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 ESSAYS ON BOOKS
 
 ESSAYS ON BOOKS 
 
 BY 
 
 A. CLUTTON-BROCK 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY 
 
 PUBLISHERS
 
 PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
 
 4 oil 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THESE Essays are all reprinted from the 
 Literary Supplement of The Times, with 
 v2 a few corrections and a few passages left out. 
 Some of the essays were written on particular 
 occasions, the death of a writer or the anni- 
 J^ ; versary of his birth or death. These consist 
 chiefly of praise, but I was glad of the chance 
 to praise great men, especially Swinburne, who 
 is now suspected by the old and neglected by 
 the young. The essay on Shakespeare was a 
 i^ task set me ; yet I enjoyed writing it when 
 ^ forced to do so. The essays on the Brontes 
 u and on Turgenev were provoked by books 
 with which, in spite of their merits, I dis- 
 agreed more than I agreed. I reprint them 
 because the opinions I oppose in them are, 
 I think, common. 
 
 A. CLUTTON-BROCK 
 
 GODALMING 
 
 October 1920 

 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Shakespeare ..... i 
 
 Shakespeare's Sonnets 
 
 The Prose Romances of William Morris 27 
 
 Dickens . . . . • 
 
 Algernon Charles Swinburne 
 
 The Wonderful Visitor 
 
 Donne's Sermons 
 
 The Brontes .... 
 
 Dostoevsky .... 
 
 The Promise of Keats 
 
 The Note-Books of Samuel Butler 
 
 The Life of Samuel Butler 
 
 turgenev .... 
 
 The Clash of East and West in 
 Thought .... 
 
 15 
 
 39 
 
 54 
 67 
 78 
 92 
 
 104 
 
 "5 
 
 129 
 
 142 
 157 
 
 169 
 
 Vil
 
 ESSAYS ON BOOKS 
 
 Shakespeare ^ ^ <> ..c* o 
 
 ( Written for the Tercentenary of his death) 
 
 WE know little about Shakespeare, yet 
 we may be sure that he would be 
 surprised rather than pleased to find that he 
 had become an institution. If I must be an 
 institution — we can fancy him saying — let it 
 be called Bacon rather than Shakespeare. But 
 the desire to call the institutional Shakespeare 
 Bacon is inevitable ; for, if all these plays are 
 perfect, if they always manifest omniscience, 
 omnipotence, and the loftiest intentions, they 
 must have been produced by a god ; and we do 
 know enough about Shakespeare to be sure 
 that he was not like a god. We know that he 
 was something of a hack, like Mozart and 
 Tintoret ; he wrote to earn his living, and 
 did not care much what became of his plays 
 after they had been acted. He never even had 
 a university education, and there are one or 
 
 A I
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 two scandalous stories about him. How could 
 such a man become an institution ? One could 
 not imagine him even a Trustee of the British 
 Museum, like the Archbishop of Canterbury or 
 the Lord Chancellor. These are the men fit 
 to become institutions — and there was a con- 
 temporary Lord Chancellor capable of any- 
 thing, a universal genius. Not an artist, 
 perhaps, but Shakespeare*'s plays have ceased 
 to be works of art since they became perfect ; 
 we do not enjoy them so much as the sense 
 that we are doing our duty to our King and 
 Country when we read them or see them — well, 
 not acted, but presented. 
 
 If Shakespeare could see them acted now he 
 would know how unworthy he was to have 
 written them. For this kind of performance, 
 he would say, I should have written something 
 quite different ; and if he could read some of 
 the books about him, he would say — For this 
 kind of criticism I ought to have written some- 
 thing no less different. In fact, he would not 
 know himself at all in that institution whose 
 tercentenary we are now celebrating, and he 
 might wish that we should celebrate it by 
 abolishing it. For artists have their peculiar 
 vanities, and one of them is a desire to be 
 liked for what they have done best. The real 
 
 2
 
 Shakespeare 
 
 Shakespeare must have known quite well that, 
 like other human beings, he did not always 
 do his best ; but this institutional Shakespeare 
 always did his best, and therefore he is not a 
 human being and so not an artist. He is 
 praised indiscriminately for passages of which 
 the real Shakespeare must have been a little 
 ashamed, if he ever remembered them, and of 
 which he would certainly not care to be re- 
 minded ; and the effect of this praise is to 
 make him seem almost a dull writer. But the 
 real Shakespeare, unlike some of the greatest 
 poets, was at great pains not to be dull ; he 
 was an entertainer who succeeded because 
 he was himself much entertained with life ; 
 he could be amused even by bores, and so he 
 could make them amusing. But the bores 
 have had their posthumous revenge upon him ; 
 they have almost persuaded us that he is too 
 great and good to be amusing, and they have 
 made a practice of quoting in speeches and 
 books those passages from him which are least 
 amusing, which, divorced from their context, 
 seem almost dull. 
 
 As an artist Shakespeare has been more 
 sinned against than sinning, and yet he cer- 
 tainly sinned. He wrote from hand to mouth, 
 and was often content with his second best 
 
 3
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 both in conception and in execution. We 
 may guess that he had an itch for writing, 
 which was encouraged by his enormous pro- 
 fessional facihty. No doubt he enjoyed his 
 own rhetoric, enjoyed writing it and hearing 
 it spouted on the stage ; but he would not have 
 enjoyed hearing a bore quote it as if it were 
 gospel. He knew well enough that his rhetoric 
 was only a useful makeshift, even if he had 
 the Elizabethan love of it. At that time 
 rhetoric was a new weapon, as sweeping ges- 
 tures were to the painters of the Cinquecento. 
 The EHzabethan felt that he owed some rhetoric 
 to his audience, and when he wished to ease 
 their minds from the strain of rapid events 
 he turned it on as a modern playwright might 
 turn on epigram. The actors declaimed it 
 swiftly and the audience liked it, as we like 
 the arpeggios of a virtuoso pianist ; yet it was 
 not meant to be listened to very closely. But 
 now, with our modern habit of reading Shake- 
 speare rather than acting him, we do listen to 
 Shakespeare's rhetoric closely, and pedants tell 
 us that it is all high poetry. What is more, 
 actors declaim it as if it were the funeral 
 oration of Pericles, and so slowly that they 
 are forced to cut Shakespeare's best to make 
 room for it. So there are some who are 
 
 4
 
 Shakespeare 
 
 tempted to revolt against him as a mere 
 rhetorician. 
 
 He was a great rhetorician, but not 
 because he trusted in rhetoric. Among the 
 chief poets of the world there is none who can 
 let himself go so completely as Shakespeare, 
 none who can surrender himself so utterly to a 
 conception and to an execution worthy of it. 
 But he needed to practise this power of sur- 
 render both in his conception and in his execu- 
 tion. We may guess that, provided he made 
 himself capable of the highest, he did not care 
 much if he often fell below it in the process. 
 He was not a sublime egotist and he had no 
 egotistical love of perfection. What he de- 
 sired was to be equal to the Heaven-sent 
 moment when it came ; and he never knew 
 when it would come in the course of his trade. 
 He was cleverer even than Fletcher — no one 
 ever was so clever as Shakespeare — but his 
 cleverness was tolerable to him only because 
 he could rise through it when the Heaven-sent 
 moment came. Worldlings make the best 
 saints, and Shakespeare is the worldling among 
 all the great saints of poetry. Much nonsense 
 has been talked about his omniscience, but he 
 did know more about the art of literature than 
 any other poet, because he practised more of 
 
 5
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 it ; and he alone of all the greatest poets of 
 the world was able to enrich his masterpieces 
 with the whole art of literature. Hamlet is 
 a masterpiece like the Diviiie Comedy or 
 the Iliad or the Agamemnon^ but how much 
 more amusing it is than any of those works. 
 The Prince of Denmark is a figure of high 
 poetry like Milton's Prince of Darkness, yet 
 we know him as well as Peter in War and 
 Peace^ while Polonius and Osric are as near to 
 us as anyone in Dickens. In the Fool in King 
 Lear Dickens and ^Eschylus are, as it were, 
 fused, and in Cordelia, Sophocles and Dostoev- 
 sky. For Cordelia is something of a shrew ; 
 we can project her into the modern home as 
 we could not project Antigone. We can see 
 her in the clothes of to-day ; we could marry 
 her even and be a little afraid of her fierceness 
 or lovingly amused by it. These are all figures 
 that could be translated without incongruity 
 into comedy ; for Shakespeare lived in that 
 world, too, lived and moved and had his being 
 in it. He rose out of prose into poetry as 
 naturally as Mozart rose into melody. He 
 was a professional writer, but not a pro- 
 fessional poet like Milton or Dante; he 
 practised no austerities of art or of experience, 
 but opened his mind to earth and heaven, 
 
 6
 
 Shakespeare 
 
 living and writing as if he were just an ordinary 
 man with a gift. 
 
 We say living, because in spite of the little 
 that is known about him we know that his 
 art must express the life of his mind. He 
 must have lived more largely than Dante or 
 Milton, must have wasted his time more, have 
 been less fastidious with himself and with 
 others. Of all the great poets, he is the 
 most at ease with prose and with the prose 
 way of thinking. The difference between 
 prose and poetry in works of imagination 
 is mainly in speed of thought ; and Shake- 
 speare could think fast or slow as the mood 
 took him ; he could linger like an epicure 
 over the character of men and things even 
 when they were ugly or absurd, where Milton 
 would have rushed past them in angry im- 
 patience. It was indeed the peculiar power 
 of his imagination to conceive a tragedy in 
 relation to the whole diverse, incoherent world 
 of reality, and to preserve the diversity, the 
 incoherence, the inattention of it all, even at 
 the tragic height. There are other tragedies 
 as intense as King Lear, but there is none of 
 equal intensity so rich in content, none so 
 closely connected with the world as we know 
 it, none so full of characters that we should 
 
 7
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 recognize if we met them. And because the 
 characters are thus fully drawn, the tragic 
 conflict between them is sharper than it ever 
 is between the noble shadows of the Greek 
 drama. There is a struggle of actual flesh 
 and blood ; there are secrets revealed about 
 ourselves, as in Dostoevsky ; but it is Dostoevsky 
 set to music and with ten times the power of 
 expression that any novelist ever had. The 
 novelist can tell us about his characters' 
 emotions, but Shakespeare can make their 
 emotions as strong to us as to themselves. 
 He can put into words, not merely the subtlety, 
 but also the force, of states of the soul ; he 
 has the science of the psychologist and the 
 music of the poet combined as no one has 
 combined them before or since. 
 
 This combination is his peculiar excellence ; 
 and his form is made to suit it. We never 
 see that form in his plays as they are commonly 
 acted now, nor can we be fully aware of it 
 when we read them. For his method is, as it 
 were, to assume a rushing current of events 
 and to throw a searchlight upon different 
 points in that current. In the Greek drama 
 the convention is that all the action is presented 
 on the stage except what is related. The 
 audience knows all the facts from first to last, 
 
 8
 
 Shakespeare 
 
 and the facts are carefully selected so that they 
 may all be known. Shakespeare's way is rather 
 to give us swift glimpses of the whole actual 
 complexity of life ; and his art is to choose 
 them so that we see the connexion between 
 one glimpse and another, so that they have a 
 cumulative power upon us. But he does not 
 aim at continuity, and to force any kind of 
 continuity upon him, as is commonly done in 
 modern versions of his plays, is to spoil his 
 form. He set out to be a dramatist ; and we 
 cannot see his dramatic greatness, the excel- 
 lence of his construction, or the power which 
 made his method possible, if his plays are 
 robbed of their form. For he has the peculiar 
 power of making his characters come to life 
 and be themselves the moment they appear on 
 the stage. Hamlet is Hamlet in the first 
 words he speaks. Language identifies him as 
 people in real life are identified by their faces ; 
 yet at the same time it is used to carry on the 
 action of the play, and things happen as 
 swiftly as in a play of mere situation. But 
 when Hamlet soliloquizes, it is not merely an 
 outworn dramatic device; for his thoughts 
 are so phrased that we recognize his mind as 
 if it were a well-known face. And this power 
 of giving instant life to a character is what 
 
 9
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 gives life also to Shakespeare's form ; for, 
 without it, there would be no continuity in the 
 glimpses of his searchlight. It is the characters 
 themselves, the moment they appear, that 
 connect one glimpse with another and convince 
 us that they are glimpses of a real world which 
 continues in all its complexity and richness 
 between the glimpses. Hamlet, Cordelia, 
 Othello, Macbeth, lago, seem to have a life 
 independent of the play. We feel that we see 
 only a little of them and can deduce much 
 more. We are aware of their existence between 
 the scenes in which they appear ; for, when 
 they enter, they are already absorbed in their 
 business, and, when they depart, they are still 
 absorbed in it. That is where Shakespeare 
 differs from Ibsen, whose characters live only 
 in their dramatic relation with each othei\ 
 We cannot think of them apart from the play, 
 for he seems to create them only for dramatic 
 purposes and to care for them only dramatically. 
 They are puppets into which he breathes life ; 
 and when the curtain falls they are put back 
 into the cupboard. But Shakespeare seems to 
 throw his searchlight upon living men and 
 women, to control the light and not the 
 characters. And he seems to love them, too, 
 as if they had been made by God, not by 
 
 10
 
 Shakespeare 
 
 himself; the world of his plays is not a world 
 of his contrivance. In that he is like the 
 greatest painters, who seem not to compose 
 their pictures but merely to lay the emphasis 
 of their own delight on what they have seen. 
 There are people who will tell you that in 
 construction Shakespeare is a fool to Ibsen ; 
 but he was playing a different game and one 
 more difficult. He cannot do as he will with 
 his characters to make a play, because they are 
 not his characters ; they have come to life in 
 his mind, and he can only choose his glimpses 
 of them. But the wonder is that in this 
 independent life of theirs they still speak with 
 his power of words and yet out of their own 
 minds and in their own character. Hamlet 
 has all Shakespeare's genius of expression ; he 
 talks as Shakespeare himself could talk only 
 in the ecstasy of creation ; yet it is always 
 Hamlet who talks, and not a poet at large. 
 And even at those moments when the theme 
 of the play passes, as it were, into pure music, 
 when the action fades away and we see only a 
 naked soul before us utterly aware of itself and 
 its relation to the universe, it is still the soul 
 of Hamlet or King Lear that speaks or thinks, 
 and not the mere comment of the poet. He 
 is always the dramatist, even when his drama 
 
 II
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 rises above all circumstance of time or place ; 
 when his characters have forgotten the world, 
 he does not forget them. 
 
 And because his characters thus come to 
 life in his mind he is equal master of tragedy 
 and comedy, which are both part of the real 
 life of man and in a living man cannot be 
 separated for dramatic purposes. Hamlet, 
 Macbeth, King Lear are too real to be dignified 
 always ; they forget themselves and forget that 
 they are tragic figures. The world in which 
 they live is not purely tragic, for it is the real 
 world, although Shakespeare may give us 
 mainly tragic glimpses of it. And so FalstafF 
 is not purely comic. He possessed Shake- 
 speare's mind and took on an independent life 
 of his own ; he was the first figure that 
 Shakespeare created with the whole of his 
 power, and so the first that does not seem to 
 have been created at all, or rather does not 
 seem to have been invented. Shakespeare had 
 perhaps a model for Falstaff ; he began with a 
 real man, but into him he was able to throw 
 the whole of his own mind, to feed his growth 
 with all his own faculties. FalstafF, belonging 
 to comedy, is a prose figure; but in him 
 Shakespeare raises prose to the height of 
 poetry, and then, in Hamlet, he enriches poetry 
 
 12
 
 Shakespeare 
 
 with the circumstance of prose. So we may 
 say of him that it is his peculiar achievement 
 to have fused poetry and prose, giving to each 
 the qualities of the other. 
 
 That may seem a mere formula for all that 
 passion and laughter and beauty, and it sounds 
 colder still to say of him that he more than 
 any other man has made poetry rational and 
 credible. Yet if we consider the beauty of his 
 poetry, the heights and depths of the soul to 
 which he attains, it is not cold. The greater 
 the weight of matter to be carried, the greater 
 is the power of flight needed to carry it ; the 
 greater the mass of circumstance in a concep- 
 tion, the greater the imagination needed to 
 conceive it. Shakespeare's problem was the 
 problem of one who wrote for a living, of one 
 who loved life as it was too well to empty 
 it of content for artistic purposes ; and yet it 
 was the problem of one who could not be 
 content without making a music out of life. 
 Words for him must perform all their ordinary 
 functions, yet they must dance ; men and 
 women must have all the marks of circumstance 
 upon them, yet they must utter their immortal 
 souls ; life must not be separated from its 
 routine and its indignities, yet it must overcome 
 them both with laughter and tears This 
 
 13
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 problem he did not always solve, for he was a 
 man, like all great artists, living desperately in 
 a hand-to-mouth struggle, and not a god 
 conceiving and executing without haste or 
 rest. But it is his glory that he did live and 
 work in such a way that he was able to solve 
 this problem, the hardest that any writer ever 
 set himself, more than once or twice. There 
 are times when he rises from earth to heaven, 
 trailing, not clouds of glory with him, but the 
 whole diverse and troubled world of man, and 
 because he ignores no element of that world, 
 but transfigures it all in his music, he convinces 
 us that his music is true. He was not a saint, 
 but, more even than the saints, he charges our 
 life with values, and when we have experienced 
 Hamlet or King Lear we are utterly assured 
 that life, wliatever it brings us, is worth 
 experiencing. 
 
 14
 
 Shakespeare's Sonnets o ^ ^ 
 
 MANY people who do not care at all 
 for poetry take an interest in Shake- 
 speare's plays for irrelevant reasons. But you 
 cannot take an UTelevant interest in the 
 Sonnets unless you want to know who Mr. 
 W. H. was, or who was the dark lady, which 
 is absurd. The Sonnets are pure poetry, and 
 also pure Elizabethan poetry. They belong 
 to their time as much as Botticelli's Prima- 
 vera. So, of course, do the plays ; for the 
 work of every great artist is rich with the 
 character of his own time. It is only dull 
 men, half conscious of their own dullness, who 
 fear the vulgarity of circumstance and try to 
 purge their writings of it. But the plays are 
 so familiar to us, at least in quotations, that it 
 is easy for us to mistake the Elizabethan in 
 them for the universal. We think that all 
 poetic plays ought to be like them. We are 
 taught to see a kind of abstract perfection in 
 them ; and that teaching would make them 
 seem dull if Shakespeare were not, luckily, the 
 
 15
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 least dull of all great writers. As it is, when 
 we forget that he was an Elizabethan we miss 
 much of his character and beauty ; for unless 
 we understand what is temporal and local in a 
 great artist, and see him, as it were, flowering 
 in his native fields, we cannot enjoy him 
 with perfect sincerity. His works cut off 
 from their environment are like specimens in 
 a botanical collection, and he seems to have 
 written for libraries or painted for museums. 
 How dull does the poetry of Shakespeare 
 become when turned into maxims of universal 
 application ; and what a mass of dullness has 
 been produced by versifiers trying to write 
 plays like his in circumstances utterly different. 
 The man who said that Hamlet was too full of 
 quotations was wiser than he knew ; it is 
 often quoted by people who are not aware that 
 it is either drama or poetry. But such people 
 find little to quote in the Sonnets; and, 
 though a few may read them to find out why 
 Shakespeare wrote them, most of their readers 
 are drawn to them by their poetry alone. 
 
 We may be sure that Shakespeare wrote his 
 Sonnets for the pleasure of writing them. 
 There was a good deal of task work in his early 
 plays, as in the early journalism of Meredith ; 
 but in the Sonnets there was only the dis- 
 
 i6
 
 Shakespeare's Sonnets 
 
 interested labour of a young artist, and after- 
 wards of a master, turning from the business of 
 his life to express himself directly. Among all 
 the wild conjectures about the Sonnets one 
 thing seems to be certain — namely, that many 
 of the earlier ones were literary exercises 
 and that many of the later were not. The 
 theme at first seems artificial, and no doubt 
 it was ; the wise artist chooses an artificial 
 theme when he is too young to get one from 
 his own experience, for he knows that he must 
 learn his art before he can use his experience 
 of life in it. Besides, the young artist delights 
 in his art for its own sake; it is still a 
 pleasant game to him, and he is content that 
 others should make the rules of it. Thus the 
 young Shakespeare was glad to write like the 
 other poets of the time ; and, since sonnets, of 
 one form or other, were the fashion, he wrote 
 sonnets. No doubt he was less happy in his choice 
 of a theme ; we cannot be much interested in his 
 arguments for marriage ; they are only a pre- 
 text for writing poetry, and not a very good 
 one. Besides, he sticks too conscientiously to 
 his argument, so that we are provoked when 
 we find that the wonderful opening — 
 
 Music to hear, why hear'st thou music sadly? 
 Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy, 
 B 17
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 is only another incitement to matrimony. 
 This is as near to being abstract poetry as any 
 verse can be; the music has as little to do 
 with the theme as the tunes of an Italian opera 
 have to do with the situation. 
 
 But we are not therefore to suppose that 
 Shakespeare wrote coldly, any more than Keats 
 wrote coldly in Endymion. He was stirred 
 by all the beauty of the world, and one beauti- 
 ful thing brought another to his mind, as the 
 scent of a flower reminds us of all the richness 
 of summer. Nor did he write vaguely as many 
 young poets write when moved by this general 
 passion for beauty. The chief fault of his 
 early verse — a promising fault in any young 
 artist — is an excessive precision. Just as he 
 laboui's description in Venus and Adonis, so 
 he labours argument in the early Sonnets. He 
 never trusts to luck or hopes that some mean- 
 ing will come of a combination of fine sounds, 
 but makes every word do as much work as if it 
 were in a legal document. Indeed, all the 
 legal terms which he uses are only a sign of 
 his passion for precise expression ; and if he 
 had written nowadays he would very likely 
 have pressed scientific words and images into 
 his service. It is through his images that he 
 is drawn more and more into reality and the 
 
 i8
 
 Shakespeare's Sonnets 
 
 expression of his own experience. Thus it may 
 be that, when in the twenty-first Sonnet he 
 glances at a rival poet, he is only following a 
 fashion ; but continuing the same theme in 
 the twenty-third he starts by describing what 
 he must have often seen, and perhaps even felt 
 himself — 
 
 As an unperfect actor on the stage, 
 Who with his fear is put beside his part. 
 
 This has the sudden reality of Mercutio amid 
 all the romance of Romeo a?id Juliet. Like 
 him, it is taken from life and foretells a poetry 
 in which romance and reality will be at one. 
 
 And soon the reality passes from images 
 into the main theme, enriching, not destroying, 
 the romance. It is Shakespeare himself who 
 speaks of his own life in the sonnet which 
 begins, " When in disgrace wath fortune and 
 men's eyes," not the Shakespeare of universal 
 fame, the imaginary tranquil master of all art 
 and knowledge, but one for whom, as for all 
 human beings, the future is uncertain and 
 failure as frequent as success. We suppose 
 that anyone who could command the music 
 of Shakespeare or Schubert must have the 
 world at his feet ; yet this music may have 
 been lavished on one indifferent individual, and 
 
 19
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 it only became the voice of universal passion 
 when the authors of it were dumb. We might 
 say of them as Shakespeare says of the 
 unknown : — 
 
 What is your substance, whereof are you made, 
 That millions of strange shadows on you tend? 
 
 They who spoke so intensely for themselves 
 seem now to speak for every one ; and their 
 music has gathered richness and meaning from 
 the many times that it has been repeated as if 
 it were uttered for the first time. But it only 
 fits all passion because it fitted so exactly the 
 passion that first begot it, and also because 
 that passion itself was rich with the love of 
 all beautiful things. No man whose love is 
 narrow and confined to one single incident in 
 his life can make poetry out of it ; a man 
 must have loved many things before he can 
 express his love for one; otherwise he can 
 only insist baldly that he loves, like the bandit 
 in Man and Superman who cries : — 
 
 Mendoza thy lover, 
 
 Thy lover, Mendoza, 
 
 Mendoza adoringly lives for Louisa. 
 
 There's nothing but that in the world for Mendoza. 
 
 Louisa, Louisa, Mendoza adores thee. 
 
 The love poetry of Shakespeare is full of 
 
 20
 
 Shakespeare's Sonnets 
 
 delight because it is enriched and illustrated 
 with the love of many things. When he asked 
 why his verse was "so far from variation or 
 quick change" he named the very qualities 
 for which it is most remarkable. Yet all the 
 variations and quick changes are related to 
 each other because they express the same 
 passion for many different objects. In this 
 the Sonnets are like Love in the Valley; 
 they show us a whole world heightened and 
 glorified by love. The interested passion ol 
 one human being for another becomes part of 
 the disinterested passion for all beautiful things 
 and at the same time intensifies it so that the 
 poet can make as passionate a music about 
 summer as about love itself — 
 
 Not that the summer is less pleasant now 
 Than when her mournful hymns did hush 
 
 the night, 
 But that wild music burthens every bough, 
 And sweets grown common lose their dear 
 
 delight. 
 
 In the Sonnets, as in Love in the Valley, love 
 is no longer an incident in life, but a state 
 of being in which all things are harinonized ; 
 and the world becomes one ideal landscape, 
 where every object has the same kind of 
 
 21
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 significance. It is a heaven of beauty, but not 
 a heaven of happiness ; for, if it were, it would 
 be unreal, and we might believe those who say 
 that all the Sonnets are literary exercises. 
 That they are not, is proved by the very 
 sound of the poet^s voice, which can be heard 
 in many of them as clearly as the voice of 
 Catullus in his finest verses. 
 
 Never believe, though in my nature reign'd 
 All frailties that besiege all kinds of blood, 
 That it could so preposterously be stain'd, 
 To leave for nothing all thy sum of good ; 
 For nothing this wide universe I call, 
 Save thou, my rose ; in it thou art my all. 
 
 This is as moving as the poem of Rochester's 
 in which he expresses the fear — 
 
 Lest, once more wandering from that Heaven, 
 
 I fall on some base heart unblest. 
 Faithless to thee, false, unforgiven, 
 
 And lose my everlasting rest. 
 
 True, Shakespeare's lines are full of the 
 Elizabethan rhetoric ; but that was natural to 
 all poets of the time. It was a habit that had 
 become second nature ; and it did not imply 
 the lack of real emotion any more than the 
 artificial phrases of an angry man nowadays 
 
 22
 
 Shakespeare's Sonnets 
 
 imply that his anger is feigned. The drama 
 was the predominant form of poetry, and 
 owing to its predominance all poetry tended 
 to be rhetorical. The modern sonnet is apt 
 to be meditative, as if the poet were thinking 
 aloud in it ; but the Elizabethan sonnet was 
 written like a speech in a play, and it came 
 naturally to Shakespeare to express himself , . - « vj 
 like Berowne or Komeo, heightening his A^f 
 matter with all the arts that tell on the stage. 
 No doubt he simplified the form of his sonnets 
 to suit his dramatic manner. The Italian 
 sonnet would have been too complicated and 
 too slow in its movement for his eager 
 eloquence, which would not endure to be 
 checked at the end of the octave, and which, 
 as it is, often seems to be violently reined in 
 by the concluding couplet. All poetry is 
 artificial in form, and the predominant artifice, 
 whatever it may be, affects every poet's style, 
 so that it seems more artificial than it is in an i 
 age subject to a different poetic convention. 
 But Shakespeare in his finest sonnets is as 
 much master of his rhetoric as in the finest 
 scenes of his plays ; and their peculiar merit 
 is this, that in them all the Elizabethan 
 eloquence becomes personal, like the whole 
 apparatus of the orchestra in Beethoven's 
 
 23
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 symphonies or the Florentine science in the 
 drawings of Michelangelo. 
 
 Ah, do not, when my heart hath 'scaped this sorrow, 
 Come in the rearward of a conquered woe. 
 Give not a windy night a rainy morrow. 
 To hnger out a purposed overthrow. 
 If thou wilt leave me, do not leave me last, 
 When other petty griefs have done their spite, 
 But in the onset come ; so shall I taste 
 At first the very worst of fortune's might. 
 
 The imagery of these lines is so subdued to 
 the emotion that we scarcely notice it. A 
 smaller artist would only weaken and dilute 
 his passion with this comparison of his mis- 
 fortunes to foul weather ; but here the result 
 is to make the passion itself seem world-wide 
 without losing any of its intensity. The 
 current of the verse is so strong that it sweeps 
 all the images along with it and they quicken 
 the reader's imagination without troubling his 
 understanding. His mind is never for a 
 moment distracted from the main theme, yet 
 that is enriched by a wild and various music 
 which no simple and direct statement could 
 contain. Shakespeare presses the wind and 
 rain into his service, and turns their tempestu- 
 ous sound into his own voice. 
 
 There are some great writers who are 
 
 24
 
 Shakespeare's Sonnets 
 
 naturally disposed to simplicity of expression. 
 Shakespeare was not one of these. Images 
 swarmed in his mind so that he had no need 
 to cast about for them ; indeed, he seems to 
 have thought in images. In modern times 
 thought is more abstract ; the scientific way 
 of thinking has affected pure literature, and 
 even the poets are shy of metaphor, lest it 
 should lead them into artifice and irrelevance. 
 But, though the profusion of Elizabethan 
 imagery may sometimes distract us from the 
 main theme, it is less artificial than we are apt 
 to suppose. Indeed, reasoning seems to have 
 grown out of the use of metaphor, just as prose 
 has grown out of poetry ; and much of the 
 Elizabethan imagery is a symptom of the 
 effort to reason in verse. Passion itself be- 
 came argumentative then, as we may see from 
 the love poems of Donne ; no one doubts 
 that he expressed his own feelings, even in his 
 most flagrant conceits ; but because Shake- 
 speare was a very great artist, his art, even at 
 its best, is supposed to prove that all through 
 the Sonnets he was only playing a brilliant 
 game. Sometimes, no doubt, he was. All 
 young poets, however full of passion, will write 
 for the mere pleasure of writing ; and passion 
 itself will incite them to elaborate every fancy 
 
 25
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 that comes into their minds. Nor is it strange 
 that, in speaking for himself, Shakespeare 
 should have kept some of his dramatic habits 
 of speech. It is these very habits that give 
 their eloquence to the Sonnets. The poet, 
 used to set lovers talking on the stage, talks 
 himself like Romeo ; but it is more reasonable 
 to suppose that he knew how to make Romeo 
 talk because he was himself a lover, than that 
 he wrote the Sonnets because he had got the 
 habit of expressing feigned passions on the 
 stage. 
 
 26
 
 The Prose Romances of William Morris 
 
 THE prose romances of William Morris, 
 except those two which have a political 
 purpose, are still little read. They have a few 
 steady admirers, but most people, if they have 
 heard of them at all, have formed a notion of 
 them which keeps them from reading them. 
 They think that Morris wrote them to illustrate 
 some theory of his own about language or 
 about beauty ; that they are a protest against 
 prosaic realism, or the ugliness of modern life, 
 or what not. Others say that they are charm- 
 ing, no doubt, but shadowy and unreal, an 
 inferior Earthly Paradise in prose, and there is 
 quite enough of the real Earthly Paradise in 
 verse. Well, the way to get rid of these 
 notions is to read the romances themselves ; 
 and it is a very easy way. Begin with The 
 Wood heyond the Worlds and, if you like 
 romance at all, you will have finished it and 
 started on another before you have asked 
 yourself whether you enjoy it. There are 
 some people, of course, who do not like 
 
 27
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 romance at all, just as there are some who do 
 not like music or pictures of the Madonna. 
 They can be interested only in facts familiar 
 to them, and they cannot believe any story 
 that might not be told as news in a newspaper. 
 But if these complain of the prose romances 
 that they are vague or unsubstantial, they 
 misstate the reason why they dislike them. It 
 is true that Morris does not tell us when or 
 where his stories happened, but he knows 
 clearly and fully what happened in them, and 
 he tells it with the precision of his knowledge. 
 He never seems to be inventing, but always to 
 be relating, and therefore it does not matter 
 that he relat es what may never have happened. 
 Given the world of his romance, we know that 
 it would have happened as he tells it. 
 
 A story, whatever kind of world it may be 
 in, is, like the form of music, either a natural 
 growth of the author^s mind or a device ; it is 
 the result of his experience or of his desire to 
 tell a story. Now it is commonly supposed 
 that Morris's romances are the result of his 
 desire to tell a story, or even of his desire to 
 write in a certain style full of obsolete words 
 and constructions. But Morris was a great 
 man, and great men, whatever mistakes they 
 may make, do not write for such reasons. It 
 
 28
 
 Prose Romances of William Morris 
 
 is true that in his prose romances he stole a 
 holiday from his Socialism, but he did not 
 change himself into a dilettante when he did 
 that. The world of which he wrote, unlike 
 the world in which he lived, was not one that 
 he wished to reform ; but neither was it, as 
 some have absurdly called it, a decorative 
 world. Literature cannot be decorative, for it 
 is not a means of decoration ; and to call it 
 that, whether in praise or blame, is to use 
 a false analogy. Probably those who call 
 Morris's romances decorative mean that the 
 characters in them are faintly drawn and move 
 languidly against a background of pretty 
 detail. If so, they have found in these 
 romances what they expected to find, not what 
 is there. For the romances are full of passion 
 and trouble and delight and sin ; and, although 
 their world is not ours, it is a world in which 
 Morris's own experience of life tells — indeed, 
 it seems to be created entirely out of his 
 experience. Perhaps the true reason why 
 great artists turn to ideal art is to be found in 
 the proper meaning of the word " ideal." It 
 is not that they would empty their creation of 
 all that is not beautiful in reality, but that 
 they would make it all out of their own 
 experience. Realism is a hindrance to them 
 
 29
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 because it implies a mass of routine and detail 
 which exists in reality but is not part of their 
 experience of it. When Michelangelo painted 
 " The Creation of Adam " he gave us, from his 
 own experience of life, his notion of what life 
 means to man. Clothes were not part of that 
 meaning, nor were any circumstances of time 
 and place ; his Adam belongs to no age, and 
 the ground on which he lies is of no season or 
 country. Everything in the picture is created 
 to express his idea and through it his experi- 
 ence. Michelangelo there was able to escape 
 from irrelevant circumstance by means of his 
 subject ; and Morris uses romance for the same 
 purpose. Unlike Michelangelo, he charges his 
 romance with a great deal of circumstance, 
 such as landscape and the handiwork of man ; 
 but all this he creates instead of copying it ; 
 and it is all there, not to make his romance 
 like reality, but to express his own sense of 
 values. Above all, it is not there for the sake 
 of prettiness. Morris may have hated certain 
 realities, but he did not fear them ; and he did 
 not turn to romance because he wished to 
 persuade himself or anyone else that it was 
 reality ; he turned to it because he was able to 
 express his own sense of reality most clearly 
 in it. 
 
 30
 
 Prose Romances of William Morris 
 
 II 
 
 I do not know how he made his stories ; 
 whether he invented them before he began 
 to write, or whether they grew as he was 
 writing. Probably they grew, for they read 
 as if they were old stories, yet they are 
 original and not like any old stories that we 
 know. In all of them we feel the working of 
 his mind, with his clear sense of the values of 
 life and his wonder both at its beauty and at 
 the mystery of its evil. There is magic in 
 these stories, but it is not there to make them 
 exciting, nor through any feeble attempt to 
 believe in something incredible. We know 
 that Morris did not believe in magic in this 
 world ; but in that world of his creation it 
 seems to be equivalent to the mystery of evil in 
 this. Evil, in this life, always seemed to him 
 a malign enchantment ; he could see far into 
 the rational explanation of good things, but 
 not of bad ; he could understand imperfection, 
 but not perversity. And his enchantresses in 
 The Wood beyond the World and The Water 
 of the Wondroiis Isles are alive with this 
 mystery of evil, with luxury and cruelty and 
 the love of power, so that the power which 
 they exercise seems to be evil itself, causeless, 
 
 31
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 irrational, and ruinous, like evil in this wor'd 
 as he saw it. The enchantress in The Wood 
 heyond the World destroys herself like evil, 
 tempted to her death by enchantment, having 
 stabbed one of her lovers who has taken the 
 form of another. 
 
 But the Lady drew him toward her, and 
 snatched the clothes from off his shoulders 
 and breast and fell a-gibbering sounds mostly 
 without meaning, but broken here and there 
 with words. Then I heard her say : " I shall 
 forget ; I shall forget ; and the new days shall 
 come."' Then there was silence of her for a 
 little, and thereafter she cried out in a terrible 
 voice : " O no, no, no ! I cannot forget ; I 
 cannot forget " ; and she raised a great wailing 
 cry that filled all the night with horror (didst 
 thou not hear it?), and caught up the knife 
 from the bed and thrust it into her breast, 
 and fell down a dead heap over the bed and 
 on to the man whom she had slain. 
 
 But one can do no justice to these stories 
 by quoting passages from them, for their life 
 is in their movement and their effect is cumu- 
 lative. What Morris tells sets the mind work- 
 ing so that it imagines things more wonderful 
 than those which are told. The story is 
 listened to breathlessly ; and at the end the 
 whole effect of it gathers upon the memory 
 
 32
 
 Prose Romances of William Morris 
 
 as,' if it were single and instantaneous. But it 
 is worth quoting a passage to show how little 
 Morris's style resembles the common idea of 
 it. That idea is based upon a few sentences 
 which we wish he had written otherwise, 
 because they serve as an excuse for not reading 
 him. " Whilom, as tells the tale, was a walled 
 Cheaping-town hight Utterhay." So Tli£ 
 Water of the Wondro7i-s Isles begins, and 
 people think that, because it begins so, it must 
 be a mere archaistic exercise. We wish that 
 he had not used obsolete words, since they dis- 
 tract the reader's attention from the sense, 
 but he did not use them because his sense was 
 poor. Those vices of style which are fatal are 
 also vices of matter, and Morris has not these. 
 His style is easier to understand than that of 
 most modern novelists, it is the style of a 
 writer who forgets himself in his story and 
 who forces neither beauty nor cleverness upon 
 us. It rises and falls with the matter, but 
 even where the matter is mere explanation it 
 is not dull or ugly. 
 
 Ill 
 
 These romances are remarkable, not for 
 their remote and tranquil beauty, but for their 
 c 33
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 vividness and precision. Morris, like Coleridge 
 in The Ancient Mariner^ is a realist of imagined 
 things. He produces an illusion by showing 
 us what we have never seen, not by reminding 
 us of what we have seen. The Well at the 
 World's End is a mediaeval romance, but unlike 
 other mediaeval romances in that it seems to 
 be told by a man who has lived in the Middle 
 Ages. Scott, in Ivanhoe or The Talisman, 
 insists upon strange and picturesque detail. 
 He gives us stage scenery, and his characters, 
 when they are not merely modern, act up to 
 it. But Morris takes the Middle Ages as a 
 matter of course ; for him they are not scenery 
 or a background, but the world in which his 
 characters live and move, and the characters 
 do not act their parts but are themselves. 
 Nor does he tell us anything to remind us that 
 we are in the Middle Ages ; the details are 
 there for the part they play in the story, they 
 are details that one man of the time might 
 have told to another, not as being strange, 
 but as matters of common interest. Nor does 
 he put his story in the Middle Ages be- 
 cause it is a beautiful time to him in which 
 all goes well. He loves it, but not because he 
 thinks of it as an earthly paradise. His sense 
 of evil and oppression is just as strong when 
 
 34
 
 Prose Romances of William Morris 
 
 he writes of the Burgh of the Four Friths 
 as when he writes of modern London. The 
 people of the Burgh are a kind of mediaeval 
 Spartans, who oppress all their neighbours and 
 steal their women. They talk to a stranger 
 in an inn about these women, who are fairer 
 than their own, and one of them says that 
 they are "good websters, and, lacking them, 
 figured cloth of silk would be far-fetched and 
 dear-bought here." Thereupon a youth laughs 
 at him and says : — 
 
 Fair sirs, ye are speaking like hypocrites, 
 and as if your lawful wives were here to hearken 
 to you ; whereas ye know well how goodly 
 these thralls be, and that many of them can 
 be kind enough withal ; and ye would think 
 yourselves but ill bestead if ye might not 
 cheapen such jewels for your money. Which 
 of you will go to the Cross next Saturday and 
 there bring him a fairer wife than he can wed 
 out of our lineages ? and a wife withal of whose 
 humours he need take no more account than 
 of the dullness of his hound or the skittish 
 temper of his mare, so long as the thong 
 smarts and the twigs sting. 
 
 Here Morris shows us, the more vividly because 
 casually, the particular kind of oppression that 
 .he most hated in all ages, the oppression 
 which treats human beings as if they were not 
 
 35
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 human ; and he shows us, too, how this oppres- 
 sion, even in a strong military people, taints 
 the whole of society and makes it ugly and 
 loveless and luxurious. He was not writing a 
 social tract, but expressing his own sense of 
 values in a story ; and it is that which makes 
 his stories real to him and to his readers. 
 Indeed, no romtincer was ever less allured by 
 the common elements of mediaeval romance ; 
 he is not the fashionable novelist of the 
 Middle Ages, interested in knights on horse- 
 back caracoling in search of adventure. 
 Rather he loved the Middle Ages because they 
 were expressive both of good and of evil, 
 because both were plain to see in them, like 
 the saints and devils of a Gothic church. 
 What troubled him about our own time was 
 its inexpressive complexity, its evil that seemed 
 to be causeless, its good that produced evil 
 results. Looking back on the Middle Ages, 
 from a distance but with vast knowledge and 
 still greater divination, he saw good and evil 
 clearly opposed in them ; and in his romances 
 he could bring them to an issue and so for a 
 while escape from his unsatisfied longing to 
 bring them to an issue here and now. In 
 The Roots of' the Mountains there is war 
 between the Goths, the people who were the 
 
 36
 
 Prose Romances of William Morris 
 
 hope of Europe, and the Huns, a mere force of 
 barbarism and cruelty and destruction. To 
 him that war is the prelude of the Middle 
 Ages, and he tells of the victory of the Goths 
 with the delight of one who knows what it 
 means for the future. As we read, it seems to 
 us, not a mere tale of fighting, but history 
 told by one who took part in it yet had fore- 
 knowledge of its meaning. 
 
 As for the people of the romances, they are 
 not portraits, but rather figures in a large 
 composition ; yet they are never lay figures. 
 Morris knew too well the kind of man and 
 woman he liked not to draw them firmly. 
 Now and again he surprises us by his subtlety 
 -though he never insists upon it, for his own 
 mind was subtle. He had a turn for intro- 
 spection which was checked by his incessant 
 labours, but which taught him a great deal 
 about other men's minds. This knowledge is 
 usually rather implied than displayed, like so 
 much of his knowledge ; he is not an osten- 
 tatious anatomist of the mind, but every stroke 
 of character is firm and in its right place. 
 His heroes and heroines are not insipidly good, 
 but we know that we should like them if we 
 could meet them, and we feel that there is 
 much more to be known about them than he 
 
 17
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 tells us. Indeed, we feel that about everything 
 in the romances ; he has created a world in 
 them and not merely told a story, and there 
 is that world of wonder and beauty and terror 
 waiting to be enjoyed by thousands where it is 
 now only enjoyed by tens. 
 
 38
 
 Dickens o «<c» o «t> o -.c* 
 
 {Written for the Centenary of his birth) 
 
 THE fourth part of Dickens's Holiday 
 Romance tells of a country in which 
 children and grown-ups change places. The 
 children rule and the grown-ups have to obey 
 them. The point of the story is that the 
 grown-ups are described as if they were 
 children, and being so described they appear 
 more troublesome and less attractive than real 
 children. There is a party of grown-ups at which 
 
 four tiresome, fat boys would stand in the 
 doorway and talk about the newspapers, till 
 Mrs. Alicumpaine [the child who gives the 
 party] went to them and said, " My dears, I 
 really cannot allow you to prevent people from 
 coming in. I shall be truly sorry to do it ; but 
 if you put yourselves in everybody's way I 
 must positively send you home." One boy, 
 with a beard and a large white waistcoat, who 
 stood straddling on the hearthrug warming his 
 coat-tails, was sent home. " Highly incorrect, 
 my dear," said Mrs. Alicumpaine, handing him 
 out of the room, " and I cannot permit it." 
 
 In this little tale Dickens only does openly and 
 
 39
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 consciously what he does, without knowing or 
 without confessing it, in the best part of all his 
 books. That boy with a beard and a large white 
 waistcoat, who stood straddling on the hearth- 
 rug, is seen as Dickens saw every one whom he 
 did see, whether young or old, good or bad, 
 male or female. His own life was not divided 
 into periods of childhood, youth, and middle 
 age ; his experience was always of the same kind. 
 People and things affected him to the last just 
 as they had affected him when he first began 
 to take notice ; and since there were no 
 divisions in his own life, he took no account of 
 such divisions in the lives of others. He says, 
 somewhere, that feelings which we think 
 serious in a man seem to us comical in a boy ; 
 but he himself reversed the process. Children 
 are nearly always serious to him. It is men 
 who seem to him absurd, when they conceal 
 their childishness behind beards and large 
 white waistcoats. He loved those who, like 
 himself, remained children all their lives ; but 
 the others seemed to him to be playing some 
 kind of stupid game ; and, if he could, he 
 would have sent them all to bed. 
 
 What troubled him most in life was the fact 
 that the pompous boys in beards and white 
 waistcoats had all the power and used it to 
 
 40
 
 Dickens 
 
 oppress the true children, young and old. He 
 saw the Bumbles and Gradgrinds making life 
 unpleasant for the poor, just as stupid grown- 
 ups had made life unpleasant for him when he 
 was a child. His own childish memory still 
 smarts in his treatment of a mere tease like 
 Pumblechook, against whom he pays off old 
 scores as if they were scores of yesterday ; and 
 he hates Bumble as a boy might hate a bully 
 at school. Thus, while he has great pity for 
 those whom he loves and understands, he may 
 seem merciless to those whom he does not ; and 
 there is a nursery morality in his punishments. 
 There are two kinds of people in his books, 
 the good and the bad, and at the end he sees 
 that both get their deserts ; but there is no 
 real cruelty in his heaviest retributions. His 
 villains are bundled off to gaol like guys to the 
 bonfire, because it is the proper place for them. 
 Fagin himself is half a guy, though real enough 
 to be terrifying to a child ; and we feel 
 that Dickens has seen him as a frightened 
 chilti might see him. So it is with Mr. Carker 
 and even Madame Defarge ; indeed, she talks 
 as if she were talking to children with the aim 
 of frightening them. 
 
 "You work hard, Madame," said a man 
 near her. 
 
 41
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 " Yes," answered Madame Defarge. " I 
 have a good deal to do." 
 
 " What do you make, Madame ? " 
 
 " Many things." 
 
 " For instance " 
 
 "For instance," returned Madame Defarge 
 composedly, " shrouds." 
 
 It reminds one of the Wolf in Red Riding- 
 Hood, " All the better to eat you with, my 
 dear." 
 
 Dickens's memory must have been stored 
 with figures that had frightened him in his 
 childhood, and at the same time excited his 
 curiosity. His books are full of people vivid 
 and sinister, who talk more or less incompre- 
 hensibly, who seem to have a secret way of life 
 of their own and a nature, half elfish or devilish, 
 half absurdly mechanical. That is how ugly 
 people absorbed in their own concerns often 
 appear to an observant child, who cannot from 
 their speech discover what they are about, and 
 who thinks, therefore, that it must be some 
 wicked game played for its own sake. A child 
 has no idea of business or the struggle for life ; 
 it can be serious enough, but always over a 
 game ; and it estimates people by the kind of 
 game they seem to be playing and by the 
 manner in which they play it. So Dickens 
 
 42
 
 Dickens 
 
 saw all the diff'erent activities of men as games, 
 good and bad. Wemmick, at the office, played 
 a poor game ; at home, with his castle and 
 drawbridge and aged parent, he played a good 
 one. Whenever Dickens chose he could forget 
 all that he knew by experience about the 
 struggle for life and fall into his natural 
 childish observation of men's doings, describing 
 them as if he did not know their object, with 
 extreme vividness but with a constant sense of 
 the absurdity of actions and words which seem 
 mechanical because they are unintelligible. That 
 was his satiric method, which he applied to 
 officials, to people of fashion, to politicians, 
 to all important persons. Every one who fell 
 into routine, who seemed to act inexpressively 
 and with no sense of the fun of life, was turned 
 by him into a marionette. And in this world 
 of marionettes, made vivid and strange by 
 their isolation from the customary background 
 of reason and purpose, animals and objects by 
 way of compensation became more human, as 
 they appear to the intense curiosity of a child. 
 " The blackbeetles . . . groped about the 
 hearth in a ponderous, elderly way, as if they 
 were shortsighted and hard of hearing, and 
 not on terms with one another." He thinks of 
 them, too, as if they were playing a game, the 
 
 43
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 game of pretending to be human beings, and 
 he laughs at them for the serious manner in 
 which they play it. 
 
 Naturally, with this method, he is better at 
 invention than at construction. He took great 
 pains with his plots, as with everything ; but 
 they often seem a mere distraction from his 
 proper business. They provide motives for 
 the behaviour of his vivid figures, motives 
 which seem to us inadequate, as indeed they 
 are, because they are manufactured, not ob- 
 served like the figures themselves. For 
 Dickens himself there was a perpetual mystery 
 ill human life, which he could enjoy without 
 wishing to explain it. He was not a scientific 
 novelist, and he only tried to be one to satisfy 
 the supposed demands of his public. His 
 natural way of telling a story was primitive : 
 it was to relate the doings of men without 
 troubling about their motives ; and this he did 
 so well that we believe in his characters with- 
 out understanding them and without seeing 
 any likeness in them to ourselves. Many of 
 them have become mythical, and we are merely 
 irritated when Dickens himself tries to 
 rationalize his myths, to manufacture motives 
 where he did not see them, as even Shake- 
 speare manufactured motives for lago which 
 
 44
 
 Dickens 
 
 are inadequate to explain him. Dickens's 
 business is creation, not analysis, and he 
 creates so profusely that his creatures often 
 become an unmanageable mob who will not be 
 governed by his plot. What has Mrs. Gamp 
 to do with the plot of Martin Chuzzlewit or 
 with the world of duty and business with 
 which he makes a feeble effort to connect her ? 
 If we could for a moment consider the motives 
 of her conduct, she would dwindle into a 
 wicked old woman ; but Dickens had seen her 
 and drawn her without a thought of her 
 motives. She has nothing to do with right 
 and wrong, and the fact that she is a nurse 
 is a mere pretext for her introduction. All 
 we ask of her is that she shall continue to talk ; 
 and we follow her through the book as we 
 follow a great comic actor when he gags upon 
 the stage. Both may interfere with the plot, 
 but, if they do, so much the worse for it. 
 When Falstaff enters, the history of England 
 becomes a mere background to him ; and when 
 Mrs. Gamp is talking, Martin Chuzzlewit is 
 a super. 
 
 There is only one other English novelist who 
 for limitations and for intensity can be com- 
 pared with Dickens — namely, Charlotte Bronte ; 
 and there is a similar cause for the limitations 
 
 45
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 and the intensity of both. For as Dickens is 
 the child among novelists, Charlotte Bronte 
 is the girl. They see very differently, but the 
 eyes of both are not dulled by experience 
 and their feelings not blunted by theory. 
 They do not find in life what they expect to 
 find in it, and therefore their books are full 
 of surprises for us. But experience is a word 
 that may be used in different senses. People 
 have wondered that Charlotte Bronte should 
 have written so well with so little of it ; they 
 forget that it was a sharp experience for her 
 to meet a new person or to enter a room for 
 the first time. We cannot tell whether she 
 would have kept this eagerness of perception 
 if she had lived; but Dickens kept it all his 
 life, and he is her only rival in describing 
 everything as if he had never seen anything 
 like it before. The difference between them 
 is a difference both of sex and of age. She is 
 older than he is, for there is nothing childlike 
 about her. Both are magnificently unworldly ; 
 but Dickens went through the world with a 
 child's detachment, watching it and wondering 
 at it, working too hard, enjoying himself too 
 much, but never turning his game into a 
 business. Charlotte Bronte was not detached 
 from life, but caught into it by newborn 
 
 46
 
 Dickens 
 
 passions and instincts. She had reached the 
 age of love, and the world was as full of 
 adventures for her as it was full of men. For 
 Dickens, being still a child, it was as full of 
 adventures as of things. Adult love to him 
 is only a tiresome business that has to be 
 written about because his readers, being grown 
 up, want it. For Charlotte Bronte it is the 
 one thing that gives meaning and a fearful 
 glory to life. But with this difference between 
 them they are alike in this and unlike other 
 great novelists, that they always seem to write 
 about the present, not the past. Nothing that 
 they tell of is mellowed or dimmed by the 
 lapse of time ; as we read them we have the 
 same illusion of something that has just 
 happened, the same conviction of reality, un- 
 supported by reason and defiant of it, which 
 comes to us when we remember in the morning 
 a dream of last night. Other writers have to 
 satisfy our sense of probability ; their fiction 
 must be less strange than truth because they 
 must persuade us that it is true ; but Dickens 
 and Charlotte Bronte can persuade us of any- 
 thing by their mere power of representation. 
 As we read them we see with their eyes and 
 pass through their experiences. It may be 
 all subjective, as the philosophers say ; but so 
 
 47
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 is a dream, and that is often more vivid than 
 objective realities. 
 
 Charlotte Bronte has this one advantage 
 over Dickens, that love for her is a pre- 
 dominating interest to which all other interests 
 are subordinate. So she can make a story out 
 of love, coherent and of natural growth, with 
 all her own rebellions against it and mis- 
 understandings of it, with the conflict between 
 it and the sense of duty, religion, conventions, 
 the struggle for life. Her very situation is so 
 interesting that it makes a novel by itself. 
 For her, the passionate girl of genius trained 
 in a country parsonage, life is all a voyage of 
 discovery and every incident an adventure. 
 The contact between her mind and the world 
 is so sharp that sparks are struck from it every 
 moment. As we read her books we think only 
 of her ; we do not see her characters as they 
 are, but feel them as she felt them. Dickens 
 is not thus the centre of his books, nor does 
 love make a plot for him. Indeed, love, as he 
 naturally represents it, is only a childish 
 wistfulness soon forgotten in the struggle of 
 life. It is almost the only thing that he seems 
 to describe as a faint memory, calling it by 
 an effort out of the past as other writers 
 call up their childhood. But he has this 
 
 48
 
 Dickens 
 
 advantage over Charlotte Bronte, that his 
 interests are far more diverse than hers. Like 
 a child, he can forget himself in the spectacle 
 of life. She judges everything — and rather 
 harshly — except passion. His natural inclina- 
 tion is to judge nothing and to enjoy every- 
 thing, even the bores and the humbugs. The 
 world of humour is closed to her and the 
 world of passion to him. There are distressing 
 passages in the works of both : in hers when 
 she thinks it necessary for her characters to 
 be funny ; in his when his characters try to 
 make love or talk about love like grown-up 
 people. And it is a curious fact that her fun 
 and his sentiment read very much alike ; there 
 is the same preposterous artificiality in both, 
 the same instant loss of all those great qualities 
 of style which elsewhere they exhibit so con- 
 stantly. 
 
 There used to be a notion, founded on his 
 sentimental failures, that Dickens was an 
 illiterate vulgarian of genius, a bad and un- 
 scrupulous writer who interests the refined 
 only because he tells them of vulgar people like 
 himself whom they have never met. But no one 
 who has ever tried to write can read a chapter 
 of him without seeing that he was master of 
 a sound and even classical prose style. It is true 
 D 49
 
 fissays on Books 
 
 that he had not what we call a classical edu- 
 cation ; but he was as well trained for writing 
 English novels as JEschylus for writing Greek 
 plays. His teachers were Fielding, Smollett, 
 and Defoe ; and he had learned from them 
 thoroughly. If he felt and saw like a child, 
 he wrote like a man, with a masculine weight 
 and clearness and balance. There is no 
 hysteria in his pamphlets, but moderation and 
 common sense, and anger only when it is just. 
 He was not naturally rhetorical or sentimental, 
 but supplied both rhetoric and sentiment out 
 of conscientious good-nature. They were 
 sweetmeats that he did not like himself, but 
 gave to his grown-up readers because they 
 clamoured for them. When we call him a 
 child we do not impute to him any weakness 
 of intellect or lack of judgment; he was 
 limited only in his range of emotions and in 
 his appreciation of adult motives ; and even 
 that limitation was the result, perhaps, of his 
 extreme keenness of perception. We cannot 
 believe that he was incapable of any kind of 
 emotion or understanding whatever ; but his 
 mind was so busy with the material provided 
 for it by his eyes and ears that it had no 
 leisure to occupy itself with its own workings , 
 or to entertain a lasting passion. 
 
 50
 
 Dickens 
 
 Yet the dazzling spectacle of life did inspire 
 him with one lasting passion — the passion of 
 pity ; and it was that which gave music to 
 his laughter and weight to his thought. All 
 his ideas were sound ; he loved the essential 
 virtues and hated the essential vices. If life 
 could be as he wished it to be, it would be 
 neither dull nor cruel ; there would be room 
 in it both for the weak and for the strong, 
 for the city clerk and the man of genius. We 
 can best understand a great writer by noticing 
 what he does best ; and Dickens's masterpiece 
 is not Mrs. Gamp, nor even Peggotty or Joe 
 Gargery, but the convict Abel Magwitch. It 
 was not fun but pity that lifted his genius to 
 its greatest height, and a pity as reasonable 
 as justice. There is no description of his so 
 sharp and so full of meaning as the description 
 of Magwitch as Pip first saw him on his 
 return : — 
 
 In all his ways of sitting and standing, and 
 eating and drinking — of brooding about, in a 
 high-shouldered, reluctant style — of taking out 
 his great horn-handled jack-knife and wiping it 
 on his legs and cutting his food — of lifting 
 light glasses and cups to his lips, as if they 
 were clumsy pannikins — of chopping a wedge 
 off' his bread, and soaking up with it the last 
 fragments of gravy round and round his plate, 
 
 51
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 as if to make the most of an allowance, and 
 then drying his fingers on it, and then 
 swallowing it — in these ways and a thousand 
 other small nameless instances arising every 
 minute in the day, there was Prisoner, Felon, 
 Bondsman, plain as plain could be. 
 
 In that description, and in the account of 
 the process by which Pip's first disgust was 
 changed to affection, Dickens is no longer the 
 marvellous child among novelists but a master 
 among those masters who have taught pity 
 to the world out of their own hearts. And 
 his pity here is too proud and too sure of itself 
 to argue. There may have been readers when 
 Great Expectations was published who thought 
 that the account of the death sentence was an 
 appeal to sentiment, that it was only a proper 
 protection of society that men and women 
 should be hanged by scores for all sorts of 
 offences, and in particular for returning to 
 their native country when they had been trans- 
 ported for life. But read the passage now 
 and you will think Dickens''s pity wiser than 
 their common sense : — 
 
 Penned in the dock . . . were the two-and- 
 thirty men and women ; some defiant, some 
 stricken with terror, some sobbing and weeping, 
 some covering their faces, some staring gloomily 
 
 52
 
 Dickens 
 
 about. There had been shrieks from among 
 the women convicts, but they had been stilled, 
 and a hush had succeeded. The sheriffs with 
 their great chains and nosegays, other civic 
 gewgaws and monsters, criers, ushers, a great 
 gallery full of people — a large theatrical 
 audience — looked on, as the two-and-thirty 
 and the Judge were solemnly confronted. 
 
 Then follows the Judge's address to Magwitch, 
 with its reasons why he deserved to die, all 
 based upon a gross ignorance of his character 
 and motives. In the person of that Judge, 
 Dickens reveals the world to itself with an 
 irony more quiet and more deadly than laughter 
 or tears. There his genius, wise in its childish- 
 ness, spoke with the voice of posterity ; and 
 it seems to speak now as if he were living 
 among us and could rebuke us too for our 
 pompous cruelties and could, like the child 
 that he was, enjoy the praise and honour we 
 give to his memory. 
 
 S3
 
 Algernon Charles Swinburne o o 
 
 ( Written on the occasion of his death) 
 
 WHEN a great poet dies it is natural 
 and right that we should think only 
 of the splendour and not of the imperfection 
 of his works. While he is with us, and when 
 we have grown accustomed to his presence 
 among us, we may note the defects of his 
 genius ; and these are sure to be judged by 
 the unconscious but implacable justice of 
 posterity. At the moment of his death we 
 must feel and express only our gratitude for 
 all that he has done to glorify our lives. 
 Then, for a while, he has no competitors among 
 the living or the dead. The thoughts of all 
 lovers of poetry are fixed upon him, as the 
 thoughts of a family are fixed upon a member 
 of it who has just passed away. 
 
 There is no doubt that Algernon Charles 
 Swinburne was one of our great poets, a master 
 of his art who said immortal things and 
 helped to make the history of the human 
 mind. But there is one circumstance that 
 makes his death peculiarly moving to us. He 
 
 54
 
 Algernon Charles Swinburne 
 
 was the last of the giant race before the flood, 
 the latest born and the latest to survive of the 
 great romantic poets who have dominated our 
 literature ever since the first songs of Blake 
 rose almost unheard so long ago. The death 
 of Swinburne marks the close of an heroic age 
 in our poetry, as the death of Tintoret marked 
 the close of an heroic age in Italian art. True, 
 there is one of Swinburne's great companions 
 who still survives ; but as a poet Mr. George 
 Meredith is troubled with our later emotional 
 scepticism. He is in date a romantic, as 
 Donne was an Elizabethan ; but, like Donne, 
 he has always been in revolt against the poetry 
 of his own time and has seemed to be making 
 experiments towards the poetry of the future. 
 He is, as it were, wandering between two worlds, 
 labouring to make an instrument for the ex- 
 pression of ideas still too new to be expressed 
 in terms of beauty. But Swinburne belonged 
 altogether to a world of poetry that has died 
 with him. In literature he was the heir of all 
 the ages, and the last inheritor of a great 
 tradition. There are some great men who 
 prepare for the future and others who con- 
 summate the past. He was one of these ; 
 he seems to have been born with the ideas 
 that informed all his poetry, or at least to 
 
 55
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 have acquired them without effort or question. 
 There was never any emotional scepticism in 
 him ; he had never to persuade himself of the 
 value of what he loved or the worthlessness of 
 what he hated. No poetry has less argument 
 than his or less prosaic content. About the 
 glories of life he was an extreme dogmatist, 
 and his one aim in poetry was to express 
 them. Thus from us, with our emotional 
 insecurity, our constant questioning of the 
 values of all things, he is as far re- 
 moved as Fra Angelico ; and as a poet he 
 seems to have the unfair advantage of the 
 artists of the age of faith. It makes no 
 difference that his faith sometimes expressed 
 itself in furious denunciation ; he was as 
 eager to proclaim his disbeliefs as his beliefs 
 and he made poetry out of both. Whatever his 
 superficial extravagances or perversities may 
 have been, he knew for certain what he 
 valued in life; his mind was fixed and his 
 faith unshaken. 
 
 There still persists a notion that he was a 
 morbid poet. In his youth he played with 
 morbidities, as boys play at being pirates ; 
 but they never tainted his mind or perverted 
 his sense of the value of things. They were 
 mere experiments, like some of his versification ; 
 
 56
 
 Algernon Charles Swinburne 
 
 and. like all men of enormous and restless 
 energy, he was fond of experiments in his art. 
 He spoke afterwards of certain poems in the 
 first series of Poems and Ballads as the sins 
 of his youth. In the Prelude to Soiigs 
 before Sunrise he said that he had done with 
 them and was now to treat of loftier themes. 
 We have, he wrote, 
 
 A little time that we may fill 
 
 Or with such good works or such ill 
 
 As loose the bonds or make them strong 
 Wherein all manhood suffers wrong. 
 
 By rose-hung river and light-foot rill 
 There are who rest not ; who think long 
 
 Till they discern as from a hill 
 At the sun's hour of morning song, 
 
 Known of souls only, and those souls free, 
 
 The sacred spaces of the sea. 
 
 He himself was never in doubt which works 
 were good and which ill ; and his eyes were 
 always set steadfastly upon the sacred spaces of 
 the sea. He was not content to rest, or to 
 prolong the emotions and the music of his 
 youth past their proper season. There is 
 another poem of his in which he says 
 farewell to his youth, and no poet has ever 
 said it more bravely. We are all of us, when 
 the change to middle age comes, afflicted with 
 a sense that the glory of life has passed away ; 
 
 57
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 and poets are sometimes overpowered by that 
 sense, and cry — " Out of the day and night 
 a joy hath taken flight." Swinburne got a 
 new inspiration from the courage with which 
 he faced the change. In the Vision of 
 Spring in Winter he says : — 
 
 The morning song beneath the stars that fled 
 With twilight through the moonless mountain 
 
 air, 
 While youth with burning lips and wreathless 
 hair 
 Sang toward the sun that was to crown his head, 
 Rising ; the hopes that triumphed and fell dead, 
 The sweet swift eyes and songs of hours that 
 were ; 
 These mayst thou not give back for ever ; these, 
 As at the sea's heart all her wrecks lie waste, 
 Lie deeper than the sea ; 
 But flowers thou mayst, and winds, and hours of 
 ease. 
 And all its April to the world thou mayst 
 Give back, and half my April back to me. 
 
 There are not many of us who know the 
 hopes that triumph and fall dead, whose 
 dreams of world-wide fame come true before 
 they are thirty ; and it is difficult for us to 
 understand that a poet cannot live for ever 
 upon dreams come true. Swinburne discovered 
 that by experience ; he faced the fact and 
 
 5«
 
 Algernon Charles Swinburne 
 
 determined to take all the seasons of life as 
 they came. Therefore he did not outlive his 
 gift or his faith, but learned to write better of 
 death than he had ever written of love : — 
 
 The seal of sleep set on thine eyes to-day 
 Surely can seal not up the keen swift light 
 
 That lit them once for ever. Night can slay 
 None save the children of the wonib of night. 
 
 These lines are from the elegy on John 
 William Inchbold, which was published in the 
 third series of Poems and Ballads. That 
 poem and others in the book are enough to 
 refute the common belief that Swinburne's 
 genius spent itself in his youth, that after 
 thirty he never said anything that he had not 
 said better before. The belief exists, perhaps, 
 because there are no signs of struggle or doubt 
 or transition in his work. He always had the 
 voice of youth and wrote like a lover ; but as 
 he grew older he wrote less and less of the 
 passions of youth and more and more of the 
 matters that concern, or should concern, man- 
 hood. He was never a great tragic poet, hard 
 as he tried to be one, for his genius was lyrical ; 
 but there have been few poets who could treat 
 a tragic theme lyrically as well as he, none 
 who has revived the ballad with such a perfect 
 
 59
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 mixture of nature and art. Here is a verse 
 from A Jacobite's Exile : — 
 
 We'll see nae mair the sea-banks fair, 
 And the sweet grey gleaming sky, 
 
 And the lordly strand of Northumberland, 
 And the goodly towers thereby ; 
 
 And none shall know but the winds that blow 
 The graves wherein we lie. 
 
 And here is one, even more poignant, from 
 A Jacohite''s Farewell : — 
 
 O lands are lost and life's losing, 
 And what were they to gie? 
 
 Fu' mony a man gives all he can, 
 But nae man else gives ye. 
 
 Critics have talked of Swinburne's wonderful 
 power of imitation, as if he were a mere virtuoso 
 producing a series of literary exercises. The 
 best answer to that kind of criticism is to 
 read Before the Beginning of Years or A 
 Jacohite''s Exile, and then to ask whether any 
 imitative poetry has ever rung like that. 
 There is the same golden music in both ; and 
 that music expresses something great in the 
 poet's soul, a divine energy of emotion not 
 hampered by doubt or chilled by fear. It is 
 often said that his poetry contains nothing but 
 music ; it would be as foolish to say of music 
 itself that it contains nothing but music ; for 
 
 60
 
 Algernon Charles Swinburne 
 
 all real music, whether of words or of notes, 
 expresses a real emotion. We are apt not to 
 give a man credit for what he can do with 
 magnificent ease ; and it is hard to realize all 
 the learning and labour and high thinking and 
 noble feeling that have gone to the making of 
 that rushing music. Often it is so swift that 
 we scarcely notice the thought latent in it. 
 The impetus of the sound will not suffer our 
 minds to dwell on the sense. But still the 
 sense is there in all his finer poems, and he 
 himself has warned us of the fact in a beauti- 
 ful image : — 
 
 For life's helm rocks to the windward and lee, 
 And time is as wind, and as waves are we ; 
 
 And song is as foam that the sea-winds fret, 
 Though the thought at its heart should be deep as 
 the sea. 
 
 Swinburne was never an " intellectual." He 
 was too sure of things for that, and had too 
 simple a delight in life and his art. But only 
 those who know nothing of poetic processes 
 would call him a brainless poet. He did not 
 argue or analyse, because he held that he had 
 something better to do ; but we can see from his 
 criticism that his theory of poetry was clear 
 and consistent. Poetry for him was a means of 
 expressing emotion in terms of beauty ; it 
 
 6i
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 might do other things, but they were not 
 essential. The emotion and the material 
 beauty were essential, the one being the ex- 
 pression of the other. No doubt he carried 
 this theory to an extreme in his practice; he 
 was too determined to express emotion in every 
 line and to make every line beautiful ever to 
 write a good play or a good narrative poem. 
 All the people in his plays make poetry about 
 the situation ; they do not live and move and 
 have their being in it, and Tristram of 
 Lyonesse is a series of magnificent distractions 
 from the story. But in the plays he speaks 
 sometimes like a great tragic poet, although he 
 can never manage the action about which he 
 speaks. Here is the end of Locrine, in which 
 Gwendolen, having defeated and killed her 
 husband and his paramour in battle, says that 
 she will not refuse them burial : — 
 
 Not I would sunder tomb from tomb 
 Of these twain foes of mine, in death made one— 
 I, that when darkness hides me from the sun 
 Shall sleep alone, with none to rest by me. • 
 
 But thou — this one time more I look on thee — 
 Fair face, brave hand, weak heart that wast not mine — 
 Sleep sound— and God be good to thee, Locrine. 
 I was not. She was fair as heaven in spring 
 Whom thou didst love indeed. Sleep, queen and king, 
 Forgiven ; and if— God knows— being dead, ye live. 
 And keep remembrance yet of me — forgive. 
 
 62
 
 Algernon Charles Swinburne 
 
 To show what variety there is to be found 
 
 in this poet, often called monotonous, we will 
 
 quote a passage in the same metre from the 
 
 description of the loves of Tristram and 
 
 Iseult : — 
 
 Like fire 
 The lit dews lightened on the leaves, as higher 
 Night's heart beat on toward midnight. Far and 
 
 fain 
 Somewhiles the soft rush of rejoicing rain 
 Solaced the darkness, and from steep to steep 
 Of heaven they saw the sweet sheet lightning leap 
 And laugh its heart out in a thousand smiles, 
 When the clear sea for miles on glimmering miles 
 Burned as though dawn were strewn abroad astray, 
 Or, showering out of heaven, all heaven's array 
 Had paven instead the waters. 
 
 In passages like this, and, indeed, in the whole 
 poem, romantic poetry exhausts its possibilities. 
 The romantic process of combining human 
 passions and natural forces in one complicated 
 harmony could not be carried any further, 
 nor could the appropriate romantic effects 
 of versification. No further development is 
 possible in the art of poetry as Swinburne 
 practised it. He has had a few imitators, but 
 only one notable follower. Professor Gilbert 
 Murray, translating the most romantic of 
 Greek poets, has divined, perhaps almost 
 unconsciously, that he could not do justice to 
 
 63
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 the art of his original, except with an art no 
 less highly wrought. If there had been any 
 dullness or crudity in the language and verse of 
 his translation, it must have failed altogether. 
 There was only one contemporary style equal 
 to the task, and that was the style of Swin- 
 burne. The success of the translator proves, 
 not only his own genius, but the greatness of 
 both his originals. The mind of Euripides 
 is equal to the language of Swinburne, and 
 the language of Swinburne to the mind of 
 Euripides. There is also a pleasant irony in 
 the feat, since Swinburne's hatred of Euripides 
 was one of his few critical perversities. 
 
 Hitherto, we fear, we may seem to have 
 made too many apologies for the great poet. 
 That is the worst of criticism, it must be 
 always either detracting or apologizing ; to 
 express the glory of a master is beyond the 
 powers of any critic. The final question to be 
 put about a poet is this — Has he increased our 
 sense of the value of the noble things of life ? 
 To do that is the function of all art, not by 
 argument but by expression. Therefore, in 
 considering what we owe to the genius of 
 Swinburne, we should not ask what ideas we 
 have got from him, but what emotions, and of 
 what nature and strength ; for emotion is our 
 
 64
 
 Algernon Charles Swinburne 
 
 final test of the values of things. To this 
 question there can be only one answer. Those 
 who are famihar with his greatest works know 
 that they communicate noble emotions with 
 irresistible power; his music puts us in love 
 with life ; and we can only love the best of life. 
 Even in that earlier poetry of his that seems 
 all melodious despair, it is really the thwarted 
 and troubled glory of life that he sings. The 
 music of Before the Beg-inning- of Years is 
 exultant, whatever the sense may be. In his 
 poetry, life, freed from all routine and irrele- 
 vance, is represented in music as a conflict of 
 vast significance between good and evil forces, 
 and the evil forces, like Milton's Satan, have 
 splendour and greatness. Even when Swin- 
 burne hates he never sneers ; and his invective, 
 however extreme, is like the shadow cast by a 
 bright light. What is it that we remember of 
 his two sonnets to the White Tsar ? Not what 
 he denounces, but what he glorifies ; not the 
 abuse, but the passage in which he tells the 
 Tsar to take heed lest his crownless head lie 
 low : — 
 
 By his of Spain who dared an English Queen 
 With half a world to hear.ten him for fight, 
 Till the wind gave his warriors and their might 
 To shipwreck and the corpse-encumbered sea. 
 E 65
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 No doubt he could hate, and exulted some- 
 times in expressing his hatred. But his 
 genius lay not in hatred, but in love ; and his 
 noblest poems are those which express love of 
 what is best worth loving. All greatness and 
 beauty, whether of nature or of man, fired him ; 
 he was like the legendary statue that burst 
 into music when touched by the rays of the 
 sun. In the sestet of his finest sonnet he 
 praised two leaders who seemed to him to 
 refuse the highest hopes of mankind, and 
 with this we will end instead of praising him 
 further : — 
 
 Honour not hate we give you, love not fear, 
 Last prophets of past kind, who fill the dome 
 
 Of great dead Gods with wrath and wail, nor hear 
 Time's word and man's : " Go honoured hence, 
 go home, 
 
 Night's childless children ; here your hour is done ; 
 
 Pass with the stars, and leave us with the sun." 
 
 66
 
 The Wonderful Visitor o <?^ ^o 
 
 MR. GOSSE was bom, and bred, to write 
 the life of Swinburne ; and it is a 
 piece of luck for the immediate reputation 
 of the poet. An official biography would have 
 made him seem uninteresting to all the young ; 
 they would have glanced at it, said " Just what 
 I thought," and read his poems no more. But 
 you cannot glance at this book without reading 
 it through ; and having read it, you will wish 
 to read the poems again. To treat Swinburne 
 in an official manner would be like breaking a 
 Bird of Paradise on the wheel ; and never for 
 a moment has Mr. Gosse attempted to do so. 
 There is a Swinburne legend which would have 
 been killed by an official biography, but Mr. 
 Gosse authenticates it for us ; he convinces us 
 that our most delightful dreams about the poet 
 were true, and that the truth is even better 
 than the dreams. Could a book full of so 
 much good fun have been written about any 
 other great poet ? Hogg came near it in his 
 
 67
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 fragment of a life of Shelley ; but the family 
 suppressed him, and throughout his book the 
 fun is marred by a sense of insecurity. Shelley 
 is always a tragic figure, tragic for others as 
 well as himself; but Swinburne's life is like 
 summer lightning, 
 
 I do not mean that Mr, Gosse makes him 
 seem futile or ridiculous. Love and admira- 
 tion are implied in everything he says ; but he 
 is not going to make the poet insipid ; his aim 
 is to give us his exact and exquisite quality, 
 which he does in a number of stories, a number 
 of delicate phrases, all carried on in the quiet 
 stream of his narrative. He does not criticize 
 the poems much, though what he says of them 
 is both just and amusing; but, after reading 
 his book, we shall understand them better and 
 enjoy them more. For he shows us the con- 
 nexion between the solemn, august part of the 
 poet and his childishness; he makes the two 
 one ; and until we see them as one we cannot 
 do him justice. 
 
 Swinburne was a wonderful visitor to this 
 earth, like Mr. Wells's angel ; he was like an 
 angel of Florentine fifteenth-century art, imp- 
 ish and beautiful, and the more beautiful 
 because impish. Every story about him is 
 in character, Uke the stories about Mozart ; he 
 
 68
 
 The Wonderful Visitor 
 
 ought himself to have been in The Magic Flute, 
 and to have played his tricks and sung his 
 divine songs in that paradise of music. He 
 was often absurd, and yet always in character, 
 with an absurdity which his friends loved 
 because it was his, for it was beautiful, like 
 a child's errors of speech. It makes one laugh, 
 but never with a sense of superiority over him ; 
 and it is also pathetic, for he was always losing 
 his way like a child in the world, and until 
 Watts-Dunton became his nurse there was no 
 one to look after him. Mr. Gosse expresses 
 the pathos of it in the most delicate way. He 
 tells us, for instance, of an evening in 1877, 
 when Swinburne was forty, but still a child. 
 He went to Swinburne's rooms to hear him read 
 the essay on Charlotte Bronte : — 
 
 Algernon was standing alone in the middle 
 of the floor, with one hand in the breast of his 
 coat and the other jerking at his side. He 
 had an arrangement of chairs, with plates and 
 glasses set on the table, as if for a party. He 
 looked like a conjuror who was waiting for his 
 audience. He referred vaguely to " the others," 
 and said that, while they delayed in coming, 
 he would read me a new poem he had just 
 finished. . . . The poem was very magnificent, 
 but rather difficult to follow, and very long. 
 It took some time to read ; and still no one 
 
 69
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 came. As the evening was slipping away I 
 asked him presently whether the reading of 
 C. Bronte should not begin. Whereupon he 
 answered, " Fm expecting Watts and Ned 
 Burne-Jones and Philip Marston, and — some 
 other men. I hope they'll come soon." We 
 waited a little while in silence, in the twilight, 
 and then Swinburne said, " I hope I didn't 
 forget to ask them." He then trotted or 
 glided into his bedroom, and what he referred 
 to there I don't know, but almost instantly he 
 came out and said cheerfully, " Ah ! I find I 
 didn't ask any of those men, so we'll begin at 
 once." After he had read long and with 
 amazing violence " he seemed quite exhausted, 
 and sank into a kind of dream into the corner 
 of his broad sofa, his tiny feet pressed tight 
 together, and I stole away." 
 
 Life was as dangerous to him as to a child, 
 and yet he passed through it, as he passed 
 through London traffic, though he seemed in 
 danger of being run over every moment. But 
 on one point the common legend about him 
 does him an injustice, like the common opinion 
 of his poetry ; it does injustice to his intellect. 
 He had, as Mr. Gosse says, great savoir-faire 
 and a very shrewd judgment of character. If 
 he had wished to be a man of the world he 
 miffht have been one. He could understand 
 whatever he wished to understand, like Shelley, 
 
 70
 
 The Wonderful Visitor 
 
 and he had more sympathy than Shelley. 
 No one has ever done justice to the subtlety 
 of his novel Love's Cross Currents \ and 
 even Mr. Gosse only mentions it by name. 
 But in it he shows a power, like that of Henry 
 James, to give us the very scent of character, a 
 power which he left undeveloped in his poetry. 
 He was also, unhke the minor poets who tried 
 to imitate him, a hard worker and a great 
 scholar. " He is," Ruskin said in 1866, 
 "simply one of the mightiest scholars of his 
 age in Europe." Further, as Mr, Gosse points 
 out, there is in Songs before Sunrise a 
 philosophic power beyond that of any other 
 poet of the time. But the music of these 
 poems is so loud that it drowns the thought 
 in them ; and every one said, and still says, 
 that he was merely a singer with a wonderful 
 organ. That belief was encouraged by his 
 impishness ; we expect a great poet to be 
 solemn, and Swinburne could be solemn only 
 with a child's insecurity ; at any moment he 
 would turn to the game of abusing those whom 
 he delighted to abuse, and the more fiercely 
 he did it the more it was a game to him. 
 
 All rage and bitterness were a game to him, 
 which he learnt from Victor Hugo. " From 
 his satirical poems," says Mr. Gosse, "he 
 
 71
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 adopted a certain attitude of being astride the 
 barricades of existence, shouting at the top of 
 his voice with a flambeau in his fist. It was 
 inconsistent with the dignity, gentleness, and 
 docility which were also natural to him." 
 Yes, it is a distressing fact about children 
 that they will incessantly shout. It -spoils the 
 music of their voices, and often it spoiled the 
 music of Swinburne's, and also drowned his 
 thought. Mr. Gosse tells us plainly that he 
 was never fit to live at liberty in London ; but 
 he had this great good fortune, and also merit, 
 that, whatever his "irregularities" when he 
 was there, he could always return home to his 
 family like a child that has hurt itself; and at 
 home he was a happy and peaceful child. In 
 1871 Henry Kingsley wrote, in a letter, of his 
 behaviour with his father and mother. "I 
 believe Algy is very eccentric in London, but 
 I never see him there. Here he is a perfectly 
 courteous little gentleman." So it was natural 
 to write of the divine poet and the man of 
 thirty-four ; his father said of him : " God has 
 endowed my son with genius, but He has not 
 vouchsafed to grant him self-control." One 
 can see that to his parents he was always a 
 child, and also that he was content to be a 
 child to them and to love them like a child ; 
 
 72
 
 The Wonderful Visitor 
 
 yet, when his father died, he wrote a poem 
 about him that will make his name immortal. 
 
 Mr. Shaw has said somewhere that Swin- 
 burne wrote about literature poetry almost as 
 good as other poets have written about life. 
 That seems a just condemnation of the poet 
 — until you read his best poetry. Then the 
 problem is — What was the nature of the 
 power which produced this poetry ? Mr. 
 Gosse's book helps us to solve it. We see 
 that Swinburne, whatever else he may have 
 been, was not one who exploited himself for 
 literary purposes. To talk of his marvellous 
 technical gifts as if they were separate from 
 his mind and character is to fall into a dan- 
 gerous error about him and about the nature 
 of art. Only a great poet has marvellous 
 technical gifts in poetry ; and a man can be 
 a great poet only with the whole of himself. 
 Swinburne did not, as critics have supposed, 
 experience life at two removes ; but hfe was 
 very much simplified to him, as it is to most 
 children. Like them, he believed always that 
 he could have his heaven here and now on 
 this earth ; and what was not heaven to him 
 was hell. His heaven here and now was 
 peopled with saints and angels, and his hell 
 with devils ; not devils that he really hated 
 
 73
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 or feared, but a gargoyle kind of devil, for 
 which he delighted to find invective. He 
 enjoyed them almost as much as his angels, 
 enjoyed telling them what he thought of 
 them, as a mediaeval sculptor enjoyed carving 
 gargoyles. He saw life as an incessant war 
 between them and his angels, in which the 
 angels always triumphed like Michael over the 
 dragon ; and he sang the songs of triumph. 
 
 Some of those songs, like other religious 
 exercises, are long and tiresome; they are 
 like the Athanasian Creed set to Handelian 
 music. But he could praise more magni- 
 ficently than any poet that has ever lived, 
 like a choir of Correggio's young-eyed cheru- 
 bim. To think of his gift for music as if it 
 were physical like a great voice is to be 
 lost in a false analogy ; his music was the 
 answer of his spirit to the universe, of a reality 
 in him to a reality outside him. There was 
 ritual in it, as if he were a young priest, an 
 Ion, of the universe; he waved his censer, 
 he made his obeisances, he raised his chant; 
 and there are times when we wish our poets 
 to be men talking, not priests chanting. For 
 Swinburne all life was a wonderful memory, 
 not a sudden surprising discovery. His heroes, 
 even while he stood face to face with them, 
 
 74
 
 The Wonderful Visitor 
 
 were legendary to him ; Mazzini was like 
 Harmodius, Victor Hugo like -^schylus ; the 
 past ordered the present for his mind ; he lived 
 not in time but in a — 
 
 Steadfast rest of all things firmly stayed 
 Upon the pillars of eternity ; 
 
 and his very impishness and naughtiness were 
 but a refusal to have any dealings with the 
 transitory and particular. The universal 
 alone existed for him ; and his is a poetry of 
 the universal, both in its themes and in its 
 method. It is all rehgious poetry as much as 
 the poetry of Crashaw ; the only difference 
 is in the subject-matter. He writes about 
 Mazzini as Crashaw writes about St. Theresa ; 
 and about the Republic as Crashaw writes 
 about the Name above every name, the Name 
 of Jesus. You may call either poet empty, 
 vague, artificial, if you will and are deaf to 
 their music ; but this music expresses a uni- 
 versal that cannot be expressed otherwise in 
 words, and one of which they were actually 
 aware in their own experience. They them- 
 selves remained young-eyed cherubim through 
 all the routine of life ; and if we will not listen 
 to their music, that is our loss. 
 Swinburne did not grow old like other men. 
 
 75
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 He merely became aware of the fact that he 
 needed a nurse, and retired into the safe 
 nursery that Watts-Dunton made for him at 
 Putney. VVatts-Dunton had the weaknesses 
 common to the best of nurses : he was over- 
 officious, over-watchful, over-eager to keep his 
 charge from playing with bad boys who might 
 lead him into mischief, and he tried to teach 
 him his own very domestic wisdom. This, too 
 often, Swinburne accepted like a good child, 
 and recanted his old admirations with the old 
 childish vehemence. Mr. Gosse, very naturally, 
 is a little impatient of this nursery tyranny ; 
 but it must have prolonged the poet's life, and 
 he was happy and healthy under it. " He 
 went on gliding over the commons of Wim- 
 bledon with the old noiseless regularity, but 
 it could hardly be said that he held a place 
 any longer in the ordinary world around him." 
 More than ever he lived on memories ; and his 
 later poetry seems all to be made out of the 
 memories of his youth. But we think that 
 Mr. Gosse, like every one else, is unjust to it. 
 It is not all the poetry of mere momentum and 
 habit. If the lines on John William Inchbold, 
 in the third series of Poems and Ballads^ had 
 appeared in the first, they would be famous ; 
 but the world had made up its mind that 
 
 76
 
 The Wonderful Visitor 
 
 Swinburne was only echoing himself, and it 
 listened to him no longer. Perhaps some 
 foohsh people will think that Mr. Gosse has 
 not been reverent enough to him ; but there 
 is in his book that reverence which does not 
 fear to tell the affectionate truth. 
 
 77
 
 Donne's Sermons <:> o <:> o» 
 
 THERE is a legend that Donne was the 
 greatest of English preachers, but even 
 those who read old books, even those who read 
 his poetry, do not read his sermons. Mr. 
 Pearsall Smith has made a selection from them 
 and he begins by telling us why they are unread. 
 There are very many of them, they are very 
 long ; and Donne had " the unhappy faculty of 
 developing to the utmost the faults of any 
 form of literary expression he adopted." The 
 worst fault of the sermon, as literature, is that 
 it is preaching. We make it a reproach against 
 writers when they preach, not merely because 
 preaching is out of place except in sermons, 
 but because in itself it is disagreeable. We 
 do not like a man who preaches, in the pulpit 
 or out of it ; for in the process he ceases to be 
 human — men are not born to preach to each 
 other — he loses the good faith of the artist, 
 he tells us not what he has to say, but what 
 
 78
 
 Donne's Sermons 
 
 he thinks we ought to hear. The convention 
 of sermons changes, but it is never a good one ; 
 it is always a giant's robe, awkwardly worn by 
 men as dwarfish as the rest of us. When he 
 enters the pulpit the priest must pretend to 
 be a prophet ; however humble he be by 
 nature, that pretence makes him speak with 
 alien jaws, louder than his wont, with a 
 solemnity not his and a conviction he has not 
 earned. Some few of us read sermons of to- 
 day because we are used to their convention 
 and hope they will do us good ; but we do not 
 read sermons of yesterday, or of the seven- 
 teenth century. As Mr. Pearsall Smith puts 
 it, they seem to belong to some remote 
 geological era of human thought. 
 
 But he has read Donne''s sermons more than 
 once, and he has found in them, like an 
 excavator among palaeolithic remains, frag- 
 ments of art, of eloquence, of passion. The 
 great poet was not lost in the preacher, but 
 transmuted ; Donne himself says, thinking no 
 doubt of his own case, that a voluptuous man, 
 turned to God, will " find plenty and delicious- 
 ness enough in him, to feed his soul, as with 
 marrow, and with fatness, as David expresses 
 it ; and so an angry and passionate man will 
 find zeal enough in the house of God to eat 
 
 79
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 him up." The example he gives is obsolete to 
 us, but it must have been apt enough to him. 
 
 Solomon, whose disposition was amorous, 
 and excessive in the love of women, when he 
 turn'd to God, departed not utterly from his 
 old phrase and language, but having put a 
 new, and a spiritual tincture, and form and 
 habit in all his thought, and words, he conveys 
 all his loving approaches and applications to 
 God, and all God's gracious answers to his 
 amorous soul, into songs, and Epithalamians, 
 and meditations upon contracts, and marriages 
 between God and his Church, and between 
 God and his soul. 
 
 We may smile at the notion that it was 
 a converted Solomon who sang the Song of 
 Solomon, but the converted Donne did con- 
 tinue to sing even in the pulpit ; he could not 
 be subdued to what he worked in ; and Mr. 
 Pearsall Smith has rescued these beauties and 
 made an anthology of them, saving us all the 
 pains that he has taken and we could never 
 have endured. 
 
 Donne is here one of the greatest of our 
 prose writers, in some things unequalled. The 
 sermons are not written as they were preached ; 
 he took no fully written manuscript into the 
 pulpit, Mr. Pearsall Smith tells us, but wrote 
 from memory afterwards, with many additions 
 
 So
 
 Donne's Sermons 
 
 and changes. Yet here we have the spoken 
 rather than the written word ; we can almost 
 hear the voice of the speaker, who thinks 
 aloud, and should be read aloud if all his 
 beauty is to be perceived. Words themselves 
 set him thinking and feeling ; the momentum 
 of his mind presses through them and is 
 increased by them — is increased also, even to 
 us now as we read, by the presence of the 
 listening congregation. Thay had their part, 
 as with all great speakers, in the making of 
 these sermons, with their eager silence, their 
 expectant spirits. As the plays of Shakespeare 
 were made for the theatre, so was this eloquence 
 made for the church ; and it is still quick with 
 that intercourse, not closet eloquence, but a 
 man speaking at one particular moment to 
 other men. If any speaker to-day would train 
 himself in eloquence, he could not do better 
 than to get some passages of Donne by heart ; 
 not to imitate them, but because they have 
 the rhythm of speech, mastering thought 
 natm'al to the speaker and at one with it. 
 Often, even in the greatest passages, the 
 thought is obsolete to us; but the passion, 
 even the idea, lives through its past intellectual 
 forms. Donne, for instance, as in a famous 
 poem of his, takes the Resurrection of the 
 F 8l
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 Body literally, almost ludicrously, but he 
 rushes through his literal details to a close 
 the more magnificent and surprising because 
 of them. 
 
 In what corner, in what ventricle of the 
 sea, lies all the jelly of a Body drowned in the 
 generall Jlood? What coheerence, what sym- 
 pathy, what dependence maintaines any rela- 
 tion, any' correspondence, between that arm 
 that was lost in Europe, and that leg that was 
 lost in Afrique or Asia, scores of years between ? 
 One humour of our dead body produces worms, 
 and those worms suck and exhaust aU other 
 humour, and then all dies, and all dries, and 
 molders into dust, and that dust is blowen 
 into the River, and that puddled water 
 tumbled into the sea, and that ebs and flows 
 in infinite revolutions, and still, still God 
 knows in what cabinet every seed-Pearle lies, 
 in what part of the world every grain of every 
 mans dust lies ; and, sibilat popidum s^ium, 
 (as his Prophet speaks in another case) he 
 whispers, he hisses, he beckens, for the bodies 
 of his Saints, and in the twinckling of an eye, 
 that body that was scattered over all the 
 elements, is sate down at the right hand of 
 God, in a glorious resurrection. 
 
 There is a poem by Gerard Hopkins, Of 
 the Comfort of the Resurrection, that seems 
 to remember this passage, even to use Donne's 
 method, though with another poet's freedom. 
 
 82
 
 Donne's Sermons 
 
 At least there is, with the same theme, the 
 same surprise in the close — 
 
 Flesh fade, and mortal trash 
 Fall to the residuary worm ; world's wildfire, leave 
 but ash. 
 
 In a flash, at a trumpet crash, 
 I am at once what Christ is, since He was what I 
 
 am, and 
 This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, 
 immortal diamond. 
 
 Is immortal diamond. 
 
 Donne, too, has Hopkins's trick of letting one 
 word call up another with its sound, a trick 
 that would be tiresome if we could not almost 
 hear him, in the silence of his congregation, 
 making music and sense of his echoes. 
 
 When it comes to this height, that the fever 
 is not in the humors, but in the spirits, that 
 mine enemy is not an imaginary enemy, fortune, 
 nor a transitory enemy, malice in great persons, 
 but a reall, and an irresistible, and an inexor- 
 able, and an everlasting enemy, the Lord of 
 Hosts himselfe, the Almighty God himselfe, 
 the Almighty God himselfe onley knows the 
 waight of this affliction, and except hee put in 
 that pondus glor'iae, that exceeding waight of 
 an eternal glory, with his owne hand into the 
 other scale, we are waighed downe, we are 
 swallowed up, irreparably, irrevocably, irre- 
 mediably. 
 
 83
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 There are passages of confession, as well as 
 ecstasy, that remind us of Augustine — 
 
 I throwe myselfe downe in my Chamber, 
 and I call in, and invite God, and his Angels 
 thither, and when they are there, I neglect 
 God and his Angels for the noise of a Flie, 
 for the ratling of a Coach, for the whining of 
 a doore ; I take on in the same posture of 
 praying ; Eyes lifted up ; knees bowed downe ; 
 as though I prayed to God; and, if God or 
 his Angels should ask me, when I thought 
 last of God in that prayer, I cannot tell. 
 Sometimes I finde that I had forgot what I 
 was about, but when I began to forget it, I 
 cannot tell. 
 
 This honesty makes him humane even in 
 his theology : " Never propose to thyself such 
 a God, as thou wert not bound to imitate ; 
 thou mistakest God, if thou make him to be 
 any such thing, or make him to do any such 
 thing, as thou in thy proportions shouldst not 
 do." The magnanimous man, such as Donne 
 was, remains magnanimous even in his ortho- 
 doxy ; he does indeed love his God and would 
 not show Him unlovable. Nor, being a poet, 
 would he lower men's spirits from his vantage- 
 ground in the pulpit. " David proposes to 
 himself, that he would sing of mercy, and of 
 fudgement ; but it is of mercy first ; and not of 
 
 84
 
 Donne's Sermons 
 
 judgement at all otherwise than it will come 
 into a song." It was the artist in him that 
 freed him from the pedantries of imprecation ; 
 he knew they were ugly and that God does 
 not love ugliness. Then, in a long passage, 
 too long to be all quoted but short enough 
 when read, he exalts his priesthood not in a 
 vain professional pride but for a pretty, un- 
 expected reason. 
 
 What a Coronation is our taking of orders, 
 by which God makes us a Royall Priesthood. 
 And what an inthroriization is the coming up 
 into a pulpit, where God invests His servants 
 with His ordinance, as with a cloud, and then 
 presses that cloud with a Vae si non, woe be 
 unto thee, if thou doe not preach, and then 
 enables him to preach peace, mercy, consolation 
 to the whole congregation. That God should 
 appeare in a Cloud, upon the Mercy Seat, as 
 He promises Moses He will doe, that from so 
 poore a man as stands here, wrapped up in 
 clouds of infirmity, and in clouds of iniquity, 
 God should drop raine, poure down His dew, 
 and sweeten that dew with His honey, and 
 crust that honeyed dew into Manna, and 
 multiply that Manna into Goniers, and fill 
 those Gomers every day, and give every 
 particular man his Gomer, give every soule in 
 the congregation, consolation by me ; — 
 
 So it continues in a manner strange to us 
 
 85
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 now ; but we know he is speaking the truth 
 about himself, which a man must do if he is to 
 persuade us that he speaks truth about God. 
 
 It is a misfortune that Donne never, except 
 in a few short poems, found a form into which 
 he could pour all his riches without any dross 
 of pedantry. Mr. Pearsall Smith has made 
 those extracts for us, because he was forced to 
 make them for himself. Donne never was able 
 to separate his fire from his smoke; and, the 
 more you read him, the more you conjecture 
 that he did not make the best of his life either. 
 The God in him was frightened by the beast, 
 that animal part of him which he cowed, but 
 never transmuted utterly ; it seems to growl 
 in the pedantries of his prose, as earlier in the 
 ugly fancies of his verse. He could not attain 
 to the happy voluptuousness of one who sees 
 heaven in all beauty ; for him there was always 
 the sting of lust and the curse of mortality in 
 the flesh. So he longs always and never 
 enjoys; longs for the unchanging, since change 
 to him is full of danger; but there is the 
 beauty of eternity itself in his longing for it, 
 and here is prose that can be put beside the 
 verse of Vaughan — 
 
 A day that hath no pridie or postridie, 
 yesterday doth not usher it in, nor to-morrow 
 
 86
 
 Donne's Sermons 
 
 shall not drive it out. Methusalem^ with all 
 his hundreds of yeares, was but a Mushrome of 
 a night's growth to this day. And all the foure 
 Monarchies, with all their thousands of yeares, 
 And all the powerfull Kings, and all the 
 beautifull Queenes of this world, were but as a 
 bed of flowers, some gathered at six, some at 
 seaven, some at eight. All in one morning, in 
 respect of this Day. In all the two thousand 
 yeares of Nature, before the Law given by 
 Moses, and the two thousand yeares of Law, 
 before the Gospel given by Christ, and the two 
 thousand yeares of Grace, which are running 
 now, (of which last houre we have heard three 
 quarters strike, more than fifteen hundred of 
 this last two thousand spent) In all his six 
 thousand, and in all those, which God may be 
 pleased to adde, Li domo patris. In this House 
 of his Fathers, there was never heard quarter 
 clock to strike, never seen minute glasse to turn. 
 
 Donne loved joy and longed for it ; unlike 
 many preachers, he preached it ; rejoicing, he 
 says, is the serenity of Heaven — 
 
 And he that hath not this joy here, lacks 
 one of the best pieces of his evidence for the 
 joyes of Heaven ; and hath neglected or refused 
 that Earnest by which God uses to bind his 
 bargaine, that true joy in this world shall flow 
 into the joy of Heaven as a river flows into the 
 sea. 
 
 But here, too, and always, his beauty is the 
 
 87
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 beauty of longing ; the voice almost breaks in 
 its song ; he sows in tears, but he has not 
 yet reaped in joy. He loved " things extreme 
 and scattering bright," like the sun-lit rim of 
 a thunder-cloud ; his beauty, like Dostoevsky's, 
 is wrung by faith out of anguish ; and we can 
 understand how men crowded to witness that 
 passion, not 5,s to a show, but that they might 
 share a life more intense, if more suffering, than 
 their own. For Donne must have lived in his 
 sermons as a musician in his music ; men came 
 to see a wind shaken by the wind, by the wind 
 from an unknown country ; they came to hear 
 words telling more than words can, and even 
 now they tell it to us. As Mr. Pearsall Smith 
 says — 
 
 It sometimes seems as if he were using time- 
 honoured phrases of the accepted faith, its hope 
 of Heaven, and its terror of the grave, to 
 express a vision of his own — a vision of life and 
 death, of evil and hon'or and ecstacy — very 
 different from that of other preachers ; and we 
 are troubled as well as fascinated by the 
 strange music which he blows through the 
 sacred trumpets. 
 
 Yes, we are troubled, and it is a strange music, 
 in church, because other divines preach content- 
 ment, but Donne never. They see the universe 
 
 88
 
 Donne's Sermons 
 
 as a hierarchy, with every one, from God 
 through the angels and saints and bishops and 
 priests and deacons, down to the beggar, in 
 his proper place. But for Donne, the poet, 
 the artist, as for Christ Himself, humanity 
 makes all men equal in desire for that Godhead 
 and eternity and paradise which it is the aim 
 of all to achieve. Platitudes about the in- 
 sufficiency of this life were real to him ; he 
 valued in it only its hints and whispers of 
 another. So he remained a wild poet like 
 Poe even when he tried to speak the language 
 of a dean ; like Poe's, his mind was haunted 
 with the thought of worms and corruption — 
 " the conqueror worm " might be his phrase — 
 because of his passion for an unchanging, 
 untroubled eternity. In his last sermon he 
 uses words to express the indignity of decay 
 with an iteration almost mad : — 
 
 We must all pass this posthtime death, this 
 death after death, nay this death after buriall, 
 this dissolution after dissolution, this death of 
 corruption and putj'efactioii, of vermicidation 
 and incineration, of dissolution and dispersion 
 in andyrom the ^ave, when these bodies that 
 have been the children of royall parents, and 
 the parents oj royall children, must say with 
 Job, Corruption, thou art myjatlier, and to the 
 Worm, thou art my mother and my sister. 
 
 89
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 And, he ends, that we shall be — 
 
 mingled with the dust of every highway, and 
 of every dung-hill, and swallowed in every puddle 
 and pond. This is the most inglorious and con- 
 temptible vilification^ the most deadly and 
 peremptory nidlijication of man that we can 
 consider. 
 
 Like Diirer's Melancolia, this is full of re- 
 volt and anguished disappointment after the 
 glorification of man by the Renaissance. 
 Raphael eternized the life of man here and now 
 in his School at Athens ; he painted triumphant 
 minds thinking, untroubled, for ever. Diirer 
 showed how thinking troubles the mind of 
 man to madness, and Donne how these beauti- 
 ful forms of the flesh must be wasted in 
 corruption. He could never " forget to wonder 
 that men are born to die " ; he was half a 
 Pagan, with a death''s-head always at his feast, 
 even at his feast of eloquence ; but the other 
 half of him staked all on the faith that his 
 desires were true, that the will of God was his 
 own deep, permanent will, and the bounty of 
 God as infinite as his own expectation : — 
 
 He brought light out of darknesse, not out of 
 a lesser light ; he can bring thy Summer out of 
 Winter, though thou have no Spring ; though 
 in the wayes of fortune, or understanding or 
 conscience, thou have been benighted till now, 
 
 90
 
 Donne's Sermons 
 
 wintred and frozen, clouded and eclypsed, 
 damped and benummed, smothered and stupified 
 till now, now God comes to thee, not as in the 
 dawning of the day, not as Ih the bud of the 
 spring, but as the Sun at noon to illustrate all 
 shadowes, as the sheaves in harvest to fill all 
 penuries, all occasions invite his mercies, and 
 all times are his seasons. 
 
 91
 
 The Brontes 
 
 ■^> 
 
 THE writings of the Brontes tempt one 
 to continual curiosity about their lives. 
 Villette and Wuthering Heights are wonderful 
 books, to be read for their own sakes ; but they 
 are also events in a still more wonderful story, 
 the story of the Brontes. Everything written by 
 Charlotte seems to have some reference to her 
 life, to things which actually happened to her 
 and not merely to the inner experience of her 
 mind. So, when with this curiosity aroused 
 by her own words we read what is known 
 about her and discover the strangeness of her 
 life, we are tempted to find too much of her 
 actual experience in her novels. Miss Sinclair 
 seems to have written her Three Brontes to 
 warn us against this temptation. It is mainly 
 a commentary upon other books and contro- 
 versial throughout. We agree with much of 
 it, but we think that she would have done 
 better if she had forgotten the other books. 
 
 92
 
 The Brontes 
 
 She is too protestant and above all too anxious 
 to prove that Charlotte was not a minx on the 
 look out for a husband. One might as well 
 defend St. Francis of Assisi against the charge 
 of other- worldliness. Minxes may have their 
 merits, but they live on a different level from 
 Charlotte Bronte. They have designs on 
 people ; she had a desire for a certain state 
 of being to which love was necessary, and for 
 that reason she desired love. Miss Sinclair, 
 in her anxiety to prove that she was no minx, 
 overlooks this desire of hers, and her Charlotte 
 is too negative. Indeed, in her enthusiasm for 
 Emily she sometimes writes of Charlotte like 
 an enemy. She speaks of Emily's superb 
 * attitude to life, her detachment from the 
 stream of circumstance, and then tells us that 
 " Charlotte was at moments pitifully immersed 
 in the stream of circumstance, pitifully de- 
 pendent on the material event." We are not 
 sure what she means, but we are sure that 
 Charlotte was never anything pitifully. And 
 here is a worse passage still : — 
 
 She had loved life, not as Emily loved it, 
 like an equal, with power over it and pride 
 and an unearthly understanding, virgin and 
 unafraid. There was something slightly sub- 
 servient, consciously inferior, in Charlotte's 
 attitude to life. She had loved it secretly, 
 
 93
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 with a sort of shame, with a corroding passion 
 and increduHty and despair. Such natures are 
 not seldom victims of the power they would 
 propitiate. It killed her in her effort to bring 
 forth life. 
 
 As if there were any possible connexion 
 between Charlotte's physical incapacity to bear 
 a child and her philosophy or lack of it. 
 "With this kind of reasoning we might as well 
 condemn Wuthering Heights because Emily 
 died of comsumption and say that her stoicism 
 was only the armour of a weakling. When 
 once writers begin to talk about life as if it 
 were a person they are sure to talk about 
 human beings as if they were machines. The 
 best part of Miss Sinclair's book is about Emily, 
 and especially about her poems. She says 
 some good things about Charlotte, but is in- 
 clined to make her a foil to Emily, a proceed- 
 ing which Emily would have resented as much 
 as anyone. 
 
 We have said that Charlotte had a desire 
 for a certain state of being to which love was 
 necessary. But Miss Sinclair insists rightly 
 that she was not a sentimentalist. Indeed, if 
 Charlotte was, or promised to be, the greatest 
 English novelist of her time, it is because, 
 besides being more strongly moved by experi- 
 
 94
 
 The Brontes 
 
 ence than her rivals, she is free from that 
 vice of sentimentality which weakened them. 
 Dickens and Thackeray, with all their wider 
 and larger experience, were apt to distort it 
 for their own emotional pleasure or for the 
 emotional pleasure of their readers. Charlotte 
 Bronte is sometimes absurd from inexperience, 
 but she never did that. She made up her 
 mind early that life was hard, and that she 
 could get from it very little of what she 
 desired. She told herself that she was a plain 
 woman who had to work for her living, and 
 that her desires were not likely to alter the 
 nature of the Universe. This, we suppose, 
 is what Miss Sinclair means when she says 
 that there was something slightly subservient 
 and consciously inferior in her attitude to- 
 wards life. Her mistake comes from thinking 
 of life as a person. Towards real persons, 
 towards men and women, Charlotte had the 
 pride of Lucifer; and it was pride that kept 
 her from being angry with things because they 
 were not favourable to her desires. She was 
 not subservient to life ; but she would not lose 
 her temper with it any more than she would 
 lose her temper with a baby. When she 
 moralizes, as she sometimes does, in a Sunday- 
 school manner, it is not because such moraliz- 
 
 95
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 ing satisfies any part of her mind, but because 
 she enjoys telhng herself unpleasant facts. 
 She never pretends to like the hardness of life 
 or to think it just or reasonable; she only 
 insists that it is hard and that it is no use to 
 pretend otherwise. 
 
 And it is the same with people. In Vilktte 
 she says of PauHna : " I liked her. It is not 
 a declaration I have often made concerning 
 my acquaintance in the course of this book; 
 the reader will bear with it for once." Here 
 there is a conscious revolt against what seemed 
 to her the ordinary misrepresentations of 
 fiction. She did not believe that there was as 
 much affection in real life or as much reason 
 for it as novels usually pretend. At any rate, 
 people in her position did not find the world 
 amiable, and she was not going to make any 
 pretence of loving it so as to contrive a pretty 
 story. The curious thing is that her proud 
 submission to the hardness of life is more 
 determined in Villette, written after the success 
 of Jane Eyre, than in Jane Eyre itself. At 
 the end of Jane Eyre she says : " 1 know 
 what it is to live entirely for and with what I 
 love best on earth. I hold myself supremely 
 blest — blest beyond what language can express ; 
 because I am my husband's life as fully as he 
 
 96
 
 The Brontes 
 
 is mine." Rochester even recovered the sight 
 of one eye and acknowledged that God had 
 tempered judgment with mercy. In Villette 
 there is neither mercy nor judgment but 
 the chance of a storm, the issue of which 
 the reader can take to be what he chooses. 
 " Leave sunny imaginations hope," says the 
 writer, and we know that her own imagination 
 is not sunny. " Madame Beck prospered all 
 the days of her life; so did Pere Silas. 
 Madame Walravens fulfilled her ninetieth 
 year before she died." There is a happy end- 
 ing for you if you want it, thrown like a bone 
 to a dog. CJiarlotte Bronte does not believe 
 that happiness comes to those who know best 
 what happiness might be. She does not for a 
 moment believe that Lucy Snowe could have 
 had with Doctor John that kind of happiness 
 which the Jane Eyre of the past had enjoyed 
 with Rochester. Doctor John throughout 
 Villette is treated as a day-dream. If he 
 begins to be the hero of the book, it is only 
 to show that heroes are not for Lucy Snowe, 
 however much she may have dreamed of them. 
 And soon she seems to console herself with 
 the thought that heroes are heroes only to 
 heroines. That, I think, is the real reason 
 why Doctor John is a failure, and not because, 
 G 97
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 as Miss Sinclair says, Charlotte is too con- 
 sciously preoccupied with him. She had never 
 met a man who seemed to her like the hero of 
 a novel, and when she tried to draw one she 
 was hampered by scepticism. She keeps telling 
 herself that Doctor John is ordinary, though 
 good. He would no doubt seem a hero to a 
 woman who fell in love with him ; but Lucy 
 Snowe, like her creator, was not the woman to 
 indulge herself in a hopeless passion. Through- 
 out Villette Charlotte revolts against Doctor 
 John and against the convention that would 
 make him the chief character in it. She is for 
 the men and women who do not get happiness 
 so easily ; and they triumph in her masterpiece, 
 not materially, but because their griefs and 
 joys interest us more than any mechanically 
 contrived happiness of heroes and heroines. 
 
 But though Lucy Snowe is plain and quiet, 
 and though M. Emanuel can make himself 
 ridiculous, they both have the genius of their 
 creator. Charlotte Bronte, though she de- 
 spised the heroes and heroines of circumstance, 
 worshipped genius, and was, perhaps, the only 
 English novelist who could represent it, not by 
 telling us about the wonders it achieves, but 
 by revealing its mind to us. Lucy Snowe and 
 Paul Emanuel do no wonders; but in them 
 
 98
 
 The Brontes 
 
 she shows us genius without its works ; and in 
 her description of Rachel she no longer tries 
 to conceal her worship. Rachel did not know 
 that the one woman in Europe of a genius 
 equal to her own, and greater, was watching 
 her ; and that woman an English Miss whom 
 none of her own admirers would have looked 
 at twice, a little Puritan who knew nothing of 
 the world except by intuition, who hated the 
 Pope, despised foreigners, and was ready to 
 believe all actresses wicked. She had been 
 told that Rachel was not good, she says — 
 
 Wicked, perhaps, she is, but also she is 
 strong ; and her strength has conquered beauty, 
 has overcome grace, and bound both at her 
 side, captives peerlessly fair, and docile as 
 fair. . . . Fallen, insurgent, banished, she 
 remembers the heaven where she rebelled. 
 Heaven's light, following her exile, pierces its 
 confines, and discloses its forlorn remoteness. 
 
 And then at the end, in her delight of under- 
 standing another genius with her own, she for- 
 gets all about the rumoured wickedness : — 
 
 I had seen acting before, but never anything 
 like this — never anything which astonished 
 Hope and hushed Desire; which outstripped 
 Impulse and paled Conception ; which, instead 
 of merely irritating imagination with the 
 thought of what might be done, at the same 
 
 99
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 time fevering the nerves because it was not 
 done, disclosed power like a deep, swollen 
 winter river thundering in cataract, and bear- 
 ing the soul, like a leaf, on the steep and steely 
 sweep of its descent. 
 
 Like another Puritan, she is carried away by 
 her Lucifer and reveals herself and her own 
 rebellion in her description of Rachers. It 
 was not merely common inadequate art but 
 common inadequate life also which irritated 
 her imagination with the thought of what 
 might be done, at the same time fevering the 
 nerves because it was not done ; and in all her 
 books there is the conflict between her desires 
 and her determination not to mistake reality. 
 She had those thoughts which wander through 
 eternity ; she had her own conception of a 
 heaven which she would not give up for any 
 conventional idea of happiness and by which 
 she measured all earthly things and people. 
 But what made her and her art remarkable 
 was her determination not to lose herself in 
 dreams of that heaven, not to exchange ugly 
 truth for any pretty illusion. We wonder 
 that she should have come out of that 
 Yorkshire parsonage, as if she wrote by a 
 miracle about things she had never seen or 
 known. But it was the contrast between her 
 
 I GO
 
 The Brontes 
 
 real life and what she desired that made her 
 art. Everything good in it is taken from 
 external or internal experience ; there is the 
 dark foil of reality to all her dreams. She is 
 the most lyrical of our novelists, because every- 
 thing that happened to her moved her to 
 emotion through the contrast between what 
 was and what she desired. The plot is always 
 made by the adventures of her own soul, and 
 they are stranger than any adventures of 
 romantic heroes in outlandish countries. 
 When first Jane Eyre appeared there was 
 resentment both of men and of women that a 
 woman should speak so frankly of the adven- 
 tures of her soul. The world was used to a 
 Rachel telling everything about herself and 
 women on the stage ; it was not used to an 
 English governess, the daughter of a country 
 parson, making the same revelations with more 
 frankness and greater power. It was lawful 
 for a woman to describe how women acted and 
 spoke when in love with men ; it was not 
 lawful for her to expose the mind of a woman 
 who was in love with love itself. We enjoy the 
 dreams of young men about love, especially 
 in lyrical poetry ; but here was a girl who, 
 with primeval innocence, not merely expressed 
 her dreams in poetry but represented them in 
 
 lOI
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 fiction, showing the woman who dreamed them 
 so vividly that every one knew she was real. 
 Hence the Quarterly reviewer, he or she, was 
 determined to believe either that she was not 
 real or that she was not a fair specimen of her 
 kind ; a man must have written the book, or, 
 if not a man, a woman who, for some reason, 
 had long forfeited the society of her own sex. 
 
 That reviewer knew nothing of the other 
 side of Charlotte Bronte, the bravery that 
 went with her innocence ; and he or she was as 
 far out as the reviewer who conjectured that 
 In Memoriam must have been written by 
 the widow of a military man. Charlotte 
 Bronte remarks that when the world was 
 younger and haler than now moral trials were 
 a deeper mystery still. " Perhaps in all the 
 land of Israel there was but one Saul — certainly 
 but one David to soothe or comprehend him." 
 So when she wrote women were a deeper 
 mystery even than they are now ; the idea 
 that they should tell the secrets of their own 
 hearts, or had any secrets to tell, had not 
 existed, perhaps, since the time of Sappho. 
 Perhaps in the whole of England there was 
 but one Charlotte Bronte, certainly but one 
 Emily to comprehend her. It was the Bronte 
 family that made each of them write with that 
 
 1 02
 
 The Brontes 
 
 wonderful frankness and innocence. There 
 were two girls, if not three, who knew the 
 secrets of each other's hearts and knew where 
 their own were safe from misunderstanding. 
 Their dreadful home was their fortress against 
 the world, to which they returned to renew 
 their strength in communion with each other. 
 For Emily it was the world; and everything 
 outside was a nightmare of unreality. In 
 Wutherin^ Heights we seem to see her mind 
 lost in that nightmare and fighting with 
 it, but never losing courage. So she fought 
 with death itself; and for Charlotte the 
 memory of her death and the others made the 
 outside world always lonely and inhospitable. 
 "The spirit was inexorable to the flesh," she 
 said of Emily after she was dead. She herself 
 could make terms with the world, but they 
 were her own terms. She conquered it, and 
 cared so little for her conquest that she 
 manned her father's curate, not having found 
 either Rochester or Paul Emanuel in real life. 
 We must not suppose that she took him 
 because she could find no one better. That 
 would be a gross misunderstanding. She loved 
 him as much as she could love any reality ; but 
 it was only by the conquest of herself that she 
 was able to love an ordinary man at all. 
 
 103
 
 Dostoevsky -o o o o o 
 
 THE novels of Dostoevsky discover a 
 strange world to us, in which people talk 
 and act like no one that we have ever met, 
 yet we do not read them because we wish to 
 hear about these strange Russian people, 
 so unlike ourselves. Rather we read them 
 because they remind us of what we had for- 
 gotten about ourselves, as a scent may suddenly 
 remind us of some place or scene not re- 
 membered since childhood. And as we have 
 no doubt about the truth of the memories 
 recalled by a scent, so we have none about 
 Dostoevsky's truth. It is strange like those 
 memories of childhood, but only because it has 
 been so long sleeping in our minds. He has 
 no need to prove it ; he presents it for our 
 recognition, and we recognize it at once, how- 
 ever contrary it may be to all that we are 
 accustomed to believe about ourselves. 
 
 The strangeness of Dostoevsky's novels lies 
 in his method, which is unlike that of other 
 novelists because his interest is different from 
 theirs. The novel of pure plot is all concerned 
 
 104
 
 Dostoevsky 
 
 with success or failure ; the hero has some task 
 to perform, and we read to discover whether 
 he succeeds in performing it. But even in 
 novels where character is more considered it is 
 still the interest of failure and success which 
 usually makes the plot. The hero, for instance, 
 falls in love, and the plot forms round this 
 love ; or he is mamed, and there is a suspense 
 about his happiness or unhappiness. But in 
 the greatest of Dostoevsky 's books, such as 
 The Brothers Karamazov or The Idiot, the 
 interest is not in the happiness or un- 
 happiness of the hero ; for to Dostoevsky 
 happiness and unhappiness are external things, , 
 and he is not concerned even with this kind of 
 failure or success. He has so firm a belief in 
 the existence of the soul, and with it a faith so 
 strong in the order of the universe, that he 
 applies no final tests whatever to this life. 
 Plot with most novelists is an effort to make 
 life seem more conclusive than it is ; and that 
 is one of the reasons why we like a firm plot in 
 a novel. With its tests and judgments and 
 results it produces an illusion of certainty 
 agreeable to our weakness of faith ; but 
 Dostoevsky needs no illusion of certainty, and 
 gives none. He had a faith independent of 
 happiness and even of the state of his own 
 
 105
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 soul. Life had poured unhappiness upon him 
 so that he knew the worst of it from his own 
 experience ; yet we can tell from his books 
 that he knew also a peace of thought compared 
 with which his own miseries were unreal to 
 him. In that he differs from Tolstoy, who saw 
 this peace of thought in the distance and could 
 not reach it. Tolstoy therefore conceived of 
 life as an inevitable discord between will and 
 conviction, and tried to impose the impossible 
 on mankind as he tried to impose it upon 
 himself, judging them with the severity of his 
 self-judgments. His books are full of his own 
 pursuit of certainty and his own half-failure 
 and half-success. He still makes happiness the 
 test, even though he knows that the noblest 
 of men cannot attain to it ; for his own un- 
 happiness was caused by the conflict in his 
 mind between will and conviction. But in 
 Dostoevsky this conflict had ceased. He was 
 not happy, but he was not torn by the desire 
 for happiness ; nor did he test his own soul or 
 the souls of others by their happiness. His 
 faith in the soul was so great that he saw 
 it independent of circumstance, almost in- 
 dependent of its own manifestations in action. 
 For in these manifestations there is always the 
 alloy of circumstance, of the passions of the 
 
 1 06
 
 Dostoevsky 
 
 flesh, or of good or evil fortune ; and he tried 
 to see the soul free of this. He did not judge 
 men by the diversities which outward things 
 seem to impose on them ; for him the soul was 
 more real than all these diversities, and they 
 only interested him for their power of revealing 
 or obscuring it. Therefore his object in his 
 novels is to reveal the soul, not to pass any 
 judgments upon men nor to tell us how they 
 fare in this world; and this object makes his 
 peculiar method. He does not try to show us 
 souls free from their bodies or from circum- 
 stance, for to do that would be contrary to 
 his own experience and his own faith. Rather 
 he shows them tormented and mistranslated, 
 even to themselves, but in such a way that we 
 see the reality beyond the torments and the 
 mistranslations. His characters drift together 
 and fall into long wayward conversations that 
 have nothing to do with any events in the 
 book. They quarrel about nothing ; they have 
 no sense of shame ; they behave intolerably, so 
 that we know we should hate them in real 
 life. But, as we read, we do not hate them, 
 for we recognize ourselves — not indeed in their 
 words and behaviour, but in what they reveal 
 through these. They have an extreme frank- 
 ness which may be in the Russian character 
 
 107
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 but which is also part of Dostoevsky's method, 
 for the characters of other Russian novelists 
 are not so frank as his. He makes them talk 
 and act so as to reveal themselves, and for 
 no other purpose whatever. Yet they reveal 
 themselves unconsciously, and their frankness, \ 
 though surprising, is not incredible. 
 
 But we, accustomed to novels concerned with 
 failure and success, and with plots formed upon 
 that concern, are bewildered by Dostoevsky"'s 
 method ; and even he is a little bewildered by 
 it. He never quite learned how to tell his 
 own kind of story, a story in which all out- 
 ward events are subordinate to the changes 
 and manifestations of the soul. Even in The 
 Brothers Karamazov there is a plot, made out 
 of the murder of old Karamazov, which seems 
 to be imposed upon the real interest of the 
 book as the unintelligible plot of Little 
 Dorrit is imposed upon the real interest of 
 that masterpiece. And in The Idiot events 
 are so causeless and have so little effect that 
 we cannot remember them. The best plan is 
 not to try to remember them, for they matter 
 very little ; the book is about the souls of 
 men and women, and where the construction 
 is clumsy it is only because Dostoevsky is 
 impatient to tell us what he has to tell. 
 
 io8
 
 Dostoevsky 
 
 Those who believe that the soul is only an 
 illusion — and there are many who believe this 
 without knowing it — will be surprised to find 
 how much truth Dostoevsky has discovered 
 through his error. Whether his faith was 
 right or wrong, it certainly served him well 
 as a novelist, and so did his experience. No 
 modern writer has been so well acquainted 
 with evil and misery as he was. Other novelists 
 write about them as moving exceptions in life ; 
 he wrote about them because, in his experience, 
 they were the rule. Other novelists write 
 about them because they have a quarrel with 
 life or with society, or with particular institu- 
 tions ; but he has no quarrel with anything ; 
 there is neither hatred in him, nor righteous 
 indignation, nor despair. He had suffered from 
 Government as much as any man in the world, 
 yet he never saw it as a hideous abstraction, and 
 its crimes and errors were for him only the 
 crimes and errors of men like himself. 
 
 We hate men when they seem no longer men 
 to us, when we see nothing in them but 
 tendencies which we abhor ; and a novelist 
 who expresses his hatred of tendencies in his 
 characters deprives them of life and makes 
 them uninteresting to all except those who 
 share his hatred. Even Tolstoy makes some 
 
 109
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 of his characters lifeless through hatred ; but 
 Dostoevsky hates no one, for behind every 
 tendency he looks for the soul, and the 
 tendency only interests him because of the 
 soul that is concealed or betrayed by it. 
 Thus his wicked people, and they abound, are 
 never introduced into his books either to 
 gratify his hatred of them or to make a plot 
 with their wickedness. He is as much con- 
 cerned with their souls as with the souls of his 
 saints, Alyosha and Prince Myshkin. lago 
 seems to be drawn from life, but only from 
 external observation ; we never feel that 
 Shakespeare has been lago himself, or has 
 deduced him from possibilities in himself. 
 But Dostoevsky 's worst characters are like 
 Hamlet. He knows things about them that 
 he could only know about himself, and they 
 live through his sympathy, not merely through 
 his observation. He makes no division of men 
 into sheep and goats — not even that subtle 
 division, common in the best novels, by which 
 the sheep are more real than the goats. For 
 I him all men have more likeness to each other 
 j than unlikeness, for they all have souls; and 
 because he is always aware of the soul in them 
 he has a Christian sense of their equality. It 
 is not merely rich and poor or clever or stupid 
 
 no
 
 Dostoevsky 
 
 that are equal to him, but even good and bad. 
 He treats the drunkard I.ebedyev with respect, 
 and, though his books contain characters as 
 absurd as any in Dickens, he does not intro- 
 duce them, like Dickens, to make fun of them, 
 but because he is interested in the manner 
 in which their absurdities mistranslate them. 
 Nor is the soul made different for him by sex, 
 for that is only a difference of the body. So he j 
 does not insist on femininity in his women ; he 
 knows them, but he knows them as human 
 beings like men ; and he is interested in sexual 
 facts not as they affect his own passions but 
 as they affect the soul. He, like his hero 
 Myshkin, was an epileptic, and what he tells 
 us of Myshkin's attitude towards women may 
 have been true of himself. But if that is so, 
 his own lack of appetite, like the deafness of 
 Beethoven, made his art more profound and 
 spiritual ; he makes no appeal to the passions 
 of his readers, as Beethoven in his later works 
 makes none to the mere sense of sound. 
 
 He was an artist purified by suffering as 
 saints are purified by it; for through it he 
 attained to that complete disinterestedness 
 which is as necessary to the artist as to the 
 saint. Whenever a man sees people and 
 things in relation only to his own personal 
 
 III
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 j wants and appetites he cannot use them as 
 I subject-matter for art. Dostoevsky learnt to 
 free everything and everybody from this rela- 
 tion more completely, perhaps, than any writer 
 known to us. Not even vanity or fear, nor 
 any theory begotten of them, perverted his 
 view of human life. In his art at any rate 
 he achieved that complete liberation which is 
 aimed at by the wisdom of the East ; and his 
 heroes exhibit it in their conduct. Myshkin 
 would be a man of no account in our world, 
 but Christ might have chosen him for one of 
 his Apostles ; any Western novelist, drawing 
 such a character, would have made him unreal 
 by insisting upon his goodness and by display- 
 ing it only in external actions, as saints in most 
 European pictures are to be recognized only by 
 a halo and a look of silly sanctity. We fail 
 with such characters because we should not 
 recognize them if we met them in real life, and 
 because we do not even wish to be like them 
 ourselves. They represent an ideal imposed on 
 us long ago from the East, and now only 
 faintly and conventionally remembered. We 
 test everybody by some kind of success in this 
 life, even if it be only the success of a just self- 
 , satisfaction. But Myshkin has not even that ; 
 he is unconscious of his own goodness, and of 
 
 112
 
 Dostoevsky 
 
 the badness of other men. People who meet 
 him are impatient with him and call him " the 
 idiot " because he seems to be purposeless and 
 defenceless ; but we do not feel that the 
 novelist has afflicted them with incredible 
 blindness, for we know, as we read, that we too 
 should call Myshkin an idiot if we met him. 
 His understanding has never been trained by 
 competition or defence, but that is the reason 
 why now and then it surprises every one by its 
 profundity ; for he understands men's minds 
 because, like Dostoevsky himself, he does not 
 see them in relation to his own wants, and 
 because his disinterestedness makes them put 
 off all disguise before him. 
 
 " Dear Prince," some one says to him, " it's 
 not easy to reach paradise on earth ; but you 
 reckon on finding it. Paradise is a difficult 
 matter. Prince — much more difficult than it 
 seems to your good heart." But Myshkin's 
 heart is not good because it cherishes illusions ; 
 he does not expect to find paradise on earth, 
 and he does not like people because he thinks 
 them better than they are. Seeing clearly 
 what they are, he likes even the worst of them 
 in spite of it ; and to read Dostoevsky's books 
 throws us for the time into Myshkin's state of 
 mind. When we are confronted with some 
 H 113
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 fearful wickedness, even when we read about it 
 in the newspapers, it shakes our faith in life 
 and makes it seem a nightmare in which 
 ordinary comfortable reality has suddenly 
 turned into horror. But in Dostoevsky's books 
 the horror of the nightmare suddenly turns to 
 a happy familiar beauty. He shows us wicked- 
 ness worse than any we had ever imagined, 
 wickedness which, if we met with it in real life, 
 would make us believe in human monsters with- 
 out souls ; and then, like music rising through 
 the discord of madness, he shows us a soul, 
 like our own, behind that wickedness. And we 
 believe in the one as we have believed in the 
 other; for we feel that a man is telling us 
 ( about life who has ceased to fear it, and that 
 his faith, tested by the suffering which he 
 reveals in his books, is more to be trusted than 
 our own experience. 
 
 114
 
 The Promise of Keats ^:> o .cf 
 
 MR. BRIDGES' essay on Keats was 
 written more than twenty years ago, 
 and he has since revised it. It is one of the best 
 essays in our language upon a great poet, or, 
 rather, upon his poetry ; for Mr. Bridges shows 
 little psychological curiosity about Keats in it. 
 He gives us an analysis of Endymion which 
 should be read by every one who wishes to enjoy 
 that work. About all the poems of which he 
 speaks he has something simple and true and 
 precise to say; yet I am not satisfied. Or, 
 rather, I wish to add something to what he has 
 said and to differ a little from what he implies, 
 if not from what he asserts. 
 
 Keats, he says at the beginning of his essay, 
 " was smitten down in his youth, in the very 
 maturing of his powers, which, having already 
 produced work of almost unrivalled beauty, 
 held a promise of incredible things." There 
 I both agree and dissent. I do not believe 
 
 115
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 that Keats died in the very maturing of his 
 powers. Rather, when he was overcome by 
 disease, there was a change working in him 
 which made him a beginner again ; and in this 
 change was the promise of incredible things. 
 He was the prize student among English poets, 
 though he won no prize in his lifetime. No 
 one ever did such student work as Hyperion ; 
 and he did not finish it because it was student 
 work. It even gave him a disgust of his 
 master, Milton. Mr. Bridges quotes him on 
 this point. " I have but lately stood on my 
 guard against Milton. Life to him would be 
 death to me.*" Even in the great Odes there 
 are marks of the student, passages of delighted 
 virtuosity that remind one of the student 
 drawings of Mr. John, In the Ode to the 
 Nightingale he is further from natural speech 
 than Shelley in his best lyrics ; he is producing 
 a splendid work of art and enjoying the sense 
 that he is doing so. 
 
 To cease upon the midnight with no pain. 
 
 That is the phrase of a wonderful student ; but 
 Shelley wrote poetry more naturally than he 
 wrote a letter ; and Keats did not understand 
 or admire this freedom of his. He thought 
 that Shelley did not pay enough respect to 
 
 ii6
 
 The Promise of Keats 
 
 poetry and told him to curb his magnanimity, 
 be more of an artist, and load every rift with 
 ore. Those are modern words ; they might 
 have been said by an art student of to-day ; 
 and Keats is the first modern art student 
 known to us. That, no doubt, was why he 
 irritated not only dull, peevish men like Giffbrd, 
 but also men of the world like Byron, He 
 seemed to them a narrow little, impudent 
 Cockney ; and he had the modern impudence 
 and frivolity of manner, the modern eagerness 
 for all kinds of ideas and audacity in expressing 
 them. He was at home with ideas long before 
 he was at home with people ; one ci\n imagine 
 him, now, in a studio in Chelsea, slipshod and 
 restless, shy yet talkative, and with a cigarette 
 always loosely held between his lips. So he 
 has been the favourite poet of art students and 
 of clever young poets who are learning their 
 craft. He writes as they would like to write ; 
 they see how magnificently he brings things 
 off, how there is the scent of poetry itself in 
 the " magic casements," and " the large utter- 
 ance of the early gods," and "the music 
 yearning like a god in pain," and " the besieg- 
 ing wind's uproar." It is of such phrases that 
 the young poet dreams ; they are poetry to 
 him ; and he who can make them lives a life 
 
 117
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 that is worth living. Keats thought that 
 himself ; words were to him a delicious material ; 
 and he seems to feel them with delicate fingers, 
 to give them quality with his touch as Chardin 
 gave quality to paint. All that feeling is ex- 
 pressed consciously in his fragment of an Ode 
 to Maia : — 
 
 Mother of Hermes ! and still youthful Maia ! 
 
 May I sing to thee 
 As thou wast hymned on the shores of Baiae."* 
 
 Or may I woo thee 
 In earlier Sicilian ? or thy smiles 
 Seek as they once were sought, in Grecian isles, 
 By bards who died content on pleasant sward, 
 Leaving great verse unto a little clan ? 
 O, give me their old vigour, and unheard 
 Save of the quiet primrose, and the span 
 
 Of heaven and few ears, 
 Rounded by thee, my song should die away 
 
 Content as theirs. 
 Rich in the simple worship of a day. 
 
 It is rounded like a piece on the violin played 
 by a master, and the delight of rounding it 
 seemed then to Keats the best thing in life. 
 
 Because he did this wonderful student work 
 we are apt to think of him as one whose career 
 was determined. He means to us the Ode to 
 the Nightingale and odes unwritten of the 
 same kind. His furthest point of progress is 
 La belle dame sans merci or the fragment of 
 
 Il8
 
 The Promise of Keats 
 
 The Eve of St. Mark ; and who could go 
 further than that? Yet these are not his 
 furthest point of progress, and it is not they 
 that hold the promise of incredible things. 
 He could not have done better that way ; but 
 he was starting on a different way foreshadowed 
 in The Fall of Hyperion. Many things led him 
 into it; already in 1818 he had said that he 
 would turn all his soul to the love of philo- 
 sophy ; and one can see in his letters how 
 strong this lo.ve was in him. There is no 
 opposition, as Mr. Bridges points out, " between 
 his true instinct for ideal philosophy and his 
 luxurious poetry (which seems rather its young 
 expression)," and for a time he sought a philo- 
 sophical justification for that . luxurious poetry. 
 But philosophy made him think about his art, 
 made him desire to enrich it with the whole of 
 himself. There came a time when it seemed 
 to him that in his romantic poetry he was 
 playing a game ; and in the Fall of Hyperion 
 he expresses the same mood that is expressed 
 by the young Shakespeare at the end of Love's 
 Labours Lost. The Veiled Shadow says to 
 
 him : — 
 
 Thou hast felt 
 
 What 'tis to die and live again before 
 
 Thy fated hour ; that thou hadst power to do so 
 
 Is thine own safety. 
 
 119
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 This is the language of conversion, and the 
 Shadow proceeds to tell him how he can attain 
 to salvation both in life and in art — 
 
 " None can usurp this height," returned that shade, 
 
 " But those to whom the miseries of the world 
 
 Are misery, and will not let them rest. 
 
 All else who find a haven in the world, 
 
 Where they may thoughtless sleep away their days, 
 
 If by a chance into this fane they come, 
 
 Rot on the pavement where thou rottedst half. 
 
 That is to say the poet, the artist, who sees in 
 life nothing but material for his art, ceases to 
 be even a poet, an artist, repeats his own youth 
 when he is past it, and rots away in the haven 
 he has made for himself. The dreamer and 
 the poet are distinct — 
 
 Diverse, sheer opposite, antipodes, 
 
 The one pours out a balm upon the world, 
 
 Theother vexes it. 
 
 So his masterpieces seemed to Keats mere 
 dreaming. He had half unconsciously ex- 
 pressed in them moods simpler than he actually 
 experienced, moods which he assumed so that 
 he might simplify the problems of his difficult 
 art. Now he was no longer content to do so ; 
 his desire was to write poetry with all his 
 faculties and to enrich it with all his experience, 
 whether that seemed poetical in itself or prosaic. 
 
 120
 
 The Promise of Keats 
 
 It is strange how classical and romantic 
 mean the same error when they express a 
 defect of art. They mean a refusal of experi- 
 ence so that art may be made easy, as if the 
 essence of art were the choice of experience and 
 not the transfiguration of it. Keats saw that, 
 as a romantic poet, he had been fastidiously 
 choosing experience, and that at two removes. 
 He had dreamed about the past as something 
 that he could experience aesthetically. He 
 sees the figures on a Grecian Urn removed 
 out of time, freed from anxiety and mis- 
 chance — ■' 
 
 Fair Youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave 
 - Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare ; 
 
 Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, 
 Though winning near the goal — yet, do not grieve ; 
 She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy 
 bliss. 
 For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair. 
 
 When he wrote this he envied this perfect 
 unreality — it seemed to him better than hap- 
 hazard hand-to-mouth reality, as all art seemed 
 to him better than life ; and he would turn 
 away from the present to the beautiful dumb- 
 show of the past that he could watch from a 
 distance, to lovers who did nothing but love 
 and for whom love was all passionate gestures. 
 
 121
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 Between him and the subject-matter of his art 
 there was a gulf like that between the audience 
 and the stage, and he did not look at the rest 
 of the audience. His eyes were fixed upon 
 those figures of passion who had no life outside 
 their passion, and whose passion therefore was 
 itself unreal. He tried to live himself in their 
 heaven, which was not a heaven of pure joy, 
 but of detachment from the struggle for life 
 and from all ideas connected with it. 
 
 Mr. Bridges points out how in the Epistle 
 to John Hamilton Reynolds Keats rebels 
 against the ideas which the struggle for life 
 fosters in the mind of man. He wishes to see 
 the beauty of the visible world simply, and to 
 have his ideas controlled by it, as if they were 
 dreams caused by circumstances — 
 
 O that our dreamings all, of sleep or wake, 
 Would all their colours from the sunset take : 
 From something of material sublime, 
 Rather than shadow our own soul's day-time 
 In the dark void of night. 
 
 He wished to be passive to beauty, even if it 
 were unmeaning, rather than active in his own 
 version of life as it happened to him ; and that 
 is the romantic attitude always. 
 
 But he discovered that, while he had been 
 watching love and writing of it thus in the 
 
 122
 
 The Promise of Keats 
 
 past, he did not know what love was. Mr. 
 Bridges speaks of his failure in the delineation 
 of human passion and charges him with a lack 
 of true insight into it, " which may have been 
 due to the absence of awakening experience.'' 
 He speaks, too, of his superficial and unworthy 
 treatment of his ideal female characters. It is 
 true that they are apt to be " pusses," Cockney 
 young ladies whom one might take for an 
 outing; and Keats himself fell in love with a 
 " puss." But, having done so, he discovered 
 what love really was — not a matter of gestures 
 and music, not something that transported 
 him from the audience on to the stage, but 
 something that troubled the whole of his body 
 and soul. It was not a duet in which the 
 perfect concord, whether of sorrow or joy, 
 overcame all irrelevant facts; rather, it kept 
 all the imperfection, misgiving, and discord of 
 reality and heightened them. He found that 
 by the mere process of loving he could not pass 
 into the world of the Eve of St. Agnes ; there 
 were still two separate human beings, and the 
 other was not ready to sing the part he had 
 dreamed for her. 
 
 Out of this discovery he made strange 
 poetry, poetry that has in it the promise of 
 incredible things. In the Ode to Fanny and 
 
 123
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 the Lines to Fanny he shows us that he was 
 indeed awakened by experience, frightened by 
 a love that began to seem, not freedom, 
 but slavery. He saw that he was surrender- 
 ing himself to another, and that other not 
 purely a lover but herself, untransfigured 
 by love. He saw the slave not of an angel 
 of romance, but of a woman with all the 
 haphazard, unredeemed prose of life still in 
 her. Fanny Brawne was an individual, not 
 a type; but he was still bound to her, and 
 to the hard facts in her that he could not 
 love for themselves. In the Ode to Fanny 
 he is tormented by jealousy. He knows 
 that she is a minx, and she is going to 
 a dance without him, where she will flirt; 
 there are all the trivial ignominies of in- 
 fatuation, yet he transforms them in his 
 poetry — 
 
 Who now, with greedy looks, eats up my feast? 
 What stare outfaces now my silver moon? 
 Ah, keep that hand unravish'd at the least ; 
 
 Let, let the amorous burn — 
 
 But, pry'thee, do not turn 
 The current of your heart from me so soon. 
 
 O ! save, in charity, 
 
 The quickest pulse for me. 
 
 And the poem ends with the desperate serious- 
 
 124
 
 The Promise of Keats 
 
 ness of a passion that he knows will not be 
 understood — 
 
 Ah ! if you prize my subdued soul above 
 The poor, the fading, brief pride of an hour ; 
 Let none profane my Holy See of love, 
 
 Or with a rude hand break 
 
 The sacramental cake ; 
 Let none else touch the just new-budded flower : 
 
 If not — may my eyes close, 
 
 Love ! on their last repose. 
 
 But still stranger, and with still more 
 promise of incredible things, are the Lines to 
 Fanny, in which we see him possessed by the 
 fear of love; almost hating it, though he 
 cannot hate her, because he knows that love 
 will persist and yet be subdued to the discords, 
 the imperfections, the routine of life ; that it 
 can continue when the morning freshness and 
 the music are gone from it — 
 
 Where shall I learn to get my peace again? 
 To banish thoughts of that most hateful land, 
 Dungeoner of my friends, that wicked strand 
 Where they were wreck'd and live a wrecked life ; 
 That monstrous region, where dull rivers pour, 
 Ever from their sordid urns unto the shore, 
 Unown'd of any weedy-haired gods ; 
 Whose winds, all zephyrless, hold scourging rods. 
 Iced in the great lakes, to afflict mankind ; 
 Whose rank-grown forests, frosted, black, and blind, 
 
 125
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 Would fright a Dryad ; whose harsh-herbaged meads 
 Make lean and lank the starv'd ox while he feeds ; 
 There bad flowers have no scent, birds no sweet 
 
 song, 
 And great unerring Nature once seems wrong. 
 
 It is the awakening of La belle dame sans 
 merci expressed with a new psychological 
 precision ; and it seems to promise that Keats 
 was to be the Donne of the romantic move- 
 ment, but a greater Donne who had mastered 
 that which he forsook, who could express his 
 disillusionment with all the music of his old 
 illusions. 
 
 But always he returns from these rebellions 
 and misgivings with a sick passion to the hope 
 of a complete rest and harmony in love — 
 
 I cry your mercy — pity — love ! — aye, love ! 
 
 Merciful love that tantalises not, 
 One-thoughted, never-wandering, guileless love, 
 
 Unmask'd, and being seen — without a blot ! 
 
 This Fanny Brawne could not give him ; she 
 was not ready to play her part as the mistress 
 of a poet. Keats was to her just her young 
 man whom she would play off* against other 
 young men ; yet he was bound to her by the 
 sick, exasperated desire of the consumptive. He 
 longed to be free, to feel and think about the 
 universe, and he could feel and think about her 
 
 126
 
 The Promise of Keats 
 
 alone. A little longer and he might have 
 written of her as Catullus wrote of Lesbia ; but 
 he went to Italy to die and, on the way, wrote 
 that last sonnet in which he still dreamt of a 
 Nirvana of love. 
 
 Nothing could be sadder than this last re- 
 turn to an impossible dream, and the thought 
 that he left her, baffled and starving, with no 
 other dream to take its place. But we are 
 concerned now with that last growth of his 
 mind which was stopped in its first promise 
 by disease. Nothing foreshadows his unguessed 
 greatness so much as this power of writing a 
 strange new poetry about his first discomfort- 
 ing experience of passion. He might have 
 thrust it to the back of his mind and refused 
 to write poetry about it ; he might have remained 
 a forlorn romantic without conviction. But he 
 was too great a poet not to accept the experi- 
 ence in all its ugliness and sharpness. To him 
 the miseries of the world were at last misery 
 and not something to make poetry about. 
 He saw the general unhappiness in his own ; 
 he saw that reality alone was interesting, how- 
 ever disconcerting it might be ; and that it 
 was reality only to those who experienced it 
 fully. There is fullness of experience in those 
 Lines to Fanny as in no earlier poem of his, 
 
 127
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 yet it is all poetized. He can make phrases 
 about it as rich as any he made about the 
 nightingale — 
 
 And great unerring nature once seems wrong. 
 
 Perhaps that is the finest line he ever wrote ; 
 more than any other, at least, it promises the 
 incredible things that he would have written. 
 It is strange that Shelley, who cared for little 
 of his poetry, who cannot have known that 
 his mind was like the wide world dreaming of 
 things to come, should yet have given a con- 
 vincing music to our dreams about him — 
 
 It was for thee yon kingless sphere has long 
 Swung blind in unascended majesty, 
 Silent alone amid an Heaven of Song. 
 Assume thy winged throne, thou Vesper of our 
 throng. 
 
 We cannot believe that such a mind shared 
 the corruption of the body, that such a music 
 ended, broken and dismayed by its own end- 
 ing. Shelley knew, when he was among the 
 prophets, that — 
 
 The soul of Adonais, like a star. 
 
 Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are. 
 
 128
 
 The Note-Books of Samuel Butler 
 
 <?■ 
 
 SAMUEL BUTLER said that "the true 
 writer will stop everywhere and any- 
 where to put down his notes, as the true 
 painter will stop everywhere and anywhere to 
 sketch." He himself, as Mr. Festing Jones tells 
 us in his preface to The Note-Books, began to 
 make notes early, and continued until he died. 
 For the last eleven years of his life he spent an 
 hour a. day re-editing them ; and he left five 
 bound volumes of them, with enough material 
 unbound to make another volume. Mr. 
 Festing Jones has made selections from all 
 these, grouping the notes under different heads ; 
 and he has added an index which I have tested 
 and found excellent. For the first enjoyment 
 of the book all that is needed is to read it 
 through ; but afterwards anyone who deserves 
 to possess it will want to know his way about 
 it. The index will guide him ; and the editor 
 deserves our thanks for that almost as much as 
 for giving us the book itself. 
 I 129
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 Samuel Butler was a born writer, but also a 
 born amateur. He knew this himself, and he 
 was no doubt thinking of his own work when 
 he wrote a note upon Amateurs and Pro- 
 fessionals. 
 
 There is no excuse [he says] for amateur 
 work being bad. Amateurs often excuse their 
 shortcomings on the ground that they are not 
 professionals, the professional could plead with 
 greater justice that he is not an amateur. . . . 
 He has got to square every one all round, and 
 will assuredly fail to make his way unless he 
 does this ; if, then, he betrays his trust he does 
 so under temptation. . . . 
 
 The question is, what is the amateur an 
 amateur of ? What is he really in love with ? 
 Is he in love with other people, thinking he 
 sees something which he would like to show 
 them ? . . . If this is his position he can do no 
 wrong, the spirit in which he works will ensure 
 that his defects will be only as bad spelling or 
 bad grammar in some pretty saying of a child. 
 
 In fact, the amateur can afford to be dis- 
 interested ; and Butler ordered his whole life so 
 that he might be able to afford this expensive 
 luxury. Not only did he learn to do with 
 very little money ; he also economized in 
 beliefs and emotions, not because he was by 
 nature cold or sceptical, but because he would 
 not be a partisan of any one view of life. He 
 
 130
 
 The Note-Books of Samuel Butler 
 
 seems to have regarded himself as a consecrated 
 bachelor; Melchisedec, he says, was a really 
 happy man. " He was without father, without 
 mother, and without descent. He was an 
 incarnate bachelor. He was a born orphan." 
 He wished to be a Melchisedec free from all 
 ties whatever, spiritual and intellectual as well 
 as material. He only wrote a book, he said, 
 when it came to him and insisted upon being 
 written, and it was the same with convictions. 
 He did not seek after them, they had to force 
 themselves upon him. Such a man would be 
 an uninteresting failure if he had no convictions ; 
 Butler is interesting because his convictions, 
 though few, were strong. 
 
 He had, as he takes pains to show us, no 
 grievance against life or the human race. If 
 a sentimentalist had complained that nothing 
 was sacred to him he might have answered that 
 everything was sacred. That was the reason 
 why he was ready to joke about everything 
 he made no division between sheep and goats, 
 between the serious and the trivial, between the 
 sublime and the ridiculous. He was at ease 
 about the universe as much as a mediaeval 
 Christian about his religion, and had the same 
 delight in profanity. The Note-books are full 
 of his naughtiness ; and no one could be 
 
 131
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 shocked by it who did not enjoy being shocked. 
 " It is all very well for mischievous writers 
 to maintain that we cannot serve God and 
 Mammon. Granted that it is not easy, but 
 nothing that is worth doing ever is easy.'' 
 That remark is worth considering, because 
 Butler had no personal interest in making it. 
 He was not trying to excuse himself for 
 serving Mammon alone ; he had an indifference 
 to Mammon so complete that he could say a 
 good word for him. So Keats told Shelley that 
 an artist must serve Mammon. " He must 
 have self- concentration — selfishness perhaps," 
 Both mean that there is always a practical 
 problem to be solved ; and Butler would have 
 said that, as God sets the problem, you cannot 
 serve Him without serving Mammon. 
 
 Butler's naughtiness is an indulgence that he 
 permits himself, knowing that it will not 
 become a vice of his mind. It was as delicious 
 to him as idleness to a busy man — and as 
 necessary. For his weakness was to become too 
 serious about everything that he undertook ; 
 he enjoyed the game of proving just as much as 
 the game of disproving, and he convinced him- 
 self that Nausicaa wrote the Odyssey. Indeed, 
 but for his recreations of naughtiness, he might 
 have become a bigot or at least a crank. It 
 
 132
 
 The Note-Books of Samuel Butler 
 
 was his instinct of self-preservation that drove 
 him to them ; and in them he reacted against 
 himself as much as • against anyone else. 
 Swift, incessant reaction is the secret of 
 Butler's wit ; it was what gave life to his 
 thought and adventures to his mind. With 
 some comic writers it is a vulgar trick played 
 coldly and mechanically. With Butler it is a 
 habit, but a habit that surprises even him ; and 
 we feel the surprise in his unexpected turns of 
 speech. It is a reaction, too, just as often from 
 the absurd to the serious as from the serious to 
 the absurd. Take, for instance, this passage 
 headed "Night-shirts and Babies," which 
 affords a good example of the adventures of 
 his mind : — 
 
 On Hindhead, last Easter, we saw a family 
 wash hung out to dry. There were papa's 
 two great night-shirts and mamma's two lesser 
 nightgowns, and then the children's smaller 
 articles of clothing and mamma's drawers and 
 the girls' drawers, all full swollen with a strong 
 north-east wind. But mamma's nio-Titiiown 
 was not so well pinned on, and, instead of being 
 full of steady wind, like the others, kept blow- 
 ing up and down as though she were preaching 
 wildly. ... I should like a Santa Famigiia 
 with clothes drying in the background. 
 
 That desire for a Holy Family with clothes 
 
 133
 
 Essays on . Books 
 
 drying in the background expresses the whole 
 character of Butler's mind. It was not that he 
 wanted to sneer at the' Holy Family, but that 
 he liked the beautiful and the comic in the 
 same picture. His mind got zest for each from 
 the contrast between them ; he was like the 
 builders of the Middle Ages, who adorned their 
 cathedrals with gargoyles, and he liked to play 
 the part of a gargoyle himself, grinning among 
 all the solemnities of the universe yet not 
 incongruous with them. It is the glory of 
 Gothic art that it has room for the grotesque 
 as well as the beautiful ; and for Butler life 
 itself had the same glory. He made his jests 
 about everything in heaven and earth, not 
 because he thought nothing serious, but 
 because he tested the seriousness of everything 
 by its power to survive the ordeal. No one 
 ever had more of the humorist's delight in 
 the universal imperfection of things. " All 
 progress," he said, " is based upon a universal, 
 innate desire on the part of every organism to 
 live beyond its income." He laughed, as M. 
 Bergson says we always laugh, at the victory of 
 the mechanical over life ; but this very laughter 
 implied, as all genuine laughter must, the belief 
 that life is not mechanical. " Life," he says, 
 " is eight parts cards and two parts play, the 
 
 134
 
 The Note-Books of Samuel Butler 
 
 unseen world is made manifest to us in the 
 play." There was nothing he hated so much 
 as heresies of perfection in morals, science, or 
 art ; he hated any explanation of anything that 
 professed to be complete, any ambition of 
 absolute virtue, any attempt to produce perfect 
 beauty ; and that not because he disbelieved in 
 truth, virtue, and beauty, for he loved them all 
 three, but because he thought they could only 
 manifest themselves in imperfection. Of the 
 philosopher he says : — 
 
 He should have made many mistakes and 
 been saved often by the skin of his teeth, for 
 the skin of one"'s teeth is the most teaching 
 thing about one. He should have been, or at 
 any rate believed himself, a great fool and a 
 great criminal. He should have cut himself 
 adrift from society, and yet not be without 
 society. He should have given up all, even 
 Christ himself, for Christ's sake. He should 
 be above fear or love or hate, and yet know 
 them extremely well. v 
 
 The same might be said of the saint ; indeed, 
 a wise man once said of some one that he was 
 born too good ever to be a saint. According 
 to Butler, it is only through our faults that 
 we get experience and the wisdom and virtue 
 that come of it ; yet we must know that they
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 are faults before we can profit by them. 
 Nothing is so incapacitating as self-love ; and 
 most of his ridicule was really directed against 
 that and against the idols begotten of it. " I 
 am the e^ifant terrible of literature and science," 
 he says. " If I cannot, and I know I cannot, 
 get the literary and scientific big-wigs to give 
 me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave 
 bricks into the middle of them," He enjoyed 
 heaving bricks disinterestedly ; but he took 
 good aim with them. It was one of his foibles 
 not to be impressed by reputations, however 
 great or old ; for reputations are only dogmas, 
 and he was against all dogmas. So far as he 
 was concerned the most famous poet, painter, 
 or musician had to win his reputation, not to 
 impose it ; and the Greek tragedians, Michel- 
 angelo, Bach, and Beethoven could win no 
 praise from him. 
 
 In all his judgments he was a typical insular 
 eccentric; indeed, he was the latest, and 
 perhaps the last, of that great race of eccentric 
 amateurs who are the glory and scandal of 
 England. A Frenchman or German of culture 
 would think him a mere barbarian to-day ; 
 fifty years hence, perhaps, some German will 
 write a huge book about him, proving that he 
 was the father of modern thought, the great 
 
 136
 
 The Note-Books of Samuel Butler 
 
 rebel against romantic illusions, compared with 
 whom Nietzsche was a rhetorician. Butler 
 often talks like Nietzsche, as where he disputes 
 Matthew Arnold's notion that " righteousness 
 was to the Jew what strength and beauty were 
 to the Greek or fortitude to the Roman." 
 
 This sounds well [he says] but can we think 
 that the Jews, taken as a nation, were really 
 more righteous than the Greeks and Romans ? 
 Could they indeed be so if they were less 
 strong, graceful, and enduring ? 
 
 And yet we are sure that he would not have 
 liked Nietzsche, for Nietzsche was too much 
 of a professional rebel and brow-beater for 
 his taste. Nietzsche wrote as if he were a 
 politician addressing a meeting of his own 
 supporters ; he flattered the self-love of other 
 rebels, and encouraged them to think of them- 
 selves as a sect in possession of the truth. 
 But Butler had no desire to form a sect or to 
 address an audience of rebels. 
 
 But you, nice People ! [he cries] 
 
 Who will be sick of me because the critics thrust 
 
 me down your throats, 
 But who would take me willingly enough if you 
 
 were not bored about me, . . . 
 Please remember that, if I were living, I should be 
 
 upon your side
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 And should hate those who imposed me either on 
 
 myself or others ; 
 Therefore, I pray you, neglect me, burlesque me, 
 
 boil me down, do whatever you like with me, 
 But do not think that, if I were living, 1 should 
 
 not aid and abet you. 
 There is nothing that even Shakespeare would 
 
 enjoy more than a good burlesque of Hamlet. 
 
 And nothing, we may add, that Butler enjoyed 
 more than a good burlesque of human life, 
 which would amuse the nice people and shock 
 the professionals. The nice people were his 
 chosen audience, the people who have their 
 own likes and dislikes and are not committed 
 to any kind of theory ; the people who do not 
 want to impose themselves on others, and who 
 do not pretend to know or feel more than 
 they do know and feel. But that unassuming 
 word " nice "" meant much when he used it ; 
 and, having said that a man was nice, he was 
 likely the next moment to say that he was saved. 
 This meant, finally, that he was disinterested, 
 not merely according to rule and in the ordinary 
 conduct of life, but in his very nature, seeking 
 no reward for his virtue even from his own 
 conscience, and being, indeed, unconscious of 
 it. Now and again in these notes Butler be- 
 trays his own passion for disinterestedness. 
 
 The world admits [he says] that there is 
 
 138
 
 The Note-Books of Samuel Butler 
 
 another world, that there is a kingdom, 
 veritable and worth having, which, neverthe- 
 less, is invisible and has nothing to do with 
 any kingdom such as we now see. It agrees 
 that the wisdom of this other kingdom is 
 foolishness here on earth, while the wisdom 
 of the world is foolishness in the Kingdom of 
 Heaven. In our hearts we know that the 
 Kingdom of Heaven is the higher of the two 
 and the better worth living and dying for, 
 and that, if it is to be won, it must be sought 
 steadfastly and in singleness of heart by those 
 who put all else on one side and, shrinking 
 from no sacrifice, are ready to face shame, 
 poverty, and torture here rather than abandon 
 the hope of the prize of their high calling. 
 Nobody who doubts any of this is worth 
 talking with. 
 
 And in answer to the question, How are we 
 to find the Kingdom of Heaven ? he says : 
 " We are not likely to go wrong if in all 
 simplicity, humility, and good faith we heartily 
 desire to find it and follow the dictates of 
 ordinary common sense." 
 
 Butler believed and insisted that common 
 sense was necessary to salvation, was, indeed, 
 a symptom of it. That was where he differed 
 from Romantics and from the worldly alike. 
 Romantics think common sense is no concern 
 of theirs, and the worldly think it is only 
 
 139
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 their concern. Butler set it above the scorn 
 of the one class and the patronage of the 
 other. It was a gift, he held, to be cultivated 
 for all purposes, and as necessary to the saint 
 and the artist as to the man of business ; the 
 fact that they pursue different ends makes no 
 difference. Life is a matter of execution as 
 well as of conception ; and if the execution 
 is poor it will pervert the conception. His 
 sharpest satire was directed against the people 
 who pervert their conception with bad exe- 
 cution — the sentimentalists, doctrinaires, Phari- 
 sees ; all the people who love themselves and 
 their own theories better than anything else, 
 and who therefore never test their theories 
 by results. In all this Butler, however much 
 he may like to shock us in detail, follows the 
 great orthodox tradition of the ages. He is with 
 Socrates against the Sophists and with Christ 
 against the Pharisees. " Forget yourself and 
 love others," he says, " and you shall attain to 
 common sense and be one of the nice people — 
 in fact, you shall be saved." He puts it all 
 prosaically because in our time the worldly 
 have captured prose as the Romantics have 
 captured poetry ; and it was his aim to deliver 
 prose, like common sense, from the clutches of 
 the worldly. If he had been a poet he would 
 
 140
 
 The Note-Books of Samuel Butler 
 
 no doubt have tried to deliver poetry from the 
 clutches of the Romantics, As it was he wrote 
 one piece, the In Memoriam to H.R.F., 
 which is poetry in its matter and half-poetry 
 in its form ; and no one knows Butler who 
 has not read this. But no one knows him who 
 has not read this book through ; and perhaps 
 it will come to be the most read and valued 
 of all his books. 
 
 141
 
 The Life of Samuel Butler o* yi> 
 
 SAMUEL BUTLER often spoke against 
 the sin of biographers, which is greater 
 than they know. By refusing to tell the 
 whole truth, or the most interesting part of it, 
 not only do they make their biographies dull, 
 but they mislead and discourage mankind. 
 The great man, as they present him, has 
 attained to a perfection both impossible and 
 insipid ; we despair of being like him and do 
 not wish to be like him ; we may think him a 
 Parsifal, but we resent him as a pure fool. 
 Butler himself said of his Life of his grand- 
 father, Dr. Butler : — 
 
 It is better that I should be indiscreet and 
 dishonourable than that men's true minds 
 should be concealed and turned again to false- 
 hood, if we have a chance of getting at them. 
 It is next to never that we can get at any 
 man's genuine opinion on any subject, except 
 the weather or eating and drinking ; and when 
 we can do so directly or indirectly neither 
 
 142
 
 The Life of Samuel Butler 
 
 amour propre nor discretion should be allowed 
 to veil it, for there is nothing in this world so 
 precious nor is there any other stuff from which 
 genuine fresh opinion can derive. 
 
 Mr. Festing Jones, who, like Butler himself, 
 has a gift for humanizing the wisdom of the 
 serpent, is careful to quote this in the preface to 
 his Life of Butler ; it is his answer to those who 
 may accuse him of indiscretion. He has written 
 as if for Butler to read ; and we are sure that, 
 whatever anyone else thinks about the book, 
 Butler would have liked it. His method is the 
 method of Boswell ; he seems to tell all he 
 knows, but his interest in his subject has made 
 him select by instinct what is interesting 
 because it describes Butler. The book in 
 form is a chronicle, all narrative and little 
 description ; but the narrative describes, and, 
 with each chapter, we know more of Butler, as 
 a man living and changing and growing before 
 us ; we cannot know him completely until we 
 have read to the end, because he himself was 
 completed only by death. In fact, it is one 
 of the best biographies in the language, a 
 document of human nature, because it shows 
 us a particular man in all his circumstances of 
 time and place, and a document which, as we 
 read it, we know we can trust. 
 
 143
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 Butler liked to present himself in his books as 
 a smiling invulnerable critic of the universe ; 
 but here we learn how often he was wounded. 
 He might, if he had chosen, have made a 
 tragedy of The Way of All Flesh ; but he 
 would not exhibit the pageant of his bleeding 
 heart, because he wished it to bleed as little 
 as possible. As we read, we discover that life 
 was not kind to him, and that he was always 
 trying to armour himself against fate. To 
 begin with, his childhood was unhappy ; in a 
 letter written when he was forty, he says, " I 
 have had the worst three years I ever had 
 since the horrors of childhood and boy- 
 hood " ; and he did not often complain of any- 
 thing. Then for many years he mistook his 
 vocation, trying to paint when he was born to 
 write ; he lost a great part of his money 
 through tinisting in friends; he found after 
 many years that he had wasted affection on his 
 dearest male friend ; and, what was almost 
 worse, his dearest female friend seemed to be 
 wasting her affection on him, at least he 
 believed that she wished to be his v/ife, while 
 he did not wish to be her husband. So there 
 was a misfit both ways ; and he remained a 
 bachelor, hungry for a happiness which he 
 
 knew to exist. 
 
 144
 
 The Life of Samuel Butler 
 
 That is one side of him, concealed in his 
 public writings, but now revealed without undue 
 emphasis in Mr. Jones's narrative. One might 
 have guessed it from Erexvhon Revisited, which 
 is made beautiful and moving by the hero's 
 hunger for affection, Butler's own hunger, for 
 he always wrote autobiography in his stories, 
 and cared for nothing in other stories that was 
 not autobiography. He was a disappointed 
 man, and his disappointments made him sus- 
 picious ; hence his grievance against Darwin. 
 As Mr. Jones says, with an affection too great 
 not to be candid, " Butler felt he had been 
 taken in. It was John Picard Owen and the 
 chickens over again ; it was the alleged death 
 and resurrection of Jesus Christ over again ; it 
 was his own education over again ; and there 
 was nothing for it but to investigate the whole 
 subject and write a book about it. This book 
 was Evolution, Old and New.'''' Butler, with his 
 attacks now on religion, now on science, is to 
 be understood only when we see him in process 
 of finding out the world. There was a con- 
 spiracy to keep him, young, unsuspecting, and 
 generous, in the dark, to exploit his best 
 qualities and the best qualities of all the 
 young. His father tried to make a parson of 
 him by concealing the facts about the Gospels, 
 K 145
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 and his father was only a party to one great 
 conspiracy. Darwin tried to make him believe 
 that there was no intelligence in the order of 
 the universe by concealing the facts about 
 the universe ; and he was only a party to 
 another great conspiracy. So finally he re- 
 venged himself on his father in The Way of all 
 Flesh and The Fair Haven ; and on Darwin in 
 a series of books ; but he was always trying to 
 purge himself of the bitterness which these 
 deceptions provoked in him : he would not be 
 a weakling squealing against his oppressors ; if 
 he was deceived it was his own fault. It 
 is more immoral, he insisted, to be prey 
 than a beast of prey ; he would be neither, 
 but a man who explained to the beast of prey 
 the very processes by which, unconsciously, he 
 hypnotized his victims. He disliked his father 
 not so much for being a serpent as for persuad- 
 ing himself that he was a dove ; he saw the 
 world infested with serpents disguised, even to 
 themselves, as doves,, and so lacking the beauty 
 of the serpent ; and his mission, or his pleasure, 
 was to undisguise these prudish serpents, to the 
 world and to themselves. 
 
 Butler tried to be fair to his father. In 
 1883 he wrote this note on their relations : — 
 
 He never liked me, nor I him ; from my 
 
 146
 
 The Life of Samuel Butler 
 
 earliest recollections I can call to mind no 
 time when I did not fear him and dislike him ; 
 over and over again I have relented towards 
 him and said to myself that he was a good 
 fellow after all; but I had hardly done so 
 when he would go for me in some way or other 
 which soured me again. I have no doubt I have 
 made myself very disagreeable ; certainly I have 
 done many very silly and wrong things ; I am 
 not at all sure that the fault is more his than 
 mine. But no matter whose it is, the fact 
 remains that for years and years I have never 
 passed a day without thinking of him many 
 times over as the man who was sure to be 
 against me, and who would see the bad side 
 rather than the good of everything I said and 
 did. 
 
 It would be futile now to judge either of them ; 
 but the story of their enmity has value because 
 it shows us how grudges often grow up between 
 father and son, and how they may be prevented. 
 In this case the father never understood the 
 workings of his own mind ; he had been trained 
 to conceal them from himself, never to admit 
 to himself that he did anything because he 
 wished to do it. The son saw his motives 
 with fatal clearness and despised him for 
 refusing to see them ; the father was afraid of 
 him without knowing that he was afraid, or 
 why ; and his fear, driven like all his real feel- 
 
 147
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 ings into his unconscious mind, disguised itself 
 as dislike and disapproval. Butler, who could 
 not speak frankly to his father on any subject, 
 because of the convention established in the 
 family that the father could do no wrong, 
 spoke frankly of his father in his own mind 
 and in The Way of all Flesh, but did not so 
 purge himself of bitterness. He still kept his 
 opinion, and his art, a secret from his father, 
 and there remained, on the one side this secret, 
 on the other unconscious fear because of it ; on 
 the one side satire, on the other moral dis- 
 approval, as weapons in a warfare always 
 suppressed and so never ended. The moral, 
 for parents, is that, if they do not know them- 
 selves, their children will know them. 
 
 But Butler's worst enemy was his closest 
 friend. The story of Charles Paine Pauli is 
 stranger than fiction, and would be incredible 
 if it had not happened. Butler got to know 
 him in New Zealand, and admired him as being 
 all that he himself was not : handsome, attrac- 
 tive, a man of the world who knew where to 
 get well-fitting clothes and how to wear them. 
 But Pauli had no money and was in bad health ; 
 Butler believed that, if he stayed in New Zealand, 
 he would die. So they both returned to England, 
 Butler lending him ^£'100 for the voyage and 
 
 148
 
 The Life of Samuel Butler 
 
 promising to pay him o£^200 a year for three 
 years so that he might be called to the Bar. 
 This was in 1864, and Butler continued to 
 support Tauli, as he supposed, until Pauli's 
 death in 1897. Pauli never would tell him 
 anything about his affairs ; and for some time 
 Butler lived in penury, sharing what he had 
 with Pauli. Their friendship was not happy ; 
 Butler thought that Pauli was possessed by a 
 dumb devil. "The wrongness of his silence 
 wounded me. I told him that I thought it 
 wrong, but he said he would tell me if he 
 could — it was so difficult to say exactly what 
 he was earning — people did not pay him, etc., 
 and I, still believing him to be much as I was 
 myself in the matter of good faith, accepted 
 his excuses." Even when Butler lost nearly all 
 his money, Pauli would not tell him anything 
 of his private affairs, nor where he lived, nor 
 whether he was making anything at the Bar ; 
 and they never met except when Pauli came 
 over from Lincoln"'s Inn to lunch at Butler's 
 early dinner in Clifford's Inn. But still Butler 
 tried to believe the best of Pauli ; said he was 
 kind to animals, and behaved with all the 
 infatuation of a bachelor who, unconsciously, 
 tries to make a friend the substitute for a wife. 
 In 1897 Pauli died without sending for Butler, 
 
 149
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 who saw his death in The Times. He then 
 discovered that Pauli had at one time earned 
 from ,£'800 to .^900 a year at the Bar, but 
 lately only about .^500. He left £^000, none 
 of it to Butler; and he had been receiving 
 money from other friends. Butler wrote a 
 full account of his relations with Pauli, and 
 said at the end of it : " My main feeling is 
 one of thankfulness that I never suspected the 
 facts. . . . The only decent end for such a white 
 heat of devotion as mine was to him for so many 
 years was the death of one or other of the 
 parties concerned. ... I felt pretty sure I 
 was doing a great deal too much, but I would 
 rather have done a great deal too much than a 
 little too little." In 1901 he wrote this note : 
 " I knew I was being cruelly treated, but 
 how cruelly I never knew till after his death, 
 when I could not even forgive him, as I would 
 have done." 
 
 The great satirists are always men who, 
 one way or another, have been cruelly injured ; 
 their love is negative in their art because it 
 has been baulked ; but we can see how much 
 Butler was injured in the affair of Pauli from 
 the fact that he, who made so much of his art 
 out of autobiography, could never use this 
 story for satire ; he could only write a plain 
 
 150
 
 The Life of Samuel Butler 
 
 account of it. We can see also that he tried 
 to make himself out a kind of Sancho Panza 
 to all the false quixotries of the world because 
 he was really a Don Quixote. It was a case 
 of protective mimicry, in which the fly 
 managed to persuade himself, and the wasps, 
 that he had a sharper sting than theirs. 
 
 It is interesting to know that he drew 
 Towneley in The Way of all Flesh from 
 Pauli. It was not a good likeness, for it 
 expressed only his illusions about Pauli and 
 also about the Towneleys of the world, whom 
 he admired just because he did not understand 
 them. The man who quite simply and 
 brutally exploits others, who takes without 
 giving always, was different in kind from 
 Butler ; and Butler, who suffered from his own 
 passion for giving, admired him as an artist 
 admires a Bengal tiger, admired him as a 
 perfect and finished product, while he himself 
 had the malease, the unpreparedness, the 
 inadequacy, of incessant growth. This in his 
 satire he tried to conceal ; there he consoled 
 himself by pretending to be a pure ironic 
 mind ; but, far more truly than Byron, he 
 smiled so that he might not weep, or so that 
 his tears might not be seen. 
 
 His quarrel with Darwin was irrational 
 
 151
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 enough — so irrational that we must look for 
 the cause of it behind the actual facts ; and 
 the cause was his own odium theologicum. He 
 was angry with Darwin and all his followers 
 because he thought they denied intelligence 
 to the universe, and still more because they 
 denied love to it. They emptied all things 
 of value ; and he cared ultimately for nothing 
 but the values of man. He cared for them so 
 much that he would not have them too easily 
 justified — to sentimentalize the universe was 
 almost worse than to make it out full of sound 
 and fury signifying nothing. As he himself 
 said, he was always ready to give up Christ 
 for Christ's sake ; but the most real things in 
 the universe to him were the Christian virtues, 
 and he was not content to leave them hanging 
 in a meaningless void. " There is a something 
 as yet but darkly known which makes right 
 right and wrong wrong." He was angry with 
 the men of science because, as it seemed to 
 him, they were trying to prove, even when 
 they were not sharp enough to see it them- 
 selves, that there is nothing which makes right 
 right and wrong wrong. Hence his attitude 
 to the Church, which will surprise many 
 readers of this book. In 1880 he wrote to 
 the Bishop of Carlisle : — 
 
 152
 
 The Life of Samuel Butler 
 
 If those who start with an all-pervading, 
 supreme intelligence can yet find nothing out 
 of harmony with their initial assumption in a 
 theory of evolution, which is attended at each 
 step by mind, purpose, and the exercise of the 
 moral qualities ; and if, again, those who, like 
 myself, start with tabukc rasce, and, working 
 up from the first thing they can lay hold of, 
 find themselves driven first to evolution, then 
 to purposive evolution, and through this to 
 the action of a supreme, all-pervading mind or 
 purpose in both organic and inorganic matter ; 
 then surely we may be upon the eve of the 
 removal of other misunderstandings. 
 
 Two years later he wrote: "It is not the 
 Bishops and Archbishops I am afraid of. 
 Men like Huxley and Tyndall are my natural 
 enemies, and I am always glad when I find 
 church people recognizing that the differences 
 between them and me are, as I believe myself, 
 more of words than things." You may almost 
 say that he chastened the Church because he 
 loved it; but he did not love the men of 
 science. You could be on your guard against 
 the Church, and its exasperating habit of 
 telling little lies in the cause of a great truth ; 
 but the men of science, he thought, told little 
 truths in the cause of a great lie ; and the 
 world was not on its guard against them. 
 
 153
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 They had deceived even him ; and a burnt 
 child, if it is Butler, hates the fire. 
 
 I insist upon this side of Butler's experience 
 and character because it will be new to most 
 readers ; but Mr. Jones does not insist upon 
 it; he lets it appear in the course of his 
 narrative. Butler suffered much in life, but 
 he was not unhappy ; he wrestled with life, 
 conquered it, and enjoyed the sense of his own 
 victory. In 1898 he wrote : " If in my books 
 from Erezvhon (1872) to Luck or Cunning-? 
 (1887) there is a something behind the written 
 words which the reader can feel but not grasp 
 — and I fancy that this must be so — it is due, 
 I believe, to the sense of wrong which was 
 omnipresent with me, not only in regard to 
 Pauli, the Darwins, and my father, but also 
 in regard to my ever-present anxiety about 
 money." If that were the whole truth, if 
 Butler had been cradled into prose by wrong 
 and nothing else, his books would be dispirit- 
 ing, which they are not. There is something 
 else behind the written words which the reader 
 can feel ; and that is the sense of victory, even 
 before it was won. Butler always believed in 
 victory, to be won not so much by an heroic 
 defiance of men and things, as by smiling both 
 at and with them. If there was a practical 
 
 154
 
 The Life of Samuel Butler 
 
 joke in the universe, he would rob it of its 
 sting by seeing the point of it; and he did 
 not believe that the joke was really a cruel 
 one. There was nothing he believed in so 
 much as kindness ; and he thought one could 
 win it, even from the nature of things, by 
 refusing to be frightened into unkindness. 
 So, by taste and on principle, he was the 
 kindest of men and won happiness that way. 
 There was nothing he enjoyed more than 
 his relations with his servant Alfred ; they 
 were to him a symbol of his success in life ; 
 and we can see what they were from a letter 
 which Alfred wrote him in 1891 : — 
 
 Dear Sir, — I hope you arrived quite safe 
 ~ on Tuesday and found your sister well. ... I 
 have a little complaint to make. You never 
 looked out of the carriage to see me standing 
 on the platform as I always do. There was I 
 standing in the rain and you never looked at 
 me. . . . — Yours truly, Alfred. 
 
 On receiving this, Butler sent an apology by 
 telegram, and Alfred replied : — 
 
 Received telegram this morning, thank you. 
 I showed it to Mr. Jones and he laughed. I 
 forgive you. — Alfred. 
 
 If bitterness had overcome Butler, he would 
 have known that life had beaten him ; as it
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 was — out of the strong came forth sweetness, 
 though with a quick, peculiar flavour of its 
 own. There are many likenesses of him, in- 
 cluding portraits by himself; but the one 
 which is most like the Butler of this book is a 
 photograph taken by Alfred in 1898. It is a 
 queer mixture of an anthropoid ape and a god, 
 expressing exactly Butler's own view of evol- 
 ution ; the god is in the making, and would 
 be a little bored if there were not still some- 
 thing of the monkey in him. Mr. Jones has 
 not left the monkey out of his book any more 
 than the god ; it will increase both the gaiety 
 and the faith of nations. 
 
 156
 
 Turgenev <?■ <:^ o ^y^ o 
 
 WHEN you enjoy a writer thoroughly 
 you do not ask yourself whether he is 
 superior to some other writer, as, when you 
 love anyone, you do not ask whether he is 
 better than some one else. It is when we have 
 passed out of the fresh enjoyment of an artist that 
 we become his partisans. Mr. Edward Garnett, 
 unfortunately, begins his Study of Turgenev 
 as a partisan. His first chapter is on Tur- 
 genev's critics and detractors. He starts in a 
 bad temper because there are those who think 
 Tolstoy and Dostoevsky greater. This heresy, 
 he tells us, arose in Russia ; and he will have 
 it that anyone in England who shares it is 
 imitating some Russian, Mr. Maurice Baring 
 " has echoed various Russian critics," he is not 
 to be credited with an opinion of his own. 
 And Mr. Conrad in his Foreword is also angry 
 with those who prefer Dostoevsky. " You 
 know very well, my dear Edward, that if you 
 had Antinous himself in a booth of the world's 
 fair, and killed yourself in protesting that his 
 
 157
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 soul was as perfect as his body, you wouldn't 
 get one per cent, of the crowd struggling next 
 door for a sight of the double-headed nightin- 
 gale or of some weak-kneed giant grinning 
 through a horse collar." Thus it is that Mr, 
 Conrad expresses his own preference for Tur- 
 genev. We did not know until we read Mr. 
 Garnetfs book that there was this prevailing 
 depreciation of Turgenev ; but Mr. Garnett 
 tells us all about it, and works himself into a 
 rage over it, just as if he were an antivivi- 
 sectionist or a Baconian. So, if you have 
 read Turgenev innocently and enjoyed him as 
 you should, you will probably hurry past this 
 first chapter on critics and detractors to dis- 
 cover what Mr. Garnett has to say when he 
 has recovered from his anger at those who do 
 not think Turgenev the greatest of Russian 
 novelists. For, after all, what does it matter 
 if A and B prefer Dostoevsky to Turgenev, and 
 say so ? Life is too short for these literary 
 feuds, at least if you care for literature. 
 
 Unfortunately, Mr. Garnett never escapes 
 from his partisanship. Throughout the book 
 he has his eye on Turgenev's position rather 
 than on Turgenev himself. He is always pro- 
 testing that he is a perfect Antinous; and 
 this is a pity, for when he does forget to wor- 
 
 158
 
 Turgenev 
 
 ship his idol he says good things about him 
 and his characters, as that his Tatyana in 
 Smoke " is born to corrupt, but never to be 
 corrupted." We wish that he had not been 
 so much the slave of his enthusiasm ; for 
 Turgenev is now far enough away from us 
 both in time and in fashion to be treated 
 justly. But for Mr. Garnett he is still a 
 neglected contemporary ; and he writes always 
 as if he must shake us out of our ignorance 
 and prejudice. So, much of his book seems 
 to belong to the past ; we are not conscious 
 of any prej udice against Turgenev, and we do 
 not care to be scolded for it. 
 
 Yet, perhaps, the world has grown colder to 
 him than it should be, and it is worth while 
 to inquire the reason of this. We have always 
 wondered, for instance, why Tolstoy was so 
 much irritated by him. Mr. Garnett speaks 
 of his " lifelong hostility to Turgenev's genius, 
 only removed by the • latter 's death." That 
 seems to suggest envy, which is certainly not 
 the explanation. Perhaps Turgenev was too 
 much of an artist for Tolstoy, too much 
 specialized ; for there was nothing Tolstoy 
 hated so much as specialization. His book. 
 What is Art P, is one long attack on the 
 specialization of the artist. To Tolstoy and to 
 
 159
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 Dostoevsky writing was a natural process, like 
 talking ; but to Turgenev it was more of a 
 ritual, as to Flaubert. He wrote, or seemed 
 to write, with an exquisite naturalness; he 
 was far too well bred to be shoppy in any- 
 thing ; but he looked at life like an artist, like 
 one who was going to make use of it. Tolstoy 
 lived it ; and his writing was only an extra 
 consciousness, an effort to live yet more in- 
 tensely in words than in actual fact. He is 
 like a man who sings at his work ; whereas 
 Tiu-genev is like a man playing an instrument, 
 a very big man playing a very small instru- 
 ment. After reading A House of Gentlefolk 
 or Fathers and Children, one is filled with the 
 sense of great power producing a very small and 
 exquisite sound. Tolstoy's books are full almost 
 to confusion. Turgenev's are exquisitely empty 
 like a Japanese room. It is not a barren empti- 
 ness, but the result of an austere inhibition ; 
 everything in it is typical, and he admits no 
 detail irrelevant to the type. His characters 
 never run away with him, or with themselves. 
 
 What passion, what knowledge, what ob- 
 stinate questioning is implied in Bazarov, 
 the hero of Fathers and Children ! But it is 
 all implied. Turgenev will not speak out 
 about it. All the Russian novelists are 
 
 1 60
 
 Turgenev 
 
 distant to their readers compared with the 
 English, compared with Dickens or ChaHotte 
 Bronte. They tell us more, but they do not 
 confide ; they seem to speak to a general 
 abstract public, and not to the particular 
 reader. But Turgenev is the most distant of 
 them all ; he writes almost like a philosopher, 
 as if he would disdain to convince us of any- 
 thing by a personal appeal. So Bazarov is 
 like a thesis come to life. He is utterly con- 
 vincing while we read ; but he is not quite 
 human, like Levin or Myshkin, because he 
 always speaks and acts in character. He lacks 
 the richness, the irrelevance, of reality, that 
 last illusion which a writer can produce only 
 when his characters produce it on him, when 
 he has forgotten his design in them. Tur- 
 genev never does that ; but it is not because 
 of the aesthetic poverty of his mind. We 
 may be sure that he knew and perceived and 
 felt abundantly ; all his observations are too 
 perfectly relevant, too easily precise, to have 
 been brought in because he wished to make 
 use of them. But in each case his mind was 
 possessed by the type ; and he would not allow 
 the individual to trespass beyond it. 
 
 That, perhaps, was what irritated Tolstoy, 
 to whom men were utterly individual, and 
 L i6i
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 for whom life was a fierce conflict between the 
 individual and the laws of God. To Turgenev 
 it was rather a conflict between the type and 
 the laws of Nature. The anarchy of the world 
 for Tolstoy is in man and in his disobedience 
 to God. Why is man thus disobedient ? That 
 is the question he asks. For him all the 
 sorrow and suffering of life come from man 
 himself, from the individual sinner. But to 
 Turgenev they come from man's incompati- 
 bility with Nature ; and the question he asks 
 is, Why is the -universe what it is ? In the 
 last scene of Fathers and Children, where the 
 dead Bazarov''s old father cries, " I said I 
 should rebel, I rebel ! I rebel ! " Turgenev, 
 says Mr. Garnett, epitomizes in one stroke the 
 infinite aspiration, the eternal insignificance, 
 of the life of man. That is always the drama 
 for him, a little group of human beings, aspir- 
 ing and thwarted by a surrounding indifference. 
 And for him there are two kinds of human 
 beings: those who aspire and are thwarted, 
 and those who basely comply with Nature and 
 become themselves part of that which thwarts. 
 Of Maria Nikolaevna, the woman who seduces 
 the hero in Torrents of Spring, Mr. Garnett 
 says that "in her ruthless charm she is the 
 incarnation of a cruel principle in Nature." 
 
 162
 
 Tu 
 
 rgen 
 
 ev 
 
 But that is true of all the evil characters of 
 Turgenev, whether they are lustful like her 
 or merely worldly. They seem to be con- 
 spiring with Nature to bring the dreams of 
 his heroes and heroines to naught. They are 
 like the big, dull boy at school who bullies 
 and derides the weak and sensitive. For him 
 human stupidity is part of the stupidity of the 
 universe, and the few who rise above it are 
 crushed by it or by circumstance. And yet he 
 does passionately believe in those few and loves 
 them passionately ; they are to him beautiful, 
 inexplicable flowers in a barren wilderness ; 
 they make life worth living, and yet fill it 
 with pain. Like St. Paul, he cries that there 
 is nothing worth having but love, but to him 
 love is a beautiful, forlorn irrelevance in a world 
 unfitted for its survival. All his heroes fight a 
 losing battle, not merely with the fools of the 
 world, but with the nature of things. And so 
 all his beauty and tenderness seem to be but a 
 pathetic interlude, a strain of music suddenly 
 drowned by noise ; and the point of the book 
 always is this sudden marring of the music. 
 At the end you are not thrilled and heartened 
 by the sense of escape ; rather, you are cut off' 
 suddenly from what you love, and made to feel 
 that this separation is for ever, is in the nature 
 
 163
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 of things. The mechanism of the universe 
 closes in upon you ; and it is mere mechanism. 
 Those who consent to live like machines are 
 the winners now and for ever. 
 
 Now one has only to state this attitude of 
 Turgenev to see that it is not the modern 
 attitude. We, whatever we believe, do not, 
 like him, suffer from this sense of the treachery 
 of things. There is to us more mystery than 
 treachery in them ; and we cannot, like him, 
 divide human beings into sheep and goats, into 
 those who basely consent to Nature and those 
 who are piteously crushed by her. To us, as 
 to Tolstoy, human stupidity is unnatural 
 rather than natural ; it is rebellion rather 
 than compliance. In fact, as a thinker, 
 Turgenev is old-fashioned. That "sad philo- 
 sophy " of his which Mr. Garnett finds implied 
 in the ending of A HoiLse of Gentlefolk is to 
 us no philosophy at all, but merely the cry of 
 one who has been hurt by life ; and all his 
 books are cries of pain, though the cries of one 
 who knows how to make them beautiful. 
 
 In his last illness he said : " When my 
 sufferings are unendurable, I follow Schopen- 
 hauer's advice. I analyse my sensations and 
 my agony departs for a period." In all his 
 books he seems to be doing that, and with the 
 
 164
 
 Turgenev 
 
 • 
 
 same sad purpose ; he is an artist so that he 
 may not suffer too much from life by losing 
 himself in it. Thus to him his art is more 
 than life itself. If he could, he would be 
 utterly a spectator ; but he was too great a man, 
 too much of a lover, for that. So for him 'there 
 is in all the affections more pathos than joy ; 
 for they are what tie us to life ; they give us 
 the dream of happiness, and yet make it im- 
 possible. He sings St. Paul's Hymn to Love 
 in a very minor key ; and it is to him not love 
 triumphant, but love the betrayer and the 
 betrayed. 
 
 So perhaps Mr. Garnett is right after all, 
 and we are unjust to him. We cannot under- 
 stand what he is so sorrowful about. He 
 belongs to the past of the Romantics who con- 
 sented utterly to their griefs. To the modern 
 mind sorrow is something to be conquered, or 
 to be laughed away as a little unreal. It is a 
 proof of failure rather than of any kind of 
 success ; or at best it is a phase from which we 
 hope and try to escape. But Turgenev settles 
 down in it, not with any gross luxury of woe, 
 but as if it were the business of man to make 
 pain tolerable by analysing it, as if the pleasure 
 of analysis were some by-product of human life 
 which man, in the universal unreason of things, 
 
 165
 
 ^ Essays on Books 
 
 may utilize, as we utilize coal-tar in our drugs. 
 But we cannot now consent to believe in the 
 universal unreason ; and so Turgenev's art, 
 with all its beauty, seems to us pathological, 
 and, as we read, we ask. What was the matter 
 with him ? 
 
 But that is a foolish attitude ; for in all 
 great writers it is the product that matters and 
 not the process. So we feel some sympathy, 
 after all, with Mr. Garnett's anger. What 
 irritates him is our want of sympathy ; and it 
 irritates him the more because he still shares 
 Turgenev's view of life, and is therefore able to 
 enjoy him like a contemporary. That cry — 
 " I rebel ! I rebel ! " — is to him not the cry of a 
 period, not the expression of a type, but the 
 natural everlasting cry of humanity. He also 
 rebels ; and to him Turgenev is the expression 
 of himself. He says Yes to Turgenev''s version 
 of life ; but most of us now say No to it, as 
 Tolstoy did. It is not that life seems to us 
 more pleasant than he made it, but that it 
 means more. Yet it is foolish to be hindered 
 by this intellectual difference from the aesthetic 
 enjoyment of him. He may have been wrong 
 intellectually, and in his comment upon life ; 
 but that is a matter of argument. The beauty 
 of his work is not a matter of argument. But 
 
 i66
 
 Turgenev 
 
 we can see it only if we sympathize with him, 
 if we see him as a wonderful and beautiful 
 human being, who suffered more than most 
 men, and whose books express his suffering in 
 terms of beauty. And it is easy to sympathize 
 with him, because sympathy is the secret of his 
 own excellence. It is a limited sympathy, for he 
 does divide men and women very sharply into 
 sheep and goats ; he is afraid of the stupid, 
 as he is afraid of Nature, and his fear ex- 
 presses itself in cold dislike. But for the 
 innocent, the passionate, the pure in heart, for 
 all those who are blest in the Sermon on the 
 Mount, he has a tenderness that makes music 
 of his words and of his very plot. Protest, if 
 you will, that life is not like this; yet you 
 must admit that life itself has drawn this 
 music out of a beautiful mind. Turgenev's 
 novels are nearer to poetry than any others, 
 because his comment on life is so purely 
 emotional. Like Schubert, he makes his songs 
 out of sorrow ; all his exquisite precision of 
 detail, all his skill of construction, are means 
 of expressing that. His very characters are 
 mouthpieces of it, and subdued to its minor 
 key. So his books have the unity of music ; 
 and, if Mr. Garnett chooses to value this unity 
 above all other qualities of art, he has a right 
 
 167
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 to do so. I began his book with some irrita- 
 tion, because he was irritated. I ended it with 
 sympathy, both for him and for Turgenev. 
 Therefore he has, after all, produced on me the 
 effect which, no doubt, he wished to produce. 
 
 i68
 
 The Clash of East and West in Thought 
 
 MR. STEPHEN GRAHAM tells us that 
 all that is positive in modern Russian 
 thought springs from the teaching of Solovyof. 
 Introducing his book, The Justification oj 
 the Good, he says : " Tolstoy we know ; 
 Dostoevsky we know ; and now comes a new 
 force into our life, Solovyof, the greatest of the 
 three.'' Certainly The Jtistijication of the 
 Good is worth reading, but not because 
 Solovyof is greater than Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. 
 They remade the novel, but he has not remade 
 moral philosophy ; indeed, he has failed in 
 that which he set out to do — namely, to justify 
 the good ; and he has failed because the good 
 is not entirely good to him. There is in his 
 mind a conflict between a natural Oriental 
 pessimism and an acquired Western optimism ; 
 and this conflict makes the weakness, and the 
 interest, of his book. He himself is entirely 
 unaware of it ; to himself he is a Christian ; 
 but his Christianity is tainted by ancient 
 
 169
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 heresies natural to the Eastern mind, and so 
 natural to him that he thinks they are a part 
 of Christianity. In actual Christianity there 
 always has been a drift towards Manicheism, 
 checked again and again by conscious dogmatic 
 statement or unconscious revolt. The very 
 affirmation that God made all things in heaven 
 and earth is a denial of Manicheism ; but here 
 we find it still possessing the mind of a trained 
 philosopher just as it possessed the mind of 
 Tolstoy. Again it comes to us out of the 
 East, a dark, Asiatic madness, a melancholy 
 deeper than thought, betraying itself in 
 Solovyofs very conception of the nature of 
 morality. He protests, as we have said, that 
 he is a Christian, and d&nounces Schopenhauer ; 
 yet, wherever he is a Christian, he is incon- 
 sistent with his own first principles. In them 
 he is a follower of Schopenhauer, or rather one 
 of those Eastern pessimists whom Schopenhauer 
 followed with a European zest that denied his 
 own pessimism. Schopenhauer was consistent 
 in thought, but his mood, his cheerful malice, 
 contradicted his thought; Solovyof is incon- 
 sistent in thought, but underlying that in- 
 consistency there is a mood of despondency 
 which betrays itself whenever he speaks with 
 most conviction. 
 
 170
 
 Clash of East and West in Thought 
 
 He professes to be an advocate of the uni- 
 verse ; but his heart is not in the work, and he 
 fails to make the universe seem attractive. 
 That is the mark of the true pessimist; try 
 as he will, he cannot make us like his version 
 of the universe; the more he praises it, the 
 more we rebel. At best he can only preach 
 contentment, and we cannot be content to 
 be content with the universe ; we must finally 
 side with exultation or with despair. 
 
 Solovyofs pessimism betrays itself at once 
 in his account of "the primary data of 
 morality." According to him, " the funda- 
 mental feelings of shame, pity, and reverence 
 exhaust the sphere of man's possible moral 
 relations to that which is below him, that 
 which is on a level with him, that which is 
 above him." Pity, for him, is the origin of 
 love and is itself a more moral feeling than 
 love. He believes that, because he believes 
 that all good has its origin in pain ; he is 
 unable to conceive of a good state of mind that 
 is not painful to him who experiences it. 
 " Love in itself," he says, " or love in general, 
 is not a virtue; the virtue behind it, the 
 unconditioned virtue, is always pity." But 
 this is contrary to the Christian faith, and 
 contrary also, we believe, to all human ex- 
 
 171
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 perience. Solovyof s very psychology is per- 
 verted by his pessimism ; of the mother, 
 whether human or animal, he says that no 
 mental state but pity " can express her original 
 solidarity with her weak, helpless, piteous off- 
 spring wholly dependent upon her." But, 
 according both to the Christian faith and to 
 experience, a mother's love is deeper than pity ; 
 pity is only an incident of it. Solovyof would 
 persuade us that love, like all good things, is 
 necessarily painful in its origin ; it comes of 
 suffering the pains and sorrows of others, and 
 its joy is but the result of that suffering. But, 
 according to the Christian faith, love is deeper 
 than both joy and sorrow — these are but 
 incidents of it which it accepts and to which 
 it gives a quality, a meaning, they lack without 
 it. And, as a fact, the mother, human or 
 animal, is not always pitying her piteous off- 
 spring. The cat, the best of mothers, delights 
 in her kittens, which are far from always piteous. 
 The natural tie between her and them, the tie 
 between any mother and her child, is not pity, 
 it is motherhood and childhood, which means 
 love. 
 
 But Solovyof, in denying that love is a 
 virtue, betrays the fact that, in his profound 
 pessimism, he does not know the meaning of 
 
 172
 
 Clash of East and West in Thought 
 
 the word love. " Selfish love for oneself and 
 one's property, passionate love of drink or of 
 horse racing, is not reckoned as a virtue." But 
 these are not love. Men cannot love them- 
 selves ; self-love is only a metaphor, a redttctio 
 ad absurdum of egotism. It means that the 
 egotist is so incapable of love that he would 
 love himself if he could. Self-love is a word 
 for a negative, meaning the absence of love for 
 others; and when we speak of the love of 
 property or drink, we also use the word meta- 
 phorically ; we mean that a man commits the 
 absurdity of behaving as if it were possible to 
 love these things. Solo vy of quotes the words 
 of St. John — "Love not the world" — which, 
 he says, are an expression of the fundamental 
 principle of asceticism. But asceticism itself 
 is not fundamental, except for pessimists like 
 Solovyof. It is a negative means to a positive 
 end, a means to love. When we say that a 
 man loves the world, or anything else that 
 cannot be an object of love, we mean that he 
 is, by some kind of egotism, preventing himself 
 from loving. Love is self - forgetfulness in 
 something that can be loved, but Solovyof does 
 not really believe in the existence of that which 
 can be loved for its own sake. He tries, but 
 unconsciously, instinctively, he fails. Still he 
 
 173
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 says that love of our neighbour has its source 
 in pity, and love of God in reverence, which 
 means to him fear or gratitude. He is too 
 despondent to affirm in either that quality 
 which directly moves us to love. The great 
 positive passion does not exist for him because 
 to him the universe, God Himself, is negative, 
 forbidding; and all good consists in refusing 
 and in the pain of refusal. Thus he says, in 
 a curious passage, that to share another's joys 
 is not so good in itself as to share his sorrows. 
 
 Participation in the pleasures of others may 
 always have an element of self-interest. Even 
 in the case of an old man sharing the joy of a 
 child doubt may be felt with regard to the 
 altruistic nature of the sentiment ; for in any 
 case it is pleasant for the old man to refresh 
 the memory of his own happy childhood. On 
 the contrary, all genuine feeling of regret at 
 the suffering of others, whether moral or 
 physical, is painful for the person who experi- 
 ences that feeling, and is therefore opposed to 
 his egotism. This is clear from the fact that 
 sincere grief about others disturbs our personal 
 joy, damps our mirth, that is, proves to be in- 
 compatible with the state of selfish satisfaction. 
 
 One could not imply more clearly that God 
 does not wish us to be happy, that He has 
 made a universe in which we can be good only 
 through suffering. But the Christian doctrine 
 
 174
 
 Clash of East and West in Thought 
 
 of love asserts that he who loves will consent 
 to both the joys and the sorrows of love, that 
 love itself is good, not joy or sorrow. 
 
 Joy and grief are woven fine, 
 A garment for the soul divine. 
 And when this we truly know, 
 Safely through the world we go. 
 
 A state of mind is not good because it is 
 painful ; the joy we take in the joys of others 
 is not egotistical because it is joy ; indeed, 
 the egotist is prevented by his egotism from 
 feeling it. The good state of mind is love; 
 and it is to be valued because it is love, whether 
 it brings us joy or sorrow. Solo vy of confuses 
 pleasure with joy ; participation in the pleasures 
 of others will have an element of self-interest, 
 if it is not the result of love but of the desire 
 to share the pleasures. But love cannot come 
 of the desire to share pleasures, although it 
 alone enables us to share both joy and sorrow. 
 Here, as elsewhere, the psychology of Solovyof 
 is wrong, because, for him, the universe forbids. 
 But it is when he comes to speak of shame 
 and the sexual instinct that his Manichean 
 madness most clearly betrays itself. Con- 
 science, he says, is simply the development of 
 shame. " The whole moral life of man, in all 
 its three aspects, springs from a root that is 
 
 175
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 distinctly human and essentially foreign to 
 
 the animal world." But shame is a negative 
 
 feeling, it is dislike, it says. Do not; and if 
 
 conscience, if our whole moral life, springs 
 
 from this negative origin, it loses value for us 
 
 the moment we are aware of the fact. We 
 
 cannot consent to a universe in which that 
 
 is so. Imputing this source to the good, 
 
 Solovyof at once fails to justify it for us; the 
 
 Kingdom of Heaven itself is for him a negative, 
 
 to which we attain by being ashamed, not of 
 
 "this world," but of our very selves. True, 
 
 he says that " the object of condemnation in 
 
 asceticism is not material nature as such. 
 
 From no point of view can it be rationally 
 
 maintained that nature considered objectively 
 
 whether in its essence or in its appearances — 
 
 is evil." But here it is only the acquired 
 Western part of him that speaks, and it is 
 contradicted in a few pages by the instinctive 
 Oriental. He says that the animal life in man 
 must be subordinate to the spiritual ; but he 
 means that it must be denied and destroyed 
 by the spiritual. 
 
 The moral question with regard to the sexual 
 function is in the first place the question of 
 one's inner relation to it, of passing judgment 
 upon it as such. How are we inwardly to 
 
 176
 
 Clash of East and West in Thought 
 
 regard this fact from the point of view of 
 the final norm, of the absolute good — are we 
 to approve of it or to condemn it ... to 
 affirm and develop or to deny, limit, and finally 
 to abolish it ? 
 
 Solovyof says we are to abolish it. 
 
 The caiTial means of production is for man an 
 evil . . . our moral relation to this fact must be 
 absolutely negative. We must adopt the path 
 that leads to its limitation and abolition ; how 
 and when it will be abolished in humanity as 
 a whole or even in ourselves is a question that 
 has nothing to do with Ethics. 
 
 Here is the very doctrine of the Kreutzer 
 Sonata; but in Solovyof it is supported by 
 a dark mysticism which he never clearly ex- 
 presses. According to him the carnal means 
 of production is somehow the cause of death. 
 "Man's final acceptance of the kingdom of 
 death, which is maintained and perpetuated 
 by carnal reproduction, deserves absolute con- 
 demnation." Such, he says, is " the positive 
 Christian point of view, which decides this all- 
 important question according to the spirit and 
 not according to the letter and, consequently, 
 without any external exclusiveness." True, 
 the Manichean drift of Christianity has always 
 existed ; but always Christianity has resisted 
 M 177
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 it, always its bright positive has overcome that 
 dark negative ; and even Solovyof allows a 
 practical compromise with his own doctrine, 
 though the doctrine itself he insists is true, 
 in the following curious passage : — 
 
 The idea that the preaching of sexual 
 abstinence, however energetic and successful, 
 may prematurely stop the propagation of the 
 human race and lead to its annihilation is so 
 absurd that one may justly doubt the sincerity 
 of those who hold it. It is not likely that 
 anyone can seriously fear this particular danger 
 for humanity. So long as the change of 
 generations is necAsary for the development 
 of the human kind, the taste for bringing 
 that change about will certainly not disappear 
 in men. 
 
 He does not see that, if the change of genera- 
 tions is necessary for the development of the 
 human kind, it is the darkest pessimism, im- 
 plying the malignity of God Himself, to hold 
 that the process necessary for that change is 
 itself sinful. 
 
 But Solovyof, as soon as he comes to deal 
 with economics, escapes from his own mad- 
 ness, and indeed supplies an antidote to it. 
 Here he is subject to Western thought, here 
 he is no longer a pessimist or a Manichee, 
 and here he escapes from his psychological 
 
 178
 
 Clash of East and West in Thought 
 
 error. In the chapter on the Economic 
 Question, he insists that man is not entirely 
 an economic being, that the economic man 
 is a figment of bad metaphysics ; and he points 
 out, very shrewdly, that Marxian Socialism 
 has been infected with the error of the 
 " bourgeois " economics which it set out to 
 destroy. 
 
 The defect of the orthodox school of political 
 economy — the Liberal, or more exactly the 
 Anarchical, school — is that it separates on 
 principle the economic sphere from the moral. 
 The defect of Socialism is that it more or less 
 confuses or wrongly identifies these two distinct, 
 though indivisible, spheres. From the pluto- 
 cratic point of view the normal man is, in the 
 -first place, a capitalist, and then, per accidens^ 
 a citizen, head of a family, an educated man, 
 member of some religious union, etc. Similarly, 
 from the Socialist point of view all other 
 interests become insignificant and retreat into 
 the background — if they do not disappear 
 altogether before the economic interest. 
 
 In fact, the error of the economic maniacs is 
 of the same nature as the error of the sex- 
 maniacs. Both find but one content in human 
 nature, whether it be sex or the struggle for 
 life; and Marxian Socialism is based upon 
 that monomania, like plutocracy. Both, says 
 
 179
 
 Essays on Books 
 
 Solovyof, have the same motto — " Man liveth 
 by bread alone.'' " The struggle between the 
 two hostile camps is not one of principle. . . . 
 One party is concerned with the material 
 welfare of the capitalist minority, the other 
 with the material welfare of the labour 
 majority." It could not be better put, though 
 it is not true of all kinds of Socialism ; and 
 in refuting it Solovyof also refutes his own 
 Mauicheism. " Economic relations," he says, 
 
 are based upon a simple and ultimate fact, 
 which cannot, as such, be deduced from the 
 moral principle — the fact, namely, that work, 
 labour, is necessary to the maintenance of 
 life. . . . The necessity to work in order to 
 obtain the means of livelihood is, indeed, a 
 matter of fate and independent of human will. 
 But it is merely an impetus which spurs men 
 to activity, the further course of that activity 
 being determined by psychological and moral, 
 not by economic, causes. 
 
 And, again, " productive labour, possession 
 and enjoyment of its results, is one of the 
 aspects of human life or one of the spheres 
 of human activity." Now apply all this ad- 
 mirable doctrine to "carnal reproduction." 
 It also is a simple and ultimate fact, which 
 cannot be deduced, as such, from the moral 
 principle. It also is necessary to the maintenance 
 
 1 80
 
 Clash of East and West in Thought 
 
 of human life; and the fact that it is so is 
 independent of the human will. To say that 
 it is evil in itself is as if one said that the 
 instinct of self-preservation was evil in itself; 
 which is to condemn the nature of the universe, 
 as we know it. Solovyof, when he comes to 
 economics, does not condemn the nature of 
 the universe or of man, because economics is 
 a wholly Western study and he has not read 
 his own Eastern heresy into it. But, inevitably, 
 if he had thought consistently he would have 
 been forced either by his economic doctrine 
 to give up his Manicheism, or by his Manicheism 
 to give up his economic doctrine. The two 
 are incompatible, but Solovyof did not discover 
 it. So the interest of his book is not in its 
 philosophy, but in that conflict between East 
 and West which divides it into two inconsistent 
 parts. The very sincerity of the writer makes 
 the conflict the more patent. Here we have 
 in philosophical terms the tragedy of Tolstoy's 
 last years; for Manicheism makes life im- 
 possible ; and that is why Christianity, which 
 says that life is not only possible but glorious, 
 must always condemn it. 
 
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