archbishop Tait. " I am a Balliol man
who has failed." And again, " We are only humble
men of letters ; we admire the superb proportions
of Sir Robert Morier ; we cannot emulate them.
But we subsist and perform our humble functions."
Was he serious in this badinage? Half serious.
It was, perhaps, one reason why he did not wish
his life to be written. Did he feel the consolation
of having made a noble sacrifice for the sake of a
profession, or to secure freedom for his own inner
life ? The first he might well have had, but he did
not love his profession ; the last, it will be seen, he
only half secured.
"Though I am a schoolmaster's son I confess
that school-teaching or school-inspecting is not the
line of life I should naturally have chosen ; I adopted
it in order to marry. . . . My wife and I had a
wandering life of it at first. . . . We had no home ;
one of our children was born in a lodging at Derby,
PEGASUS IN HARNESS 63
with a workhouse, if I recollect aright, behind and
a penitentiary in front. But the irksomeness of
my new duties was what I felt most ; and during
the first year or so it was sometimes insupportable."
So he spoke of the life when leaving and look-
ing back on it. " Well-nigh a positive purgatory,"
he called it at the time. " I've had a hard day,"
he writes on one occasion. " Thirty pupil-teachers
to examine in an inconvenient room, and nothing
to eat except a biscuit which a charitable lady gave
me." Things, perhaps, need not have been quite
so trying. Arnold probably managed badly ; but
at times it was what is called a "dog's life," Even
had he been a better economist of time and
strength, it would have been difficult to combine it
with writing the highest poetry, for, Carmina
secessum scrihentis et otia queer unt, "the Muses
haunt the brooding mind."
But it certainly was a fortunate hour for
English education when, in order to marry Miss
Fanny Lucy Wightman, Matthew Arnold accepted
the post of school-inspector. What a wealth of
resources he brought to it has been seen — the
tradition of his father, moral and intellectual
standards of the highest, wide culture, poetic
imagination, ready sympathy, eloquence, charm,
genius. In the strict technical sense he was
probably not a good inspector. He was tempted
to delegate his work. The details were not
congenial. As years went on he became im-
patient, as he wrote to his mother, of getting old
amid a press of occupations and labours for which,
as he says, borrowing the phrase of his own Goethe,
<' after all I was not born." But his high gifts were
64 MArrHEW ARNOLD
not all lost in what might appear his humble calling.
Read " A French Eton " ; note his powers of
description, the masterly placing on the canvas of the
Lycee of Toulouse and the College at Sorcze, the
lovely and sympathetic picture of Lacordaire, the
digression about the old cite of Carcassonne. In
such passages the son of Dr Arnold and of Oxford,
the hearer of Keble and Newman, the poet and
literary artist, all appear. He brought, again, to
the service of English education an idea of what
education was and what it might be, some notion
of its history, some conspectus of the history of
other countries and other times, above all, his own
fresh critical spirit, his habit of taking wide views
and questioning everything, his mixture of patriot-
ism and discontent, his interest in foreign countries,
his love of England even as she was, and his desire
to see her yet better.
His detached and independent position gave
him much advantage. He retained his instinct for,
and interest in, affairs. His work lay, it should be
remembered, in the region of elementary, not of
the higher or secondary education, and within this
region in a peculiarly selected and restricted area,
that of the Nonconformist schools. He started
with a prejudice against the Nonconformists. Like
his father, he wished to "compel them to come in,"
and resented their unwillingness to be compelled.
Among his poems almost the only acrimonious one
is the early sonnet on the ''Independent Preacher."
Their positive principles he only half understood.
He regarded them as schismatics for schism's sake.
As he went on he came to know them better, and
found many friends among them, and undoubtedly
BECOMES PROFESSOR OF POETRY 65
learned much from them. But their ways were
not naturally congenial to him. A lover of beauty,
his temperament a curious blending of the sensuous
and the gay with the austere, he could respect
them, but he could not love them, and, as Goldwin
Smith, in his trenchant criticism of "Falkland,"
pointed out, he ever did less than justice to the
Puritans. By natm'e he was drawn to the
colour and the comfort, the historic dignity and
glamour, of the Roman Catholic system, with its
warmth and variety, its pleasant recognition of the
" cakes and ale " of this world, containing, in his
own phrase, "all the world of Shakespeare." The
want of beauty in the Congregationalist, Metho-
dist, and Baptist conventicles and beliefs got upon
his nerves ; and he used one-sided language about
their "hideousness and immense ennui"
He retained, however, his wonderful spirits.
He was bright and brave. "We are not here
to have facilities made for us for doing the work
we hke," he wrote, "but to make them for our-
selves." Still he desired more scope, more "action,"
as he called it. It was when he was in this mood
that Oxford, ever his best friend, came to his
rescue and gave him just what he wanted — an
outlet from his poorly paid drudgery, emolument,
honour, opportunity, authority, above all a pulpit
from which to address the world. It is difficult
to estimate how much he owed to the Professor-
ship of Poetry, to which he was elected in 1857.
He was an ideal man for the post. His lectures
were brilliantly successful both on their delivery
and in their subsequent publication. It is enough
to say that the " Lectures on translating Homer "
E
66 MATTHEW ARNOLD
aiul " Essays in Criticism " were the first-fruits of
liis professorship. It is strange to read that even
these lectures "were not quite the work he liked."
What oil earth would he have liked ? He thought
he would have liked to give himself more to poetry,
to creation rather than to criticism. But he knew
how hard it was to do so, living the life he had to
live. He could not do it without being exhausted,
nay, "torn to pieces," viel zerrissen, as he said,
borrowing the phrase of his great master, Goethe.
Some effort, fortunately, he did make. To this
period w^e owe " Merope " and the volume entitled
"New Poems," published in 1867. "Merope"
was the outcome of his professorship, and has been
happily called his "diploma piece." It is perhaps
best described, if a little cruelly, as just such a
poem as might have been expected from any
professor of poetry — except Matthew Arnold. In
it he appears as an inverted Wordsworth. The
preface is one of the best things he ever penned.
His theory is admirable, his practice a cold failure.
He was disappointed and inclined to grumble to
Conington at the success of Swinbm^ne's " Atalanta,"
though not really classical. But it is not only the
glitter and damour of "Atalanta" that make
poor "Merope" show faint and pale. The poem
is equally a failure if compared with the austere
force and solemn music of " Samson Agonistes," or
the dainty art and frolic charm of "Achilles in
Scyros."
The "New Poems" succeeded much better.
From the first they sold well, and went into a
second edition almost directly. His name as a poet
was now firmly established. He had the popular
THE "NEW POEMS" 67
encouragement he required. Yet, after the publica-
tion of this volume, Arnold wrote hardly any more
verse. Why did he not go on ? The *' New-
Poems " themselves contain, perhaps, part of the
answer. After 1869 it is noticeable that all his
poems were occasional, and all but two prompted
by the death of friends, either human or brute,
these last ever among his dearest — Dean Stanley,
"Geist," "Kaiser," and "Poor Matthias"; the two
best, a " Summer Night " and " Thyrsis," were
drawn from him by the death of his brother
William, and of that brother of his soul, Arthur
Hugh Clough. He projected other poems, and it
is interesting to note what he projected, namely, a
handling of the Middle Ages, especially, perhaps, of
the Nibelungen story, poems on "St Alexius," on
the "Voyage of Achilles to the Island of Leuce,"
and a tragedy on Lucretius. He thought Tennyson
had not done justice to the Middle Ages, and that
he could do much better. He was distressed to
find that Tennyson also was engaged on Lucretius,
with which he himself had been occupied for
twenty years. He thought, however, he would
persevere with it. Those who remember the happy
allusions in " Wordsworth's Grave " and " Ober-
mann " will much regret that he did not. Why did
he not ? The answer is only partly given in the
pathetic if awkwardly phrased stanzas entitled
"The Progress of Poesy."
" The man mature with labour chops
For the bright stream a channel grand.
And sees not that the sacred drops
Ran off and vanish'd out of hand."
Arnold was not, he never became, "the old
68 MATTHEW ARNOLD
man tottering nigh," and "feebly raking among the
stones " ; but it would appear that the cause of his
ceasing to poui' forth was not so much that the sacred
drops vanished, as that he never chopped the channel
grand. Tlie real reason was that if he had little
time in all, he did not give that little to poetry. A
striking passage in a letter to Sir M, E. Grant-Duff,
a very sympathetic recipient, to whom, conse-
quently, some of his best letters were written, gives
the truest clue to his real attitude.
" One is from time to time seized and irresistibly
carried along by a temptation to handle political or
religious or social matters directly ; but, after
yielding to such a temptation, I always feel myself
recoiling again and disposed to touch them only so
far as they can be touched through poetry."
More and more, almost insensibly, he yielded to
the temptation, and the recoil became less and less.
The fact is, as Mr W. H. Dawson has discriminat-
ingly brought out, his prevailing desire was to deal
with these political, religious, and social matters.
He thought he could do this through poetry.
But through what kind of poetry ? He had a
strong instinct for true poetry. When he was
young this predominated. In so far as his mission
was to preach beauty, poetry was a suitable
medium. And in a sense beauty, no doubt, is truth,
and truth is beauty. But they are not the same,
nor to be handled in the same way. Unless the
form of satiric or didactic or gnomic poetry be
adopted, these topics cannot be touched except
indirectly. Matthew Arnold did not adopt any of
these forms. He therefore touched them only
indirectly. So touching them, he fancied that he
ARNOLD AND TENNYSON 69
had achieved already some considerable measure of
success. "My poems represent," he wrote in 1869,
" on the whole, the main movement of mind of the
last quarter of a century."
He thought Tennyson "deficient in intellectual
power." He thought that he himself had perhaps
" less poetical sentiment than Tennyson, less intel-
lectual vigour and abundance than Browning, but
more of a fusion of the two than either," and, above
all, " that he had more regularly applied that fusion
to the main line of modern development." Does
not this show how difficult it is for even the best
critic fairly to judge his own work ? For what
was the "main line of modern development" in
the quarter of a century preceding 1869, both in
England and on the Continent? What were the
ideas with which men's heads everywhere were full ?
Were they not chiefly these — the potency and
promise of material and mechanical development,
the conception of what was called, sometimes by its
English, sometimes by its Latin name, " freedom " or
" liberty " in every field ; the emancipation of
women, of the lower classes, of the serf, of the
slave; "free trade," a "free press," a "free church
in a free state " ; and, with a view to all these, the
extension of the franchise and the universal applica-
tion of parliamentary systems ? Were they not the
ideas which went with these, of " nationality " and
of "unification," and, above all, coming to crown
them in the intellectual sphere, of " evolution,"
which seemed to supply a philosophic basis for all
these movements ? But where are these ideas, or
any of them, to be found in Matthew Arnold's
poems? The "march of mind," the "steamship
70 MA'rrilKW AKNOLD
and tlie railway and the thoughts that shake man-
kin<l," the " happy sails that bear the Press," the
"parliament of man, the federation of the world,"
the progress of science "charming her secret from
the latest moon " — it is to " Locksley Hall " and
" The Princess " and " In Memoriam," to the lines
on the opening of the Exhibition, and those to the
Qneen, that we must go to find them ; for Tennyson
seems to have felt them all and anticipated many of
them. It does not seem to have occurred to
Matthew Arnold that perhaps to this fact, as well
as to his " poetical sentiment," Tennyson's popularity
was due.
There was, indeed, another movement going on
sinmltaneously, by some considered only a back-
water, by others the main stream. This was the
movement which Disraeli partly started, partly only
led, which began with the " Young England " set,
and, after prevailing in the Conservative reaction of
1874, has since, in the main, merged itself in the
later Unionist and Imperialist movement, but has
also contributed something to modern Liberalism.
To this stream of tendency Matthew Arnold, who
had many affinities, besides his power of phrase-
making, with Disraeh, also contributed. Its note
was to offer opposition to the Manchester school
and to many of those ideas of liberation enumerated
above, and, before all, to disparage the merely
material and mechanical advance of England. It
finds strong, if somewhat obscure expression in the
famous apostrophe to England as " the weary Titan "
in the lines on " Heine's Grave." The whole of
that poem, indeed, indicates Arnold's position very
well. He called himself a Liberal, and so he was ;
ARNOLD AND THE "MAIN MOVEMENT" 71
but he was a continental Liberal, desiring to unite
freedom of opinion with strong government. Be
that as it may, of this reaction against the older
English Liberalism he had no monopoly. Tennyson
expressed it even more strongly in " Maud " ; and
Dickens, whom Matthew Arnold strangely did not
read till his last years, expressed it in "Hard
Times." Kuskin, too, is full of it. Arnold's capital
idea, however, was that the world, down to the
French Revolution, had based itself on supernatural
Christianity ; that the French Revolution meant the
breaking up of that foundation ; and that the world
was moving, or striving to move, towards a new
basis, resting on non-supernatural Christianity. In
his poetry this again finds its best utterance in the
two " Obermann " poems ; but once more the
utterance is obscure.
It is probably to such utterances that Arnold
alludes when he speaks of having touched in his
poems the "main movement" of his time; for it is
these ideas, and ideas cognate to them, that he
proceeded to work out in his prose. Mr Humphry
Ward, in his introduction to the selection from
Arnold's poems included in his " British Poets " —
an introduction full at once of eloquence and insight,
and, for the personal side, one of the best things
written upon Arnold — points out that it was the
decade of storm and stress (1840-1850) that gave
Arnold as a poet his real ply. Certainly out of
the discouragement, the melancholy of that "yeasty
time" he never grew. The later more optimistic
note of " Imperialism," so potent in our own day,
struck so early and so forcibly by Tennyson, he
never strikes at all. If he mentions the Colonies in
r:.
MAITHEW ARNOLD
his writings it is only to think of thorn as children
of the Philistines and an offspring more hopeless
than their parents. If we go deeper the result is
still the same. Many will remember the striking
criticism by the late Professor Henry Sidgwick on
the position, in relation to the main movement of
mind, of *' In Memoriam," and of "its unparalleled
combination of intensity of feeling with compre-
hension of view in dealing with the deepest needs
and perplexities of humanity."
" In the sixties, I should say " (writes Professor
Sidgwick) " that these deeper issues were somewhat
obscured by the discussions on Christian dogma,
and Inspiration of Scripture, etc. One may recall
Browning's reference to this period —
" The ' Essays and Reviews ' debate
Bej^ins to tell on the public mind,
And Colenso's words have weight."
During these years we were absorbed in struggling
for freedom of thought in the trammels of an
historical religion ; and perhaps what we sym-
pathised with most in "In Memoriam" at this
time, apart from the personal feeling, was the
defence of "honest doubt," and, generally, the
forward movement of the thought. Well, the years
pass ; the struggle with what Carlyle used to call
" Hebrew Old Clothes " is over. Freedom is won,
and to what does Freedom bring us ? It brings us
face to face with atheistic science ; the faith in
God and Immortality, which we had been
struggling to clear from superstition, suddenly
seems to be "in the air"; and, in seeking for a
firm basis for this faith, we find ourselves in the
midst of the "fight with death" which "In
Memoriam " so powerfully presents.
Colenso's words had no weight with Matthew
ATTITUDE TO NATURAL SCIENCE 73
Arnold. Indeed he annoyed and alienated his
Broad Church friends by treating Colenso as a
ridiculous figure, a calculating boy turned enfant
terrible. But in the "obscuring" discussions on
dogma and inspiration he was and remained
absorbed. He did not perceive, then or afterwards,
that the really epoch-making book of 1859-63 was
not "Essays and Eeviews," nor even the "Vie de
Jdsus," but the " Origin of Species." The fact is
that the great defect of Matthew Arnold's culture
was his almost total want of appreciation of the
real importance of Natural Science. It was partly
the fault of his bringing up. What the position of
Natural Science was in the studies of Rugby under
his father is sufficiently indicated by the immortal
picture of "Martin" in "Tom Brown's School-
days." Oxford was little better. Natural Science
was, it is true, just beginning, when Matthew
Arnold went there, to struggle in luminis oras.
Sir Henry Acland was laying the foundations of
its modern study. His own contemporary, Henry
Smith, caught the spark and fanned it into flame.
But Matthew Arnold remained almost as insensible
to it as Gladstone. Officially and theoretically, no
doubt, he recognised its value ; but the diameter of
the sun and moon, the chemistry of the candle,
the "descent of man," were for Matthew Arnold,
like the equator, only things to take liberties with ;
and he thought Lord Salisbury a dangerous young
man because he advocated the larger introduction
of Natural Science into Oxford.
The determination of Arnold's relation to the
" main movement of ideas " belongs, however, to
the consideration of his prose rather than of his
74 MATrHEW ARNOLD
poetry. By a strange irony it is through the very
(jiiality in wliieh lie was willing to admit himself
inferior, but in which he was really strong, that,
as a poet, he, like all poets, will live. What are
his best poems, his most memorable pieces ? Are
they not " The forsaken Merman," " Sohrab,"
"Mycerinus," "Tristram and Iseult," " Kequiescat,"
"A Summer Night," "A Southern Night," "Rugby
Chapel," the lovely descriptive passages in " Thyrsis "
and the "Scholar Gipsy," or in the "Stanzas from
the Grande Chartreuse " ? They are not those in
which any "main movement of ideas" appears, but
those which are pervaded by the quality of poetic
sentiment. Much, indeed, he did contribute to the
ideas of his countrymen, but this he did as a prose-
writer rather than as a poet.
Meanwhile, Oxford had given him, as we said,
a pulpit just when he wanted it. Having a pulpit,
he at once began to preach. The instinct for,
the interest in, the two spheres, politics and
religion, so universal in Englishmen, the desire to
have his say about them, he had always felt ; and
now his chance had come. It is significant that
his first prose book, published two years after he
became Professor of Poetry, had nothing whatever
to do with poetry, but was a return to his early
loves, which came back to him in his first mission
abroad. " I really think," he wrote from Lausanne
in 1859, " I shall finish and bring out my pamphlet."
He did so. It was "England and the Italian
Question." It is not insignificant that it bore a
biblical motto, given in the language of the Vulgate,
which he used, he said, when he was not earnestly
serious, " Sed nondum estjinis " (S. Matt. xxiv. 6).
CULTURE AND ANARCHY 75
His first magazine articles were also significant.
They were " Maurice de Guerin " and the " Bishop
and the Philosopher." Three years later he opened
his guns more directly, no longer from across the
Channel, but on English soil, in the article, " My
Countrymen," which, later still, was to form part
of "Friendship's Garland."
Thus, even during his tenure of the professor-
ship his real bent was clear. The "Essays in
Criticism " themselves are only half literary. The
element of politics and the element of rehgion,
the elements of social and moral and didactic
criticism, are at least as strong as those of literature
proper ; and it is these that form the originality
and charm of the volume quite as much as the
aesthetic or artistic elements. Directly he was
freed from the bias given by the professorship, he
showed his own inclination even more decidedly.
He ceased to be professor in 1867, winding up
with the lectures on Celtic Literature. He began
almost at once the series of articles which form
" Culture and Anarchy." It was ten years before
he published anything new on literature. How
was the decade filled ? In it he produced " Culture
and Anarchy," "St Paul and Protestantism,"
"Friendship's Garland," "Literature and Dogma,"
" God and the Bible," and " Last Essays on Church
and Religion." There was not room for much
belles-lettres. Truly it is "character and not cir-
cumstance that is destiny." It was not mainly
want of leisure that prevented Arnold from writing
more poetry or more literary criticism ; it was his
own action, his own deliberate choice, his own
overmastering interest in contemporary affairs.
76 MAITHEW ARNOLD
Though his poems had now at hist begun
steadily to make their way, it was these prose con-
tributions on subjects of general interest which first
made him a force in the country. " Gentlemen, you
see before you what you have often heard of, an
unpopular author," he said to the Income- Tax
Commissioners on one occasion. A really popular
author he never became during his lifetime ; but
these writings undoubtedly reached a large and
wide audience. Their precise effect is difficult to
estimate, as it is not easy to dissociate the religious
from the political, and the political from the
educational portion, of his writings. To judge by
the results which have actually come about, the
truth would seem to be that he affected his country,
as regards these three points, in an ascending
scale — least, that is to say, in the religious field,
more in the political, most of all in the educational.
His methods were least adapted for success in the
first. The English, and not the English Non-
conformists alone, are a serious people, peculiarly
serious as regards their religion. Matthew
Arnold's bantering, even flippant, tone and superior
airs, his "smiling academic irony," as Swinburne
called it, estranged even those who might have been
expected to sympathise with him. What Gladstone
forcibly expressed for himself, was felt by many.
"It is very difficult" (he wrote) "to keep one's
temper in dealing with M. Arnold when he touches
on religious matters. His patronage of a Christi-
anity fashioned by himself is to me more offensive
and trying than rank unbelief."
Arnold remained, too, always somewhat of an
amateur in biblical criticism ; and the " higher
CONTRIBUTION TO THEOLOGY 77
critics," both of his own and of later days, have
not paid much attention to him, not so much,
indeed, as might have been expected. Jowett, on
the morrow of his funeral, wrote : —
" The world has been pleased to say many com-
plimentary things of him since his death, but they
have hardly done him justice, because they did
not understand his serious side — hard work,
independence, and most loving and careful fulfil-
ment of all the duties of life."
But earlier, when "Literature and Dogma"
appeared, Jowett himself had pronounced after
reading it : —
" Arnold is too flippant to be a prophet. His
argument of the meaning of words from their
etymology is fallacious and a most Philistine sort
of fallacy. But he is a master in the art of
plausibility. A confident statement, a slight joke,
an argument of this kind, may be brought against
anything. Oh, 'tis much that a slight jest will do."
It is significant, however, that the most serious
minds have taken him most seriously. R. H.
Hutton (of whom Matthew Arnold wittily, if
ungratefully, said that his fault was, "Always
seeing so very far into a millstone ") in his own
day wrote of him as " a great Oxford leader " and
a "guide of modern thought," ranking and compar-
ing him with his master. Cardinal Newman. The
present Bishop of Birmingham, Dr Gore, in
his lectures on St Paul's Epistle to the
Romans, says : —
" Life in Christ Jesus, Christ living in me — there
can be no question that these beautiful phrases,
which, if St John's witness be true, represent
78 MAITHEW ARNOLD
the teiicliiiii]: of Christ himself, express also what
was most central in !St Paul's idea of Christianity.
It was the great merit of Matthew Arnold's " 8t
Paul and Protestantism " that it recalled the fact
to notice in ordinary educated circles. Recent
scientitic study of St Paul has gone in the same
direction."
Something, then, Arnold contributed to theo-
logical education. Did he achieve his great object
of delivering England from the political Noncon-
formist, and the Nonconformist from his narrow
religion ? The first end has certainly not yet been
achieved. To the second, in so far as it, along with
some widening in other quarters, has come about,
many causes contributed ; and probably Arnold's
contribution was not by any means the largest.
In the realm of politics and of social questions
he achieved much more. Here his manner, "easy,
sinuous, unpolemical," as he liimself described it,
was admirably suited for its purpose. His banter
and raillery only aided him ; and it may be
questioned whether any man of letters, by the
mere power of his pen, has effected so much in this
region since the days of Swift. Matthew Arnold,
fortunately, was no Swift or Juvenal. No sceva
indignatio lacerated his heart or prompted his
prose-poetry. Rather his method was that of the
dapper, plump little Roman poet-critic who
"touched, like the sly rogue he was, every foible
of his friend so gaily that his friend laughed with
him," who "insinuates his way into our bosom
and plays about our heart." There is more than
one "Horatian echo" in Arnold's verse; there are
many in what may be called his " Satires and
Epistles."
FROM INDIVIDUALISM TO COLLECTIVISM 79
"There is to-day a cult of Matthew Arnokl,"
says Mr W, H. Dawson, the well-known writer on
sociology, in the preface to his solid volume entitled
" Matthew Arnold in Relation to the Thought of his
Time ; " it is growing, it must grow." How far either
the statement or the prediction is to be accepted it
is difficult to determine, without more evidence than
we possess. But the fact of their being thus made
so fully set forth by such a writer is, in itself, so
far as it goes, evidence. What cannot be over-
looked is that many of the greater changes and
reforms of to-day are those which Arnold predicted
and advocated ; that he certainly was, in regard to
his views and ideas, in advance of his time ; that
he was, in his own language, " going with the move-
ment of the world."
The chief political changes in the England of
the last quarter of a century — and they are so great
that already they amount to something like a silent
revolution — may all be referred to or summed up
under one capital change of policy and public
feeling, in itself a revolution — the change from the
policy of laissez-faire to that of state -action, the
change from Individualism to Collectivism. Many
causes have doubtless contributed to effect this
revolution, and many men. How far Matthew
Arnold aided to bring it about may be difficult to
determine. What is certain is that he inculcated
and reiterated it so importunately that, for at least
some part of it, it seems ungenerous not to give him
credit.
" A true poet, and not only a poet, but a man,
as we now see with a far truer insight into the
intellectual needs of his countrymen than any other
80 MATTHEW ARNOLD
writer of the closinjj; quarter of the century." It is
thus that ]\Ir John IMorley writes of him in his
new classic "Life of Ghidstone." Only a few
years back the Bishop of Hereford, addressing
the British Association at Cambridge upon the
subject of education, called attention again and yet
again to the warning words of Matthew Arnold
"in his illuminating reports on the schools and
liiiiversities of the Continent as he saw them thirty-
seven years ago," and to his advocacy of scientific
system and method.
"Had some English statesman" (the Bishop
said) " been enabled to take up and give effect to
Mr Arnold's chief suggestion, as Humboldt and his
colleagues gave effect to their ideas in Prussia in
the years 1808 and onwards, the advantage to our
country to-day would have been incalculable."
What Arnold cared for in education, as in
affairs, was not administrative or practical detail,
but wide and fresh views, and the introduction of a
general philosophy and system by which the detail
should be governed. In this region it is hardly
possible to exaggerate the services which he
rendered to his country. Of the ideas which slowly
and gradually have come to the birth in English
education Arnold had not, indeed, a monopoly —
few inventors ever have a monopoly of their ideas —
but at least they are all contained in Arnold.
Hardly anywhere are any of them stated earlier,
and nowhere are they stated earlier with such
completeness as in his pages. "Organise your
primary education," he said, even before the general
establishment of primary education was recognised
as a State duty. He laboured for its organisation.
A BRITISH ACADEMY 81
He laboured not less for its regulation. From the
first moment that it was proposed, he courageously
contended with "Bob Lowe" — a humble school-
inspector with a powerful minister — against the
introduction l^ "payment by results." It has died
hard and slowly, but the first death-blow was dealt
by Arnold's hand.
" Organise your secondary education," be cried
again, boldly overstepping his province in the cause
of what he felt to be an obvious public need. Here,
even more completely than in the sphere of primary
education, we are living even yet on his ideas ; his
spirit still rules us from his urn. What was it he
said at the outset ?
" There must be a real Minister of Education,
supported by an Advisory Committee of educa-
tional experts. All schools and their courses must
be inspected either by the Government or, for the
Government, by the Universities. New secondary
schools must be provided by local authorities up
and down the country."
The Bills of 1899 and 1902 were framed in close
agreement with these lines. It may fairly be
claimed that he suggested these ideas and also did
much to create the public feeling necessary for
their being carried into effect.
He was much laughed at for his supposed
advocacy of a British Academy of Letters. He did
not advocate any academy. The German academy
which he predicted we should one day have, is an
accomplished fact. The French academy which he
said we should not have, we have not got. If a
Roman Catholic University is hereafter created in
Ireland, it will be created because the feeling and
82 MAITHEW ARNOLD
the ideas wiiicli he toiled to infuse and inculcate
have prevailed. If it is not created it will be
beciiuse it will be wrecked on the very reef which
he always dreaded, because the forces which he
recognised and deplored will have proved too
strong.^ In all these things he was before his time.
In all, his secret of keeping an open mind and
letting a fresh stream of ideas, derived from quiet
pondering on the best hitherto thought and written,
play upon our everyday conceptions, may be said to
be justified.
What then is the truth ? Was he after all a
prophet, despite his flippancy, despite his airs, his
persiflage, despite his white gloves, his pouncet-
box ? Had he a message for his generation ? He
certainly thought he had. He toiled and labom'ed,
he rose up early and late took rest, he probably
shortened his life, he certainly retarded his own
worldly advancement, he forswore the darling
Muses, in order to deliver it. Much of the prophet
he undoubtedly possessed, yet he was not quite a
prophet. He had not the prophet's intensity or
abstraction. He did not retire enough either into
the wilderness or into himself. Like his own
Goethe, sitting between Lavater and Basedow, he
occupied a middle place.
" Prophete rechts, Prophete links.
Das Weltkind in der Mitte."
In his apt and discriminating stanzas, entitled "In
Laleham Chm^chyard," Mr William Watson hints
very happily the contrast between the disciple and
his other master.
^ The Bill creating a University has been passed, but perhaps
these sentences may still stand.
DEFECTS AS CRITIC AND AS POET 83
" Lulled by the Thames he sleeps, and not
By Rotha's wave.
'Tis fittest thus, for though with skill
He sang of beck and tarn and ghyll,
The deep authentic mountain-thrill
Ne'er shook his page ;
Somewhat of worldling mingled still
With bard and sage."
Moreover, even as a critic, and even as a poet,
he lacks something. He did not concentrate
enough. He did not remember his own Goethe's
dictum —
"Wer Grosses will muss sich zusammen rafFen ;
In der Beschrankung zeigt sich erst der Meister."
He was divided between his two desires. He
did not give up all for poetry, like Tennyson, or
for philosophy, like Herbert Spencer. Even his
criticism is in a sense superficial. He did not go
deep ; he was more artist than scholar. His
account of Heine is not exhaustive ; he did not
mean it to be. When Sir M. E. Grant DufF offered
him fuller information, he declined it. His account
of Gray's infertility is brilliant, but, as Mr Tovey
has shown, not supported by full consideration of
Gray's life and character. His criticism was often
a matter mainly, as Swinburne said, of "studious
felicity of exquisite phrase." Yet in these very
phrases critical power of the highest was condensed.
His apergus, too, and his intuitions were those of
genius. They set others thinking and working. Of
this, his lectures on Celtic Literature, of which he
said, with characteristic frankness, "I know
nothing," are a capital instance.
So too his poetry is unequal. He is often
compared to Gray ** going down the centuries with
84 MA rn lEW ARNOLD
his thin vohime iiiuier his arm." The parallel is
not a good one. A better, so far as it goes, though
it does not go far enough, woukl be with Collins;
for though he has not greater, if so much, per-
fection, in a few pieces Matthew Arnold shows
greater scope and range than either Gray or Collins.
A defective ear, an uncertain choice and mastery
of metre, yet often a lovely, unsought, unaffected
music, always a tender elegiac passion, a pure
drawing and colom-ing of nature, a philosophic and
scholarly aroma blended with exquisite delicacy of
sentiment — these are characteristic of both. Poetry
is, above all, an affair of genius and often largely of
youth. Had Arnold given his life to it, to pure
poetry, that is, not to any Wordsworthian inculca-
tion of the "main movement of ideas," but to the
poetry with which he began, he might have done
some greater, stronger, more finished things. Who
shall say ? But he did enough and more than
enough, it may be confidently asserted, for
immortality. A spirit buoyant, blithe, and charm-
ing, a delightful private friend, a faithful public
servant, a benefactor of the commonwealth in his
own day, and to all after-days a critic of genius
and a true poet — to have been, to have achieved
all this, is enough, is much.
" But seldom comes the Poet here,
And the Critic's rarer still ! "
If each is rare taken singly, how rare should the
combination be ! How rare it is !
Ill
THE ART OF TRANSLATION
" Traduttore, traditore, " says an Italian proverb.
"He occupied himself with that most lazy of all
modes of dealing with the classics, that of trans-
lating them." So wrote somewhat splenetically
one famous Oxford scholar of the last generation
about another. " Never translate ! Translation is
the death of understanding." Such was the dictum
of a great German philologist of the same era, often
repeated and enforced upon successive generations
of his pupils.
In all these utterances there is a grain of truth,
in the last more than a grain. Yet all are absolutely
opposed to the apparent faith and certain practice
of mankind. To this false, this indolent, this fatal
pursuit, high talent, and unsparing industry have
again and again in all ages been devoted.
"Never translate." But the world has always
been translating. Our own time is often described
as an age of this, that, or the other. Whatever it
is or is not, it is certainly an age of translation.
Almost all our poets from the beginning of the
century have experimented in the art. Byron
translated on occasion. Shelley was notoriously a
professed translator, both in prose and verse. His
86 THE ART OF TRANSLATION
Cyclops, his Hymn to Mercury, his Symposium, his
Prologue to Faust, are, and will probably remain,
among the most successful efforts ever made to
transfer poetry and prose from one literature to
another. And he not only practised, but theorised
about the art. Keats, with his very moderate
Latin and no Greek, cannot be added to the list
of professed translators ; but what is not sufficiently
remembered, he translated for himself the entire
^neid of Virgil, and it may be noticed that his
famous sonnet on Chapman's Homer is perhaps the
most eloquent tribute to the value of translation
ever penned. Scott translated. The Lake Poets,
despite their appeal to Nature at first hand, were
no less translators. Southey translated. Coleridge's
renderings from Schiller are part of his very best
work, and among the best translations of any time.
Wordsworth himself, though he passed such
trenchant strictures on Dryden's Virgil, produced
a version of two books of the ^neid far flatter
and more conventional than the flattest parts of
Dryden.
With the poets nearer to our own day the same
is the case. Rossetti and Browning translated much,
Matthew Arnold occasionally ; Tennyson in a few
noble specimens showed what he might have done
in this field had he chosen. Of his friend Fitzgerald
we shall speak anon. Clough and George Eliot
toiled at the task of translation. Mr William
Morris, Mr Swinburne, Mr Robert Bridges, Mr
William Watson, Sir Theodore Martin, Sir Stephen
de Vere, Mr Frederick Myers, Mr Ernest Myers,
Mr Andrew Lang, Mr Gosse, and a host of others,
have given us translations of the highest order;
PROSE-WRITERS AND SCHOLARS 87
while, perhaps, if we consider the range and variety
of his efforts, the most accomplished and skilful trans-
lator of his time was the late Mr J. A. Symonds.
These are all poets as well as prose-writers, but the
same is the case with those who are more purely
writers of prose — with Carlyle and his brother, with
Mr Froude and Mr Goldwin Smith, Professor Max
Muller, Mr Pater, Mr Blackmore, Mrs Ward. In
other countries the same phenomenon presents
itself. Goethe and Schiller translated ; Heine,
most passionate and spontaneous of poets, the
Catullus of Germany, like Catullus himself, surprises
us with specimens of this laborious, unspontaneous
art. France supplies many examples, and the best
known, if not the best, of American poets is
among the best known of translators.
Nor have the scholars of our time paid any
more attention to the warning voices of Pattison
and Haupt than the men of letters. On the
contrary, they have been unusually diligent as
translators. Some, like Jowett, have given to it
the major part of their effort. Most of the best
have practised it — Conington, Kennedy, Munro,
Jebb, Ellis, Campbell, von Wilamowitz-Mollendorf,
Garnett, Butcher, Leaf, Verrall, Dakyns, Godley,
Mackail, Morshead, Whitelaw, J. B. Rogers,
Murray, Phillimore, Headlam, and many more. To
the scholars may be added the men of practical life,
lawyers like Lord Brougham and Lord Bowen,
divines like Dean Plumptre, statesmen like Lord
Derby or Lord Carnarvon, and finally, and above all,
Mr Gladstone. Mr Gladstone had always been a
translator. As a young man, he published versions
from and into Greek and Latin. His Latin and
88 THE ART OF TRANSLATION
Italian iviuloriiigs of hymns are well known.
His first ireedom saw him retiii'ning to his first
loves.
All this when massed together seems surprising,
yet in all this onr own Victorian Age stands only
in the same relation as in other matters to the ages
of the past. The fact is, that great ages of pure
literature have always been ages of translation, in
Italy, in France, in Spain, in Germany, in England.
Such in England was the great age of Queen Anne.
Such more strikingly still was the greater age of
Elizabeth. What our poets are now that they
have always been — Gower and Chaucer, Lydgate
and Surrey, Marlowe and Spenser, Ben Jonson and
Milton, Fairfax and Harington, Denham and
Cowley, Dryden and Pope, Addison and Johnson,
Gray and Cowper. The Elizabethan Age was also
full of prose translations ; the versions of North and
Florio, Holland and Fenton, Sylvester and Shelton,
and others, are still memorable ; while it should
never be forgotten that the Authorised Version of
the Bible, as its quaint but fine Preface reminds us,
belongs to the era of Elizabeth and James I. — to the
era exactly, that is, of Shakespeare.
The scholars, of com-se, at this period and
earlier, translated into Latin, which was still
thought the most elegant and artistic medium.
Of this practice More and Lyly are English
examples, as Erasmus and Ficinus, or earlier,
Petrarch and Boccaccio, are foreign. The public
demanded translations, and so did the publishers.
Salmasius, Milton's great opponent, was a victim
to the demand. His edition of the Palatine
Anthology was not given to the world, and the
WHY SO MANY VERSIONS ? 89
book remained inedited for two hundred years,
because he died before he could finish the Latin
"crib" which was to introduce it to its modern
readers.
There is a common view of translation which
regards it as naturally and necessarily a task
for inferior minds, capable of being performed
adequately by them and unworthy of any great
or good ability, a fit employment for those who
are essaying or those who have failed in literature.
Much translation doubtless is produced by hacks,
and it is obviously poor enough. But such
production is in reality only like the other hack
or jom^neyman work which fringes true and living
literatm-e. Translation worthy of the name has
its proper place, and that no mean one, in the
hierarchy of letters. Nay, rather what is note-
worthy is not that so much translation is done by
inferior writers for gain and as a trade, but that
so much is done by men of ability for love and
for little hire.
What is the strange fascination which induces
men again and again to undertake tasks arduous
from their length or their intrinsic difficulty or
from both ? Why this constant succession of
translations of authors already again and again
translated ? The whole of Homer, the whole of
Virgil, of Dante, of Cervantes, of Camoens ;
^schylus, Sophocles, Euripides, the Odes of
Horace, Goethe's Faust, the songs of Heine, these
are tasks men seem never weary of imposing upon
themselves. Something there must be in the
nature of translation itself, as a function and
exercise of human faculty, which underlies this
90 THK AR r OF TRANSLATION
strange pheiiDinenon. What that nature is, and
what is the true and natural place of Translation in
literature, are the questions which these pages are
an attempt to determine.
Now, considering the important part that
translation has played in the intellectual and
spiritual history of the human race, both in the
widest sense and also more particularly in pure
literature and in education, it is extraordinary that
so little attention has been definitely or deliberately
given to its nature and principles.
It is not too much to say that the translations
of the Scriptures alone have had an incalculable
efiPect, not only as regards their matter, but also
as regards their style, upon the languages and
literatures of mankind. It is only necessary to
recall the broad fact of the influence of the
Septuagint, the Vulgate, and the Authorised
Version in its various stages, severally upon the
subsequent history of Greek, of Latin and the
derived tongues, and of English, or of the similar
if more confined influence of the French and
German versions. Through them not only the
thoughts, the religion, the morality of the Hebrews,
but their words and their turns of expression, have
profoundly and for ever affected the style and
expression of the Indo- Germanic races. There
are no translations which can compare in import-
ance with these, but Amyot's and North's Plutarch,
the German translations of Shakespeare, Dryden's
Virgil, and Chapman's and Pope's versions of
Homer, have contributed appreciably to form and
inspire the literatures to which they have been
added.
GREEK AND ROMAN TRANSLATORS 91
Yet, for all this, little or nothing has been
written systematically on the Art of Translation.
There is no recognised Philosophy of Translation.
Aristotle did not include it in his Encyclopsedia,
there is no lost work on Hermeneutics or Meta-
phrastics to be recovered from an Egyptian grave.
The reason of this is not far to seek. The Greeks,
in their great age at any rate, though they borrowed
something, perhaps much, from Persia or Egypt,
had for literary purposes no need or temptation to
translate. There are some interesting Alexandrine
versions, but no Attic translations,^ The fortunate
Greek boy found no foreign languages standing
between him and literature. All his classics,
including specimens of excellence in every kind,
were in his own tongue. In this respect Greek
literature holds an unique position among
the Hteratures of the world. It appears, like
Melchizedek of old, without father or mother.
It is what the Athenians themselves claimed
to be, ''autochthonous," without models, a law
to itself
With the next great literature of antiquity the
case is absolutely different. Latin literature proper
begins in translation and imitation, and as it begins
so it continues. From Livius Andronicus to
Seneca, from Seneca to Boethius, the Latin writers
are translators, or, if not translators, imitators ;
and it is noteworthy that the great authors of the
Golden Age are more rather than less imitative
than those of the Silver and subsequent periods.
Catullus, the most spontaneous of Roman writers,
is a translator. Cicero is a professed and whole-
^ Hanno's "Periplus," whatever it is, is hardly an exception.
92 THE AHT OK 'I'RANSLATION
sale translator. Virgil and Horace are full of
adaptation and imitation wliicli may be said to
imply translation, and sometimes to include it.
On much of Ovid's extant work the same criticism
may be passed, while of his lost "Medea" it would
doubtless be still more true. But, more than this,
there was a mass of definite Roman translation
which has perished. A poem, for instance like
that of Aratus on the Signs of the Heavens and the
Weather, which, though it does not appear to us of
very commanding or conspicuous merit, had a
singularly extended vogue in antiquity, was at four
dififerent epochs of Roman literature translated by
fom* writers — all names of note, and two very
memorable — Varro Atacinus, Cicero, Germanicus,
and Avienus. The Romans translated, too, at a
fairly early period from the Carthaginian. But the
Romans, while they were great translators and
good grammarians, were not, in the true sense,
philosophers. Such philosophy as they were
capable of borrowing they borrowed from Greece.
Critical they were, of course, but their professed
literary criticism is also derived mainly from
Greek sources, and though they translated much,
they did not attempt to write the philosophy of
translation.
In one point the Romans broke ground. They
set the example of the Translator's preface. It is
significant that almost all translators have thought
it necessary to write a preface. The practice was
perhaps begun by Cicero. His remarks in his "De
Optimo Genere Oratorum," which was written as a
preface to his translation of the two most famous
speeches of ^schines and Demosthenes, are at any
TRANSLATORS^ PREFACES 93
rate among the earliest and among the best of the
kind. In English literatm-e the first important
example is probably that of Chapman. Follow-
ing Chapman, we have a long series from the
famous prefaces of Dr3'den and Pope to those of
our own day, the last and best of which is
Jowett's Preface to the third edition of his
noble version of Plato. It is from these trans-
lators' prefaces that the "critic" of translation,
the analysis of its principles, the classification
of its rules so far as it has any, must mainly be
collected. To them, of course, must be added
Matthew Arnold's well-known Lectures, trans-
lating Homer. On the art of translation, on
certain rules and precepts which may be laid
down about it, these authorities have a good deal to
say, and a good deal in which they are agreed, and
which has therefore the weight of their agreement.
But no one of them, it may fairly be said, enters at
all systematically into first principles. Indeed,
from the nature and occasion of their writing,
there is no need for them to do so. Some
beginnings of a philosophy of translation may
be found in Mr Symonds's " Essays, Speculative
and Suggestive." There is Bishop Huet's curious
and erudite treatise, " de Interpretatione " ; there
are also various French and German hrochures
and articles, such as those of Tycho Mommsen
or Professor von Wilamowitz-MoUendorf.^ But
these, again, are rather tentative and occasional.
On the other hand, on the question of the
relation of language to thought, much has, of course,
1 The best recent utterance is Mr F. Storr's brilliant and witty
address given to the Modern Language Association last year, 1908.
94 THE ART OF TRANSLATION
been written by both pliilosopliers ^ and philologists,
and it will be seen that in considering the limits
or tlie possibility of translation this famous and
dilHcult question is at once raised. For the first
step towards a philosophy of translation is to
define translation. What is translation ? It
is the expression of one man's thought as con-
veyed in one language generally, but not neces-
sarily, by another man, in another language. If
there were so many precise and different
thoughts present, or capable of being present,
to the mind of an average civilised man,
and if in each great language of civilisation
there were one word for each of these thoughts,
the problem would be simple enough. It
would be a mere question of substitution -, a = x^
h=y\ substitute x for a and y for h wherever found,
and the result is attained. Such a process would
be indeed an indolent mechanical task, unworthy
of the powers of an able man. Such a process there
is. But its value is confined within very narrow
limits. It extends as far as the very lowest
function of the courier or interpreter. It is
obviously limited by the number of ideas or
concepts which are absolutely common to mankind.
Now in one sense these are fairly numerous, in
another they are very few. There is even a sense
in w^hich there are none at all. "Whatever sway
•' Collectivism " may achieve in the social or
political realm, in the philosophical domain
Individualism must always retain the first import-
ance. The individual man is the feeling and the
1 Schopenhauer, Jowett and Max Miiller have all handled
this theme.
VARIETY OF INDIVIDUAL MINDS 95
thinking unit. And no two units feel or think
exactly alike.
" Minds on this round earth of ours
Vary like the leaves and flowers."
"We fancy we are thinking the same thoughts,
we use the same words to express them. But if
we looked closely enough into the matter, we
should find that there is an intransferable, un-
translatable individuality about our thoughts
themselves. In the same way, though we may
have a common national or provincial accent, or
a common family intonation, still there is a peculiar
individual timbre and tone about every individual
voice and mode of pronunciation, and an individual
manner too, born of circumstance or education.
And naturally, the higher we get in the scale of
originality and of education combined, the greater
is this multiplicity of these nuances of difference.
We do in effect translate the language of our friend
into our own, when we endeavour to explain his
ideas or his communication in our own words, and
we experience occasionally the underlying difficulty,
nay impossibility, of translation in so doing.
Roughly speaking, however, and for pm-poses of
translation, we may say that there is a certain
number of ideas common to mankind, and a some-
what larger number common to that part of man-
kind which falls under the sway and definition of
Western Civilisation. But the number is much
smaller than is generally supposed. The simple
facts and factors of natm'e, father, mother, child,
young, old, earth, air, water, fire (which, as
Ai'istotle says in the Ethics, burns alike in Persia
96 THE ART OF TRANSLATION
and in Clreecc) — these are coiiiiiiun, though eveu
here the indivithiality of mankind and of groups of
mankind has introduced associations, colours,
lialoes, wliich cling to the idea and are conveyed by
the national word for one nation and cannot be
translated into the language of another. The only
words which are really translatable are those which
hardly require translation, the names of things
essentially international and cosmopolitan : an
international railway ticket, telegraph, sleeping-car,
postage stamp, these can be absolutely translated,
for the same things pass from land to land. So
again the terms of natural science, where they do
not happen to be identical, have generally an exact
scientific equivalent as between civilised countries.
But wherever any thing or idea has a national
character it cannot really be translated. To take a
very simple example : the English dictionary
equivalent for the French maison is "house," and
for practical purposes no one w^ould hesitate to
translate maison by "house" and "house" by
maison. But anyone who has once seen a French
house knows that maison suggests and calls up
something as distinct and different from an English
house as France is from England. Here the
"Never translate" of Professor Haupt has its
value. Professor Freeman cried out and objur-
gated when Jowett translated the Greek Tro'Xt?
by the English " State " : he was right that the
word "state" conveys something very dififerent
from, something larger than, the Greek TroXig,
but the words "city" and "town," which he
might have used, convey something as dififerent and
smaller. Nor does it help to say that "city" or
WORDS ARE INTERSECTING CIRCLES 97
" town " once meant something more like what was
meant by -TroXig. Approximate words in different
languages do not cover exactly the same area.
They are, as Schopenhauer said, not concentric
circles, but intersecting circles with different
centres. And if this is the case as regards the
translation of mere simple words expressive of
definite things or relations, what are we to say of
the combinations of these words in increasing
degrees of complexity, with a larger and ever larger
admixture of national and individual idiosyncrasy ?
What are we to say not only of the simple ex-
pression of ideas in words, but of the highly artistic
expression in prose or still more in poetry, when
the choice of words, and their arrangement with its
resulting alliteration and assonance, its mutually
affected sound and colour, value and suggestion, go
to make up the complex and subtle presentment
of a whole bundle of the perceptions, selections,
reasonings, affections, loves and hates, it may be,
of a most unusually developed mind ? It is obvious
that the difficulty is increased a million fold, and
that what was in a sense impossible in principle
becomes impossible too in detail. A line like
Virgil's Sunt lacrimce rerum et mentem mortalia
tangunt is, and must remain, untranslatable.
Dante indeed, in an interesting passage in the
"Convito," pronounces that all translation of good
poetry is impossible. The wonder is then that
translation appears so possible, and that in a sense
it is so possible.
We have been laying stress on the dissimilarity
of human beings ; but though they differ so much,
they are compounded of common elements, and
G
98 THE ART OF TRANSLATION
tluTi' is almost no limil to that human sympathy to
which iiotliiiig human is alien.
"Thr \\(irl(l but feels the present's spell;
Tlie poet leels the past as well,
Whatever men have done might do,
Whatever thought might think it too,"
There is a phenomenon to the marvel and the
significance of which sufficient attention has never
been paid : it is the schoolboy's Latin and Greek
verses. That a sharp small boy should be able to
arrange the comparatively few Greek or Latin
words he knows in a tolerably simple pattern, the
Chinese puzzle verse, is not so astonishing. But a
clever sixth-form boy, or an undergraduate at
college, will do something very different from this.
With little or no experience of life or of the world,
with no profound original poetic talent or insight,
with a limited stock of Latin or Greek at his com-
mand, he will yet enter apparently into the heart
and secret of the style of the unapproachable masters
of the ancient world. He will give you Virgilian
Hexameters or Sophoclean Iambics to order. He
will be more Thucydidean than Thucydides, more
Tacitean than Tacitus. If the style is the man, he
will throw himself with the skill of a consummate
actor into the character he Avishes to reproduce.
But more than this, he will translate the master-
pieces, the most characteristic passages, of a great
modern, of Shakespeare or Milton or Tennyson, into
something which the best judges of ancient letters
have to confess, though they may detect a flaw
here or there, bears the very impress of the
ancient nation and author into whose style he is
translating.
THE ART OF "COMPOSITION" 99
There are, of course, yet higher flights, where a
special master hke Jebb, or Ellis, or (alas ! the late)
Mr Walter Headlam " from out the ghost " of Pindar
or Catullus or Theocritus in his bosom "rolls an
Olympian," or indites hendecasyllabics or bucolics
that read like a beautiful original. But these
higher flights, being as they are exceptional, are not
perhaps such striking evidence of that strong
human solidarite, that strange intellectual telepathy
which thus enables men, across the gulf of the
ages and of widely diflering civilisations, to imitate
and reproduce the manner, the accent, the style,
the very informing spirit of a vanished personality.
Perfect translation, then, is impossible, yet transla-
tion has infinite possibilities. Perfect sympathy
with the original is impossible ; perfect reproduc-
tion in a new medium is impossible. But in both
there are infinite degrees of approximation.
And herein lies the explanation of that
phenomenon noticed above — the multiplication of
translations. Every age feels the original in its own
particular way, every age has its own manner of
expression, and the same is true of every individual.
Therefore it is that they want translations of their
own, and are satisfied with no other. Therefore
they are willing, nay eager, for small recompense
or none, to try again and yet again, that experi-
ment in which they see so clearly that others
have failed.
" The song is to the singer and comes back
most to him." The song is the singer's imitation,
his version, of nature and passion. Even more
truly is the translation to the translator, and gives
him a satisfaction which it can give to no one else,
100 rilK ART OF TRANSLATION
for no one else can look through his eyes or speak
with his voice.
Especially is this the case in dealing with the
ancients. Speaking in the large way, the great
classical masterpieces of antiquity remain the same
from age to age : scholarship may do something to
furbish them up a little, their text may be purified,
fragments may be recovered and restored, excre-
scences may be removed, but on the whole they
present the same general semblance and character
as when they were dug from their resting-places in
monastic lumber-rooms by Poggio or Boccaccio.
It is with them as with the great artistic remains —
" Gray time-worn marbles
Hold the pure Muses :
In their cool gallery
By yellow Tiber
They still look fair."
But successive generations of scholars and virtuosi
look at both with different feelings. The eye sees
what it brings with it, the power of seeing.
Different ages have different sympathies. The
Romanticist finds Romanticism in the classics ; the
Impressionist, Impressionism ; the Kealist, Realism.
An age like our own, which sympathizes by turns
and in varying degrees with all these, will find
something of them all. Sympathy is partly a
matter of culture, of the education of the taste and
feeling, partly a matter of knowledge. The old
translations are not accurate grammatically. Still
more are they not accurate as regards under-
standing of the relation in which the originals
stand to their own time, the reason, the significance
of their colour or genre, the meaning of their
EVERY AGE WANTS ITS OWN TRANSLATION 101
allusions. As to all these points, philology makes,
as Jowett said, a slow but subtle advance, and
new and more accurate renderings are called for.
But the old versions, like the originals, are regarded
with dififerent feelings from age to age.
Om^ time is in sympathy with the Elizabethan ;
the merits of the great Ehzabethan versions have
been rediscovered, and we are grateful to the
editors and publishers who put them once more
within our reach. On the other hand, the present
disregard of the poetry of Dryden and Pope is
undue, nor can it be doubted that the pendulum
will swing again in their direction, and that the
real merit which underlies the mannerism of their
versions, as of their original pieces, will be again
appreciated.
It is clear then that that age, that nation, and
that individual will produce the best versions
whose sympathies are most comprehensive, whose
appreciation is most just, and whose language is
most various.
So far from translation being a lazy task for
second-rate minds, it is a task which tries the best
powers of the best. It is only the best ages of
literature, and the best writers, that can produce
really excellent translations. The reason why they
do not oftener give themselves to the task is partly
that they are naturally pre-occupied with their own
creative effort, partly the difficulty, the insuperable
difficulty, of the task ; and therefore its inherently
unsatisfactory character. Occasionally, of course,
there is to be found a mind first-rate or almost
first-rate, which is fastidious and critical, to which
creation comes with difficulty. Such a temperament,
LIBRARY
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
102 THE ART ()F TRANSLATION
the temperament of the great executant or scholar
or copyist, is, as is well known, nearly if not quite
as fine, but also nearly if not (juite as rare, as the
temperament of the composer, the poet, or the
painter. Such a temperament may express itself in
translation. The poet Gray — whether owing to
his age or to his own nature, who shall say ? — was
very largely such a temperament. Fortunately he
was something more, and he gave us a handful of
poems, ^aiu fxe'u, aWa poSa. But had he been no more,
Gray the critic, Gray the scholar, might have
expressed his poetic self in translation. The speci-
mens he has given us of Statins are, probably, as near
perfection as it is possible for translation to come.
It being admitted then that a perfect translation
is impossible, and perhaps that a final good transla-
tion is impossible, a good translation according to
our times — good, not absolutely, but as Aristotle
would say, for us — may be, nay, obviously is, quite
possible, often most useful and sometimes, too,
most delectable. What are the canons of ex-
cellence of such a translation ? What are the
rules which the translator should follow?
Translation has been already defined as the
expression, in another set of words generally by
another man, of the thoughts of one man already
expressed in one set of words. It is possible, of
course, for a man to express his thoughts first in
one set of words and then in another in one
language, as for instance when he explains him-
self in simpler language to a child or a foreigner,
or an uneducated person.^ This is a kind of
translation. It is possible also for a man to trans-
1 So MadaiBe Lafayette wittily compared a bad translator
THE TRANSFERENCE OF IMPRESSION 103
late from one state of a language into another.
Thus Dryden calls his modernisations of Chaucer
translations, and certainly the difference between
the modes of thought and expression of Chancer
and those of Dryden amounts to the difference
between two languages. Again, a person who
commands perfectly two languages or three, if
that be possible, may translate his own thoughts
from one into the other. But all these are rather
subtleties and refinements. The translation which
requires discussion is something more than these
processes. It may perhaps be called literary
translation, and by translation what is ordinarily
meant is literary translation. Now, in literary
translation, there is something more than the bare
meaning to be conveyed. There is the whole
impression. Perhaps, strictly speaking, the bare
meaning cannot really be separated from the whole
impression ; that is to say, the whole living meaning
is an inseparable whole, and what is called the
bare meaning, if it could be separated, would be a
lower organism altogether, not a part of the higher.
But be this so or not, the whole impression is what
the translator has to transfer from one literature
to another. What then are the canons of good
translation, and what are the reasons of those
canons? There is one proposition on which all
translators seem practically and natm-ally agreed.
The aim of a translation should he to produce an
impression similar, or as nearly as may he similar,
to that produced hy the original.
to a blundering footman delivering a pretty message for his
mistress, adding, "Plus le compliment est delicat plus on est sur (pie
le laquais s'en tire mal."
104 THE AUT OF TRANSLATION
This is the first and fundamontal proposition.
To it is sometimes added a fm'ther appendage,
more especially in the case of the ancient classics ;
namely, an impression similar to that produced by
the original on its original hearers or readers.
But, said Matthew Arnold, we cannot possibly
know what impression Sophocles or Horace pro-
duced on their contemporary hearers or readers.
Matthew Arnold, to tell the truth, somewhat
exaggerated the difficulty. We do know how the
ancient writers affected their hearers, in so far as
their hearers have told us this. Some general idea
or conception of this original impression may be
gathered from smidry sources, even if it does not
help us very far. Further, the ancient criticisms of
the classics agree, on the whole, very I'emarkably
with the most considered and final of those
criticisms which express modern feeling. They
may, therefore, give us confidence that our impres-
sions, making allowance for all that separates us,
are not different or alien in kind from those
received by the ancients, and they emphasize
for us the importance of what will be seen
to be the most important matter of all in
translation, the reproduction of the essential and
differentiating character of the original author. A
translation which did not represent ^schylus as
grandiose, at times almost to tumidity, or Em^pides
as rhetorical, would not have commended itself,
could he conceivably have known and miderstood
it, to Ai'istophanes : a translation of Horace which
does not reproduce as a main characteristic
"studied felicity," or "harmonious rhythm" would
not have commended itself to Petronius or Ovid.
ESSENTIALS OF A TRANSLATION 105
It is not easy, it is difficult — some acute critics,
like Mr Hamerton, say it is impossible — exactly to
know or feel how a foreigner is affected by the
masterpieces of his own literature. But here the
intervening gulf, if it cannot be abolished, may be
narrowed and bridged. The opportunities of
mutual interchange and explanation are many,
the possibilities of knowledge are great. From
this first proposition follow most of the others on
which translators are agreed.
A good translation should read like an original.^
Why ? Because the original reads like an original.
It might be amusing to ask, what about a transla-
tion of a translation ? Of this of course there are
some very notable examples, such as North's
version of Amyot's version of Plutarch, to which
Shakespeare owed so much. Shelley first read
Plato in an English version of a French version.
But it is obvious that such versions are not to
be judged by the ordinary standard. They may
serve a useful, even a great pm^pose, but they can
hardly satisfy the requirements of the best trans-
lation.
And to read like an original, a translation must
be idiomatic in the language in which it is written.
Thus, as Jowett says, " The first requisite of
an English translation is that it be English." This
is the canon which is most frequently transgressed
by translators. It is the non-observance of it
which at once separates off and condemns the mass
of inferior translations. All who have any large
acquaintance with translations are familiar with
^ " Ut opus avTO(l)V&;, non alieni Interpretatio credi possit "
(Huetius, "dc Optimo Genere Interpretandi," p. 79).
lOG THE ART OF TRANSLATION
wliat may bo called "translation English," a
language which is neither English nor Greek nor
Latin, French nor German, but something between
the two. The grosser forms of it do not need to
be pointed out, "Pigeon EngHsh," "English as
she is spoke," these we all know ; as again all
teachers know the "translation English" of the
fourth-form boy. The subtler, less obvious forms
of it are just those which distinguish inferior trans-
lations. How often, when we read a translation,
do we not feel that no one could write thus
unless he had been translating? — a feeling which
at once pro tanto, if our canon be good, condemns
the work.
Now, if a translation is to be idiomatic, since
the idioms of different languages differ, it is obvious
that a literal translation is at once condemned.
Here, as elsewhere, the letter killeth, the spirit
giveth life. A really good translation should be
not so much exact as faithful. It should not be
free, but it should be, what is the same thing with
a difference, liberal. It should be, in the language
of Painting, not perhaps exactly Impressionist, but
rather Impressionist than Pre-Raphaelite.
That the best translation should be not literal
but liberal, all the best translators are agreed.
This canon is laid down by Cicero in the passage
already alluded to, and by Chapman, who laughs
as he says at translators with
" Their word-for-word traductions, where they lose
The free grace of their natural dialect."
It is to Dryden, however, that the credit must
be given of having first drawn this out with careful
DRYDEN'S PREFACES 107
analysis and examples. Dryden is sometimes
called the first great writer, the ''father" of
modern English prose. He is more certainly
the father of English criticism. An excellent prose
writer he certainly is, nervous, clear, free yet firm,
and a shrewd critic, and his critical pieces are
excellent reading. But unfortunately Dryden in
his prose as in his verse was hasty and somewhat
reckless. The torrent of his genius hm'ried him
on and extricated him only too easily from every
difficulty. We may not take seriously the gibe
of Swift :
" Read all the prefaces of Dryden,
For those our critics much confide in,
Though writ at first only for filling
To raise the volume's price a shilling."
But Dryden confesses himself that he wrote them,
as he confesses that he wrote many things, "in
haste." Yet, hasty in composition as they are, they
are full of sound sense and discriminating judgment.
The fullest analysis of the art of translation will
be found in the Preface to his rendering of the
Epistles of Ovid.
"All translations," he there says, "I suppose
may be reduced to three heads. First, that of
Metaphrase, or turning an author word by word
and line by line from one language into another.
" The second way is that of Paraphrase, or
translation with latitude, where the author is kept
in view by the translator so as never to be lost,
but his words are not so strictly followed as his
sense, and that too is admitted to be amplified
but not altered. An example of this style is
Waller's Fourth ^neid.
108 THE ART OF TRANSLATION
'* The tliirtl way is tli.-it of Imitation, where the
translator (if now we have not lost that name)
assumes tlie liberty not only to vary from the words
and sense, but to forsake them both as he sees
oceasion, and taking only some general hints from
the original to run division on the groundwork as
he pleases."
The examples given of this method are Cowley's
Odes of Pindar and the same author's rendering
of Horace.
Having distinguished these three modes, Dryden
proceeds to discuss their relative advantages and
disadvantages. The whole discussion is too long
to quote, but the main points may well be given.
" Concerning the first of these methods, our
master Horace has given us this caution :
" Nee verbum verbo curabis leddere fidus
Interpres."
Too faithfully is indeed pedantically. It is almost
impossible to translate verbally and well at the
same time. Such translation (in the case of poetry)
is like dancing on ropes with fettered legs : a man
may shun a fall by using caution, but the graceful-
ness of motion is not to be expected.
" Imitation is the other extreme. It is the
endeavour of a later poet to write like one who
has written before him on the same subject, not
to translate his words or be confined to his sense,
but only to set him as a pattern and to write as he
supposes that author would have done had he
lived in our age and in our country."
It may be justified, says Dryden, in the case
of Cowley's Pindar — for Dryden, be it noted,
seems like Horace to have had the idea that
"PARAPHRASE'' VERSUS "IMITATION" 109
Pindar was a most irregular poet, above or without
law, one who
" Per audaces nova dithyrambos
Verba devolvit numerisque fertur
Lege solutis " ; —
but not in the case of a regular and intelligible
poet like Virgil or Ovid.
To state it fairly, he concludes : " Imitation
is the most advantageous way for a translator
to show himself, but the greatest wrong which
can be done to the memory and reputation of
the dead." He then proceeds to advocate the
middle course of "Paraphrase" or "translation
with latitude."
Like Dryden, we may perhaps dismiss " Imita-
tion" as not really translation at all. At the
same time he seems to admit that it is a process
which may produce very fair poetry, and it
should be noted that Dryden all along is really
thinking and writing of poetical translation.
Certainly a process tending very much towards
"Imitation," in which the "latitude," at any
rate which the translator has allowed himself,
is very large, has given us one of the most
remarkable and individual poems of our time,
the " Omar Khayyam " of Edward Fitzgerald : —
" Your golden Eastern lay,
Than which I know no version done
In English more divinely well ;
A planet equal to the sun
That cast it, that large infidel
Your Omar."
Fitzgerald's method avowedly contained a good
deal of "Imitation."
Chapman's Homer again is really, as Mr
no rilK ART OF TRANSLATION
Swinburne's discriniinating eulogy on it shows,
rather an Imitation than a Translation. "By
the stiindard," says Mr Swinburne, *'of original
work they may be more fairly and more worthily
judged than by the standard of translation." We
may compare, too, Coleridge and Lamb, who say
the same thing. And some of the best reputed
and happiest modern versions of the classics
into English undoubtedly err on the side of
"Imitation," such as Frere's Aristophanes or
Morshead's Agamemnon. Indeed, a moderate
use of " Imitation " is hardly distinguishable from
Dryden's own " Paraphrase " ; and it may be noted
that this very word "Paraphrase," which Dryden
uses to denote the middle course, is ordinarily
used to imply something certainly much nearer
to imitation than to literal translation, and, indeed,
that Dryden himself, as will be seen both by
practice and precept, supports such an application.
There can be little doubt that this middle
course is the true "golden mean," the true course
for the translator to pursue, whether we call it
"Paraphrase," which, as we have indicated, may
be to modern ears misleading, or "translation
with latitude," or, as we have suggested, "liberal"
as opposed to literal translation. The question
will be as to the amount of latitude permissible.
One main consideration which should determine
this will, if what was said at the outset be correct,
at once appear. The latitude must be sufficient,
but not more than sufficient; it must be the
minimum which will suffice to make the translation
idiomatic and natural in the language into which
it is made. The skill of the translator will be
THE INDIVIDUAL CHARACTER 111
found in reducing the quantity as nearly as may
be to this minimum.
But another consideration affects this latitude —
a consideration the enforcement of which is
perhaps Dryden's chief merit — a consideration
which many even of the very best translators
have overlooked/ It is the preservation of the
individual differentiating character of the original
The language of Dry den should here be quoted
in extenso :
"No man," he says, "is capable of translating
poetry who, besides a genius to that art, is not
a master both of the author's language and of
his own ; nor must we understand the language
only of the poet, hut his peculiar turn of thought
and expression, which are the characters that
distinguish, and as it were individuate, him from
all other writers.
"When we are come thus far, it is time to
look into ourselves, to conform our genius to his,
to give his thoughts either the same turn if our
tongue will bear it, or if not, to vary but the
dress, not to alter or destroy the substance. The
like care must be taken of the mere outward
ornaments, the words. Every language is so
full of its own proprieties that what is beautiful
in one is often barbarous, nay, sometimes nonsense,
in another. There is therefore a liberty to be
allowed for the expression, neither is it necessary
that words and lines should be confined to the
measure of the original. The sense of an author,
generally speaking, is to be sacred and inviolable.
^ It is this that makes Jowett's Plato so great a success, his
Thucydides, in point of style, comparatively a failure. The Plato
is Uke Plato, the Thucydides is often not like Thucydides. No
one^reading it would understand why the original is considered
so crabbed and condensed.
112 TIIK AKV OF TRANSLATION
If the fancy of Omd he luxuriant, it is his character
to be SO; and if I retrench it, he is no longer Odd.
It will be replied that he receives advantage by
this lopping of his superfluous branches, but I rejoin
that a translator has no such right. When a
painter copies from the life, I suppose he has no
privilege to alter his features and lineaments under
pretence that his picture will look better, perhaps
the face which he has drawn would be more
exact if the eye or the nose were altered, but
it is his business to make it resemble the
original."
What Dryden says well but briefly here, he
has enforced and somewhat amplified in another
piece, the Preface to what is called the Second
Miscellany, including translations from Theocritus,
Lucretius, and Horace. This Preface is exceed-
ingly characteristic of Dryden, and contains some
criticisms thrown out by the way which are of
interest and instruction, beyond the province of
translation.
" There are many," he says, " then, who under-
stand Greek and Latin, and yet are ignorant of
their mother tongue. The proprieties and deli-
cacies of the English tongue are known to few.
To know them," he adds, "requires not only
learning, but experience of life and good society.
Most of our ingenious young men take some cried-
up English poet for their model and imitate him.
"/if appears necessary that a man should be
a nice critic in his mother tongue before he attempts
to translate a foreign language. Neither is it
sufiicient that he be able to judge of words and
style, but he must be a master of them too : he
must perfectly understand his author's tongue and
absolutely command his own.
THEORY OF BROWNING'S "AGAMEMNON" 113
"/So that to he a thorough translator he must
be a thorough poet}
"Neither is it enough to give his author's
sense in good English in poetical expressions
and in musical numbers; there remains a
yet harder task, and it is a secret of which
few translators have sufficiently thought. It is
the maintaining the character of an author which
distinguishes him from all others, and makes
him appear that individual poet whom you ivoidd
interprets
He then complains that the translators have
not preserved the difference between Virgil and
Ovid, but have confounded their several talents,
and compares them to Sir Peter Lely, who " drew
many graceful pictures, but few that were like,
because he always studied himself more than those
who sat to him." "In such translations," he
says, "I can easily distinguish the hand which
performed the work, but I cannot distinguish
one poet from another."
The sum and substance of Dryden's remarks
then is, that the best translation is translation
with reasonable latitude, not mechanically or
servilely reproductive, but loyal and faithful both
to sense and style, not literal but liberal. And
this is the view of all the best translators. It
is true that an eminent poet and translator of
our time, Robert Browning, in the Preface to
his version of the "Agamemnon," holds a brief
for literal as against liberal rendering. He main-
tains that a word-for-word translation gives the
best notion of the original, and that if the reader
^ Compare Chapman's Preface to his translation of the IHad.
H
lU THE ART OF TRANSLATION
wants embcllishnicnt he can put it in for himself.
Browning was a genius, a poet of originality, and
a masculine thinker, and anything he advances
seriously should be seriously considered. But in
this case he put himself out of court. His love,
his passion for the great Avriters of Greece, does
credit to his heart rather than his head. His
biographer tells us that he refused to admit the
pretensions of even the best of them to be masters
of style, and wrote his "Agamemnon" partly
to expose the folly of those pretensions.^ In
other words, he does not appreciate in them that
of which as a poet he was most in need, and which
they could have given him ; namely, artistic form.
The result is an "Agamemnon" reflected in the
distorting mirror of Browning's manner. That
there is vigour and fire in his version is of course
true, as there must be in everything he touched.
But if he says that ^schylus is obscm^e, he has
given us obscurum per obscuriorem, and the scholar
who said that he could just make it out with
the aid of the original had reason as well as wit
on his side. It is true that a perfectly literal
translation may be best for two persons — for
him who knows the original, and for him who,
without knowing the original, is himself a man
of great creative imagination, and can reclothe
the dry bones with flesh and blood and beauty.
But a translation is not meant only or mainly
for such readers, and Browning is not con-
sistent. He does not give us a really literal
version. He throws it into a certain form, but
1 "Life and Letters of Robert Browning," by Mrs Suther-
land Orr, p. 308.
ROSSETTI AND FITZGERALD 115
it is the form not of JEschylus or anything
resembhng ^schylus, but of Browning.
Further, against the great authority of
Browning may be quoted the authority, far greater
in this matter, of the master to whom he owed
so much, D. G. Eossetti. Rossetti was one of
the most practised and unfaiHng translators of
his own or any time. No one probably was
ever more highly sensitive to the impression he
wished to convey, more passionate in the desire
to convey it. Arbitrary, wilful, he, if any ever
did, formed his opinions for himself, and they may
be trusted to be sincere. What does he say
then on this point ? In the Preface to the first
edition of "Dante and his Circle," he writes : —
"The life-blood of rhythmical translation is
this commandment, that a good poem shall not
be tm^ned into a bad one. The only true motive
for putting poetry into a fresh language must be
to endow a fresh nation as far as possible with
one more possession of beauty. Poetry not being
an exact science, literality of rendering is altogether
secondary to this chief law. I say literality, not
fidelity, which is by no means the same thing.
When literality can be combined with what
is this primary condition of success, the translator
is fortunate, and must strive his utmost to unite
them. When such an object can only be attained
by paraphrase, that is the only path."
Such is the canon of the translator of the
"Ballad of Dead Ladies," as it was that of the
translator of "Omar Khayyam."^ And what
Rossetti says of rhythmical translation is, of
^ See Edward Fitzgerald's Preface to his version of the
"Agamemnon."
116 THE ART OF TRANSLATION
course, equally good in principle of all translation
of artistic stylo, wlicther in poetry or prose.
It is indispensable then in translating, whether
from poetry or prose, that the translator should
preserve the essentials of the style and character
of the original. And to do this it is obvious that
he nuist be careful first of all to consider what in
each case these are. The critic, as Dryden saw,
must precede and underlie the translator. This is
what Matthew Arnold, a consummate critic, saw
so clearly, and brought out so forcibly in those
delightful Lectures on translating Homer, alluded
to already, lectures which everyone who aspires to
translate should, to use Horace's phrase, " thumb
night and day." He begins by laying down four
main characteristics of Homer, all four of which
are so essential that the translator can neglect no
single one ; and he then points out how, by
neglecting one or more, the various translators
of Homer have failed so far in various ways.
But, as appears in the course of Matthew
Arnold's disquisition, in translating poetry it is not
enough to preserve the style ; there is yet another
consideration of the highest importance, the con-
sideration of the form. This is the point in which,
as we saw, Dryden is weakest, partly because his
time was weak in form, partly because it was
limited. From the large freedom in spirit and
expression of the Elizabethans, from their spacious
time and its melodious burst, English poetry
gradually declined, nor did it expand again until
the dawn of the Romantic movement in the early
years of our own century. Gray felt and struggled
against the restriction with the feeling he has so well
TRANSFERENCE OF "FORM" 117
expressed in the " Stanzas to Mr Bentley." Dryden
perhaps did not feel it, for Dryden was Titanic, not
Olympian, a giant, not a god ; but he was limited by
it. For those who feel it, and in proportion as
they feel it, form must always be one of the great
problems and difficulties of the translator. It is
the superadded difficulty which makes any trans-
lation of poetry often so hopeless. It is a barrier
set between language and language, between
literature and literature. All forms are not
congenial or even possible to all languages. Even
when the same forms are common to two or more
languages, they are common, but with differences.
The Latin Hexameter, the Latin Pentameter, the
Latin Alcaic and Lyric, even when a great Latin
artist attempts to minimise the difiPerence, are felt
by us to be quite dififerent from the Greek.
Now form is of the essence of much, nay of
most, poetry. Die Kunst ist nur Gestaltung, says
Goethe, " Art is only the giving of Form." Although
for certain reasons it is a common and in some
ways commendable practice to translate poetry
into prose, no one doubts that an enormous loss
is at once involved by that process. What, then, is
to be done with form by the translator? The
perfect translation undoubtedly requires that the
form, as well as the style and sense, should be
transferred. This is the first and best method.
And there are some languages as between which
and cases in which this transference can be effected
fairly adequately. Form can often be transferred
from German into English, and English into
German, though the absence of terminations in
English and the consequently more monosyllabic
118 THE ART OF TRANSLATION
character and (leficiciicy in double rhymes of Englisli
constitutes a didiculty witli which every translator
is t'aniiliar. Aijjain the heroic couplet, with a
ditierence, is common to French and English.
Boileau can be translated into the style of Dryden
or Pope, and vice versa. So again the Sonnet
borrowed from Italian has been naturalised in
England, and Italian sonnets can, allowing for
differences of ending and rhyme, be sufficiently
rendered into English.
But the cases in which the same form and
mould are naturally common to two countries
and languages are very limited. The next question
is, can exotic forms be naturalised ? To some
extent this can perhaps be done. In the first
place many, perhaps most, of the forms which seem
native and indigenous have originally been imported.
It is an experiment always worth trying. The
result will often be beautiful, even if it is not
absolutely what is aimed at. Tennyson's Alcaics
and Hendecasyllabics and Galliambics — be they,
what is disputed, syllabically and prosodically exact
or not — do not produce just the same effect and
impression as the similar metres used by Catullus,
Alcaeus, and Horace, but have a charm of their
own. The exquisite metrification, too little ap-
preciated, of the Jubilee Ode does not even suggest
to many ears the rhythm of Collis o Heliconii, on
which it is based, but it is a beautiful addition to
Englisli metres. The same may be said of many of
Mr Swinburne's marvellous and brilliant experi-
ments. There is then always much to be said for
attempts to translate into the "metre of the
original." Such a careful and conscientious
ENGLISH HEXAMETERS 119
volume as Professor Robinson Ellis's renderings
of Catullus, done in this manner, not only aids the
English reader to form an idea of Catullus, but
discovers new possibilities in the English language.
But for perfect translation, it is necessary not only
that a form be possible, but that it be natural, and,
if not familiar, at least so congenial that it may
hereafter become familiar. Here again the first
canon of translation has its force : "A translation
must read like an original." That being so, then
it is almost imperative for the translator to adopt a
form which is already familiar, and perhaps this
rule might be laid down, that no form or metre
can be happily used in translation in which a
master in the language of the translation could
or would not naturally write an original poem.
Translation metres are no more permissible than
translation English.
A crucial instance of the question of transference
of metres is the Hexameter. Is the Hexameter an
English metre, and can it be used to translate the
Greek and the Latin Hexameter? The history
of the attempts to acclimatise the Hexameter in
England is very interesting, but too long to be
recited here. A pleasing though not great poem
has been written by Longfellow in English
Hexameter, and some beautiful, though not quite
commandingly or convincingly beautiful, effects
have been there attained. Clough used the metre
with more strength and better result. But neither
Longfellow's nor Clough's ^ Hexameters, nor again
Kingsley's, recall or suggest the general ring, or any
single rhythm or combination of rhythms, of either
^ Cp. Clough's " Letters of Parepidemus," No. II.
120 THE ART OF TRANSLATION
Homer or Virgil. They do not echo either the
"surge and thunder" of the IHad or Odyssey, or
the " stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of
man." Unless, then, something very different,
something much more, can be made of the
llexamcter in English than has yet been made,
the Hexameter cannot be used to translate the
Greek or Latin Hexameter. It is possible that a
great artist may yet arise and enormously develop
the capacities of the Hexameter, and it may then
be used. Matthew Arnold thought it might be
made a possible metre. The beautiful but too
brief fragment of translation he quoted from Dr
Hawtrey seemed at first sight to justify this faith.
But Matthew Arnold's own attempts are, it must
be confessed, ftiilm-cs. Mr Robert Bridges' most
interesting and masterly prosodic Hexameters have
shown what can be done in English with the metre
as a vehicle of the Epistolary style of Horace, but
Mr Bridges has not attempted its heroic use.
The Germans claim to have succeeded better
with the Hexameter. Perhaps it may be allowed
that they have succeeded slightly better. The Hexa-
meter has now at any rate this advantage in
Germany, that a thoroughly popular poem by a
poet and artist of the first order has been written
in it. German, moreover, would appear to be a
language which lends itself to translation. It is
plastic : like the sculptor's clay, it takes the mould
of any form, and in setting and becoming itself,
does not necessarily break. The structm'e of French,
on the other hand, is essentially crystalline. It must
arrange itself in a few mathematically deter-
mined patterns. It has an admirable lucidity and
GERMAN HEXAMETERS 121
brilliance, but little plasticity. And this plasticity
of German applies to metre as well as to sense.
It would perhaps be unfair to say that the literary
standard in Germany is not so high as in England
or France, considering the excellence reached by
Goethe or Heine, but this may perhaps be said
that, according to the capacity of the German
language, the Hexameter has been more success-
fully adopted in German than in English. But the
German Hexameter would certainly seem to be
nearer to the English than it is to the Greek, and
the English Hexameter should, of com^se, be used
for translating a German Hexameter poem such as
"Hermann und Dorothea."
The case of the Pentameter in English is much
the same as that of the Hexameter, excepting
that perhaps even less attempt has been made, and
with less success, to naturalise the Pentameter,
and the whole matter may be summed up in the
well-known lines of the late Laureate —
" Hexameters no worse than daring Germany gave us,
Barbarous experiments, barbarous Hexameters."
If then a metre, a form cannot be transplanted or
transferred without losing more than is gained,
what is the translator to do ? He must do what
he had to do with the words and style. He must
try to find what is on the whole an equivalent.
He must consider what are the main and essential
characteristics of the metre and style of the original,
and what metre in his own language will on the
whole best contain and give back those character-
istics. And he will be helped here, as elsewhere,
by considering analogies, by considering what
V22 TUV. \\{'V OV TllANSLATION
aiitliors and what pieces, in liis own language,
generally resemble his original, and what have been
the forms adopted by them.
He may further, in an analogous though
different metre, preserve much of the essence of
the form of the original, its movement, its allitera-
tion and assonance. On this point it would be
difficult to find better precept or example than
those of that well-known master of translation and
composition in English, Latin, and Greek, C. S.
Calverley. As his biographer points out, in his
renderings both into and from the ancient languages,
where it was possible, he preserved, with extra-
ordinary skill and fidelity, form for form, cadence
for cadence. When it was not, he showed
wonderful tact in selecting a form which was
analogous and sympathetic.
A consideration of this point would have saved
translators from many deplorable errors at the
outset of their work. It w ould have saved us from
w^hat Matthew Arnold so well calls the " detestable
dance " of Dr Maginn's Homeric Ballads :
" And scarcely had she begun to wash
Ere she was aware of a grisly gash ; "
and from the not detestable but deplorable mistake
which led so good a scholar and man of letters,
and translator too in other fields, as Professor
Conington, into thinking that the stately grace, the
melancholy majesty of Virgil could possibly be
preserved in a rattling imitation of Scott. Scott
has a music, a music cheerful, breezy, martial,
noble. It is capable of a sadness and of an
elevation of its own, but it is no more like that of
Virgil than a pibroch or the strains of a drum and
TRANSLATIONS OF MRGIL 123
fife band are like a funeral march of Chopin
rendered with a full orchestra.
The metre of Homer and Virgil must remain a
difficulty for the translator, but more may probably
be done with blank verse, the recognised English
vehicle of the Epic, than has yet been done.
Tennyson's two experiments with Homer, more
especially the second and less known piece,
"Achilles over the Trench," show this. Not even
this has all the qualities of Homer, but it has many.
It is, as Mr H. W. Paul pointed out in a review
not long after the poet's death, astonishingly
faithful, even literal. But the secret of it lies in
the inimitable choice of words and combination of
words, and in the management and variation of
the rhythm. Tennyson's view about Virgil was
that, if translated into English, he ought to be
translated into Miltonic blank verse, and he used
to quote certain passages of "Paradise Lost" as
being eminently Virgilian in their movement.^
Of the characteristics of Virgil he has, of course,
shown, in his exquisite poem " To Virgil," that he
was a most sympathetic lover and judge, and it is
to be profoundly regretted that he did not include
among his experiments at least one or two transla-
tions from that author.
Meanwhile the many experiments made in
translating both Homer and Virgil are singularly
instructive to the translator. In the case of these
consummate authors it is now recognised that a
final translation can hardly be expected. Different
^ Compare Wordsworth's letter to Lord Lonsdale, Feb. 5,
1829. ("Memoir of W. Wordsworth," by Chr. Wordsworth,
vol. ii., p. 70.)
124 TIIK Airr OF TRANSLATION
translatiDMs l)i'ing out dilierent sides and portions
of their excellence : Dryden the virihty and
rhetoric of Virgil, William Morris the romance
and glamour, Lord Bo wen the majesty and rolling
harmony, and so on. This point was well put
by the late F. W. A. Myers in his Essay on Virgil,
— for its length one of the most suggestive and
original criticisms of Virgil ever written. He has
himself given some specimens of translation from
Virgil in the Heroic couplet, if that can still be
called the Heroic couplet to which he has given
an entirely new and original colour and character.
In some renderings printed now a long time ago,
but never, we believe, published, he achieved
perhaps an even greater success, and one very
curious and instructive. Few would imagine or
ever believe that it would be possible to translate
Virgil successfully into the metre and stanza of
Tennyson's " Dream of Fair Women." But those
who know Mr Myer's renderings will admit that
an astonishing degree of success has been attained.
The lesson probably is, that while the general form
of the metre is much, a great deal may be done
by the employment of the secrets of poetic sound
and diction within the general form of the metre.
Of these secrets Mr Myers was a special master, and
it is much to be desired that he should give us
some larger and longer specimens of what he could
accomplish by applying them to the rendering of
Virgil. The success of Dryden — not always, and
especially not now, sufficiently recognised — is due
in the same way to what is done within the metre.
The Heroic couplet, as we said, is trammelling and
unsuited to the rendering of Virgil, but a careful
TRANSLATION INTO THE HEROIC COUPLET 125
study of Dryden's Virgil reveals unsuspected
degrees of labour, art, and resulting beauty in his
individual phrases and combinations.
But there are places where the Heroic couplet
is suitable, where it helps and does not hinder the
translator. It is suited, as Dryden discovered,
and Pope still further displayed, for epigram, for
rhetoric, for argument, for balancing and pointing
antithesis, and so for satire or criticism, or again
for conveying a certain urbane, modish artificiality,
as of brilliant but not quite heartfelt or natural
conversation. Hence it translates, and translates
well, two different styles and metres — the Elegiac
of Ovid, and the Hexameter satire of Horace or
Juvenal. The conclusion of the couplet within
itself in the Ovidian Elegiac is admirably repre-
sented by the same conclusion within itself in the
Heroic couplet, while there is the same opportunity
when required of breaking through and carrying on.
It would not be difficult to press this parallelism
and correspondence further. There is, of course,
considerable flexibility in the Heroic couplet, and
it may be noted that Professor Conington, who
failed so conspicuously with Virgil owing to his
ciioice of a metre, more than balanced his failure
by as great a success in his rendering of Horace's
Satires and Epistles. The Preface in which he
explains the peculiar character of Horace's satiric
style is for any who care for these niceties most
excellent and valuable reading. So it may be added
in his Preface to his translation of the ^neid, a
large part of which is devoted to showing why he
ought not to have adopted the metre he has adopted.
That for the purposes of translation, where the
126 THE ART OF TRANSLATION
metre cannot bo absolutely reproduced, much may
bo done with an approximate or correspondent
metre, is shown again conspicuously in the case
of the Iambic. The Iambic l)oat is, of course,
common to Greek, Latin, and English, but the uses
made of it and the cflfects produced in practice are
somewhat different. The great Greek Iambic line,
the line of the dialogue of Greek drama, is, of course,
the Senarian, consisting of six Iambics or their
equivalents. The corresponding line in English
contains only five. The Greek line is therefore a
little longer than the English, and, considering that
translation tends to be longer than the original, it
is difficult for the translator to reproduce line by
line. Yet by manipulation this may often be done.
But, what is far more important, the movement,
vrhat Dryden calls the "breakings," the stresses,
and pauses may be so reproduced and followed
that the difference in the length of the line is
hardly felt. Some of Swinbm'ne's lines in such
" imitative " poems as " Atalanta " or " Erectheus "
ring with an absolutely Greek echo. As a speci-
men of translation, where the form of the original
is followed as closely almost as it is possible, Mr
Symond's rendering of the famous tirade of Medea,
given in his " Studies of the Greek Poets," may be
cited.
To go through other metres would be wearisome
and unnecessary. Suffice it to say, that now^ after
the great continuous effort that has been spent
from the beginning of our century upon technique
and metrification, including the return to and
revival of the EHzabethan modes, and the adoption
of certain foreign styles, the English translator has
USE OF RHYME IN TRANSLATION 127
or may have at command a greater wealth of diction
and music, of vocabulary and metres, than he ever
had before. Every poet who, Hke Coleridge
or Shelley, Keats or Tennyson, Swinbm-ne or
Bridges, really enlarges the music and colom' of
the English tongue, adds to the translator's
possibilities not only by making him more suscep-
tible to tones and nuances mmoticed before in the
music and colour of the great models of other
tongues, but by fm^nishing him with the appropriate
medium in which to reproduce them. To adduce
a single instance, there are few more entirely
successful pieces of translation than Sir Kichard
Jebb's poetic rendering of Catullus' lovely little
lyric, Diance sumus in fide. It is not, perhaps, to
be called exactly Swinburnian, yet could it have
been written before Swinbm^ne's influence had
been felt ?
Before we leave the topic of poetic translation
a word ought perhaps to be said about the much-
vexed question of rhyme. Rhyme has, if anything
ever had, the "defects of its qualities." It is an
undoubted beauty, but it is an undoubted fetter.
It is hardly found in Latin and Greek. Is it natural,
is it necessary to introduce it in translating from
these languages ? The answer would appear to be
that it belongs to what is called the genius of the
English language. It comes in under the head of
idiom and equivalent, and, subject to the con-
sideration stated above, should be used as such.
So far only a few rhythms in English have been
proved to be really successful or really pleasing
without rhyme. Among them, it is true, is the
greatest, namely, blank verse. It is an advantage
128 THE ART OF TRANSLATION
{\)V the Driginal poet jind tlio translator that it is
free from tliis trammel. But blank verse can only
he used, as we saici above, for certain purposes.
In the lyric, rhyme seems almost necessary to
counterbalance the loss involved in forsaking the
form of the original Latin or Greek. Certainly
the few undoubtedly good specimens we have of
verse translation from Latin and Greek lyrics or
elegiacs — such as those by Ben Jonson, Dryden,
Shelley, or Rossetti, or Cory's " They told me,
Heraclitus — they told me you were dead " — go far
to justify the use of rhyme. ^ This last piece does
more : so far as it goes, it thoroughly justifies
the liberal as against the literal method. It is not
literal. It does not follow the form of the original
exactly, it does not exactly follow the words ; yet
it is not mere imitation — it is successful translation.
It gives the value and the spirit of the words, the
value and the soul of the form. It is true and
moving poetry, the work of one who was a poet.
And the last word on translation of poetry is
Dryden's, "To be a thorough translator of poetry
a man must be a thorough poet."
It remains to say a few words about prose
translation, and especially about the translation of
poetry into prose. To-day, when the feeling for
style and technique in language is widespread, it is
perhaps not so necessary as it would have been a
short time ago, but for the completeness of the
argument it is necessaiy to state that writing
prose is a fine art as well as writing poetry, and
^ Since this essay was written, Dr Gilbert Murray, in his
brilliantly successful translations of Euripides, has justified on a
large scale, and in the most convincing manner, the use of rhyme.
SECRETS OF STYLE 129
that prose differs from poetry in degree rather than
in kind. Yet even now this is not always properly
appreciated. We speak, it is true, in the schools,
of "Prose Composition," but we forget the full
significance of the word "composition," and most
persons fortunately, like M. Jourdain, speak and
write prose all their lives without knowing it.
The masters of language at all times have under-
stood it. Dry den in a most happy phrase speaks
of running his thoughts into verse or giving them
"the other harmony of prose." The ancient
masters, the Greeks and Romans, understood it,
the Greeks pre-eminently. They laboured their
prose composition as carefully as their verse.
Isocrates spent ten years over a single Panegyric ;
Plato in his eightieth year was still touching up his
Dialogues — readjusting their coiffure, as the Greek
phrase has it. After his death tablets were fomid
on which he had experimented in the order of
words — exercises like the pencillings of the great
Italian artists. Style is hardly less, perhaps more,
a characteristic of prose than of verse, and no one
who is sensitive to style, who feels the quality of
the prose style of Plato or Cicero or Livy, Bossuet
or Buffon, Addison, Sir Thomas Browne, Burke,
Gibbon, Goethe, or again of those nearer our own
time, De Quincey, Newman, Ruskin, Froude,
Pater, will need to be told that the secrets are as
subtle or as many as those of verse. But what is
important is that they are for the most part the
same as those of verse. Order, rhythm, alliteration,
assonance, the choice of words, and the combination
of words, the grouping of phrases and sentences,
of paragraphs and periods, these are among them.
I
130 THE ART OF TRANSLATION
The skilful joining or introduction, or setting, the
ciil/ida jiuidura wliicli makes an old word new, or
prevents a new one from jarring or startling, belongs
as much to prose as to verse. It follows then that,
where there are style and form in a prose original,
that style and form must be preserved in a transla-
tion. It follows, too, that in translating poetry into
prose much may and must be done in this direction.
The translation of poetry into prose is neces-
sarily somewhat of a pis aller. It involves a large
and certain loss ; but it brings, too, some gain.
The freedom of the " other harmony of prose "
enables the translator to follow more closely and
faithfully the detail and the inner and incidental
movement of many originals than he could do if
trammelled by a set form, and where the form of
the original cannot be preserved this becomes so
much pure gain. In proportion as sensitiveness to
the minutige and the differences of the originals
has grown, and with this sensitiveness the despair
of reproducing them, this practice has gained
ground. Prose renderings, like those of Munro,
Butcher, Lang, Leaf, Myers, Mackail, J. Jackson,
and others, often rise to high literary beauty, and
are felt to be not only the most useful, but the most
satisfying translations available. Tennyson himself
approved this practice, as we now know from the
fine version of the Sixth Iliad printed by his son
at the end of vol. vi. of the new annotated edition
of the Poems.
When this modern style of prose translation of
verse really began, it might be difficult to say.
Goethe suggested to his own countrymen, as a
new thing, that it would be well to translate
THE " AUTHORISED VERSION '' 131
Homer into prose. But this had been successfully
done and defended by Madame Dacier in French
a century earlier. And there is one much older
version of poetry, the most successful of all, with
which we are all familiar ; so familiar that we often
forget to think of it as a specimen of translation
at all. It is, of course, the Authorised Version of
the Bible. Large portions of the Old Testament
are definitely poetic in form, and perhaps the
larger portion of the whole is essentially poetic in
character and structure. The poetic character
has certainly not been lost, but shines through in
several of the more famous versions, in the Vulgate,
in the Lutheran German, in the French, and not
least in our own version. It is to be seen, of
course, most sustainedly in the Psalms (the Prayer-
book Version usually, though not always, shows it
best) and in the Song of Songs, in Job and in
the lyrical pieces contained in the other books —
the Song to the Well, the song of Deborah, the
lament of David, and so on ; but it is not less
striking in the Prophets, or even in much of
the historical and philosophical books^ — Genesis,
Ecclesiastes, and parts of the Apocrypha. A
Scotch minister, it is related, once lost his pulpit
by preaching on the lyrical beauty of the Psalms,
but it will now be held not impermissible to use
this example, and to say that of the possibility and
possibilities, of translation of poetry into prose, of
the lines on which it should go and the canons it
should observe, there is no greater proof or monu-
ment, and none fortunately which has had greater
influence, than that afforded by these versions of
ancient Hebrew poetry, and especially by oui' own.
i:?2 rm: aim' of translation
Such are some of the main features, conditions,
and jn'inciples of the Art of Transhition. To draw
them out into rules or suggestions for practice
would not be difficult, but this would be better done
in a separate article. That it is really an art, and a
fine art, full of ditliculties, yet full of possibilities,
enough has perhaps ])een said to show. That it
has had a considerable, nay a great, influence on
all the great Aryan literatures but one, is clear.
Nor in this regard ought the Semitic literatures
to be forgotten, with their immensely important
versions of the Scriptures and the Arabic renderings
of Jewish and also of Greek authors, especially
Aristotle and Plato, the range and influence of
which extended from Spain to India. But trans-
lation has had another very important influence,
one never perhaps more important than at the
present, one still likely to increase — namely, in
education. That translation is one of the best,
perhaps the best, of literary exercises, whether it
come as the self-imposed discipline of the young
writer or the set task of the schoolboy, is beyond a
doubt. In the teaching of the classics, as they are
called in this country, nothing has been more
striking than the growth in importance of written
translation. Whereas original composition, in
Latin especially, the original copy of verse or the
Latin essay — "Latin writing," as it was signifi-
cantly called — was at the beginning of the century
the prevaiUng exercise and translation the excep-
tion, now the latter is the rule, the former a mere
survival. " Translation is the death of under-
standing." That may be true for the last stage
and for the finished scholar ; but that translation
VARIETY OF STYLE 133
is the beginning, the quickening of understanding,
is the universal belief on which the modern system
of education is based. In Germany the revised
Prussian code gave it a larger place than before.
Both in Germany and among ourselves it has
been recognised that real translation, literary
translation, not mere literal word-for-word con-
struing, is what is truly educational. At the
present moment, as applied to Latin and Greek,
it seems to have reached the highest possible
pitch, and there can be little doubt that it is the
secret of the efficiency as an educational method of
the so-called classical training. One of the reasons
why the same mental training is not attained
through the modern languages is that the difficulty
of translation from them is necessarily less ; the
other, that the experiment has never been tried in
the same way. If the same effect or anything like
what has been attained through Latin and Greek
is to be attained through French and German, the
present system of translation must be greatly
expanded. It is not enough to make the student
translate ordinary colourless exercises or letters
commercial or otherwise in English into the same
in French or German. He must be made to
distinguish, to appreciate, and to copy the various
styles, generic and individual — the style of the
orator, the historian, the philosopher, the poet,
of Bossuet or Vergniaud, of Buffon or Beranger,
of Goethe or Heine, of Kant or Von Ranke, of
Machiavelli or Leopard i.
Then, and only then, will the student trained
in modern languages learn the gamut of these
tongues and of his own.
IV
DANTE AND THE ART OF POETRY
It may seem superfluous, if not impertinent, at this
time of day to remind the world that Dante is a
poet — not less than a poet, but also not more than a
poet ; a poet greater than most if not quite all otlic^rs,
more comprehensive, of more universal appeal, yet
after all and before all a poet, with the merits, but
also — for better and for worse — with the limitations,
of a poet. Yet it is precisely at this time of day
that the reminder is needed. Dante was certainly
never more widely praised, probably never more
highly appreciated ; but he is in some danger of
being most praised and most appreciated, not for
that which he most truly desired to be, and that
which he most truly is, but for the accessories and
accidents rather than the essence of his work.
Dante is a whole so vast that his reader is often-
times tempted to forget the whole in the parts.
Dante as a philosopher, a politician, an historian,
a geographer, an astronomer, a geometrician —
Dante as an Aristotelian, a Platonist, even by
anticipation an Hegelian — Dante as a Guelph, a
Ghibelline, an Imperialist, a Catholic, enlists suc-
cessively the several interests of those who come to
DANTE A POET FIRST 135
him with special interests of their own. Dante is
all these or something of all these, but all these
would matter little, would not make Dante, if he
were not above all a poet. And this is what he
himself sought and strove to be. To be a poet, to
succeed as a poet, to be even a poet laureate,
recognised, decorated — this was the instinct of his
childhood, the inspiration of his youth, the task of
his manhood. And if it was not only in order to
be a poet that he labom^cd at philosophy and
science and rhetoric, still it was to this end that he
bent all the powers of his intellect, on this that he
concentrated all the mighty resources of his heart.
His own countrymen in simpler ages nearer his
own time recognised this fact beyond a doubt.
Boccaccio says plainly that it was ambition that
made Dante a poet, ambition for fame and glory,
and that he chose this calling because it led, like
the life of heroic deeds, to a crown — because the
poet is the rival of the hero ; and there is much in
Dante's own language, which indeed Boccaccio is
but echoing, to confirm this view.
Of all purely human energies, Dante ranks that
of the poet highest. The place occupied by the
poets, and the parts assigned to them, in the
"Divine Comedy," are very remarkable. The
name of poet, we read, is that which honours most
and most endures. The great Pagan poets are
stationed within the gate of Hell, it is true, but in a
region apart, a region of light amid the darkness ;
they have such honour^ that it separates them
^ In the lines which describe their fate ("Inferno/' iv. 71 et
secj.), the words "onrevol, onori, onranza, onrata, onorate," are
curiously repeated, till the whole passage may be said literally
136 1) AN IK AND THE ART OF POETRY
tVoiii the inannor of the rest, the lionourable name
\\ hicli sounds of (hem on earth gaining them grace
and advancement in heaven. As Pagans they must
endure the doom of Pagans, but of honom', apart
from divine justice, none have more. It is theirs to
pass, (hyshotl as it were, over the rivulet of Elo-
quence, and to enter through the Seven Gates into
the Noble Castle, where, in a serene air, neither sad
nor glad, they rest for ever among the wise and the
bold. Such is the spot where " Orpheus and where
Homer are." But not Orpheus and Homer only.
It is enough to wear the name of a true poet to gain
admittance to their elysium, and Dante includes in
it not only "Horace the satirist," Lucan and Ovid,
Plautus and Terence, Juvenal and Persius,
Emupides and Simonides, but others who are to us,
and must have been in a still greater measure to
Dante himself, little more than names — Agathon
and Antiphon, Csecilius and Varro. All have
equal honom^ with the kings and conquerors of the
world, and of the realms of the mind, with Caesar
and Cicero, with Plato and Aristotle, with Hippo-
crates and Galen, with Hector and with Saladin the
generous. So again, in the great passage which
opens the "Paradiso," we read that the triumph of
the poet is as high and rare as that of the Caesar.
"Joy should there be in Delphi when any thirsts
for the seldom plucked laurel."
But this is not all. To the poets the poets
to re-echo with " honour, honour, honour to them, eternal
honour evermore."
This sort of repetition, it may be noted, is a well-known
figure in Proven 9al poetry, and is known as the "mot tornat."
A play on these same or kindred words occurs in the " Ensen-
hamen " of Sordello, vv. 1050 fF.
DANTE AND VIRGIL 137
have ever been kind, and the sweetest and aptest
praises of poetry have in all ages been those penned
by the brethren of the craft. But no great poet has
ever, in all history, honoured another as Dante has
honoured Virgil The position of Virgil in the
"Divine Comedy" is unique in literature. The
language which Dante holds towards him at meeting
and in parting — the language which he makes
Sordello and Statins hold towards him, with its
intensity of grateful love and admiration, implies
before everything Dante's view of poetry, and of
poets such as Virgil. Virgil is Dante's " Author,"
a word perhaps of special meaning on Dante's lips,
and his Master. Dante can plead with him by
virtue of long study and of mighty love. Again
and again he quotes his words or his thoughts. A
single epithet of Virgil avails with him to lift one
who in the " ^neid " is a mere name, a Pagan
princeling, with Trajan and Constantine to a place
more advanced than that of Virgil himself, high and
bright in bliss. ^ We have only to look under the
name Virgiho in Dr Toynbee's Dictionary to see
collected together the titles by which Dante apos-
trophises the Roman poet — his loved, his dear, his
wise, his true guide, the sea of all wisdom, the
dear pedagogue, the lofty doctor, the mightiest of
the Muses. Sordello, that distant and disdainful
spirit, motionless and unpertm^bed in his pride like a
couchant lion, leaps to life and love as he greets his
brother Mantuan. Statius, just released from Pur-
gatory, would be willing to spend another year amid
its dolours only to have lived on earth with Virgil.
^ " Rhipeus justissimus unus," " lEn," ii. 426. Cp. " Par.,"
XX. 68.
188 DANTE AND THE ART OF POETRY
He forgets his condition in the desire to "clasp
him, every word of w lioni is a dear token of love."
In the consummate moment wlien Dante himself at
last sees Beatrice, his first impulse is to turn to
VirL^il with Virgil's own words, those words which
doubtless had often risen to his lips in real life, " I
feel the footprints of the olden flame." And when
he finds that his confidant is gone, he forgets even
his new bliss and gain in passionate weeping for his
loss.
All this is much, but more than all, if we
consider the profound and calculated significance
and proportion of all Dante's important figm'es, is
the mere fact of Virgil's position in the poem.
Poetry, in the person of Virgil, is Dante's guide
through two-thirds of his journey. Poetry is the
highest embodiment of human wisdom, the purest
glory of the human race, the best human pilot of
humanity.
But Virgil, it may be said, and to a less degree
Statius and the other great ancients, are seen by
Dante through a haze of conventional reverence ;
they are heroic figures ; they are traditional glories
— mythic, symbolical, and as such accepted and
partly taken on trust by Dante. Even if it were so,
Dante's love of poetry, the importance he attaches
to it as such, is not less conspicuous in his mention
of the poets of his own time.
"Even like the two sons that Statius tells of,
when they beheld again their mother, even such was
I when I heard name himself the best father of me
and mine who ever used sweet and grateful rhymes
of love.
" And I to him : Your sweet ditties, so long as
THE DANTE "BROTHERHOOD" 139
modern use shall last, will make dear their very
ink."
It is thus he introduces Guido Guinicelli. But
Guido tells him he can point to a still better
master.
There is a warmth of special personal interest
in the passage which follows. It is of course
Dante's practice to introduce everywhere his
personal friends and foes, to embody his loves and
hates in concrete examples. His dealing with
poetry is no exception, and throws a light on the
history of the poet and his art. It has sometimes
been said that no good art is produced except in a
circle or a school, a brotherhood or a clique. Like
all rules, this has its exceptions, but Dante is not
one. Despite his tremendous individuality and
originality, he certainly comes before us at first as a
member of a little coterie or clique of poets, a
youthful brotherhood, striving, as so many youthful
brotherhoods have striven, to strike out a new
style. And nowhere does the camaraderie of such
a brotherhood receive more touching or noble
glorification than where Dante introduces his own
early poetic friends and compeers into his immortal
song. The idea of "Dante and his Circle" has
been made familiar to us by the genius and learning
of Mr D. G. Rossetti. In the w ords which Dante
puts into the mouth of Guido Guinicelli, it is
perhaps not fanciful to discover an echo or reminis-
cence of the opinions, possibly of the very language,
held by this little coterie, when they lived and
talked together, in the first infallibility of youth : —
"As for ditties of love and prose of romance,"
140
DANTK AND THE ART OF POETRY
says Guido, "this one excelled all who Avrote them.
Let tlie tools pratt' who believe that the Limousin^
is before him. So the elder generation cried up
Gnittone of Arezzo, until at last the truth pre-
vailed." -
The better master whom Guido introduces is
Arnaut Daniel, the Proven9aI poet, an imitation
of whose language Dante proceeds to build, so
to speak, into the walls of his own cathedral.
That Dante should thus honour these poets
of his own and somewhat preceding times is to
us remarkable. But what emphasises his action,
and what is still more significant of his place
among his poetic friends, is that we have it on
record that Cino da Pistoia, a contemporary poet
who knew Dante well, makes it a serious complaint
that Dante omitted to mention yet another minor
poet of the time, one Onesto di Boncima.
Cino finds two faults in the "Divina Com-
media." Two faults — so many and yet no more
in so great, so large a work — curiosity is roused
to hear what they are.
" One is that holding with Sordello high
Discourse, and with the rest who sang and taught.
He of Onesto di Boncima nought
Has said, who was to Arnauld Daniel nigh." ^
1 The Limousin is Giraut de Borneil, of Essidueil, a castle
near Limoges.
- " Purg.," xxvi. 120. See Butler and his note ad loc. See
also " Academy," April 13th, 1889. Fra Guittone of Arezzo
died in 1293, and thus belongs to the generation before Dante.
He is coupled, in " Purg.," xxiv., with the Notary, Jacopo
da Lentino, and Buonagiunta Urbiciani of Lucca.
3 Cino da Pistoia : Sonnet xii. ; Rossetti's translation in
" Dante and his Circle." Onesto di Boncima of Bologna
was a doctor of laws. He is mentioned and quoted by Dante in
the " V. E.," I., XV. : " Honestus, et alii poetantes Bononiae."
BROTHER POETS 141
The passage about the two Guides in the
eleventh canto of the "Purgatory" is so well
known as not to need quotation. The second
Guido may be Cavalcanti, while it is often
maintained that the third poet, who "perchance
may chase both one and the other from the nest,"
is Dante himself. All worldly fame, even the
poet's, is but a breath ; but the phrase La gloria
delta lingua betrays Dante's feelings, and so does
the curious expression, Se non e giunta dalV etati
grosse.
Sordello, the good Sordello, has been already
noticed. His prominence and importance in the
" Commedia " can hardly be attributed to any cause
but that he too was a poet, even if his attitude
toward Virgil did not prove this.^ The same
would appear to be the reason of the place and
part given to Folquet of Marseilles^ in Paradise.
A troubadour -bishop, he has the rare quality of
miiting art and religion ; he has passed fi'om
earthly to heavenly love ; he is there where poetry
finds its true end and explanation ; there where one
gazes into the art " which makes beautiful with so
great affection " ; there " where the good is discerned
whereby the world on high turns that below."
^ He is specially mentioned in the "De Vulg. Eloq.," I., xv. 8.
" Sordellus de Mantua, qui tantus vir eloquentiae non solum in
poetando sed quomodo loquendo patrium vulgare disseruit."
Dante's view of him may have been further influenced by
his having been in some sense his pioneer and precursor.
It seems certain that Dante was indebted to Sordello's lament
on the death of Blacatz for the idea of making him the
" showman " of the princes in " Ante-Purgatory."
■^ "Par.," ix. 37. He, too, is mentioned in the "V. E.," H.,
vi., among the famous singers, the diclaiores illustres, and a
line of his is quoted.
142 DANTE AND THE ART OF TOETRY
Siu'h passages are enough, and more than
ouDiigli, to show what was Dante's chief earthly
ambition, bk^ided, it is true, with a higher aim
which at first fosters and then overpowers it, but
in which, though merged, it is not lost. It
was to be a poet, a "regular" poet, a great
poet like Virgil or Homer, one of the company
of the sovereign bards, the sixth among such
great intelligences. To write poetry was his
overmastering instinct and interest from youth
to age. Every mood, every phase, of his life
lends itself to, passes into, this form of expression.
He returns to it again and again, with wider
view^s, with greater knowledge, with intenser
passion. Foiled in his practical career, in exile
and wandering he gives himself to this end.
Poetry is to win all back for him. Worn, wasted,
whitened with age, he is to conquer his obdurate
country. He is to return in triumph to Florence,
a poet recognised, admitted, accepted ; and over
the font w^here in infancy he was baptised he
is to take the poet's crown of laurel : — ^
" Con alti'a voce omai, con altro vello
Ritoriierc) poeta, ed in sul fonte
Del mio battesmo prender6 '1 capello."
Such was Dante's personal and intellectual
ambition. But why was it so ? To be a true,
a great poet — what did this mean for him, and
how did he think it could be compassed ? What,
in other words, did Dante consider to be the art
and function of the poet? What is this great
poet's theory of poetry ?
1 Cp. "The Life," by Boccaccio, § 8, and del Virgilio's
First Eclogue, vv. 42-44.
TALENT AND GENIUS 143
Have we the material for answering this
question? Not perhaps altogether, but to a
large extent we have. We have it partly in
Dante's poems, partly in his prose works, which
are largely analytical and critical. Poets, says
Aristotle,^ are of two kinds. Poetry is '? €v<pvov£ tj
ixavLKov, the product of either a fine talent or
a fine frenzy; or, to put it a little differently,
poets are either conscious and self-critical or
unconscious and instinctive. "Poetry," says one
of the most gifted of our living poets —
" may be something more than an art or a science,
but not because it is not, strictly speaking, a science
or an art. There is a science of verse as surely
as there is a science of mathematics ; there is
an art of expression by metre as certainly as
there is an art of representation by painting. To
some poets the understanding of this science, the
mastery of this art, would seem to come by a
natural instinct which needs nothing but practice
for its development, its application, and its per-
fection. Others, by patient and conscientious study
of their own abilities, attain a no less unmistakable
and a scarcely less admirable success."^
The words of Aristotle were probably not known
to Dante, ^ but they were doubtless known to
one of his first critical biographers, Lionardi Bruni,
^ Aristotle, "Poetics," xvii. 2 (1455a), ed. Butcher. See also
Professor Butcher's excellent comment on the same, p. 368,
with note, and compare Matthew Arnold's preface to his
" Selections from Byron," p. xvi.
2 Swinburne, "Studies in Prose and Poetry," pp. 132, 133.
2 Dante almost certainly was not acquainted with the
" Poetics " of Aristotle. See Moore, " Studies in Dante," First
Series (1896), pp. 8 and 93. On the other hand, he seems
to have known the " Ars Poetica " of Horace fairly well,
and probably at first hand. Ibid., 197.
144 DANTE AND THE AllT OF POETRY
who distinij:iiislies between the poets wlio write
by virtue of a certain innate force, which may be
called furore, and those poeti lltterati e scienti-
Jiciy who compose per istudio, per dlsciplina
ed arte e per prudenza, and adds : e di questa
seconda spczie fu Dante.
And he is certainly right, though so inspired,
so great, so forcible is Dante, such the fire, such
the sweep and scope alike of his imagination
and his passion, that he seems to unite both
qualities. Ma^t/co'?, ei)0u>H : fine frenzy, fine talent —
the words seem coined to describe, as indeed they
were perhaps suggested by, the contrast between
^schylus and Sophocles. That contrast, be it
remembered, is not in truth the contrast of the
inspired with the uninspired, of the artistic with
the inartistic. None could truly say that ^Eschylus
is not a consummate artist or that Sophocles is not
divinely inspired. It is rather the contrast hinted
above, of the conscious and the trained with the
unconscious and natural artist. We may re-
member how Sophocles himself said to ^schylus :
"You do what is right, ^schylus, but without
knowing it." Dante reminds us at first sight
more of the elemental and spontaneous grandeur of
^schylus, but if we look more closely we find
in him the calculated poise and finish of Sophocles.
Not Sophocles himself was more self - critical.
Goethe tells us that he " had nothing sent him in his
sleep " : there was no page of his, as Carlyle says,
but he well knew how it came there. Dante
doubtless could and would have made the same
profession. Nay more, alone among the greatest
of the great poets, unless indeed we are to admit
DANTE'S METHOD 145
this very Goethe to that crowning category, he
has given us with some fulness an account of his
views of poetry and of the theory of his practice.
The art of Homer, be it the art of a man or
of a nation, is consummate. But of Homer,
the artist, one or many, the maker or makers
of the "Iliad" and "Odyssey," we know nothing.
A few allusions tell us of the guise and manner
of the Homeric minstrel, of his conception of
inspiration, his mode of exposition, but that is all.
Had chance preserved to us Sophocles' prose
work on the Chorus, in which he combated the
practice of the elder poets and defended his own,
we should have known something perhaps of
the theory of the most artistic of first-rate Greek
poets about his art. Of Virgil's method of
composition nothing is recorded save two or three
interesting and not improbable traits. Shake-
speare, in a few well-known and striking passages,
flashes the illumination of his myriad-faceted mind
on poetry and the poets. Milton, a more disciplined
artist, in noble prose, reminding us of Dante,
whom indeed he avowedly had before him, tells
us what in aim and training a true poet should
be, and discloses the aspiration and the creed
with which he himself set about his great work.
But Dante gives us far more than any of these. In
his "Vita Nuova" we have Dante's "Wahrheit
und Dichtung," the "Wahrheit und Dichtung"
of a diviner nature than that of Goethe, the
story of the growth of his soul, the passion of
his boyhood and youth, with its reflection in his
early songs and sonnets, and finally his resolve
on the threshold of middle life to close that book
K
146 DANTK AND THE ART OF POETRY
and open a now one only when years and study
should have enabled him to write concerning
his lady what " hath not before been written
of any woman." In the "Convivio," written
later in life, he returns upon this theme and
philosophises it, giving us an elaborate account
of his second period of study and self-discipline,
and much dissertation upon both the subject
and the method of poetry. Finally, in the book
*'De Vulgari Eloquentia," certainly projected after
he had begun the " Convivio," and probably written
later, he sets out the theory and grammar of his art.
To attempt such a task at all, to view poetry in
this way as a science and an art with definite
principles and even rules, may seem to some a
little strange, especially in a poet ; but in reality it
is not so, and perhaps only appears so to the
English reader. England is the very home of
poetry, but it is precisely in England that its
genesis is for the most part least understood.
England, in art as in science, has been the country
of individual genius, not of traditional schools, of
intuition rather than of system. To the Italian, as
to the Greek and Latin mind, it seems a natural or
at any rate a familiar view. It is significant that
in the "Lives" of Dante, alike that by Boccaccio
and that by Bruni, there are found disquisitions on
the "Art of Poetry." To Dante himself it was
doubtless f^imiliar from the first. He was brought
up on the great classical Latin authors, with their
exact forms and metres, and on the traditional
comment and criticism which had come down along
with them from antiquity. Though ancient they
were not removed from him as they are from our-
LATIN AND VERNACULAR 147
selves by the barrier of a dead medium. Latin
was still a living language, a living voice of poesy.
So Dante doubtless acquired at school that art
of the schools which he retained through life — the
art of writing Latin verse ; the art to which in his
old age Joannes de Virgilio challenged him, and
with which he replied to the challenge ; the art
with which he actually began perhaps to write the
"Divine Comedy," that art to which, however, he
himself more than any other was by his own
example and success to deal the death-blow.
But side by side with the older lore and practice
of the schools, and the precept, and, to a slight
extent, the example of his " master " Brunetto, he
came under another and even more potent influence,
that of the still new art of those living friends,
slightly older or contemporary, among whom he
found himself
When and how Dante began his practice of the
art of spontaneous poetry in the vernacular we do
not know ; but it is clear that it was very early in his
career. He tells us himself that when his first great
vision came to him he had already discovered for
himself the art of expressing himself in rhyme, and
it would appear that he was familiar with the idea
of exchanging poems with those who were known
poets of that day. The sonnet which stands first
in the "Vita Nuova," and which is the outcome of
that vision, was certainly not Dante's first essay in
poetry. It is too good for a first attempt, and indeed
he tells us himself that he has passed by many
things which may be imagined by the pattern of
those which he is giving.
The " Vita Nuova," then, displays to us the
148 DANTE AND THE ART OF POETRY
figiu'e of one who was from the first a lover and a
stiHloiit of ])oetry. When the boy of nine met
with the girl younger by a few months, and con-
ceived the inspiration of his life, he was already
potentially, but perhaps also actually, a poet.
Possibly already, though probably not till later,
he could apply to his feeling words from Homer :
" She seemed the daughter not of mortal man, but
of a God." Certainly from that hour his poetic
impulse began. Poetry and love with Dante went
ever hand in hand.
" lo mi son un che, quando
Amor mi spira, noto, ed a quel modo
Che detta dentro, vo significando."
This is the plain meaning or implication of the
" Vita Nuova " itself, which it seems best to follow,
notw^ithstanding the difficulties, as old as the
" Vita " and " Compendio " of Boccaccio, to which
Dr Moore has called attention.
As the book proceeds we see the practice of
Dante gradually growing in scope and subtlety.
Love is the spring and source, but love is not
enough. Form and art are from the first apparent.
Dante has all the forms of the tj'ovatori at his
command — the Sonnet, the Ballata, the Canzone.
He uses these various forms as the nature of the
occasion prompts or requires. This he implies in
the introduction to the first Canzone. But he
further varies the form, in its divisions, to suit the
sense. Thus, Sonnet vii., he tells us, he does not
divide, because "a division is only made to open
the meaning of the thing divided," whereas Sonnet
ix. is divided into as many as four parts, four
A PROFESSIONAL POET 149
things being therein narrated, while the last sonnet
of the "Vita Nuova" comprises five parts, and
might, he says, even be divided piii sottilmente
than he has divided it.
Dante, then, all along shows in his attitude
towards poetry several marked characteristics
which we must never forget if we wish properly
to appreciate his poetry and his place among
poets. From the first he regards poetry as being
definitely an art, an art with a tradition and
examples, an art which may, nay, which must, be
learned from the examples, and from those who
have the tradition. Certain it is that directly he
appears in his own strength he appears as a pro-
fessed and we may even say a professional poet.
As such apparently he was recognised and won
some fame quite early, and when he qualified for full
citizenship by joining the College of Physicians
and Apothecaries, he was entered as Dante d'
Aldighieri, Poeta Fiorentino. It is a tradition
not incredible, perhaps not improbable, at any rate
significant, that he became a Professor of Poetiy at
Ravenna, and lectured on the art to many pupils.^
As a poet he lived, as a poet he became famous,
as a poet, and perhaps in the garb of a poet, he
was buried ; and this attitude of the self-conscious
avowed poet pervades all his prose works. In the
*' Vita Nuova," as we have seen, he distinctly takes
up the position of a man of letters, and a critic of
himself and of others. In the "Convivio," his
second prose work, he goes fm'ther. His attitude
there is very curious. The piece, especially the
^ See the Prolegomena to Wicksteed and Gardner's '' Dante
and Giovanni del Virgilio," pp. 85^ 86.
150 DANTF. AND THE ART OF POETRY
fourth treatise, is full of disquisitions on the art of
poetry. ])ante quotes the poets Virgil, Statins,
Luean, Juvenal ; he discoiu'ses of the styles suitable
to different themes, of the art of embeUishing a poem
m concluding it ; but, above all, like some professors
of fine art, he admits us to his studio, or rather con-
verts it into a class-room, writes a poem as it were
on the black board, and then explains, if not how, at
least why all is done as it is. The letter to Can
Grande adds a few touches on the kinds and parts
of poetry, and especially, of course, of comedy, and
the " Divine Comedy " in particular.
It is, however, in the " De Vulgari Eloquentia "
that he sets out his view most systematically, and
it is from this treatise that his attitude towards
poetry as a formal art is to be gathered. If Dante
really lectured on poetry this treatise may be the
substance of his lectures ; at least we may say that
had he lectured on poetry this is what his lectures
would have been like. For the treatise on the
Vulgar Tongue is in reality a treatise de Ai'te
Poetical As Boccaccio says of it, in the "Vita,"
" Dante wrote a brochure in Latin prose which he
entitled 'De Vulgari Eloquentia,' in which he
intended to instruct those who wished to learn the
art of modern poetry, 'del dire in rima."' As its
title runs, it is a treatise on language ; but it is
really a treatise on language as relative to poetry,
on the vulgar or vernacular language as appropriate
to the vernacular poetry of Dante's immediate
predecessors, of his contemporaries and himself.
It is therefore at once an historic document of
1 In 1705 the Professorship of Poetry at Wittenberg was
styled a Chair of Eloquence.
THE "DE VULGARI ELOQUENTIA" 151
great value for Dante's time, and an analytical
and critical work of still greater value for Dante's
own theory of poetry. As we have it, it is im-
perfect and consists of only two books. There
were to have been at least four.
The first is more strictly philological, and is
devoted to discussing the genesis of the various
languages of the world, with a view to discovering
which is the best, or at any rate the best for the
Italian poet. It ends by pronouncing that the
best language for this purpose is the Latinum
vulgare illustre, or grammatical vernacular of Italy.
The second book, which is more strictly de Arte
Poetica, needs more detailed consideration.
Dante begins by asking whether, this being
established as the best language, those who write
poetry in Italian should use it. On the surface,
he says, the answer would appear to be yes,
because — and the saying is notable for Dante's
attitude towards poetry — every one who writes
verses ought to adorn or beautify his verse as much
as possible. But it should be with an appropriate
beauty. The best horseman should have the best
horse, since it is appropriate to him, and the best
conception the best language. But the best con-
ceptions can only exist where knowledge and talent
are. Those who write poetry without knowledge
and talent ought not to use the best language. A
bos ephippiatus, or "a pig in a baldric," is not
beautified, but rendered hideous and ridiculous.
Again, not only not all poets, but not all themes,
deserve the best language. How then are themes
to be classified ? Salus, Venus, virtus — these are
the highest things, which ought to be treated in
152 DANTE AND THE ART OF POETRY
the best manner ; and the best themes of verse are
correspondingly, "prowess in arms," the "kindhng
of love," tlie " ruHng of the will." So the best poets
of the vulgar tongue have sung — Bertran de Born
of the sword, Arnaut Daniel of love, Giraut de
Borneil of righteousness, Cino da Pistoia of love,
and his friend (Dante himself) of righteousness.
So much for language in general. Now of
form. How, Dante asks, are these themes to be
tied together ? There are many forms which poets
of the vulgar tongue have used, some the canzone,
some ballads, some sonnets, some illegitimate and
irregular modes. Of these we hold, says Dante,
the canzone to be the most excellent. But what
is the best form of the canzone ? For many, says
Dante, take their form by chance rather than as
art dictates. And here we must remember, he
says, that we have called the versifiers in the vulgar
tongue for the most part poets, and poets certainly
they are if we shall rightly consider poetry, which
is nothing else than feigning by means of rhetoric
thrown into a musical form—'' Quae nihil aliud est
quam fictio rhetorica in musicaque posita."
But though poets, they are different from the
great, that is, the regular, poets, who have written
poetry in the grand style, and with regular art,
magno sermone et arte regulari, whereas these,
as we have said, write as chance dictates. The
more closely we imitate these great poets the more
correctly shall we write. But the first thing is for
each to choose a weight suited to his shoulders,
even as our master Horace prescribed : —
" Sumite materiam vestris qui scribitis aequam
Viribus."
THEME AND STYLE 153
Next, when our theme is decided on, we must
|) decide on the style, whether it shall be tragic,
comic, or elegiac. If a tragic theme is to be ours,
then we must employ the more noble vernacular,
and must tie our canzone accordingly. But if a
comic theme, then we must take now a middle,
now a low, vernacular ; if an elegiac theme, then
nothing but humble or sad language will suit. Let
us pass by the other styles and treat of the tragic
style.
"And because, if we remember rightly, we
proved that the highest is worthy of the highest,
and because the tragic is the highest of styles, there-
fore those themes which need the highest treatment
must be sung in this style alone, namely, the themes
of valour, love, and virtue, and the thoughts to
which they gave birth, that no accident may make
them base.
"Let poets all and sundry, therefore, be
warned, and discern well what we say ; and when
they intend to sing these themes absolutely, or
the thoughts which flow absolutely and directly
from them, let them first drink of Helicon, then
tune their lyre to pitch and so take the plectrum
with confidence, and begin in due form. But to
make the canzone and the distinction as is fitting,
there's the rub, hoc opus et labor est, since never
without energy of genius and assiduity of art
and an intimate acquaintance with the sciences can
it be done. They who achieve it, these are they
whom the poet in the sixth of the ^neids calls
beloved of God, by fiery virtue lifted to the skies,
and the sons of heaven, though he be speaking in
a figure.
"Let then their folly confess itself, who,
without art or knowledge, trusting only in talent,
rush into singing the highest themes in the highest
154 DANTE AND TIll^ ART OF rOKTRV
style. Lot them desist from such presumption,
and if by their natural sluggishness they are geese,
let them not attempt to emulate the starward
soaring eagle."
Dante proceeds to discuss in order, first the best
metre, which he decides to be the hendecasyllabic ;
then the best construction ; finally the best diction ;
carefully making good each point with illustrations.
The detail into which he enters is most significant.
*' A sieve must be used to sift out noble words ; "
" polysyllables are ornamental ; " and so on.
As Mr Howell well says, the minuteness of
his divisions and subdivisions and the elabora-
tion of his rules disclose in part the secret
of the extremely artificial canzoni which seem to
flow so easily from the poet's pen, and show us
within what rigid restrictions his genius was
content to work.
Such, so far as we have it, is Dante's theory
of the art of poetry. It is unfortunate that we do
not possess that portion of the "De Vulgari
Eloquentia" which would have treated of the
comic and elegiac styles, and more particularly of
the comic, to which technically the "Divine
Comedy " belongs — topics touched on in the letter
to Can Grande. The main points of the theory,
however, emerge clearly enough. Poetry, accord-
ing to Dante's view, is an art, one of the fine arts,
an art distinct and definite and difficult, in which
success cannot be attained without knowledge,
without long study, without laborious practice.
There is poetry and poetry, there are poets and
poets, but all must conform to the laws of their art.
For what is poetry? Technically and in terms,
MEANING OF "FICTIO" 155
as we saw, poetry is ^^fictio rhetorica in musicaque
posita." Such is Dante's brief and pregnant
definition. Unfortunately both the reading and
the rendering of this central passage are somewhat
in dispute/ but three elements, or two at any rate,
are seen pretty clearly.
First, poetry is fictio, finzione, fiction, feigning,
invention, imaginative description, the statement
not of fact, but of fancy. It is at once creation
and imitation, or something between the two. It
does not appear that Dante was acquainted with
Aristotle's formal treatise on poetry, but possibly
Aristotle's teaching may have filtered down to
him. Certainly if this be what he meant by flctio,
1 The Grenoble MS. almost certainly, the Trivulzian
certainly, gives the words as quoted above. And so Trissino
read, rendering verbatim : " quale non e altro che una finzione
rettorica e posta in musica." Professor Rajna, the most recent
editor, in his large edition of 1896, introduced a conjectural
addition, reading "fictio rhetorica versificata in musicaque
posita." In his smaller edition of 1897, however, he drops
" versificata " and adopts a smaller alteration, reading " fictio
rhetorica musice composita." As to the meaning, he thinks
it must remain in doubt, unless it be found that the definition
is not Dante's own, but borrowed, and the source be discovered.
If it be Dante's own, " fictio " probably means " finzione." If
the definition be borrowed, it may mean no more than "com-
positio." As to " musica " and " musice," Rajna adopts the
larger view, relying mainly on " Convivio," iv. 2, and iv. 6. For
Professor Rajna's views the writer is indebted partly to his
critical note, partly to a private letter to Dr Paget Toynbee,
Mr Howell, on the contrary, renders merely : " Poetry is a
rhetorical composition set to music." That " fictio " may mean
merely a composition is possible; that "musica" means merely
music seems hardly possible. The subject, however, is too long
for a note, and calls for a separate disquisition. The older
translators appear to favour the view adopted above. And the
" D. C." itself is, of course, a "fictio" throughout, though much
of it is based on fact and experience. Cp. Leynardi, p. 224.
156 DANTE AND 'JIIE ART OF POETRY
he is in agreement with Ai'istotle's teaching as a
wlu)le.'
Den Jonson, it may be noted, says very much
the siime in his "Discoveries." "A poet is that
which by the Greeks is call'd xar e^oxvv o -n-oiriTyg, a
maker or a fainer ; his art, an art of imitation or
faiuing, expressing the Hfe of man in fit measure,
numbers, and harmony, according to Aristotle : from
the word Troieli', which signifies to make or fayne."
Secondly, it is rhetorica. But rhetoric means for
Dante all that it meant for his great master, the
science and the art of ruling the passions of man
by understanding them, of dealing therefore with
his thoughts cind emotions in their various relations,
and, again, the science and the art of dealing with
language. Rhetoric in this sense touches on the
one side moral and mental philosophy, on the other
grammar. In the "Convivio" it appears as the
art of pleasing the passions by words, and corre-
sponds as such to the Heaven of Venus.
Thirdly, it is in musica posita, or musice
composita. But, again, music meant for Dante
all, or almost all, that it meant for Plato, or
perhaps we should rather say that it had not lost
altogether its original two-fold Greek meaning.
It still implies the music of words as well as of
notes. Perhaps the best illustration of this is to be
found in three passages in the " Convivio " : one
where he speaks of the poets who have tied
together their words with mosaic art, " ' coll ' arte
musaica le loro parole hanno legate " ; another, where
1 See especially Professor Butcher on Aristotelian and
Baconian views of poetry, " Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and
Fine Art," pp. 174, 373.
CHARM IN POETRY 157
music, to which the Heaven of Mars is compared,
is stated to have two beauties, one of them being
the beauty of relation, such as is seen in harmonised
words and songs ; ^ and finally, a third, in which he
says expressly that the beauty {beUezza) of the
song he is discussing, as distinguished from its
goodness (bonta), depends on three things — the
construction, which belongs to the grammarian ;
the order of the discourse, which belongs to the
rhetorician ; and the rhythm of its parts, which
belongs to the musician.
It is of the essence then of poetry to be
harmonised, to be artistic, to be beautiful. It is
not sufficient, Dante says over and over again, that
it should be excellent, that it should be good in
matter, that it should even be coldly beautiful. It
should have beauty of form and sound, of order
and diction. It should have sweetness and
harmony, dolcezza e armonia. As Horace says,
in words which Dante doubtless knew and
approved, though he does not actually quote
them : —
" Non satis est pulchra esse poemata ; dulcia sunto
Et quocuiique volent animum auditoris agunto."
But this is not inconsistent with its being true
and natural and simple. Rather it is beautiful
because it is true. The beauty arises out of the
truth. Poetry is the beautiful voice of truth to
feeling and truth to fact ; it is beautiful, therefore,
with the beauty of propriety. No one ever
^ In " V. E." II., viii. 50, acantio is defined as " actio completa
dictantis verba modulationi armonizata." It is " fabricatio
verborum armonizatorura," as opposed to " ipsa modulatio."
ir.8 DANTE AND TTIK ART OF POETRY
recognised this more fully than Dante. Few have
ever been capable of recognising it so fully. For
it is just in his universality, his catholicity, and
withal the adequacy of his power to his knowledge,
of his art to liis matter, that he is so transcend-
ent ly great.
When not long ago Tennyson died, Mr Watts-
Dunton well said that the most characteristic
thing about him was " a great veracity." This was
true of Tennyson ; truer it could not be of any poet.
It is true of many — shall we say of all the best
poets ? It is true on the grandest scale of Dante.
The famous passage —
" E s' io al vero son timido amico
Temo di perder viver tra colore
Che questo tempo chiameranno antico " —
has even a wider and fuller application than Dante
intended. The secret of his immortality has been,
before all, his truth.
Wordsworth, in his well-known essay, complains
of poets whose eye never seems to have been
" steadily fixed upon their object." Such a com-
plaint could never be made of Dante. He says
himself, in the remarkable canzone which heads
the fourth treatise in the "■ Convivio,"
" Chi pinge figura,
Se lion pu6 esser lei, non la pu6 porre,"
and he explains more fully in the comment, " No
painter can portray any figure unless he makes
himself first by a mental effort that which the
figure ought to be." And in the passage quoted
above he implies that the secret of his style, the
new sweet style which the earlier poets could not
TRUTH IN POETRY 159
compass, was its sincerity and simplicity, its truth
to feeling.
But the new style is not only simple and true :
it is sweet, it is beautiful, it is poetic. To be
sincere and honest, true to oneself, "not to
manipulate one's feelings," is the secret of all art.
But art, in that it is art, also expresses faithfully
what the artist truly feels. And poetic art goes
further : it expresses it beautifully and with a
special kind of beauty. Prose may be true ; prose
may be, to make use of Milton's phrase, simple,
sensuous, and passionate ; prose may contain many
of the elements of poetry. Dante's prose is often
highly poetic, both in structure and in quality.
Nothing is more striking than the way in which
it resembles his poetry in the ideas and even in the
turns of expression. Two instances taken from the
"Vita Nuova" will suffice to show this. One is
very simple : it is the mode of speaking of the
anniversary of Beatrice's death. "On that day
which fulfilled the year since my lady was made
of the citizens of eternal life." Nothing is needed
but metre to make this a beautiful line for the
"Divine Comedy." With such passages Dante's
prose abounds. The other instance is more
striking ; it is one of substance ; it again resembles
not a few passages, and might itself have made one,
in the "Divine Comedy." It is the passage where
Dante says of certain mournful ladies, " As I have
seen rain falling mingled with fair snow, so did
I seem to see their speech issue forth mingled with
sighs." Such passages are essentially poetic ; they
are the matter of poetry. But Dante would not
call them poetry, but prose. They are not
160 DANTE AND TIIK ART OF POETRY
harmonized ; they are not " tied with the bond of
nmsic " ; they are beautiful, but not with the
beauty of poetry.
For unreal ornament Dante cared nothing.
Poetry, he recognised, should be as reasonable as
prose. Its ornament and arrangement should bear
analysis : —
"Poetic licence is allowed," he says, "to poets,
but licence with reason. The great poets of old
did not speak without consideration, nor should
they who rhyme to-day ; for it were a shame that
one should rhyme under the cloak of figure and
rhetorical coloiu'ing, and afterwards, if questioned,
should not be able to strip his words of their
clothing and show their true meaning. Of such
foolish rhymers," he adds, " I and my first friend
know many." ^
Poetry, then, should be as reasonable as prose.
It should bear being broken up and paraphrased in
prose, not indeed without loss, but without absolute
destruction.
But that there is no such thing as poetic diction,
that "prose is verse and verse is merely prose" —
such a theory could never for a moment even in
satire be imputed to Dante. Dante is at times
sublimely, perhaps we may say divinely, grotesque ;
he is at times sublimely simple and plain, almost
common. But into the freakish discordances of a
Browning, who refused, we are told by his
biographer, to recognise even the first of Greek
writers as models of literary style, and made his
translation of ^schylus' "Agamemnon" partly
" for the pleasure of exposing and rebuking these
i"V. N.,"§25.
USE OF VULGAR DICTION 161
claims," or again, into the deliberate common-
places and puerilities of Wordsworth in his unin-
spired moments, Dante could not fall. Falls and
faults are his, it is true : he tells us himself that he
often failed to attain to his own ideal. Often both
in prose and verse he cannot write as he would.
His theme transcends his powers : " he has the
habit of his art, but the hand trembles." But his
faults are the faults of a true, not a false
theory of poetry. Ugly Avords and sounds befit
ugly themes, and childish language childish ideas.
What is the true canon ?
" To describe the bottom of the universe is not
an enterprise to be taken up in sport, nor for a
tongue that cries mammy and daddy ; but let those
ladies aid my verse who aided Amphion to wall in
Thebes, so that my words may not be diverse from
the fact"—
" Si che dal fatto il dir non sia diverse."^
There is perhaps no passage more characteristic
of Dante's method, of his serious painstaking, his
invocation of art, his poetic aim, than the one that
ends thus.
Truth to fact and feeling, as was said above, is
the secret of Dante's matter; and fitness, appro-
priateness of language to thought, is the secret of
his style. In fact and feeling nothing is too high or
too low for Dante. Below the bottomless depth
of Hell, above the ineffable highest Heaven, he
ranges, but the highest rules the lowest ; it is the
1 "Inferno," xxxii. 12. He does, however, occasionally use
low words in the "Divine Comedy," but this is because the
poem is avowedly a comedy, and deliberately written in a mixed
style.
L
1G2 DANTK AND PI IK ART OF POETRY
beauty and the love wliicli prevail. It follows that
in his art Dante is at once the greatest of realists
and the greatest of idealists. But realist or idealist,
or both, Dante is always an artist. Poetry cannot
be written, he says, by mere afflatus, de solo ingenio,
without art or knowledge. His practice follows,
and depends absolutely upon, his theory — the best
proof that his theory, as said above, is good and
adequate. Every rule and every principle which he
has thought out and set forth in his prose works is
put in force and use in the "Divine Comedy."
He is ever conscious of the limits of his art, of the
fren deW arte. It is true that, like the best art, it
often conceals itself; the restraint is not always
obvious, but the restraint is always there. The
geometric symmetry of the " Divine Comedy " has
often been noticed. It could hardly be doubted, even
if it were not demonstrable, or if he did not himself
say as much, that Dante, so careful of the whole,
was equally careful of every line and word.^ He
fails sometimes in his command of his resom-ces, and
sometimes his resources fail him. The writer of the
" Ottimo Commento " tells us, in a passage now well
known, that he had heard Dante himself state that
he had never for the sake of a rhyme said anything
that was not otherwise in his mind,^ but that many
1 Mariotti draws out with great elaboration the extraordinary
underlying symmetry and numerical balance of the " D. C."
He has been at pains to count and classify the lines and words
employed by Dante in the different parts of his poem. He
concludes by saying that the " D. C. " reminds us of the Biblical
words, "omnia in mensura et numero et pondere disposuisti."
Cp. also Leynardi, p. 114.
2 Yet one is tempted to suspect such passages as " Inferno,"
xxxii. 26, .30, as partly written for the rhyme. Compare also the
USE OF ORNAMENT 163
times and oft he had made words signify something
different from that which they had been wont to
express in other poets. If Dante, then, is obscm-e,
it is doubtless partly because his thought was in
advance of all language, partly because, like that of
Thucydides, it was in advance of his own time ; for we
must remember that, not unlike Thucydides, Dante
was himself making his language as he went, and
that the vulgar Italian which he employed was still
in a rough and unformed state. It was not
because he did not desire to be beautiful or finished,
nor because he did not take pains, that he was ever
otherwise, but because of the inherent difficulty of
his subject and the imperfection of his medium, or
because he did not think beauty appropriate. Thus,
in describing the souls of the "stingy" and the
"lavish," cuffing each other in the fourth circle of
Hell, "their conffict," he cries, "shall have no beau-
tifying of style from me." But, speaking more
generally in the "De Vulgari Eloquentia," he says
that every poet ought to beautify his style as much
as possible. And again, in the " Convivio " : —
" Every good workman at the end of his work
ought to ennoble and embellish it to the best of his
power, that it may leave his hands more famous and
more precious. This I intend to do, not as a good
workman myself, but as a follower of such in the
past."
"Famous, precious, beautiful, ennobled, embell-
ished" — that is what Dante, the "austere Dante,"
thought a poem ought to be : ornament, deliberate
ornament, appropriate no doubt, but still ornament,
rhyme Malacoth, Sabaoth, " Par.," vii. 1, and Toynbee's Dic-
tionary, sub voc.
1G4 DANTE AND THE ART OF POETRY
shoukl not be ^vanti^^•. Later in life he became
more confident of bis own powers and skill, but bis
desire is tbe same. To acbievo it be spent life and
strengtb. " lie grew pale beneatb tbe sbade of
Parnassus." "Tbe sacred poem, to wbicb lieaven
and eartb bave set tbeir band, made bim lean for
many years." And no wonder. For every line of bis
poetry, as every page of bis prose, bears witness to
tbe intense and all-devouring industry of genius, to
tbat " long study " wbicb is only possible to " migbty
love." It is ever so witb tbe greater poets. Critics
bave written, and men sometimes speak, as tbougb
Sbakespeare, an unlearned and unlettered miracle,
wTote by mere afflatus, wrote, as tbe pbrase is, by
tbe ligbt of nature and of bis own genius, and took
little or no trouble witb bis diction or versification : —
" But Otway failed to polish and refine,
And fluent Shakespeare scarce effaced a line."
But tbe fact is, tbat if Sbakespeare was not
exactly a scbolar, still be was not an illiterate. He
bad been at a good grammar scbool, be bad a
fair knowledge of Latin, and a smattering of otber
languages, but above all be practised bimself early
and long in tbe art of writing, and of writing verse.
His lines are, to employ Ben Jonson's words about
bim, " well-tuned." His rbytbm is wbat is tecbni-
cally called! learned. His "precious pbrase" is, to
use bis own deligbtful and significant expression,
" by all tbe Muses filed." Of Dante, as of Milton,
we may say mucb more. Mr Robert Bridges, in
his original and suggestive examination of Milton's
prosody, has shown us something of the marvellous
art of Milton's blank verse. A very interesting paper
DELIBERATE ARTIFICE 165
by Mr Tozer ^ on Dante's versification demonstrates
that Dante employs just the same artifices of
inversion and variation which Mr Bridges finds in
Milton. It is, he well says, in the temperate use of
these and similar changes that the melody of Dante's
verse consists.
To challenge the authority of Dean Chm^ch on
any main characteristic of Dante seems audacious,
almost sacrilegious. Yet Dean Church, toward the
end of his famous essay, appears in one passage
hardly to hold the balance quite as true as usual.
It is where he says that Dante has " few of those
indirect charms which flow from the subtle
structure and refined graces of language, none of
that exquisitely- fitted and self-sustained mechanism
of choice words of the Greeks " ; and again, " that
his sweetness and melody appear unsought for and
unlaboured." Unlabom-ed and unsought in a sense
they indeed appear, but only because the skill to
command them had been sought and laboured at
during a lifetime. That Dante chose, " sifted," his
words we know from his own statement. Lines
like—
" La concubina di Titone antico
Gia s' imbiancava al balzo d' oriente,"
can hardly be called spontaneous. They are
beautiful, but beautiful with the artistic, nay, the
artificial beauty of poetic diction. Dante's use of
alliteration and assonance," of balance and antithesis,
1 "Textual Criticism of the Divine Comedy." E. Moore;
Cambridge, 1889. Appendix V., p. 713.
2 Mr James Russell Lowell remarks, indeed, that Homer,
like Dante and Shakespeare, and like all who really command
language, seems fond of playing with assonances. " My Study
Windows" (''Library of Old Authors"), p. 240.
166 DANTE AM) TIIK ART OF POETRY
still more his oinployinont of propor names, wliich
give a pDinp and blazonry to diction like that which
is ij^iven by heraldry to architecture or sttiined glass
or painting ; all these point to a love of language
and of its hues and colours for their own sake, to a
love of literary and linguistic art as such.^
" Dopo la dolorosa rotta, quando
Carlo Magno perde la santa gesta,
Non son6 si terribilmente Orlando,"
Are the echoes of such a passage, the colloca-
tion and the separation, the inversions and the
sequences, unsought or unstudied ?
No, rather must we agree with that eloquent
and subtle critic of language, alas ! too early silent,
Mr Walter Pater, who, in his introduction to his
friend Dr Shadwell's version of the "Purgatorio,"
says that, despite the severity of his subject, Dante
** did not forget that his design was after all to treat
it as a literary artist, to charm his i^eaders; and
that he has shown a command of every sort of minute
literary beauty, an expressiveness, a care for style
and rhythm at every point, the evidence of which
increases upon the reader as his attention becomes
mic7'oscopic." ^
But indeed Dean Church himself was not in-
sensible to this aspect of Dante. In his remarkable,
^ His own j)hrase, used of Arnaut Daniel — " Miglior fabbro
del parlar materno" — is very significant (" Purg.," xxvi. 117).
Cp. fabricatio verborum armonizatorum, " V. E.," II., viii. 5.
2 "The Purgatory of Dante Alighieri," by Charles Lancelot
Shad well ; Introduction by Walter Pater, pp. 15-16. Cp.
Leynardi, " La Psicologia dell' Arte nella ' D. C, ' " last
chapter, especially pp. 491 et seq. Leynardi contrasts the
repeated use of a, o, and u in "Inf.," iv. 10, 12, with that of i
and e in "Inf.," ii. 127-29.
DANTE ALWAYS AN ARTIST 167
though less known, essay on Browning's " Sordello,"
he takes a juster, because more comprehensive,
view : —
*' Dante, the singer, the artist, seemed naturally
to belong to that vast and often magnificent
company, from Orpheus and Homer downward,
whose business in life seemed art and the perfec-
tion of art. But Dante, with his artist's eye and
artist's strength, was from the beginning and con-
tinued to the end in closest contact with the most
absorbing interests of human life. We almost
forget the poet, and such a poet, in the man."
The fact is that both aspects are true. Dante
is more than an artist : but he is always an artist.
His own feeling about the form of his work is best
expressed in his own words. He leaves us in no
doubt. In the song that opens the second book of
the " Convivio," he says that he wishes it may please
even if it is not understood. Few will understand
thee, he says ; but say to them —
"Ponete mente almen com' io son bella."
In the twelfth chapter he explains that the beauty
consists in construction, which is given by grammar,
in order, which is given by rhetoric, and in rhythm,
which is given by music. The beauty should, how-
ever, be appropriate. This he explains in the
opening lines of the poem prefixed to the next
book, in which he says that he must now put away
the sweet rhymes he was wont to use in treating
of love, and must speak of the valour which makes
a man truly noble, with rhyme rough and subtle.
"Rhyme rough and subtle"^ — '' Rima aspra e
^ In the second chapter he explains that aspra refers to the
168 DANTE AM) THE ART OF TOETRV
sottile" — what truer description could there be of
much of the '* Divine Comedy " ? But that it is so
is (hie neither to accident nor to defect, but to
design. Always and ever Dante cared for two
tilings together, the matter and the manner, the
thing to be said and the way of saying it: "^ a
cost parlare, e a cosl intendere le scritture." When
he exalts his matter he sustains it with more art.
It was thus that his art rose with him and with
his theme. For manner he must ever have cared,
or he would not have cared so profoundly for
Virgil — for Virgil, the stylist par excellence ; Virgil,
in whom Coleridge found nothing but diction and
metre. Dante found much beside ; but that he
loved Virgil as he did, and that his early boast was
to have won by long study the Virgilian style, is pre-
eminently significant of his attitude and tempera-
ment. From Virgil and his Roman brothers he
caught, moreover, the strength of the Roman, or
rather of the Latin utterance, imperial, martial, legal,
logical, clear-cut, clear-sounding. But Christianity,
as Dean Church has so truly and delicately indicated
in his "Gifts of Civilisation," Christianity, with its
breaking -up of the fallow ground of the heart,
needed a more subtle music than the Roman,
something more than even the melancholy majesty
and grace of the " stateliest measure ever moulded
by the lips of man." That more subtle music was
to be found in the fresh and tender poetry of love
style, to the sound of the poetry ; soltile refers to the meaning
of the words. In " Inferno," xxxii., he complains that he
cannot command rhyme rough enough for the lowest circle of
Hell. Mr C. B. Heberden, in an excellent paper, " Dante and
his Lyrical Metres," printed in the " Modern Language Review "
for July 1908, brings this out with thoroughness and nobility.
THE "NEW SWEET STYLE" 169
and chivalry, in the " new sweet style " for which
the way was paved by the troubadours and worked
out by the pupils of Brunetto Latini, Guido Caval-
canti, and Dante himself, in concert with poets like
Cino da Pistoia, painters like Giotto, musicians
like Casella — that style which the Notary and
Guittone of Arezzo and Bonagiunta could not reach,
the style which followed exactly the dictation of love.
In these two schools, as was said at starting,
Dante served his apprenticeship. But of their
teaching, too, he came to the end. He saw that
he must find and trust himself. Nothing is more
instructive for the understanding of Dante's develop-
ment than to compare the last words of Virgil, at the
end of the " Purgatorio " proper, with the invocation
at the beginning of the "Paradiso." At meeting
Virgil, Dante did homage to him and hung on his
every word. Now he is an apprentice and in
pupillage no longer. " Await no more," says Virgil,
" my word or my sign ; free, right, and sound is thy
judgment, and it were a fault not to follow it.
Wherefore prince and pontiff over thyself I crown
and mitre thee." Dante is to stand at last, as a
great poet must stand, in his own strength : but no
one knows better than he the diflBculty of his art.
"Well may poets," he says in the letter to Can
Grande, "need much invocation, for they have to
seek something from the powers above, beyond the
common scope of mankind, a bounty, as it were,
from Heaven itself." " O good Apollo," he cries —
using words which recall the striking expression
employed of St Paul, the vas electionis — " make me
in my last toil a vessel of thy power, so fashioned
as thou requirest for the gift of the beloved laurel.
170 DANTE AND THE ART OF POETRY
llithorti) one peak of Parnassus hath sufficed me,
but now with both it is meet that I enter the
remaining Hsts."
The exact me.uiing of these last words is
obscm-e, but the gist of the passage with its con-
text is phiin. There is a poetry of earth, there is
a poetry of heaven. There is the art of the amorist
and the troubadour ; they too are poets, but not
regular poets, not great poets— they sing of love,
but of an earthly passion. Dante too sings of love.
He too began as the amorist of earthly beauty,
which yet contained for him the seed and promise
of the heavenly ; he was led up from the love of
earthly beauty to the love of knowledge, to that
divine Eros,^ the love of Him in whom beauty and
knowledge are united, the love that " moves the
sun and all the stars."
Such is poetry for the true poet, no toy, no trifle,
an art rather, a fine art, but the best of all the fine
arts, to which all knowledge may be made tributary,
and which may itself subserve the highest ends.
Dante is an artist, but he is more than an artist.
Art for art's sake has no meaning for him. Were
he asked whether art ought to be moral, he would
reply that man, whether artist or not, ought certainly
to do right and live well. Poetry cannot save
Brunetto or Arnaut Daniel. It cannot even save
Virgil, best of Pagans.
Yet poetry may rise to heaven. It may have the
highest mission. It may be in no pedantic sense
a Teologia. It may be of power "to celebrate in
^ Plato, "Symposium." Cp. "Convivio," ii. 13, where Dante
describes how he came to love the gentle lady Philosophy ;
and again, "Convivio," ii. 16.
THE "DIVINE^' POET 171
glorious and lofty hymns the throne and equipage
of God's almightiness, and what he works and
what he suffers to be wrought with high providence
in his Church." Thus the poet's place may truly be
with the heroes and the saints ; and such is Dante's.
Carlyle saw this when he wrote the " Hero as Poet " ;
Raphael saw it when he painted the " Disputa " ; but
Dante's own Virgil had seen it long before : —
" Hie manus ob patriam pugnando volnera passi,
Quique sacerdotes casti, dum vita manebat,
Quique pii vates et Phoebo digna locuti."
Dante perceived the place that he might win, and
won it.
" The song that nei'ves a nation's heart
Is in itself a deed. "
What shall be said of the song that has nerved
the heart and lifted the soul of the race ? Only
that here the language of Dean Church in his
unforgettable peroration is no hyperbole, but the
simple and the sober truth. Only that while, as an
artist and for technical reasons, Dante himself called
his poem by the name which belonged to the range
of the humble and the human, a " Comedy," the
world soon added, and has for ever attached, first
to the poet and then to the poem, the epithet
"Divine."
V
VIKGIL AND
TENNYSON :
PARALLEL
A LITERARY
" I salute tliee, Mantovano,
I that loved thee since my day began."
Few books Iiave had a longer or more living
influence than the "Parallel Lives" of Plutarch.
Its shining examples of character and genius have
affected and inspired the emotion and emulation of
all ages and portions of the Western world. If
the trophies of Miltiades have caused sleepless
nights to many besides Themistocles, it is Plutarch
whom envy or ambition must blame or thank. Yet
of the thousands who have sauntered through or
even lingered in Plutarch's gallery, how many have
really noted its arrangement? Many have read
the "Lives": few have read the "Comparisons."
Most common is it to speak only of Plutarch's
"Lives," and, ignoring the epithet he gave them,
to forget that they are parallels.
Plutarch's method, indeed, has gone out of
fashion, as history has become more scientific and
less picturesque — more pedantic, perhaps some
would say, and less historic. History, it is seen,
if it repeats itself, ever does so with a difference,
and the historic or geographic parallel only pro-
vokes a smile of superiority. Yet the method of
172
THE "ENGLISH VIRGH." 173
Plutarch has its advantages. Truth to tell, it is,
as Bacon remarked, quite as much a part of science
to note resemblances as to note difiPerences. Often
the differences are natural or necessary, and it is
the resemblances which are surprising. Simil-
arities, in style and genius, between the late Lord
Tennyson and the Koman Virgil have often been
noticed. The comparison was, perhaps, first made
in print by Lord Tennyson's old friend, the Rev. R.
D. B. Rawnsley, a quarter of a centmy ago. It
was perhaps rather of Mr Andrew Lang's pretty
allusion that the poet himself was thinking when
he remarked to a friend : " Someone once called
me the English Virgil " ; but in any case he w^as
aware of the suggestion and was pleased by it.
The parallel of their lives, however, has never been
as fully worked out as it deserves to be. For,
striking as is the analogy when once suggested,
in general terms and on the surface, it will be
found still more striking when the two biographies
are, after the manner of Plutarch, placed side by
side.
The life of Tennyson has been given us in a
singularly full and happy form. Perhaps no poet's
life has ever been written in a way to be more
useful to the scholar and the critic. Virgil's life
we no longer possess in a shape comparable to this.
But such a picture of him did once exist, and of
that picture considerable relics and traces remain.
Besides the three great works of Virgil, the
"Eclogues," " Georgics," and "^neid," there have
come down, as scholars know, various minor works
— in particular two hexameter pieces, the " Culex,"
or " Gnat," and the "Ciris," a mythological poem;
174 VIRGIL AND TENNYSON
a pivtty idyll, (Mitiil(Ml llii' "Morotum" or "Salad";
till' "Copa," or "Mine Hostess," a short elegiac
piece; and, further, a small collection, chiefly of
lyrical poems, called the "Catalepta," or "Cata-
lepton." Several "Lives" of the poet, longer or
shorter, have also sm'vived These it has been not
unusual to treat with neglect or discredit, as a
tissue of forgery or a mass of accretions. But this
is sm-ely a mistake. Virgil, though, like Tennyson,
he loved seclusion, did not live or die in a corner,
but rather in the fullest blaze of light. He vs^as a
great figure in the great world of Kome when
Rome was at her highest intellectual level. Of that
Rome he may, like Horace, properly be called a
laureate poet. He was the friend of the Emperor
Augustus, and of the greatest statesmen and the
leading literary men of the day. By two of these,
Tucca and Varius, specially intimate friends of
long standing, his papers were sifted, and his great
epic edited, under the Emperor's own direction.
Varius, himself an excellent and admired poet, also
wrote his friend's " Life." He wrote with full
knowledge of the persons and the facts, while most
of the persons were still living and the facts were
still fresh. His memoir contained, we have reason
to believe, a full and sufficient account of the poet,
of his life and work, his education and friendships,
his habits of composition, personal traits, anecdotes,
table-talk, good stories, perhaps scandals, obiter
dicta, and the like, together with illustrative
extracts from the poet's poems, whether pubhshed
or unpublished, and from his correspondence,
including both his own letters and those of friends.
When it was written, many of the documents on
THE *' LIVES" OF VIRGIL 175
which it was based, such as the letters of the
Emperor, like those of the Queen to Tennyson,
were in evidence, and they remained so long after.
It would have been impossible to make any serious
mis-statement which many living friends could
correct, or which could be contradicted by reference
to documents undoubtedly authentic, or to inter-
polate any poem or portion of a poem as Virgil's
without authority.
On this " Life " by Varius, and on the authorised
edition or editions of Virgil's poems, it is pretty
clear that the later authorities rested, as long as
any serious and strong critical spirit remained.
The best that we now have is a fairly long sketch,
probably by Suetonius, much in the nature of a
" Dictionary of Biography " article. This, no doubt,
is an abridgment from the "Life "by Varius, but
has been again added to and embroidered from
other less excellent sources. In Virgil's case, as
in most others, there were current, immediately
after his death, and perhaps even during his Hfe-
time, conflicting texts and semi-authenticated
stories, and some of these doubtless estabhshed
themselves in lieu of, or side by side with, the
genuine ; but without entering into the minutise
of discrimination, it may be said that we possess a
considerable body of information about Virgil, and
that when due allowance has been made for such
accretions, a great deal remains, Avell attested or
carrying its own claim to credence. We know
more, probably, about the life of Virgil than we do
about the life of Shakespeare. To state this may
not indeed be to state very much. The late Master
of Balliol, Professor Jowett, whose sturdy historical
170 VIRGIT, AND TENNYSON
scepticism knew hardly any limit, was fond of
saying that all that we really know about Shake-
speare's life could be written on a half-sheet of
notepaper. The Master, it is true, did not live to
see the brilliant essay of his distinguished pupil
Mr Sidney Lee, but even had he done so he
would probably have stuck to his epigram.
Taking then the Hfe of Virgil as we have it,
let us put it side by side with that of Tennyson.
The regular method of Plutarch would no doubt
be to recite first the one career and then the other,
and finally to institute the comparison. For our
purpose, however, it would seem better to take
the two lives together. The life of Tennyson may
be assumed to be generally known, that of Virgil
will be best understood when thus brought into
comparison point by point.
The large differences are obvious. Virgil was
born and spent his days in Italy, the Italy of the
last centiu'y before the coming of Christ ; Tennyson
in England, the England of the nineteenth century
of the Christian era. Tennyson lived to eighty-six,
Virgil died at fifty-one. Tennyson married and
saw children and grandchildren of his blood ;
Virgil had neither wife nor child. Tennyson lived
all his days under a constitutional monarchy ; Virgil
first under a Republic, then under a despotism.
Virgil wrote three principal works in three styles
— the pastoral, the didactic, the epic — but all in
one metre, though with great variety within that
metre. It is only in his minor poems that we find
him using either elegiac or lyric measures. There is
little here to match the infinite variety of Tennyson.
But all these contrasts, with the exception of
FROM OLIGARCHY TO EMPIRE 177
the personal dififerences of length of life and
domestic surroundings, are not in reality nearly
so great as would at first sight appear. Looking
at history in the large way, what is seen is that
Virgil flourished when the Eoman Republic was
changing into the imperial monarchy of the Caesars ;
what will be seen hereafter is that Tennyson
flourished when the English realm and monarchy
were expanding into the British Empire.
Between the old senatorial oligarchy of Rome
and the government of England as it existed under
the hereditary monarchy, the privileged House
of Lords, and the unreformed House of Commons,
there is no small similarity. It is one of the great
services of Mommsen and his scholars to have
shown that the movement towards the Empire —
the Roman revolution, as it is sometimes styled —
was, notwithstanding its monarchic and imperial
result, a democratic movement, fought for, and
issuing in, the admission of many to civic privileges
previously confined to a few, and the extension
to wide regions of as much of self-government as
was possible without a representative system.
Both poets, then, were born and grew up in times
of "storm and stress." Both witnessed in their
own day an immense expansion — the one a city,
the other a kingdom outgrowing its ancient bounds ;
each saw the establishment, amid battle and throes,
of a world-wide empire. Events moved more
slowly in the later case ; and thus, if Tennyson
lived longer, he saw less, rather than more, political
change, for the thirty or thirty-five additional years
of his life were needed to complete the revolution
begun in his boyhood.
M
178 VIIUHL AND TENNYSON
Virgil was born in 70 B.C. His birth -year, the
year of the consulship of Ponipey and Crassus,
may be taken as the beginning of the Roman
revohition, for it was this consulship that began,
through the restoration of the Tribunate, to undo
the work of Sulla, while the memorable impeach-
ment of Verres by Cicero was, if not the first, at
least a very signal recognition, of the provincial
empire of Rome. Virgil's boyhood and youth,
then, were full of distm*bance at home and abroad.
The great campaigns of Pompey and of Caesar
shook alike the Eastern and the Western world,
from his fifth to his twentieth year. He was a
child of seven at the time of Catiline's famous
conspiracy ; then followed the long ignoble brawls
and street-fights, of which those of Clodius and
Milo were only the most notorious. He came
of age in the Roman sense in the year of the first
invasion of Britain, on the day, tradition relates, of
the death of his great forerunner Lucretius. He
was twenty-one when Caesar crossed the Rubicon,
twenty-six when Caesar fell by the dagger of Brutus,
thirty-nine when the battle of Actium once more
brought a settlement into view.
Tennyson in like manner was born in the last
years of a narrow oligarchy, when gigantic wars
abroad were reacting upon a state of unstable
equilibrium at home. His birthday fell amid the
opening conflicts of the Peninsula campaign, and in
the year in which Sir Francis Bui'dett introduced
his first motion for a reform of the House of
Commons. The effect of the struggle with Napoleon
was for a time to retard the disintegration of the
English oligarchy. But, Waterloo over, and peace
REVOLUTION AND REFORM 179
restored, the movement soon began once more,
and indeed was fomented by the distress consequent
on the long and wasting war. Tennyson's child-
hood saw Peterloo and the Cato Street conspiracy ;
his youthful days were the " rick-fire days " of riot
and rebellion in town and country. As an under-
graduate he helped to quench a blazing farm near
Cambridge. He would have been, but for his
father, at the battle of Navarino, in 1827. He
actually went, with Arthur Hallam, in 1831, to the
Pyrenees, to help the insurgents under Torrijos.
Then came the great battle for " Reform " at home,
and the memorable upheavals in Em^ope. Tenny-
son through all this turmoil was, like Virgil, for
liberty, but also for order and rehgion. Of finding
both together he rather despaired.
" The empty thrones call out for kings.
But kings ai'e cheap as summer dust ;
The good old time hath taken wings.
And with it taken faith and trust.
And solid hope of better things."
To the Koman reformers it seemed that the
combination could, by divine providence, be found
in Caesar : —
"O Meliboee, deus nobis heec otia fecit." ("Eel.," i. 6.)
In the welter of the civil war, Virgil's life was
probably in danger, and for a time he lost his
property ; but the rule of Csesar meant peace and
enfranchisement. Julius had been the friend of
the provinces, the friend in particular of Lombardy ;
he became patron of Gallia Transpadana in 68 B.C.,
when Virgil was a child of two. In the year 49
B.C., when Virgil was twenty-one, Caesar conferred
180 VIIUJIL AM) TENNYSON
the Roman citizensliip on its inhabitants, thereby
attaching tlic whole region to his cause. Tennyson
at twenty-three was ringing the Somersby church
bells with his brothers for the passing of the Reform
Bill. Virgil had no bells to ring, but it is not
unlikely that the feeling of himself and his family
was, miUatis mutandis, much the same as that of
the Tennysons. On all grounds — personal, political,
and, as we shall see later, philosophic — Virgil was
in thorough sympathy with the Empire and the
Augustan regime. The bent, the bias, of both lives
is the same. It is the political accord of Virgil,
just as it is the political accord of Tennyson, the
personal attachment of Virgil, like the personal
attachment of Tennyson, the spiritual sympathy of
Virgil, like the spiritual sympathy of Tennyson,
which made them both such happily loyal, because
such sincerely and spontaneously loyal, laureates,
the one of Augustus, the other of Victoria. Both,
while becoming pre-eminently national poets, Virgil
the Roman, Tennyson the English, singer, had a
divided provincial and racial strain. Tennyson was
probably a Dane by descent ; Virgil, it would seem,
with his melancholy and magic, his romance and
glamom", may be claimed by the Celts. Both his
own name and that of the village where he was
born are, it is said, Celtic.
Both were children of the country, and of the
real unsophisticated country. Tennyson was born
in the sequestered hamlet of Somersby, in Lincoln-
shire ; Virgil's birthplace was also a hamlet, that
of Andes — for such was its strange name — possibly
the modern Pietola, a little way out of Mantua.
Mantua itself was no large town, and Andes,
RUSTIC BOYHOOD 181
whether three or seventeen miles away — for this
is disputed — must have been thoroughly rural. In
birth Tennyson had the advantage. His father,
though disinherited in favour of a younger brother,
was the eldest son in a good family, and was a
beneficed clergyman and a Doctor of Laws of
Cambridge. His mother, too, came of a good
county stock. Virgil's father, on the other hand,
would appear to have been a hired servant to one
Magius, a carrier or courier, perhaps himself in
addition a working potter, who by industry amassed
a little property for himself, which he increased by
keeping bees and buying up tracts of woodland,
and then, like the industrious apprentice, marrying
his master's daughter, whose name, Magia, or
Magia Polla, may perhaps have given rise to the
later idea that Virgil was a wizard.
Both, then, were brought up face to face with
nature, with the country, and with country folks
and ways. Mr Watts Dunton once made the
pertinent remark about Tennyson, that he was a
poet of the country in a sense even beyond that of
ordinary lovers and students of nature ; that he
was the only great poet who, if he saw a turnip-
field, could tell with a farmer's eye how the turnips
were doing. The "Georgics" were written, no
doubt, from a personal knowledge similar or even
greater. So probably was the famous picture of
the " Coryoius senex," the old gardener amid his
roses and his cucumbers, with whom perhaps may
be compared the two "Northern Farmers."
Both, however, while reared in the depths of
the country, received as good an education as the
time could give. Tennyson was sent first to Louth
182 VIRGIL AND TENNYSON
Graiinn.ir Scliool, then to Trinity College in Cam-
bridge. Virgil went to school, first at Cremona,
then at fifteen to Milan — some say also to Naples
to learn Greek with Parthcnius — and finally at
seventeen was entrusted to the best teachers of
the day at Rome. Each of them found incidentally
through his education a good introduction to the
gi'eat world of letters and affairs. All of us know
the list of Tennyson's early friends, the " Cambridge
Group," the "Apostles," as by a cant name for a
recently founded club they were called — Milnes,
Trench, Blakesley, Alford, Thompson, Spedding,
Brookfield, Spring-Rice, Charles Buller, above all
Arthm* Hallam. It is not possible to say exactly
when Virgil made the acquaintance of his chief
friends, but among those who were school-fellows,
fellow- students, or early comrades, are Alfenus
Varus, Quintilius Varus, ^ Varius and Tucca, Gallus
and Macer, and Horace himself; somewhat older
were Pollio, the statesman-poet, and Cinna, the
poet-friend of Catullus. It is worth noting that
Antony and Augustus himself were also earlier and
later pupils of the same teacher Epidius, from
whom Virgil learnt rhetoric ; and one of the ancient
"Lives" actually makes Virgil a fellow- student
with Augustus, though this is open to much doubt,
for Augustus was seven years his junior.
Tennyson began to A^Tite verse as a boy, or even
as a child, and naturally felt the influence of the
leading writers just before his time, notably Byron,
Moore, and Coleridge. Keats he came to love, and
Wordsworth to admire, somewhat later, after he
^ " Multis ille bonis flebilis occidit,
Nulli flebilior quam tibi, Vergili." (Horace, Odes, i. 24.)
VIRGIL AND CATULLUS 183
had achieved his own style. Virgil, apparently,
began not less early. His first poem, written in
boyhood, is said to have been an epigram on a
certain Ballista, a fencing-master or trainer of
gladiators, who also, it would seem, took the road
as a highwayman, and was stoned to death for his
crimes. The incident was not improbably an
experience or a good story of Virgil's father, the
carrier's man. The epigram has been preserved : —
" Monte sub hoc lapidum tegitur Ballista sepultus ;
Nocte, die, tutum carpe viator iter ! "
which perhaps may be rendered :
" Old Sling is dead,
And o'er his head
This hill of stones we rear :
Now take your way,
By night or day.
Traveller, the road is clear ! "
Virgil's Byron and Coleridge were Catullus
and Lucretius. Among his minor youthful pieces
are several in the Catullian vein. One, which is
an obvious parody of Catullus, seems again to
contain a reminiscence of Virgil's home and early
days. It is a poem on an old muleteer, turned
schoolmaster and town-councillor, who, in lines
which are a travesty of Catullus' well-known
stanzas on his old yacht, boasts his own former
prowess and dedicates himself to Castor and
Pollux, the traveller's gods. Catullus belonged
to the literary generation just before Virgil; his
brief and brilliant literary career was at its height
in Virgil's early years. It was natural that he
should exercise a strong influence over the poets
of the next era; and indeed it is clear that he
184 VnUJIL AND TENNYSON
did set, or lead, a fashion, to which Virgil and
perhaps Horace also — though, if so, he afterwards
repudiated it — yielded in their youth. Catullus
died when Virgil was twenty-three; whether they
ever met we do not know ; it may be remembered,
however, that both came from Lombardy. Artisti-
cally, they had much in common — for Virgil, like
Catullus, belonged to the Alexandrine school —
and they enjoyed many common friends. Just as
Tennyson was linked to Byron, whom he never
saw, by Rogers and Leigh Hunt, so Virgil was
linked to Catullus by men like Pollio and Cinna.
Some other minor pieces attributed to Virgil
are extant, less creditable followings of the Catul-
lian fashion ; but it is not certain that Virgil
wrote them, and they are hardly consonant with
the character with which, as will be seen later,
his youth was credited. Tennyson had also his
period of youthful heat and trial, but he passed
through it well. He uttered nothing base, and
hardly anything bitter. In one or two pieces he
just showed what he could have done in the
mordant and satiric vein had he wished. Such
a piece is the spirited and gay repartee — a
" silly squib " he called it himself — to " Crusty
Christopher," the dogmatic and heavy-handed
Professor Wilson ; while the lines on Sir E,
Lytton Bulwer, entitled the "New Timon and
the Poets," which were sent to "Punch," though
not sent by Tennyson himself, afford an even
better example.
But Virgil soon fell under another influence,
for him far more potent than that of Catullus.
One of the most striking and interesting of his
VIRGIL FINDS PHILOSOPHY 185
minor poems is what may perhaps be called a
sixth-form or undergraduate piece, written when
he was passing fi'om grammar and rhetoric to
philosophy, when, as an Oxford undergraduate
would say, he was turning from " Honour Mods "
to "Honom- Greats." Not a few young Oxford
scholars from Eton, let us say, or Winchester or
Charterhouse, a little wearied, for the nonce at
any rate, with what seem the trite topics and
stale rules of scholarship and composition, and
looking forward to a new subject and what
promised to be more real and vital studies, will
understand Virgil's feelings in these lines. They
are headed : Virgil abandons other studies and
embraces the Epicurean philosophy. The text is
uncertain in places ; the whole may be somewhat
freely rendered as follows : —
" Avaunt, ye vain bombastic crew.
Crickets that swill no Attic dew :
Good-bye grammarians, crass and narrow,
Selius, Tarquitius, and Varro !
A pedant tribe of fat-brained fools.
The tinkling cymbals of the schools ;
Sextus, my friend of friends, good-bye
With all our pretty company !
I'm sailing for the blissful shore,
Great Siron's high recondite lore.
That haven where my soul shall be
From every tyrant care set free.
You, too, sweet Muses mine, farewell,
Sweet Muses mine, for truth to tell
Sweet were ye once, but now begone !
And yet, and yet, return anon.
And when I write at whiles be seen
In visits shy and far between ! "
In another shorter piece in the same collection,
186 VIRGIL AND TENNYSON
which, moreover, is vouched for by Quintilian,
Virgil attacks a rhetorician of the day, accusing
him of murdering first the alphabet, and then
— which he seems actually to have done — his
own brother. It is curious to see these poems
of schoolboy or undergraduate revolt. Such an
attitude is, of course, common with young men
of genius, and not least common among those
who afterwards become champions of order and
convention. Virgil in later days became, if ever
there was one, a scholarly poet, so much so that
he was even accused of subtle verbal affectation
and of pedantry. Remembering these youthful
explosions, we may say that probably here too
his position was really not unlike that of the
Tennyson of whom Jow^ett writes : " Tennyson
was very much of a scholar, but was not at all
a pedant. Once he said to me, 'I hate learning,'
by which I understood him to mean that he hated
the minutiae of criticism compiled by the Dryas-
dusts."^ Both certainly loved simplicity, but
the simplicity of knowledge, not of ignorance.
It need hardly be said that Virgil's "sweet
Muses" did return, and that he found himself
loving philosophy, but writing poetry. But this
love of philosophy was in him no passing under-
graduate phase. It sank deep into the very tissue
of his being : it persisted to his latest day. In
his last year, when he set out on the final fatal
journey to Greece and Asia, his purpose was,
we are told, to finish the "JEneid," and then
to devote the rest of his life to philosophy. The
^ In the same spirit the erudite Gray said to Walpole, that
" learning should never be encouraged."
EPICUREANISM 187
Epicurean philosophy was fashionable in the Rome
of Virgil's youth, and his tutor Siron was its most
fashionable professor. It had two main branches of
interest and two aspects. It was largely a material-
istic philosophy, attempting to give an account
of the physical universe, deahng therefore with
questions rather of natural science than of philo-
sophy proper. In the realm of rehgion it preached
a kind of mechanical fatalism, a "polytheistic
deism," if such a phrase can be coined. This,
like other agnostic systems, produced in shallower
natures an easy hedonism — "let us eat and drink,
for to-morrow we die " ; in deeper, a sort of
strenuous positivism or religion of irreligion —
"let us toil and strive, for the long night cometh,
and in the grave there is neither wisdom nor
knowledge." The first may be seen in Memmius
Gemellus or in Horace, who calls himself a "hog
of Epicurus' sty " ; the second in Lucretius and
in Virgil. The debt, the deep debt, of Virgil
to Lucretius is obvious and avowed, but its
character and limits are not always understood.
Here once more the parallel with Tennyson
l3ecomes singularly illuminating. Tennyson and
his friends at Cambridge, hke Virgil in the class-
rooms of Rome, complained of the narrow range,
the cut-and-dried nature, of much academic study.
His fine, but too denunciatory sonnet on the
Cambridge of his day, ending —
" You that do profess to teach.
And teach us nothing, feeding not the heart" —
may be set side by side with Virgil's piece just
quoted. It was not so much with grammar that
188 VIRGIL AND TENNYSON
Tennyson ;uul Jlallani (luarrelled as with mathe-
matics, tlie predominating study of Cambridge;
but, more tlian with any one subject, it was
with the monotonous hide-bound character of
Cambridge studies in those days. "None but
dry-headed, calculating, angular little gentlemen
can take much delight in a+ J b, etc.," Tennyson
wrote to his aunt, Mrs Russell. Macaulay had
written almost the same thing from Cambridge
to his mother just ten years before. Gray and
his friends had said it in far earlier days, both
at Cambridge and at Oxford ; and Clough, in his
"Lines in a Lecture-room," wrote in much the
same strain even of Oxford philosophy lectures
at Balliol. Tennyson, however, did not bid the
Muses pack : on the contraiy, he read Virgil
under the table while Whewell was lecturing.
The hope of himself and his friends lay in poetry,
in philosophy, and in natm^al science, still more
in the combination of the three ; and oddly enough,
at the very moment when Darwin at Christ's
was also complaining of the unfruitfulness of
Cambridge education and pursuing field-botany
with Henslow, Tennyson at Trinity was propound-
ing the view that the development of the human
body might possibly be traced from the "radiated,
vermicular, molluscous, and vertebrate organisms."
It is the peculiar characteristic of Lucretius that
he combines exactly these three elements. One of
the finest of Rome's poets, he is also in a sense
her most genuine philosopher, and certainly her
truest man of science. It is a commonplace that
he, more than any other ancient writer, anticipates
Darwin and the theory of evolution ; he also
LOVE OF SCIENCE 189
displays more powerfully than any other the atomic
theory, as the ancients miderstood it. Virgil's
lines on Lucretius are well known, and the allusion
is obvious, whether it be specially to the poet or
generally to the philosophy which he pre-eminently
put forward. Even more significant are the
splendid verses which precede them, beginning : —
" Me vero primum dulces ante omnia Musae,
Quarum sacra fero ingenti percussus amore,
Accipiant," etc. (" Georgics," ii. 478 et seq.)
The Muses, his " sweet Muses " once more,
are to teach the poet, and through the poet the
world, the secrets of nature and science. If he
cannot learn these, the poet would prefer the life
of seclusion and ease, unknown to fortune and
to fame.^ This is worth toiling for, not the giddy
and gaudy glories of the senate and the market-
place, of the throne and the sword : Yes,
" Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas,"
but also —
" Fortunatiis et ille, deos qui novit agrestes,
Panaque Silvanumque senem Nymphasque sorores."
That this love of science was one of Virgil's
earliest loves is shown by the fact that it had
appeared already in the Sixth of the " Eclogues," in
the famous song of Silenus, the language of which
is strikingly Lucretian ; and indeed still earlier,
in the "Culex." The lines in that poem (vv. 57
et seq.), beginning
" O bona pastoris, si quis non pauperis usum/'
are a rough draft of the magnificent passage just
^ There is a story that Virgil said that the only thing of
which there comes not satiety is knowledge. ("Tib. CI.
Donati Vita," xviii. 73.)
190 VIRGIL AND TKNNYSON
qiiotetl. Its persistence is proved by its reappear-
ance in the First "/Eneid," in the song of the
minstrel lopas, who, like Silenus, sings of "the
wandering moon and tlie smi's echpse," and
" WluMu-e niankiiul and cattle came,
Tlie source of water and of flame,"
and again in that transcendent central passage
of the Sixth ^neid, beginning —
" Principio caelum ac terram camposque liquentes,"
the most Virgihan passage in Virgil, as Mr
F. W. H. Myers calls it, and which he has
rendered so finely.
Tennyson's early poems in exactly the same
way show this combination of interests, which
was to reappear later in more splendid and
mature expression. The chief mark of his pieces
in the little Lincolnshire volume, put out by him
and his brother when still at school, is the display
made, with all the innocent exaggeration of boy-
hood, at once of literary learning and of scientific
study. This is shown by the very titles of the
poems, "Apollonius' Complaint," "The High
Priest to Alexander," "Mithridates presenting
Berenice with the Cup of Poison " ; by lines
like—
" The mighty sea-snake of the storm.
The vorticella's viewless form,"
and again, by the frequent notes and references
to "Baker on Animalculse," or to ^Hus Lam-
pridius ; while the Cambridge prize poem " Timbuc-
too," which may perhaps be called Tennyson's
"Culex," displays, in a manner less crude, it is
NEITHER AN ORATOR 191
true, but still immature, precisely the same
featm'es.
Both writers, then, to use the phrase of the
last century, "commenced poet" early. We do
not know when Virgil first published anything,
but the "Culex" was evidently regarded as an
early and promising publication ; and many of
his other minor poems were doubtless circulated
in manuscript, as indeed were many of Tennyson's,
among his friends. It is fair then to say that
both early achieved a certain limited success and
recognition. Then came for both that period
which so often comes between youth and man-
hood, bringing with it causes at once internal
and external for imcertainty and arrestation.
Virgil apparently tried the bar, but without
success. He appeared and spoke in court as
an advocate, but only once. In speech he was,
says Melipsus, very slow, and like one untaught.
Tennyson never attempted a profession. An
; admirable talker, he never made a speech, only
once returning thanks, and that, as he said, not
on his legs, at a dinner given by a society of
authors at Hampstead. Before a crowd he was,
he professed, infinitely shy. Speaking of the
youthful club whose debates are immortalised
in " In Memoriam," he said, " They made speeches,
I never did." Yet both Tennyson and Virgil
have shown great mastery of rhetoric in writing
speeches for their characters.
Both, again, appear to have dabbled in
medicine ; both certainly studied the stars.
Amongst other studies, says Virgil's biographer,
he devoted himself to medicine, and especially
192 VIRGIL AND TENNYSON
to astroloi^y. Tennyson as a youth read medical
books till he fancied, like a medical student,
that he had all the diseases in the world. As
for astronomy, he was at all times devoted to
it. It is one of the most constant and conspicuous
features of his earliest poems, as of his very last.
The striking fragment, "The Moon," and the
beautiful astronomical stanzas, afterwards removed,
which appear in the early versions of the " Palace
of Art," show the same taste, to which he
returned in "God and the Universe." "His
mind," said Sir Norman Lockyer, "was saturated
with astronomy." But both made their studies
subservient to poetry rather than to a profession.
The "Culex," we are told, was written when
Virgil was sixteen. Before he published the
"Eclogues" he had learned something of the
trials of life as well as of the dreams of the
poet and the aspirations of the student. In the
year 41 B.C., when he was twenty-nine years of
age, his father lost his estate by the confiscations
of the civil war; and Virgil and his family were
turned out of house and home, and had to take
refuge in a cottage belonging to Siro, his whilom
master in philosophy.^ The story of his restoration
is well known. The good offices of Pollio, the
poet and statesman, and of Cornelius Gallus, the
poet, made interest with Maecenas and ultimately
with the future Emperor, Octavianus himself;
and Virgil's patrimony was restored. Tennyson's
story is of course not so heroic, nor so well
known, but it affected him very deeply. He
1 The person who was put in possession in the poet's
place bore, like Catullus' butt, the name of Arrius.
FORTUNES AND HEALTH 193
lost the little property inherited from his father
by an unlucky philanthropic speculation. His
mother and sister suffered too in the same way.
Then followed a season of real hardship. "I
have drunk," he said, "one of those most bitter
draughts out of the cup of hfe which go near
to make men hate the world they move in." He
found, however, a Gallus and a Pollio in Carlyle
and "Dicky" Milnes, and a Maecenas in Sir
Kobert Peel, who recommended him for a pension
of 200^. a year. Both, then, chose the poet's
life, and remained faithful to it, through good
report and evil report, in sickness and in health,
for richer, for poorer, until death ; both when
once fairly established gave themselves up to
it, and forswore everything else. Virgil's genius,
says an ancient authority, forsook him when he
attempted prose. The same cannot be said
of Tennyson ; but neither published any works
in prose. A few scraps are all that remain of
Virgil's correspondence, nor are Tennyson's letters
numerous.
In person Virgil was tall, dark, of rustic mien,
and of variable health, often suffering from weak-
ness in the throat and siomach and from headache,
and not seldom spitting blood. He was exceed-
ingly temperate in eating and drinking. Gossip
has not spared his character, but what is certain
is that he was modest and refined in thought
and word, so much so that, just as Milton was
called at Cambridge the "Lady of Christ's,"
Virgil, by a Greek pun on his name, was known
at Naples as " Parthenias " ; the " Lady," or, to
use the old-fashioned expression, the "Miss" of
N
194 VIRGIL AND TENNYSON
Naples. There is, perhaps, an alhision also to
the Greek name of Naples, Parthenope. Other
plays upon his name have been made at other
times. Leland, in his popular stories about Virgil,
tells us how a Florentine claimed him for Florence,
on the ground that he was a true lily of the city
of lilies — Vet'' giglio. He very seldom came to
Rome, though he had a house there in a good
situation, near Maecenas' villa; when he did,
he disliked very much being seen in public, and
if anyone pointed him out he fled into the nearest
house. For the most part he affected the seclusion
of Campania and Naples or Sicily. Yet this
retirement, says Tacitus, did not diminish either
the favour of Augustus or his popularity with
the people of Rome. When he did come to
town he was a celebrity, and on one occasion
when he was at the theatre and his own poems
were recited, the whole house rose up and honoured
him as if he had been the Emperor.
Substitute Hampshire for Campania, the Isle
of Wight for Naples and Sicily, and London for
Rome, and this account might, in most points,
have been written for the late Laureate, who
might also be described as tall and dark, and,
if not exactly rustic, not town-bred in appearance,
who, though certainly not girlish or ladylike in
appearance, was twitted for his intellectual and
artistic daintiness as "Schoolmiss Alfred," and
who also fled from the interviewer and the
admirer.
Throughout his life Virgil seems to have
been shy and sensitive, but amiable and attractive.
Horace, in the delightful glimpse given on the
LOVABLENESS OF BOTH 195
road to Brundusium, tells us two things of
him — that having a poor digestion he retired
to sleep after dinner instead of playing tennis
with Maecenas, and that he was emphatically a
"white soul," the most sincere and lovable of
spirits. Apocryphal or doubtful stories eke out
the record of his modesty and afiPection, gentleness
and generosity. "His hbrary was open to all
scholars ; he went on the principle that friends
have all in common ; he praised the good, he
censured none ; if he saw anything well said by
anyone else he was as pleased as if it was his
own, so that everyone who was not absolutely
cross-grained not only liked but loved him, and
the contemporary poets, though burning with
jealousy among themselves, Varius, Tucca, Horace,
Gallus, Propertius, were one and all devoted to
Virgil."^ So it might be written of Tennyson,
in whom nothing is more admirable than his
charity, whether as a man or a poet. Nothing
in his life is more entirely delightful than the
accoimt of his relations with the other poets of
his long reign, from the days of Eogers and
"Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt and Freihgrath, to those
of Victor Hugo, Henry Taylor, the Brownings,
Matthew Arnold, Rossetti, Longfellow, Lowell,
Patmore, Whitman, Swinburne, Watts-Dunton,
Watson, and Kipling.
Both Tennyson and Virgil, while young, con-
ceived the idea of writing an epic, but, daunted by
its difficulty, postponed it. " The earliest fragment
of an epic," says Lord Tennyson, " that I can find
among my father's MSS. in my possession, was
1 " Tib. CI. Donati Vita," xvii. 67.
196 VIKGIL AND TENNYSON
probably written about 1833, when he was twenty-
four, and is a sketch in prose." The vision of
Arthur, as Tennyson said of himself, had come upon
him when, little more than a boy, he first lighted
upon Malory. The magnificent fragment of the
'* Morte d'Arthur " was read by him in manuscript
to his friends in 1835. Twelve was the number
of books he had originally contemplated, as we
learn from the preface afterwards added to this
fragment ; and this was the number of " Idylls "
ultimately completed, though they were not
written in the order in which they are now
arranged.
Not otherwise Virgil, after he had written a few
youthful pieces, began a poem on the History of
Rome, but, repelled by the amount of matter, also,
as some say, by the roughness of the proper names
involved, tiu'ned to the " Bucolics." Not otherwise,
when he came to write the "^neid," he sketched
it out in prose, arranging it for twelve books, and
then composed it piecemeal and in no order, taking
up a section here and a section there, as the humour
seized him.
Neither life, after its earlier years, can be said
to have been eventful. A poet's life natm-ally has
but few events. Its landmarks are his poems. A
few visits, a few travels, the trip to Brundusium,
the voyage in the "Pembroke Castle," journeys to
Italy or to Greece — these may diversify life, but
are hardly events. Through the liberal gifts of
friends Vu-gil became very wealthy, enjoying a
fortune of some 100,000/. When Augustus
offered him the property of a citizen who had
been exiled, he declined to accept it. Is it a
DEATH OF VIRGIL 197
coincidence, or something more, that Tennyson was
the one poet of modern times who became rich by
poetry ? ^
Virgil, being mimarried, could not found a
family. His father died before him, and his mother
married again. Of his two brothers he lost one in
childhood, and the other as a young man. He left
half his property to his half-brother, Valerius
Proculus. The rest of his life is soon told. He
spent on the " ^neid " some eleven years, groaning, it
would seem, over the magnitude of the task, saying
that he had been mad ever to undertake it, longing
to be free and turn to other pursuits more to his
taste. At last, in his fifty-second year, he deter-
mined to make a great effort to finish. He decided
to travel to Greece and Asia, and there devote
himself in seclusion to the sole task of revising his
poem, so that he might have the rest of his life free
to follow philosophy. He started on his journey
and proceeded as far as Athens, when he met
Augustus returning from the East. The Emperor,
using perhaps a little gentle violence, persuaded the
poet to retm*n in his own company. But fate had
other destinies for him. He went in a very hot sun
to make an antiquary's visit to the neighbouring
town of Megara. He contracted a low fever, made
it worse by travelling by sea, without any break,
to Brundusium, and, reaching that port in a critical
state, died there on the 21st of September, 19 B.C.
His ashes were conveyed to his home at Naples,
and there entombed, a little way out of the town,
on the road to Puteoli. Upon the tomb was
^ Shakespeare and Pope under very different conditions were
similarly prosperous in their day.
198 VIRGIL AND TENNYSON
inscribed the distich wliich, it is said, he himself
dictated on his ileath-bed : —
" Fields, flocks, and chiefs I sang ; Mantua gave
Me birth, Calabria death, Naj)les a grave."
By the multitude his resting-place was little heeded,
but it became a sort of shrine of the faithful, who,
like Silius Italicus, kept the poet's birthday there
and honoured his shade. The fame of him lived
long on the country-side. Whether he was more
of a saint or a wizard was uncertain, but his
name lingered on, and is apparently still known
and associated with strange tales of magic and
marvel.^
Meanwhile his poems became more and more
widely read. Like Tennyson, Virgil became at
once an author for the young, a classic for colleges
and schools. He suffered, but also gained, as the
topic and theme of critics of every order, from the
professor and professional critic to the itinerant
lecturer or reciter. The first to lecture on Virgil
was a private tutor and lecturer to young ladies and
gentlemen, one Quintus Csecilius Epirota, a freedman
of Cicero's friend Atticus, and a friend of Virgil's
friend Gallus, apparently a Greek by origin, for the
rest a dilettante of somewhat doubtful morals,
styled by the epigrammatist Domitius Marsus "the
nurse of baby bards." Another, a critic of heavier
metal, was the compiler of the first Latin Dictionary,
Verrius Flaccus. Still later, it is interesting to find
^ See Comparetti, " Vii'gilio nel Medio Evo," translated by
Mr F. M. Benecke, London, 1895; and Mr C. G. Leland's more
recent book, "The Unpublished Legends of Virgil," Eliot
Stock, London, 1899.
THEIR COMMENTATORS 199
Cornutus, the tutor to whom his pupil Persius
makes so touching an acknowledgment, commenting
on Virgil. But what is still more noticeable is that
the best of all the commentators on Virgil is not a
Roman of Rome, but a colonial, a Latin scholar of
the colony of Berytus in Syria, Marcus Valerius
Probus, who flourished in the middle and latter
part of the first century of our era. A man of real
learning, Probus restored, in more than one place,
an almost certain reading, notably when he gave
back to Lavinia her "blosmy" locks.^ A man too
of independent mind, he ventured, we are told, to
criticise Virgil at times, and that sharply. So
Tennyson found some of his first and best com-
mentators in Van Dyke of the United States and
Dawson of Canada, while the earliest annotated
editions of his poems were written by professors of
English in India for their native students.
Virgil was everywhere. Lines of his were
inscribed on spoons and tiles, and introduced Hke
texts on gravestones. Fashionable blue-stockings
began the conversation at dinner by comparing
Virgil and Homer, or discussing the "Dido
problem." Grammarians and lexicographers made
him their norm and example. The schoolboy
thumbed his "^neid" by lamplight till the page
grew black with the smuts ; he learned it for
repetition, and scribbled scraps of it on the nearest
wall. At Pompeii, where all is silent, and has
been so for eighteen hundred years, it is touching
to read the first word and a half of the famous
second book, "conticuere cm . . . ," while still
1 "Floros crines." {" JEneid/' xii. 605.) The old and
common-place x'eading is "flavos crines."
200 VIRGIL AND TENNYSON
more iiotablo, scrawled in gigantic letters, as though
by the hand of the genius of Kome itself, on the
wall of tlie Baths of Titus, is the most appropriate
of lines : —
" Tanta' molis erat Romanam condere gentem."
Like Tennyson, like all truly popular poets,
Virgil was parodied. Like Tennyson, he was taken
to task during his lifetime, and for much the same
faults as Tennyson. What are these? First and
foremost, unoriginality, plagiarism. "Virgil," says
his biographer, " never wanted disparagers (obtrec-
tatores), and no wonder, for Homer has been dis-
paraged too." Herennius collected only Virgil's
faults, Perellius Faustus his thefts as well ; Quintus
Octavius Avitus had eight books of parallels or
translations, enumerating what verses he borrowed,
and from what sources. Other critics defended
him from these charges of plagiarism, but Virgil's
own answer is the best : " Why don't these gentry
attempt the same thefts themselves? They will
then find that it is easier to rob Hercules of his
club than Homer of a single line." Still he was not
insensible to criticism. He intended, we are told,
to go into retirement and polish his works till even
the most hostile critic could say no more. Here
again how like Tennyson ! " No poet," says Mr
Lecky, "ever altered more in deference to his
critics " ; while the late Mr Churton Collins and Mr
Stephen Gwynn have shown how many corrections
he made in his early volume after the strictures of
the Quarterly Review.
Of Virgil's imitation much is obvious enough.
It is obvious that he copies Theocritus, obvious
SUBTLETY OF THEIR STYLE 201
that he translates, and it must be confessed, even
mistranslates him. He avowedly follows Hesiod
and sings the song of Ascra through the towns of
Italy. It is patent that he copies Homer and
borrows from Ennius. Tennyson's case is different.
He, too, was a scholar deeply versed in letters,
Greek, Koman, and modern, and he often makes
avowedly scholarly allusions and appropriations,
and occasionally, though not often, obviously
imitates or translates. But the amount of his
imitation has been, as he himself long ago pointed
out, much over-estimated by the class of critics who
are inclined — to use his own phrase — to "swamp
the sacred poets with themselves."
In addition to the charge of plagiarism thus
brought against both of them, they were taken to
task for yet other faults, faults of manner, faults of
matter. Virgil was accused of a " new Euphuism "
of a special and subtle kind, by which he gave an
unusual and recondite meaning to simple words.
The critics could not call him either bombastic or
poverty-stricken, they therefore quarrelled with
what he and Horace considered the secret, and
what surely is one secret, of his grand style, his new
and inspired combination of old and simple materials.
The truth would seem to be that Virgil, like
Tennyson, held the theory that poetry and poetic
diction must often suggest rather than express,
that you cannot tie down the poet to one meaning
and one only. " Poetry is hke shot silk," Tennyson
once said, "with many glancing colours, it combines
many meanings " : —
" Words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the soul within " ;
202 VIRGIL AND TENNYSON
and this is exactly the theory applied by Conington
to the elucidation of Virgil'
A more serious charge is that levelled against
the characters, and especially the heroes, of their
epics. " Tennyson's mediaivalisni, it is said, is unreal :
he has sophisticated the masculine directness of
Malory. The hero of the * Idylls ' is a prig, and a
blameless prig : he is too good, he is even goody."
This has often been said of Tennyson and King
Arthiu*. It is exactly what is said of Virgil and
plus jEneas. Virgil's hero is a prig or a " stick " —
"always," as Charles James Fox remarked, "either
insipid or odious " : his blood does not flow, his
battles are battles of the stage. Virgil's epic is a
drawing-room epic. These are criticisms often
made, and there is a superficial truth in them,
^neas is certainly not a simple Homeric hero.
" He is conceived by Virgil," says Professor Nettle-
ship, "as embodying in his character the qualities of
a warrior, a ruler, and a civiliser of men, the legend-
ary impersonation of all that was great in the
achievements of Rome. His mission is to carry on
a contest in Italy, to crush the resistance of its
warlike tribes, to give them customs and build
them cities."
" Belluin ingens geret Italia, populosque feroces
Contundet, moresque viris et mcenia ponet." *
Mr Gladstone significantly misses this character.
To him Turnus is more attractive than ^neas : he
is the leader of a people " rightly struggling to be
free." But, in truth, to Virgil, Tm-nus is a
1 For instance, in his note on " Assurgens fluctu nimbosus
Orion "—" ^neid," i. 535. - "^neid," i. 263.
TYPE AND ANTITYPE 203
barbarian. So Arthur is the champion of the faith,
who —
" In twelve great battles ruining overthrew
The heathen hordes."
He is not only the warrior-king of legend, but is an
ideal —
" New-old and shadowing Sense at war with Soul,
Ideal manhood closed in real man."
It is this element of allegory that here and
there, as Mr Stopford Brooke has eloquently
shown, makes Arthur seem "superhuman," "out
of the world," "too good for human nature's daily
food."
It has been a question with critics to what
extent ^neas is the type of Augustus. There can
be little doubt that Virgil sincerely saw in the
Augustan regime the realisation of much of his
wish for the Roman people. Tennyson also could
write of Prince Albert —
"These to his memory — since he held them dear.
Perchance as finding there unconsciously
Some image of himself."
"JEneas," says Professor Sellar, in almost the
same language as Professor Nettleship, " is intended
to be an embodiment of the courage of an ancient
hero, the justice of a paternal ruler, the mild
humanity of a cultivated man living in an age of
advanced civilisation, the saintliness of the founder
of a new religion of peace and pm-e observance, the
afiPection for parent and child which was one of the
strongest instincts in the Italian race."
So again, " Mr Tennyson," wrote Mr Gladstone,
"has encouraged us to conceive of Arthur as a
204 VIRGIL ANT) TENNYSON
warrior no less irresistible than Lancelot, but as
also perfect in purity, and as in all other respects
more comprehensive, solid, and profomid."
Yet, after all the worldling is tempted to ciy —
" Victvix causa deis placuit, sed victa CatonV
Tennyson has come nearer to success with his
hero than Virgil. Arthm* finds more voices to
praise him than ^neas. The greatness of Virgil
does not depend upon ^neas, but upon the
"^neid" as a whole. Of its characters the
greatest is Dido : indeed it may be doubted if
any other is really great. Yet many are excellently
dehneated ; and figures like Anchises, Evander,
Mezentius, Camilla, and Drances have a pictur-
esqueness and dramatic value, as the creations
of one who is a master in gi'ouping and figure-
painting, if not exactly in character- drawing. As
much or indeed more might be said of the minor
characters of the " Idjdls," Gawain, Sir Bors, Enid,
Elaine, and others ; but Tennyson's powers as a
delineator of character are not to be judged only,
perhaps not mainly, by the "Idylls." The
characters of his dramas are, it is true, in the
first place, not so much ideals as historical studies ;
but the study of the personality of Queen Mary
is very fine,^ and so are the conceptions of Harold
and of Becket, as became increasingly clear when
the last was seen on the stage ; while, leaving
these out of the question, the " Northern Farmer,"
and in a difiPerent way " Ulysses," and, yet again,
^ " Vienne un ^rand acteur qui comprenne et incarne Harold,
une grande actrice qui se passionne pour le caractere de Marie,
et sans effort Tennyson prendra sa place parmi les dramaturges."
(Filon, "Theatre Anglais," p. 168.)
VIRGIL'S ORTHODOXY 205
"Maud," show a power of indicating individuality
by a few strokes, which is of a very high order.
But if the epics of both fall short in directness,
in point of heroic strength and life, and in those
quahties in which Homer is so forcible, both have
on the other hand qualities which go far to
compensate for these defects. Both make appeal
to sentiments and interests strong at once in their
own day and for all time. Both are national poets
addressing themselves to the patriotism of their
countrymen ; both are at once religious and
scientific ; both are scholars and artists. What in
this regard was Virgil's attitude is best seen by
placing him once more side by side with Lucretius.
Lucretius, as was said above, is a natural
philosopher. Science for him retained its old
double meaning : it was at once natural science,
that is to say, physical investigation and induction,
and philosophy, that is, metaphysical speculation.
Lucretius is not indeed aggressively negative :
rather he is an agnostic. He embraces a phil-
osophy which retains the gods provisionally.
He does not accept the ordinary views about them,
but he does go so far, in his magnificent proem,
as to give a kind of scientific justification to a
national belief and a family cult. He does not
however believe, he disbelieves, in the immortality
of the soul. He certainly cannot, by any stretch,
be called orthodox. Virgil on the other hand
is constructive, is in a sense orthodox. The
orthodoxy of his time consisted in maintaining
the accepted historic religion of Rome, and in
giving a new sanction to its traditions and legends.
This line Virgil pre-eminently follows. Further,
206 VIRGIL AND TENNYSON
he has a strong yearning for a personal immortality.
Ho starts, it is true, with the same Epicm'ean
creed as Lucretius : his desire is to know the
causes of things. Horace began in precisely the
same way. But Horace rested in, or lapsed into,
an agnostic conformity : for liim all after this life
is dust and shadow. Virgil is not content with
such a view. If still somewhat of a doubter,
" majestic in his sadness at the doubtful doom of
human kind," more and more he trusts to a
"larger hope." He beheves in a Providence, a
P^o^^dence to whom the Roman people is specially
near and dear; he believes in the persistence of
the individual soul, though it may clothe itself
in dififerent forms, and therefore in a Heaven and
a Hell, even in a Pm-gatory. The Sixth "^neid"
is a magnificent efifort to reconcile traditional belief
and philosophic science. The famous doctrine
of metempsychosis is employed, no doubt, partly
as a splendid artistic device, parallel to the
" Making of the Shield," but it is also an attempt
to justify the belief in immortality, to give to
humanity "the wages of going on, and still to be."
Here again Tennyson's effect is less intense,
or perhaps rather only less concentrated. Like
Virgil, he too was possessed from youth to age
by a passion for philosophy. Jowett said to him :
" Yom- poetry has an element of philosophy more
to be considered than any regular philosophy in
England. It is almost too much impregnated
with philosophy. Yet this to some minds will be
its greatest charm." It is hardly necessary to
recall his part in the early discussions of the
Cambridge " Conversazione " Society, better known
NATURE AND FAITH 207
by its popular style as the *' Apostles," or how
with Mr James Knowles and Professor Pritchard
in later days he founded the Metaphysical Society,
to which a brief but notable chapter in the " Life "
is very properly devoted by his son. Like Virgil,
and with better opportunities than Virgil, he had
a passion for natural science — a passion that appears
on almost every page of his poems. He was
accepted by the scientific men of his age as their
most intelligent and sympathetic critic and mouth-
piece in the world of letters ; while his accuracy
as an observer of nature is a household word.
Virgil's poetry is more artificial, and certainly
cannot always be called scientific, but it is probable
that less than justice is done to him on this score.
Mr Warde Fowler, for instance, tells us that,
excepting that of the half mythical "alcyon," all
Virgil's descriptions of birds are true to nature.
Tennyson was specially careful about his birds and
beasts, and had much correspondence about them
with friends, in particular with the late Duke of
Argyll ; and, as other experts have shown, he was
not less exact in his botany.
But Tennyson, if a naturalist, was no materialist ;
and with this scientific attitude there went in him,
as in Virgil, an intense personal conviction of the
immortality of the soul. His effort was to bring
all these factors — natural observation, personal
intuition, reason, and passion — into relation with
religion in general, and in particular with Christi-
anity, still more especially, here and there, with
that Anglican Christianity in whose warm and
kindly bosom he had been brought up.^ For like
1 Cp. Sneath, p. 26. Tennyson's relation to religion and
208 \ lUGIL AND TENNYSON
Virgil, if, to use the old classical phrase, his head
struck the stars aud the sky, he had his feet firmly
planted on the soil of his own country.
Both, then, wrote nub specie eternitatis, but
both were passionately patriotic, even to the extent
of appearing at times almost narrowly national.
Of this it is hardly necessary to multiply examples
from either poet. Virgil's many splendid allusions
to the beauties and glories of Italy, her lakes and
mountains, her "hill-towns piled on their sheer
crags," her "rivers gliding under ancient walls,"
his great apostrophe to her as " Mother of increase,
mighty mother of men," are known to all. His
magnificent hues in the Sixth "^neid" sum up
Rome's character and mission as perhaps no other
artist has ever summed up the mission and
character of a race.
" To rule the world, O Roman, be thy bent,
Empire thy fine art and accomplishment,
The crushed to spare, but battle down the proud,
Till all beneath the code of thy firm peace be bowed ! "
("iEneid," vi. 851.)
The mission of England, the mandate of the
British Empire, is not so fierce or selfish or all-
embracing, and Tennyson's strain is natm^ally
different. It is all the more interesting at once to
compare and contrast Tennyson's patriotic songs
and passages, such songs and passages as —
" Love thou thy land,"
or —
There is no land like England,"
philosophy are well brought out in two books — Mr E. H.
Sneath's " Mind of Tennyson," and Mr C. F. G. Masterman's
"Tennyson as a Religious Teacher."
or —
PROPHET AND SCHOLAR 209
Pray God our greatness may not fail
Thro' craven fears of being great."
The utterances of both poets, moreover, have m
this matter a certain character of prophecy. What
is specially noticeable, perhaps, is how Tennyson
outran his own time in his language about the
Colonies and the Empire as a whole, his words
about which are even more true and vital now
than they were when he wrote them. As a key
to this, we may remark that so far back as May
1881 we find him writing in a private letter to
Sir Henry Parkes, Premier of New South Wales :
" I always feel with the Empire, and I read with
great interest of these first steps in Federation,"
Both poets, again, were scholars, though, as we
have seen, neither was a pedant. Both read
widely and deeply. Both were " lords of language,"
coiners of "many a golden phrase." Tennyson
invented and employed many metres. Virgil, so
far as we know, used but few ; indeed in his great
acknowledged poems he used the hexameter alone.
But within the large limits of the hexameter he
made numberless experiments and inventions.
There is reason, as was said above, to believe that
the criticisms of Horace were worked out in
conjunction with Virgil ; Horace's maxims about
the choice of words and the combination of words,
and about the arrangement of a theme, coincide
exactly with Virgil's practice ; and indeed in more
than one place he avows that he has Virgil in his
mind. That Virgil was a conscious and critical
artist, laborious and careful, there can be no doubt.
He used to compose, we are told, a large number
o
210 VIRGIL AND TENNYSON
of lines every iiKH'iiinjj;, (lictntiiig them to his
secretiiry, and then j^oing over them all day, to
rednce them finally to very few/ saying that " he
brought forth his poems as a she-bear does her
young, and grailually licked them into shape," Not
to stop his flow, he would pass over certain parts
without finishing them ; other places again, he, so
to speak, propped up with very shght lines, which
he would say in jest were " shoring-poles " put in to
support the work until the solid pillars should
arrive. But sometimes lines would come to him
in a flash, and his amanuensis Eros in his old age
used to tell a story, whicli apparently became a
little confused in the telling, how he had completed
two lines of the " ^neid " on the spur of the
moment as his work was being read over for entry
in the finished book.
Tennyson's process was perhaps less methodical,
but he too polished and rejected. He certainly
composed hundreds, nay thousands, of lines which
he never wrote down ; as a rule he " rolled them
about in his head." But to him, too, not seldom
the lines "came." "Many of his shorter poems,"
says his son, "were made in a flash! "and again,
" When alone with me he would often chaunt his
poems and add fresh hues." "'Crossing the Bar'
came," he told his son, "in a moment," as he was
crossing the Solent, on his way from Aldworth to
Farringford. Often his poems started from a single
line. The line, "At Flores in the Azores Sir
Richard Grenville lay " was on his desk for years,
1 Tennyson has himself referred to this tradition in " Poets
and their Bibliographies." Cp. " Corpora fingere lingua,"
" iEneid," viii. 634.
POETIC ELABORATION 211
but he finished the ballad at last, all at once, in a
day or two. " What people don't understand," he
said, "is the slow germination, the long preliminary
process which must precede the sudden rapid
bursting into flower." The crowning instance is
"Maud," the whole of which, as we now have it,
was written backward, as the development and
justification of the lovely little lyric beginning, " O
that 'twere possible. After long grief and pain,"
which had been composed and even published in a
magazine, very many years earlier.
Both were very fastidious. Tennyson would
throw away a beautiful poem like that on
" Eeticence " because he could not please himself
about one collocation. He would reject, says
Aubrey de Vere, passages or stanzas, however
beautiful in themselves, if they spoiled the general
form of the poem. We know less about Virgil, but
all we know points in the same direction, and the
story about his wishing the "^neid" to be burnt
is probably no fable, though it is also probably true
that he acquiesced in his impulse being over-ruled.
Tennyson restored or revived the use of many old
and beautiful English words and forms : forms like
knotted, words like jUttermouse or marish, " Not a
cricket chirred," " The wood ihsii grides and clangs,"
"The poached filth that floods the middle street."
It is characteristic that he regretted that he had
never employed the word ''yarely!' Exactly
analogous is Virgil's use of archaism, his genitives
in ai, his infinitives in ier ; his oUe for ille and hoc
for hue, or his quianam and porgite and Jlictus ; or
the beautiful old word Jlorus as an epithet for a
maiden's hair, alluded to already.
212 VIRGIL AND TENNYSON
Thero is notliing unusual in the fact that both
read their poems aloud : this has been done by
many poets, ancient and modern. But in their
manner of reading there is an interesting
resemblance. Virgil used to read or recite from his
poems, we are told, not, as became the fashion at
Rome, publicly or semi-publicly at stances to large
audiences, but only occasionally to a few chosen
friends, and then for the most part passages about
which he was in doubt, in order to get his friends'
judgment. Of the charm of his reading abundant
testimony has been preserved. He read with
wonderful sweetness and fascination, and with
enviable dramatic power, and often brought out the
meaning of hues of his own which without him
were empty and dumb. The story of Octavia
fainting at the recital of the passage on the young
Marcellus is well known.
Tennyson followed the same practice. He read
to get his friends' judgment. " The constant reading
of new poems aloud was the surest way of helping
him to find out any defects there might be." He
also read for the enjoyment of his friends.
Reporters differ, as is to be expected, about the
artistic value of his reading. One witness said he
read with a voice like a rough sea ; but in truth
it was very fine, musical, and sympathetic, and
brought out, like Virgil's reading, new and
unsuspected meanings and beauties in the poems
themselves. Fanny Kemble speaks of the striking
and impressive reading of "Boadicea." Gladstone
understood and was converted to " Maud " when he
heard it read ; so was Dr Van Dyke, the American
critic, who has written on the whole the fullest and
TENNYSON S LOVE OF VIRGIL 213
truest account of Tennyson's reading. The reading
of freshly finished poems to special friends was
with both poets a great occasion. Thus Virgil
read the " Georgics " to Augustus, at the rate of a
" Georgic " a day, for four days. Propertius, again,
was admitted to a hearing of the "^neid," while
it was still in process, and wi'ote :
" Way, bards of Greece, and Roman bards, make way I
More than the 'Iliad' soon shall see the day."
So Tennyson read to the Prince Consort, or to the
Rossettis and the Brownings.
It would be easy to carry the parallel into yet
further detail, but perhaps it has been almost over-
elaborated already. Much of the same kind of
similarity might be found between other poets,
ancient and modern. Tennyson has much of
affinity with Milton and Gray. As regards Virgil,
Tennyson had Virgil himself, as well as Virgil's
model before him, and was a conscious and constant
student of Virgil. His poem on Virgil is well
known. What is less well known, though recorded
in the last lines, is the lifelong love out of which
these glorious stanzas themselves flowed. " I had
no idea that Virgil could sound so fine as it did by
his reading," said Savile Morton in 1844. " Tears
which during a pretty long and intimate intercourse
I had never seen glisten in his eye but once, when
reading Virgil — dear old Virgil, as he called him —
together." So wrote Edward Fitzgerald, who
shared this, as he shared so many of Tennyson's
loves.
It seems a pity that he did not give any
specimen of translation from a poet with whom he
214 VIRGIL AND TENNYSON
had so much affinity. How he thought it ought to
have been done he has told us. Like Wordsworth,
ho thought Virgil should be translated into blank
verse. Perhaps the best suggestion of what
Tennyson's rendering would have been like, had he
attempted it, is to be found in the closing Hues of
"Demeter," lines which have a distinctly Virgihan
ring :—
" The Stone, the Wheel, the dimly-glimmering lawns
Of that Elysium, all the hateful fires
Of torment, and the shadowy warrior glide
Along the silent field of Asphodel " — ^
or in what his son justly calls the " Virgilian "
simile about the torrent and the cataract in "Enid."
Imitation, however, is one thing, the approxima-
tion of independent wi'iters another ; and in
drawing out the parallel some deduction must
perhaps be made on these and similar grounds. In
their actual output, too, there is perhaps more
difference than in their genius. Tennyson is more
various : Virgil is more concentrated. Had Virgil
followed up his early bent, or had he lived longer,
he might have given us both lyrics and elegiacs of a
memorable kind. The " Catalepta," as already
hinted, seems to suggest analogues to several of
Tennyson's occasional verses. It must be remem-
bered also that our record of Virgil's personality is
very imperfect. Thus his intense passion for
philosophy, hinted at, as has been shown, more
than once in his remains, can hardly be properly
^ Other very Virgilian passages are the lines in the " Lotos
Eaters," beginning, " They sat them down upon the yellow sand,"
or those in the "Princess," beginning, "Then rode we with the
old king across the lawns,"
THEIR "SAYINGS" 215
estimated now, though it is unconsciously felt in his
poetry. Again, we have very few of his sayings.
There is one, which sounds genuine and is
certainly fine, " That no virtue is more useful to a
man than patience, and that there is no lot so hard
that a brave man cannot conquer it by bearing it
wisely." He has expressed this maxim in the
*'^neid":—
" Quidquid erit, superanda omnis fortnna ferendo est ; "
and Horace, in his beautiful dirge on Virgil's friend
Quintilius Varus, is perhaps alluding to it, and for
Virgil's sake :
" Durum : sed levius fit patientia,
Quidquid corrigere est nefas."
With both may be not inaptly compared Tennyson's
fine and famous lines —
" O well for him whose will is strong !
He suffers, but he will not suffer long."
Had Tennyson been more bold and determined
with his epic, reared a more sustained architecture,
and finished all in a style and on a scale, more fully
corresponding to the promise of the first "Morte
d' Arthur," the resemblance might have been more
complete, if less interesting.
Yet when all deductions have been made, the
parallel seems well worth working out. How close
it is perhaps we can hardly yet tell. Hereafter,
when these things shall have become history, when
the Victorian age like the Augustan shall lie ''fore-
shortened in the tract of time," its separate stars
gathered to one ghttering constellation, it will be
216 VIRGIL AND TENNYSON
more easy to pronounce. Yet assuredly it is
strikincjly close. Fitly indeed was a wreath of
laurel from the tomb of Virgil laid upon Tennyson's
bier. Were there ever two poets at once so pro-
found and so popular, satisfying at the same time
the highest and the widest tastes ; poets the delight
of the artist and the student; the favom-ites, and
more, the friends, of monarchs ; the heroes, so far as
men of letters can be heroes, of an empire ? Did
we hold Virgil's creed, we might be tempted at
times to think — though the dates do not exactly,
but only nearly, correspond — of that ancient doctrine
of reincarnation so wonderfully handled by Plato
and by Virgil himself, and to fancy that the tender
and pensive, yet withal masculine, spirit, which
went to join Musseus on the Elysian lawn nineteen
years before the birth of Christ, had, after twice
rolling the fateful cycle, foimd a third avatar, and
lived again, well-nigh two thousand years later, in
the English Laureate of the nineteenth century.
But Tennyson's faith, though the doctrine had
much attraction for him, was not this. Rather it
was one which looked ever forward and upward —
*' On and always on."
VI
GKAY AND DANTE
" The curfew tolls the knell of parting day."
" Squilla di lontano
Che paia '1 giorno pianger che si muore."
(" The distant bell
That seems to mourn the dying of the day.")
The parallel is fairly obvious, and suggests at once
that Gray borrowed his thrice-famous opening from
the commencement of the eighth canto of the
"Purgatorio." Such resemblances, it is true, by no
means always prove borrowing, or at any rate
conscious borrowing. Often they are due to
"unconscious cerebration," as often to mere co-
incidence. In the case quoted, however, there is
evidence that Gray himself admitted the debt. He
even avowed that it was originally fuller. " He had
first written," he said, *'the knell of dying day," but
" changed ' dying ' into 'parting' to avoid the concetto."
Gray is, of course, generally considered a highly
imitative poet. It is certain that he was a very
learned poet. He congratulated himself, indeed,
on not possessing a good verbal memory, for even
without this, he said, he had imitated too much,
and had he possessed it, all he wrote would have
been imitations, from his having read so much.
The poetic power and importance of Gray have
217
218 GRAY AND DANTE
recently boon iinpn^ned in much the same way,
and on nnicli the same grounds, that the poetic power
and importance of Horace have also recently been
impugned. He may well be content to be dis-
paraged in such company.
" Eij«» apis Matinse
More inodoque,
Grata carpentis thyma per laborem
Plurimum circa nemus uvidique
Tiburis ripas operosa parvus
Carmiiia fingo."
So wrote Horace of himself. But what Horace
called "the modest industry of the Matine bee," the
world called euriosa felicitas, " felicity reduced to
a science." And of this euriosa felicitas Gray has
a large share. Nay, of this special combination of
learning with poetic genius he is, perhaps, although
there are other good examples, the most complete
example in English letters, in which, moreover, he
is sm*ely a very singular and fascinating figure.
For what is Gray ? A don, a "futile don," as,
in his brilliant insouciant youth, too soon, alas, to
be glorified by a soldier's death, the late Mr G. W.
Steevens, himself at the time that infallible being, a
non-resident junior fellow, might have called him ; a
"futile don" in days when the life of a resident
don at Oxford or Cambridge was one of real academic
seclusion and sequestration ; a " futile don " and yet
a first-rate poet ; shy, fastidious, academic, yet fired
with genuine if suppressed passion, and filled with
world-wide sympathies ; a cross between, shall we
say, the author of the " Anatomy of Melancholy "
and Lord Tennyson ; a don who, from his college
rooms, indited the most popular poem in the
THE "DON" AS POET 219
language, which Wolfe, if the tale be true, repeated
as he rowed down the St Lawrence, on the eve of
his victory and his death, saying he would rather
have written it than take Quebec ; a poet, too, who
achieved the first rank with so few lines, yet a poet
again whose little represented so much, whose tiny
posy, "a handful, but all roses," was the outcome
of an acquisition and culture truly immense.
If Milton, after making his Italian journey, had
returned to Cambridge, had never married or
become Latin Secretary, but had immured himself,
with his books and his mulberry-tree, in the delight-
ful courts and gardens of Christ's College, we might
have seen, a century and more earlier than Gray's
time, the same phenomenon. As it is, Caliimachus
writing " They told me Heraclitus " in the Museum
of Alexandria, is perhaps a parallel from Greek
Literature, but in English letters Gray is unique.
So many explanations have been given of the
paradox which he presents, that it is worth while
to consider once more how he came to be what he
was, to do what he did, and, what is not less
remarkable, to do, or at any rate to write, no more
than he did. Matthew Arnold puts down Gray's
infertility to the credit of his times, to the "moral
east wind then blowing." But Fitzgerald is more
probably correct when he writes : " I fancy Gray
would have written and published more had his
ideas been more copious and his expression more
easy to him."
Gray's temperament no doubt made him a don.
He did not like Cambridge, or rather, with many of
her sons, he liked her best in vacation, when the
University was down. He said hard things of her,
220 GllAY AND DANTE
both as an undergraduate and in middle age. Yet
ho returned thither after seeing something of the
world, ho lingered there, and finally made his life
or, at any rate, his home there, and it is doubtful
if he would have been either happier or more pro-
ductive elsewhere.
Had he married "Madam Speed" with her
"thirty thousand pounds," her "house in town,
plate, jewels, china, and old japan infinite," he
might have been shaken out of himself, but it would
have been a dangerous experiment. Addison was
not perhaps very happy with his Countess. And
being a don confirmed and set the bent of Gray's
temperament. Yet it is character, not circumstance,
that is destiny, and it was temperament that was
really responsible for his manner of Hfe. His
genius, his instinct, were rather for acquisition than
creation. He knew this himself. As to creation,
his answer to Wharton, when asked by him to
write an epitaph, is sufficient evidence :
"I by no means pretend to inspiration [he replied],
but yet I affirm that the faculty in question is by no
means voluntary. It is the result (I suppose) of a
certain disposition of mind, which does not depend
on oneself, and which I have not felt this long time.
You, that are a witness how seldom this spirit has
moved me in my life, may easily give credit to
what I say."
As to acquisition, his own language is no less
significant. "When I expressed my astonishment
that he had read so much," says Norton NichoUs,
he replied, " Why should you be surprised, for I do
nothing else ? " He had essentially the tempera-
ment of the scholar. Like Mark Pattison, he
GRAY'S PROFOUND LEARNING 221
could not, or would not, write on any topic, until
he had read all that had been written upon it.
The fact that he was a good classical scholar,
that he wrote Latin verses, some of which have
even made an enduring mark, is well known. The
true character and amount of his classical studies
is not so fully recognised. Gray was not merely a
scholar in the ordinary sense in which many well-
educated men of letters, and not a few men of
action, have been scholars ; he was a genuine and
deep student, an "original researcher." Temple
and Potter, scholars of his own day, described him
as "the most learned man in Europe or of the age,
equally acquainted with the elegant and profound
parts of science, and that not superficially but
thoroughly," and the opinions of Temple and
Potter in the eighteenth century have been en-
dorsed in the last by Fynes-CHnton and— most
fastidious and hard to satisfy — the late Master of
Trinity, Dr W. H. Thompson.
"Gray projected," says the learned author of
the " Fasti Hellenici," " a literary chronology. Had
this work been completed by a writer of Gray's
taste, learning and accuracy, it would have un-
doubtedly superseded the necessity of any other
imdertaking of the same kind." Gibbon, indeed,
lamented that the poet was sometimes lost in the
scholar and man of science. After quoting from the
fragmentary piece on " Education and Government,"
he proceeds to ask, " Instead of compiling tables of
chronology and natural history, why did not Mr
Gray apply the powers of his genius to finish the
philosophic poem of which he has left such an
exquisite specimen ? "
222 GRAY AND DANTE
But tlio answer is that Gray was by nature as
nuich of a student, nay, perhaps, though lie never
achieved a History, even as nuich of an historian,
as Gibbon himself, and that it was part of his
genius to compile. Like Gibbon, he would seem
to have read, and even observed, pen in hand.
Whether he was at home or abroad, he was always
jotting, noting, extracting, recording. When he
made the Grand Tour he kept elaborate notes of
travel, often probably to the annoyance of his more
volatile companion, Horace Walpole, who writes
significantly to West, "Only think what a vile
employment 'tis, making catalogues."
He studied the fine arts in the same methodical,
diligent way in which he travelled, or in which
he perused the classics. He was a great lover
of music, and early acquired a taste for the Italian
schools of that art, as well as of painting. His
acquaintance with painting is shown in his letter
of criticism to Walpole in reference to the latter's
"Lives of the Painters." Pergolesi, Leo, and
Scarlatti were among his favom'ite composers.
Galuppi, whom many admirers of Browning
suppose him to have discovered, was well known
to Gray. Walpole even thought that Gray had
first introduced Pergolesi into England. This
cannot be established, but what is certain is,
that when in Italy he collected — transcribing
many pieces with his own hand — nine volumes
of Italian music, w^hich are still in existence, a
monument alike to his predilections and his
indefatigable industry. Dr H. E. Krehbiel, in
whose possession they now are, gives a very
full and precise account of them in his interesting
GRAY AS A NATURALIST 223
little book on *' Music and Manners in the Classical
Period." Gray was also at the pains to add the
names of the chief singers by whom he had
heard these pieces performed. The whole collec-
tion thus forms now a most valuable record of
forgotten music and musicians. He kept a journal
in France, a journal in Italy. He wrote an essay
on Architecture. Above all, he was interested in
Natural History of every kind. About the same
time as White of Selborne, he kept a naturalist's
calendar of the same sort as that kept by White.
He drew up a list of the "Fishes that live in
the Mediterranean, about whose names we know
nothing from the Greeks or Romans." He wi'ote
an exceedingly clever account, in Latin hexameters,
of the "Generick Characters of the Orders of
Insects," beginning thus with the Coleoptera —
"Alas lorica tectas Coleoptera jactant."
He annotated Gerald's "Herbal" and Ray's
" Select Remains " ; Linnaeus' " Systema Naturae " he
not only annotated, but illustrated with careful
pen-and-ink drawings of birds and insects, produc-
ing a volume which deservedly was one of the
chief treasures of Mr Ruskin's library, and after-
wards of that of the late Mr Charles EKot Norton.^
But, indeed, he annotated many, if not most, of his
books. It is a thousand pities that his library
was dispersed, after being kept together for some
seventy years. The items, a few out of many,
that have been recovered from dispersal, afford
1 It has been beautifully reproduced in facsimile by that
fine scholar to whom the tradition of letters owes so much
on both sides of the Atlantic.
224 GRAY AND DANTE
a most striking testimony to the width of his
interests, the depth of his knowledge. The
catalogue of it, printed in 1851, when it was
sold, makes our mouths water. He annotated
Euripides and " The Digest," Boccaccio and Milton,
Clarendon and Bishop Burnet, Roger Lord Orrery,
Dugdale's "Baronage," and various volumes of
memoirs and travels. On Aristophanes, and on
Plato, he left a body of systematic notes.
But what is not less remarkable than Gray's
learning is his culture. He had, as has been
said by his graceful and sympathetic biographer,
Mr Edmund Gosse, all the modern tastes. He
knew and loved the Elizabethan writers, and even
the earlier English literature of Lydgate and Gower
and Chaucer. He appreciated Gothic architectm-e.
He loved mountainous scenery. He was fascinated
by the Alps, though their terrors when he crossed
them were very various and very real. He
discovered the Enghsh Lakes before Wordsworth,
and the Scotch Highlands before Scott. He
played the spinet, he collected blue china, he
had flower-boxes in his college windows at
Cambridge, and when he was in London went
every day to Covent Garden for a nosegay. He
was a connoisseur in wall-papers, stained glass,
and high -art furnitiu"e, and in these matters it
may be noted that his taste was more fastidious
than that of Strawberry Hill, where he accused
Walpole of having "degenerated into finery."
He loved the classical, but he loved the
romantic too. He translated Norse and Welsh
poetry before York-Powell had collected the one,
or Matthew Arnold written on the other. Among
MILTON AND KEATS 225
Gray's modern tastes was the taste for Dante,
Dante was, of course, well known to England
and England's poets long before. Three hundred
and seventy years earlier Chaucer visited Italy,
and probably met Petrarch and very possibly heard
Boccaccio lecture, while his various allusions to
Dante, and his reproduction of the story of "Erl
Hugelyn of Pise " are well known.
Milton in his day also made the Italian tour,
and knew Italian well — better than some of his
critics, such as the late Rector of Lincoln, who
have had the temerity to find fault with his
knowledge. Milton copies Dante, he translates
him, he avows that he took him for his model.
"Above all I preferred," he says, "the two famous
renowners of Beatrice and Laura, who never write
but honour of those to whom they devote their
verse."
In what was till yesterday our own century,
from first to last, our poets, with hardly an
exception, have been students and lovers of
Dante.
Keats in 1817, then a young man of twenty-
two, wrote of him :
" He is less to be commended than loved, and
they who truly feel his charm will need no
argument for their passionate fondness. With
them he has attained the highest favour of an
author, exemption from those canons to which
the little herd must bow ; Dante, whether he has
been glorified by the Germans or derided by the
French, it matters little."
Shelley writes more precisely but not less
p
22G GRAY AND DANTE
fervently. Byron, who told Murray that he
thought his "Prophecy of Dante" was the best
thing he had ever done if not unintelligible, and
who published a very careful translation of the
Paolo and Francesca episode, felt, and acknow-
ledged that he felt, the power and compulsion
of the great Florentine. It was, it would seem,
from the motto prefixed by him to "The Corsair"
that Tennyson as a boy of twelve first learned
that " A sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering
happier things."
Of Tennyson himself, or the other poets nearer
our own time. Browning and Matthew Arnold,
Longfellow and Lowell, Rossetti and Swinburne,
there is no need to speak. They share, and indeed
have done much alike to illustrate and to stimulate,
that " great love and long study " of Dante which
has been among the most characteristic symptoms
of the process of thought and letters in England
and, we may add, in America, in our own centiu*y
and day.
But if such was the taste of Chaucer and
of Milton, if such was the taste of the nineteenth
century, such was not the taste of the eighteenth.
And this is just one of the points which makes
Gray so interesting. It is true that to study
Italian was fashionable enough in England in the
last century. The little Eton set at Cambridge,
who, with West at Oxford, formed the " Quadruple
Alliance," the set to which Gray belonged, the
picture of which has been so delightfully recovered
for us by Mr Tovey, began the study, of their
own motion, as young men, with Signor Hieronimo
Piazza, the University teacher.
HORACE WALPOLE 227
"I learn Italian like any dragon [he writes to
West, in one of the first letters preserved], and
in two months am got through the 16th book of
Tasso, whom I hold in great admiration ; I want
you to learn too, that I may know your opinion
of him ; nothing can be easier than that language
to any one who knows Latin and French ah-eady,
and there are few so copious and expressive."
And again in one of his early letters he alludes
to having translated (like all beginners) the "Pastor
Fido."
But to learn Italian is not always, certainly was
not then, necessarily to love Dante. Walpole, for
instance, began Italian with Gray, with Gray he
travelled to Italy, and studied Italian art. In
two places in his letters he makes allusion to
the author of the " Divine Comedy " ; in the first,
he says that, "asking Mr Hayley's pardon, he does
not admire Dante"; in the second, he tells Mr
WiUiam Mason that "Dante was extravagant,
absurd, disgusting; in short, a methodist parson
in Bedlam." This may seem astonishing by itself,
but it is worth noting that in the same vein
Walpole poured equal contempt on Gray's modern
taste for Norse. "Who can care," he said,
"through what horrors a Runic savage arrived
at all the joys and glories they conceive — the
supreme felicity of boozing ale out of the skull
of an enemy in Odin's Hall?" In point of fact,
Walpole's language is strong, but the sentiment
is only too characteristic of that " wonderful eigh-
teenth century through which poor Gray wandered
in life-long exile." It is only fair to Walpole,
however, to say that he also made a serious and
22S GRAY AND DANTE
sensible observation about Dante, and one which
bore fruit. "Dante," he said, "is a difiicult
author. I wish we had a complete translation
in prose with the original on the opposite page."
The remark had some influence in setting Gary
on his admirable rendering.
With Walpole's may be set Lord Chesterfield's
opinion, which is amusing, and also of value if
only in showing what was the verdict on Dante
of a cultivated man of fashion in 1750. It is
thus he wrote in that year to his son —
"Whatever author is obscure and difficult
in his own language certainly does not think
clearly. This is, in my opinion, the case of a
celebrated Italian author, to whom the Italians,
from the admiration they have of him, have given
the epithet of il divino; I mean Dante. Though
I formerly knew Italian extremely well, I could
never understand him ; for which reason I had
done with him, fully convinced that he was
not worth the pain necessary to understand
him."
But even Lord Chesterfield's scourge, Dr
Johnson, the English oracle of the century, held
probably much the same views. Few things of
the kind are more interesting than to contrast
the attitude of Dr Johnson towards Ossian and
Macpherson with that of Gray.^ Johnson's is
the more amusing and even heroic, but Gray's
is undoubtedly the more scholarly and sympathetic,
and the more in accord with modern views.
^ The pious diligence of the late Dr Neil, Librarian of
Pembroke, recovered for his College Library, inter alia, Gray's
copy of Macpherson's "Ossian."
OTHER ITALIAN CLASSICS 229
Johnson hardly mentions Dante except, oddly
enough, to compare the opening of the "Pilgrim's
Progress " with that of the " Divine Comedy." Yet
Johnson knew Italian, and speaks with apprecia-
tion of Petrarch and Ariosto. Still more strange,
Boswell quotes two lines from the "Divine
Comedy," but avows that he does not know the
author of the quotation.
Gibbon in the same way, who knew Italy
and Italian better, perhaps, than he professes,
speaks, it is true, of Dante's "original wildness,"
but would appear to prefer Ariosto and Tasso, and
seems to regard Petrarch as a more important if
not better poet.
Gray knew and loved Petrarch too. His copy
of Petrarch was marked, after his methodical
academic manner, with signs indicating the com-
parative merit of the various pieces. Boccaccio,
we have seen, he had studied minutely. He was
also well acquainted with Tasso and Ariosto.
Indeed, there is httle doubt that Norton Nicholls
was right in saying that Gray knew the whole
range of Italian literature, both prose and verse.
And it has been seen that to know, with Gray,
was to know exactly and exhaustively.
What is pretty certain then is that his acquaint-
ance with Dante was of the same minute and
profound kind as his acquaintance with Aristo-
phanes or Plato. The evidence for this, it is
true, is somewhat scattered and scanty, but, taken
in conjunction with Gray's own character, it seems
sufficient.
The statement about the debt to Dante with
which this paper begins is drawn from what is,
230 GRAY AND DANTE
perhaps, the most graphic and best accuimt of
Gray preserved, namely, the "Reminiscences" of
the Rev. Norton Nicholls, This gentleman, a
Suffolk rector, wealthy and of artistic tastes, the
owner of a "villa" at Blundeston, near Lowestoft,
who died in 1809, at the age of sixty-eight, was
in particular deeply versed in Italian. A fine
tree in the ground is still called "Gray's tree,"
and until recently was surrounded by a circular
bench which is said to have been a favom-ite seat
of the poet. Among the ciu'iosities of literature is
an Itahan *' Canzone," prefixed by Mr Mathias, one
of the chief biographers of Gray, to a collection
of lyrics from the most illustrious Itahan poets,
and dedicated, "Al erudito e nell' amena lettera-
tm-a versatissimo Norton Nicholls." In this
singular piece Gray figm'es several times. He
is called
" Quel Grande che canto le tombe e i Bardi."
and later figures somewhat grotesquely as one of
the well-known "swans of the Lord of Delos,
who are seen disporting, and whose cries are heard,
along the learned stream."
Mr Norton Nicholls went up from Eton to
Cambridge in 1760. Apparently he had already
learnt Italian at Eton. His first acquaintance
with Gray, he tells us, was one afternoon, drinking
tea, at the rooms of a Mr Lobb,^ a Fellow of
^ Dr T. A. Walker, Fellow of Peterhouse, has furnished me
with some entries from the College records which show that
this must have been the Reverend William Lobb, a Somerset-
shire gentleman, who was about this time Junior Dean, Greek
Lectui'er, and Chaplain in the College.
NORTON NICHOLLS 231
Peterhouse. Was afternoon tea, too, one of Gray's
modern tastes ? Collins, poor lad, used, we know,
to give tea-parties in his undergraduates' rooms at
Magdalen.
The conversation, Mr Nicholls goes on to say,
turned on the use of bold metaphors in poetry, and
that of Milton was quoted, " The sun to me is dark
and silent as the moon." ^ Nicholls does not say,
indeed, "quoted by Gray," but it is probable that
this was so, for Gray seems to have affected the
quotation, and makes it, as will be seen later, in
his "Journal in the Lakes."
Nicholls, a humble freshman, ventured to ask if
it might not possibly be imitated from Dante's
"Mi ripingeva la dov' il sol tace." Gray turned
quickly romid to him and said, " Sir, do you read
Dante ? " "I have endeavoured to understand
him," was the reply. Gray was much pleased,
addressed the chief of his discourse to him for the
rest of the evening, and invited him to Pembroke
Hall. Nicholls afterwards told a friend of the
awe he felt, at the time, of the poet, and the
lightning of his eye, that '' folgormite sguardo,
as the Tuscans term it," but "Mr Gray's courtesy
and encouraging affability," he said, " soon dis-
persed every uneasy sensation and gave him
confidence."
This "snapshot," if we may call it so, gives a
glimpse, for which we cannot be too grateful, of
the poet hi the environment of the Cambridge of his
day, and of his personality and interests. Was
Gray's surprise rather that young Norton Nicholls
knew Italian at all, or that he read Dante ?
^ " Samson Agonistes," v. 85.
232 GRAY AND DANTE
Perhaps we are not justified in saying the latter.
After they became friends, it seems clear, though
it is not stated, from several quotations and
allusions which arc scattered up and down the
"lleminisccnces," that they read Dante together.
** Gray," Norton Nicholls proceeds, " had a perfect
knowledge of the Italian language, and of the poets
of Italy of the first class, to whom he looked up
as his great progenitors, and to Dante as the father
of all; to wdiose genius, if I remember right, he
thought it an advantage to have been produced in
a rude age of strong and uncontrolled passions,
when the Muse was not checked by refinement and
the fear of criticism."
This reminiscence by Norton Nicholls is, to
speak strictly, almost the only piece of external
evidence we have of Gray's study of Dante. The
rest is all, or almost all, internal.
It is characteristic of Gray that he only once
in his life asked for any preferment; that when
he asked for it, he half expected and half hoped
to be refused, and, as a matter of fact, was refused.
What he solicited, yet shrank from, is also signifi-
cant of the "futile don." It was a Professorship,
that of Modern History and Modern Languages.
This post became vacant in the year 1762, and
Gray made some little interest to obtain it. Five
years earlier he had declined the office of Poet
Laureate offered him on the death of CoUey Gibber.
That he did so seems a pity. Gray evidently did
not really despise the office, though he made fun
of it. He wished somebody might be found to
"revive its credit," but he shrank from trying
himself. His prevailing reason seems to have been
GRAY AS PROFESSOR 233
his donnish temperament, his constitutional, chilly
hesitancy. Had Gray accepted the post, Scott
might apparently afterwards have done the same.
The tradition of Spenser and Ben Jonson and
Dryden would have been revived ; that of Southey,
"Wordsworth, and Tennyson would have been
anticipated; the series would have become, by so
much, at any rate, the more continuously illustrious.
That Gray was well suited for it is shown by his
Installation Ode, one of the best examples in the
language of an official " Pindaric " written for a set
occasion, but he declined it. He would have been
even better suited to be Professor of Poetry ; but
Cambridge had not, like Oxford, such a Professor-
ship.
The Chair of History, to which he now aspired,
was given to a Mr Brockett, a friend of Gray's pet
aversion. Lord Sandwich. Fortunately, if it is
permissible to say so, the Professorship was, three
years later, again vacant. Mr Brockett, who had
been dining with his noble patron, fell from his
horse on the way back to Cambridge and broke his
neck. Augustus, Duke of Grafton, that often and
over-much maligned potentate, for whose quiet
merits the pen of that accomplished Vice-
Chancellor and Burgess of Oxford, Sir W. Anson,
has at last procured recognition, had the good sense
at once to select Gray, and the tact to write — no
easy matter — a letter which secured his accept-
ance, and Gray became Professor.
Being Professor in those days unfortunately
did not involve lecturing, and though Gray drew
out an admirable sketch of an inaugural lecture, he
never inaugurated. One duty, however, attached
234 GRAY AND DANTE
to the office of liogius Professor of History, which
Gray discharged, as it happened, with a very
interesting sequel — the duty of providing teachers
such as those under whom he had himself studied,
in French and Italian. The Italian teacher whom
Gray introduced was one Agostino Isola, after-
wards editor of Tasso. Under Isola's tuition Gray
himself took the opportunity of renewing his
acquaintance with the Italian poets. The same
teacher some years later taught Italian to Words-
worth, while his granddaughter, Emma Isola,
became the adopted daughter of Charles and Mary
Lamb, and later, the wife of Tennyson's friend,
fellow-traveller, and publisher, the friend, too, of
other poets beside Tennyson, and himself an author,
Edward Moxon.
We said it was a pity that Cambridge had no
Professorship of Poetry. Not that Gray would
have been more likely to lecture from the Poetic
than from the Historic Chair, but that he would
have filled it specially well, and it might have
induced him to ^vi4te, if not to deliver, what he
projected, and what he could have executed better
than any one else. His letters show him to have
been as good a critic of poetry as he was poet. He
j^rojected a history of English poetry. He dropped
the scheme as he dropped so many, but he handed
on a sketch of his intentions to his friend the
Oxford Professor, Dr Thomas Warton. The idea,
he told Warton, was in some measure taken from
a scribbled paper by Pope.
The sketch, which is still extant, is naturally a
dry and dull syllabus, but has its interest in the
light it throws upon the extent of Gray's reading
THE HISTORY OF POETRY 235
and the scope of his conception. After an
" Introduction " : "On the poetry of the GaUic or
Celtic nations as far back as it can be traced ; on
that of the Goths ; on the origin of rhyme," etc.,
the " First Part " was to have been : *' On the
school of Provence, which rose about the year 1100,
and was soon followed by the French and Italians.
Their heroic poetry or romances in verse, allegories,
fabliaux, syrvientes, comedies, farces, canzoni,
sonnets, ballades, madrigals, sestines, etc. Of their
imitators, the French, and of the first Italian School,
commonly called the Sicilian, about the year 1200,
brought to perfection by Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio,
and others."
Had Gray carried out the design, of which this
is the outline, we should have known more
accurately the extent of his acquaintance with
Dante. But he did not do so. All that remains
of it are some scattered essays or collections of
notes, on English metre, on the Pseudo-Ehythmus,
and on Rhyme, etc. These notes are again
annotated, and the annotations contain several
references to Dante. Scattered and haphazard as
these are, they are sufficient to show an acquaint-
ance with Dante's works of no common kind.
Thus they show Gray to have been familiar not
only with the "Divine Comedy" but with the
" Canzoni," and, what is still more remarkable, with
Dante's prose work, the "De Vulgari Eloquentia."
This last Gray quotes at least six times. He
understands and discusses its literary and philo-
logical allusions ; Arnauld Daniel, Guido of Arezzo,
Dante's master, Brunetto Latini, are all familiar
names to him. He discusses the promnance and
236 GRAY AND DANTE
history of the decasyllabic metre, " our blank verse,"
and of the Terza Eima ; and the form and use of
the Sonnet, the Sestine, and the Canzone. He
notes the employment of a mixture of languages,
as appearing not only in Dante's " Canzoni," from
which he quotes in illustration, but also in the
"Divina Commedia" itself. To illustrate the
omission of final syllables in the older poets, he cites
"Pm-gatorio," xiv. 66.
" Nello stato prima(io) noii si rinselva."
A good deal of this lore is avowedly derived
from Crescimbeni, Some, too, no doubt, was
drawn from the old Italian commentators ; for it is
pretty clear that in studying the Italian, as in
studying the ancient classics, Gray read everything
that could possibly help him to understand or
illustrate his author.
We said just now that his library, had it been
preserved, would doubtless have furnished abundant
evidence of this ; some evidence is afforded even by
such record of it as remains. Messrs Sotheby's
Sale Catalogue of 1851, alluded to above, is
fortunately unusually descriptive. It contains an
account of two items which in this regard are of
much significance — Gray's copy of Dante and
his copy of Milton. The former appears as
follows :
" Dante (Alighieri) Opere con I'esposizioni di C.
Landino e di A. Vellutello, etc., Hogskin, gilt
leaves ; fol, Venet. 1578, with an extract from
" De Bure " relative to this edition, and an elaborate
note on the word "Comedia," "The Mysteries,"
etc., with passages from Weever's "Funeral Monu-
GRAY'S " DANTE " AND " MILTON " 237
ments " and " Crescimbeni della Volgar Poesia " :
all in Gray's autograph."
The Milton is described as " interleaved, anno-
tated and illustrated with abundance of passages
from various authors, ancient and modern, wherein
a similitude of thought or expression to that of
Milton has been considered observable by Gray."
Among the quotations it is noted are some, as there
could hardly fail to be, from Dante.
Where the Dante may now repose I know
not, though it is doubtless, like so many of Gray's
books, in existence. They were, to judge by the
specimens extant, mostly good copies, and the
annotations in the poet's autograph give them an
additional value which has ensm-ed their pre-
servation.
The Milton is fortunately in the best of hands.
It is preserved in the Library of the Marquis of
Lansdowne at Bowood, and, thanks to the kindness
of the owner, I have been able to inspect it. It
answers exactly to the description in the catalogue.
It is full of quotations, beautifully written out
by Gray in his own scholarly hand, from the
Greek authors both in prose and poetry — Homer,
^schylus, Sophocles, Plato, Diodorus Siculus ;
from the Latin — Lucretius, Virgil, Horace, Statius,
Claudian ; from our own Spenser, to whom, as
Gray knew, Milton had owned himself specially
indebted; but above all what concerns us most
here, from the Italian poets. These last are very
numerous. The first quotation of all upon the
first page, to illustrate the expression "Things
unattempted yet in prose or rhyme," is from the
238 GRAY AND DANTE
Paradiso, the second from Ariosto. There are
many drawn from Tasso, but most perhaps from
Dante. All go to show that easy and full
command of the " Tuscan poets " that we should
expect.
Gray's commonplace books in the master's
Lodge at Pembroke bear the same testimony.
They contain several pages of parallel passages
from the Latin and Italian poets.
In the meanwhile, an interesting and eloquent
testimony to the fact and value of Gray's remarks
is to be found in the use made of them by one of
the earliest, and still the best, translator of Dante,
the scholarly and poetic Gary.
To return, however, from Gray the student and
philologist to Gray the poet, the same Sale Catalogue
quoted above contains a notice of a manuscript
translation by Gray of "Inferno," xxxiii. 1-75, the
Ugolino episode. A note in the catalogue suggests
that it was probably wi'itten very early, and when
Gray was commencing the study of Italian. It also
exists in a MS. now in the possession of the Earl
of Crewe. It was among the new matter which
the industry of Mr Gosse recovered and printed,
and may be consulted in his edition. Mr Gosse, a
little kind, perhaps, to his discovery, speaks of it
as dating in all probability from Gray's best poetic
years and possessing extraordinary merit. The
ground on which he so dates it is the spelling. It
may be doubted, however, whether this evidence is
very conclusive. The merit, considering that it is
the work of Gray, can hardly be rated so high, and,
all things considered, it appears more probable that
the note in the Sale Catalogue is right, and that the
TRANSLATIONS 239
piece is a youthful exercise belonging to the period
when Gray, as appears from his letters, was much
occupied with translations, when he translated
Statins for the delectation of his friend West, and
when, as we know, he translated for his teacher
the "Pastor Fido."^ A translation of Tasso,^ also
printed by Mr Gosse, probably belongs to the same
period, for, as we may remember, he speaks of
Tasso to West in the letter quoted earlier in this
paper. ^
It should be remembered, too, that the story of
Ugolino is one which has fastened on the imagina-
tion of the world. It is probably, with the exception
of that of Paolo and Francesca, the best-known
picture in the many-chambered gallery of Dante.
In Italy especially, where the study of Dante has
been, as a rule, more popular, not to say superficial,
than in England, and with fashionable teachers of
Italian, it has always been specially popular, and it
is the more likely for that reason that it was
suggested to Gray by Signor Piazza than that it
was selected by his own taste.
At the same time it must be admitted that, if
selected by Gray's own taste, it would be an
excellent illustration of the remarks made by him
and quoted earlier about the "rude age of strong
and uncontrolled passion, when the Muse was not
checked by refinement and the fear of criticism."
^ Dr Toynbee has pointed out to me that Mr Mason actually
said as much. Fide "Gentleman's Magazine" for 1846, vol. i.,
pp. 29 fF.
2 " Gerus. Lib. Cant.," xiv., St. 32.
3 I am glad to find in Mr Tovey's new and careful edition of
" Gray's Letters," for which all lovers of Gray will be grateful,
that this view has the confirmation of his favour.
240 GRAY AND DANTE
The point, after all, is not one of much moment ;
what is ftir more interesting is to note that Dante
would seem to have been an author much in Gray's
mind and often on his lips.
One of the most characteristic and striking of
Gray's remains is his " Journal in the Lakes." It has
often been noticed how he anticipates Wordsworth
in his love of this lovely region ; how, for instance,
he made the observation, the use of which is one of
Wordsworth's most admired touches, of the noise
caused by the streams at night, "the sound of
streams inaudible by day."
It has perhaps not been noted that his Journal,
short as it is, contains two quotations from Dante.
One indeed is only that already referred to, derived
from Dante through Milton : " The moon was dark
to me and silent, hid in her vacant interlunar cave."
The other is more important. The whole passage
in which it occurs is significant and merits repro-
duction m extenso. It is a description of Gowder
Crag. "The place reminds one," says Gray,
speaking of it with admiration, " of those passes in
the Alps where the guides tell you to move on with
speed and say nothing, lest the agitation of the air
should loosen the snows above and bring down a
mass that would overwhelm a caravan. I took
their counsel and hastened on in silence " ;
" Non ragionam di lor, ma guarda e passa ! "
The quotation is now quite hackneyed ; was it
so in Gray's day ? Perhaps it is impossible to tell.
In Italy very likely it was. But certainly the
whole passage, with this line occurring in the
context and manner in which it is here found, is
GRA\"S "ELEGY" 241
a striking utterance for the year of grace, 1769,
in England.
To love the lakes, even tremblingly to admire,
as we know Gray admired, the Alps, to compare
the one with the other, to be reminded by both of
Dante, all this says much for the shy self-sup-
pressing scholar, the "futile don," who in the small
hom's of the classic period was a romanticist before
the dawn. Wordsworth in his well-known preface
pours special scorn upon Gray's " Elegy " on West.
But Gray was a far better critic than Wordsworth.
His accoimt of the natiu'e of poetic diction is far
more just and scholarly than that of Wordsworth.
And if always learned and often artificial, yet he
did not, as the direct large sympathy of Burns at
once detected, want for genuine passion. Burns
admired Gray not for diction, but for passion,
professing, strangely enough, that he himself is
unable
" To pour with Gray the moving flow
Warm on the heart."
It is this fusing passion that is the true secret of
the success of the " Elegy." It seldom flamed up or
burnt bright in Gray's poems. But he was a very
real poet and knew what real poetry was. He
knew his own limitations and those of his age. He
knew that what poets most need, as one of the very
best of our own living poets has said, is inspiration.
He knew and wrote that his was not a time of
great poets :
" But not to one in this benighted age
Is that diviner inspiration given.
That burns in Shakespeare's or in Milton's page.
The pomp and prodigality of heaven."
242 GRAY AND DANTE
But he knew and loved the great poets as few have
loved, and still fewer have known, them. And
among the greatest in his estimation, the first in his
regard, nuist clearly be reckoned the author of the
" Divine Comedy."
VII
TENNYSON AND DANTE
" Nessun maggior dolore,
Che ricordarsi del tempo felice
Nella miseria." — Dante ("Inferno," v. 121-3).
" This is truth the poet sings.
That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things."
Tennyson (" Locksley Hall ").
Both the voice and the echo are famous. The
Hnes from Dante are among the most often cited of
his many often cited utterances. The words of
Tennyson form not the least well-known quotation
from the English poet who has furnished to his
countrymen more quotations than any other poet
since Shakespeare.
George Eliot, as many will remember, makes
signal use of both. To the central and touching
chapter in "Daniel Deronda," which tells how
Deronda saved Mirah Lapidoth from suicide, she
prefixes Tennyson's lines, and shortly after, when
she makes her hero sing a snatch from the
gondolier's song in " Otello," in which, as she says,
Rossini has worthily set to music the immortal
Italian; "Dante's words," she adds, "are best
rendered by our own poet in the lines at the head
of the chapter."
Such is the versura, the "give and take," of
literature and art. But even this is not all. As the
248
244 TENNYSON AND DANTE
late Mr Churton Collins pointed out, the passage in
Dante had already, before Tennyson echoed it,
been imitated by Chaucer in '* Troilus and Cresside."
" For of fortune's sharpe advei'sitee
The worste kind of infortune is this,
A man to have been in prosperitee
And it remember when it passed is."
And after all, even in Dante, it is probably not
original, but came to him from Boethius, who, in his
"de Consolatione Philosophise," writes, ''In omni
adversitate fortunce infelicissimum genus est in-
fortunii fuisse Jelicem et non esse" and he again
may have derived it from Pindar or Thucydides,
who both have something very like it. Whence
Pindar derived it we know not. It may, as
Macaulay would say, possibly have been new at the
court of Chedorlaomer. Tennyson himself did not
apparently take it directly from Dante, but from
Byron. For Byron he entertained, it will be
remembered, a boyish passion. At fourteen, when
he heard of Byron's death, he felt as if the world
was darkened, and carved on a rock in the Holy-
well glen, " Byron is dead." Two years earlier than
this he had written to an aunt, Miss Marianne
Fytche, a letter, the earliest specimen of his letters
preserved, and one which it is difficult to believe is
the work of a boy of twelve, so full is it of learning
and of critical judgment. It is devoted to dis-
cussing " Samson Agonistes." This passage, he
writes,
" Restless thoughts, that like a deadly swarm
Of hornets arm'd, no sooner found alone
But rush upon me thronging, and present
Times past, what once I was, and what am now,"
ARTHUR HALLAM 245
puts me in mind of that in Dante which Lord
Byron has prefixed to his " Corsair," " Nessmi
maggior dolor e," etc.^
Tennyson's cognisance then, and in a sense his
appreciation of Dante, began with his childhood,
though perhaps he would hardly have said, with
regard to him, what he does of Virgil, when in the
culminating stanza of his famous Ode he most
felicitously salutes that poet with Dante's own
epithet, " Mantovano," and continues,
" I that loved thee since my day began,"
for Dante is not one of the list of authors, long as it
is, which he and his brothers, as we are told,
"mostly read out of their father's well-stocked
library." Nor do we, as far as I remember, find
again any allusion to Dante, or to Italian, until he
went to Cambridge and came into contact with
"his friend the brother of his soul," Arthur Hallam.
Then at once, any love he may have cherished for
either the Italian language generally, or Dante in
particular, received a powerful stimulus alike of
knowledge and sympathy.
It was in 1828 that Tennyson entered Trinity
College, Cambridge. Hallam came up somewhat
later in the same year. Full of poetic and
philosophic interests, of literary loves and aspira-
tions, he was full in particular of the Italian poets
and of Dante. He had for them a natiu*al elective
affinity. Already at Eton, as a boy of fourteen, he
had translated the famous and favourite episode of
^ It may be noted that Byron prefixes other less striking
(piotations from "Inferno," v., to the second and third Cantos of
the "Corsair."
246 TKNNYSON AND DANTE
Ugoliiu) into Sophocleaii Iambics, although he
possesseii at this time, as liis father says in the
brief but touching memoir prefixed to the Remains,
but httle acquaintance witli Dante or Avitli Itahan.
Two years hiter, still a mere lad, he had left Eton
and gone with his father for a prolonged tour in
Italy. There he fell at once and eagerly upon
the study of Italian, with marvellous rapidity
mastering the language so completely as to be able
to write in it sonnets on wdiich Panizzi pronounced
a high eulogy. Dante he studied especially. No
poet, says his father, was so congenial to the
character of his own reflective mind ; and, again,
" Petrarch he admired, but with less idolatry than
Dante."
It was fresh from these scenes and studies that
he arrived in Cambridge, to be the leader, the
** master-bowman " of that wonderful undergraduate
set immortalised by " In Memoriam," where, as
William Cory sings,
" Arthur, Alfred, Fitz, and Brooks
Lit thought by one another's looks,
Embraced their jests and kicked their books
In England's happier times."
They flung themselves upon religion and
politics, upon poetry and natural science, upon
literature old and new, upon all things human and
divine. In poetry the German school of Coleridge
had much influence with them, but fortunately not
the German alone.
" At this time," says the present Lord Tennyson,
writing of the year 1829, "my father, with one or
two of his more literary friends, took a great
"TIMBUCTOO" 247
interest in the work which Hallam had undertaken,
a translation from the 'Vita Nuova' of Dante,
with notes and preface. For this task Hallam,
who in 1827 had been in Italy with his parents,
and had drunk deep of the older Italian literature,
was perfecting himself in German and Spanish, and
was proposing to plunge into the Florentine
historians and the mediaeval schoolmen. He writes
to my father : ' I expect to glean a good deal of
knowledge from you concerning metres which may
be serviceable, as well for my philosophy in the
notes, as for my actual handiwork in the text.
I propose to discuss considerably about poetry in
general, and about the ethical character of Dante's
poetry.' "
In 1829 the two friends competed for the prize
offered by the University for an English poem.
The subject was the unpromising one, how or why
chosen I have often wondered, of "Timbuctoo,"
suited only, it might be thought, for the famous
rhyme about the cassowary, or for Thackeray's
well-known mock heroics in " The Snob."
" In Africa, a quarter of the world,
Men's skins are black, their hair is crisp and curl'd,
And somewhere there, unknown to public view,
A mighty city lies, called Timbuctoo.
" I see her tribes the hill of glory mount,
And sell their sugar on their own account ;
While round her throne the prostrate nations come,
Sue for her rice and barter for her rum."
Tennyson took it a little more seriously than
Thackeray. His father had pressed him to be a
candidate. He altered the beginning and ending
248 TENNYSON AND DANTE
of a pooiu lio liad by him upon the subject, save
the mark, of the "Battle of Armageddon." He
sent this in, and it won the prize. If it has about
as nnich to ck) with Tinibuctoo as with Armageddon,
it is a striking piece of rhythm and fancy, and
possesses not a few points of interest, but they are
foreign to this paper. Arthur Hallam took it more
seriously still. He offered a poem in Terza Rima
and containing several Dantesque Hues, but he was,
as we saw, not successful.
It was in the same year, 1829, that Arthur
Hallam's attachment to Miss Emily Tennyson began.
Mr Hallam did not at first give it full sanction ; but
after this fh'st year Hallam visited Somersby
regularly as a recognised lover.
In 1830 Tennyson pubHshed his first individual
volume, " Poems chiefly Lyrical." Of knowledge
or love of Dante in the Italian I have not myself
been able to trace any noteworthy indication in its
pages. But his friend Hallam, reviewing the
volume in the " Englishman's Magazine," thought he
detected some resemblance.
" Beyond question [he writes] the class of poems
which in point of harmonious combination " Oriana "
most resembles, is the Italian. Just thus the
meditative tenderness of Dante and Petrarch is
embodied in the clear searching tones of Tuscan
song. These mighty masters produce two-thirds
of their effect by sound. Not that they sacrifice
sense to sound, but that sound conveys their
meaning when words could not."
In February 1831, owing to his father's faihng
state of health, Tennyson left the University pre-
maturely. His friends sent after him his " Alfieri,"
THE "TUSCAN POETS" 249
which one of them had borrowed and not returned.
His father died in the March of that year, and he
never went back to Cambridge. But his friends
came to him, and especially Hallam, for his owti
sake and for his sister's.
" How often, hither wandering down,
My Arthur found your shadows fair,
And shook to all the liberal air
The dust and din and steam of town :
" O bliss, when all in circle drawn
About him, heart and ear were fed
To hear him as he lay and read
The Tuscan poets on the lawn ! "
"When Arthur Hallam was with them," says
Lord Tennyson, "Dante, Petrarch, Tasso, and
Ariosto were the favourite poets, and it was he who
taught my Aunt Emily Italian and made her a
proficient scholar." Has he not left his own ex-
hortation in verse, a sonnet addressed to his
mistress ?
" Lady, I bid thee to a sunny dome
Ringing with echoes of Italian song ;
Henceforth to thee these magic halls belong,
And all the pleasant place is like a home.
Hark on the right with full piano tone
Old Dante's voice encircles all the air ;
Hark yet again, like flute tones mingling rare,
Comes the keen sweetness of Petrarca's moan.
Pass thou the lintel freely ; without fear
Feast on the music ; I do better know thee
Than to suspect this pleasure thou dost owe me
Will wrong thy gentle spirit, or make less dear
That element whence thou must draw thy life ; —
An English maiden and an English wife."
260 TENNYSON AND DANTK
In one of the interesting bundles of letters from
Hallani to W. H. Brookfield, which were published
by Colonel Brookfield in the "Fortnightly" a few
years ago, Hallani makes an allusion to his absorp-
tion in his attachment which is a pretty comment
on this sonnet. "Even Dante," he writes, "even
Alfred's poetry is at a discount."
At the end of the year, 16th December 1831,
Hallam, who had obtained the first prize for a
Declamation, pronounced it, odd as the venue may
seem to modern ideas, in the College Chapel. It
was upon the influence of Italian on English
literature, and Wordsworth was, it is said, present
on the occasion. Gladstone, as we know from "Mr
Morley's Life," certainly was. In it the orator
spoke of Dante as "an entire and plenary repre-
sentation of the Itahan mind."
About the same date Hallam seems to have
introduced Alfred Tennyson to Moxon, a publisher
of poetic and Italian proclivities, married later to
Emma Isola, whose grandfather had taught Italian
at Cambridge successively to Gray and Wordsworth.
Moxon was just then publishing for Hallam a reply
to a treatise, interesting alike on account of its
authorship and its occasion, the " Disquisizioni sullo
spirito Antipapale," of Gabriele Eossetti, Professor
of Italian at King's College, known for himself,
still better known for the personality and produc-
tions of his illustrious children — Maria, Dante
Gabriel, Christina, and the sole survivor, William.
Professor Rossetti had previously pubhshed a
"Commentary on Dante's Comedia," which con-
tained in germ the main idea of these extraordinary
volumes, the idea, namely, that the "Divine
ROSSETITS "DISQUISIZIONI" 251
Comedy" is a gigantic cryptogram, conveying,
under cover of an artificial jargon, an attack on
the Papacy and all its works. The book evidently
created, at the time, a considerable sensation, not
unhke that recently produced by the so-called
Bacon- Shakespeare theory, and the two volumes
were in 1834 translated into Enghsh by Miss
Caroline Ward, who dedicated her translation to
the Eev. H. F. Cary. But Hallam had already
issued his rejoinder in a brochure entitled " Remarks
on Professor Rossetti's Disquisizioni, by T. H. E.
A.," pubKshed by Moxon in 1832.
It was his last, and I agree with Mr Le
Gallienne, his strongest literary effort. He sent it
in the autumn to Tennyson, who, at the end of
this year, again appeared before the world as an
author. He had now for some time been working
at a number of poems for a new volume. Many of
them were submitted to the judgment of his friends,
especially of Arthur Hallam. Foremost among
these was the "Palace of Art." "All at Cam-
bridge are anxious about the 'Palace of Art,'"
writes Hallam, "and fierce with me for not bringing
more," and Dean Merivale writes to W. H. Thomp-
son (the future Master) "that a daily 'divan'
continued to sit throughout the term, and the
' Palace of Art ' was read successively to each man
as he came up from the vacation." It is fair,
however, to say that in this mutual admiration
society there were some who scoffed, and asked
whether the "abysmal depths of personahty"
meant the "Times" newspaper. James Spedding
was not one of these, for he knew it by heart, and
spouted instead of reading it.
252 TENNYSON AND DANTE
111 this poem, as all will remember, Dante
appears both directly and indirectly :
" For there was Milton like a seraph strong,
Beside liim Shakespeare bland and mild ;
And there the world-worn Dante grasp'd his song
And somewhat grimly smil'd."
So rmis the well-known stanza now, as, after being
touched with that curiosa felicitas of which Tennyson
is such an amazing master, it appeared in the
edition of 1842.
But in the 1832 volume, and doubtless in these
undergraduate recitations, it had run quite
differently :
" There deep-haired Milton like an angel tall
Stood limned, Shakespeare bland and mild,
Grim Dante pressed his lips, and from the wall
The bald, blind Homer smiled."
That the later is the happier version there can be
no sort of doubt, but to any who would study
Tennyson's appreciation of Dante both are interest-
ing alike in their common element, and in their
divergence. In the earlier, the number of figures
introduced was far larger than in the later. A
stanza a little further on ran :
" And in the smi-pierced oriel's coloured flame
Immortal Michael Angelo
Looked down, bold Luther, large brow'd Verulam
The King of those who know."
In 1842 only two figures appear :
"And thro' the topmost oriel's colour'd flame
Two god-like faces gazed below :
Plato the wise, and large-brow'd Verulam
The first of those who know."
GOETHE AND DANTE 253
"Bold Luther," one of Tennyson's youthful heroes,
has given place to Plato. Some who do not
consider the "Divine Comedy" a Protestant
cryptogram, might, in the abstract, regret his
disappearance, but all will recognise that if the
poet was to appropriate Dante's famous phrase,
"7? maestro di color che sanno'' to any other
than Dante's nominee, the great German reformer
was not so suitable a substitute as Aristotle's own
master.
For the rest the traditional mien of Dante so
happily described here seems to have specially
interested Tennyson. Bayard Taylor thought the
poet himself like Dante. Something in his lofty
brow and aquiline nose, he said, suggested Dante.
A bust of Dante, as many will remember, was
the first object that struck the visitor who was
admitted through the sacred gate into the ante-
room at Farringford. How long the poet had
possessed it I know not, but it is in connec-
tion with these lines that Fitzgerald records
a famous remark of his : " The names of
Dante and Michael Angelo in this poem," he
writes, "remind me that once, looking with
Alfred Tennyson at two busts of Dante and
Goethe in a shop window in Regent Street, I
said : ' What is there wanting in Goethe which
the other has ? ' Alfred Tennyson replied, ' The
Divine.'"
The best comment, however, on the bust of
Dante, and on Tennyson's epithet, "grim," is
probably to be found in the story of his friend
Sir Frederick Pollock's nurse, told by Sir Frederick
himself in his " Remembrances " :
254 TENNYSON AND DANTE
"Sir Frederick was laid up in 1878 with an
attack of fever, and employed the services of a
professional nurse. Sonic time afterward this same
woman attended a lady of his acquaintance, and
in reading a book to her, came on the name of
Dante. 'I know him,' she said. The lady was
astonished, and asked, ' How do you know him ? '
'He's a great friend of Sir Frederick Pollock's.
There's a bust of him on his staircase. He's a
very severe-looking gentleman.'"
Another poem, not unlike the ''Palace of Art,"
is "The Dream of Fair Women," which Aubrey de
Vera picks out as
" A marvellous specimen of one especial class of
poetry, that of Vision, which reached its perfection
in Dante, whose verse the young aspirant may have
been reading with a grateful desire to note by
this poem the spot on which his feet had rested for
a time."
To return, however, to Tennyson himself. In
March 1833, writing to his aunt, Mrs Russell,
he quotes the third Hne of the "Divina Com-
media," and in August of the same year Hallam,
leaving for Vienna, gave to Emily Tennyson
an Italian book, "Silvio Pellico." But these
are only tiny straws, showing the way the
wind blew. A few weeks later, the stroke
came which was to give a bias profound and
lasting to all Tennyson's life and art. Hallam
left England for Austria, and there, on the 15th
of September,
*' Within Vienna's fatal walls,
God's finger touched him and he slept."
DEATH OF HALLAM 255
Fifty years later, almost to a day, two men, his
compeers, now two of the most famous in England,
or indeed in the world, as they sate on board a
steamer passing up the coast of Scotland, in a
rare moment of rest and relaxation, were deploring
the death of this friend of their youth, saying
what a noble intellect he possessed, and how-
great a loss he had been to Dante scholarship ;
they were Gladstone and Alfred Tennyson.
At the moment Tennyson was stunned. He
thought he could and would write no more.
But soon, little by little, and in broken efforts,
he began again. He betook himself to work and
study, minded like Dante to prepare himself to
write better than he had ever hitherto done.
Among his studies was Italian ; and we might
well imagine that in Itahan Dante would hold
the place he must always hold in the Italian
studies of a serious, philosophic, and poetic mind.
It is noticeable as an indication of the study of
Dante in the Tennyson set at Cambridge that Dean
Alford, another special friend of Arthm' Hallam,
wi'ites in 1833: "I have rather of late inclined
to allegory, not that of more modern times, but
a mode of that of our sweet Spenser and the great
and holy Dante." But there is more specific
indication in Tennyson's own letters and in the
poems which he published later. For the present
he gave nothing to the world, writing and re-
writing, but observing strictly the Alexandrine
and Horatian motto,
" Nonumque prematur in annum. "
When, however, the ninth year brought their
266 TENNYSON AND DANTE
publication, the new pieces showed how he had
been occupied at this earher period. Conspicuous
in the 1842 vohune is the famous piece "Ulysses,"
as many think, the most condensed and complete
expression of Tennyson's genius at its best. It
was this poem that convinced Carlyle that Tenny-
son was really a poet. It was this again that
Lord Houghton made Sir Robert Peel read when
he induced him to grant the Civil List pension.
Finally, it was in Dante that Tennyson found the
fitting quotation when he wrote to his friend
Rawnsley to tell him of his good luck and the
carping of "the causelessly bitter against me and
mine," and said, "Let us leave them in their limbo ;
Non ragionam di lor ma guar da e passa."
For this was the period at which " Ulysses "
was composed, as he said himself, "soon after
Arthur Hallam's death, and it gave my feeling
about the need of going forward and braving the
struggle of life perhaps more simply than anything
in 'In Memoriam.'"
It is then the earliest first-rate piece written
after the great experience of shock and sorrow, and
drawing from that much of its strength. This is
its personal origin ; its literary inspiration is
obvious. "I spoke with admiration of his
"Ulysses," says Locker-Lampson. He said,
"Yes, there's an echo of Dante in it." And
surely there is more than an echo.
" Fatti non foste a viver come bruti
Ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza."
"To follow knowledge like a sinking star
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought."
LEITERS TO MISS SELLWOOD 257
The mould of the piece is Homeric, but the mood
is Dantesque. But the pubhcation of "Ulysses"
was still far off. When he wrote it, the poet
was in personal need of the lesson it contains,
and, indeed, it may be said to be a soliloquy
addressed to his own heart. Meanwhile a new
light had broken on his clouded path. He had
begun to correspond with the happy bridesmaid
to his brother's bride, his new sister-in-law, Miss
Emily Sellwood.
With admirable and rare reticence. Lord Tenny-
son has given only a few brief extracts from the
sacred love-letters of his father and mother ! They
contain some of the most striking things the poet
ever said. Among the earliest is this :
"I dare not tell how high I rate humour, which
is generally most fruitful in the highest and most
solemn human spirits. Dante is full of it. Shake-
speare, Cervantes, and almost all the greatest have
been pregnant with this glorious power. You will
find it even in the Gospel of Christ."
In 1840, after three brief years, their corre-
spondence was broken off, forbidden because there
seemed no prospect of Tennyson being able to
marry. At last the time came when they were
permitted to resume their intercourse, and finally,
as Tennyson said, in words worthy even of Dante,
"the peace of God" came into his life before the
altar of Shiplake Church, when he wedded his
wife there on 13th June 1850. The same month
saw the pubhcation of "In Memoriam," in some
ways the greatest of Tennyson's works, possibly
too the most Dantesque. Not, indeed, that "In
R
258 TENNYSON AND DANTE
1
Momoriani " can be called very Dantesque. The
resemblance between it and Dante's grand poem
is of the slightest. Yet slight as it is, it has been
more than once remarked, and with perhaps a
little more reason than at first sight appears.
Aubrey de Vere, a critic certainly well qualified
to judge, seems to have been much impressed
by it. He notes the similarity of occasion. "As
in the case of Dante," he writes, "a great sorrow
was the harbinger of a song greater still." Tenny-
son himself, too, had some vague idea of the
resemblance in his mind. "In Memoriam," he
says, speaking more particularly of the Epilogue
on his sister Cecilia's marriage to Professor
Lushington, "was intended to be a kind of
Divina Commedia, ending with happiness."
The ultimate triumph of Love over everything — •
sin, pain, and death — was, we are told, a constant
idea with him, and he would often quote the words
inscribed on the portals of Hell,
" Fecemi la divina potestate
La somma sapienza, e il primo amore,"
as if they were a kind of unconscious confession by
Dante that "Love will conquer at the last." Both
Introduction and Epilogue certainly convey this idea,
and for this reason, amongst others, I am not one
of those who could relinquish either, or think that
they do not add to the richness of the whole. It is
the fashion to decry the Epilogue with its " white-
favom'ed horses " and its " foaming grape of Eastern
France," and to call it trivial or even banal. Were
it less stately and exquisite than it is, I could not
have given up the lines with which it ends. These
THE LINES ON DANTE 259
at least may claim to be Dantesque in their
simplicity and sublimity.
" That God, which ever lives and loves.
One God, one law, one element,
And one far-ofF Divine event.
To which the whole creation moves."
Tennyson's marriage and the publication of " In
Memoriam" marked his definite assumption of a
settled place in life and letters, which by the
happiest of coincidences was authoritatively
endorsed by his appointment, also in the same
year, to the post of Lam^eate.
In the Memoir written by his son, Dante from
time to time appears. The "Divine Comedy," we
are told, was usually taken with him on his travels,
and his wife and he read the " Inferno " together in
the Crimean winter of 1854, when he was writing
"Maud."
Lady Tennyson's Journal for 7th May 1865 notes
a more special reference : " Last evening, in answer
to a letter from Florence, asking for lines on Dante,
he made six, and sent them off to-day, in honour of
Dante's six hundredth centenary." The lines are
graceful in thought and expression, but not perhaps
striking, certainly not to be put into the same
category with the spontaneous "Ode to Virgil."
What is chiefly characteristic, especially in a man
so simple and sincere as Tennyson, is their humility.
They run as follows :
TO DANTE
(^Written at the request of the Florentines)
" KING, that hast reign'd six hundred years and grown
In power, and ever gi'owest, since thine own
260 TENNYSON AND DANTE
Fair Florence lionouvinp tliy nativity,
Thy F"loronce, now the crown of Italy,
Hath sought the tribute of a verse from me,
I, wearing but the garland of a clay.
Cast at thy feet one flower that fades away."
About them there is preserved an interesting
and characteristic story. Tennyson gave them to
Lord Houghton, who was going to Florence for the
occasion, to recite to the Florentines, Lord
Houghton repeated them to a brother of Canon
Warburton. Fifteen years or more later Tennyson
was talking to Canon Warburton about the probable
short duration of all modern poetic fame.
"Who," said he, "will read Alfred Tennyson
one hundred years hence? And look at Dante
after six hundred years."
" That," answered Warburton, "is a renewal of
the garland-of-a-day superstition."
" What do you mean ? "
" Yom* own words ! "
" Why, what can you mean ? "
"Don't you remember those lines which you
gave to Milnes to read for you at the Dante
Centenary ? "
My father had forgotten the lines.
Warburton then wrote them out as far as he could
remember them, and shortly afterwards Tennyson
recalled the correct version. And he included
them in that wonderful volume published in his
seventy-first year, "Ballads and Poems," which
contains "Rizpah," "The Revenge," "The Voyage
of Maeldune," "De Profundis," the Sonnets on
"Old Brooks," and on Montenegro, and the Epitaph
on Sir John Franklin.
GLADSTONE AND TENNYSON 261
In 1883 came the memorable voyage in the
Pembroke Castle. Gladstone and Tennyson began,
as already mentioned, at their first breakfast, upon
Hallam and Dante. Dante they discussed a good
deal, not always agreeing. Tennyson, it seems, had
on one point the better of the argument, although
he ends a letter written to Gladstone a little later
with a postscript : *' I have totally forgotten what
passage in Dante we were discussing on board the
Pembroke Castle.'' If report speaks true, they
discussed, inter alia, the question whether Dante was
ever cruel. Tennyson was not blind to Dante's
limitations. As he told Miss Anna Swanwick, he
could never bring himself to pardon Dante for his
cold-blooded perfidy in refusing to wipe the frozen
tears from Frate Alberigo's eyes.
Without multiplying references then to the Life,
it is evident that Dante was constantly in Tennyson's
hands, and still more in his head ; that when he
speaks of him, he speaks with knowledge, and that
we need not be surprised if we find in his writings
some traces or echoes of a poet he knew and loved
so well. His recorded criticisms of Dante are
worth quoting.
" We must distinguish [he said] Keats, Shelley,
and Byron, from the great sage poets of all, who
are both great thinkers and great artists, like
^schylus, Shakespeare, Dante, and Goethe.
Goethe lacked the divine intensity of Dante, but he
was among the wisest of mankind, as well as a
great artist."
And again :
" Ugolino, and Paolo and Francesca, in Dante,
equal anything anywhere."
262 TENNYSON AND DANTE
When he was planning Aldworth, he said he
would like to have the blank shields on his mantel-
piece enil)lazoned with devices to represent the
great nioilern poets : Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare,
Milton, Goethe, Wordsworth.
Talking with Gladstone at Hawarden soon after
the Pembroke Castle trip upon Dante, he expressed
the view that " as the English language is much
finer than the Italian for variety of sound, so Milton,
for sound, is often finer than Dante." He quoted
Milton, Virgil, Dante, and Homer to illustrate his
meaning, and then said, "What, for exam23le, can
be more monotonous than the first lines of the
* Inferno,' with their ' a's ' ? "
" Nel mezzo del cammin di nostr« vita
Mi ritrovfli per una selva oscura
Che la diritta via era smaritta ? "
Of echoes or imitations of Dante in Tennyson
there would seem to be few that are indubitable,
beside the two or three ah-eady quoted, and ad-
mitted by the poet himself. Mr Climton Collins, with
his marvellous memory, did, indeed, suggest several.
With the lines in the "Gardener's Daughter,"
" We wound about
The subject most at heai't, more near and near
Like doves about a dove-cote, wlieeling round
The central wish, until we settled there,"
he compares Dante, "Inferno," v. 81-83 :
" Quali colombe dal disio chiamate
Con r ali alzate e ferme, al dolce nido
Vegnon per 1' aer dal voler portate " ;
but excepting that doves flying " to their windows "
appear in both, the parallelism is hardly very close.
I
IN MEMORIAM 263
With the well-known
" Oux" wills are ours we know not how.
Our wills are ours, to make them thine."
he compares Dante, "Paradiso," iii. 66-87, the
famous passage which culminates in the famous line
" In la sua volontade e nostra pace " ;
but Tennyson seems to emphasise rather the
freedom of the will on earth than its tranquillity
when it has reached the heavenly satisfaction,
which is Dante's point.
A more probable parallel is his next, between
the well-known passage in Dante, "Purgatory,"
xi. 91-117, about fleeting fame, and the passage
from "In Memoriam," Ixxiii. ;
*' What fame is left for human deeds
In endless age ? It rests with God."
Another passage of "In Memoriam," from Canto
Ixxxv.,
" The great Intelligences fair
That range above our mortal state,"
Mr Collins ingeniously and very probably traces to
the " Convito," ii. v. 5 :
" Li movitori di quello (Cielo) sono Sustanze separate da
materia, cioe Intelligenze, le quale la volgare gente chiama
Angeli. "
Canto Ixxxvii. he pronounces to be almost a
paraphrase of the very beautiful sonnet attributed
to Dante, beginning
" Ora che '1 mondo s' adorna."
But here again, surely, the resemblance is of the
most general kind and somewhat slight.
Much closer is the parallel which he suggests
264 TENNYSON x\ND DANTE
between the striking passage at the end of the
"Paradiso," xxxiii. 55-57,
** Da (juinoi innanzi il mio vcdcr fu maggio
Che il parlai* nostro, ch' a tal visto cede
E cede la memoria a tanto oltraggio,"
and Tennyson's
" At length my trance
Was canceU'd, stricken through with doubt.
" Vague words ! but ah, how hard to frame
In matter-moulded forms of speech,
Or even for intellect to reach
Thro' memory that which I became."
"In Memoriam," xcv.
Tennyson himself, in the Annotations published
by his son, acknowledges a few more. The abyss
of tenfold complicated change in " In Memoriam,"
xciii., refers to Dante's ten heavens. The " bowlings
from forgotten fields" are the eternal miseries of
the " Inferno," as described in Canto iii. 25-51.
I have often myself looked out for echoes or
analogies. Not many have occurred to me. I
think it possible that the well-known and most
effective onomatoposiac repetition in the Ode on
the Death of the Duke of Wellington :
" With honour, honour, honour, honour to him,
Eternal honour to his name,"
may have its germ in the well-known repetition
and play by Dante on the words "honour" and
*' honom-able " in Canto iv. of the "Inferno,"
though the assonance is less marked in the Italian.
The beautiful passage in " Tithonus " :
" I earth in earth forget these empty courts
And thee returning on thy silver wheels,"
is doubtless indebted for a lovely phrase to Dante's
" In terra e terra il mio corpo."
" Paradiso," xxv. 124.
THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE 265
Another undoubted parallel, suggested to me
by a friend, is between the description of Merlin's
beard in "Merlin and Vivian,"
" The lists of such a beard as youth gone out
Had left in ashes,"
and that of Cato in " Purgatorio," i. 34 :
" Lunga la barba e di pel bianco mista
Portava, e suoi capegli simigliante,
De' quai cadeva al petto doppia lista."
There are, again, of course, certain common-
places of literature and nature, which are found in
both. Such is the "Wheel of Fortune," so happily
utilised by both Dante and Tennyson, though
Tennyson's
" Turn, Fortune, turn thy wheel and lower the proud ;
Turn thy wild wheel through sunshine, storm, and cloud,"
resembles more the well-known song ascribed to
Guido Cavalcanti,
"L,ol I am he who makes the wheel to turn," ^
than either " Inferno " vii. 5, or " Inferno " xv. 95.
Such, too, are "the sparks flying up from the
smitten log" of "Paradiso," xviii. 100, and of the
Epilogue to Morte d'Arthur ; or
" The many-wintered crow that leads the clanging rookery
home "
of Locksley Hall, and the daws of " Paradiso," xxi.
35, in which Longfellow notes a parallelism.
But these chance parallels are of doubtful
^ Rossetti, p. 151.
266 TENNYSON AND DANTE
importance. As often as not they are merely a
product of a conmion cause ; often mere coin-
cidences. It is more to the purpose to ask if there
is any general resemblance between Tennyson and
Dante, still more whether the study of the younger
poet, whose record is so full and fresh, can help us
better to understand and appreciate the elder, a
line of argument which I well remember Mr Pater,
with the mixture of artistic sympathy and common-
sense which was so memorable in him, once intro-
ducing very effectively in a discussion as to Dante's
probable manner of life and writing.
At first sight, perhaps, it would seem as if few
poets could resemble each other less than the great
poet of Italy of the thirteenth and the great poet
of England of the nineteenth centmy. Dante's
chief poetic effort is so grand in scale as to throw
into the shade, almost at times to cause us to
forget his lesser poetical productions. No one
work of Tennyson's stands out, either among his
pieces or in the world of letters, in anything
approaching the same w^ay. And even his larger
works seem compacted of smaller, so much so that
we are inclined at times to think of him chiefly as
a poet of short pieces. "In Memoriam" is a
collection of canzoni, "The Epic of Arthur" a
series of idylls, " The Princess " a string of jewels
on a golden but slender thread. Tennyson wanted
then, or at any rate did not display, the " architec-
tonic " genius which Dante exhibits consummately,
more consummately, indeed, than any other poet,
and in respect of which, if not in other respects, he
is superior even to Homer and Shakespeare.
Yet poles apart as in this regard they are, they
LOVE OF ACCURACY 267
have much in common. Both are artists, and
conscious artists. Both are, to use Aristotle's
distinction, *' finely gifted" rather than "finely
frenzied"; both, too, in Leonardo Brum's adapta-
tion, are "poeti literati et scientijici," who compose,
"per istudio, per disciplina ed arte e per prudenzar
Both are ideaHst and realist at once. Mr P. H.
Wicksteed, in a most original article which
appeared now a little time back, called attention to
the absolute indifference, nay, studied carelessness
of Browning as to strict fact. "The good news,"
he notes, "was never brought by the three
galloping horsemen from Ghent to Aix " ; " there is
no evidence that Eaphael ever wrote a single
sonnet,^ much less a centmy," while "Browning's
geography and seamanship," he says, "are equally
concrete and equally careless."
Dante would never have allowed himself such
licence. He would have feared
" Perder viver tra coloro
Che questo tempo chiameranno antico."
Tennyson had the same love for accm'acy as Dante.
He wanted to change a line because he found that
scientific observers had altered their calculations
as to the probable duration of the sun's power of
giving heat to the solar system. That was exactly
in the manner of Dante. Both thought that poetry
should be true to fact.
**Si che dal fatto il dir son sia diverso " ^
But yet both were thorough artists. Both held
1 This particular statement is not quite correct. Drafts of
one of his sonnets by Raphael are extant.
2 "Inferno," xxxii. 12.
268 TENNYSON AND DANTE
that poetry should be beautiful ; that it was right
deliberately to embellish it, to give it, as Dante
said, '^ dolcezza e arnionia." And both, with this
end in view, laboured infinitely at technique and
studied poetic diction. As Mr W. P. Ker has
brought out, it is clear that Dante was much
interested in poets ffom whom he could learn
nothing but style ; that in learning his art he made
distinct artistic studies, so that, like Catullus, he
combined the most passionate directness with the
fullest mastery of Alexandrine artificiality.
In the early poems of Tennyson, more particu-
larly in many suppressed by him in later years,
such as the " Hesperides," we see just the same
characteristic, the cultivation of preciosity, so
fascinating to the young artist, who has not yet
learned that poetry should be "simple," as well
as "sensuous" and "passionate." Both may be
said to have passed through their pre-Raphaelite
period. Both, as a result, were to the last pre-
eminently careful of style, and used, what Dante
so well advocates, the sieve for noble words.
Both were '' docti poetce'''; yet both held that
poetry should be clear and have a definite meaning.
For both, again, were eminently philosophic, their
lore embracing alike natm'al, and mental and moral
philosophy. They possessed, too, more than one
specific interest in common. Both loved the stars.
" Since Dante," says Mr Theodore Watts-Dunton,
"no poet in any land has so loved the stars as
Tennyson." He meditated a great poem on them.
Perhaps the nearest in this love is the living poet,
a poet better, however, in prose than in verse,
Thomas Hardy.
THEIR LOVE OF VIRGIL 269
Both loved the story of " the flower of kings,"
Arthur of Britain: "■ PulcherrimcB regis Arturi
ambages" as Dante terms it, and the episodes of
Mordred and Gallehault, of Guenevere and Lancelot
and Tristan.
And both, as already hinted at, loved pre-
eminently one of the elder poets.
" I salute thee, Mantovano,
I that loved thee since my day began."
"Vagliami il lungo studio e il grande amore
Che m' ha fatto cercar lo tuo volume."
"What Horace did for Sappho, that Dante in
his noblest passages, yom* father in his most perfect
poem, have done for the ' altissimo poeta.' The
one has expressed the veneration of the modern, as
the other of the mediaeval world." So wrote the
poet and seer, lover and student both of Virgil
and of Dante, recently lost to us, Frederick Myers.
Widely different then in age, in circumstance,
and in almost every detail of their surroundings,
they yet had not a little in common in taste and
temperament. It is not without significance then
that the words which his gifted son uses to conclude
his summing up of Lord Tennyson's character
should be those of Dante.
" If I may venture to speak [he writes] of his
special influence over the world, my conviction is,
that its main and endiuing factors are his power of
expression, the perfection of his workmanship, his
strong common -sense, the high purport of his life
and work, his humihty and his open-hearted and
helpful sympathy.'
" Fortezza, ed umilitade, e largo core. "
VIII
ANCIENT AND MODERN CLASSICS AS
INSTRUMENTS OF EDUCATION^
" Let us consider, too, how differently young
and old are affected by the words of some classic
author, such as Homer or Horace. Passages,
which to a boy are but rhetorical commonplaces,
neither better nor worse than a hundred others
which any clever wi'iter might supply, which he
gets by heart and thinks very fine, and imitates, as
he thinks, successfully, in his own flowing versifica-
tion, at length come home to him when long years
have passed, and he has had experience of life, and
pierce him, as if he had never before known them,
with their sad earnestness and vivid exactness.
Then he comes to understand how it is, that lines,
the l^iith of some chance morning or evening at an
Ionian festival, or among the Sabine hills, have
lasted generation after generation for thousands of
years, with a power over the mind, and a charm,
which the current literatm-e of his own day, with
all its obvious advantages, is utterly imable to
rival."
The quotation is probably well known to many
of you, though all may not recollect where it is to be
found. It occurs in Cardinal Newman's " Grammar
of Assent." It is not unfitting, perhaps, that an
^ An Address delivered to the Modern Language Associa-
tion on 21st December 1905.
270
THOMAS AND MATTHEW ARNOLD 271
Oxford man like myself, in speaking of the ancient
classics, should have recourse to one of the most
eloquent voices and profound natures that Oxford
has ever produced, one, moreover, to whom litera-
ture appealed most deeply, and not least deeply in
its educational aspect, and who was one of its
sanest judges.
But, indeed, I might find many witnesses, from
many countries and creeds.
" The present age makes great claims upon us.
We owe it service ; it will not be satisfied without
our admiration. I know not how it is, but their
commerce with the ancients appears to me to
produce, in those who constantly practise it, a
steadying and composing effect upon their judg-
ment, not of literary works only, but of men and
events in general. They are like persons who have
had a very weighty and impressive experience.
They are more truly than others under the empire
of facts, and more independent of the language
current among those with whom they live."
Such is the pronouncement of Matthew Arnold.
His father, taking a wider range, dealing less
with style and more with substance and spirit, had
written before him no less impressively.
" In point of political experience, we are even at
this hom^ scarcely on a level with the statesmen of
the age of Alexander. Mere lapse of years confers
here no increase of knowledge ; four thousand years
have furnished the Asiatic with scarcely anything
that deserves the name of political experience ; two
thousand years since the fall of Carthage have
furnished the African with absolutely nothing.
Even in Em*ope and in America it would not be
easy now to collect such a treasure of experience
272 ANCIENT AND MODERN CLASSICS
as the constitutions of 153 connnon wealths along
the various coasts of the Mediterranean offered to
Aristotle. Tliere he niiij^ht study the institutions
of various races derived from various sources :
every possible variety of external position, of
national character, of positive law, agricultural
states and commercial, military powers and mari-
time, wealthy countries and poor ones, monarchies,
aristocracies, and democracies, with every imaginable
form and combination of each and all ; states over-
peopled and underpeopled, old and new, in every
circumstance of advance, maturity, and decline.
Nor was the moral experience of the age of Greek
civilisation less complete. This was derived from
the strong critical and inquiring spirit of the Greek
sophists and philosophers, and from the unbounded
freedom which they enjoyed. In mere metaphysical
research the schoolmen were indefatigable and bold,
but in moral questions there was an authority
which restrained them : among Christians the
notions of duty and of virtue must be assumed as
beyond dispute. But not the wildest extravagance
of atheistic wickedness in modern times can go
further than the sophists of Greece went before
them ; whatever audacity can dare and subtlety
contrive to make the words ' good ' and * evil '
change their meaning, has been already tried in the
days of Plato, and, by his eloquence, and wisdom,
and faith unshaken, has been put to shame."
So speaks Dr Arnold.
Let us turn to a very different authority.
Rousseau is accounted among the most modern,
the least classic, the most independent and in-
dividual of wi'iters. He is the arch-anarch, the
originator of the Romantic upheaval in European
thought and letters. Yet the celebrated return of
Rousseau to Nature is a retui*n to Plato.
THE GREEK LANGUAGE 273
" Would you form a conception of public educa-
tion [he writes] ? Read the ' RepubHc ' of Plato. It
is not a political work, as those think who judge of
books only by their names. It is the finest treatise
on education that has ever been written."
One more quotation, and I have completed my
array of testimony. This, the utterance of the late
Mr Frederick Myers, bears rather on the language
of antiquity than on its ideas.
" No words that men can any more set side by
side can ever affect :he mind again like some of the
great passages of Homer. For in them it seems as
if all that makes life precious were in the act of
being created at once and together — language itself,
and the first emotions, and the inconceivable charm
of song. When we hear one single sentence of
Anticleia's answer, as she begins :
ovT efxey ev /meyapoicriv evcTKOTro? loxeaipa —
what words can express the sense which we receive
of an effortless and absolute sublimity, the feeling
of morning freshness and elemental power, the
delight which is to all other intellectual delights
what youth is to all other joys 1 And what a
language ! which has wi-itten, as it were, of itself
those last two words for the poet, which offers
them as the fruit of its inmost structure and the
bloom of its early day ! Beside speech like this,
Virgil's seems elaborate, and Dante's crabbed, and
Shakespeare's barbarous. There never has been,
there never will be, a language like the dead Greek.
For Greek has all the merits of other tongues
without their accompanying defects. It has the
monumental weight and brevity of the Latin
without its rigid unmanageability ; the copiousness
and flexibility of the German without its heavy
uncommonness and guttural superfluity ; the pel-
s
274 ANCIENT AND MODERN CLASSICS
lucidity of the French witliout its jcjuncness ; the
force and reality of the English without its
structureless comminution. "
Such are a few out of the many testimonies
which might be cited as to the value and potency
over the mind of the Greek and Roman classics.
Could any similar claim be put forward for the
modern classics ? Can they in particular take the
place of the ancient as instruments of education ?
Can they teach the same moral and mental lessons,
exercise the same elevating and formative influence
on the style, and on that which we all know is the
style, the man himself? It is a question of present
and pressing importance.
The monopoly of the ancient classics has been
broken into. What some might call "their ancient
solitary reign," even in their most "secret bowers,"
is molested and disturbed. Utilitarianism, the
self-consciousness and the self-confidence of the
modern S23irit, both combine to aid the substitution
of the modern for the ancient tongues in education.
"With all its obvious advantages," says Cardinal
Newman, speaking of the current literature of om*
own day. But are its advantages so obvious?
From the point of view of culture and education
there are many obvious advantages attaching to
the ancient classics. Greece and Rome offer to us
two great compact literatures. In a sense, the two
may almost be called one body of literatiu'e, so
close is their alliance. They are the sun and moon
illuminating us with a common light. Greece
gives us examples, great examples, of almost every
genre. Epic, Dramatic, Lyric, Gnomic, Bucolic,
Idyllic; Tragedy, Comedy, History, Philosophy,
CLASSIC STANDARDS 275
Rhetoric, Critic, Logic, Physic — their very names
are Greek. If anything is wanting in the oratorical,
epistolary, or satiric vein, the deficiency is supplied
by Rome. Again, every style and mood is repre-
sented by some author, by some great author. The
classic, the romantic, the precieux, the decadent,
the rude and primitive, the euphuistic and artificial,
the simple, the elaborate, the laconic, the diffuse,
the Attic, the Asiatic, the Corinthian, the Dorian,
the turgid, the spare, the " golden mean," of each
and all, in the range from Homer to Nonnus, from
Thucydides to Procopius, from Plato to Lucian,
from Ennius to Apuleius, examples may be found,
and examples so great, so well defined, as to furnish
norms and canons. It is the same if we take the
various departments severally, the grandiloquence
of ^schylus, the perfection of Sophocles, the
romance of Euripides, the grace of Lysias, the
masculine reasonableness of Demosthenes, Isocrates'
florid decoration, Theocritus' melodious murmuring,
Menander's silver wit, the intellectual passion of
Lucretius, the emotional and personal passion, the
odi and amo of Catullus or Sappho, the worldly
wisdom and the elaborated felicity of Horace, the
easy causerie of Ovid. Each is an example in its
way. They are eternal standards, for they have
"Orbed into the perfect stars.
Men saw not when they moved therein,"
and become fixed constellations.
By them modern lights can be measured and
estimated. They give us a base for literary
triangulation.
Can we find parallels to them in modern
276 ANCIENT AND MODERN CLASSICS
1
literature ? We can find parallels, perhaps, if we
take all modern literatures, if we add to Shake-
speare, Racine and Calderon, and Moliere and
Lessing and Goethe, if to Rabelais we join Heine,
if with Bossuet we couple Burke, if we combine
Froissart and Macchiavelli and Gibbon, Pascal and
Addison and Ruskin in one list.
But we cannot get them fi'om one modern
literature alone, and it may be claimed that by
learning the two languages, Greek and Latin, we
get what would involve learning three or four
modern languages. Nay, I may put it more
forcibly. If I may assume that Latin is necessary
for all really educated persons, then I may claim
that by learning one additional tongue, the
literary student will acquire an acquaintance
with a wealth or variety of masterj^ieces which
he could only acquire by learning two or three
modern tongues.
Further, not only do Greek and Latin furnish
a fixed standard, but they also furnish a common
standard. Without the classics, literary Europe
would be broken into a set of provinces with
no lingua franca, no common international heri-
tage. This criticism, indeed, applies to the whole
classical tradition, the whole of our envisagement of
Greek and Roman antiquity.
The great names and events, the great char-
acters and situations of antiquity stand out
detached, and even denuded, sifted, concentrated,
by time. Much they have lost, but something
they have gained, by the falling away of local
and temporal detail and environment.
We do not know too much about them, as
THE "MEN OF OLD" 277
we do about so many things modern. The
achievements of Marathon, of Salamis, of Cannae
and Pharsalia, the characters and careers of
Aristides, Alcibiades and Alexander, of the
Gracchi, Catihne, Csesar, Nero, BeKsarius, of
"Plutarch's men," as they are called, these are
the commonplaces of all time.
And they start with the advantage of greater
simplicity. I know not where this is so well
put as in a short poem by a poet too little known,
but of the highest culture, and at times singularly
discerning, the late Lord Houghton. It is called
"The Men of Old."
" To them," to these " men of old," he sings :
" To them was life a simple art
Of duties to be done,
A game where each man took his part,
A race where all must run ;
A battle whose great scheme and scope
They little cared to know,
Content, as men at arms, to cope
Each with the fronting foe.
" Man now his virtue's diadem
Puts on and proudly wears,
Great thoughts, great feelings came to them
Like instincts, unawares ;
Blending their souls' sublimest needs
With tastes of every day
They went about their gravest deeds
As noble boys at play."
Modern history, modern nations, have their
great examples too, both good and bad — Arthur,
Alfred, Charlemagne, Kichard the Lion Heart,
Hildebrand, Joan of Arc, The Cid, Tell, St
Francis, Borgia, Elizabeth, Frederick the Great,
278 ANCIENT AND MODERN CLASSICS
Peter the Great, Catharine the Great, Nelson,
Napoleon, Abraham Lincoln, Bismarck.
But, again, they are sporadic, they are scattered
up and down the nations, and even yet there clings
to them something of national or ecclesiastical
prejudice or association, a halo or a haze, which
refracts om* vision and affects om* judgment.
So it is with the modern classics.
A few, the very greatest, have acquired the
fixity of the ancients. Dante, Cervantes, Shake-
speare, Moliere, Goethe, about these there is
no doubt.
But if they are as great as the ancients, they
do not replace the ancients, or enable us to
dispense with them, any more than Canova, or
Thorwaldsen, or Rodin himself, even were their
genius yet greater than it is, could enable us to
dispense with Pheidias and Praxiteles. This is
in the nature of things. There is only one Homer.
There can never be another. The miracle of his
poems generation after generation of scholars have
endeavoured to explain, but vainly. A miracle
it is. They combine primitive natm'alness with
consummate art, absolute freshness with absolute
finish. I quoted Mr Myers just now about the
language of Homer. The same paradox is to be
found in the substance. The character of Achilles,
his almost savage fury, yet his heroic knightliness ;
his splendid imperiousness, yet his artistic self-
restraint and magnificent compassion ; or, again,
the maidenhood of Nausicaa, her girlish grace
and her royal dignity, natural as Pocahontas or
Ayacanora, yet as true a lady as any out of the
most glittering court of chivalry's most golden
HOMER AND SHAKESPEARE 279
day : is there anything like it elsewhere ? I have a
very faint idea of the " Nibelungenlied " or the
"Chanson de Roland," but I believe it is only here
and there that they rise to anything like this
symmetry and harmony, this fusion of strength
and beauty, of force and form.
Can we get the same effect from the other
greatest of the great, from Dante, from Shake-
speare ?
Dante would not have thought so.
" Mira colui con quella spada in mano,
Che vien dinanzi a' tre si come sire,
Quegli e Omero, poeta sovrano ! "
Much we get from Dante that we do not get
from Homer, lessons of civil virtue and high philo-
sophy, and faith higher still, but not just what
Homer gives.
And Shakespeare, much again we get from
Shakespeare, abundantly much, that Homer has
not. But there is not even in Shakespeare's
"native wood-notes wild," that purity, that clarity,
that youthful bloom, that divine simplicity which
mark the Iliad and the Odyssey. It is the
renascence of the world we feel in Shakespeare,
in Homer it is the nascence. Often, too, in
Shakespeare is found that renascence element of
the extravagant and the "conceited" which made
Matthew Arnold say that "Homer was as far
above Shakespeare as perfection above imperfec-
tion."
Virgil, again, the inspired country-carrier's son,
the Celtic provincial swept into the spreading
citizenship of the newly-founded empire of Rome :
280 ANCIKNT AND MODERN CLASSICS
Virgil, in whom all llic old lore of woodland,
lake, and mountain is brought into touch with
the last word of the science and mysticism of the
Pagan world as it trembles on the threshold of
the new era, "■ le tendre et clairvoyant Virgile"
as Renan writes ; " qui semble repondre comme
par un echo secret au second IsaJie;" Virgil, that
strange, pensive spirit, yearning for immortality
''tendens manus ripae ulterioris amore" proudly
patriotic and imperial, yet feeling the pathos of
the conquered, and steeped in the tears that lie
so close to every mortal action, can we get the
effect of Virgil anywhere but in Virgil ? Again
we must say "No." Something of it we may
get in Tasso or in Tennyson, and much we may
find in these that is not found even in Virgil,
but just Virgil, "No."
Or Plato, the only philosopher, as it has been
said, who possesses a really great style, the greatest
prose-poet of the world, whose philosophy incar-
nates itself with form and colour, and speaks in
a living voice : Pascal, Berkeley, Kant, Coleridge,
Kuskin, all have Platonic elements, but in none
of them, nor in all, can we find all that is in Plato.
Or take History. How many styles the ancient
classics offer, and what signal specimens of each !
There is the prattling chronicle of the born story-
teller Herodotus, which yet contains far more of
art than appears upon the surface, and the shrewd,
cynical, political philosophy, the scientific logic-
ahty, the intense dramatic skill and glow of
Thucydides. Do you remember how the poet
Gray writes al)out the description of the Retreat
from before Syi-acuse? "Is it or is it not," he
CULTURE NEEDS BOTH 281
says, "the finest thing you ever read in your Hfe?"
There is the smooth, insinuating ease of Xenophon,
or again the mascuhne and mihtary brevity of
Caesar, his own war correspondent, the decorative,
Rubens-like pictures of Livy, the pungent epigram
of Tacitus.
Partial parallels doubtless we may find in
Froissart, in Macchiavelli, in Gibbon, but we must
travel from land to land to find them.
Yet, as has been ah'eady implied, the modern
languages and literatures have also their character,
their wealth, their force, above all their individu-
ality.
Culture needs, then, both, alike the ancient and
the modern. If from the Greek and Latin
languages and literatures we can draw the lessons
we have indicated, from the modern tongues we
can learn lessons too. From French we can get
lucidity, logic, lightness, justesse, Jinesse, verve,
plaisanterie. How many good qualities there are
so pecuharly French that there are for them only
French names ! From Italian come lessons in
flexibility and music, from Spanish in humour and
dignity. German can show us sincerity, depth,
thoroughness, science and scholarship, piety both
of the heart and the head ; our own rich litera-
ture, poetry, colour, the play of free individual and
free national life, masculine force, pubhc sense,
patriotism.
So with the writers. What lessons may not be
learned, not to recite again the authors already
named, from the great French tragedians, from the
French critics, from Montaigne and La Bruyere,
from Villon and Ronsard and Beranger, from
282 ANCIENT AND MODERN CLASSICS
Boileaii ami Voltaire, from Hugo and Leconte de
Lisle, from the great preachers and savants, from
Bossuet and Buffon ; or, to turn to other nations,
from the scholarly philosophy of Lessing, the
scholarly piety of Herder, from the mockery of
Heine, the melancholy of Leopardi, from Milton
and Dryden, from Burns and Wordsworth, from
the "rainbow radiance of Shelley and Byron's
furious pride " ?
They are classic, these moderns. It has long
ago been admitted ; I need not labom* the point
to an audience like this. But why are they classic ?
For the same reason as the ancients are classic.
Many here will remember how, in that beautiful,
central, magistral essay entitled " What constitutes
a Classic?" Sainte-Beuve quotes Goethe. When
these two agree in an opinion there is not much
room for a third.
"For me [says Goethe] the poem of the
Nibelungen is as much classical as Homer, both
are healthy and vigorous. The writers of to-day
are not romantic (he uses the word in a temporary
and limited sense) because they are new, but
because they are feeble, sickly, or even sick. The
ancient masterpieces are not classical because they
are old, but because they are energetic, fresh, and
lively."
What is the moral ? That if we are to give a
classical education in the modern languages, it is
the strong modern classics, to a large extent the
great, difficult, distant, modern classics, we must
employ, not the feebler and more fleeting and
easier authors.
They have their natural advantages, these modern
POTENCY OF THE MODERNS 283
classics. They come home to the modern mind.
They have for it an appeal, an allm-e, all their owti.
The great classics of antiquity are unrivalled. But
to appreciate them requires, excepting for the rare
genius of a Winckelmann or a Keats, an immense
effort, a long labour.
To lure forward the sluggish or inattentive
mood of the average boy or girl, of the ordinary
*' average sensual man," the modern ^vriters,
speaking the language of their own day, are far
more potent.
I am under no illusion. There are " many men,
many women and many children," to use Dr
Johnson's phrase, in England at any rate, whom no
classic, ancient or modern, will attract. Poetry has
for them no voice, since they have for it no ear, as
some have no ear for music.
But there are many more for whom the modern
classics may do much. If there are hundreds who
may learn, and learn to love, Greek and Latin,
there are thousands who may learn, and learn to
love, Enghsh, French, and German. Teach them
first their own tongue. Be it remembered that the
Greeks learnt no other. The French, the most
literary of modern nations, till the other day learnt
no other. Teach them next some one other great
European language and literature. Begin, if you
will, with easy and familiar pieces. But sooner or
later in all these languages let the real classics be
taught, and taught as classics by scholars or the
pupils of scholars. Use the same methods which
have proved successful in giving the highest
education in the ages gone by, only making sure
that they have really jDroved successful.
284 ANCIENT AND MODERN CLASSICS
Let there be at tlie top of your profession real
scholars, real savants, vowed to learning, transcrib-
ing, commenting, correcting, comparing editions,
ransacking libraries, sifting glosses, drudging in
dictionaries and grammars, thinking nothing too
small or irksome, like Browning's grammarian,
giving their lives to settle the business of a particle.
Let us honour these savants even if we have not
time or means, or ability, to follow their example
oiu*selves.
Let om* millionaires found professorial chairs
for them, no less than for the ancient tongues, or
for the abstruser and less lucrative portions of
natural science. Let them have their learned
societies and their erudite journals. Let them seek
and discover the vraie verite, in philology and
philosophy ; without this, the study of modern
language in its more ordinary walks will have
neither dignity nor the best educational value.
Let us beware, of course, of those very dangers,
those defects of its qualities, which too often have
impaired the effectiveness of classical education in
the past, formalism, convention, dry-as-dust
pedantry, abstraction from living human interest.
Do not let modern literatm'e and modern languages
throw away their natural, their obvious advantages.
They are living languages, and can be taught as
such. Our pupils must learn to speak as well as to
write them. But not merely to speak nor merely
to write them for business pmposes.
Let our teachers aim at teaching style as well
as knowledge. Do not count this as of little
importance. If BufFon's celebrated phrase, which I
have quoted already, is true, and "the style is the
ANCIENT ELABORATION 285
man," or essentially ''of the man," then let us
remember that if we can teach, can modify, the
style, we are teaching, modifying the man himself.
And there is no doubt that it is so. The conscience
and the taste of the real scholar find their reflection,
if not always clearly, in his character.
" And more — think well ! Do-well will follow thought,
And in the fatal sequence of this world
An evil thought may soil thy children's blood."
And since thought and words are most subtly
connected, and expression reacts on ideas and
sentiments, we cannot be too careful of expression.
Who shall say how much of the superiority of
the ancients depends on the immense pains which
they took with their expression ?
Plato wrote the opening words of his
*'Repubhc" over and over and over again, many
times. At the age of eighty he was still polishing
up his dialogues. Isocrates spent ten years on one,
by no means lengthy, composition. Demosthenes,
as both the legends and the more sober stories
about him show, took similarly infinite trouble with
expression, with the cadence and rhythm, almost
with every syllable of his great speeches.
Julius Caesar wrote a treatise on the correct use
of Latin while engaged in conquering Gaul. The
advice of Horace as to the ''nine-years pondered
lay " is proverbial.
It is here that French can help us so much.
The French are the only modern people who really,
as a nation, take pains about writing, who have a
national sense of style, a national conscience as
regards solecisms. Is it not significant that they
286 ANCIENT AND MODERN CLASSICS
are the only moclcrn nation, perhaps the only
nation, that has ever legislated about grammar ?
In England and in Germany there are cultivated
classes, there are literary coteries. We have, in
poetry especially, poets who are consummate and
careful artists : Chaucer, Spenser, Milton before all.
Pope, Gray, Tennyson ; but we have, too, the
caprice and the eccentricity against which Matthew
Arnold was ever flashing the rapier of his raillery,
we have the negligence of Byron, the lapses and
longueurs of Wordsworth, the freaks and roughnesses
of Browning.
Goethe, that noble and classic artist, a literature
in himself, Goethe said that "he had had nothing
sent him in his sleep ; " there was no page of his
but he well knew how it came there. Lessing
writes prose like a scholar, and Heine with a
brilliancy which reminds us that Paris was his
second home. More recently, Helmholtz, Momm-
sen, not a few others, without naming the living,
have ^\Titten excellently.
But who can say that while it has made great
advance and shows promise of yet more, the average
German prose does not still need much improvement
in point of arrangement and diction ? It is to
France that we and Europe turn for the model of
lucid order and logical disposition, of crystalline
form and brightness, of nicety and nettete of
expression. Le 7iiot juste, une belle page, these are
ideals of every French writer, of how few English !
Here and there a genius arises hke that of Bunyan
or Burns or John Bright, trained mainly on its
own tongue — though Bm^ns knew some French and
some Latin — a natm'al genius, which expresses
LESSONS IN STYLE 287
itself with incomparable felicity ; but the majority
of good Em'opeaD wi^iters have been reared on the
ancient or on the modern classics, practically on
Greek and Latin, on French, or Italian.
And in truth, style could be taught through
these last languages as well or nearly as well as,
probably to many pupils even better than, through
Latin and Greek. But the same steps must be
taken to teach it, the same high standard must be
set. The young classical scholar is asked not
merely to compose in Latin and Greek, but to
compose in various manners and styles, in the
oratorical, in the philosophical, in the epistolary
manner, in the style of Thucydides or Plato, of
Cicero or Tacitus. He is required to write not
only prose but verse, and in many metres. Hexa-
meter, Elegiac, Alcaic, Anapaestic. Sic fortis
Etruria rj^evit. It is thus that the fine flower of
English scholarship is grown, thus that such a
genius as that whose loss is so late and lamented
among us, the genius of Sir Richard Jebb, with its
Attic grace and lofty humanism, was prepared and
polished and perfected. The modern language
teacher, with his most advanced pupils, should
aim at no less.
But he has a yet higher vocation. The old
classical education, let it always be remembered,
gave a training not only of the head but of the
heart. It produced for several centuries in England,
and indeed in Europe, a type of character with
some defects but with many merits — sage, sane,
masculine, public-spirited. I see it passing away,
or greatly narrowed in its influence, and scientific
education more and more pressing in and spreading.
288 ANCIENT AND MODERN CLASSICS
For giving' training on liow to observe and to
reason from facts, scientific education is admirable.
It supplies what the classical education did not.
For training in character, in patriotism, in heroism,
it is not so potent. It requires then to be supple-
mented by a discipline in the humanities, if not
the ancient, then the modern humanities.
I hope, then, and believe that an interesting and
not inglorious future lies before the modern
languages and literatures in the field of education.
One obvious advantage they have. They are still
alive, still growing, every generation adds to
their wealth.
When, in the sixteenth century, that fine
scholar and poet, Du Bellay, compared the forces
of the old and the new tongues ; when even in the
eighteenth century, men in England and in France
made the same comparison, the glorious and divine
array of the ancients was nearly what it is now.
How many great authors did that eighteenth
centmy itself add to the host of the moderns, in
England, in France, in Germany ! How many
more has the nineteenth added, in every country
of Europe, and in America ! Yet the ancients, as
we have seen, can never pass away. Nay, it is
strange but true, that the rise of new modern types
often makes us understand and value the ancient
more fully. Moliere long ago taught the world a
larger appreciation of Plautus and Terence. Racine
and Goethe illustrate Sophocles. Lady Macbeth
and King Lear render Clytemnestra and CEdipus
more intelligible. Tennyson helps us to appreciate
Virgil, and Ruskin reflects light on Plato. It may
even be said that Ibsen has brought out with new
SOLIDARITE OF THE "HUMANE LETTERS" 289
force the realism in Euripides, so strong, so strange
is the solida7nte of humanity, and of its expression,
the "humane letters."
All, then, who really love literature, and wish
to give their lives to it, should study both. " Let
us," as Goethe cried, "study Moliere, let us study
Shakespeare, but above all things the old Greeks
and always the Greeks."^ The teachers of modern
languages in the future should, if possible, be
brought up themselves with a knowledge of the
ancient. If this cannot be, at least they should be
scholars and humanists in their own tongues. Thus
only will they be able to hand on to their pupils
through either medium, the older or the younger,
those high lessons, that discipline and culture and
inspiration of the human soul, which mathematics
and physical science alone, all potent and all
necessary as they too are in their own region,
cannot give, and with which our race cannot, and
in the long run will not, be content to dispense.
^ Eckermann, "Conversations with Goethe" (1827), Oxen-
ford's Translation, i. 384.
IX
" IN MEMORIAM " AFTER FIFTY YEARS
The appearance at Christmas-tide 1905, in the
familiar green cloth so dear to lovers of his
poetry, of the modest little volume " In Memoriam "
annotated by Tennyson himself, was in its quiet
way something of an event in the literary
world, and an event without a parallel. It came
like a voice from another world, and indeed
such in a sense it was. That a poem should be
published either in its first or second edition with
notes by its author during his lifetime, is not
unknown. That it should be annotated after his
death by another hand is still more common ;
indeed, it may be said to be the appointed destiny
of a classic. But that a series of annotations by
the author himself should be given to the world
after he has passed away is a thing unprece-
dented, and it is an unexpected piece of good
fortune that this should have happened in the
case of "In Memoriam."
When a poem is famous, the poet's talk or
that of his intimate friends about it, is often
preserved. The professional commentator, who
may be a friend himself, collects and compares
such remarks and adds to them from other sources.
290
GRAY'S ANNOTATIONS 291
In Tennyson's case this has ah'eady beeii done to
a considerable degree.
Tennyson was at once shy and sincere, retiring
and outspoken. He was anxious to be rightly
understood, but he did not think that everything
in poetry should, or could, be made readily plain
to the meanest intelligence. With those whom
I he knew and liked, he was very wilhng to talk
about and explain his poems, and he would even
spontaneously point out special featm-es in them
which he thought worthy of note, with much
amiability and readiness. But notes he disliked.
As readers of his volumes will doubtless remember,
the one note which they contained, conspicuous
by its singularity, was that upon the berry of
the spindle-tree,
"The fruit
Which in our winter woodland looks a flower."
He held with Gray. "I do not love notes,"
wrote Gray to Horace Walpole, who was print-
ing his Odes for Dodsley, the bookseller, "though,
you see, I had resolved to put two or three.
They are signs of weakness or obscurity. If a
thing cannot be understood without them, it had
better not be understood at all." And again, in a
delightfully humorous letter, "I would not have put
another note to save the souls of all the owls in
London. ... It is extremely well as it is ; nobody
understands me, and I am perfectly satisfied."
Gray inscribed on his title-page two words from
Pindar — (poovavra crvverola-i, " With a voicc for the
wise." He was delighted when to those who
called his verses obscure, the witty and charming
292 " IN MEMORIAM " APTER FIFl^Y YEARS
Miss Speed repeated this magic formula, as she
frequently did, no doubt with an arch air of
oracular intimit(f. "This is both my motto and
my comment," he said. He even affected to be
pleased when a " peer of the realm " understood his
allusions to Elizabethan times to apply to Charles
I. and Cromwell. "It is very well," he wrote;
"the next thing I write shall be in Welch."
There were originally four notes to the " Bard "
and none to the "Progress of Poesy." But later
on, when the " Critical Review " suggested that
he might have continued the quotation from
Pindar which runs thus, "With a voice for the
■wise — but for the general, needing interpreters,"
Gray adopted the suggestion, cited Pindar in full
on his title-page, and added some further ex-
planatory notes. Tennyson has done the same.
He was persuaded to leave a body of notes on
his collected poems which might be given to the
world by his son, if and when his son thought fit.
All through his life, and especially in his later
years, he was constantly being plagued and
pestered, orally and by letter, with inquiries,
often of the most foolish kind, as to the meaning
and allusion of phrases. Assertions as wild and
wide of the mark as those of Gray's "peer of
the realm" were made with regard to his pieces.
The "broad-brimmed hawker of holy things" was
said to be John Bright; the Northern Farmer
and Mariana were identified with special persons
and places near his home. Even so good a critic
as Lord Coleridge stated categorically that the
Pilot in " Crossing the Bar " was Lionel Tennyson,
while others said it was Arthur Hallam. Such
DAWSON AND GATTY 293
statements he found himself obliged to correct.
So again those who, to give a new application to
Shakespeare's line, delight to
"Delve their parallels in beauty's brow,"
were constantly suggesting that he had borrowed
phrases or ideas from books which he had never
read.
To these inquiries and statements and sugges-
tions he made answer in different ways. Some
of these answers have long ago been published,
as, for instance, the long and most interesting
letter he wrote in 1882 to Dawson, the Canadian
editor of "The Princess." Palgrave's edition of
the Lyrical Poems contains some notes based on
remarks made to him by the poet. Dr Gatty's
"Key" was, as he says, "glanced at by Tennyson
himself, who made some invaluable corrections, but
did not, of course, give his imprimatur to all he
did not alter." Not very long after his death Mr
(afterward Sir) James Knowles published a " Per-
sonal Reminiscence," in which, inter alia, he gave his
recollection of the poet's talk about "In Memoriam,"
and in particular the natm'al groups into which it
falls. Some of these recollections the annotations
confirm. To such partial and piecemeal comment
the "Life" was to add a great deal more. But
meanwhile in his lifetime the poet had at last
yielded. He did so with much reluctance. "I
am told," he says, in a brief preface to these
annotations, "that some of my young countrymen
would like notes to my poems. Shall I write
what dictionaries tell to save some of the idle
folk trouble ? or am I to fit a moral to each poem ?
29-t "IN MEIVIORIAM" AFTER FIFTY YEARS
or to add an analysis of passages ? or to give a
history of my similes? I do not like the task."
Another reason for his relnctance was that he
held that poetry was not an exact scientific
statement. "It is like shot silk," he said, "with
many glancing colours." "You must not say this
means this, and that means that, and no more."
Poetry, he thought, suggests rather than defines,
and " every reader must find his own interpretation
according to his own ability and according to his
sympathy with the poet."
As he had sung long ago
" Liberal applications lie
In Art, like Nature, dearest friend,"
as he sings in " In Memoriam " itself —
" Words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the soul within."
Still he was ultimately persuaded. And there
can be no doubt that he was right, and that his son
was right then in adding his weight on that side
of the scale, and that he is right now in publishing
these annotations and in beginning with "In
Memoriam." The case was somewhat the same
with the biography. Tennyson himself was much
averse to allowing his life to be written. Yet
we cannot be too grateful that he gave permission
for the task to be essayed by his son, who, with
whatever drawbacks, as he himself admitted, of
close kinship, knew the facts as none else could,
and, what is more, inherited, both physically and
mentally, the tradition, spiritual and intellectual,
of his illustrious father.
THE "LIFE" 295
That " Life " was in itself a comment at once
general and special on the poems. And it may
farther be said that the brief notes here given
are an extension of the "Life." In particular they
are an extension of the noble central chapter on
"In Memoriam," chapter xxv., which is very
appropriately used again as an introduction by
the editor of these annotations.
The Life and the notes together indeed afford
us an opportunity quite unique. Of no poet of
equal importance has the career been written with
such fulness and authority. The story of Gray
has already been told. Gray's contemporary
Collins added notes to his own poems. Matthew
Ai'nold, in some instances, did the same. To the
poems of Shelley, Lady Shelley has appended here
and there authoritative annotations. But no poet
has hitherto lent with his own hand such aid to
his readers as is afforded by these annotations
on "In Memoriam." What would we not give
for annotations as brief, yet as illuminating as
these, by the author, on the "CEdipus Tyrannus,"
or the "Sixth ^neid," or Dante's "Divine
Comedy," or Shakespeare's "Sonnets," or Goethe's
"Faust"?
" In Memoriam " in itself calls for note and
comment. It is a high and difficult poem.
As Professor Andrew Bradley says in the very
judicious preface to his edition, " To those who
think all commentary on ' In Memoriam ' super-
fluous I will venture to reply that they can never
have studied the poem." It is also in a sense
Tennyson's central poem and the key to half
the others. To understand "In Memoriam" it
296 " IN MEMORIAM " AFfER FIFTY YEARS
1
is necessary to understand Tennyson. The whole
of his life led up to this particular poem, and is
in various ways represented in it.
It is well briefly to remind ourselves what that
life was. Tennyson's career, which ended so
gloriously, did not indeed begin exactly " in low
estate." On the contrary he was of a well-
connected family. But he had the immense
advantage of starting in a quiet, imobserved way,
in touch with the lowliest and humblest. His life
began on a "simple village green," in a modest
home, under the shadow of an ancient church,
beside a pastoral rivulet, in a sequestered hamlet,
nestling in the green depths of the English country,
quiet and far from men even now, still more so at
the beginning of the last centmy. Here, among
village folk, farm-hands, ploughmen, shepherds,
blacksmiths, playing with their children, hearing
their talk, the great problems of life stole softly
upon him, in field and churchyard, by wood and
wold.
" Know I not death .'' the outward signs ?
" I found him when my years were few ;
A shadow on the graves I knew.
And darkness in the village yew."
He studied nature in herself and in books. He
watched the dragon-fly bursting his husk, drying
his gauzy wings, and flying a "living flash of light"
through the dewy crofts, the "sea-blue bird of
March" flitting by imder the "barren bush," the
grayling hanging in the stream. He listened to the
"low love-language of the bird, in native hazels
tassel-hung," the boom of the bittern, the "sudden
CAMBRIDGE DAYS 297
scritches of the jay," the nightingale's ''long and
low preamble," the rare notes of the mounted
thrush ; he spent the night with shepherds on the
hills, gazing at the stars, or lay on the dunes at
Mablethorpe listening to the league-long breakers.
He went to school in the neighbouring town of
Louth, marked the manners of the bourgeoisie^
came home again and continued his pursuit of
scholarship and science, especially astronomy and
geology. The early poems by "Two Brothers"
which belong to this period, interesting in them-
selves, are still more interesting in their significance.
They show a cm'ious combination of these two
elements of study. Quotations from Martial and
Horace, and Virgil and the ''Araucana," are
interspersed with references to "Baker on
Animalculge " ; poems on Persia or Apollonius
Rhodius, with pieces on phrenology and on " Love
the Lord of Nature."
Then he went up to Cambridge. Small,
provincial, clerical, narrow, unreformed, Cambridge
had yet that peculiar privilege of the English
Universities, the college life, the intercourse of
young men, at once free and close. Neither
Tennyson, nor Darwin, who was there at exactly
the same time, derived much from the set studies
of the place ; but whereas Darwin, oddly enough,
fell in with a sporting set, hard-riding, jolly, almost,
as he says, too jolly, who no doubt " crashed the
glass and beat the floor," Tennyson consorted with
a very different coterie. "lis avaient vecu
ensemble," says a French writer, speaking of
Tennyson and Hallam, "une de ces magnifiques
jeunesses que connaissent seules dans le monde
298 "IN MEMORIAM" AFTER FII^^Y YEARS
moderno les imivervsitcs anglaises. On dissertait de
omul re sr/hi/i, sans faire ii d'ailleiu's des quibusdam
aliis." They
" held debate, a band
Of youthful friends, on mind and art,
And labour, and the changing mart
And all the framework of the land."
"They had among them," says Carlyle, in his
"Life of Sterhng," "a debating society called the
Union, where on stated evenings was much logic
and other spiritual fencing and ingenious colhsion,
probably of a really superior quality in that kind."
But the esoteric circle which Tennyson's lines
depict was not the Union but the Conversazione
Society, commonly known as the "Apostles."
Chief of this society was Hallam, the "master-
bowman," the hero and the friend of all. In
particular he was the bosom friend of Tennyson.
Together they pursued the same studies, literature,
science, philosophy. Plato and Milton and Dante
were among their favom'ite authors. They acted
Shakespeare together.
" Say, for you saw us, ye immortal Lights,
How oft unwearied have we spent the nights ?
Till the Ledcenn Stars, so famed for Love,
Wondered at us from above.
We spent them not in toys, in lusts, or wine.
But search of deep Philosophy,
Wit, Eloquence, and Poetry,
Arts which I loved, for they, my Friend, were Thine.
" Ye fields of Cambridge, our dear Cambridge, say.
Have ye not seen us walking every day ?
Was there a Tree about, which did not know
The Love betwixt us two } "
SPAIN AND THE RHINE 299
If any poetry but his own were needed to illustrate
Tennyson's relation to Hallam, these lines from an
earlier "In Memoriam," written by a poet of his
own Trinity, just two centuries earlier, the lines of
Cowley on the death of Mr Harvey, might be cited.
They travelled together, first in 1830 to the
Pyrenees and the Spanish border in aid of Torrijos
and his insurgents. Together they paced the
valley of Cauteretz,
" Beside the river's wooded reach,
The fortress, and the mountain ridge,
The cataract flashing from the bridge.
The breaker breaking on the beach."
Later, in 1832, they went to Rotterdam,
Cologne, and Bonn.
" You leave us : you will see the Rhine,
And those fair hills I sail'd below.
When I was there with him ; and go
By summer belts of wheat and vine."
They wrote poetry together and intended to
publish in one conjoint volume. Hallam went
down to Lincolnshire, stayed at Somersby, and
became engaged to Tennyson's sister Emily.
Tennyson went up to London and was a guest at
67 Wimpole Street.
An amusingly naif and simple notice of the
last of these visits, recorded in the "Life," is very
significant of Tennyson. Hallam and he visited
together the Elgin Marbles, the Tower, and the
Zoological Gardens ! Together they looked
through microscopes at moths' wings, gnats' heads,
and at all the lions and tigers that lie perdus in a
drop of water. "Strange," said Tennyson, "that
300 "IN MEMOUIAM" AFTER FIFTY YEARS
tliese wonders should draw some men to God and
repel others. No more reason in one than the
other." Nothing is more interesting than to trace
their interchange of interests and ideas — Hallam
widening Tennyson's interest in literature, Tennyson
imbuing Hallam with science. Then came the
crash :
" Within Vienna's fatal walls
God's finger touched him, and he slept."
It is always difficult, in a sense it is impossible,
for imagination to recover or art to preserve the
first poignancy of actual present grief, as of any
other living emotion. More and more as time goes
on the personal becomes impersonal, the individual
general. It is their appeal to the general heart,
quite as much as the personal passion which throbs
through them, that keeps alive CatuUus's lines with
their
" Ave aique Vale, of the Poet's hopeless woe,
Tenderest of Roman poets, nineteen hundred years ago."
The voice of Horace, when he calls Virgil
"a white soul" and "half his own," sounds faintly
from the far ages. We are tempted to regard these
as only happy literary phrases borrowed from some
earlier som'ce which never had any personal
meaning. Doubtless in this we do the kindly,
friendly, warm-hearted Horace wrong. So to-day
the echo in turn begins to grow more distant —
" I, the divided half of such
A friendship as had mastered Time-"
When " In Memoriam " appeared, the critics
thought its passion excessive, extravagant, unreal.
DEATH OF HALLAM 301
The poet met, as he expected, with "scoffs and
scorns." Yet the grief, the passion was very real
in Hallam's circle when, in Carlyle's phrase, "the
days and the hours were." His loss cut deep, and
went hard, with every one of them. Gladstone,
Lord Houghton, Alford, Brookfield, Kemble, all
bear the same witness. "You say nothing more
about Hallam," writes Alford. "I do not
remember anything for many years which has
distressed me so much as his death : I sometimes
sit and think of it till I feel quite unhappy. It
seems indeed a loud and terrible stroke from this
reality of things upon the fairy building of om'
youth." "I walked upon the hills," says Gladstone
in his diary, "to muse upon this very mournful
word which cuts me to the heart. Alas for his
family and his intended bride." With Tennyson it
cut deepest, and went hardest, of all. He was at
first absolutely stunned. Ai'thur Hallam died at
Vienna on 15th September 1833. But in those slow-
moving days it was three months before the remains
were brought home by sailing ship from Trieste,
and the funeral actually did not take place till the
next year, 3rd January 1834. As the winter wore
on Tennyson began to wi'ite, and jotted down some
fragmentary lines which, as his son says, proved to
be the germ of " In Memoriam."
" Where is the voice I loved ? ah, where
Is that dear hand that I would press ?
Lo, the broad heavens cold and bare,
The stars that know not my distress ! "
They are also, it may be noticed, the germ of that
wonderful threnody "Break, break." To the same
302 "IN MKMORIAM" AFTER FIFTY YEARS
epoch belongs the l)egiiiiiing of the "Two Voices"
or " Thoughts of a Suicide," and on this followed
the fii'st sections of " In Memoriam "
" Fair ship, that from the Italian shore."
" When Lazarus loft his charnel cave."
" It draweth near the birth of Christ." ^
He also began the "Morte d' Arthur" and
"Ulysses," wdiicli last, these notes tell us, gave
especially his feelings about the "need of going
forward and braving the struggle of life." Though
probably he little realised it at the time, it was to
be long before any complete poem on Hallam was
to appear. Seventeen years actually elapsed, a
long interval, carrying him from first youth far into
manhood, and even middle age. This long period
of the gestation of "In Memoriam" needs to be
reahsed. It contained many ups and downs of
mood and fortune, many changes of place and
domicile. When he began to write, Tennyson was
living quietly in the old house at Somersby, with
his mother and sisters, roaming solitarily by wold
and marsh and seashore, working at Science,
German, Itahan, and Theology, diving deeper into
the Classics, reading Dionysius of Hahcarnassus,
correcting and adding to the 1832 volumes. Two
years later he met, acting as bridesmaid to her sister,
his brother's bride, his own future wife, of whom
he had once before had a gUmpse, a vision as of
"a Dryad or an Oread" in the Holywell Wood,
near his own home. An understanding, a half-
engagement, grew up between them. Joy began
1 They were known among his set as separate poems, " The
Fair Ship," " The Christmas," etc.
SORROW AND RECOVERY 303
to blossom again. He wrote too to his friends and
visited them occasionally. But he was poor, he
had to sell his Cambridge medals. Letters were
expensive, travelling almost impossible. Then in
1837 came the break-up of the old Somersby home,
in itself no slight sadness. Tennyson went to
reside first with his mother at High Beech and
then at Tunbridge Wells and Boxley, near
Maidstone, then to London and the " dusty purlieus
of the law." He continued, as Mrs Richmond
Ritchie beautifully says, "living in poverty, with
his friends and his golden dreams."
Gradually he regained tone and vigour. His
friendship with Edmund Lushington, and Lushing-
ton's marriage with his sister Cecilia, replaced to
some extent the double loss incurred by the death
of Arthur Hallam. In 1842 he published the two
volumes, the old volume recast, with many new
and noble pieces. He became a world-poet,
known in America and in Germany, recognised
at home by Rogers and Carlyle. He had been
silent for ten years. But he had not been inactive.
The French writer already quoted has summed
up the situation better perhaps than any other
critic —
"Rien de plus fecond que ces dix annees qui
s'ecoulent entre le vote du bill de reforme et le
rappel des Corn-Laws. Le caractere general de
Tepoque est facile a definer en deux mots : il est
liberal et spiritualiste. C'est precisement dans le
meme sens que s'etait dirigee revolution particuliere
de Tennyson. Perdu dans son deuil prive, oubhd
de tons, meditant a I'ecart sur une tombe, il etait
restd k I'unison avec I'ame de son pays. Aussi
304 "IN MEMORIAM" AFTER FIFrV YEARS
(i^s qu'il reparut devant le public en 1842 fiit il
iinmediatement reconnu et salue comme le grand
po^te de TAngleterre."^
But the end was not yet. The failure of the
** earnest frothy" Dr Allen, the philanthropic
pyroglyphic pirate, the loss of his own and much
of his sisters' and brothers' patrimony, the necessity
of breaking off his engagement with Miss Sellwood,
sunk him again in the depths. Something of the
bitterness of his heart in this trying crisis speaks
in the scathing lines wrung from him by the incon-
siderate sneers of the "New Timon," the only
bitter lines of Tennyson's ever published, and then
not by himself After this he began once more
to climb slowly, and this time surely. The pension
which "Dicky" Milnes, stung by Carlyle's strong
language, obtained by making Sir Eobert Peel
read "Ulysses," lifted him from the ground. He
was able to travel, went with his pubHsher-friend
Moxon to Switzerland in 1846, came back and
pubHshed "The Princess" in 1847, and travelled
again in Cornwall, Scotland, and Ireland in 1848.
In 1849 he wrote the Prologue. At last, in 1850,
"In Memoriam" was completed, and its author
was content to give it to the world. The poem
shows again and again the marks of its manner
of composition. It is a golden chain of many
curious links, interspersed with shining jewels.
Each individual link is most highly wrought. The
jewels have been collected and polished in various
spots and at different moments. The original
chain has been lengthened. Either end has been
finished off with a special added ornament. Some,
^ A. Filon, " Revue de Deux Mondes," September 1885.
PLACES OF INSPIRATION 305
and those not the least lovely of the links, have
been introduced late and as by after-thought.
To use other language, the songs were given to
the singer as the word of inspiration to the
prophets of old, in "many ways and many
portions." They echo many places, many moods.
Some came to him in the deep and leafy lanes of
his own Lincolnshire, or as he stood on her high
wolds looking over the marsh to the sea ; some in
Wales ; some in Gloucestershire ; others at High
Beech or Tunbridge Wells ; some where the
brimming Thames swims by the " silent level " and
" osiered aits " of Shiplake ; others yet again amid
" streaming London's central roar." The beautiful
canto —
" The Danube to the Severn gave,"
which, as Canon Beeching so happily says, "has
given to the Wye a place and character among
poetic rivers," was, hke the lovely blank verse lyric
in " The Princess,"
" Tears, idle tears,"
composed in that most romantic of ruins, which
inspired Wordsworth to one of his noblest strains,
Tintern Abbey. The stanzas beginning —
" Sweet after showers, ambrosial air,"
came wafted on the evening breeze which swept up
the estuary of Barmouth, where the "horned
flood," between its high-peaked promontories,
pours into the sea. The terrible early days,
the home-bringing, the funeral, the succeeding
Christmas-tides, which recall once and again, with
u
306 -IN MEMOUIAM'^ AFIER FU-TY YEARS
varying moods, this first sad season ; his brother's
wedding, his sister's wedding — all are reflected.
The Epilogue is in a sense his own as well as his
sister's epithalamiuni. Its festal happiness and
glorious hope echo his own return to friendship,
joy, and confidence, and his deepening sense of
love.
The mode of its composition was queer and
unmethodical. He kept a ''butcher's ledger" sort
of book, and in its long columns wTote these
immortal cantos as they came to him. At first
they were a scattered sequence of songs. " Elegies "
or "Fragments of an Eleg}^," the poet thought of
calling them. Tennyson says himself, "I did not
write them w^ith any view^ of weaving them into a
whole, or for publication, until I found I had
written so many." But gradually the poem came
together. He also called it sometimes the " Way
of the Soul," and it has indeed an organic unity.
This has nowhere, perhaps, been more distinctly
or authoritatively stated than in a letter, too little
known, which the author himself addressed in
October 1877 to an Italian admirer, Count Saladino
Saladini Pilastri of Cesena. This gentleman had
translated some of the less difficult cantos of " In
Memoriam" into Italian, and asked the poet's
approval of his publishing them. Tennyson replied,
" I thank you for your very interesting letters and
for the honour you have done me in translating
some of the poems in my 'In Memoriam.' You
are doubtless aware that though in the form of
distinct poems, it is a consecutive whole." Count
Pilastri proceeded to translate the whole poem,
and in 1901 gave it to the world.
^
EDITIONS AND TRANSLATIONS 307
It is now more than seventy years since Hallam
passed away. It is more than fifty since "In
Memoriam " was piibhshed. In the seventeen
years between the conception and the birth the
passion gradually took an altered character. It
did not, indeed, yield to the " Victor Hours "
" That ride to death the griefs of men,"
but it became
"A grief, then changed to something else."
And in the crowded and hurrying half-century
since its appearance it has necessarily assumed a
different aspect. "In Memoriam" has had an
immense vogue and popularity, which is still
strongly maintained. Messrs Macmillan alone
have sold some 40,000 copies of the separate
editions since the book came into their hands,
besides the sale of the collected works. The
moment it came out of copyright it was pounced
upon, and almost every publisher has now produced
an edition of it, either alone or with other pieces of
Tennyson. Innumerable selections from it have
appeared. In 1856 came the first American
edition, published at Boston, to be followed by
many others. It has been translated into Latin,
French, German, and Italian. It was first trans-
lated into German three years after its publication ;
there are now in that tongue three complete
translations and many more renderings of selected
pieces. The French translation, a very careful one,
with an introduction and notes by M. Leon Morel,
appearing only six years ago, affords evidence that
the interest in France increases rather than
308 "IN MEMOUIAM" AITER FIFTY YEARS
(liniiiiishes. It is also significant of a further
j)luMi()inonon.
Around "In Memoriam " there has grown up
a whole literature of elucidation, illustration, and
conunentary. When it first appeared, F. W.
Robertson of Brighton, the well-known divine
and preacher, hailed it as containing "to my mind
and heart the most satisfactory things that have
ever been said on the future state," and began
almost at once to lecture on it. A little later he
wi'ote an analysis for the use of his hearers. About
the same time the author of "Alice in Wonder-
land," Mr Dodgson, at Oxford, with the aid of his
sister, compiled an index or concordance to the
poem for their own use, which they afterwards
published. Dr Gatty's "Key" appeared in 1881,
and went through several editions. In 1884 came
the thoughtful, careful, and still valuable study by
Mr John F. Genung. In 1886 a young lady,
rarely gifted and deeply read. Miss Elizabeth
Rachel Chapman, included in a striking volume
called a "Comtist Lover, and other Studies," a
series of "arguments" to "In Memoriam," which
she afterwards published in 1888, as a separate
" Companion " to the poem. This the poet
pronounced to be the best he had seen. A little
later, in 1900, followed a very dainty and delicately
appreciative edition, with notes, by Canon Beeching,
and then in the two succeeding years two very
important works by two professed and indeed
professorial English critics of much experience, Mr
Andrew Bradley and the late Mr Churton Collins.
These two last editions may be said to com-
plement each other. Both are scholarly and able,
PARALLEL PASSAGES 309
and make valuable contribution to the understand-
ing of the jDoem. Professor Collins is the more
copiously illustrative, Professor Bradley the more
analytical. Professor Collins's marvellous memory
and large learning suggest to him innumerable
parallels which are extremely interesting as
illustrating the phenomenon of literary resemblance
or coincidence, but the majority of which, it may
be pretty certainly said, were not present to
Tennyson's mind.
It would be very easy to multiply them still
further. An ingenious and suggestive little book
by an American scholar, Professor Mustard, of
Haverford College, entitled "Classical Echoes,"
has already done this as regards the Greek and
Roman poets. But, as Professor Collins and
Professor Mustard themselves say, ever so many
of these parallels are parallels, but no more. To
accuse Tennyson of plagiarism is, as Browning
finely put it, to "accuse the Rothschilds of picking
pockets." The hght thrown on this long- vexed
question of Tennyson's borrowings by these new
annotations is very interesting. He himself, or
his son for him, indicates parallels and perhaps
debts to Alcman and Pindar, to Lucretius and
Catullus, to Virgil and Horace, to Dante, to
Shakespeare and Milton, and to Goethe. Some
of them had already been pointed out before.
The ingenuity of Professor Collins had discovered
the key to the "great intelligences fair" of "Li
Memoriam," lxxxv. vi. in Dante's "Convito," ii.
5. This is confirmed by the editor. So again is
the reference to the " Brocken Spectre " in
" His own vast shadow glory-crowned."
:U0 "IN MEMORIAM" AFTER FIFTY YEARS
Sometimes his silence seems to belie Professor
Collins's and Professor Mustard's surmise. Some
again of the most beautiful, such as the parallel
between "the life that lives melodious days" and
Statins' Pieriosque dies et hahentes carminci somnos^
indicated in this volume by Tennyson himself, had
escaped the notice of previous commentators. As
to occasional paraphrases from certain Latin and
Greek authors to be found in "In Memoriam," as
elsewhere in Tennyson's poem, the poet himself
says frankly and once for all, "They seem too
obvious to be mentioned."
Tennyson's language is so vivid and so luminous,
so rich in life and colour ; to use Milton's famous
formula, even when it is not "simple" it is so
" sensuous and passionate " that it produces a very
distinct and direct impression, so distinct and
direct, indeed, that the reader does not ask himself
whether it is exactly and in detail clear. He is
not, therefore, usually considered a difficult poet,
in the sense, for instance, that Browning is difficult.
" In Memoriam " contains perhaps a dozen lines as
difficult as scores in " Sordello." But it has these
difficult lines. What exactly, for example, are the
" bowlings from forgotten fields " ? If we turn to
these annotations we find that this phrase, which
fills us with confused horror and seems to suggest
ever so many things all at once, refers primarily to
the "eternal miseries of the Inferno,"^ but it is
coloured by associations with Virgil's "Mourning
Fields," perhaps also with Tennyson's own doctrine
of lower lives left behind in the scaling of man
from brute life upwards.
^ Especially to Dante, "Inferno," iii. 22-51.
DIFFICULT PHRASES 311
Again, there are difficult phrases, such as those
over which commentators like Professor Bradley
have spent endless trouble. " God shut the door-
ways of his head" (xliv. i.). The notes tell us this
means no more and no less than the time when the
sutures of the infant skull close up. There are
difficult constructions, as, for instance, " Could I
have said," etc. (lxxxi. i.). The editor confirms
a note of James Spedding on the MS. of "In
Memoriam," "Could I have said," means, "I
wish I could have said," and "Love then . . ."
does not mean " Love in that case would have had,"
but " Love actually had at that time." The famous,
much-debated expression, "the larger hope," meant,
it seems, the hope to which Tennyson's loving
nature clung, that in the end the whole human
race would reach salvation and happiness: "at
last — far off — at last to all."
An example of language of a different kind,
calling for a note, is to be found in the couplet
in Lxxxix. —
" Before the crimson-circled star
Had fall'n into her father's grave."
The lines are, no doubt, allusive, an allusive
description of the planet Venus, which, according
to La Place's theory, was evolved from the sun,
and which sets so soon after the sun as to dip into
the crimson of his setting. Professor Bradley finds
fault with them as marring a beautiful passage,
and Professor Collins thinks them over- Alexandrine.
But it is the sort of ornament that abounds in Virgil
and still more in Dante. For instance —
" La concubina di Titone antico
Gi4 s' imbiancava al balzo d' oriente."
(" Purgatorio," ix. 1-2.)
312 "IN MKMORIAM'' AFTER FIFTY YEARS
Canon Boeching, again, in the famous opening
passage which, as we now know, echoes Goethe^ —
"That nicii may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things" —
finds fault with the use of "stepping-stones," which,
he says, is "curiously inaccurate." Why it should
be inaccurate is not easy to perceive. It is a very
natural use, and if it was once novel, this passage
has made it a household word, as Canon Beeching
might have seen if he had noticed a certain very
amusing caricature in the " Daily Graphic " during
the last General Election, entitled "Stepping-
Stones to Office."
But this is only one example of the risk of
finding fault with a great master. It would be
easy to multiply instances. One thing specially
noticeable about these annotations is the way in
which they disregard ever so many such criticisms.
Their brevity and terseness are remarkable. They
do not overload or overlay the poem. They err
on the side of telling too little rather than too
much. We can see now why Tennyson liked Miss
Chapman's " Companion." It did not go too much
into detail. Tennyson's beauties and difficulties
are of the Virgilian order, and of him it is true
what Virgil's most famous commentator said of
that author, Virgilium difficile est et cmn interprete
recte legere et sine interprete. But at least the
effect of these notes is to leave the exquisite original,
so fine, so chaste, so chiselled in form, unspoiled,
to let it tell its own tale as before.
Many beautiful poems have been written on the
death of a friend. Indeed, few subjects have
"LYCIDAS" AND "THYRSIS" 313
called out poetry more beautiful in all literatures.
The lament of David over Jonathan ; the famous
dirges of Theocritus, of Bion, and of Moschus,
with their imitation by Virgil; Ovid's lament for
the death of Tibullus ; are among the most memor-
able. English literature displays Milton's " Lycidas,"
the "Adonais"of Shelley, Arnold's "Thyrsis," all
different, each original, yet all conforming to a
common traditional type. " In Memoriam " holds
a place apart from all these. "Thyrsis" in some
ways approaches it most nearly. It was written
at various times during two years, and different
portions, e.g. the passage about the cuckoo on the
wet June morning, or the stanzas beginning
"Where is the girl," are, as Arnold's letters record,
reminiscent of different places and moments. But
"Thyrsis" was not written till long after the early
companionship with Clough, on which it was based,
had come to an end.
"In Memoriam" is in a sense "Lycidas" and
" Thyrsis " in one ; or rather it may be said to begin
by being like " Lycidas " and to end by being like
"Thyrsis." "Adonais," again, marks one moment,
the moment of the death of a genius, to some
extent but not very specially, a personal friend.
The theme, therefore, is far more restricted. There
is, as Professor Bradley acutely points out, the
same general movement, the same "transition
from gloom to glory," but it is effected with "a
passionate rapidity " that suits the one concentrating
hour and thought, of a premature and deplorable
death.
The closest parallel to "In Memoriam " is to be
sought perhaps, paradox as it may sound, not in
314 "IN MEMORIAM" AFTER FIFTY YEARS
poetry at all, but in a piece or pieces by the
greatest poet that ever wrote in prose, in the
"Dialogues" of Plato which deal with the death
of Socrates, more especially the "Phsedo." It is
true the friendship is different. The friendship of
Plato for Socrates is that of a young for an older
man, not that of two youthful compeers. But it
is an intellectual friendship, sustained over a
considerable time, pushing itself into, and filling
with personal emotion, many deep places of human
thought. When Socrates was torn from him,
suddenly, sharply, unexpectedly, Plato was thrown
back upon those speculations which he had shared
with his adored master, which he had delighted to
pursue step by step and side by side with him.
He asked himself anew, with poignant personal
interest, "Where is my friend now? What is the
soul? Is it immortal? Where and what will be
the existence after death ? " This is the natm'al
cry of passionate yearning :
" Ah, Christ, that it were possible
For one short hour to see
The souls we loved, that they might tell us
What and where they be."
Stunned at first, like Tennyson, Plato, too, slowly
"beats his music out." He goes over again all the
arguments of religion, of tradition, of the newest
philosophy and science, all the evidence of psychical
and cerebral phenomena ; he pieces them together ;
despair and desolation gradually give place to hope
and happy confidence. At first he says only,
"They rest," and "their sleep is sweet." Then his
voice "takes a higher range." If he does not go so
far as Tennyson and say :
THE "PH^DO" 315
" They do not die,
Nor lose their mortal sympathy,
Nor change to us, although they change,"
yet he suggests that the noble dead are living on
in some happier state, and ends by saying in effect,
"So he has fulfilled the will of God, this wisest,
and justest, and best of men I ever knew." And
the ultimate basis is not science, but faith and love,
born particularly of high aspiration and pm-e life.
It is not accident that has coupled "In
Memoriam" with the "Phsedo" as one of the
great utterances on Immortality. It traverses the
same ground, uses many of the same arguments
and topics. It is a philosophical as it is a religious
poem. But it is not a philosophical treatise or a
religious tract. It is a poem. If the substance
suggests Plato's " Phgedo," the form, as has often
been said, suggests Shakespeare's Sonnets. Nor,
again, is it a biography. Like Plato, the author
allows himself large liberty in dealing with dates
and places and persons. The arrangement is only
partly logical or chronological. It is artistic.
Further, "In Memoriam," though no doubt
coloured by a prevailing philosophy, is not to at
all the same extent involved with any system. It
is not a rehgious or philosophical poem in the sense
that " Paradise Lost " is a religious poem, or the
" Essay on Man " a philosophical poem. These, it
has been said, live in spite of their tenets and their
systems, by virtue of their incidental poetry. It
has been prophesied that the same will be the fate
of "In Memoriam." How far is this true? Two
great factors there are undoubtedly present in "In
Memoriam," two great factors found side by side
:no ^'IN MKMORIAM" AFTER FIFTY YEARS
ill the ago to which it belongs — Christianity and
Evohition. The doctrine of Evolution is the great
paramount doctrine of the nineteenth century. It
was in the air with Lamarck and Cuvier in the
early years of the century. It was hinted at by
the "Vestiges of Creation" in 1844, and was finally
definitely promulgated by Darwin and Wallace in
1858 and 1859. The rest of the century was filled
by its gradual absorption and acceptance. "In
Memoriam " — the date is striking — appeared in its
central year, 1850. When the poem was published,
still more when it was begun, it was, as Mr
Andrew Lang has pointed out, far before its age.
The "ape and tiger" was not yet a household
w^ord. The " Origin of Species," the duello at
Oxford in 1860 of Bishop Wilberforce and Professor
Huxley, like the famous speech in which Disraeli
in the Sheldonian theatre sided with the angels,
were still to come. So were " Essays and Reviews "
and the "Vie de Jesus."
For the rest of the century "In Memoriam"
remained well abreast of its age. How does it
stand now? The exact moment of collision, of
the conflict of these then new doubts with the old
faith in its old form, has perhaps past. The
conflict has at least taken a new phase. But
Tennyson at any rate went right to the bottom
and the bedrock. No one has put this more
forcibly than Henry Sidgwick. Nowhere is the
real service rendered by Tennyson to the hopes
and hearts of men expressed so well as it is in
the searching letter which will be found in the
"Introduction" to these notes, and which gains
yet a new light as reproduced in the " Life " which
HENRY SIDGWICK 317
has just appeared, of that profound and rare
spirit.
The questions raised by "Essays and Reviews,"
the problems of the Higher Criticism, the questions
with which Browning and Matthew Ai'nold were
so much preoccupied, were bookish questions,
deep, yet in a sense superficial. They made
"God's gift hang on grammar." When they had
cleared away, as they did clear aAvay, for Sidgwick
and his generation, the deeper difiiculty was found
still remaining. And in Sidgwick's view "In
Memoriam " still held good, because of Tennyson's
truth to Nature and to Natm'al Science, because
he was the poet of Natural Religion and of Natm^al
Science, the poet " who, above all others who ever
lived, combined the love and knowledge of Nature
with the unceasing study of the causes of things
and of Nature's Laws."^
The fact is, Tennyson is at once a highly
artificial and also a strongly natural poet. He is
at once, like Catullus or Virgil, scholarly, artistic,
almost Alexandrine, charged with learning and
allusion, with philosophy and science, and yet
at times direct as Catullus himself, and even more
elemental than Virgil. It is so in his dealing with
man ; it is so in his dealing with nature. He
studies his books, but he also, and far more often,
"looks in his heart and writes." Like Dante,
while filled with all the learning and science of
his age, he has yet the "new, sweet style which
consists in following even as love inly dictates."
Walt Whitman, the poet of democracy, "non-
literary and non-decorous," as he styles himself, felt
1 Nature, 13th October 1892.
318 "IN MEMORIAM" AFTER FIFTY YEARS
this. He calls Tennyson "feudal," but he quotes
as a specimen of simple directness, parallel to that
of Burns, the "old, eternally told passion of
Edward Gray " :
" Love may come, and love may go,
And fly, like a bird, from tree to tree ;
But I will love no more, no niore,
Till Ellen Adair come back to me."
So it is as regards nature and life in the largest
sense. Tennyson was a great natural force, a
simple, sincere, childlike disposition, face to face
with the realities of the universe. And what
were they? Ai'ound him, the material world,
"star and system rolling past," and within his
own heart, the conviction of God as more near,
more real than the realities of the material world,
the conviction of his own personal immortality, the
conviction of God's love ruling the universe,
" Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravin, shrieked against his creed."
It was fi'om this side that he approached Chris-
tianity. The love of God appeared in the human
heart, in godlike men, above all in Christ Himself
— His whole life with its "splendid purity," the
embodiment of His message — and in His disciples,
especially in the beloved disciple who preached
Love, and whose language, as these notes tell
us, colours "In Memoriam."
It has been said that "In Memoriam" is not
Christian. It is not dogmatically so. Yet when
it appeared, Frederick Denison Maurice, like F.
W. Kobertson, hailed it as a gospel. He dedi-
cated his Theological Essays to Tennyson, as
FACTORS OF FAITH 319
having taught him to enter into those deepest
thoughts and feehngs of human beings with which
true theology must correspond ; and touching on
the meaning which he and his set attached to
Tennyson's words, he said how they had longed
that the bells of our churches might indeed
" Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be ! "
And a republication of Maurice's "Essay on
Inspiration" along with this letter, as one of the
"Faith and Freedom" pamphlets, seems to show
that there are still those who find this a living
pronouncement.
What are the essential factors of Tennyson's
faith ? First, that the universe moves, and man
with it, towards some grand and good end, some
" one far-off divine event " ; that there is an
elemental process from lower to higher, from
worse to better. This may be obscm-ed by
temporary or local variations.
" No doubt vast eddies in the flood
Of onward time may yet be made."
But the spirit of man is immortal: "From state
to state the spirit walks." It will see the good
end perhaps in the next world, perhaps many
worlds and aeons after this. Next, that the law
of the imiverse is a law of love. This we can
know only by faith. Here was Tennyson's great
mainstay. Of no one in modern times can it more
hterally be said that he "endured as seeing Him
who is invisible." He had then in his own being
the elements which make Christianity seem natural
320 " IN MEMORIAM " AITER FIFfY YEARS
ami probable, and "the creed of creeds." The one
question which he put to Darwin on the one
occasion when they met, was whether his theory
of evolution made against Christianity ; to which
Darwin answered, "Certainly not." His latest
poems strike the same note as his earliest.
"That Love, which is, and was
My Father, and my Brother, and my God."
"This," says his son, "was the ultimate expression
of his own calm faith at the end of his life."
If this is not Christianity, it is something very
near to and very like it ; if it is not all Christianity,
it is a large part of it. Moreover, Christianity to
Temiyson was part of the upward process. How
the process began we know not ; we know not how
or why it was necessary. What was the origin of
evil? This too was one of the problems which
constantly exercised Tennyson. He leaned to the
old Platonic doctrine of the Demim'ge. What
we do know is, that we are called on consciously,
willingly to follow the law.
" Our wills are ours, we know not how ;
Our wills are ours, to make them thine."
Love made us free, gave us free-will. Did love as
part of this gift also make sin ? On this too
Tennyson had pondered.
One of the most important of the notes in
this new volume is that which tells us that the
"Living Will" of the memorable closing canto —
cxxxi. — is not, as so many, as even Miss Chapman,
at first thought, the Divine Will, but "that which
we know as free-will in man."
THE "FIGHT WITH DEATH" 321
And a variant of the noble and splendid verse
from the Prologue, just quoted, a variant which
Tennyson allowed intimate eyes to see, and which
might well have found a place in this volume,
ran —
" Thou seemest human and divine,
Thou madest man, without, within,
But who shall say thou madest sin ?
For who shall say, 'It is not mine ' ? "
Sneers have been levelled at "In Memoriam,"
as "weak doubt confronted by weak faith."
Nothing could be more beside the mark. Henry
Sidgwick did not think so. The concluding lines
of the culminating passage, he says, "I can never
read without tears." "In Memoriam" was a
veritable "fight with death." The doubt, the
despair, we have seen, were intense. All through
the first half they sound and sigh, agonising,
shattering. Only a faith as strong as themselves,
helped by love, that " countercharm to space and
hollow sky," could have made head against them
when,
" Like a man in wrath, the heart
Stood up and answered, ' I have felt.' "
"Old Fitz," Tennyson's early friend and a
privileged grumbler, did not like "In Memoriam,"
partly because others liked it— "Alfred has
published his elegiacs on A. Hallam," he said ;
"these sell greatly, and will, I fear, raise a host
of elegiac scribblers" — partly because he did not
like anything new of Tennyson's — he had not
liked "The Princess" or the songs in "The
Princess," except the "Bugle Song" — partly
X
322 "IN MEMORIAM" AFTER FIFTY YEARS
because he hail fallen into a desponding, pessimist
mood and thought England's day was waning,
and that Tennyson ought to play Tyi'tseus rather
than Simonides. A few years after "In
Memoriam " came out he published his own
**Omar." Tennyson too was sad about England,
but he was not a pessimist. " Omar " and " In
Memoriam" are like the Yea and Nay in "The
Two Voices." "Omar" too has had, is having,
an immense vogue ; it answers to one side of
human nature. But both sides are contained in
" In Memoriam." Fitzgerald said of " Omar," with
sadly true self-criticism, that it was "a desperate
sort of thing, unfortunately at the bottom of all
thinking men's minds." So it is, but at the bottom
of thinking men's minds too, deeper still, perhaps,
in the Pandora casket of the heart, is Pandora's
last treasure — Hope. Evolution is at least hope-
ful; it looks upward. It may be only part of
a cycle, but man is ex hypothesi at present on the
ascending road.
No poetry can be the same to two generations.
Above all, no poetry can speak to later ages
quite as it speaks to its own, to those who share in
their own personality the influence and impulse of
the epoch, who come under the living form and
pressure of the time. There is, as Professor Mackail
well puts it, a "progress of poesy" in these
matters, by which its power and function seem to
change to us from era to era of the world's history,
as they do between youth and age in our own
individual experience.
A very tender and touching passage in the " Life
of the late Ai'chbishop Benson " describes his reading
A "MESSAGE OF HOPE" 323
"In Memoriam" with his children. He contrasts
his own intense personal feeling about it with his
children's merely literary appreciation. He had
taught them to love it, and they loved it, as poetry.
But his own feeling was something very different.
"'In Memoriam,'" he says, "was inexpressibly
dear to me for the best part of my life. It came
out just when my mother's sister died. I sank
in it and rose with it. They loved it as I
did, but they were quite unconscious of the
passionate and absorbing interest with which it
had gone with me through the valley of the shadow
of death."
Yet this it has done for many, from the late
Queen to the humblest of her subjects. It may be
said, indeed, that there are two classes of readers
of " In Memoriam " — those who read it as a poem
and a work of art, and those who read it for its
inner message, to whom it has been a sacred book.
"Will it so continue ? What really is it, after fifty
years, and in the light of all we now know about it ?
It is before all a message of hope. Like the
other great scientific poet of modern times, to
whose beautiful words, spoken toAvards the close of
his life, "Von Aenderungen zu hohern Aende-
rungen" — " In Memoriam " makes such signal and
happy use — like Goethe, Tennyson "bids us to
hope." "It's too hopeful," he is reported to have
said, "this poem, more than I am myself." More,
perhaps, than he sometimes was, not more than
was his habitual temper shown, as in the earliest, so
in the latest of his poems.
What did he write, towards the close of his
days, to Mary Boyle ?
324 "IN MEMORIAM" AFTER FIFTY YEARS
"What use to brood? this life of mingled pains
And joys to me,
Despite of every Faith and Creed, remains
The Mystery.
" Let golden youth bewail the friend, the wife.
For ever gone.
He dreams of that long walk thro' desert life
Without the one.
"The silver year should cease to mourn and sigh —
Not long to wait —
So elose are we, dear Mary, you and I,
To that dim gate."
What did he write, yet later, when he was
closer still, when life's "long walk" was over?
Browning, that noble brother spirit, had passed
away with an exultant note, as one who
"Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would
triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight bettei*.
Sleep to wake,"
and who bade his fellows
" Greet the unseen with a cheer ! . . .
' Strive and thrive ! ' cry ' Speed, — fight on, fare ever
There as here ! ' "
Tennyson, if less boisterously optimistic, is not
less fearless and confident.
" Spirit, nearing yon dark portal at the limit of thy human state.
Fear not thou the hidden purpose of that Power which alone is
great.
Nor the myriad world, His shadow, nor the silent Opener of the
Gate."
In a very interesting Letter given in the " Life "
recently published, Henry Sidgwick describes how
" MOURN IN HOPE ! " 325
he has just been re-reading "In Memoriam."
What strikes him is the " balanced rhythmical
fluctuation of moods." "A certain balanced-
ness," he goes on to say, "is the most distinctive
characteristic of Tennyson's mind among poets.
Perhaps this makes him the representative poet of
an age whose most characteristic merit is to see
both sides of a question." This is true, but it must
not be forgotten how the balance finally inclines, as
in "The Tw^o Voices," so in "In Memoriam," so
everywhere in Tennyson.
"Mourn in hope!" These are the last three
words of the last poem in Tennyson's latest volume.
" Mourn in hope ! " No words could better
summarise the meaning and the message of his
deep and lofty and exquisite "spiritual song," "In
Memoriam."
APPENDIX
EXTRACT FROM A LETTER OF
PROF. ULRICH VON WILAMOWITZ-MOLLENDORF
Westend, Berlin, 2ith January 1904,
Your Essay has keenly interested me. It is specially
helpful to see objects with which we have long been familiar
reflecting themselves in the mirror of an entirely different
mind, and for us in Germany this experience is much more
instructive when it comes to us from England than when
it comes from France, for French is much less novel to
us, and moreover the firmly established familiarity with the
Greek poets in the country of Bentley and Porson, especially
in view of that constant development which is England's un-
rivalled advantage, is something quite peculiar.
Your characterisation of Sophokles has an echo of the
teaching of our fathers, and it is good for us at times to
be reminded of that teaching. I gather that you enjoy
Lessing, and I can assure you that in our schools he is for
Tragedy the master authority. When I myself was at
school, I, too, was dominated by him. It is true that most
of us to-day depart pretty widely from him — I do so myself —
just as we depart from Aristotle. However it is not about that
I wish to speak. I am attracted by your literary parallels,
what you say about Goethe, which will be contested by
more than one, and also, what to my mind carries entire con-
viction, about the intimate affinity between Tennyson and
Virgil. However I will not criticise this, and will further
keep silence as to my own private opinion and inclination.
These facts, however, as facts of experience, will arouse your
interest. With my co-operation, "Oedipus the King" and
" Antigone " were given here some two years ago, in part by
326
APPENDIX 327
leading actors. The Oedipus produced a profound impression.
The Antigone one not so profound. On the other hand, the
Oresteia, although both the mounting and the representation
left very much to be desired, proved a quite unparalleled
success ; for many, indeed, it was tragedy at its highest. It
kept the stage, and, even in a provincial town without literary
life, it has shown itself able to survive five representations.
Dramatic force made its way where spiritual depth would not
have been appreciated.
But I do not want to leave the personality of Sophokles.
In my opinion, in considering that personality, two facts first
established by the inscriptions deserve most serious atten-
tion. The first is that Sophokles became President of the
" Hellenotamiai," and that in the year which, following on
the peace with Sparta, and the ostracising of Thucydides,
brought a new assessment of taxation of the federated states.
I'he man who could fill this place was in a very special sense
an official politician. He must have possessed some real insight
into State management of the most difficult kind. For instance,
he must certainly have been a member of the Council. He
was also a pronounced party man: a colleague of Perikles.
This means more than a place on the staff of generals. A
man who had gone so deeply into political life had more of
the politician about him than the Weimar Minister. The
parallel is rather that of a Member of Parliament in England
becoming a member of the Ministry. I believe that Kreon in
the Antigone, is a sketch from life, based on the experience
which Sophokles had enjoyed of doctrinaire {)oliticians, on the
Pnyx and in the Council, experiences which were wanting to
Euripides. Per contra, Sophokles did not understand the great
sjjiritual movement of his time. Anaxagoras was nothing to
him.
This brings me to the second point. As the inscriptions of
the Athenian Asklepeion have taught us, Asklepios is a deity
only introduced after the Peace of Nikias. This introduction
was a step both religious and political, and a step in which
Sophokles played so intimate a part as to earn for himself
canonisation as Dexion (The Entertainer'). Nay, more, he
placed among his household gods the snake of Asklepios, or
some Asklepios fetich, and gave credence to the magic of the
Asklepios incubation. What a contrast to Anaxagoras and to
both Sophokles' tragic compeers ! That a man of this temper
328 APPENDIX
was, ill very truth, religious, I do not deny, rather I hold
everything in him as genuine and pure, but I think that what
Hellas has left us as her highest legacy, is another kind of
piety, is indeed just the victory over this kind.
Finally, I see no shadow of probability that the self-
criticism on his stylistic development, recorded by Plutarch,
of Sophokles in his De profectibiis in virlule, is derived from
any other source than from the poet himself: a thrice-precious
confession, " After I had played out the bombast of
.■Eschylus (played with it till I had worn it out), and then
the pungency and artificiality of my own composition, I dis-
covered at last the form of expression which contains the
highest degree of 'Ethos' (I would say, in German, Inner-
liehkeit, inwardness, but we understand it better in Greek),
and is the best." The second statement is one which no
stranger would have ventured to make. I find it absolutely
appropriate, for Sophokles' style to the end kept much of
artificiality, hence the innumerable alterations which every
savant to-day rejects. That is certainly evidence for what you
say, that he was a very conscious artist, but it falls short of
a demonstration that everything Sophoklean is classical. The
old critics, with their complaints about his unevenness (di/w/xaAta),
had right on their side. In Euripides, no doubt, this uneven-
ness is still more marked.
The Terracina statue is very fine. That is somewhat how
you picture the poet. But it is a little wanting in individu-
ality, and if it conceals his embonpoint, I am all the more pleased
that this can still be detected. For I seek to discover the
man, as far as possible, just as he was.
Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Mollendorf.
\
Note. — The Lateran statue certainly presents -^tnewhat of
what is called a " fine figure of a man," and may be said to
demonstrate Sophokles' physical as well as meatal evKoXia, and
to show him as the eis twv xprjandv 'Kdr]va'niiv whom lophon
ridiculed. But, as to its final values, I agree with Professor
Campbell. T. H. W.
PRINTED BV OLmiK AND BOYD, EDINB0KGH.
AA 001 065 865 6
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