Great Writers
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO 
 DALLAS - SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 
 
 LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 
 
 TORONTO
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 
 CERVAKTES 
 
 SCOTT MILTON VIRGIL 
 
 MONTAIGNE SHAKSPERE 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 1912 
 
 All rights reserved
 
 copykight, 1907, 
 By the McCLURE COMPANT. 
 
 Reprinted February, 1912. 
 
 Norinooli 13rfS8 : 
 Berwick & Smith Co , Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGB 
 
 Cervantes 3 
 
 Scott 39 
 
 Milton , 75 
 
 Virgil ...Ill 
 
 Montaigne 149 
 
 Shakspere 183
 
 Great Writers
 
 CERVANTES 
 
 Cervantes, noble by blood, was bom poor. An infancy at 
 AlcaM de Henares, boyhood at Valladolid, youth at 
 Madrid ; from such early years he emerges into the half 
 lights of biography in the two worlds of arms and let- 
 ters. He was certainly the poet of his school, for his mas- 
 ter praised and printed the verse of his " dear and be- 
 loved pupil ; " and why should we not believe he was that 
 same Miguel de Cervantes, page at court, who for ruf- 
 jQing there in an affair of gallantry was condemned to ten 
 years' exile and to have his right hand cut oflF, and es- 
 caped to hiding? 'Tis as easy as deer-stealing. But 
 whether as a cavalier in flight, or as a protege more 
 peacefully picked up, Cervantes left Madrid at twenty- 
 one in the train of the Papal Ambassador, Monsignor 
 Acquaviva, a fortunate Italian youth two years his 
 senior and a patron of art and letters; and, as a gentle- 
 man in attendance upon him, travelled to Rome. 
 
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 There in a city which was still the world's high capi- 
 tal the young Spanish provincial, half poet, half gallant, 
 came into touch with life in the large. He learned Ital- 
 ian, then the master tongue of hterature; in the palace he 
 mingled with the most cultivated society of the world 
 and heard much high-bred discussion; he came to rec- 
 ognize that something barbarous and belated which for- 
 eign nations found in the literature of his own land. 
 Cer\'antes had a soul capable of great enthusiasms. At 
 Rome, in 1570, a great cause was in the air. It was one 
 of the oldest of great causes. " A Crusade ! A Crusade ! " 
 was the cry. The Turks were storming Cyprus; they 
 threatened Venice; they filled the African coast; they 
 held the sea. Was the Mediterranean to be a Turkish 
 lake.'* It appealed to Cervantes because it was a 
 Christian cause, and he was of the "old Christian 
 blood " that for centuries had waged the duel with the 
 Moors, to whom the Turks were heirs. It appealed to 
 him because it belonged to the glory of Spain, with her 
 vice-royalties strewn in Italy and on the islands, to crush 
 the infidel. And it appealed to him because he was 
 young. Don John of Austria, whose figure stood out in 
 Southern Catholic chivalry with a brilliancy of knight- 
 hood not unlike Sidney's in the Puritan North, in its 
 power to awake the imagination of the generous and the 
 jealousies of the cold and mean, was the leader of the 
 
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 CERVANTES 
 cause, Cervantes's choice was a foregone conclusion. If 
 by the spirit he was a writer, by the flesh he was a sol- 
 dier. In that adventurous age a Spaniard, though a 
 genius, was bom for roving and for arms. When his 
 young patron, Acquaviva, following the pleasant Italian 
 way, put on the Cardinal's hat at twenty-four, Cer- 
 vantes left the ante-chamber and enlisted in the Spanish 
 ranks. 
 
 A year later, the sun of Lepanto breaking, October 7, 
 1571, the young recruit, sick and weak with fever, lay 
 below on the galleon, "Marquesas." At noon, the fight 
 being on, he pleaded his duty against the remonstrances 
 of his comrades, came on deck, and was stationed by the 
 long boat in command of twelve men. At night, the fight 
 over, he lay there with two gun-shot wounds in the 
 breast and his left hand shattered. It was a fruitless vic- 
 tory, men say to-day; then it was the greatest sea-fight of 
 the world. To Cervantes it remained his " one crowded 
 hour of glorious life." Five years he was in these wars, in 
 barracks and on campaigns. He served at Navarino, 
 Corfu, Tunis, Sardinia, Sicily, and in Italy — one fair 
 last year at Naples. Don John himself and the Sicilian 
 viceroy bore testimony to his good conduct. He sailed 
 for home, was captured, taken to Algiers, and fell to the 
 spoils of a Greek renegade as a Christian slave. Five 
 years more he was in these bonds. Once he was sold to 
 
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 the Dey, Hassan, for five hundred ducats, an interesting 
 fact, the price of a world-genius as a slave not being 
 often quoted. 
 
 His character now shone conspicuous. Two things 
 marked him out among thousands. He was first in the 
 eyes of the captives — to plan, to encourage and to un- 
 dertake. He was the central plotter of daring escapes for 
 himself and his comrades, by twos and threes, and by 
 scores, by land and by sea. He even dreamed of a gen- 
 eral rising and a Spanish rescue of all the sufferers. Has- 
 san said, " could he preserve himself against the maimed 
 Spaniard, he would hold safe his Christians, his ships 
 and his city." He was first also in the respect of his mas- 
 ters. Repeatedly detected, he refused to abandon his at- 
 tempts; often threatened and with the noose about his 
 neck, in the full peril of such atrocities as he frequently 
 saw inflicted, with unbroken constancy he shielded 
 others and took all danger on himself. Yet he was never 
 once struck. A certain readiness of jesting speech — 
 helped perhaps, like Lamb's, by his stammer — seems 
 to have served him at such times. His security, neverthe- 
 less, is inexplicable. A wilder tale than this of his captiv- 
 ity one does not read in books of reahty. He was al- 
 ready on board ship for transportation to Constantino- 
 ple, when the long efforts of his good mother, together 
 with the aid of a subscription in Algiers among the mer- 
 
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 CERVANTES 
 chants by the hands of a Redemptionist Father, bought 
 his freedom. So the decamping court page of twenty 
 came back to Spain at thirty-three, a crippled soldier 
 and a ransomed slave. 
 
 He became a king's officer, a commissary to collect 
 stores for naval adventures, like that great one of the 
 Armada, and a tax-gatherer. He got embarrassed with 
 courts and officers, a trusted agent defaulted, and he was 
 more than once in prison. He had married a wife. Dona 
 CataUna, not a fortune, but she brought him — here 
 opens the domestic interior — besides some vineyards, 
 "two linen sheets, one good blanket and one worn, 
 tables, chairs, a brazier, a grater, several sacred images, 
 one cock, and forty-five pullets." His house was the gen- 
 eral refuge of the women of the family; there, in 1605, 
 were living his wife, his natural daughter, two sisters, 
 and a niece; the women took in needlework, and Cer- 
 vantes himself by that time had become apparently a 
 general business agent and made out papers for cus- 
 tomers who called on him. 
 
 The jail, the tax coUectorship, the long-suflFering pov- 
 erty — are they not the familiar marks of that other pro- 
 fession, the career of letters ? " Pen never blunted lance, 
 nor lance the pen," he said; one failing, he took the 
 other. Strong by nature, he cared for success, and with 
 good sense he sought it in the beaten track. He obeyed 
 
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 occasions, he followed the fashion and the market, he 
 tried all kinds. It was the age of artificial sentiment; and 
 he wrote a shepherd book, like Sidney's "Arcadia," a 
 tangle of intrigue, rhetoric and love-plaining verse. It 
 was the age of the rising drama; and he tried the play, 
 staging realistic scenes from his life in Algiers. It was the 
 age of the European short story; and he tried the tale, 
 creating that variety of it which springs from direct ob- 
 servation of manners. Twenty years of such labours, a 
 range from the finished whimsies of fashionable courtly 
 fancy to the hard realism of the thieves' market, and he 
 had not yet succeeded ; but his mind comprised the thea- 
 tre of life, and he was trained in all the modes of literary 
 art. "Don Quixote," when it appeared in his fifty- 
 eighth year, was the book of a wise old man. Its popular 
 success did not bring him friends or money. Ten years 
 later the second part was issued. 
 
 The grave old man, on the verge of seventy, was near 
 his end; a figure of medium height, an oval face, with 
 chestnut hair, a Roman nose, vivid complexion, and 
 " the silvery beard that twenty years ago was golden " — 
 so he describes himself. Though he mingled much vrith. 
 men all liis life, he appears in the retrospect singularly 
 solitary. Not bred in the university, he had never been 
 accepted by those of the schools; he had led an inde- 
 pendent career, frank of speech, careless of enmity, aloof 
 
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 from every clique, acquainted with the strength and 
 weakness of all, soberly judging even his young rival, 
 Lope de Vega, the dariing of the age. No one who saw 
 him moving with the stooped shoulders and the slow 
 gait, thought how future ages would have prized some 
 living portrait of that face, nor guessed that this stam- 
 merer was the world-voice of Spain; none of the relig- 
 ious brotherhood he joined to secure his funeral rites, as 
 they followed him " with his face uncovered," a little un- 
 noticed company, knew that the greatest Spaniard was 
 there consigned to an obscure and now forgotten grave. 
 Cervantes himself could not have foreknown the na- 
 ture of his fame. He did not perceive the relative im- 
 portance of " Don Quixote " among his works. Not rec- 
 ognizing that he had broken out the modem path, he 
 went back to the old ways. He again sought the honours 
 of the poet in his "Journey to Parnassus." He fell in 
 with the opinion of his friends that his " Persiles and 
 Sigismunda" would reach "the extreme of possible 
 goodness," and be " the best composed in our language, 
 of books of entertainment;" he died still projecting a 
 sequel to his first pastoral romance, " Galatea." He was 
 in no haste to take up and finish the second part of 
 "Don Quixote." Literature was in those days, by the 
 standard of taste and in tradition, a thing of refinement, 
 elevation, style, in matter noble, in manner convention- 
 
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 al; and the conscious ambition of Cervantes clung to this 
 dying classicism for true reputation. " Don Quixote " 
 was never planned to be a great book. It was " engen- 
 dered in a prison," perhaps a by-thought of his mind, as 
 a parody of the romances of chivalry. Cervantes was apt 
 to have a purpose in his writings. In his realistic plays he 
 meant to bring home to men's bosoms that cause of the 
 freeing of Algiers which was his only practical dream in 
 life and lingered long; in his novels he professed that 
 they were exemplary or moral tales ; and in " Don Qui- 
 xote " he declared that his only aim was to destroy the 
 popular chivalric romance which he looked on as a false 
 and harmful mode of fiction. In his first sketch he 
 found it, perhaps, vulgar in matter and barren in 
 topic, too shght a theme to bear his genius; he tried to 
 heighten it by introducing independent tales either 
 wholly foreign or loosely connected, and episodes of gal- 
 lantry more closely yet carelessly interwoven with the 
 main plot. The book grew under his hand, and almost 
 changed its nature in the second part, where there is 
 nothing extraneous ; it displayed a depth of type and a 
 reach of discourse equal to the power of any genius for 
 creation or reflection, and gathered to itself "uath infinite 
 variety the universal significance of life. Though Cer- 
 vantes grew conscious of its intimacy with his own spirit, 
 it is only on the last page that he declares the identity of 
 
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 CERVANTES 
 the work with himself. He had gradually put into it, sub- 
 stantially, all he was — all he had seen, all he knew — 
 without being aware of what he had done till it was 
 done; and, Uke Columbus, he was never fully aware of 
 what he had done. "Don Quixote" announced a new 
 age. 
 
 Cervantes was not in advance of his age. A great book 
 greatens with time; and the seed-vessels which it con- 
 tains Time rifles, and scatters its germinal forces 
 throughout the world and ripens them in the bosom of 
 a broad humanity; but the vitality of these belongs to the 
 human spirit and is a thing apart from the individuality 
 of the original author. Men have found in Cervantes a 
 reformer, a free-thinker, a censor of Church and State, 
 a modem pessimist — all the vexed brood of restless 
 spirits of the latter days. He was none of these. He was a 
 man of his country and age, and accepted the world as it 
 was about him. He observed its elements, its operations 
 — summed the general result of life; but he had no 
 thought of changing what was. The idea of change, the 
 revolutionary idea, was out of his ken. Cervantes was 
 part and parcel of the present, whole with his time; a 
 loyal subject, a true Catholic. He approved of the expul- 
 sion of the Moors. He had a liberal outlook on the for- 
 eign world, shown especially by his fair words for Eng- 
 land, Spain's foe; and at home he saw the political and 
 
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 even the ecclesiastical organization as human institu- 
 tions subject to defect in persons, means and all their 
 temporalities; if divinely instituted, they were humanly 
 constituted. Institutional life he saw in its right propor- 
 tions as a part of fixed mortal routine, belonging essen- 
 tially in the material sphere — the body politic, the 
 body ecclesiastic. He was concerned with life in other 
 phases. He was a natural critic ; judgment was one of his 
 principal gifts, shown not only in minor literary notices 
 that stud the way, but in the large in those discourses 
 which richly interweave the narrative or arise out of the 
 dialogue, turning eloquently to monologue under the 
 flame of thought; and in the creative parts he was a critic 
 of life. He was a great critic of life just because he had 
 no ulterior aim either reformatory or humanitarian. Not 
 the practical modification of life, not life in the prospect, 
 but its imaginative contemplation, life in the retrospect, 
 was his sphere. It is an old man's book. To him life 
 was externally a spectacle, and in himself a function; 
 as a function it had been a gradually disillusioning 
 enthusiasm; as a spectacle it had become an increasing 
 irony. An enthusiastic youth is apt to be followed by an 
 ironical old age. In the South, especially, young passion 
 begot these pleasant ironies of later years, and the 
 Mediterranean literature, except in the greatest, is well 
 divided between young passion and old irony, whose 
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 CERVANTES 
 blend in " Don Quixote " attains to greatness. Its chance 
 " engendering in a prison " is in itself ironical; its destiny 
 to enthrall the world is the very fatalism of the grotesque 
 in life. A madman and a fool, a horse and ass, seeking 
 adventures in a world as it is, go faring forth on the 
 great empty Spanish plains: what mortal interest can 
 there be in their doings or their fate .'' 
 
 " Don Quixote " is the book of Spain. Its theatre is the 
 Spanish land. It is a book of the open air and the broad 
 world. It has for landscape the burning plains, the deso- 
 late romantic mountains, the strip of blue by the coast; 
 its outlook is along the Mediterranean world by the 
 highway of the islands that Cervantes had travelled in 
 youth, whence men came back with tales of sea-fight and 
 captivity; on the long Northern edge lay Protestantism 
 like a high mountain range, and its over-sea horizons 
 stretched away to Peru and the Indies. It is a book writ- 
 ten in Spain as from the centre of the world, and this 
 Spain was filled with its own folk; the race-mark of 
 "the old Christian blood," of dark-skinned Moor and 
 gipsy was stamped on them; they came forth in all their 
 variety of life, hidalgo, bourgeoise, picaresque, ducal, 
 provincial, intellectual, young and old, good and bad, 
 soldier, student, and priest, innkeepers, criminals, 
 players, peasants, lovers, highwaymen, barbers, car- 
 riers, judges, officials, doctors, menagerie-men, dam- 
 
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 sels, duennas — an endless list. Scarce any book has so 
 many people in it. This mass is put in constant move- 
 ment which gives unwearied liveliness to the scene. It is 
 a book of life on the road. All the world is en voyage. 
 The galley slaves are there; even the dead are going a 
 journey. The delineation of manners is on the national 
 scale. Only the high dignitaries of Church and State are 
 exempt from the general conscription. The Court and 
 the great ecclesiastics are not seen, but their absence 
 only proves how small a part exalted officials have in 
 constituting the character of a people. The Spanish folk 
 is represented in its racial life without them, and the 
 portrayal is nationally complete. Cervantes deals wath 
 this multitude easily, taking them indi\adually and a 
 few at a time. It is a book of short flights, of incidents 
 lightly dovetailed, of scenes strung together, of combi- 
 nations rapidly formed and dissolved. The characters 
 are seized like Holbein's in the " Dance of Death," only 
 here the dramatic moments are as various as the mani- 
 fold situations of the living range of human affairs ; the 
 pictures and groupings are nevertheless on a similar 
 limited scale, momentary and shifting, and each person 
 is characterized with his own habit of life, caught in his 
 own world, and shown completely in a few strokes. How 
 many such small scenes crowd to the memory! The 
 muleteer trolling the snatch of Roncesvalles in the dark 
 
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 CERVANTES 
 morning of El Toboso; the student singing on his way to 
 the wars, the puppet-show, the Hon, and in low life, the 
 disasters of the night at the inn; innumerable vivid 
 sketches ! Thus the book is, by its surface, representative 
 of all Spain, of the look of the land, the figures of the 
 people, the daily event and business of life. But it ex- 
 ceeds the mere flat pictorial method. It is more richly 
 bodied forth. 
 
 About all this panorama there is what gives wholeness 
 to life. There is a world-perspective of the larger pres- 
 ent, that secular environment of contemporaneity found 
 in Shakspere's plays, and here signified by means of the 
 continuous inroad of the Turkish power into the story. 
 There is a historical background, most clearly reflected 
 in the popular knowledge of chivalric romance, and in 
 the fact that every one knows of chivalry and each char- 
 acter, no matter how humble, takes up a natural and in- 
 stantaneous attitude towards Don Quixote almost as if 
 he were an expected guest. The blend of ballad history 
 with this romance helps the effect. This whole Spanish 
 folk inhabits knightly ground, and preserves its tradi- 
 tion and sentiment. There is also an emotional fond, a 
 part of national character, interpreted here by the inces- 
 sant gallantry of love in operatic episodes, by the shep- 
 herds, the serenades, the runaways, the youthfulness of 
 love, its sentimental sufferings, the folly of its escapades, 
 
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 all its charms and senselessness. And there are in the 
 Spanish nature of the book qualities more abstractly 
 felt — intrigue and trick, ceremonial, grandiloquence, 
 boasting, gullibility, mendacity, coarseness, cruelty — 
 human qualities all, but here with their Spanish physi- 
 ognomy. " Don Quixote, " even in its national aspects, is 
 a book that has all the dimensions of life, personal, geo- 
 graphical, historical, emotional, moral. It sweats Spain 
 as an olive does oil. 
 
 But all this is only the environment of the action and 
 the means of its operation in the tale. Cervantes knew a 
 more admirable way of setting forth the soul of Spain. 
 It is not merely because Don Quixote and Sancho are 
 always on the scene that they surpass the other charac- 
 ters in power of interest ; they have a higher life. 
 Cervantes stamped the genius of the race by a double 
 die, on the loftier and the humbler side; noble and 
 peasant, the mad hidalgo and the deluded boor, divide 
 between them the spiritual realm of Spain. The illu- 
 sion of the one, the duping of the other only intensify 
 their racial traits and perfect them. Character is deeper 
 than circumstance, and owtqs a superiority over all the 
 world of appearances. If Don Quixote is at first interest- 
 ing for what happens to him as is the way of life, he be- 
 comes of interest for what he is ; and the same, though in 
 an inferior degree, is true of Sancho. Don Quixote 
 
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 CERVANTES 
 achieves his ideal in his soul, however badly he fares 
 with fortune in the outer world. He is complete in true 
 knighthood, and when his madness leaves him it cannot 
 take away the nobility of nature which it has brought 
 the poor gentleman whom it found nameless and unoc- 
 cupied on his little estate and made one of the world's 
 heroes. The vocabulary of moral praise cannot exhaust 
 his virtues. He is brave, resolute, courteous, wise, kind, 
 gentle, patient; and, not to continue the enumeration, he 
 possesses these traits with a distinctive Spanish excel- 
 lence. What tenacity there is in his resolution, what 
 recklessness in his courage, what fatalistic sweetness in 
 his resignation, what endurance in a land of lost causes, 
 what sadness of defeat accepted in the quiet of adver- 
 sity ! If these are not the most obvious, they are perhaps 
 the deepest Spanish traits in the noble natures of that 
 birth and soil. In Sancho, faithful, affectionate, dubious, 
 nationality has lower relief, since he shares more simply 
 the universal peasant nature of the South, but he is as 
 abundantly Spanish in his peasanthood as Don Quixote 
 in his subHmated chivalry. Both were fooled to the top 
 of their bent ; but destiny did not mistake her way ; by 
 comedy she perfected them, each in his own kind. It does 
 not matter what happens to the battered body of Don 
 Quixote any more than to his crazy armour; in him the 
 soul 's the thing, and Cervantes keeps his soul invulner- 
 
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 able and undishonoured. The dignity of the virtue of the 
 great quahties of the Spanish ideal is preserved as well 
 as set forth, and is seconded by the humbler virtue of the 
 life near to the soil. No nation has cast ideal types of it- 
 self more summary, exemplary and real. 
 
 Later ages have seen in Don Quixote a typifying pow- 
 er even more profound, and far beyond the reach of 
 Cervantes to know, as no one can know the depths of his 
 own personality. Don Quixote was a man of the past, 
 bringing outworn arms against a changed world. Spain 
 is a backward nation, ill-furnished for modem times. 
 Other lands have persisted in seeing in Spain the Don 
 Quixote of nations, whose life was a dream of past 
 glory, whose thoughts and appliances were antiquated, 
 whose career in the modern world must be foredoomed. 
 So they saw her set forth lately in full tilt in the lists 
 against the best equipped, the most modem, the young- 
 est of the nations of the earth. But what unconscious 
 penetration there was in that man's genius, what depth 
 of truth, whose embodiment of the Spanish ideal has be- 
 come the synonym of liis country's fate! 
 
 As the book of Spain, in the external and to some ex- 
 tent in the internal sense, " Don Quixote " was fed from 
 the active life of Cervantes in his goings up and down in 
 the country as a tax-gatherer and his journeys as a 
 young soldier on the sea. He had, however, another and 
 
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 CERVANTES 
 perhaps more engaging life in the world of books. He 
 was as full of ideas as of experience. He was a scholar; 
 and using this side of his nature he made his work as ex- 
 pressive of the literary power of Spain as it was repre- 
 sentative of her active genius. " Don Quixote " was liter- 
 ary in its origin, a crusade by parody against a particu- 
 lar kind of literature; and, besides, the hero became a 
 knight-errant through the reading of books, and he re- 
 tained on his adventures that interest in literature of all 
 kinds which makes the book as much one of letters as of 
 arms. All varieties of literature used in Spain are to be 
 found in it either in examples or by allusion and criti- 
 cism, and not only those of native growth but some of 
 foreign extraction, Italian and Arabic. The chronicle, 
 the romance, the pastoral are everywhere present ; verse 
 in many forms, comic and serious; the tale of the Boc- 
 cacio type, and the realistic tale; the old Renaissance de- 
 bate between arms and letters, and those discourses 
 which are little highly finished essays of a not unlike 
 sort ; drama and poetry are also present in elaborate ex- 
 amination of their theory and practice, and the whole 
 question of diction both by example and precept; and 
 there is much specific criticism of authors and books. 
 The ballad and the proverb, characteristically Spanish 
 kinds, underlie the book, and the style includes all the 
 scale from the homeliest and coarsest to the most artifi- 
 
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 GREAT WRITERS 
 cial, ornate and resonant known to fancy and conceit 
 Cervantes's interest in all these forms, methods and 
 questions is of the Hveliest. Literature was in an unset- 
 tled state, a period of experiment, change and learning. 
 He was himself two-natured. On the one hand he was 
 breaking out new ways by sheer impulse, coming near 
 to life in his plays, nearer in his novels, nearest of all in 
 " Don Quixote," and using plain prose with perfection 
 for directness, vividness and truth; on the other hand he 
 was charmed by the academic traditions of the Renais- 
 sance in topic, sentiment, imaginative method, language, 
 poetry, and in the greater part of his writings emulated 
 it. His entire works exhibit the whole range of literature 
 in his time; "Don Quixote " shows it substantially, in 
 epitome. 
 
 " Don Quixote " thus comes to have one of the high 
 distinguishing traits of literary greatness; it is one of 
 those remarkable books which are watersheds of litera- 
 ture. It looks before and after. Toward the past it slopes 
 back on the forests of chivalry and the glades and hills 
 of the pastoral, and it is clothed with the power of poetry 
 in one or another mode of its various magic ; and it rolls 
 on to the land of the future in its realism, its humour, its 
 direct contact with life as it is, its recognition of the pop- 
 ular lot, of common-sense, of positive things, and here 
 it is clothed with the power of prose in one or another 
 
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 CERVANTES 
 mode of its modem efficiency. Cervantes could not know 
 this; his conscious ambition, unable to emancipate itself 
 from the bonds of the long-loved and still glorious tradi- 
 tion, harked back to the ways of the past, but his genius 
 always struck out for the future with the instinct of a 
 wild creature that has mysterious knowledge of its own 
 paths; his genius struck for reaHsm, for humour, for 
 prose, out toward the modern world. The poetic irony 
 of chivalry had been attempted in the old way and suc- 
 cessfully accomplished by Ariosto, and other Italians, 
 and their work ended an age; they belong to the Renais- 
 sance past. The solvent which Cervantes applied to 
 chivalry was another irony, the irony of the living and 
 actual world, the irony of prose; hence " Don Quixote" 
 is said to begin modem literature, and the greatest of 
 our Northern novelists. Fielding, Scott, Victor Hugo, to 
 name no others, have taken alms of Cervantes's genius. 
 Notwithstanding the brilliancy of the exploit — Cer- 
 vantes, like Columbus, finding the new world that men 
 of another race and nations of a later destiny were to 
 possess — the Spanish literary genius in " Don Quixote " 
 is mainly reminiscent. Though the modem child was 
 bom, it lay in an antique cradle, in an environment of 
 the past. Cervantes loved the old romances which he 
 destroyed as Plato loved the poets whom he exiled. He 
 had a soul that felt the swell of great enterprises; he 
 
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 knew the spell of the lonely deed of high emprize ap- 
 pealing to individual prowess, the call of the adventure 
 reserved for the destined knight. WTio doubts that in 
 that passage where, the priest speaking of Turkish 
 troubles, Don Quixote makes his dark suggestion, Cer- 
 vantes is smiling at his own heart ? " Were they aUve 
 now," says Don Quixote " (in an evil hour for me — I 
 will not speak of any else) the famous Don Belianis or 
 some one of those of the innumerable progeny of Ama- 
 dis of Gaul ! If any of them were living to-day, and were 
 to confront the Turk, i' faith, I could not answer for 
 the consequences. God understands me, and I say no 
 more." This had been Cervantes's dream — the freeing 
 of Algiers ; and had Philip given him a fleet, doubtless he 
 could have done it; but Philip had other thoughts, and 
 Cervantes shrugged his old shoulders, and smiled at his 
 self-confidence of earlier days. Cervantes loved the pas- 
 toral, too, and the serenade and all the dear old-fash- 
 ioned pleasures, the guitar and the high-sounding words ; 
 though set in a humorous situation the eloquent dis- 
 course of Don Quixote on the golden age gives the true 
 note of the literary heart. Cervantes was pouring himself 
 into his book, and all these loves went along with him — 
 a poet's, a scholar's, a lover's, as well as a humourist's 
 loves. He was no young novice, \Nathout a past and 
 hfe-aflFections of the mind ; the wine ripening in his tern- 
 
 [22]
 
 CERVANTES 
 perament was mellowed from the stock of the world's 
 old books. If he had clothed Don Quixote with some 
 shadows of Amadis, he knew that Sancho, too, had his 
 literary ancestry in Italy and remote Provence. Spain 
 was not only a body of contemporary manners and 
 events; it had a soul of poets dead and gone, a various 
 and rich literary tradition, gathered and exemplified in 
 these flowing pages. " Don Quixote " is a book of arms 
 and the active life, but it is also a book of letters and the 
 scholarly life; either alone had been but half the man; 
 together, body and soul, they make up the world's most 
 wonderful national book in prose — the one that is all 
 Spain. 
 
 "Don Quixote" was welcomed by foreign nations, 
 but not altogether as a foreigner. It is a European book. 
 Cervantes, besides what the genius of his race and 
 country gave him, received a gift from destiny. He em- 
 bodied a great moment of time, the passing-hour of the 
 old European ideal. It was a living ideal, that of chivalry. 
 It was sprung from real conditions, and greatly ruled the 
 minds and somewhat the lives of men through a long era. 
 It belonged to a world of social disorder, the thinly pop- 
 ulated, scarce reclaimed wilderness of feudal Europe; 
 it belonged, too, to a world of marvel, where the un- 
 known even in geography was a large constituent ele- 
 ment, and magic, superstition and devildom were so rife 
 
 [23]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 as to be almost parts of the human mind ; but such as it 
 found the world, there this ideal moved with power. 
 The military spirit never took form more nobly than in 
 this chivalric type. It combined and reconciled two of 
 the greatest motive powers in the human spirit; the idea 
 of sacrifice and the force of self-assertive personality. 
 The perfect knight would die for his faith, his loyalty 
 and his love, but he died in battle. The reality of this 
 ideal is shown by the depth, the richness and the long 
 continuance of its appeal to the bosoms of men. The 
 idea of rescue, generated from mediaeval misery and 
 helplessness in an environment of brutal physical force, 
 is its ethical core; but its efflorescence in the imagina- 
 tion of men was as many-coloured as a sun. Beginning 
 in the British waste marshes and the Frankish Court, it 
 annexed the farthest Orient to the forests, deserts and 
 seas of its adventures ; it re-made the genealogies of his- 
 tory and drew all the great, emperors and saints alike, 
 into the Hves of its parentage; it absorbed into its own 
 tradition all past heroic excellence. It developed a cere- 
 monial ritual; it gathered to itself the mighty power of 
 symbolism in its most august and passionate forms; it 
 gave forth a great legendary literature, one of the richest 
 products of human effort and faith, written in every 
 European tongue and splendid with the deeds of every 
 soil. In the fulness of time, Arthur and Roland receding, 
 
 [24]
 
 CERVANTES 
 it was Amadis who was the star of chivalry. Amadis's 
 tale, though now out of the way, was once the book of 
 Europe. It had a spell to hold the finest spirits, like Sid- 
 ney's, and appealed to them directly and intimately as 
 the mirror of their hearts and hopes. It contained the 
 European mood of knighthood in its last beauty before 
 its near eclipse and sudden dimming. Cervantes loved 
 and honoured it, and its hero was Don Quixote's ideal 
 man, as he had been of thousands of the dying cult. 
 Such was the nature of the literature which Cervantes 
 " smiled away." For that had happened to the burning 
 faith of chivalry which is the fate of all the gods ; at first 
 men are overawed by them and worship, then they lift 
 equal eyes to them and find them companions of life ; and 
 last they laugh at them. The laughter of men at chivalry 
 had already filled the world from the lips of Italy before 
 Cervantes came. In his day chivalry was dead and 
 buried. The madness of Don Quixote was but its ghost, 
 wandering in the staring daylight of a new age, forlorn, 
 ridiculous, without place or use in the world. 
 
 The pastoral, which was a later growth, was comple- 
 mentary to the chivalric romance, and by its means fem- 
 inine elements entered into the simple manhood of the 
 knightly type and softened its humanity. Its affiliations 
 were Renaissance, as those of chivalry were mediaeval, 
 and it appropriated easily the grace, the sentiment and 
 
 [25]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 the emotional luxury of the reborn classic ideal. It sur- 
 vived the true chivalric mood, and lingered; in "Don 
 Quixote " it is not less omnipresent than chivalry, but is 
 less obviously ridiculed, more lightly satirized, more 
 tenderiy treated ; it is related to chivalry, in the composi- 
 tion, as sentimental to comic opera, but both are alike 
 out of date and discarded moods living only in parody, 
 which is in literature the last stage of extinction. The 
 passing of the pastoral dream, however, is subordinate 
 and not comparable to the death of the chivalric ideal; 
 in " Don Quixote " it is the latter that strikes the tragic 
 note. Whether Cervantes was himself conscious of this 
 note of tragedy in his work must remain forever obscure ; 
 if he was aware of it, he very successfully concealed his 
 knowledge. He began with pure comic intention and 
 made fun of the chivalric tradition, and very rough fun 
 it was, nor did it grow less rough. His treatment of the 
 knight is not free from coarseness, and is unremitting in 
 cruelty; here are the standards of the practical joker and 
 the buffoon-stage; but it may be usefully remembered 
 that Cervantes's scale of cruelty in life was one familiar 
 with the ways of the Turk and the pains of the Christian 
 victims in Algiers. Primarily a comedy by its conception 
 and unflinching conduct, " Don Quixote " gave out the 
 note of tragedy only in our own latter days. In this as- 
 pect, it is a myth of the modem mind, which has taken 
 
 [26]
 
 CERVANTES 
 on new meanings and disclosed fresh phases of signifi- 
 cance with time, as is the way of myths; with this Cer- 
 vantes had nothing to do. As he did not see in his hero 
 the incarnation of his country's fate, neither did he see in 
 him the last and greatest of knight-errants. He did not 
 look with our eyes; and it is only through the perspec- 
 tive of centuries that we recognize the historic moment, 
 and discern the famous knight, a great-hearted gentle- 
 man, standing in his travesty at the grave of chivalry. 
 
 The unconscious element, or what seems such, in the 
 works of the highest genius, is their most immortal part. 
 There is a mystical union of the race with these great 
 works ; they are humanized as much by the adoption of 
 mankind as by their original creation. The general hu- 
 man spirit enters into them; they blend with it and be- 
 come impersonal ; in the large results of time — in myth- 
 ologies, in the legend of chivalry, in the masterpieces of 
 culture — they become racial products, unindebted to 
 individuals. It is thus that "Don Quixote" is enfran- 
 chised from being the book of a country or of a historic 
 moment merely, and becomes a great book of the mod- 
 em spirit. It rises with the vigour of world-life in it, and 
 bears the supreme title of a book of humanity. It con- 
 tains the experience, the thought, the doubt of man. 
 This comedy is found to be the tragedy of all idealism. 
 If this is not the aspect under which it has most widely 
 
 [27]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 spread as a book of popular amusement, it is thus that it 
 has most profoundly affected the mind of modem times. 
 Mephistopheles and Don Quixote are the two great 
 myths that the modem world has generated out of itself, 
 as characteristic as Achilles in Homeric time or Roland 
 in the middle ages or Amadis in the Renaissance. They 
 are forms of its deepest consciousness, types created in 
 its own image, planets cast from its own orb. The mod- 
 ern world is psychological, and this book contains a 
 psychology seemingly as elementary and comprehensive 
 as a law of nature; it is sceptical, and this book utters, as 
 no other does, the double entendre of life; it is pessimis- 
 tic, and this book makes the most destructive impeach- 
 ment of life. Doubtless one goes far from Cervantes in 
 such thoughts; but if he did not fathom, we may well be- 
 lieve that he felt the deeper meanings of his book, for 
 even in the eyes of the comedian it is a book of much 
 sadness. 
 
 The double nature of life is put to the fore. There is 
 an opposition in human nature, and this is set forth by 
 the contrast of Don Quixote and Sancho. It is rendered 
 in them by divers ways as the antithesis of the imagina- 
 tion with the senses, of the life of thought with the life of 
 fact, of illusion with reality, of the eloquent discourse 
 with the proverb, of the poetry with the prose of life; 
 but, essentially, this polarity is in the double aspect of 
 
 [28]
 
 CERVANTES 
 life as soul and sense. Cervantes decides for neither; he 
 presents both as liable to error. He portrays Don Quix- 
 ote with the characteristic defect of the soul, imagina- 
 tive illusion; and he gives to Sancho the characteristic 
 defect of the material man, self-interest. The higher 
 nature betrayed by its own nobility, the lower duped by 
 its own baseness — that is the two-edged sword of life. 
 That is the human comedy. 
 
 It is in the madness of Don Quixote that the heart of 
 the book beats. It is a very singular madness. The inven- 
 tion manifested in the narrative is generally thought to 
 be its prime Uterary trait; but its verisimilitude, the 
 skill with which it keeps the quaking edge of truth and 
 fiction, is as marvellous; and nowhere more than in Don 
 Quixote's madness are the shades made subtle. It is a 
 very normal madness. Don Quixote does not differ much 
 from other men in his mental processes. He interprets 
 the sights and sounds of the actual world by his past ex- 
 perience; only, as he has lived in the world of books a 
 life of imagination, his experience is unreal, liis memory 
 is inapphcable to the world about him, or, as is said, his 
 inferences are all wrong. His illusions have an origin 
 from without, and are misinterpretations of the external 
 world, due to an expectancy in his own mind which has 
 arisen from his absorbed reading of romances. His senses 
 are overlaid with thought, and he sees what he expects 
 
 [29]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 to see. It is impossible, too, to acquit him of a certain 
 complicity with his own madness. He shows it when he 
 refrains from testing his second helmet; in the fact that 
 he was not fully persuaded he was a knight-errant till 
 the Duke treated him as such; and unmistakably in his 
 tale of what happened in the Cave of Montesinos, where 
 Sancho frankly charges him with making it up; at the 
 end, too, his recovery seems, in part at least, self-willed. 
 The history of his madness, also, has a method in it; in 
 the first part he is his own victim; in the second he is the 
 victim of others; beginning with self-deception, he ends 
 as the butt of the deception of all from Sancho to the 
 Duke and the Bachelor. His madness is intermittent; if 
 his mind is in fact diseased, it is by a capability of going 
 mad under certain exciting causes, but on all other occa- 
 sions he is as remarkable for judgment as for learning 
 and eloquence. 
 
 This strange madness of Don Quixote is comic in its 
 accidents, in its circumstantial defeat, in its earthly en- 
 vironment ; but in itself it is tragic. Its seat is in the very 
 excellency of the soul ; its illusions take body in the no- 
 blest human aims, the most heroic nature and virtue of 
 the purest strain. A madman has no character; but it is 
 the character of Don Quixote that at last draws the 
 knight out of all his degradations and makes him tri- 
 umph in the heart of the reader. Modem dismay begins 
 
 [30]
 
 CERVANTES 
 in the thought that here is not the abnormality of an in- 
 dividual but the madness of the soul in its own nature. 
 That high aims may be ridiculous ; that heroism may be 
 folly; that virtue may be insanity; that the ideal which 
 was the spiritual wealth of the fathers may be the farce 
 of the children; that the soul in its exaltation, its gentle- 
 ness and sacrifice, has no necessary wisdom and in its 
 own vision no warrant of reality; that the good cast 
 down, the kind trampled on, the brave broken, become 
 the laughter of the world; these are the truths which 
 make " Don Quixote " such sorry reading for the ideal- 
 ist. He thought to make the reality of things curtsey to 
 the lie in his mind ; but that lie was itself the substantive 
 virtue of his soul. This is the paradox of idealism. 
 
 Don Quixote, so far as the Knight of the Rueful Feature 
 is concerned, would indeed be a pitiful farce to modem 
 feeling, were not his madness typical of the partial san- 
 ity of mankind. Still as in old time a man finds what he 
 goes out to seek; a man sees his own face in the world; 
 and man is still a victim of past greatness. These are cap- 
 ital truths. Imaginative illusion, the soul's vice, is com- 
 mon in life, and affects most the best of men, and espe- 
 cially those of great emotional capacity, and since 
 emotional imagination is the principal feeder of the 
 religious and moral energies of men, this illusion most 
 characterizes men of ideal temper possessed with the 
 
 [31]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 ideas of rescue, sacrifice and battle, and arises most fre- 
 quently in the field of the reform of the worid. A man of 
 one or few ideas does not differ from Don Quixote psy- 
 chologically, except in degree. Whether his experience is 
 bookish or real, he confines his attention to a specially 
 selected and usually narrow theme, neglects the correc- 
 tives that life furnishes, and becomes absorbed in his 
 mastering preconception of hfe; he is infatuated. Often 
 he exhibits a like complicity with his own partial mad- 
 ness, suppresses irreconcilable facts, and refuses to 
 think in their direction. Often, too, he passes on from 
 the stage of self-deception, in which he is only his own 
 victim, and becomes the victim of others practising on 
 him, whom they profess to take at his own estimate, for 
 gain, convenience, or amusement. The parallel is easily 
 followed out, and the fact is recognized in the word 
 Quixotic, which has become a famihar term in all lan- 
 guages. Such Quixotism is inherent in the social ideal, 
 especially as held in youth, which having necessarily an 
 inaccurate idea of life indulges those hopes natural to 
 the human breast which can have no accomplishment in 
 reality; and it is imbedded in inherited beliefs and the 
 tradition of education, which contain an element of the 
 past inapplicable to the changing present; the outworn 
 creed, the lost cause, all shells of past faith and passion 
 are its strongholds. In this lies the permanent truth of 
 
 [32]
 
 CERVANTES 
 the book to life. Illusion, and specifically the illusion of 
 the noble mind inheriting a great past, is the original 
 mark of Quixotism; and the moral which men have 
 read into it is, the finer the soul, the more utter its earth- 
 ly defeat. The hero from whom it took its name marked 
 a great break in the moral ideals of the race as things of 
 practice ; and in the futility of his high behaviour, reach- 
 ing the height of the ridiculous, seems too cleariy to ex- 
 emplify the earthly defeat of the ideal ; a defeat so abso- 
 lute that the best one can say is — he was wholly mad. 
 The point of view is that of a dying age. So Demos- 
 thenes felt on the eve of the Hellenizing of the Mediter- 
 ranean world, and Brutus on the eve of its imperializa- 
 tion; so, on the scale of personal life, an old man feels. 
 "Don Quixote" is an old man's book. Cervantes ap- 
 plied a destructive criticism to the higher nature of man, 
 in its aims, methods, and intelligence; the waste of noble 
 nature, the practical ineflSciency of virtue did not dis- 
 turb him; sceptical in that he saw the fallibility of the 
 soul, as such, in its own vision, and pessimistic in that he 
 recognized the impotence of the soul as such in action, 
 he remains serene ; the governing factor in human life is 
 its mortal condition, not its spiritual motive, he con- 
 cludes. Passion, how subUme it is ! but oh, the irony of 
 it at last ! and no form of it so ironical as the passion for 
 reforming the worid, the will to serve mankind! 
 
 [33]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 Cervantes is disillusioned ; he has accepted the disillu- 
 sionment ; he smiles at it. The peculiarity of " Don Quix- 
 ote " is that all this is set forth with loud laughter, with 
 frank and overflowing sympathy with the world as it is, 
 with delight in all its various material hfe and people. 
 It is the world of Maritomes, of Gines de Pasamonte, of 
 Roque Guinart, of the innkeepers and muleteers, of the 
 graceless duke and his duchess, of real people; it is not 
 Don Quixote's world. It is this acceptance of life as it is, 
 of the lower element in life, that is the complement in the 
 book to the denial of the old ideal. Here is the victory of 
 realism, of the positive spirit, of the oncoming age, of 
 prose and sense and actuality, the modern time. Don 
 Quixote closes a period, and in all that relates to him 
 there is the pathos of death, the hopelessness of failure, 
 the despair of the end; in all he is, the eye is reverted to 
 the past and sees its dissolution, the death of aristocracy 
 in its ideal as it was to die in its person on the French 
 scaffold. Faith in the ideal is dead in the book to the last 
 spark. The key of ideal faith had passed into the hands 
 of the new genius of the changing world, democracy, of 
 which Cervantes knew nothing; he saw and helped to 
 mould the body of the new real world, but its spirit was 
 not yet born. It is because the ideal in " Don Quixote " 
 has no spiritual future that its outworn and Ufeless forms 
 are such a mockery of the soul. It brings, too, the immor- 
 
 [34]
 
 CERVANTES 
 tal doubt. Will the democratic ideal in its evolution 
 prove as inapplicable to the enduring life of man as have 
 the other great historic ideals of the race ? Is there noth- 
 ing absolute in the soul ? Is " Don Quixote " finally 
 greatest in its philosophy, as a book of that relativity 
 which the modern spirit finds in all things and most 
 dearly loves ? 
 
 " Don Quixote " is the book of the one great defeat, but 
 also of many victories, and especially those of prose, real- 
 ism, and humour in modern hterature. Of all the victories 
 which it embodies, however, the greatest is that of Cer- 
 vantes over himself. The unfailing cheerfulness of its 
 spirit is the temperament of Cervantes playing through 
 it. He had Hved and toiled, he had felt the full passion of 
 life, he had dreamed and planned and striven, both as 
 man and writer, in arms and letters, and he had met for 
 the most part only the blows of fortune; wounds and 
 slavery, neglect and poverty, the well-known wages of 
 genius, had been paid him in full measure. Yet every in- 
 dication of his personality that survives shows him un- 
 spoiled and still companionable, pleasant, patient. It 
 was in this spirit that, being about to die, he bade fare- 
 well to all . Scott at the end of his days, with Wordsworth 
 and others about him in the hbrary at Abbotsford, asked 
 Lockhart to read the scene. Allan, the painter, " remem- 
 bered nothing he ever saw with such sad pleasure as the 
 
 [35]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 attitudes of Scott and Wordsworth as the story went on." 
 It was a scene that recalls that other death of Tennyson, 
 lying with his open Shakspere in the moonlight. " Good- 
 bye, humours; good-bye, pleasant fancies; good-bye, 
 merry friends, for I perceive I am dying, in the wish to 
 see you happy in the other life." These were Cervantes's 
 last words in his world. The most profound master of 
 the irony of hfe preserved his heart uncorroded by that 
 knowledge, as he had kept it sweet against the enmity of 
 man and fortune. 
 
 [36]
 
 Great Writers 
 
 n
 
 SCOTT 
 
 Sir Walter Scott, the prince of prose romancers, should 
 be reckoned among the great benefactors of mankind. 
 Of the works of prose in the nineteenth century, which 
 have contributed to human happiness on the universal 
 scale, the Waverley Novels hold a place by virtue of their 
 milhons of readers ; and now, coming into the hands of 
 the fourth generation, they are still one of the principal 
 effective contemporary possessions of the EngUsh race 
 in Uterature. Criticism, which sooner or later, assails all 
 works of great fame, has the most trifling effect upon 
 them; they are invulnerable in the hearts of the people. 
 They contain so much humanity in its plain style ; they 
 disclose such romantic scenes, such stir of gallantry, 
 such a high behaviour, in connection "wath events and 
 personages otherwise memorable; and they are, besides, 
 so coloured with the hues of the mind arising from local 
 association, imaginative legend, historic glamour and 
 
 [39]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 the sense of the presence of fine action, that their recep- 
 tion by the heart is spontaneous. Especially, they con- 
 tain Scotland as Don Quixote contains Spain, only upon 
 a broader and more diversified scale. Cervantes, in- 
 deed, comes into one's mind in connection with Scott in 
 many ways. 
 
 Scott's descent was like that of Cervantes. He was of 
 the old blood, but bom in a modest station. If the 
 changes of time had not reduced his family stock to the 
 condition of the poor hidalgo, they had much tempered 
 its original border strain. Scott was as much attached to 
 his ancestors as a New Englander, and was continually 
 harking back in his anecdotes — and he had a full rep- 
 ertory of such tales of the house — to " Auld Watt " of 
 Harden and "Beardie" of Teviotdale, while through 
 these worthies and otherwise he could trace the affluents 
 of his blood to the great Scotch houses, among which he 
 took particular pride in Buccleugh. His father was a 
 simple lawyer, whose portrait is exactly drawn in Saun- 
 ders Fairford, in " Redgauntlet," a plain citizen, shrewd, 
 formal, practical, well exemplifying the fixed type of the 
 profession at Edinburgh. Perhaps the hterary strain, 
 which does not appear in the paternal ancestry, came 
 from the mother, the daughter of an eminent physician. 
 Dr. Rutherford, and herself well-educated; certainly, 
 although Scott had several brothers and a sister, the 
 
 [40]
 
 SCOTT 
 genius of the family was wholly allotted to him. Owing 
 to a lameness, which developed in his right leg in child- 
 hood and was an impediment to him throughout life, 
 the boy was in early years country-bred and much en- 
 couraged in physical exertion, for which indeed he had 
 a natural incHnation, being full of animal vigour and 
 spirits. He said late in life — " from childhood's earliest 
 hour I have rebelled against external circumstances;" 
 and in combatting this physical disadvantage he first 
 exercised his courage and pertinacity. His deficiency did 
 not interfere with his good comradery as a school-boy. 
 He walked and rode a good deal, and he bore perhaps 
 more than his share in the rough fighting of the schools 
 and the town then in vogue. As he passed from master to 
 master, each of them characteristic examples of the old 
 disciphne, he did his tasks and won their interest and 
 favour, but it was rather by his sympathetic under- 
 standing of literature than by any brilliancy of mind. 
 He had the education of the schools as a thing of course, 
 and it was valuable to him; but he illustrates the fact 
 that to turn a boy loose in a library is to give him the 
 best of all opportunities — the opportunity for self -edu- 
 cation. He read from childhood widely and well, and 
 while yet a boy had such an acquaintance with great 
 literature as would now seem phenomenal, though it was 
 precisely the same as that which a generation later New 
 
 [41]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 England boys had at the same age, if they were so in- 
 clined. More than in his childish verses or the tales com- 
 posed with his schoolmates there is the feeling of in- 
 stinct in Ballantyne's school anecdote: "Come, slink 
 over beside me, Jamie, and I' 11 tell you a story. " Plainly 
 in his boyhood Scott was as full of hterature as he was of 
 fight. If one could have discerned it, however, the true 
 sign of the future was not in the literary tastes which 
 Scott shared with others of his kind, but in the historic 
 sense which he possessed in a peculiar degree. He was 
 from the start deeply interested in his own country and 
 his own people; he was an insatiable Ustener to the 
 tales of " Sixty years since " and their Uke, to the border 
 ballads, the legends, all the romantic growths of the 
 Scotch memory; he had the zeal of an antiquary in see- 
 ing the places where events had happened, the old 
 fields of battle, the ruined castle, the border-wall, or 
 whatever spot or object history had left its mark upon. 
 This was the gift that, Hke Aaron's rod, was to swallow 
 up all the others. 
 
 It is impossible to trace in Scott, in early life, any of 
 the self-consciousness that is apt to accompany such 
 precocity and intensity, any sense of a call from the fu- 
 ture. His father tolerated and indulged these tastes, but 
 to his practical mind a Uterary career for his son would 
 hardly have occurred. The youth was docile, was ap- 
 
 [42]
 
 SCOTT 
 
 prenticed in his father's oflBce, and at twenty-one was 
 called to the bar. Meanwhile he maintained his literary 
 pursuits as a matter of course. Intellectual interest at 
 that time was still a part of men's life, and in the clubs 
 of good fellowship, where Scott deUghted to make one 
 and was often a leading spirit, literature had its share 
 with other topics. Thus it happened that he was among 
 the first of his contemporaries to feel the attraction of 
 German literature, then reaching England, and to ac- 
 quire some knowledge of it ; the kinship of its ballad and 
 romance with the spirit of the border, which was already 
 growing incarnate in Scott, prepared a ready welcome 
 for it in his sympathies. Nothing is more remarkable in 
 Scott's life than its entire naturalness. He never made 
 an effort, hardly a choice; he merely did the next thing; 
 so now he did not think of adopting literature as a ca- 
 reer, but it was natural for him to try his hand at a trans- 
 lation. Life went on as naturally, too, in other ways. 
 The course of true love not running smooth, he was left 
 with a memory of early devotion which diffused a pa- 
 thetic tenderness over his recollections of youth ; and in 
 the lapse of time — not too long a lapse — he married 
 happily an English-bred lady of French birth, being 
 speedy in both the wooing and the wedding. In his cot- 
 tage at Lasswade and afterwards on the little estate of 
 Ashestiel he had a characteristic home, filled with his per- 
 
 [43]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 sonality, and in both he showed that passion for making 
 the place his own which was later displayed on the grand 
 scale at Abbotsford. He made no great progress at the 
 bar, and as time went on he habitually ascribed something 
 of this slowness to the unfavourable effect of his literary 
 avocations on his professional reputation. Tenacity, how- 
 ever, was characteristic of him. He never let go of any- 
 thing while it would hold. He knew the ways of his world, 
 too, and was not averse to them ; and in this case wisdom 
 was justified of her child. At twenty-eight he was made 
 sheriff of Selkirkshire, and five years later obtained the 
 additional post of clerk to the Court of Session; and 
 although he did not at once come into the emoluments of 
 the latter, the two places secured him for life an ample 
 independence and honourable station. His position in 
 the working world was that of a gentleman of the law 
 with clerical and executive duties. 
 
 It may be that this security of tenure as a practical 
 man contributed something to Scott's attitude toward 
 the profession of literature — a view exceptional among 
 authors — as a mode of Hfe like any other, and conse- 
 quently to liis remarkable freedom from literary vanity. 
 He was always a man of many affairs, of which literature 
 was only one; and it took its place as a normal part of 
 life. It is likely, however, that the slowness of his devel- 
 opment as an author was the fundamental cause of his 
 
 [44]
 
 SCOTT 
 
 taking so sober a view. His precocity never took the 
 form of immature publication. In the case of no genius 
 is the gradual hiving of the material on which it was to 
 work so marked, the unhurried ripening of faculty so 
 like a process of nature ; and Scott seems all the time as 
 ignorant of what was to be the outcome as the seed and 
 blade are of the full com in the ear. He was an out-of- 
 doors man as he had been a tramping boy. It is impos- 
 sible to think of him without his horses and dogs. His 
 duties as sheriff took him across country continually, 
 and he always had more months out of Edinburgh than 
 in it notwithstanding his clerkship. He was thus in con- 
 stant contact with Scotch life and country, and he never 
 lost or relaxed his first impulse, to know and see with his 
 eyes, so far as his eyes could see it, all the local history. 
 He was also in love with the genius of Scotland as it was 
 stamped in the people of all sorts and conditions. Hu- 
 man nature, the rough hard article free from its alloy of 
 the town, was treasure-trove to him. On those annual 
 " raids into Liddesdale, " and on many another journey, 
 he made himself master of this book of truth out of which 
 came so much of the character, anecdote and phrase 
 that are most sterling, real and humoursome in his books. 
 For all such actuality in the country-side he had the same 
 tenacity of mind that Lincoln showed in his circuit- 
 riding, and he was as full of genuine telling anecdote 
 
 [45]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 gathered from the hving Hp. He was, too, most compan- 
 ionable; "he met every man," it was said, "hke his 
 blood relation." In these "raids" and journeys there 
 was much roughness, but it was welcome to him as 
 having some taste of the old border life. The country 
 people were fond of him ; to them he was to the end of his 
 days " the Sheriff. " In Edinburgh, also, he held a vig- 
 orous and social life with men. In the times of the fear of 
 Napoleonic invasion, he had been a live patriot and 
 cavalryman, quartermaster of the Light Horse, and 
 took his share of camp and drill with great zest, while 
 still in the late twenties of life; and he was always a fear- 
 less horseman, preferring the turbulent ford to the safe 
 passage and never "going round" for anything in the 
 way. If he " broke the neck of the day's work " before 
 breakfast, as was his lifelong habit, it was a matter of 
 necessity; for a man who spent the greater part of the 
 day in physical activity and exercise could have a fresh 
 mind only in the morning. It was in those early hours 
 that he accomplished his literary work ; and if there was 
 much mechanical routine in the practice, perhaps his 
 youthful experience as a writer of legal foolscap had 
 accustomed him to the drudgery of the desk. In a life 
 of such variety and scope, so full of work of all kinds, 
 with many active interests, overflowing too with hos- 
 pitality and rich in friendships, genius less abundant 
 
 [46]
 
 SCOTT 
 
 and powerful than Scott's would have been over- 
 whelmed, but he had the knack to turn it all into new 
 resources. 
 
 Until Scott was past thirty he may well have thought 
 of literature as only the busiest and most delightful part 
 of his leisure, and have seemed to himself as to others 
 the son of the old lawyer treading in his father's foot- 
 steps to a like mediocre fortune. He was of a more gen- 
 erous make, it is true; he was not at all a precisian; 
 there was much freedom for human nature in Edin- 
 burgh life, and he took his share; in the careless cheer 
 of his youthful days and in the hearty sociability of his 
 manhood there was something that would now be 
 thought boisterous ; boy and man, conviviality was warm 
 in his blood. He was one of those men who diffuse a 
 physical glow about them. But also, it is plain, there 
 was something in him that set him distinctly apart; the 
 unlikeness which isolates genius, felt before it is recog- 
 nized, like the electric air of the undischarged cloud ; in 
 every company, however varied, though never too much 
 the leader, he was the interesting man. There was a glow 
 in his mind as well as in his blood. It was not literary 
 ambition exactly; though he says that when he wrote 
 the song of Young Lochinvar he was " passionately am- 
 bitious of fame, " it was more the flash of a young man's 
 feeling than the awakening of resolute ambition. Though 
 
 [47]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 
 so widely and well read in literature and with a real 
 bookishness in his tastes, his genius was not at all book- 
 ish. The glow in his mind was vital, and nourished on 
 life, and it flowed almost entirely from that historic sense, 
 that absorbed interest in his own country and people, 
 which was the master-light in which he saw Ufe. He at- 
 tracted all Scottishness to himself as by the necessity of a 
 fairy gift. If any delver in the old Hterature was in the 
 neighbourhood, such as the marvellous Leyden, he was 
 close in his company; if there was a kindred scholar 
 across the border, hke EUis, he was in correspondence 
 with him; and with such men he began that growing 
 circle of friendships by letter, re-enforced wdth occas- 
 ional visits, which is one of the most agreeable and pe- 
 culiar pleasures of the literary Ufe and in Scott's case 
 was so large and interesting a part of his biography. He 
 had, for the time, concentrated his antiquarian interest 
 in the endeavour to collect and edit the ballads which he 
 finally issued as the " Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border," 
 and in particular attention to old metrical romances. 
 This work was really a stage in his preparation to write, 
 a stone that marks his progress in that absorption of 
 Scotland into his own genius which he was unconscious- 
 ly accomplishing without a thought of its ulterior end. 
 He was so far, in the Une of his true development, only a 
 literary antiquary. 
 
 [48]
 
 SCOTT 
 The beginnings of his literary career, which ante- 
 dated the " Minstrelsy," did not grow out of his true 
 material, but in a curiously opposite way were distinctly 
 bookish. His faculty of imagination was stirred inde- 
 pendently and apart from the subjects it was to operate 
 upon habitually. He made some translations from the 
 German ballads, and also a version of Goethe's " Goetz 
 von BerUchingen ; " and in connection with these studies 
 he tried some original ballads of his own. He was then 
 twenty-eight years old and he describes these as his first 
 " serious attempts at verse. " Two years later when he 
 published the early volumes of the " Minstrelsy," the idea 
 that he might make literature an important part of his 
 Ufe seems to have been distinctly formed, and it had 
 found its true roots. The close tie, the natural birth in- 
 deed, of his first poem, " The Lay of the Last Minstrel, " 
 out of the deepest prepossession of liis mind, is obvious. 
 He wrote it, perhaps, with as little self-confidence as ever 
 any distinguished poet felt in composing his first work, 
 and was as much surprised by its reception as the world 
 was at its appearance. He won at once a popular crown 
 which no hand feebler than Byron's was to wrest from 
 him. He had then already reached his thirty -fourth year. 
 "Marmion," and "The Lady of the Lake," which 
 quickly followed, confirmed his poetic fame; on these 
 three tales in verse, together with a score of lyrics, his 
 
 [49]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 permanent vogue as what he might have called "a 
 rhymer" rests. 
 
 The merit of Scott's poetry has been much attacked 
 by latter-day critics ; but there is a reasonable view to be 
 taken of it, and within its limitations its worth is still un- 
 impaired. Its survival, notwithstanding the immensely 
 greater work of the poets who followed him — men who 
 were purely poets — shows life at the root. It had origin- 
 ality, and retains its force. Scott broke new ground; he 
 discovered material which had natural poetry, and he 
 treated it in a novel manner, appropriate to the subject 
 and stimulating to the mind. If he borrowed his metre 
 from Coleridge, he appUed it in a manner and on a scale 
 that Coleridge was incapable of. He was an experimen- 
 ter in a new kind, and in it was wholly self-educated; 
 such real defects as there are in the verse are incidental 
 to its being tentative work. There is more power than 
 craft, more Ufe than skill; he succeeds by spontaneity 
 more than by art. The careless cross-country gallop of 
 the metre is in keeping with the verve and unevenness 
 which characterize the whole; but the blood is kept 
 awake. His great power of narrative tells the tale, but the 
 interest is less in the individuals than in the kind of hfe 
 depicted, the baronial hall, the border battle, the High- 
 land romance; he re\nvified the times he treated in en- 
 during colours, which replace history in the memory for 
 
 [50]
 
 SCOTT 
 
 his district equally with Shakspere's plays for the king- 
 dom. He gave especially to the Highlands an imagina- 
 tive memory which annexed them to the lands which 
 have a meaning to the general heart of man; he alone 
 gave that charm to Loch Katrine and its environs 
 which Ufts the scene above the savagery of nature. It is 
 not due only to his description, but he placed action 
 there. It is an error to think of nature-poetry as lying in 
 the sphere of contemplation, merely because that was 
 Wordsworth's way; out-of-doors poetry, such as Byron's 
 tales, often contains more of nature in the mingling of 
 the great scene with the action than any number of ad- 
 dresses to flowers of the wayside and lonely weeds on the 
 rocks. In Scott, fair as the landscape is, nature is more 
 than landscape; it is the place of the action, the breath- 
 ing air of hfe itself. The action, moreover, which is the 
 main interest, is unsurpassed in the quality of gallantry, 
 in the stirring moment and the personal adventure. He 
 is the most martial of English poets; excepting a half- 
 dozen lyrics and ballads by Campbell, and one or two 
 others, there is nothing in our poetry to rival him in this 
 respect. This is the Homeric fighting quality that some 
 find in his verse, and there is truth in the remark. It is 
 said that he "pleases boys;" that is not against him. 
 The obviousness of his meaning, the fact that his ideas, 
 images and language are within easy reach of the aver- 
 
 [51]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 age mind, the presence of much ordinariness in the sub- 
 stance, as they partly account for his ready popularity 
 and its wide spread, also denote his permanent appeal; 
 for with all this, which is called his commonness, there 
 goes that most uncommon power to stir the blood, to 
 send the soul out of doors, to revivify lost romantic 
 modes of life in all their picturesque colour, their daring 
 spirit, their emotional reality. He makes his reader hve 
 the life, and it is not only the life of a past age but it is 
 one of the great permanent types of life. It appeals to all 
 freemen; the echo of it, the desire for it, are in their 
 blood. I have referred to the sneer that Scott " pleases 
 boys. " He does. It was " many and many a year ago, in 
 a kingdom by the sea, " that my own fourteenth summer 
 was made happy with this delight. I remember that I 
 read every line of his verse with eagerness and poured 
 out my admiration in a longer essay than this is hkely to 
 prove. The experience was not a bad one for a boy who, 
 at the yet more tender age of twelve had been deep 
 in BjTon and melancholy. It is thirty years and more 
 since then; but to this day the clang of the verse of 
 Branksome Hall turns all the iron of my blood to 
 music, and the sight of the falling standard on 
 Flodden Field is the most I shall ever know of the 
 heart of Sidney " moved more than with a trumpet. " 
 This is the sort of mastery in which Scott is great, 
 
 [52]
 
 SCOTT 
 for both boy and man. The personal reminiscence 
 only gives emphasis to what is broadly true. Poetry, in 
 the mould which Scott commanded, could not give ex- 
 pression to his whole genius; it is not in verse that he 
 did his great work; but he had set the fashion and 
 showed the way for Byron — in itself surely no small 
 thing — and when Byron " beat " him, as he said, he 
 turned to prose fiction and came into his own. It is not 
 the least of his honours as a man that after Byron had 
 surpassed him, and in fact dethroned him in the popular 
 breath, Scott made and kept his friendship and, notwith- 
 standing their profound difference in character, defended 
 his name and fame against the bitter storm of English en- 
 mity. He did not, however, give up the tale in verse at 
 once, just as he had not given up the law. It was not in 
 his nature, as has been said, to let go. He continued to 
 write metrical romances, but none of them have the same 
 boldness of execution or the same cling to the mind that 
 belonged to the earlier efforts. In these poetic years, too, 
 he had done what in any other man would in itself 
 have seemed abundant labour, in massive editorial 
 work and other miscellaneous literary ways. His poems 
 represent, after all, but a fragment of his immense energy ; 
 and now, feeling the need of appealing to the public in a 
 new Une, he solved the situation by taking up a new 
 and unfinished task. 
 
 [53]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 The entrance of Scott on the field of prose fiction 
 bears a close resemblance to his debut in poetry. It has 
 the same tentativeness, the character of an experiment. 
 He had long had in mind an attempt to depict the man- 
 ners of his country in prose. He had read Miss Edge- 
 worth's Irish tales, and he thought something like that 
 could be done for Scotland. He had for some years been 
 privately interested with Ballantyne in the printing busi- 
 ness ; and the fact had turned his mind to the problems 
 of publishing and kept him keenly aUve to the opportu- 
 nities of trade, as if he had been — as essentially he was 
 — a publisher's adviser. He was always interested in 
 " bringing out " something, and the usefulness of his own 
 faculties in feeding the press was a constant element in 
 the business. Like Cervantes, again, he tried all kinds; 
 but his first experiment in fiction had not seemed prom- 
 ising. He began " Waverley " in 1805, just after the pub- 
 lication of the " Lay of the Last Minstrel;" he resumed 
 it five years later and was again discouraged; after an- 
 other interval, finding the manuscript while he was 
 hunting for fishing tackle, he wrote the last two volumes 
 in three weeks, in 1813, and it was published anony- 
 mously early the next year. Its success, which is one of 
 the legends of literature, was as far beyond expectation 
 as that of " The Lay " had been in its time ; and he fol- 
 lowed it up, just as he had done in poetry, with that 
 
 [54]
 
 SCOTT 
 rapid succession of triumph after triumph which made 
 him in the end one of the leading figures of contem- 
 porary Europe and the national glory of his own country. 
 The "Author of Waverley " was forty-three years old 
 when he began the great series ; but though the discovery 
 and application of his powers have the semblance of ac- 
 cident, both his success and his fertility were the direct 
 result of slowly maturing causes. That long hiving of 
 material and ripening of faculty had gone on without 
 any consciousness of the end to which they were to be 
 applied; but the preparation was complete, and Scott 
 had now found the work — a necessity of genius — into 
 which he could put the whole of himself. His primary 
 endowment was the historic sense, in which he excelled 
 all other English imaginative writers, and in him it was 
 bred of such love of country as to be an impelling pas- 
 sion of patriotism. His love of Scotland was as close to 
 him as his family pride, and his life was a thing of di- 
 rect contact with what he loved. His tenacity, remarkable 
 in all its manifestations, became genius when applied to 
 anything Scottish. He had an ocular memory of the 
 places he had seen; probably there is no local spot de- 
 scribed in his Scotch novels that is not a direct trans- 
 cript from nature; and the native landscape had so filled 
 his mind that, at the end, in the soft environs of Naples 
 he could see only Scotland ; " on proceeding, " says his 
 
 [55]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 companion there, remarking on this, " he repeated in a 
 grave tone and with great emphasis : 
 
 "Up the craggy mountain, and down the mossy glen 
 We canna gang a-mUking, jar Charlie and his men. " 
 
 There was the same prepossession of his mind with the 
 historical and Uving characters of the land, its feuds and 
 legends, its past and present. In truth, in these years of 
 unconscious preparation he was not unlike Don Quixote 
 reading the romances of chivalry ; his mind was charged 
 with Scotland, and when he went forth into the world as 
 a novelist spent itself in the things of fiction, in a 
 Quixotic enthusiasm. He lived much of the time in an 
 imaginary world, as he said, not only when he was ac- 
 tually composing but in his mood of mind; it had been 
 so from childhood ; he had partly realized this world in 
 poetry, he completely embodied it in prose. His active 
 professional duties, which were of a routine nature, and 
 his out-of-doors Ufe with men and practical affairs were, 
 no doubt, a means of keeping the balance of sanity, of 
 actuality, in his life; but, for all that, he had built up a 
 world of his own in which his mind lived. It was this 
 world which came to birth in the Waverley Novels, pri- 
 marily in the Scotch tales, which are the core of the se- 
 ries, and secondarily in the foreign tales, including the 
 English, which often have large Scotch elements and are 
 
 [56]
 
 SCOTT 
 all created on the same ground principles. As on the ideal 
 side, like Don Quixote, his mind was imbued with a 
 past age that gave its colours to his waking Ufe, so too on 
 the side of actuality, like the Knight of La Mancha's 
 author, he had gone up and down in the land and knew 
 all its people, high and low, noble and peasant and cate- 
 ran, its professions and trades, its servants, its castaways 
 and poor scholars, the whole range of its human types ; 
 for the ideal and the actual, and they were homogeneous 
 and not opposed in his case, he was equally well fur- 
 nished ; his representation of Scotland would be as com- 
 plete as Cervantes had made of Spain, and vaster. 
 
 The oneness of his genius — the fact that the same pow- 
 er is here at work that produced the poems — is shown 
 by the identical way in which he approached his task. 
 The defects of " Waverley," as an experimental trial, 
 are the same as those of " The Lay ; " " The Antiquary " 
 is better made in the same way as " Marmion. " He 
 owed little, if anything, to example in either case; he was 
 self educated both as poet and novelist. The virtues of 
 mere craft do not count for much in his success in prose 
 any more than in verse. Construction is loose, compo- 
 sition is rapid and careless; art is secondary to matter. 
 Sheer power of genius, however, is there with its inevit- 
 able and brilliant mastery of the situation. It takes the 
 same direction as in the poems ; the novelist does not aim 
 
 [57]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 at a tale of individual fortunes, but he endeavours to rep- 
 resent a kind of life. It is this that gives him breadth of 
 meaning. It is social not private Ufe that he sets forth. 
 In a novel there may be many elements — the plot, the 
 hero, situation, dialogue, tableau, atmosphere and the 
 like; and these may be subordinated or emphasized 
 separately in infinite combinations. The faults which 
 criticism charges to Scott's form largely proceed from a 
 too limited and rigid conception, from the point of view 
 of construction, of what narrative art consists in. In fact 
 his novel bears, in its relation to the more unified type, 
 some resemblance to the chronicle play in its relation to 
 the more organized drama. He seeks, under the impulse 
 of his historic sense, a broader effect than any tale of in- 
 dividual life can give — a social effect. He is apt to set 
 his particular story in a stream of general events, to 
 which the fortunes of the individuals are related, but the 
 interest is less in the plot than in the stream of events. 
 He thus gives a truer perspective to fife and greater sig- 
 nificance to his matter. The control of the plot, and its 
 issues, are apt to lie at a distance, in what may be called 
 a kind of macliination in the background, as the affair of 
 the house of Osbaldiston in " Rob Roy, " or old Elspeth's 
 secret in "The Antiquary." The encompassing of a 
 larger world is round about the story. Like all the great- 
 est writers, Scott gives the great scene of Hfe always ; it 
 
 [58]
 
 SCOTT 
 is a crowded stage, a world full of people. In such a scene 
 the hero may occupy an unimportant place ; the interest is 
 not primarily in him. It is a feudal, commercial, political 
 world, filled with fixed types ; there is an abundance of 
 stock characters ; to set forth the manners and concerns 
 of this world largely in a vivid human way, to be, as it 
 were a public historian, not a writer of private mem- 
 oirs, is Scott's scope. The fortunes of the individuals 
 being inserted in this environing world, much as the dia- 
 lect is inlaid in the Enghsh, the progress of the tale is 
 managed by a succession of scenes. Scott's greatest tal- 
 ent of execution lay in the depicting of these scenes ; if he 
 was not a dramatist, there was something theatrical in 
 his faculty, and though he could not write a play, no one 
 could better stage an incident. These scenes are of all 
 kinds; indoor scenes with the fidelity of Dutch mas- 
 ters, such as the hut in " Rob Roy " or Noma's dwelling; 
 out-of-door scenes of infinite variety hke the vengeance 
 of Rob's wife or the drover's foray at the end ; scenes of 
 all degrees of spirited action and emotional play, or sim- 
 ple instances of noble behaviour like the farewell of the 
 prince in " Redgauntlet. " Scott has an unrivalled power 
 of reahzing fife at such times, and here he centres hu- 
 man interest, while about tliis incessant stream of inci- 
 dents conducted by persons suffering and doing there is 
 constantly felt the play of great forces, social, political, 
 
 [59]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 hereditary, the sense of life as an element in which lives 
 exist and here presented especially and most powerfully 
 as a thing of history and nationality. 
 
 Such a presentation of national history and manners, 
 maintaining a permanent hold on the people whom it 
 depicts, must necessarily have great veracity. Imagi- 
 nation could not part company with fact in such a case. 
 The basis of reahty in the Waverley Novels is one of their 
 most distinguishing quahties, and underHes their en- 
 durance in Uterature. It is not merely that particular 
 characters are studied from hfe ; that George Constable 
 and John Clerk sat for " The Antiquary, " that Scott 
 himself is Mr. Mannering, that Laidlaw or another is 
 Dandie Dinmont; nor is it that other characters, Uke 
 Meg Merrilhes and the gypsies are suggestions from 
 living figures that had arrested the author's passing 
 glance. It is not that the scene of " Castle Dangerous " 
 is governed by what his eye beheld on his visit there, or 
 the whole landscape of " The Pirate " transcribed from 
 his voyages among the islands of the north. Still less is 
 it what he gained from books, either of ordinary history 
 and records of events or such sermons as those from 
 which he transferred the dark and intense eloquence of 
 " Old Mortality. " He had such a marvellous memory for 
 whatever bore the national stamp, he was so brain- 
 packed with the ocular and audible experience of his 
 
 [60]
 
 SCOTT 
 converse with the people, so full of their physiognomy, 
 gesture and phrase, that he fed his narrative incessantly 
 with actuaUty; and such was his surplus of treasure of 
 this sort that in his general edition he continued to pour 
 out an illustrative stream of anecdote, reminiscence and 
 antiquarian lore in the notes and prefaces. A keen friend 
 was confirmed in his beUef of Scott's authorship by the 
 presence of a striking phrase that he had heard him once 
 use. The Scotch novels are, as it were, an amalgam of 
 memory. When he came to write them all his love of tradi- 
 tion and the country-side with which his mind was im- 
 pregnated was precipitated in an unfaiUng flow. It was 
 because Scott was so much alive \\4th Scotland that he 
 made his imaginary characters live with that intense 
 reality, that instant conviction of their truth, in which 
 he is to be compared only with Shakspere. It is true that 
 it was a man of letters who wrote the Waverley Novels, a 
 mind fed on the stuff of mediaeval romance and on the 
 tradition of the EngUsh drama, the " old play " of which 
 he was so fond ; but the hterary element in the tales is a 
 thing of allusion, hke Waverley's studies, or episodical as 
 in the character of Bunce or on a more important scale 
 of Sir Percie Shafton, or else its rambling antiquarianism 
 serves to set forth Scotch pedantry appropriately. The 
 Waverley Novels are not a development out of older htera- 
 ture, they are an original growth, a fresh form of the 
 
 [61]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 imaginative interpretation of the human past, a new and 
 vital rendering straight from the hfe. Even in the tales 
 whose scene is laid in England and the continent, where 
 Scott was more dependent on printed sources, the liter- 
 ary element is little more perceptible than in the 
 Scotch novels themselves ; the sense of reality in them is 
 not appreciably less. But Scott already had the best his- 
 torical education as a living discipline in assimilating his 
 own country and he came to the interpretation of history 
 in other lands with trained powers of understanding and 
 imagination in that field. A distinguished historian once 
 expressed to me his admiration for " Count Robert of 
 Paris," and I was glad to find such unexpected support 
 for my own liking of this novel, which is generally re- 
 garded, I beUeve, as a pitiable example of Scott's men- 
 tal decline; but my friend had been struck, he said, by 
 its remarkable grasp of history, its brilliant adequacy in 
 that way. It was the same power with which Scott had 
 grasped " Ivanhoe, " and told the tale of Quentin Dur- 
 ward, and made Richard Lion-heart Uke one of Shaks- 
 pere's kings. He had learned the way by making history 
 aUve on his own heath in the most Uving contact with 
 the past that ever man had. 
 
 Veracity is the first great quaUty of the Waverley 
 Novels. The second is emotional power. Scott was a 
 man of strength; he liked strong deeds and strong men; 
 
 [62]
 
 SCOTT 
 
 and he liked strong emotions. I do not mean the passion 
 of love, in which he showed httle interest. The way of a 
 man with a maid was not to him the whole of Ufe. In the 
 national temperament in its action in history he found 
 two great emotions : the passion of loyalty, which was in- 
 carnate in the Cavaliers and clans, and the enthusiasm of 
 religion wliich filled the Covenanters. These were social 
 forces and supported a Hfelong character in men. They 
 gave ideal elevation to the tragic and cruel events which 
 belong to Scotch history, and made an atmosphere about 
 the actors which glowed with life. Scott shared to the full 
 the national capacity for enthusiasm, and was in his own 
 imaginary world as much a Jacobite as he was a border- 
 raider; and he put into his representation a fervour 
 hardly less than contemporary. He was master, too, on 
 the scale of private as opposed to public feeling, of all 
 the moods of sorrow and especially of that dark brood- 
 ing spirit, frequent in the Scotch character, which he has 
 repeatedly drawn. Such emotion, in the people or in in- 
 di%iduals, is the crucible of romance. He used its fires to 
 the full. Whether the scene be battle-broad or dungeon- 
 narrow, whether the passion involves the fortune of a 
 crown or burns in the single breast of Ravenswood, 
 he finds in these deep-flowing and overmastering hu- 
 man feelings the ideal substance which makes his ro- 
 mances so charged with power over the heart, with the 
 
 [63]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 essential meaning of human life, in its course in char- 
 acter, and at its moments of personal crisis. The homo- 
 geneity of this power of passion with the events of 
 Scotch history and with the character of the people is 
 complete, the unity of the whole is reinforced by the ro- 
 mantic quality of the landscape, which is its appropri- 
 ate setting. The state of society, its stage in civilization, 
 is also in keeping. It is, in fact, a kind of Homeric world, 
 without any f ancifulness ; or if, when the parallel is 
 stated the difference is more felt than the hkeness, it 
 is a world of free action, bold character, primitive 
 customs, as well as of high feeling and enterprise, such 
 as has fallen to the lot of no other author since Homer to 
 depict with the same breadth and elevation. It was good 
 fortune for Scott, too, that he could follow Shakspere's 
 example in relieving the serious scene with humour. It is 
 humour of the first quality, which lies in character itself 
 and not in farcical action or the buffoonery of words. It 
 centres in and proceeds from eccentricity, in which the 
 Scottish character is also rich; nor in general is the ec- 
 centricity overstrained or monotonously insisted on. 
 Scott is very tender of his fools, whose defectiveness in 
 nature is never made a reproach or cruel burden to them- 
 selves ; and the humorous side of his serious characters 
 only completes their humanity. All parts of life thus en- 
 ter into his general material, but harmoniously. His share 
 
 [64]
 
 SCOTT 
 of artistic power was instinctive; he was never very con- 
 scious of it; but it was most remarkable in the perfect 
 blend he made of the elements used. " The Pirate " is an 
 admirable example. It is a sea story, and takes its whole 
 atmosphere from the coasts where its action lies. The 
 struggle with the elements in Mordaunt's opening jour- 
 ney is like an overture ; the rescue of the sailor-castaway, 
 the cliff-setting of Mertoun's house, the old Norse of the 
 patriarch's home, and the life of the beach there with its 
 fishing fleet, the superstitious character of Noma the 
 weird familiar of the winds, the bardic lays of Claude 
 Halcro, the sentimental pirate-father and the son with 
 his crew, the secret of the past which unlocks the plot — 
 all these make a combination of land, character and 
 story, each raised in power by imaginative treatment to 
 a romantic height and echoing the same note of the sea 
 one to the other in a blend as naturally one as sky, cliff 
 and weather. As a sea piece, given by character and 
 event as well as by description, it is an unrivalled work, 
 and this is due to its artistic keeping. This power of 
 blend was an essential element in Scott's genius; by it 
 his romance becomes integral in plot, character and set- 
 ting ; and this felicity of composition achieves in its own 
 way the same end in artistic effect that is sought in an- 
 other way by construction in the strict sense. Scott never 
 fails in unity of feeling; it was a part of his emotional gift. 
 
 [65]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 The third commanding trait of the Waverley Novels is 
 creative power. It is this that places Scott among the 
 greatest imaginative prose writers of the world, and 
 makes him the first of romancers as Shakspere is the first 
 of dramatists. He had that highest faculty of genius 
 which works with the simplicity of nature herself and 
 has something magical in its immediacy, in the way in 
 which it escapes observation and in its instant success; 
 he speaks the word, and there is a world of men, moving, 
 acting, suffering in the wholeness of life. These masters 
 of imagination, too, have as many moulds as nature; 
 whoever appears on the scene of Homer or Shakspere, 
 no one is surprised ; and Scott was as fertile as any of his 
 kind. He is a master of behaviour, for both gentleman 
 and peasant, and of the phrases that seem the very 
 speech of a man's mouth. The world of gentlemen is 
 represented in its motives and interests, its sacrifices and 
 ideas for both age and youth, with a sympathetic com- 
 prehension that makes it seem the most just tribute ever 
 given to the essential nobility of that kind of life, aristo- 
 cratic in ideal, warring, terrible in what it did and what 
 it suffered, but habitually moving in a high plane of con- 
 duct and having for its life-breath that passion of loyalty, 
 which however unreasoning, or mistaken, is one of the 
 glorious virtues of men. The world of humble life, like- 
 wise, is rendered with vivid truth in its pursuits, trials 
 
 [66]
 
 SCOTT 
 
 and submissions, the virtues welling from the blood itself 
 in peril, sorrow, natural affection, for man and woman, 
 for every time of life and in every station of the poor. It 
 is in the language of these characters that the hfe Ues 
 with most efficacy; only nature makes men and wo- 
 men who can speak thus ; and the solidity of their speech 
 is a part of the simplicity of their lives. Cuddie's mother 
 in " Old Mortality, " the old fisherman, Macklebackit, 
 in " The Antiquary, " Jennie Deans in " The Heart 
 of Midlothian" are examples; but Scott's truth of 
 touch in such dealing with the poor is unfaihng. K 
 the behaviour of his gentlemen appeals to the sense 
 of chivalry in every generous breast, the words of his 
 humble persons go straight to the heart of all human- 
 ity. In both classes there is a vitality that is distinguish- 
 able from life itself only by its higher power. He creates 
 from within ; he shows character in action so fused that 
 the being and the doing are one ; he achieves expression 
 in its highest form — the expression of a soul using its 
 human powers in earthly life. This is the creative act; 
 not the scientific exhibit of the development of charac- 
 ter, not the analytic examination of psychology and 
 motivation, for which inferior talent suffices ; but the re- 
 veahng flash of genius which shows the fair soul in the 
 fair act, be it in the highest or the lowest of men, in good 
 fortune or bad, triumphant or tragic, or on the level of all 
 
 [67]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 men's days. It belonged to Scott's conception of life that 
 character and act should be in perfect equipoise ; to find 
 them so is the supreme moment of art. It was the mo- 
 ment of Shakspere and Homer, in drama and epic; and 
 it is the moment of Scott in the novel. The Uving power 
 of his men and women by virtue of which once in the 
 mind they never die out of it, but remain with the other 
 enduring figures of imagination, " forms more real than 
 living man, " proceeds from this union of passion, truth 
 and creative power with the form and pressure of life 
 itself. The material is always noble, and the form into 
 which Scott throws it is manly. The impression of all he 
 creates is of nobility; not the nobility that requires high 
 cultivation or special consecration to supreme self- 
 sacrifice, but such nobility as is within the reach of most 
 men, to be honest and brave, tender and strong, simple, 
 true and gallant, fair to a foe and faithful to our own. 
 Scott was not greatly interested in intellect ; it plays no 
 part in his work as a governing principle; but in this ne- 
 glect of it he kept the true perspective of human life ; in- 
 deed — though this may seem a hard saying — his un- 
 conscious subordination of the intellectual to the active 
 virtues and powers is one great cornerstone of his sanity 
 and wholesomeness. 
 
 The Waverley Novels made Scott one of the famous 
 men of Europe; he held a place of distinction unshared 
 
 [68]
 
 SCOTT 
 
 at home, the idol of his own country, and honoured and 
 beloved in every English-speaking land. He also, as is 
 well known, made a great deal of money by them; and 
 Scott was glad to make money. He spent it in a magnifi- 
 cent way, and here the trait of Quixotism is very ob- 
 vious. Abbotsford, his most human monument, may be 
 described as a romantic work, the material counterpart 
 to his estate in imagination. Don Quixote sought the 
 chivalric past which was the life of his brain, in contem- 
 porary Spain; and with a touch of the same madness 
 Scott desired to realize on the banks of the Tweed 
 something of that old baronial life which was so large a 
 part of his memory and imagination; he added farm to 
 farm till he had obtained a considerable domain, he 
 built a mansion, he gathered there the museum of relics 
 of crown, battle and clan which is still intact, and there 
 he dispensed hospitality with ancient generosity, as the 
 representative of his country as well as to his friends and 
 dependents with a shadow at least of feudal state. It was 
 a dream that almost came to pass. But at the moment of 
 its realization the crash in his fortunes occurred which 
 condemned him to spend the remainder of his days in a 
 heroic effort to die an honest man. The secret of the au- 
 thorship of " Waveriey" was well kept on the whole; at 
 first it was probably merely a means of guarding his repu- 
 tation which he did not wish to expose to the risk of fail- 
 
 [69]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 ure as a novelist; afterwards, it was useful as a means of 
 exciting interest and there was no particular reason to 
 change. There was another secret, however, that had 
 been much better kept — the fact that he was a com- 
 mercial partner with the printer, Ballantyne; and the 
 occasion of his secretiveness in this case was that an in- 
 terest in trade would have been regarded as inconsistent 
 with his professional position as a lawyer. The secretive- 
 ness, the willingness to go into trade, the love of money 
 can be turned against Scott; but, to my mind, they only 
 make him more human, a natural man. Scott's practical 
 attitude toward life, and also toward literature itself as a 
 profession like any other, seems not unlike that of 
 Shakspere; it is the mortal side of the immortal genius 
 which in its own realm was loosened from the sense 
 of reality and lived in an imaginary world. Scott met 
 the situation that confronted him with courage, an un- 
 wearied labour, a reckless expenditure of mental power 
 and physical health which again illustrates the marvel- 
 lous tenacity of liis nature. He held on till he died. The 
 story of the last days and the voyage to Italy is well 
 known. He was a failing man. He still held the place of 
 honour which he had won in men's minds, the love of his 
 own and the respect of foreign nations. Goethe saluted 
 him almost from his death-bed; and soon after Scott 
 himself passed away at Abbotsford. 
 
 [70]
 
 SCOTT 
 
 The fruit of Scott's life is an immeasurable good. 
 There is the life itself, as full of kindliness as of energy, 
 of duty as of honour, incessant in activity, many-sided, 
 patient in official routine, with country loves, with re- 
 finement, blameless in the relations of son, brother, hus- 
 band, father and friend, with room for the affections of 
 dogs and horses and all God's creatures ; a life, not saint- 
 ly as we wish the lives of women to be, not without weak- 
 ness, but a source of strength to others, with the right 
 humilities and the right prides, unshaken in its loyalties, 
 a man's life. There are the works, which have been the 
 delight of millions of homes through four-score years. I 
 remember one summer seeing a boy of six enacting Rob 
 Roy, and not long after hearing Lowell tell me just 
 before he died that he had lately read the Waverley 
 Novels through again with much happiness ; genius with 
 a reach like that will defy time long. I have read them 
 myself repeatedly in the passing of years, and always 
 with a greater admiration of their literary power, their 
 sheer creative faculty, their high strain of feeling and hu- 
 man truth, and their wholesomeness for the daily sym- 
 pathies and moral ideals of the democracy. They are a 
 great feature in English literature. They lie massive, 
 like Ben Nevis and Loch Lomond, in the geography of 
 the soul's country, where she builds her earthly man- 
 sions. One takes leave of them, for a time, but he closes 
 
 [71]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 the volume, whatever it may be, with Tennyson's ex- 
 clamation in his heart : 
 
 " O great and gallant Scott, 
 True gentleman, heart, blood, and bone, 
 I would it had been my lot 
 To have seen thee, and heard thee, and known." 
 
 [72]
 
 fe*S..S^^ 
 
 Great Writers 
 m
 
 MILTON 
 
 In the old American mind there are some books that 
 neighbour the Bible in their appeal to the affections. 
 Milton, Bunyan, and Cowper have this distinction. 
 They were the books which in my boyhood I was al- 
 lowed to read on the Sabbath day — old New Eng- 
 land Sundays, days of halcyon memory, true bridals 
 of the earth and sky, brooded on by an unshared peace 
 that no desert solitude or mountain beauty ever knew; 
 the yellowing pages of the worn books still exhale odours 
 of those old summers. It is, perhaps, not over-curious to 
 think that the honour of literature, in our earlier age, 
 owed much to the fact that the living faith of the people 
 was the religion of a book; and in times when, as we 
 learn from many a pious memoir, the child in the cradle 
 was sometimes " dedicated to God," on both sides of the 
 water the thought might well grow up in the boy's mind, 
 unconsciously flowering, that as God had once spoken 
 
 [75]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 through a book, the spirit might still use the forms of 
 high literature as its vehicle, the idea of the inspiration 
 of the literary life was not far off from him. Milton and 
 Wordsworth both felt this sense of consecration, of be- 
 ing men set apart, and what from the birth of Apollo has 
 been known to the poet as the enthusiasm of the god in 
 him, they felt in their' breasts, Milton more definitely and 
 Wordsworth more abstractly and vaguely, as a divine 
 prompting and motion. Milton's addresses to the Muse 
 are too passionate to be merely imaginative flights ; they 
 are poetic prayers to a real presence. The singular thing 
 is that this is the view of posterity also toward Milton. 
 He lives as a great and lonely figure, one of the chosen of 
 Israel, with an almost hieratic solemnity; the blind old 
 man who had seen heaven and its angels, the Creation 
 and the Fall, as none other had ever beheld them, in 
 universal vision. Even in his secular life, he seems an 
 apostle of liberty, not a statesman or a politician or any- 
 thing merely executive and official, but the impassioned 
 preacher of freedom because his own soul was free, a 
 great declarer of the self-evident truths of man. But it is 
 the " Paradise Lost " that gives him his sacred charac- 
 ter. It is a poem on the highest levels of art, derived from 
 ancient and foreign sources, panoplied in severe scholar- 
 ship, wrought in the inspiration of classicism, academic, 
 intellectual, austere; and yet it made, and continued to 
 
 [76]
 
 MILTON 
 
 make, and still makes such a wide popular appeal as to 
 constitute it one of the greatest monuments of English 
 literature, without regard to the judgment of scholars. It 
 is not only a book; it is a part of English history, of the 
 history of the English race. This is the marvel — and no 
 critical problem is more difficult — what are the 
 grounds of this broad appeal in a poem which appears in 
 many ways so far from the people ? 
 
 Milton was bom a Londoner in that class of society 
 which was the backbone of the movement for popular 
 rights and independence in religion, in whose onward 
 course, during his mature life, the throne fell and Eng- 
 lish liberties were secured. Little survives to inform us of 
 his childhood except the head of the fair boy which is 
 one of the treasures of English portraiture. He was well- 
 bred in a Puritan home of means and taste, and though 
 there is no sign of rigour in his bringing up, in that hom« 
 must have been implanted in him in early days those 
 finer elements of Puritanism which seem already in- 
 stinctive in his first youth. His father who was a scriv- 
 ener had some merit as a musical composer, and was in 
 prosperous circumstances. He had masters for the boy 
 and sent him to a public school, St. Paul's, where he 
 made one deep and tender friendship with a half -Italian 
 schoolmate, Charles Diodati. At sixteen he went up to 
 Christ's College, Cambridge, where tradition says he 
 
 [77]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 was called "the Lady of Christ's," his fair hair and 
 bright cheeks and his slender youth confirming a nick- 
 name that he appears to have owed really to the purity of 
 his life and manners and a virginal mind. He remained 
 seven years at Christ's, and won the place of a first 
 scholar, showing plain traces of that saving egotism 
 which is the single trait that brings him humanly before 
 the eye now : " performed the Collegiate and Academical 
 exercises to the admiration of all, and was esteemed to 
 be a virtuous and sober person," says old Anthony 
 Wood, "yet not to be ignorant of his own parts." At 
 Christ's he had written verses, Latin and English, 
 among them the famous ode on the morning of Christ's 
 Nativity; and he showed from the first touches of his 
 hand that feeling for rich words and their melodies, the 
 sense of the moulding that beauty of language gives to 
 thought itself, which belongs so often to the poetic pre- 
 cocity of great masters of expression. There was never 
 any immaturity in his style. He wrote perfection. Yet 
 then, of course, no one knew that he had written one of 
 the great lyric poems of England, singular for its ma- 
 jesty of thought and manner in a youth of twenty-one 
 years, and a sonnet — that on arriving at the age of 
 twenty-three — which, in his works, is one of the best 
 remembered where all are memorable. 
 
 He retired from the University to Horton, near Wind- 
 [78]
 
 MILTON 
 sor, where his father had now removed from London to 
 live at ease; and there, the church, his original destina- 
 tion, being closed to him by the aspect of the times, 
 without seeking another profession, he obtained his 
 father's leave to pursue literary studies undisturbed. 
 "At my father's country residence, whither he had re- 
 tired to pass his old age, I was wholly intent," says Mil- 
 ton, " through a period of absolute leisure, on a steady 
 perusal of the Greek and Latin writers, but still so that I 
 occasionally exchanged the country for the city, either 
 for the purpose of buying books, or for that of learning 
 anything new in mathematics or in music, in which I 
 then took delight." For the six years that remained till 
 he was thirty, he thus enjoyed a secure and quiet period, 
 comparable to Virgil's ease, during which he perfected 
 himself in a studious knowledge of past literature. It was 
 an accumulative and assimilating rather than an orig- 
 inal period ; his production of English verse was hardly 
 greater in amount than Virgil's in similar circumstances ; 
 yet in its small body are comprised all Milton's minor 
 poems of fame, and among them are " L' Allegro " and 
 "II Penseroso," the best idyllic poems in the classical 
 Italian manner; "Lycidas," the first of English elegies 
 in rank; and "Comus," the only Enghsh masque that 
 the world has cared to remember. These poems are the 
 finest flower of the great literary movement that had 
 
 [79]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 swept up the north from Italy for more than a century, 
 and brought to England its great burst of genius in the 
 reigns of Elizabeth and James; the crest of the Renais- 
 sance had broken in the turbulent dramatists, but here 
 the golden flood of humanism was still at the full, with 
 Italian serenity, purity, and beauty; the burning noon of 
 passion had gone by, but a finer art, a softer mood were 
 present in Milton's genius in its youth, simple, lucid, 
 melodious, suffused with the perfect beauty of an age of 
 art about to die. In these country years Milton probably 
 looked forward only to a literary career; he was a youth- 
 ful, humanist poet seeking to write as his Greek and 
 Italian masters had done before him ; perhaps such a life 
 as Virgil's, he thought, might He in his future. These 
 were the first happy fruits. 
 
 The figure of Milton at this age is full of " sweet at- 
 tractive grace." He was handsome in manly beauty, his 
 mind set on high and serious thoughts, and with a strain 
 of uncommon purity in his soul. He led a simple Hfe in 
 his father's house, plain in its habits ; he wandered about 
 the well-watered and well-wooded country, making his 
 mind " a mansion for all lovely forms — a dwelling 
 place for all sweet sounds and harmonies," or in his 
 chamber at home moved "in the still air of delightful 
 studies;" a natural, intellectual, poetic life, free from all 
 disturbance. One hears that "music" in which he 
 
 [80]
 
 MILTON 
 " then took delight " as its perpetual undertone. It is re- 
 flected crystal-Uke in the "L' Allegro" and "II Pense- 
 roso," with a selective power of art, an idyllic brevity 
 and clearness in the scenes, an evenness of unemphatic 
 beauty, for which there is no parallel except in classical 
 and Italian masterpieces. This poetic softness and clear- 
 ness mirrors Milton's temper then ; there is not a trace of 
 the harsh traits that later came into his life, the stern- 
 ness of his middle years and his aging into austerity. He 
 was still a pure poet; full of a sweet sensuousness that 
 took delight in all beautiful things; he was a lover of 
 beauty. " What besides God has resolved concerning me 
 I know not, but this at least " — he is writing to a friend 
 — " He has instilled into me at all events a vehement love 
 of the beautiful. Not with so much labour as the fables 
 have it, is Ceres said to have sought her daughter Pro- 
 serpine, as I am wont day and night to seek for this idea 
 of the beautiful through all the forms and faces of things 
 (for many are the shapes of things divine) and to follow 
 it leading me on as with certain assured traces." This is 
 Plato's voice on the lips of the young Puritan disciple of 
 the " Phsedrus," but it denotes the enthusiasm of his soul 
 and its poetic direction. This Platonic vein, this emo- 
 tional colour of beauty in his virtue sets Milton's Puri- 
 tanism somewhat apart. So also his love of the drama 
 removes him from the historical type of the sect. He 
 
 [81]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 could not, being a scholar of classical breeding, fail to 
 look on the drama as a noble form, and its Greek exam- 
 ples fed his genius from the Euripidean passages of 
 " Comus " to the " Samson Agonistes " at the very end. 
 But while yet a student at college he had written the tri- 
 bute to Shakspere that was first printed in the Second 
 Folio; and in connection with his friend, Lawes, the 
 musician, he tried, though with an anonymity which he 
 endeavoured to preserve, the masque form of the drama, 
 then its popular or at least fashionable phase, in the " Ar- 
 cades " and on the great scale in the " Comus." This last 
 was really a piece of private theatricals written for the 
 Lord-President of Wales, who had employed Lawes, 
 and acted by his children in the great hall at Ludlow 
 Castle on his inauguration into his office. The substance 
 of the poem, however, which was the praise and de- 
 fense of chastity, was a very noble form of Puritan feel- 
 ing in the high sense. It, too, is ahve with Platonic phil- 
 osophy, but this is so inwrought in the poetry that it is 
 not felt by the reader except in its results. The praise of 
 chastity also denotes something exceptional in Milton's 
 temperament, in disclosing which it is necessary to use 
 his own words, but with the more happiness since the 
 passage opens with that remarkable sentence which is 
 the most famous that came from his pen : 
 
 '* And long it was not after, when I was confirmed in 
 [82]
 
 MILTON 
 this opinion, that he, who would not be frustrate of his 
 hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought 
 himself to be a true poem; that is, a composition and 
 pattern of the best and honourablest things ; not presum- 
 ing to sing high praises of heroic men, or famous cities, 
 unless he have in himself the experience and the prac- 
 tice of all that which is praiseworthy. These reasonings, 
 together with a certain niceness of nature, an honest 
 haughtiness and self-esteem, either of what I was or 
 what I might be (which let envy call pride), and lastly 
 that modesty whereof, though not in the title-page, 
 I may be excused to make here some beseeming profes- 
 sion ; all these uniting the supply of their natural aid to- 
 gether kept me still above low descents of mind . . . 
 Next (for hear me out now, readers), that I may tell you 
 whither my younger feet wandered ; I betook me among 
 those lofty fables and romances which recount in solemn 
 cantos the deeds of knighthood founded by our victori- 
 ous kings, and from hence had in renown over all Chris- 
 tendom. There I read in the oath of every knight that he 
 should defend to the expense of his best blood, or of his 
 Ufe if it so befell him, the honour and chastity of virgin 
 or matron ; from whence even then I learnt what a noble 
 virtue chastity sure must be, to the defence of which so 
 many worthies by such a dear adventure of themselves 
 had sworn. ... So that even these books, which 
 
 [83]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 to many others have been the fuel of wantonness and 
 loose living, I cannot think how, unless by divine indul- 
 gence, proved to me so many incitements, as you have 
 heard , to the love and steadfast observation of that virtue . ' ' 
 
 In these matters, perhaps, silence is as golden in a 
 Galahad as in a Launcelot, but the openness of Milton 
 in this and other passages, is a part of his nature and be- 
 longs to his essential character. The personal feeling is 
 only an instance of the purity that is elemental in his en- 
 tire genius which in the end became a genius for auster- 
 ity. But that time was far off, beyond the barrier of 
 twenty years of the fighting that makes all men stern. 
 The gentler Milton of the earlier day, the youth with the 
 passion for purity, the passion for beauty, the passion 
 for perfection in poetry, had no premonition of what was 
 to be, what truly " God had resolved " concerning him ; 
 he looked, it can hardly be doubted, for that Virgilian 
 future, while he pursued his studies of the most mel- 
 lowed art of civilization in the books of Athens, Rome, 
 and Italy, and dreamed the dream of travel, fearful that 
 he had been rash in allowing his friend Lawes to pub- 
 lish the unripe fruit of " Comus." 
 
 It was in this spirit that Milton, when thirty years old, 
 made the journey to Italy where he remained more than 
 a year. He must have been heartened by the praise of Sir 
 Henry Wotton, who gave him letters of introduction, 
 
 [84]
 
 MILTON 
 saying of " Comus " — "I should much commend the 
 tragical part, if the lyrical did not ravish me with a cer- 
 tain Doric delicacy in your Songs and Odes, whereunto 
 I must plainly confess to have seen yet nothing parallel 
 in our language." He met famous men, Grotius and 
 Galileo, lingered especially at Florence, Rome, Naples, 
 and Venice, made numerous friends among the men of 
 letters and taste, and had the great happiness to be fa- 
 voured with the acquaintance and warm interest of the 
 aged Manso, the befriender of Tasso in his sad life, and 
 the patron of Marini. It is plain that Milton not only 
 made a good impression, as Manso says, wdth his 
 "mind, form, grace, face, and morals," but he was so- 
 cially attractive ; notwithstanding his strength of natural 
 reserve and what he calls " haughtiness " in his charac- 
 ter, his familiar relations with comrades and elder asso- 
 ciates betray real humaneness, and the affectionateness 
 of his single close friendship with Charles Diodati inti- 
 mates perhaps the sweeter quality of nature by which he 
 bound his Italian acquaintances. He followed Wotton's 
 wise and famous advice — "a close tongue and an open 
 face will go safely over the whole world " — indifferent- 
 ly, it is to be feared; but he came out of Italy safe to 
 Geneva, and so home. One wonders what he brought 
 away really from the Italian beauty of scenery, the ruins 
 and the galleries, but it is a vain curiosity; so far as ap- 
 
 [85]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 pears, his life in Italy was essentially social, he was inter- 
 ested in the men and their academies, and wrote Italian 
 and Latin verses in their midst, Uke a dilettante youth; 
 but the great result seems to have been the stir of his 
 mind in response to the appreciation of his talents about 
 him and the forming of a soUd and resolved ambition to 
 produce a great poetic work. His own words are impor- 
 tant: "Much lateUer," he writes, "in the private acad- 
 emies of Italy, whither I was favoured to resort, per- 
 ceiving that some trijfles that I had in memory, com- 
 posed at under twenty or thereabouts (for the manner is 
 that every one must give some proof of his wit and read- 
 ing there) met with acceptance above what was looked 
 for; and other things, which I had shifted in scarcity of 
 books and conveniences to patch up amongst them, were 
 received with written encomiums, which the ItaUan is 
 not forward to bestow on men of this side the Alps ; I be- 
 gan thus far to assent both to them and divers of my 
 friends here at home, and not less to an inward prompt- 
 ing which now grew daily upon me, that by labour and 
 intent study (which I take to be my portion in this life) 
 joined with the strong propensity of nature, I might per- 
 haps leave something so written to aftertimes as they 
 should not wilUngly let it die." An epic poem or a tragic 
 drama was to be the form of this attempt, and he listed 
 nigh a hundred subjects for choice, the chief being the 
 
 [86]
 
 MILTON 
 
 British story of Arthur's Knights and the Hebrew 
 myth of Paradise. It might be thought that this width 
 of topic consorts but ill with any theory of " God's re- 
 solve " concerning him, and certainly Apollo in his in- 
 spiration was not wont to give the priestess a hundred 
 oracles to pick and choose; but if the academic and re- 
 flective nature of Milton's muse is thus superficially 
 clear, the selection of the subject of "Paradise Lost" 
 was not really arbitrary, but the choice along which the 
 character of his life and learning and the spirit of the 
 man were felt in self -commanding ways. 
 
 Milton had come home because of the threatening as- 
 pect of public affairs in the same spirit in which many of 
 our own countrymen returned at the outbreak of the Civil 
 War because it is not fit that a citizen should be abroad 
 (save in her service) when his country is in arms. But he 
 was a private person with no opening into state affairs ; 
 so he says very sensibly, " I betook myself to my inter- 
 rupted studies, trusting the issue of public affairs to God 
 in the first place, and to those to whom the people had 
 committed that charge." Up to this time Milton had de- 
 pended on paternal support, and his father had been a 
 very good Augustus to him ; now he began to earn some- 
 thing, and from undertaking the care of his sister's two 
 young boys, he set up gradually a Uttle private academy 
 of a half -friendly character for the children of families in 
 
 [87]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 his acquaintance. A few boys in a house big enough for 
 himself and his books, many of which he had collected 
 and sent from Venice, and with a garden — he always 
 kept a garden near in his many changes of London resi- 
 dence — and with the schoolmaster's task for his use- 
 ful employment; this was the outward look of the Hfe 
 which within was brooding the work that the world 
 "would not willingly let die." Milton also signahzed his 
 entrance on every-day affairs by taking a wife ; strangely 
 enough she was of a broken-down worldly Cavalier fam- 
 ily, which was much in debt to his father, and she was 
 but just past seventeen. There was a brief two months of 
 festivity in the house, after which the young bride re- 
 turned to her family for a visit, and would not come 
 back to her husband till two years later when, in the de- 
 cHning fortune of both the CavaHer cause and the family, 
 a reconciliation was arranged. Meanwhile Milton had 
 found an entrance to the Hfe of the public cause as a pam- 
 phleteer; he published in swift succession several of the 
 tracts on the times by which for twenty years he was to be 
 mainly known at home, and to become famous abroad as 
 the chief defender of the Enghsh nation in the forum of 
 Europe, and in the composition of which he expended his 
 intellectual energy till the last moment of the lost cause. 
 The golden age of Milton's hfe had gone by; the 
 happy home where he had been the light of the house — 
 
 [88]
 
 MILTON 
 and how dearly he was cherished is humanly indicated 
 by his father's having two portraits of him in boyhood 
 and youth — was broken up; Charles Diodati, his first 
 and only bosom friend, was dead. Life had entered on a 
 new scene, in which domestic unhappiness, conflict with 
 men, the indignation and bitter edge of prose were in 
 sharp contrast with that early feUcity, peace and poetic 
 musing. The change was as deep as life, and in fact 
 amounted to a substitution of intellectual for poetic 
 force as the element of its being. Up to now Milton's 
 thinking had been subsidiary to his art, but hencefor- 
 ward it was for its own sake ; he had been a man of let- 
 ters, he became a man of politics. His interest in ideas 
 was immense, though now it was first apparent. He had 
 a greater intellect than commonly falls to the share even 
 of great poets, and it was of that active sort that makes 
 the practical ideahst. The passion for perfection in art 
 which makes the poet, and for purity in life wliich makes 
 the man, are matters of the private life, but the applica- 
 tion of analogous ideas of perfection to the lives of other 
 men and to the state necessarily throws the asserter of 
 them into opposition, and in so far as he strives for their 
 victory he finds oftenest a thorny path. Milton now en- 
 tered on this career. His practical instinct working 
 through ideas is most simply seen in the things nearest 
 to him. It was no common school that he kept, no hum- 
 
 [89]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 drum routine that he mumbled over to his boys ; there 
 was a curriculum of his own devising and noticeably he 
 saw to it that his boys read more books that had life in 
 them and with a broader reach of modem power, as it 
 then was, than other schoolboys had any chance to get, 
 and he put speed into their acquisition of Latin ; quicker 
 work and a wider and more contemporary round of 
 study, and in general the Renaissance ideal of the de- 
 velopment of personal power in manifold ways, charac- 
 terized the education he strove to give. It was, no doubt, 
 the most modern school in Europe, though its pupils 
 were only half a handful. His domestic Ufe was, hke the 
 school, a near concern ; and he no sooner realized that his 
 young wife had deserted him after two months than he 
 at once declared the extreme heretical doctrine of liberty 
 of divorce and re-marriage in case of the incompatibihty 
 of the parties. It was a shocking position to take, in those 
 days, and first brought obloquy upon him, but he 
 stuck to his opinion, and indeed among the hundreds of 
 the sects of those days one may still read of the Milton- 
 ists or Divorcers, The key to Milton's intellectual life 
 lies in his Renaissance training, though the fact is ob- 
 scured by the Puritanical matter of his tracts ; personal 
 force, such as he raised to heroic proportions in Satan, 
 was his ideal; personal Uberty in all its forms was the 
 thing nearest to his heart. It gave great individuality to 
 
 [90]
 
 MILTON 
 
 his own life. Thus he belonged to no communion, at- 
 tended no church, and had no prayers at home; his re- 
 ligion must have been very sacred to him, and it suffered 
 no profaning hands; he was true Puritan, full grown, 
 not in the sense of the sectaries of his age but in that 
 which is for all time, the man free from all forms who 
 needs no intermediary with his God except the spiritual 
 Christ. The same proud assertion of individual dignity 
 is the core of the great essay in behalf of a free press, the 
 " Areopagitica," in which he set forth the doctrine of the 
 public toleration of thought and speech, the right of the 
 intellect to be heard, with undying eloquence. Liberty, 
 in one form or another, is the watchword of all his prose; 
 it was then, as it continues to be, the shuttlecock be- 
 tween statecraft and priestcraft, but Milton saw the 
 old Priest in the new Presbyter, and in all ways stood for 
 independence in the individual ; by so much the more did 
 he stand for independence in the nation, the liberty of 
 the people to call their rulers to the bar and send the vio- 
 lator of their rights to the block; with the vehement and 
 unabated directness of Demosthenes against Philip, he 
 too thundered against the Stuart line. The name of 
 Cromwell only was known so far and widely abroad 
 as that of this Defender of the People of England. It is 
 this oflBce that gives grandeur to his figure; and no one, 
 not of the race itself, has so much in the thoughts of men 
 
 [91]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 the sublime character of a Hebrew prophet, the rebuker 
 of kings, the declarer of the eternity of truth, the com- 
 panion of the thoughts of God. This loftiness felt in Mil- 
 ton's prose is what preserves it; if it is not studded with 
 sentences of abstract wisdom, like Burke's, where ripe- 
 ness of thought and breadth of phrase combine to make 
 memorable political sayings, it is strewn with passages 
 of high and sublime flow in which ideal principles flame 
 at their whitest heat of conviction. To be the voice of 
 England on a great occasion, such as the death of her 
 king by the judgment of her people, was a memorable 
 destiny; but what makes Milton more remembered is 
 that a hundred times liberty spoke by his lips. He was 
 that man, hateful to all tyrants, a Repubhcan; though 
 under the powerful presence of Cromwell, " our chief of 
 men," he swerved slightly from the line, he came home 
 true and belonged with Vane. He was not a democrat; 
 he was too much imbedded in the Renaissance for that, 
 and valued men for their personal distinction; for the 
 honour and force in them that makes for inequality: 
 
 " Nor do I name of men the common roiU 
 That wandering loose about 
 Grow up and perish as the summer fly. 
 Heads withovt name, no more remembered." 
 
 That is the very trick of aristocracy in thought and 
 accent. Equality, fraternity, were not yet risen stars. 
 
 [92]
 
 MILTON 
 Milton's " Ready and Easy Way," which he sent forth 
 as the last arrow when Charles II was almost on the 
 coast, proposed a kind of permanent Grand Council, 
 like that of the Republic of Venice, as the ruhng body of 
 the state. Nevertheless, Milton's republicanism, though 
 it was not the democracy of to-day, was the high tide of 
 the principle of freedom in that age; and when the dying 
 roll of the retreating storm was heard in that last pas- 
 sionate remonstrance of Milton, on the eve of the King's 
 landing, there was to be silence till the Marseillaise. 
 
 In these years Milton's life took on that harshness of 
 feature, which it retains in tradition, owing to his invec- 
 tive against the enemies of the State, his unhappiness in 
 his children, and perhaps the colour of the name of Pur- 
 itan. In outward ways it was one of plain habits and 
 personal dignity. He had given up teaching after seven 
 years, and when in a short period the Commonwealth 
 was established he became Foreign Secretary to the 
 Council; it was a good post, well paid, and he held it till 
 the Restoration from his forty-second to his fifty-second 
 year. He received and wrote foreign despatches and was 
 the official intermediary for all ambassadors and en- 
 voys, and was thus brought both at the Council Table 
 and in the Hall into habitual association with the heads 
 of State and persons of distinction from abroad. His pri- 
 vate fame and character were also such as to attract vis- 
 
 [93]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 its and attention upon his own account. In his appear- 
 ance and demeanour there must have been the ripened 
 breeding of the scholar and poet whose social art is at- 
 tested by his Italian travels, together with the matured 
 handsomeness of the man and the personal dignity of 
 the representative of State. His wife had died and he had 
 married again ; but after a year of happy wedlock, in this 
 instance, he lost her whose memory he made sacred in 
 the sonnet tenderly recalling her veiled face : 
 
 " Yet to my fancied sight 
 Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shined 
 So clear as in no face with more delight." 
 
 He may never have seen her face, for before this he had 
 become totally blind in his forty-fifth year. He had con- 
 tinued to perform the duties of his Secretaryship, being 
 led to the Council Room, and there listening, dictating, 
 and composing he went through the necessary business 
 as before. Except for a few sonnets at wide intervals he 
 had entirely discontinued poetry during these twenty 
 years. Dr. Johnson described these sonnets as "cherry- 
 stones," and it has been well said that this " marks the 
 lowest-point imaginable in criticism of verse." They are 
 rather stones of David's sling. That on the massacre in 
 Piedmont is noteworthy as the first blaze of the English 
 muse over the violated liberties of Europe, which Byron 
 and Shelley learned the lightning use of, and whereof 
 
 [94]
 
 MILTON 
 
 Swinburne in our own day flings the revolutionary 
 torch. The sonnets, few as they are, would be a mighty 
 monument for any genius; they have the quality of 
 Michaelangelo. Just before the downfall, Milton seems 
 to have reverted in mind to the predestination of his 
 genius to poetry and that great hope he had indulged on 
 returning from Italy : " that what the greatest and choic- 
 est wits of Athens, Rome, or modem Italy, and those 
 Hebrews of old did for their country, I, in my propor- 
 tion, with this over and above of being a Christian, 
 might do for mine." Now the end had come; blind and 
 in hiding, in those months of unloosed revenge, none, 
 the Regicides excepted, was more likely than he to fall a 
 victim ; and indeed few who have escaped it came so near 
 as Milton to being hanged. The peril of this shame to 
 England — and such shame there has been in all litera- 
 tures and nations of civility — was near, but it passed. 
 The "blind old schoolmaster," as he is known from 
 Dryden's lips, lived on in obscurity and humbleness, 
 though a few friends still remembered him and showed 
 him attention, and distinction still clung to his figure. 
 Life, it must have seemed, was done for him. Then he 
 turned to the unbroken meditation of that poem which 
 for two years had employed his thoughts at times, and in 
 three years more of lonely musing carried it to comple- 
 tion. A new age of hterature had come in, and new men, 
 
 [95]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 strangers to all that had fashioned the men of old in great- 
 ness and him, the last of them ; but the old age should yet 
 lift one towering peak to heaven, before it subsided to 
 the levels of the eighteenth century. " Paradise Lost " was 
 this last and belated birth of the greatest English age. 
 
 The opposition between the earlier and the later 
 poetry of Milton is very great, and is the more marked 
 because of the barrenness of his middle hfe in verse. 
 The liqmd flow, the beauty of surface locking in mosaic 
 sweet sights and harmonies of the natural world, the 
 mellowness of idylUc and elegiac art, the crystal purity 
 of the air of garden and grove as in some northern Ital- 
 ian night — all these and the like are the traits of his 
 poetic youth; but in the works of his age there is some- 
 thing that dwarfs such quaUties and makes natural the 
 designation of the earher verse as his minor poems. The 
 reason of the difference is, I think, the expansion of Mil- 
 ton's intellectual powers which took place on his en- 
 trance into public debate, and the strength they ac- 
 quired in that Herculean labour of the mind stretched to 
 its utmost of practical force and mastery for twenty 
 years of unremitted strain. " Paradise Lost " is a great 
 poem of the intellect as well as of the imagination. Mil- 
 ton, after a period of wavering, had finally chosen the 
 form of an epic, built on the Unes of classical tradition, 
 with the myth of Eden for its central story; the origin 
 
 [96]
 
 MILTON 
 
 and destiny of the soul and the meaning of its course in 
 history was the real theme. The subject was well 
 chosen, and fulfilled the desirable though not essential 
 condition for a work of national appeal in that it was 
 and had long been familiar to the people; the material 
 was at least as well known to the English, in its main 
 outlines, as the myths of the gods on which the Attic 
 tragedians had wrought had been known to the Athe- 
 nians. Yet it is the decadence of interest in the subject- 
 matter which is now most pointed to as impairing the 
 permanent appeal of the poem. An epic which is in the 
 third century of its victorious power need not fear any 
 displacement. Its childhood myth of the race, its crude 
 science, its antiquated theology, may all be granted, and 
 it is easy to find in its necessary conventions, which be- 
 long to it as a work of Umited art, something awkward 
 and irrational, even petty and ridiculous to the mind's 
 eye; but the attack along these lines is successful only 
 when conducted against details ; the poem in its whole- 
 ness retains an overwhelming power. It is conceived in 
 three movements; the first is the Titan struggle of the 
 rebellious angels; the second is the Eden bower; the 
 third is the creation of the world with its pendant pano- 
 rama of human history. Of these three subjects the first 
 yields the most majestic sight of that other world of 
 Hades which the tragic imagination of man in the great- 
 
 [97]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 
 pst poets ha,s essayed to picture in all times ; the second 
 gives the most charming rendering of that Bower of Bliss 
 which has also been so often attempted, and the third 
 presents the most nobly impressive story of the birth of 
 our universe that is to be found in poetry. It is not neces- 
 sary that the mind should cUng to the actuality of these 
 scenes and events any more than to the siege of Troy or 
 the voyage of iEneas ; if they have imaginary reality — 
 even if they have only that — it is all the truth that 
 poetry seeks and is sufficient to interest men forever. If 
 Adam be as real as DeucaUon, and Satan as Enceladus 
 and Prometheus, the only question that remains is with 
 respect to the relative dignity and power of the myth to 
 satisfy the mind in its efiFort to picture by a symbol — 
 since it cannot know — the secret of its birth, suffering 
 and destiny. If " Paradise Lost " be looked at in this way 
 as only a hypothesis of the imagination, it yet remains 
 the loftiest flight of the mind of man in that region of 
 what is to be only spiritually conceived. It is here that it 
 makes its long and powerful appeal to masses of readers, 
 and remains a poem of the English nation; critics en- 
 deavour to empty it of the content of meaning of which 
 it is full, and to leave only the style by which alone, they 
 will have it, the poem survives; but my own mind, I 
 know — and in this I cannot be singular — still holds to 
 the substance as the true poem, indifferent to the fate of 
 
 [98]
 
 MILTON 
 the Hebrew myth, of Puritan theology or Darwinian des- 
 cent, or any other of those matters of contemporaneity 
 which are forever tossed in men's minds. It is possible, 
 perhaps, to trace the operation of some of the elements 
 in the poem, which are not for an age, but for all time. 
 One the most salutary uses of great poetry is to give 
 a scale of Ufe. Wordsworth was led by the character of 
 his genius to observe how the continual presence of 
 grand natural features in the landscape and the habitual 
 sight of the processes of nature's hfe fulfill this function 
 for those who Uve in communion with them, and give to 
 human life a setting and perspective. The reflection of 
 the Greeks that the dramatic representation of tragic 
 changes of fortune in the Uves of the great and powerful 
 imposed on the spectators a truer estimate of their own 
 share of trial in Ufe, is an analogous thought. But the 
 soul grows in knowledge of itself not only by these hum- 
 bling influences of contrast with the grandeur of nature 
 and tragic calamity; it expands through all ideas that 
 raise its sense of power however excited, and especially 
 that power which is lodged in its own being. " Paradise 
 Lost " performs this service, with great eflSciency and in 
 diverse ways. In what poem is the infinity of the universe 
 so sensibly present, merely in the physical sphere ? It is 
 true that Milton conceives it on the ancient Ptolemaic 
 system instead of the Copemican ; but there is the sense 
 
 [99]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 of infinity in either, and so unimportant is this scientific 
 error in the effect that the ordinary man has to be told it 
 before he finds it out, while the localizing of heaven and 
 hell beyond gives the impression of unlimited spacious- 
 ness and the endless reach of the world of being quite in 
 the modern manner. In comparison with Shelley's scien- 
 tifically orthodox representation of the stellar universe 
 in " Queen Mab," Milton's is more sublime, more true to 
 the idea of infinity, in that it is bordered on by the eter- 
 nal world and held within the compass of human com- 
 prehension with no loss to its majestic beauty as a cluster 
 of celestial orbs without number for multitude. What 
 poem, again, so succeeds in realizing to the mind super- 
 human power, personal force raised to the utmost imag- 
 inable height, not only in the magnificent example of 
 Satan, but in his angelic peers, Uriel and Gabriel, even 
 in the young angels, Ithuriel and Zephron, whom the 
 fiend found invincible.'* But the infinity which most 
 shines in the poem is not material or personal, not in the 
 universe or the protagonists of the battle that was 
 fought " out of space, out of time ; " the infinity is 
 that of man himself as a soul in which issues of eter- 
 nity converge, about which play mysterious agencies of 
 evil and good, for which in its unknown course celestial 
 powers care; that infinity which in the soul itself is the 
 very ground of being of the Christian reHgion. The soul, 
 [100]
 
 MILTON 
 weaving this legend of itself from its far prehistoric 
 dawn, fashioned this wonderful Eden dream; the scenes 
 and events, imbedded in tradition and the life of histori- 
 cal ages, long and continuously in the human conscious- 
 ness, must have deep affinities with the nature of the 
 soul which in them has incarnated its intuitions, cast its 
 sense of spiritual fact, pictured its beliefs; in a word, this 
 myth embroidered on the hem of the seamless garment 
 of truth is all the memory the soul has of its own un- 
 earthly history. The particular actuality of the links of 
 the legend, and even the form of the elements of thought 
 it uses, are immaterial; for the things of the spirit can 
 only be symbolically shown. Genesis and Geneva may 
 be alike disregarded; science and dogma wholly apart, 
 there remains in the myth the long enduring substance 
 of past experience and conviction stored in the race, 
 however to be more broadly interpreted in the future. 
 If the tenet that "in Adam all men sinned" loses its 
 ancient power, it is at least an earlier reading of that 
 solidarity of humanity which is one of the master-truths 
 of the democracy; if the damnation of the angels is re- 
 pulsive to humanitarianism, it no less reflects the sense 
 of struggle with the Evil Principle which is a fact of the 
 universal consciousness of mankind, and affirms the 
 final triumph of the Good which is an element unshaken 
 in human faith; if the angelic guard round a pre-doomed 
 [101]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 Paradise seems folly to the reason, it yet does shadow 
 forth the strange double-sense in man of a heavenly 
 guardianship and its mysterious failure to protect the 
 soul in life. But few readers need to consider the matter 
 so curiously as this. Every one, who opens the poem, finds 
 mirrored there the soul in its infinite and eternal nature, 
 and the mystery of its source and destiny set forth with 
 an imaginative definiteness of vision, as nowhere else. 
 The story is displayed with unexampled grandeur in the 
 scenes, in the wasted gloom of hell, in the abyss of chaos, 
 in the freshly created universe of light, upon the battle- 
 plains of heaven; the characters are ennobled to the 
 height of what is possible in faculty and prowess, in 
 form and moving not inferior to the gods, eloquent in 
 speech, majestic in action, each great in his own resolve; 
 every element of epic power and loveliness, that the prac- 
 tice of elder poets had handled, is employed — whole 
 armies in array, individual conflict, the bower of love, 
 the tale of creation, the panorama of history, the pit, the 
 council, set forth in all the modes of oratory, dialogue, 
 narrative, apostrophe and idyl, and all in an unrivalled 
 balance and harmony of the parts. The Hebraic sol- 
 emnity and directness, the Pindaric loftiness of flight, 
 yet so absorbed into Milton's inspiration as to be his own 
 and personal to him, give to the poem that quality that it 
 holds unshared with any other epic — sublimity; this is 
 [102]
 
 MILTON 
 
 the instinctive and also the deliberate judgment of all men 
 — it is a sublime poem. If I were to sum up in a single 
 expression the immediate power of " Paradise Lost " over 
 men, I should say that no poem so dilates the mind; by 
 so doing it gives a scale to life — the scale of infinity. 
 
 "Paradise Lost" is not a modem poem; and I have 
 dwelt elsewhere, perhaps too exclusively, on the impor- 
 tant ways in which it departs from modem sympathy; 
 like all great works of imagination in literature it looks 
 on human affairs with a reverted gaze, for such works 
 are climaxes of past thought and passion in centuries 
 and civilization. But neither is it a Renaissance and 
 Reformation poem, any more than the "Divine Com- 
 edy" is a mediaeval poem. There are cantos of Dante, 
 quite as theologically dead and more unintelligible than 
 Milton's dry tracts. Such elements of hardened matter 
 from which the fire has gone are found in all the greatest 
 compositions. The poem remains universal, not for an 
 age but for all time, because it is thus a poem of the soul 
 and its mystery, and sets forth under an intelligible for- 
 mula of thought and history and in images of becoming 
 grandeur and splendour that particular legend of the 
 soul which has been the historical framework of spir- 
 itual piety in Christian ages and still appeals by count- 
 less tendrils of memory, custom and aspiration to men 
 bom Christians; it fills imaginatively what is otherwise 
 [103]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 a void, " peoples the lone infinite," as no other secular 
 work has done. It is thus that, as I said, it neighbours 
 the Bible in men's thoughts; and not only does it do this 
 by its matter, but also by its style. The Bible is the stan- 
 dard of perfection in English writing; but the same in- 
 fluence which flows from it upon the Ustening mind, and 
 is felt as the unapproached perfection of prose speech in 
 language and cadence by the host of the common peo- 
 ple in congregations, also flows from Milton's verse in 
 the region of poetry; every one, however unlearned in 
 literature, feels that here is a standard of perfection. It is 
 a fit and crowning excellence; but the style is no more 
 all of Milton than it is all of Isaiah or St. John. The peo- 
 ple cannot escape great style, as all oratory shows; 
 neither can they escape great poetry. The power of the 
 highest is always greatest upon the lowest; it is this 
 which makes a national poem possible; this sent Homer 
 with all Greek ships, Virgil with all Roman eagles, IVIil- 
 ton with all English Bibles through the Avorld. 
 
 " Paradise Lost " is the greatest of Milton's works be- 
 cause his powers are there in true balance, intellect and 
 imagination in equal fellowship, with the lesser graces of 
 poetry (such as distinguished his early verse) not in neg- 
 lect. As he grew rapidly old, his expression became bare 
 and austere; in "Paradise Regained" and "Samson 
 Agonistes" intellectual power seems to transcend and 
 [104]
 
 MILTON 
 perhaps depress the imaginative — the balance is dis- 
 turbed. They have the severity of outUne and surface 
 that belong to the peak. They were the work of the last 
 years, when one thinks of Milton and sees him in the 
 most human way, comes near to him as a natural crea- 
 ture, an old man. One youth there was who came to him 
 now, like the boys he used to teach, and had lessons from 
 him and talk, in return for which he wrote at Milton's 
 dictation. His daughters had left him; a third wife, whom 
 he married late, took kindly care of him; friends visited 
 him. He would sit outside the door in the sun, wrapped 
 in a coarse grey cloth coat. The undying portrait of him 
 is that reported by the painter, Richardson, from an 
 aged clergyman who called on him. *' He found him in a 
 small house, he thinks but one room on a floor. In that, 
 up one pair of stairs, which was hung with a rusty green, 
 he found John Milton sitting in an elbow-chair, black 
 clothes and neat enough; pale but not cadaverous; his 
 hands and fingers gouty, and with chalk stones. Among 
 other discourse he expressed himself to this purpose, 
 ' that, was he free from the pain this gave him, his blind- 
 ness would be tolerable.' " This was the old age appoint- 
 ed for the fair youth of forty years before, in whom the 
 beauty of the Renaissance seemed to have taken on 
 ideal form, on the eve of the Italian journey; to this end 
 he had brought his boyhood passion for beauty, purity 
 [105]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 and perfection through a Ufe of intellectual conflict to a 
 consummation that gave him kinship with the sterner 
 rather than the softer brothers of his art, with Pindar 
 and iEschylus and the prophets of old rather than Euri- 
 pides and the mild Italian genius ; it is hard to reconcile 
 the two, to find in the old man the youth. It is commonly 
 thought that in the tragedy of " Samson " he had his own 
 fortune in mind, and doubtless he drew sympathetic in- 
 spiration from his own position in realizing that of Sam- 
 son in defeat. But his worn spirit seems to have accepted 
 defeat without that despair of life which in so fiery tem- 
 pered a soul, so great in faculty, might well be feared. It 
 may be that his faith was equal to that birth of patience, 
 which is the crown of life long lived, and the capacity for 
 which he showed in promise in his birthday sonnet in 
 youth and in thought in his sonnet on his blindness. It is 
 at least noticeable that the last lines of " Samson" look 
 to fuller life, not death, and are words of promise and 
 submission, of growth as well as of faith: 
 " All is best, though we oft doubt 
 
 What the unsearchable dispose 
 
 Of highest wisdom brings about. 
 
 And ever best found in the close. 
 
 His servants He, with new acquist 
 Of true experience from this great eveni. 
 With peace and consolation hath dismissed. 
 And calm of mind, all passion spent." 
 
 [106]
 
 MILTON 
 In this high mood, one hopes, Milton took farewell of 
 the world as of the Muse; he died at almost sixty-six 
 years of age, leaving to mankind a life that has been the 
 inspiration of Uberty, and these few rolls of immortal 
 verse. 
 
 [107]
 
 Great Writers 
 
 IV
 
 VIRGIL 
 
 Virgil is that poet whose verse has had most power in the 
 world. He was the poet of Rome, and concentrated in his 
 genius its imperial star; so long as that ruled the old 
 Mediterranean world, with the great northwest and 
 eastern hinterlands, Virgil summed its glory for the hu- 
 man populations that fleeted away in that vast basin ; in a 
 world forever mightily changing his solitary pre-emi- 
 nence was one unchanging thing, dimmed only as the 
 empire itself faded. His memory illumined the Dark 
 Ages. He rose again as the morning star of the Latin 
 races. He penetrated the reborn culture of Europe with 
 the persistency and pervasiveness of Latinity itself; not 
 only was knowledge of his works as wide-spread as edu- 
 cation, but his influence on the artistic temperament of 
 literatures, the style of authors and even the characters 
 of men in their comprehension of the largeness of life, 
 was subtle and profound, and was the more ample in 
 [111]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 proportion to the nearness of the new nations to the di- 
 rect descent of civilization. He, more than any other 
 poet, has been a part of the intellectual life of Europe 
 alike by length of sway and by the multitude of minds 
 he touched in all generations; and, among the Latin 
 races, he is still the climax of their genius, for charm and 
 dignity, for art and the profound substance of his mat- 
 ter, and for its serious inclusiveness of human life. Of no 
 other poet can it be said that his lines are a part of the bi- 
 ography of the great, of emperors like Augustus and 
 Hadrian, of fathers like Jerome and Augustine, of 
 preachers like Savonarola, churchmen Uke Fenelon, 
 statesmen like Pitt and Burke; and among the host of 
 humble scholars, of schoolmasters, the power he has 
 held in their bosoms is as remarkable for its personal 
 intimacy as for its universal embrace. No fame so ma- 
 jestic has been cherished with a love so tender. Virgil 
 thus blends in a marvellous manner the authority of a 
 classic with the direct appeal to life. 
 
 It belongs to the sense of familiar companionship 
 which Virgil's verse exhales that some shadows of his 
 personality survive, slight but sufficient for memory and 
 aflfection. He was the son of a small farmer, in the prov- 
 ince of North Italy, of whom no more is known than that 
 he wished to give his child the best education then to be 
 had. We first see him, who was to be so great a poet, a« 
 [112]
 
 VIRGIL 
 the slender tall schoolboy at Cremona and Milan, with 
 the rusticity of manner which he never laid aside. He 
 studied also at Rome, in his youth, and found patrician 
 friends among his mates. He made his way later with 
 men of great aiBFairs, and notwithstanding the shyness of 
 his heart and the awkwardness of his manners they 
 found something to prize in him by some charm the 
 Muses shed, loved him, petted and praised him, and gave 
 him a fori;une, a house at Rome, near Maecenas' garden, 
 which he seldom used, and two country homes at Na- 
 ples and Nola, where he loved to live in the soft Cam- 
 panian air; there, except for sojourns in Sicily and pleas- 
 ant travel in the Greek cities and along the islands, he 
 passed those meditative years of privacy in which his 
 self -distrustful and long-brooding genius slowly matured 
 its eternal work; there, too, as he desired, at Naples, over 
 by the hill of Posilippo, his ashes were laid to rest in that 
 pleasant city's soil, which still keeps the tradition of his 
 tomb. He was happy in the protecting affection of his 
 friends, and also in the honour of the worid which rose 
 to him as to Augustus when he entered the theatre, and 
 in the power of lifelong labour in his art undiminished 
 by an hour wasted on inferior things. In all outward 
 ways his life was the most fortunate recorded in litera- 
 ture; and it is good to know that the world was gentle to 
 one of those delicate spirits who, usually with how 
 
 [113]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 different a fate, bring it gifts from eternity. In the mem- 
 ory of Virgil there is no bitterness of regret for the 
 words of unkindness or the blows of adversity; he lived 
 peacefully and in the habitual enjoyment of some of the 
 fairest gifts of life. 
 
 Nowhere so much as in those works which seem most 
 independent of the power of time, which escape from 
 their own age, their native country and race, and enter 
 upon a cycle of memory so vast that they are fitly named 
 the stars of the intellectual firmament, is it needful to de- 
 fine their moment, to understand the nest of their con- 
 ception, the law of their creation, the nature of their first 
 appeal to men, in a word their contemporaneity. The 
 moment of Virgil is declared plainly in the " Eclogues." 
 They are little poems, the laboured trifles of his 'pren- 
 tice hand; but in them, like the oak in the acorn there 
 is in miniature all Virgil ; both the man and his work are 
 there like a preconception. The teachableness of Virgil is 
 his prime character, and shines in his youth. He woke to 
 the past as simply as a child opens its eyes to the dancing 
 sunlight of the world, and he took it in directly as some- 
 thing belonging to him. He made speed to enter on his 
 inheritance ; and for him this heritage in its special form 
 was the glory of Greek literature. The imaginative in- 
 terpretation of the world stored in a thousand years of 
 Greek poetry was the food of his heart. Thus it came 
 [114]
 
 VIRGIL 
 about that he did not begin to write in a way discovered 
 and worked out merely by himself, but imitated, as it is 
 said, Theocritus the Syracusan, the chief Greek master 
 of pastoral verse. He could not have had better fortune. 
 For a youth unacquainted with experience the artificial 
 mode of life which the pastoral presents as its frame- 
 work of incident and song is itself favourable, since its 
 requirements of accurate representation of reality are 
 less stringent; and, especially, its small scale enforces at- 
 tention to detail and encourages perfection of phrase, 
 line and image in the workmanship and condensation in 
 the matter, while its variety of description, dialogue and 
 inserted song and its blend of lyric and dramatic moods 
 give scope to a mind experimenting as it learns. It is for 
 this reason that so many of the world's great poets in 
 their youth have tried their wings in these numbers, 
 brief, composite, academic, so well fitted for the exer- 
 cise of growing talents, already touched with scholar- 
 ship, in a world not too real to be lightly held nor so 
 fantastic as to preclude truth of feeling. Virgil derived 
 the proper good from the imitation of a great master by 
 developing through it his native power. Theocritus re- 
 mained the master-singer of the idyl ; but before the dif- 
 ferent genius of Virgil passed on to its own toils, he had 
 left the sweetness of his youth here in the pastoral like a 
 perfume forever. 
 
 [115]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 The poetic life of Virgil, however, in these years was 
 more profound than this. He was not merely training his 
 genius in certain external modes of expression; he was 
 unfolding his soul. Form was the Greek gift to Virgil; 
 not only that form which exists in the outer structure of 
 Une and melody or within the verse in its logic of emo- 
 tion and event, but form which has power to cast the 
 mind itself in predetermined hues of feeling and action, 
 of taste, of choice, of temperament, and finds utterance 
 in that beauty of the soul which is precedent to all 
 verse. Form in its rehgious moods has this power to 
 possess and shape the souls of men, as is familiarly 
 seen ; and so artistic form, alive and bodied in the lovely 
 and ancient Greek tradition, seized Virgil in the spirit 
 and fashioned him ; he was its child as the novice is the 
 spiritual son of St. Francis. The opposition between 
 Theocritus and Virgil lies in this: in Theocritus, hfe 
 puts on the forms of art ; in Virgil art puts on the forms 
 of life. In the Syracusan idyls there is objective beauty 
 — pictures idealized and detached from life; in the 
 Mantuan " Eclogues " one feels rather the presence of a 
 beautiful soul to which art has given the gift of tongues 
 to speak to all men. This deep intimate compelling 
 mastery of the Greek spirit over all that was artistic in 
 Virgil shaped him almost in his essential being ; he was 
 Hellenized as by a second birth. It was characteristic 
 [116]
 
 VIRGIL 
 of him to yield to the will of life, and he yielded happily 
 to the Greek forms of imagination, for he found in 
 this obedience that yoke in which alone everlasting 
 freedoms lie and the power of a free soul ; it released 
 his personality as if by some divine and creative touch. 
 This presence of Virgil in his verse is elementary. He 
 was a lover, and through love disengaged from Ufe its 
 moment of beauty, of sentiment, of millennial hope; but 
 this beauty, sentiment and hope are seen under that 
 almost atmospheric charm which has coined for itself 
 the name Virgilian and is breathed from himself. It is 
 not for what these eclogues contain of Theocritus that 
 they have been dear to the poets of all lands, any more 
 than it is for what the youthful lines of Spenser and Mil- 
 ton contain of these eclogues that the English breathings 
 of the pastoral are dear; it is because they express with 
 great purity and sweetness the genius of Virgil in its 
 tender age. 
 
 If any one finds in the eclogues only the echo of Theo- 
 critus, he is wide of the mark; his ear is not set to the 
 ringing of the master-melody in their song. The poets 
 used the same instrument, and the younger learned its 
 use from the elder; but each employed it with a differ- 
 ence, and this diflFerence is a gulf of ages between 
 them and an opposition in the spring and impulse of 
 poetry. Art is not life, but is evoked from life. Theo- 
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 critus held the mirror to life, but its image in his verse 
 though more beautiful is still a thing of the external 
 world; he stands outside what he depicts and renders it 
 for its own sake. Virgil projected himself into life, and is 
 the centre of the world he expresses; he uses it to illus- 
 trate his own personality, to body forth his own various 
 loves of beauty, nature, sentiment, romance, aspiration, 
 to clothe with the forms of life that soul which art had 
 shaped in him. He was still, though thirty, only a half- 
 boyish lover of books and nature and a few friends, and 
 the world he Uved in was but little known to him; the 
 eclogues with the personality of autobiography disclose 
 this young scholar in his world. Virgil's world, too, like 
 the temperamental drift of his art, is different from that 
 of Theocritus ; it is one more diversified, more actual and 
 contemporaneous even; it is a Roman, Italian, procon- 
 sular world. He thinks of Actium and Parthia as we 
 to-day think of Santiago and the Philippines. His land- 
 scape has the face and profile of familiar haunts; his 
 shepherds have the features of his own rustics; his in- 
 terests are his own local and temporal affairs. The pas- 
 toral Arcadia is a convention by means of which the en- 
 cumbrances of time and place and persons and much 
 matter of fact are gotten rid of; but under its clear veil 
 which softens the unimportant, stand undisguised the 
 men and events, the sentiment, the friendships, the 
 [118]
 
 VIRGIL 
 
 scenes, the recreations, all the loves of the young poet from 
 the humblest and tenderest up to the hope of all the world 
 which he in those first years sounded for eternal memory 
 as none before or since has sung the strain. Such is the 
 Roman substance, personal, Italian, imperial, of it all, 
 notwithstanding the superficial artifice of the poetic form. 
 Roman, too, was the seriousness of the young poet in 
 his art. He and his fellow poets of the age were in litera- 
 ture provincials whose metropolis was Greek letters. 
 They set themselves to the patriotic task of bringing the 
 Greek muses to Latium where Aeneas had brought the 
 Trojan gods, and creating in Latin something as near 
 the Greek poetry as they could accomplish, and by very 
 obviously, often direct, imitative means. They were 
 zealous in the work; all were serious in it, however light 
 the touch or the topic they strove to transplant to their 
 own language and world. Virgil was such a provincial, 
 though Greek art was itself refined in passing through 
 his temperament; and he had such seriousness of mind. 
 To compare great things with small, he was not unlike 
 the young Longfellow in America who was avid of all 
 the literatures of Europe and assimilated the poetic tra- 
 dition of the thousand years preceding his birth, and who 
 also strove with like seriousness to compass something 
 like that in his own new land; and like Virgil, he too, in 
 after life created for his country its native romance and 
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 primitive sentiment, giving to its desert nakedness an 
 ascribed and imputed poetry. The Roman moment, 
 also, in the largest way, was not unlike our own. Vir- 
 gil was bom in a dawning age; for him, as for us, hfe had 
 been long lived in the world, there was antiquity, the 
 thousand years of literature, and vanisliing religions; 
 Egypt was, perhaps, even more a monument of the Un- 
 known Death than to-day; but with the spread of the 
 power of Rome, which was then what the spread of lib- 
 erty now is, a new age was at hand. Law and peace, 
 which were the other names of Rome, had the world in 
 their grasp, and were conquering far outward along its 
 dark barbaric edges even to Britain "sundered once 
 from all the human race." It was then that Virgil, "in 
 the foremost files of time, " sang in his youth that ec- 
 logue, the " Pollio " which is the greatest hymn of anti- 
 quity, if not of all time, and won for himself, though a 
 pagan, a place among the saints of the Church : 
 
 Magnus ah integro saeclorum nascitur ordo. 
 
 The line has the swell of the " Gloria." Thus early, thus 
 fundamental by virtue of its earliness, arose in him and 
 mingled with his genius that temperament of world-hope, 
 not the diminutive Arcadian dream of a valley or distant 
 islands of the blessed, but world-hope mighty as the 
 world, on the great scale of universal sympathy for man- 
 [120]
 
 VIRGIL 
 kind, which was one of the authentic signs of a new time. 
 It was the secular hour of the founding of the Empire ; it 
 was the spiritual hour of the birth of Christ; and its 
 presence was in the young poet's heart. A mighty voice, 
 too, had before now been heard in Rome, the voice of 
 one crying in the wilderness of the dethroned gods, a 
 man so great that he could endure the longest probation 
 of any of the poets of mankind and wait nineteen cen- 
 turies for the fullness of his fame — Lucretius. Virgil 
 heard the voice, and stored it in his heart, and meditated 
 upon it; but the time was not yet come. It was the eve of 
 a great past, the dawn of a great future; and the further 
 one penetrates the verse, the more clearly stands out this 
 youthful jfigure with the radiance of the world's new 
 morning in his face. 
 
 The " Eclogues," obeying the law of all beautiful 
 things, have gathered beauty from the lapse of time. 
 Some light streams back upon them from the later glory 
 of Virgil, and they have that increase of charm which 
 belongs to things that have been long loved; the lines, 
 too, like shells, are full of vocal memories. For one who 
 knows them well and knows the poets, they are a nest of 
 the singing birds of all lands; as he reads, voices of Italy, 
 France and England blend with the familiar Unes, and a 
 choiring vision rises before him of the world's poets in 
 their youth framing their lips to the smooth-sliding syl- 
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 lables; for the eclogues have been deeply cherished. They 
 are loved chiefly, however, because the young Virgil is 
 seen in them, as in the palaestra of his art before he had 
 put on his singing-robes, with that sweet teachableness, 
 that yielding and hospitable mind, out of which was to 
 come, to bless him and the world, the wide receptivity of 
 his spirit, the rich assimilation, the accumulated power 
 of imagination in the race, already held in the grasp of 
 his genius like Ithuriel's spear. Rome and Athens, the 
 light and majesty of the world, were married in his 
 blood; and though he bore as yet only the rustic reed, 
 here in the adolescence of genius was the form of him 
 who was to hand down by descent the antique vigour to 
 the modem world. Virgil became the great reconciler in 
 his own inherited world, the great mediator between an- 
 tiquity and Christendom; he maintained in poetry, 
 equally with Plato in philosophy, the unbroken contin- 
 uity of the human spirit; but before entering on these 
 great offices and as preliminary to them he was first of all 
 and by instinct a great lover — a greater lover than 
 Dante — and here in the first friendly affections of the 
 senses melting with the world, of the heart blending with 
 other lives, of the mind breathing the universal hope of 
 all, is this lover in the bud — he, who was to be the 
 greatest lover in all the world of all things beautiful, 
 strong, tender, pitiful, sad, and fated. 
 [122]
 
 VIRGIL 
 
 There was another scope, a different fibre in the 
 *' Georgics," the fruit of his seven years' toil in early 
 manhood. His genius had been powerfully condensed; 
 the matter of the song was as firmly organized as it was 
 richly diversified ; the whole, scarcely two thousand lines 
 in all, was a great single poem. The sense of nationaUty, 
 no longer diffused and dispersed, bums at the centre as 
 its nucleus and feeding flame. The work, though small 
 in scale is monumental in effect; it bears the Roman 
 birthmark in its practical purpose to share in the res- 
 toration of the agricultural life, and in the author's dedi- 
 cation of his powers to public spirit. It was characteris- 
 tic of Virgil to require reality in his subject-matter, and a 
 present hour; contemporaneousness presided in the in- 
 ception and purpose of all he did ; however far he might 
 range, he brought all home to amplify that moment of 
 Rome in which he lived. More than any other of the 
 poets of mankind he used the poetic art to idealize, to 
 exalt and to enrich the nation's consciousness; and, 
 through singleness of mind and comprehensiveness of 
 effort, he became the most national of all poets. As the 
 world had been given to Rome to rule, Rome had been 
 given to him to be the Empire of his song ; this was his 
 destiny. His genius did not expand suddenly and at once 
 to so vast a sphere ; but as is the case with all men who 
 accumulate greatness as if by a process of nature, hum- 
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 bier impulses and lesser tasks conducted him upon his 
 way. He would tell the story of Italy — that was the 
 phase under which Rome first appealed to him. It was as 
 if some one of our own poets had chosen to write an 
 idyl of the old free Ufe of New England, in the days be- 
 fore national unity and American destiny had come to 
 fullness in his heart. With unerring instinct, in choosing 
 his theme, he struck straight at the fundamental Roman 
 interest, the land, the soil ; but not yet imperializing, he 
 seized this interest not in its foreign form of land-hunger 
 which is the impulse of all empire, but in its primitive 
 form of the home-domain, " the mighty mother of men 
 and fruits, " that Italy which was Rome's birthright. He 
 thought of the land, too, not as our nature-poets do in 
 modem days as a description of contour and colour and 
 changes of the weather, the magic of the senses, but 
 primitively as the dwelling place of the race and the ele- 
 ment of its labours. Toil; that, too, was a Roman idea, 
 and he yoked it with the land in a Roman way; for 
 he saw human life on the soil as an arduous and un- 
 remitting warfare with the stubborn obduracy of na- 
 ture, who being subdued, nevertheless, became benefi- 
 cent, rejoicing in her captivity, and rewarded her 
 conqueror with the harvest of the earth and its loveli- 
 ness, with the external blessings of the gods and with 
 moral boons of inward excellence stored in the char- 
 [124]
 
 VIRGIL 
 acters of men by tliis discipline of the perennial task 
 of life. 
 
 The " Georgics " is the story of this perennial task. In 
 its original and parent form no more than an almanac, a 
 manual of the planting of crops, the raising of cattle and 
 the tending of bees, it grew in Virgil's mind to be a poem 
 of the sacred year. Virgil was by instinct and tempera- 
 ment a ritualist. The regularity inherent in times and 
 seasons and all ceremonial, the solemnity belonging to 
 all rites, the presence of the abstract and hidden in 
 their significance, were things profoundly Roman and 
 responded to what was by race deeply implanted in his 
 nature. The round of the seasons in their connection 
 with agricultural life was in his eyes a ritual of the year, 
 the presence and action of a natural religion. The de- 
 pendence of man on nature always plays a great part in 
 religious hfe; even now when that dependence is less 
 definitely felt than in primitive times it is at birth, mar- 
 riage and death, the great moments of nature, that re- 
 ligion has its common and vital impact on the general 
 hfe; and in the primitive conditions, set forth in this 
 poem, nature might seem herself to appoint the sacred 
 days of the gods both for prayer and for thanksgiving, to 
 order the festivals in their course and to prescribe the pe- 
 culiar service for the hour, month after month, in an- 
 nual revolution. The needs of each season and the pur- 
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 GREAT WRITERS 
 suits appropriate to it determined the active duties of 
 man, and these drew after them the due rehgious prac- 
 tices consecrated by use and wont; and, in the issue of all, 
 the blessings of the divine gods crowned the labour with 
 a present reward. Natural piety could not have a simp- 
 ler being than this. The mystery of the world which en- 
 velopes all life-processes on the earth has always over- 
 hung the out-of-doors people with some grandeur in the 
 elements, with stars and winds and waves ; in living near 
 to nature, they seem, by virtue of being lost and unpro- 
 tected there, to reach out to the unknown in habitual 
 ways. Virgil felt this mystery after a different fashion; 
 he knew it in the forms of old mythology that Greek im- 
 agination had put on in the divine presence, and also in 
 the fqrms of new science that Greek intellect had put 
 forth in attempting a rational conception of nature as a 
 thing subject to human knowledge. He was not dis- 
 turbed by this double possession of imagination and 
 rational intuition ; that teachable, that yielding and hos- 
 pitable mind, by its own nature made him in his self- 
 expression a representative poet; he gave out life in its 
 wholeness. This sacred year, with its ritual of work and 
 and worship, drew his eyes upon it, as a thing of out- 
 ward beauty, and first gave up to his gaze, first of men, 
 that enveloping charm of the land and its life which is 
 now the world's thought of Italy; this year, too, with its 
 [126]
 
 VIRGIL 
 antique usages, as old, perhaps, as the tilled soil itself, 
 recurring in their seasons as the sun rose in the zodiac, 
 engaged his affections by which he was bound to all 
 things of reverence, age and piety, and none more than 
 he realized in his heart both their divine and human ap- 
 peal; and, with all this, awoke, too, the philosophic mind, 
 fed from later fountains, and he flung round this ancient 
 Italy, humanized by long life upon its soil, that large 
 horizon of the intellect, in which liis own time was be- 
 ginning to live. 
 
 In such ways as these the poem which was begun as a 
 manual of the farm's task-work came from Virgil's 
 hands so touched with visible beauty, old religious asso- 
 ciation, the mythology and science of the Mediterranean 
 world and his own loves for all these, that it was, without 
 fiction, an incarnate Italy. He had embodied in his verse 
 the land itself with all its loveliness, then as it is to-day, a 
 land long lived in, with history, legend and ruins of a 
 storied past reaching back into the unknown ages; he 
 had set forth its characteristic life, the human product of 
 the soil, as a thing so sharing in the simplicities of na- 
 ture and what is divinely primitive as to make it seem 
 the eternal model of what the life of man on earth should 
 be, under the dispensation of labour, yet enveloped in 
 the kindly agencies of sun and rain, springtide and 
 summer heat and mellowing falls, the birth and rebirth 
 [127]
 
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 of all things in the revolution of the year — a life which 
 was itself religion, a round of duty, prayer and praise; 
 and he had evoked from this land and the hfe there lived 
 in the plains and uplands that abstract Italy, the eldest 
 of the modem nations, in unveiling whom he may al- 
 most be said to have created the mother-land. It is the 
 same Italy, then and now ; the stream of Italian patriot- 
 ism still mounts to the hymn of the second Georgic as its 
 fountainhead. There Italy is first seen clothed with 
 the divinity that a land identified with a race and a re- 
 nown takes on in the hearts of its children. Virgil seized 
 the fact in its moment, with that revelation of the actual 
 which the highest poetry exists to achieve. He sees Italy 
 as the centre of the world, with other lands antique or 
 barbarous lying on the sea about and beyond her, each 
 with its just distance and colouring and place in the 
 Mediterranean world, which is her sphere, but subject 
 and tributary to her unenvious supremacy in fertility and 
 men and fame. The miracle is the perfection with which 
 Virgil expresses this security in happiness, beauty and 
 power, this unclouded felicity of fortune, this ordered 
 peace, wliile distant clouds of war and menace whirl only 
 on the far confines of the scene. 
 
 He had prepared himself with wonderful thoroughness 
 for the work; a broad base of scholarship lies under it, 
 and for the didactic substance he had brought all Greek 
 [128]
 
 VIRGIL 
 
 and Roman knowledge, and something even from Car- 
 thage, to contribute to its truth, precision and fulness ; but 
 it was rather by his cultural knowledge, which he used 
 in heightening and expanding the theme to its true pro- 
 portions, that he regenerated and transformed the matter 
 of the verse and made the rural scene into the glory 
 of Italy. The wealth of this preparation, and his seven 
 years' toil, may seem disproportionate to the result in a 
 poem so brief, but only to those who do not know that, 
 the scale of the matter being allowed for, the power of a 
 poem is in inverse proportion to its length. He used for 
 his artistic method a selective, partial description, sub- 
 ordinating individuality and detail to social and general 
 presentation, and he employed episode, suggestion and 
 the emphasis that lies in enthusiasm to enlarge the 
 theme and qualify it with greatness; in particular, he 
 intended no exhaustion of the subject but only of the 
 feeling of the subject, which is the method of great 
 poetry, and hence come the rapidity, the variety, the 
 completeness of impression which are the most obvious 
 traits of the changeful lines. The " Georgics," most of all, 
 reveals the master of the poetic art ; and in a work some- 
 what limited by its choice of one though a great and en- 
 during phase of human life and also by its national in- 
 spiration and its attachment to a particular social mo- 
 ment, the mind has leisure to notice the more its artistic 
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 GREAT WRITERS 
 modes, the choice and ordering of the material, the col- 
 ours of rhetoric, the edge and immobility of style ever 
 fresh and everlasting as sculpture, the wealth of mo- 
 saic, the pictorial, sententious and eclectic compositeness, 
 the elaboration of the poem's beauty in the whole and in 
 detail. It is full of a poet's choices; and, though popular 
 with the cultivated class to which it was addressed, is 
 essentially a poet's poem. True to himself, the stuff which 
 Virgil worked in was his own nature; out of his heart 
 brooding on the beauty of the visible world about him, 
 on the picture of its human labours and the imperial 
 care conserving all these things in happy and lasting 
 peace, came the vision shaped and coloured and ideal- 
 ized by his sympathies with man's life, his affections for 
 the things of old time, his hopes in the present. The 
 *' Georgics " in a land of patriots and poets is still the 
 unrivalled monument of the first poet-lover of Italy. 
 
 The "Aeneid, " Virgil's last and greatest work, is a 
 world-poem. It is one of that splendid cluster of world- 
 poems, which by the fewness of their number, the sing- 
 leness of their glory, and the great intervals of time that 
 separate them, have, of all man's works most infinitude; 
 though time attacks them, they survive like the pyra- 
 mids ; they are man's Bibles on the side that he turns to 
 the human, Uke the Scriptures on the side that he turns 
 to the divine. The distinctive feature of the " Aeneid " is 
 [130]
 
 VIRGIL 
 
 the arc of time it covers, the burden of time it supports. 
 After that song of Italy, of the land and the life, the gen- 
 ius of Virgil struck a deeper compass of reality and 
 seized the theme at its heart. " Utter my toiUng power, " 
 said Rome. The tale of the wanderings of Aeneas and 
 how he brought the Trojan gods to Latium is only the 
 fable ; over and beyond all the character and event which 
 it contains, and including these Uke an atmosphere, it is 
 a symbol of the massive labour of the seven centuries 
 that had for their crown and cUmax the pacified Au- 
 gustan world. 
 
 Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem. 
 
 This massive labour, this toiUng power, is the theme. It 
 is not the Homeric world ; no ten years' foray, brilUant 
 with Greek personahty, in the dawn of history; no pas- 
 sionate boy, though the most splendid of all Alexanders, 
 great in his sulking wrath, his comrade-love and his 
 battle-glory; no chieftains parleying in the council and 
 warriors rushing in the field ; not these. It is the Virgilian 
 world — Rome at the summit of her Empire, rising from 
 those seven centuries of interminable strain. Rome in 
 the verse is its creative impulse, and governs the poem 
 in its whole and in its parts. The sense of past time, 
 too, always so strong in Virgil, is never relaxed. The 
 "Aeneid " is the book of an old world. 
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 Aeneas is, in his character, Rome concentrated — a 
 man set against the world; and in him, too, is that per- 
 spective of the past. He has outHved his personal life; 
 his city is in ashes, his wife is dead; there remains noth- 
 ing for himself, only to hve for others, to obey the will of 
 the gods, devotion to a public end. He is characterized 
 by patience, in which his piety is absorbed — that 
 patience which alike to the Pagan and the Christian 
 worid, to the Oriental and the Occidental mind, is 
 the greatest virtue of man, and was the state virtue of 
 Rome; to endure, however distant the goal, however 
 frequent the defeat, however adverse men and fortune 
 and the gods. The " Aeneid " is the book of victory de- 
 ferred, as imperial Rome, to one looking backward on 
 her past, was the last fruit of time, the late issue of long 
 and perilous struggle through generations. Toil, which 
 in the song of Italy was linked with the land, is here 
 fused with the power of empire; but it is toil — the 
 same Roman idea, though more informed with grand- 
 eur, and it draws with it the same rule of Ufe, obedience, 
 though more set forth with the stem absoluteness that 
 belonged to Roman discipline. If Aeneas offends roman- 
 tic sentiment by deserting Dido at Carthage, he con- 
 formed thereby to the Roman ideal of right in some of 
 its deepest foundations ; and even in the modem view, it 
 may be suspected that if in place of the wing-heeled 
 [132]
 
 VIRGIL 
 Mercury there had been some Hebrew prophet rebuk- 
 ing an erring David, the sympathy of the reader might 
 run truer with the thoughts of Virgil. Rome would not 
 tolerate the noblest of Antonys forgetting empire in pas- 
 sion for a woman; and Aeneas, in abandoning Dido, 
 was the reverse of Antony, and measured to the Roman 
 rule of life. Aeneas gains, and is truly seen, in propor- 
 tion as the mind is free from the allurements of individ- 
 uality, free from the worship of the ungovernable hu- 
 man power in life, and all that makes against the ideal of 
 patience, obedience and rule; the grandeur of the indi- 
 vidual is found in Mezentius and Tumus, creatures of 
 self-will opposed to the will of heaven, and herein justly 
 doomed to perish ; if these latter seem the true heroes, it is 
 as Satan is sometimes, and perhaps popularly, regarded 
 as the hero of Milton, but to Milton Satan was infernal 
 as to Virgil Tumus was impious. Aeneas stands at the 
 opposite pole of conduct; and if he shares the defective 
 attraction which the typical Roman character historically 
 discloses, he the more illustrates that efficient power in 
 life, of which the sense greatens as time clarifies the 
 mind of the ardours of youth, whether in men or nations; 
 for the ideal implanted in him, like every part of the 
 poem, bears the mark of a world grown old. 
 
 The presence of Roman time in the verse, especially 
 the sense of the sorrows that are the price of empire, is 
 [133]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 also profoundly felt in the diffusion of pathos through 
 the poem, not the pathos of individual lives but of the 
 general lot, which makes it the saddest book of the world. 
 It contains three great defeats ; the destruction of Troy, 
 the fall of Carthage, which is the atmosphere of fate in 
 which the personal tragedy of Dido bums out on her 
 funeral pyre, and the overthrow of Tumus ; the true ac- 
 tion is contained in these passages; and, in addition, 
 though Aeneas is finally successful, his checks have 
 been so many and his success is so long delayed and 
 is so palely realized that his career, in the impression it 
 makes, may almost count as a fourth defeat. Against this 
 scene of disaster the majesty of Rome's final triumph 
 in history, though it fills all the horizons of the poem, 
 blazes in vain. Here are the tears of time. Lacrimae rerum 
 seems almost the other name of the "Aeneid, " as it 
 is its best known and central phrase. The "chanter of 
 the PolUo " had come to this. He who was the first to 
 sound the strain of world-hope was also now the first to 
 strike that parallel chord of world-woe which has re- 
 verberated down all after ages. The " Miserere " follows 
 the " Gloria " as manhood follows youth. If the" Aeneid" 
 were only a poem of heroic action, and not a symbol of 
 life long hved, the suffering would be absorbed in the 
 action ; but the poem is heavy wdth thought and clouded 
 with feeHng Uke a sun struggUng with echpse. The in- 
 [134]
 
 VIRGIL 
 
 tellectual force in it, the passion of thought, Virgil's 
 overmastering sympathy with the victim — and Aeneas 
 by his long sufferings is essentially a victim — shake its 
 containing bounds, and again and again threaten its 
 epical form. A thousand lines have the lyrical cry ; they 
 could, and do, stand alone, each one a poem. The dra- 
 matic power in the episode of Dido threatens to over- 
 bear the moral unity of the structure ; the didactic depth 
 of teaching in the descent to Hades threatens to intermit 
 the sense of action and shift the scene to the academy; 
 and at every turn, when the epic seems shpping from his 
 hand, Virgil invokes Rome, returns to that ground-swell 
 of his music, and fuses all disparate elements in its en- 
 veloping power. It is the thought of Ascanius and the 
 Julian line that overrules the wrongs of Dido; and in the 
 Elysian fields it is the encomium of Rome — the most 
 majestic lines ever written by the hand of man — and 
 the bead-roll of her heroes and the vision of her Augus- 
 tan triumph that restore the epical interest and su- 
 premacy. It is in these ways most truly that, as Ten- 
 nyson said, this " ocean-roll of rhythm sounds forever of 
 imperial Rome." 
 
 Rome, too, sustains the verse in its weakest part, the 
 
 mythology, and gives to that debilitated supernatural 
 
 element the only reality which it contains. Virgil was 
 
 bom too late to be a true believer in Olympus; but in 
 
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 GREAT WRITERS 
 placing the prophecy of Rome on the lips of Jupiter and 
 in identifying the fate of Rome with the divine purpose 
 and will he made the mythological creed discharge a 
 true and important function in the poem, and in fact its 
 only function; except for this, Olympus is only a tradi- 
 tional adornment, a part of the mechanical scheme and 
 surface pictorialness of the plot, and one element in that 
 many-sided perspective of human history in which the 
 poem is so remarkably beyond all others. If, however, 
 Olympus is a shadow and Virgil recedes from it in his 
 mind, on the other hand he is far advanced and moves 
 forward in what was to Homer the shadow- world, the 
 life beyond the grave; in his thought and sentiment there 
 is not only the sense of profound reality, but he touches 
 on the confines of revealed religion. Here most strik- 
 ingly, in the sweep backward to the still visible but 
 fading gods and in the sweep forward to the still unborn 
 Christian ages, the " Aeneid " shows that characteristic 
 of greatness in literature wliich lies in its being a water- 
 shed of time; it looks back to antiquity in all that 
 clothes it with the past of imagination, character and 
 event, and forward to Christian times in all that clothes 
 it with emotion, sentiment and finality to the heart. If, 
 as is sometimes said, Gibbon's history is the bridge be- 
 tween the ancient and the modem world, the " Aeneid " 
 is the high central ridge where time itself joined both. 
 [136]
 
 VIRGIL 
 
 Virgil was so great a poet because he assimilated his 
 vast mental experience, and turned it, in the true Ro- 
 man way, to power over the future. His language it- 
 self — and he was the " lord of language " — bears the 
 Roman stamp. Scarce any poet is so brief; hke all the 
 masters of poetic speech he seldom carries his sentence 
 beyond three Unes, and more often he clasps the sense in 
 shorter limits, and notably in those " half-hnes " which 
 are so often spoken of as the special characteristic of his 
 style, though they are also to be found in Shakspere with 
 like power. Oratory belongs to the epic as the lyric be- 
 longs to the drama, as its rhetorical means of intensity; 
 and oratory was a Roman art. It belongs to Virgil equal- 
 ly with his winged music. It is the oratory of Brutus, not 
 of Antony; and it is present in spirit and method, not 
 only in the set speeches and narratives, but in the general 
 flow of the verse; the weight of thought, the compact- 
 ness of vision, the intensity of the lyrical cry of feeUng it- 
 self, are indebted to it, for it is the native world of Ro- 
 man speech, and Virgil in his song could only heighten, 
 refine and amplify it, pour it in more lucid and tender 
 voices of the spirit, which was none the less a Roman 
 spirit. It is common to regard the earlier books of the 
 "Aeneid" which are more inspired by the Greek ele- 
 ment in Virgil's culture as the greater; but in the later 
 books in which the inspiration of the home-land prevails 
 [137]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 more, and not less excellently in its own qualities, if the 
 presence of Rome is less imperially impressive, it has 
 more primitive charm. The eariy air of Rome is here, 
 the youth of primeval Italy, when Empire was far away. 
 In Mezentius and Tumus, and especially in Evander, 
 there is an original impulse, a native stamp; and, most of 
 all, in Camilla. Few poets cast a new type of woman- 
 hood. Camilla is the first of those ideal Italian women 
 who have glorified the pages of Tasso and the canvasses, 
 divine and human, of a hundred artists. K the later books 
 of the " Aeneid " are less valued, it is partly because they 
 are purer in originality, more Italian in their interest, 
 and in Hmiting themselves to the evolution of a roman- 
 tic past for the soil of Italy and the beginnings of Rome 
 make a narrower appeal. To Virgil this task was, per- 
 haps, deerer than the echoes of Troy and the sorrows of 
 Carthage, but he worked with names that sounded less 
 in the ears of the world. In one respect he succeeds mar- 
 vellously; both on the voyage and in Italy he gives the 
 sense of the early Mediterranean world as a place of 
 wandering colonists and rising settlements in lonely 
 places, a sense of the taking possession of the virgin land, 
 with seas and coasts and spaces never to be crossed 
 again; such a wonder-world did not come to man's view 
 a second time, so effectually, till the days of Cortez and 
 Magellan and De Soto, in the daw^n of the Americas. 
 [138]
 
 VIRGIL 
 
 The primitive time, such as it is shown in Evander, has 
 the same reaHty, and his hospitahty has retained in men's 
 minds its place as the historic and ideal moment of the 
 simplicities of the first Ufe of men on still unviolated soil. 
 If one's eye is on the Roman spirit of the poem, he will 
 not find the Italian prepossession of its last books an 
 obstacle to his interest; but rather the charm of a more 
 home-bred inspiration will endear to him its humilities, 
 its native character and the nobility of human feeling 
 which is nowhere in the poem so constant, pervasive and 
 pure. If Rome is less, in these passages, in her imperial 
 form, Italy is more; and it is that Italy in which the true 
 Rome resided and to which she returned, of which the 
 Empire itself now seems a planet she cast from her larger 
 and more immortal life. 
 
 The poem of Rome, however, even though such a na- 
 tion as Italy fall heir to it, could not maintain its inti- 
 macy with the modem mind and continue to make a di- 
 rect appeal to hfe, unless it were something more. There 
 is a greatness in the " Aeneid " beyond the presence of 
 Rome in the verse. It might seem that Virgil was by na- 
 ture little fitted for the epic; his initiation into life had 
 been through that "passive youth" which Shelley de- 
 scribes, the type of poetic boyhood, sensitive, impressi- 
 ble, inexhaustibly recipient; and all his days he was a 
 scholar drawing into his brooding thoughts the spectacle 
 [139]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 of things till his knowledge was equal to the world- 
 culture of his time; that such a man should give back to 
 the world what he had received from it in the shape of a 
 poem of action seems incongruous, and, doubtless, like 
 Tasso and Milton and Spenser and Teimyson, in their 
 several degrees, he experienced the natural difficulties of 
 the task. Yet, to the brooding spirit, not thought, but 
 action is the true sphinx of life ; not what is dreamed or 
 reasoned or desired, but what is done, w hat God permits, 
 as the phrase goes, the power of unrighteousness that is 
 nine-tenths of life; this fastens the eye, perplexes the 
 mind, disturbs the heart. Virgil, bom late and acquaint- 
 ed with the world long hved in, was of a contemplative 
 mind; in the "Aeneid" thought shadows every word, a 
 subtle judgment blends with every action clothing it, as 
 music clothes the line, in an element of its own, pitjang, 
 appealing, affirming, according to the motions of the 
 poet's soul; and hence the "Aeneid" has its grandest 
 phase, by vartue of wliich it has entered into the hearts 
 of so many later generations and still enters. It is a 
 meditation upon life. 
 
 The modes in which the poem thus affects the reader 
 are infinitely varied; sometimes so intimate as to seem 
 the voice in one's own heart of one's own hfe, or so lofty 
 and assured as to seem the voice of all men's hearts, or 
 so world-sweeping in its pathos as to seem the voice di- 
 [140]
 
 VIRGIL 
 vine. Unbroken is the sense of the difficulty of Hfe, not 
 merely under its old conception as a warfare, but as a 
 thing of burden, of frequent mistake, of unforeseen and 
 unmerited disaster, of repeated defeat, of uncertain is- 
 sue; the toiling power of Rome is made up of the in- 
 numerable toils of miserable men, and about the main 
 actors are the files of captive women, the sons burning 
 on their funeral pyres before the faces of their parents, 
 all the wretchedness of a military state for the private 
 life. The element of difficulty felt in the reverses of the 
 main fortune of the tale, in its birth in the terrors of the 
 last night of Ilium, in the wrong landings, the insidious 
 dangers of Carthage, the burning of the fleet, is, on the 
 individual scale broken into a thousand cries of death 
 and sorrow essentially personal and domestic. Life on 
 land and sea is a field of battle, and everywhere are 
 corpses rolled by Simois or the ocean-wave, and in every 
 prospect the heart follows the remnant of men, in their 
 beaten courage ever more courageous, but none the less 
 victims of life. " Pain, pain, ever, forever, " rings through 
 the poem like a Promethean cry; the burden of Priam, the 
 burden of Dido, the burden of Tumus, kingdom after 
 kingdom, and by the way the strewn corpses of Palinu- 
 rus, Euryalus, Pallas. In the Elysian fields Aeneas 
 marvels why any soul should desire to see the light of 
 life. Over all there hangs in heaven the doubtful interest 
 
 [141]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 of the gods in human fates. " If any gods be just " — " if 
 there be any kindness in heaven " — these are the re- 
 frains of all the prayers. In the presence of the mystery 
 of what is done on earth the reason, always unsatisfied, 
 will not be silent and refuses to yield its just share in the 
 conduct of life ; if, in one age, the tale be of Eden and the 
 Fall, this offends the mind's sense of justice; if, in another 
 time, it be of the struggle for existence from the dawn of 
 life, this offends the mind's sense of mercy; in knowledge 
 of justice and mercy, the mind finds its own superiority 
 to the environment in which it is imprisoned, and in its 
 moods of sincerest reason still seeks refuge in the pro- 
 visional prayer on Virgil's lips. 
 
 Lucretius had lived; and something of all this diflS- 
 culty, pain and uncertainty had come to light in that 
 great intellect. He was essentially one of the eternal Pu- 
 ritan brood, personal revolters against church and state, 
 which in history have been the twin tyrants of mankind; 
 he looked back on the past and saw there immense and 
 long-continued error in important parts of life, the de- 
 lusion and woe of whole peoples since time began; and 
 he denounced superstition as the mother of human ills. 
 He was an individualist, a man of conscious virtue, self- 
 sufficing; he had an empire in his mind; he spoke out, a 
 lonely intellect in a world stripped for his eyes to the 
 bare principles of its being, and in his words was the 
 [142]
 
 VIRGIL 
 
 fiery seed of the new universe of scientific thought. Vir- 
 gil was of a different strain, a natural worshipper, rev- 
 erent of the rite, attached to the myth, clinging with his 
 affections to the outward garniture of Ufe and history; 
 but his eyes were on the same things that Lucretius saw. 
 He, too, was finding in philosophy the true goal. He felt 
 from youth the compelling power of thought of Rome's 
 greatest mind as he looked out on the long Pagan retro- 
 spect of life's beauty and sorrow. How did he save him- 
 self from the intellectual indignation, the despair of the 
 divine, the earthly pessimism of Rome's great sceptic; 
 for the face of Virgil, "majestic in his sadness at the 
 doubtful doom of human kind, " is the grave face of a 
 believer. He saved himself by the power of love. 
 
 He was a lover of life; only an immense love of life 
 could have so revealed to him the pity of it. At every 
 touch he shows a spirit naturally dependent ; teachable, 
 yielding, hospitable, responsive, sympathetic, appeahng, 
 his heart flows out upon things, uniting with them at 
 every contact, from his early loves of nature, romance 
 and antiquity, his long passion of patriotism, on to his 
 brooding over the fates of men ; and yet with his self -sur- 
 render to the things of life there goes, equal with it, 
 the true Roman self-control; it is a surrender that re- 
 turns to him as strength. At every turn of the verse he 
 evokes the moment of beauty from the natural world, 
 [143]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 and from life its moment of pain, with the clarity of the 
 poet; charm, which is the one, and pathos, which is the 
 other, are the words that leap from the heart in the mem- 
 ory of what he wrote, and after these the third is majesty, 
 which is the principle of control in him, and completes 
 and perfects his genius. These are wonderfully softened 
 by his constant tenderness. The epics generally find no 
 place for children in them ; but here there are three — 
 Astyanax, Ascanius and Marcellus — and two of these 
 are dead boys. Of all Virgil's loves, the greatest in 
 power is the love of human Ufe; and it is this that makes 
 the poem so Christian-Uke, because it is embodied and 
 conveyed in the forms of sorrow and especially of be- 
 reavement. Yet the burden of that sorrow comes as the 
 burden of the Roman world running its long career of 
 battle-strife; here is the heart of Rome beating in the only 
 Roman breast in which it had become fully conscious of 
 itself. The world was ready to be re-bom; there is no 
 break; the premonitions of Christian feeling are natural 
 to Virgil. It is this that makes him of all ancient writers 
 the nearest to modem times, of all epic poets the nearest 
 to all nations. The "Aeneid" is, I think, the greatest 
 single book written by man because of its inclusiveness 
 of human hfe, of hfe long Uved, in the things of life. It is 
 the dirge of Rome; majestic in its theme, beautiful in its 
 emotions, sad in its philosophy, it is almost the dirge of 
 [144]
 
 VIRGIL 
 life ; yet many a modem mind still turns from the con^^ 
 lemplation of human Ufe in history, hke the thousands 
 of old days, to Virgil, and says with Dante, Tu se' lo mio 
 maestro, " Thou art my master. " 
 
 [ 145 ]
 
 Great Writers
 
 MONTAIGNE 
 
 Montaigne was one of the great confessors of life. The 
 confession is a paradox; for he reveals himself, and it is 
 the reader who stands revealed. A personal writer, whose 
 whole story is about himself, as he says, matters of his 
 own career, opinions, anecdotes, trivialities of the daily 
 life, a diary of privacies ; yet throughout it is not he who 
 is interesting, but that human nature of which he is the 
 showman. His work is not to represent life, as the novel- 
 ist does in fiction, but to illustrate it by his own example. 
 The fortune of those who have been drawn to him, now 
 for three centuries, is identical; they all claim a share in 
 his individuality. Emerson says of that copy he found in 
 his father's library : " It seemed to me as if I had myself 
 written the book, in some former life, so sincerely it 
 spoke to my thought and experience." Byron heard the 
 same personal tone in it. Not all of Emerson is there, 
 not all of Byron ; there are neither heights nor depths of 
 [ 149]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 Ihe soul in the book; but human nature in the norm of 
 its range, in its middle flight, in its average of the gen- 
 tleman, a little knowledge, a little morals, a little relig- 
 ion, with much moderation and good sense — these are 
 there, exemplifying the practical life of the great and 
 small in the world in which Montaigne Uved and in 
 which his admirers have lived after him. In the practice 
 of life that the world wills, Montaigne is a master; he is 
 its moralist; the " Essays " contain its rule and counsels, 
 and are vivaciously varied by the gossipy interwoven 
 tale of his adventures, body and soul. 
 
 Montaigne, nevertheless, had in his own right the fig- 
 ure that arrests the eye and traits that jet from the mem- 
 ory in high relief. One thinks of him commonly in con- 
 nection with his famous tower, the great Tour de Mon- 
 taigne, that overhangs the entrance of the chateau, 
 round, dungeon-like, massive, in the uppermost of whose 
 three stories is the circular room, spacious, with its raft- 
 ers on which were cut inscriptions, the author's mottoes 
 of life, and its deep embrasured windows through which 
 he looked out to three parts of heaven, on the garden, 
 farm-yard and court, and over the sloping estates to the 
 distant Perigord hills; here was his library, and Mon- 
 taigne is thought of here, in retirement, Uke a sohtary 
 surveying the world. But this is a fantastic conception. 
 He was in reality a man of affairs all his Kfe; he had the 
 [150]
 
 MONTAIGNE 
 
 mind of a man of aflFairs, with something superadded. 
 The best inheritance he drew from his father, an active, 
 capable, successful man, was the athletic vigour and 
 business capacity that did him yeoman service in that 
 age when both were needed to keep one's feet in the 
 world about; but to his father he also owed that added 
 something — he owed a careful education. The elder 
 Montaigne, though not learned, was the friend of schol- 
 ars, and experienced that new interest in the intellectual 
 life which in his day was moulding France as the Ren- 
 aissance spread to the northwest out of Italy; it was a 
 movement that dealt much with education and favoured 
 originality, experiment, eccentricity even; and it was, 
 perhaps, by the touch of Italian conversation and ideas 
 that the father determined that the son should be 
 brought up with Latin for his mother tongue. He had 
 already put the boy to nurse in the country with poor 
 people, in order that he might have his mind and sym- 
 pathy open to the life of the humble, and so contract a 
 lively feeling of their condition; and now he secured 
 proper instruction, a learned German who taught the 
 child to speak in Latin from his earliest accents, while 
 all who came in contact with him were compelled to con- 
 form to the rule, even the servants, so that this chatter, 
 it is said, left traces in the country speech. The boy felt 
 and talked in Latin till he was six years old, and later in 
 [151]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 life French was so much less natural to him that in mo- 
 ments of deep excitement the instinctive words in his 
 brain were Latin. He was bred at college from six to 
 thirteen, immediately put to the law, and made counsel- 
 lor at twenty-one, in which capacity three years later he 
 became one of the Parliament of Bordeaux, the city that 
 throughout his life was the stage of his public actions and 
 of which his father was mayor. The family by its integ- 
 rity, kindness and energy, had long held a well-estab- 
 lished place in the province. On his father's death, Mon- 
 taigne who had married some five years before became 
 its head. The inscription which records his accession 
 may still be read at the chateau, as follows: 
 
 "In the year of our Lord 1571, aged thirty-eight, on 
 the eve of the Kalends of March, the anniversary day of 
 his birth, Michel de Montaigne, having long been weary 
 of the slavery of courts and public employments, takes 
 refuge in the bosom of the learned Virgins. He designs 
 in quiet and indifference to all things, to conclude there 
 the remainder of his life, already more than half-past, 
 and he has dedicated to repose and liberty this agreeable 
 and peaceful abode, which he has inherited from his 
 ancestors." 
 
 When Montaigne thus sought the private life in the 
 middle of his years, he had already hved a full and ac- 
 tive career in a station of moderate distinction which 
 [152]
 
 MONTAIGNE 
 had brought him in contact with various aspects of the 
 human lot. He knew the Hfe of the court and had led it 
 at Paris and elsewhere with a young man's interest, 
 with gallant adventures, with gaming and episodes and 
 debauch, and on all sides he had formed ties with per- 
 sons of power. He knew the life of the camp, and had 
 followed it, as the custom was, at sieges and on marches 
 to which a young man of his position would go at his will 
 and come away at his choice. He knew the life of admin- 
 istrative affairs to which his post in the Parliament 
 obliged him and by which he was brought into serious 
 concerns affecting his locality and the interests of his 
 faith and country. He had taken no leading part, but he 
 had observed human life in many ways, and he had 
 learned to keep his balance in a difficult age. He was a 
 firm Catholic and loyalist, but he had the art of remain- 
 ing on good terms with all parties, and in his own coun- 
 try which was in the disturbed region he suffered but lit- 
 tle in the religious and civil dissensions that distracted 
 and oppressed the times with the changing fortunes of 
 Henry of Navarre. He was that marvel of the moral life, 
 a man of integrity who is a master of compromise. 
 
 An entirely diflFerent phase is revealed in the only in- 
 cident of distinction that marked his early years. This 
 was his friendship with Estienne de la Boetie, a fellow- 
 counsellor in the Parliament of Bordeaux, famous as the 
 [153]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 youthful author of the most eloquent attack ever made 
 upon the institution of Monarchy, which though then 
 circulated was not published for many years, and known 
 also as a poet. The two young men were of about the 
 same age, and their friendship, which was meant by 
 themselves to restore the classical example to the world, 
 was terminated after six years by La Boetie's early 
 death. This attachment is one of the legends of litera- 
 ture, and in it Montaigne showed most heart beyond any 
 other action of his life. He idolized it after the ancient 
 model in his essay on " Friendship; " he wrote a minute 
 account of the death-bed scenes, with the classical touch, 
 but real; and his references to his loss are among the 
 few passages of his writings that have poignancy. His 
 first task when he became master of himself in the world 
 was to edit such of his friend's papers as it seemed dis- 
 creet to publish, but he reserved the immortal essay on 
 " Monarchy " for less turbulent times and the next age. 
 It was not in his character to find in his pious duties to 
 the dead a legacy of unrest that might disturb the years 
 which he had dedicated to "repose and liberty." 
 
 Montaigne's retirement was by no means absolute. 
 Throughout the score of years that it lasted before death 
 carried him off at the edge of sixty, he kept in touch with 
 the business of this world ; and his privacy was especially 
 broken by two events, his travels into Italy and his in- 
 [154]
 
 MONTAIGNE 
 cumbency of the mayoralty of Bordeaux. The Italian 
 journey, which took place after eight years of labour on 
 the "Essays" and when he was forty-seven years old, was 
 primarily undertaken on the score of health since he had 
 become subject to the stone, and he may also have de- 
 sired to observe the effect of the first publication of his 
 work, then just issued, on his reputation. He saw Paris, 
 assisted at a siege, and made his way by Baden and the 
 Tyrol to Venice, and thence to the chief cities of north- 
 ern and central Italy, visiting the baths and taking the 
 waters by the way. He was an excellent traveller. He 
 rode on horseback, a habit which he greatly enjoyed, 
 with a sufficient but not too expensive suite, in the style 
 befitting a French gentleman of his rank; and he took 
 pains to live in the country according to its own customs, 
 to mix with its people and lay aside his native prejudices, 
 to get the full benefit of travel by means of a lively curi- 
 osity, an open mind and a hospitable manner. He was 
 bound by no rule or plan, but zigzagged along accord- 
 ing to his mood, doubhng on his track or deviating from 
 it as the fancy took him; and in all places he conformed 
 and gave way and reaped his harvest of experience and 
 observation. Social tact distinguished him. He got on 
 with the papal critics of the " Index," who handled his 
 " Essays" with some doubtfulness, just as he had done 
 with Henry of Navarre, and they left him to make his own 
 [155]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 emendations. He gave a dance for the country girls at 
 the Baths of Lucca. He made friends everywhere. In 
 spite of acute attacks of illness, with discomfort and 
 wearing pain, he maintained an even and settled de- 
 meanour, and thoroughly enjoyed the new scenes, the 
 honourable entertainment and the variety of hfe and 
 manners. The note-book which constitutes his Travels 
 reveals the man as plainly and more simply than the 
 "Essays." Posterity remembers out of it two things, the 
 eloquent description of the ruins of Rome, and the oflFer- 
 ing which he was solicitous to hang up at Loretto — "a 
 framed tablet with four silver figures attached, repre- 
 senting our Lady, myself, my wife and my daughter." 
 
 He spent a year and a half in this journey, and it was 
 still unfinished when he received news of his election to 
 the mayoralty of Bordeaux. He made his return without 
 haste, and as soon as he had arrived told them, he says, 
 " what they had to expect of me — no memory, no vigil- 
 ance, no experience, no vigour; but also no hatred, no 
 ambition, no avarice, and no violence." It was an ex- 
 cellent programme that was thus promised in the dis- 
 tressed situation of affairs, and the character of Mon- 
 taigne for justice, moderate temper and tact must have 
 much commended him in that time and place; he pleased 
 well enough to receive the unusual distinction of a re- 
 election, and thus served for four years. It was charac- 
 [156]
 
 MONTAIGNE 
 
 teristic of his career that he entertained Henry of Na- 
 varre at his chateau in the last year of his term, and that, 
 a pestilence desolating the country at its conclusion, he 
 declined to return to the stricken city to preside at his 
 successor's election. He was an expert avoider of risks. 
 He was careful to leave his chateau undefended in order 
 not to invite attack, and this device succeeded; but he 
 owed his extraordinary immunity from the ravage and 
 insult of either party to his character and manners. Once 
 when a hostile company had entered the chateau by a 
 kind of stealth, Montaigne's hospitable good nature 
 carried the matter so well that the leader took his party 
 off without sign of the injury that had been intended; 
 and once when Montaigne was stopped on the road and 
 robbed, his bold spirit and fair temper so told in his fa- 
 vour that he was released and warned of other danger by 
 the captain of the band. He was not deficient in courage, 
 but what carried him through in so many difficult and 
 delicate situations was his knowledge of men and his 
 open appearance, his mastery of social intercourse. He 
 had none of the traits of a recluse; he was more a soldier 
 and a man of pleasure, used to the business of life, sin- 
 cere, honest, moderate, and above all adroit. In his 
 travels, his office, his adventures of whatever kind, he 
 has the stamp of the man who lives, who knows how to 
 take and give in a real world, and to whom living is more 
 [157]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 primary than thinking — in other words, the man of 
 action. 
 
 Montaigne, the writer, none the less, was formed by 
 his education. Education had an equal importance with 
 life in stamping that image of personality. It was a class- 
 ical education, but he did not get it at school. The col- 
 lege where he was bred in his boyhood years was one of 
 the most distinguished in France, but it was one of those 
 hells which civilization has imposed on the suffering 
 youth of most generations. Montaigne tells us how 
 he slipped away from liis routine tasks and read by 
 stealth his Ovid and Virgil and found his true world 
 there. He gave his education to himself by reading 
 in his manhood. The important books were of course 
 the ancients. The Latin authors he read in their own 
 tongue in which he was well grounded, and the Greek 
 authors for the most part in the translations then 
 made by the French humanists; and, generally speak- 
 ing, he knew the Greek authors later than the Latin, 
 and especially Plato came to him toward the close of his 
 life. He was essentially a pupil of Plutarch, a sort of 
 man who has become in our culture extinct but in the 
 sixteenth century flourished in the new lands of the Re- 
 naissance; and especially he was an intellectual child of 
 Plutarch, the moralist. When poetry began to grow shal- 
 low in interest to Montaigne, as it belonged to his nature 
 [158]
 
 MONTAIGNE 
 that it should, history and biography became the food of 
 his serious thought. They appealed to him because they 
 illustrate Ufe; and it was Hfe that Montaigne held as the 
 centre of his meditation always — not life in its princi- 
 ples, but rather life as it is hved, the scene of life. For 
 example, he says that he always had great curiosity to 
 know how men died, and would eageriy inquire for all 
 the details. Plutarch in his various writings gives im- 
 mense illustration of life thus viewed in all its aspects, 
 and with it a wealth of apposite reflection on human na- 
 ture and the fortunes of men. The conduct of life broadly 
 speaking is his theme, as it became Montaigne's. To all 
 such knowledge out of antiquity Montaigne added the 
 memoirs and narratives of the recent worid. He applied 
 this to his own ends. To him all these facts of life were 
 not an affair of learning, not information, gossip, but 
 means by which he came to a better understanding of 
 human nature, or, as he said, of himself. His proper 
 study, he affirmed, was only himself. The power of his 
 education consisted in the vital connection he made 
 through it between himself and the story of men's lives 
 as he picked up its multitude of fragments in the bio- 
 graphical and historical records of past times. For prin- 
 ciples of conduct, for maxim and apothegm, he fell back 
 on Seneca, and with all the discursive philosophy of the 
 later ancient world he was in touch; but he became a 
 [159]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 moralist because he was primarily an observer, and he 
 was always more interested in the premises than in the 
 conclusions of his thoughts, more absorbed in the curi- 
 ous spectacle of human phenomena than in the laws of 
 human nature. He had an immense interest in things 
 human, and this gave him the secret of originality. " I 
 am human," he said. "I am immensely interesting to 
 myself, I will write about myself." The "Essays" were 
 thus engendered. This directness of Montaigne belongs 
 to the man, to his vital energy. He had been formed by 
 life, it is true; but in his mind, the mind of a man of af- 
 fairs, there was, as I have said, something superadded; 
 it was a meditative habit. There was, however, nothing 
 of the closet in it, nothing of the abstract and logi'^al, the 
 speculative for its own sake; it was a thing of experience, 
 empirical. The intellectual part of his book is a medita- 
 tion upon life as something observed, recorded, prac- 
 tised; the vivid reality of the book, which makes it seem 
 often written by the reader, springs from this. A man of 
 affairs, in his ripeness, meditating upon the business of 
 living, with cogency, with brilliancy, with unexampled 
 frankness — this was what hfe and education combined 
 to make of Montaigne; and the "Essays" are the mind 
 of such a man. 
 
 Montaigne was a bom man of letters, but like many 
 men so bom he did not think of making the career. His 
 [160]
 
 MONTAIGNE 
 father's house was a place of books, of scholars and the 
 intellectual ferment of the age; he had been trained by 
 men of learning and had mingled with the poets of the 
 times; but he showed no early disposition to write a 
 book. There was no adolescence in his genius. For learn- 
 ing he had the characteristic literary contempt. The first 
 requisite for any career for him was that it should be a 
 life. Montaigne had that secret, which has so often de- 
 veloped the highest literary faculty, the power to absorb 
 life into himself directly, to let life have its way with him 
 as an experience, and yet to maintain in the midst of it 
 complete possession of himself, to lead his own life. He 
 established terms with his environment. With that facil- 
 ity which seems rather a characteristic of southern than 
 of northern peoples, he accepted the social fictions with 
 all solemnity. He was a true Catholic in faith; and the 
 truth revealed through the church, with the observance 
 of its attendant and customary ritual, as things beyond 
 the pale of what is merely human — this was accepted 
 as being imposed by his baptism ; he conformed, and did 
 so with apparent sincerity. He was a true loyalist, and 
 the system of state, with its ritual also, was accepted as 
 being imposed by his birth in the country and under the 
 crown ; he conformed in secular as in religious matters to 
 things established. But this being settled, he remained 
 the master of himself in both thought and action, the 
 [161]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 man of his own choice. He was by temperament Epi- 
 curean, given to an indulgent habit of pleasure, with the 
 wisdom of the moderates; yet his character was of a 
 more vigorous stock than such words imply; he was 
 hardy and sufficiently energetic. Indeed there was in his 
 spirit a nobler capacity, a movement toward enthusiasm 
 even, and a power of admiration that is most often 
 found in alliance with more active and ardent ambition 
 than belonged to his nature. The Stoical precepts awak- 
 ened a glow in him, the personality of Socrates seized 
 him with the fervour of hero-worship, Cicero disturbed 
 him by his weaknesses. But this strength, this latent pas- 
 sion, this capacity to be morally great never reached the 
 kindling point. One is aware of it by its heat, but never 
 by its flame. He had dedicated himself to repose as well 
 as to liberty ; he would pass life agreeably — that was 
 the main thing. He was active intellectually rather than 
 morally ; his curiosity was unlimited, and what it brought 
 him was the food of untiring and discursive reflection; 
 but, before all, he was a moralist in the scientific spirit of 
 exploration, and not at all in the proselytizing spirit of 
 the believer. 
 
 He discovered himself as a writer almost, it would 
 
 seem, by one of those accidents of life which are also not 
 
 uncommon in the history of literature. He was not an 
 
 author, and apparently had no thought of being one,when 
 
 [162]
 
 MONTAIGNE 
 his father put into his hands a book which he asked 
 him to translate. It was a theological work of the times 
 of the Reformation, a " Natural Theology " by Ray- 
 mond de Sebonde, written in a curious sort of Spanish 
 with Latin terminations and left at the chateau by one 
 of the elder Montaigne's scholarly visitors, an attempt 
 to show the truth of religion on grounds of human rea- 
 son independent of revelation. Montaigne translated this 
 work, and it was afterward published. Later he was led 
 to compose an apology or defence of it, a paper included 
 in his " Essays " and the longest of them. In the medita- 
 tion of this important piece and in writing out his 
 thoughts Montaigne seems to have found himself intel- 
 lectually ; and it may fairly be said that the various mat- 
 ter of the famous " Essays " flowed from the author of 
 the " Apology " as truly as Scott's Novels proceeded in 
 their long sequence from "the Author of Waverley." 
 The conjunction of the two names is suggestive; for, at 
 not far from the same mature period of manhood as 
 Scott began his career in fiction, and from a similar 
 foundation of life that had practically fed his genius un- 
 intermittently in the moral sphere by affairs and books, 
 Montaigne like Scott at the moment of Waverley was at 
 the moment of his apology for Raymond de Sebonde at 
 the point of ignition ; he had been prepared by tempera- 
 ment, experience and studies, in a purely practical way, 
 [163]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 without literary premeditation, to become the great mor- 
 alist of life that the " Essays " revealed. Montaigne, like 
 Scott and Cervantes, was the product of life, in which 
 studies, it is true, were a large element, but of which 
 reality was the substance and vigour; his book is conse- 
 quently one of those greatest books in which Ufe is su- 
 preme. The centre of it is Montaigne himself, because 
 that was the point where for him life converged all its 
 forces; and hence, too, it is often and habitually a book 
 of apparent egotisms, of trivialities, of confidences, as of 
 a man talking with a friend and of a friend, with the 
 frankness of privacy; but this personality which is the 
 centre of Montaigne's world is also the centre of all of us, 
 it is human nature, it is ourselves. In this book life is so 
 supreme that the reader himself lives in it. 
 
 Montaigne's subject which he unfolds in the "Es- 
 says " is the scene of life, that existence of which " all the 
 world's a stage." He does not do this by the methods of 
 the imagination, as the poet and novelist do. He brings 
 to the task observation, history, biography, all that ex- 
 perience has given him from his personal career or that 
 he had drawn from recent times, and in addition the 
 great bulk of recorded life that the philosophers and es- 
 sayists and historians of antiquity had gathered, a mass 
 of detail that was as modem to him as the facts of jour- 
 nalism. This great body of real experience and moral 
 [164]
 
 MONTAIGNE 
 reflection upon it which man had accumulated at the end 
 of the classical civilization had been displaced by the 
 Christian ages, but in Montaigne's day it flowed back 
 upon men's minds through the channels of the Renais- 
 sance; and it has now again been displaced by the insur- 
 gence of the modern ages of colonization, industrialism, 
 mechanical science, and in its stead we have a different 
 history and other biographies and travels which have not 
 yet developed that finality as an accumulated result of 
 long living which belongs to antiquity. Montaigne thus 
 stands, as it were, in the Renaissance gap between the 
 Christian and modem ages, and surveys life "looking 
 before and after," by the undying lamp that he had 
 found in the Roman tomb. He has placed Christianity 
 on one side, and, having made his peace with it, it 
 troubles him no more ; he has hung up the votive images 
 in the shrine of Loretto, and will die when the time 
 comes in the proper odours and acts ; but merely as the 
 reasoning animal that is earthly man he will examine 
 human nature without regard to its spiritual part which 
 is a thing whose habitat is the church. Human nature, so 
 considered, is the same that it was in classical times and 
 is perhaps there more simply observed because of the 
 absence of any entanglement with revealed truth. Mon- 
 taigne thus, though he did not live in the past, lived, in a 
 sense, in the thoughts of the past, and hence one feels in 
 [165]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 the " Essays " a certain breath of remoteness at times, a 
 certain mustiness of thought. The idea of death, for ex- 
 ample, was a fixed idea of ancient moralists ; and Mon- 
 taigne is much concerned with it, as if it were as impor- 
 tant for him as for Cato and Seneca, as if he were under 
 the same need of Stoical rather than Christian prepara- 
 tion for it, more as a mortal end than an immortal be- 
 ginning. This idea is, no doubt, part of his literary leg- 
 acy ; he could not avoid prepossession with it, his authors 
 being what they were; but its importance in his reflec- 
 tion indicates a pre-Christian mood in his mind, marks 
 the infection of his paganism, discloses the intellectual 
 and moral atavism which was imbedded in the Renais- 
 sance. The Stoical insistence on the idea of death is the 
 trait of a dying culture; it could not fill the mind of a 
 Christian in that antique way unless he were already de- 
 tached in soul from the lessons of his own faith to some 
 degree. In Montaigne this interest, except in so far as it 
 was purely literary, marks a reversion to a past type of 
 intellect, a dislocation from his age which assimilates 
 him with the great world-minds independent of their 
 origin from any particular age; in fact, while seem- 
 ing a mere reversion mentally, it signifies really his mod- 
 em enfranchisement. Such an escape into the past was 
 the way to a cosmopolitan point of view. 
 
 This cosmopolitan habit was, in fact, Montaigne's dis- 
 [166]
 
 MONTAIGNE 
 tinction. What an excellent traveller he was is seen in his 
 account of the Italian journey ; but he was a better trav- 
 eller in his mind. An enlightened spirit, a mind hospit- 
 able to new things, a marvellous power of detaching him- 
 self from his own heredity and civilization belonged to 
 him; his mind was not repelled, but freshened by nov- 
 elty and strangeness. In the reports of travellers from 
 the Perus and the Indias he sought out manners and 
 customs, the differences from what was established in 
 European habits and ideas; he was interested in what 
 these savages and pagans had made of themselves in 
 their own worlds apart. The page of antiquity, too, in 
 which his curiosity was so much absorbed, held a broad 
 and various world, the old Mediterranean civilization of 
 many races, institutions, religions, thoughts, careers. 
 This past in all its diversity was, too, it must be remem- 
 bered, far better known to him than the middle ages or 
 even his owti times of which the human story had not yet 
 been spread in books in anything like the same degree. 
 His world of intelligence was substantially the classical 
 world ; there were the things he knew, his intellectual in- 
 terests, his dominant mental memories. When he was 
 made, during his Italian residence, a citizen of Rome, an 
 honour that gave him so much delight, no one living 
 better deserved the title ; for he was truly a citizen of that 
 eternal Rome which endures in the mind of man. Indeed* 
 [167]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 he had something of what may be called a colonial de- 
 pendence on the life of antiquity, and his outlook and 
 feeling toward Rome and Athens were not unlike the at- 
 titude of the scholars of New England toward London 
 and Paris in the last century. He was more at home there 
 than in his own age; his outward life and action were in 
 his own neighbourhood, in the religious and civil strife 
 of a province with which he made terms for the day and 
 the hour, but the life of his mind was in the company of 
 the antique world and its affairs. He naturally fell into 
 the pliilosophic attitude which prevailed in that ex- 
 hausted paganism; and from the sur\'ey of the scene of 
 life familiar to him out of that Greco-Roman past and 
 under the guidance of Roman thought that gave his 
 mind direction, he gathered that general impression of 
 the feebleness of man's nature which kept on deepening 
 with years until it became the master theme of his mat- 
 ter, and made the famous " What do I know " the legend 
 of his shield in literature. 
 
 This impeachment of man's faculty for knowledge 
 was nothing new. It was made up of a resume of the rags 
 and scraps of those old sceptics in whom the intellect, 
 which had awakened in Greece and had a long career, 
 found its first disillusionment in the pursuit of truth. It 
 had a curious place in Montaigne's day as being the 
 complement of the idea of the necessity of revealed 
 [168]
 
 MONTAIGNE 
 truth miraculously made known to the race; but it was 
 not in that aspect that Montaigne cared for it. The fee- 
 bleness of man's natural faculty for truth fell in with 
 Montaigne's general convictions with regard to human 
 nature; it harmonized with the Epicurean ease of his 
 temperament. The idea of sex, to approach his philoso- 
 phy in another way, was a cardinal interest in his mind. 
 He makes his confessions with equal frankness and 
 discretion, but with unconcealed thought. He brings 
 no imagination, no romance to bear upon the matter; 
 he is scientific, naturalistic, and unashamed. As the 
 higher spirituality, which he leaves to the church, is 
 absent from his philosophy, the higher ethics is absent 
 from his morality. To live with ease in this world involves 
 concessions to established conditions ; and as Montaigne 
 conceded to the church and the state, he conceded also 
 to nature, and was seemingly as unaware of any conflict 
 in one case more than in another; this, it seemed to 
 him, was good sense, the quality in which, in the judg- 
 ment of his readers, Montaigne is more eminent than 
 any other writer. And, in truth, viewing the scene of hu- 
 man hfe in its action and its thinking, apart from any 
 divine element, as the stage of the world where man is 
 only man, and seeking its examples in the confusions of 
 his own age and in the retrospect of decadent and ex- 
 piring Rome, Montaigne has within these limits a sing- 
 [169]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 ular gift for reasonableness, for setting forth the Hfe 
 that the world wills, for good sense. The weakness of 
 human nature, whether knowing or acting, being ac- 
 cepted as primary there remains for Montaigne only 
 the question of an easy adjustment thereto, of a search 
 for " repose and liberty; " and such good sense is the key. 
 In the discursive setting forth of human life and na- 
 ture under these lights Montaigne developed one great 
 virtue, toleration. It isolates him in that age, and does 
 him honour forever. A conviction of the futility of human 
 faculties in the pursuit of truth carries with it the sense 
 of uncertainty in doctrines and induces a mood of indif- 
 ferency toward all tenets, whereby the habit of tolera- 
 tion becomes natural; and, in addition, familiarity with 
 the diversity of human opinion and of moral practice, 
 that has filled the world both in antiquity and among the 
 newly-found regions of the earth gave him the poise and 
 freedom of the travelled mind, of the man acquainted 
 with men and cities, of the man detached from the slav- 
 ery of one environment. A classical education had exer- 
 cised on Montaigne one of its great freeing powers; it 
 had made him familiar with a civilization, not specifi- 
 cally and theologically Christian, but of an overawing 
 type; it had redressed the balance of ecclesiastical 
 prejudice, and restored the secular life to its due pro- 
 portions as a thing of this world, of reason and of nature, 
 [170]
 
 MONTAIGNE 
 apart from revelation. In Montaigne's ease, indeed, life 
 had become essentially a purely secular affair, and he 
 considered it as a moralist quite as if he had been bom 
 in the fourth century and remained unconverted. 
 Toleration was the natural habit of a mind so bred, 
 and so capable of entering into another age. It may 
 have been grounded, if one examines the matter curi- 
 ously, rather on a kindly philosophical contempt of 
 human nature than on the doctrine that the way to 
 truth lies through the conflicts of an untrammelled 
 liberty of thought and speech ; it may not have been 
 the toleration of a free government, such as is now 
 conceived; but in the days of the religious wars and 
 at the end of the sixteenth century in France, it was the 
 mark of a singularly enlightened spirit. The spectacle of 
 France at that time, and the personal experience of Mon- 
 taigne who had friends on both sides of the struggling 
 factions, no doubt aided him, by virtue of his repug- 
 nance to the folly and turmoil of the scene, to establish 
 the principle in himself ; but it also belonged to his con- 
 ciliating and compromising temperament, to his power 
 of facilitating life, to his classically bred intelligence, and 
 to his native kindliness. Toleration was in him a human 
 instinct, strongly supported by his knowledge and expe- 
 rience and approved by his judgment, and not merely a 
 conclusion of philosophy or principle of government. He 
 [171]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 was as singular, too, for his hatred of cruelty. What he 
 has to say of torture in legal processes, of the imposi- 
 tion of cruel punishments, of public executions and the 
 like matters, also marks him out in the age. He was one 
 of those who had become humane as well as reasonable 
 in his converse with that antiquity which was then infus- 
 ing secular vigour into the blood of the world as an anti- 
 dote to the ecclesiastical poisons that had long corrupted 
 free human nature. Yet in his "Essays" there is one 
 singular silence. He does not mention nor even allude to 
 the massacre of St. Bartholomew, which was one of the 
 great events of his lifetime, and by which he must have 
 been deeply moved. It is an indication of his good sense. 
 His retirement, after all, was indeed profound intellectu- 
 ally, in the great round Tour de Montaigne, by the 
 Perigord hills; there he freely speculated and gossiped 
 in his learned way in the still air of delightful studies; 
 but practically when in the midst of state-affairs, and 
 there was question of publishing his friend La Boetie's 
 attack on " Monarchy " or of a St. Bartholomew's Day, 
 he kept close mouth. This sense of contradiction between 
 the intellectual and the practical life is necessarily felt in 
 Montaigne; it affects the sincerity of the man, for many 
 readers ; but it belongs to the psychology of the conform- 
 ist in every age. Montaigne has lived by his thought 
 rather than by his life, and by his privacy rather than by 
 [172]
 
 MONTAIGNE 
 his publicity; yet thought and hfe with him moved with 
 singular intimacy and equality; and as his career, de- 
 spite its prudencies, will be held manly, energetic, hon- 
 ourable and above all wise, so his thought, despite its 
 reticencies — and they are many and serious — will be 
 held bold, free, advancing and again above all wise. 
 Repose and liberty, could he compass and reconcile 
 them, were a possession worth many practical com- 
 promises. 
 
 Montaigne's name, for mankind, is that of the great 
 doubter. The modern spirit, in this one great phase of 
 its manifestation, may be said to begin with him, in lit- 
 erature. He was not aware of the career that this scep- 
 ticism was to run, of the deep reach and radiations of its 
 undermining power in later days, agnostic and pessimis- 
 tic, as far as to the base of life itself. He did not question 
 the worth of life; he had found life a pleasant thing; but 
 he certainly doubted the worth of the higher life. He re- 
 peatedly expresses the doubt that the exercise of the 
 higher faculties interferes with the pleasurable good of 
 life and introduces a disturbing element injurious to 
 human happiness. He makes that interrogation of civili- 
 zation, in developing which Rousseau found him so 
 fruitful a master. Montaigne, merely as a conformist, 
 had eliminated much from life; and his temperament 
 led him along that path to a general ehmination of the 
 [173]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 nobler faculties, the superior aims, the dangerous toils 
 of the ideal, which he knew rather by observation, seeing 
 what trouble these things brought upon the private life 
 and pubhc tranquilHty ; and in his view of the worid, the 
 life of nature, whether individually seen in the poor and 
 humble or collectively in the newly-found savages, 
 seemed possibly preferable to the types of ci\'ilization. 
 Perfectibility was an idea that he did not know. Repose 
 and liberty were the ends of life for him, and weakness 
 its condition; not to impose too great a burden, not to 
 accept too heavy a yoke, not to open too distant a scope, 
 not to propose too far a goal, rather to avoid the heights, 
 this was wisdom. It is the philosophy of one who places 
 happiness in recognition of the limitations rather than in 
 cultivation of the energies of life ; to enjoy life it is most 
 needful not to overestimate its worth. Such a scheme, so 
 little exacting of force, is naturally crowned by the vir- 
 tues of ease, by moderation, reasonableness, good-sense, 
 the virtues of Montaigne. 
 
 He was at one with his theory; he is its illustration, 
 and after all it is himself and not his theory that is inter- 
 esting. The page grows antiquated and dull with out- 
 worn knowledge in proportion as the theor}' occupies it, 
 tatters of the past in science, thought and scandal ; but it 
 grows vivid and contemporary as soon as he puts him- 
 self into the sentences. For him he is himself the model 
 [174]
 
 MONTAIGNE 
 of life; the human nature that he exhibits with such vi- 
 vacity is that with which he has grown acquainted in his 
 own bosom. He tells piecemeal in the rambling method 
 of the " Essays " all the story of himself, his birth, educa- 
 tion and career, what has happened to him, what he has 
 done, his tastes and habits, the secrets of his meals and 
 his toilet, the course of his disease, the most trivial, the 
 most dubious, the most private matters; he makes the 
 world the familiar of his person, of his mortal being, of 
 his quality of man. This intimacy which he ingenuously 
 allows, as a thing the most natural to him in the world, 
 wins credence for his sincerity in his intellectual confes- 
 sions, in his examination of his thoughts and impres- 
 sions, in his remarks on the ways of the world that he 
 lived in ; and this sincerity has the appearance of being 
 absolute. It gives to his thought that quality of echo, 
 which makes it seem the whisper of one's own experi- 
 ence, the utterance of one's own unframed words. Mon- 
 taigne ingratiates himself in the bosom of the reader by a 
 thousand ways, but by none more than by this of being 
 his spokesman; it is pleasant to confess by proxy, to 
 let another tell those truths of which human nature, 
 in its tacitness, is half -ashamed, expose those half -lies 
 which it is reluctant to acknowledge but of which it is 
 aware; and it is pleasant to find the philosophy of the 
 pleasurable, the unexigent, the not too serious, stated 
 [175]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 with so much unconcern, and to feel the compromises of 
 life take on an aspect of such reasonableness. It is in 
 these things that the personality of Montaigne is so at- 
 tractive; in the Epicurean, the Sadducean moments of 
 life, in its average actuality of living among people of the 
 world, he is good company; the doubt in his mind has 
 great pardoning power, and may contain indeed a gen- 
 eral amnesty for Hfe. 
 
 In a temperament such as Montaigne shows in his ca- 
 reer, his thought and his personality there is defined a 
 universal type of man, a constant mood of the human 
 mind, a spirit of life speaking intelligible words to men 
 in every reflective age. It is of the fourth century or the 
 sixteenth or the twentieth indifferently. Its reality was 
 never more vital than in Montaigne, its words never 
 more vivid than here; he is by far its best incarnation. 
 The time was ripe for a lukewarm gospel ; the long tri- 
 umph of fanaticism was waning in its last fierce excesses ; 
 the hour of the moderates had come. After ages of dog- 
 matism, his unconcerned "What do I know," is the 
 voice of a new world; after centuries of spiritual strain, 
 in every form of fervour and travesty, his radical accept- 
 ance of this world as man's proper sphere to which he 
 should adapt himself is a welcome relaxation ; after the 
 torture, assassination and massacre, the turmoil of sect 
 and feud, the misery of warring faiths, his sceptical tol- 
 [176]
 
 MONTAIGNE 
 eration is a truce of reason that men might be glad to 
 have on any terms. In his works it may seem hard to dis- 
 cern the morning Ughts; but, as happens in great books, 
 the past and future blend there with long rays. The con- 
 junction of his acutely alive mind with the matter of an- 
 tiquity often strikes the reader as a union of the quick 
 with the dead ; but that is an illusion due to our own re- 
 laxed hold on the classical authors. He found the lettered 
 ages of Rome and Athens more modem than any inter- 
 vening century, nearer to him than his own times, supe- 
 rior to them; and so it came about that his book involves 
 a great span of time, and remembers Socrates as it fore- 
 shadows Rousseau. In the midst of all this precept out 
 of Seneca and anecdotes of the philosophers' lives, there 
 is a constant cropping out of the great modem traits — 
 the free exercise of reason, the appeal to nature, the rest- 
 less curiosity, the plea for toleration and humaneness, the 
 interest in education, the disposition to examine all things 
 anew and bring them to the test of practical reality, to 
 think out the world afresh. Montaigne's modernity is 
 clouded, too, no doubt, not only by his antiquarianism, 
 but by his attitude of ease toward life. It seems incon- 
 gruous that one who was so little a reformer as he should 
 be counted among the leaders of a new age ; but if he did 
 not proselytize for a cause, he exemplified what is the 
 best and profoundest of all reforms, a reform in the 
 [177]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 habit of thinking ; he thought for himself. He was great 
 in independence of mind; whatever he thought, it was 
 his own. He was great, too, in force of character; what- 
 ever he did was his own. He was, as has been said, the 
 man of his own choice. Individuality such as this is an 
 undying ideal; it is superlatively modern; and Mon- 
 taigne is thus a great type of the modem man, primarily 
 in the conduct of his mind, and perhaps also more truly 
 than would readily be confessed, in the conduct of his 
 life. He was not a weakling, though his philosophy may 
 easily be mistaken for that of a weakling. Justly inter- 
 preted, do not his concessions, compromises, reticences 
 show strength of judgment, strength of good sense, pru- 
 dence, which in practical life often avail quite as much 
 as strength of mere opinion ? Nor was truth, of itself, a 
 large part of life for Montaigne; it was at best an uncer- 
 tainty. He was not a martyr of ideas, but he was a man 
 of ideas. He spent several years in collecting, digesting, 
 and illustrating these ideas in the book, continually add- 
 ing something to the earlier forms, and left there this 
 portrait of himself, body and spirit. The terms on which 
 he stands \\'ith his reader are those of friendship, and for 
 friendship a man must be born ; and it must be acknowl- 
 edged that not all men are bom for friendship with such 
 a one as he describes himself. There are many who echo 
 Clough's words — " I do not greatly think about Men- 
 [178]
 
 MONTAIGNE 
 taigne;" and Clough was classical, sceptical, modern, 
 but he was serious-minded. Montaigne is not an author 
 for serious-minded people, in that sense. He has too 
 great detachment of mind, too great insouciance of con- 
 duct; he is in all senses too free a man. 
 
 It might seem that a book which is described as a con- 
 fession of hfe, and one in which human nature finds it- 
 self absolved in the very bosom of the reader, is just such 
 a one as should appeal to grave persons. But Montaigne 
 has not the proper manner of the confessional; he is gar- 
 rulous, not truly penitent, but rather scandalously inter- 
 ested in his own story; the confession of man's nature 
 has quite as much the character of an exposure of life. 
 Certainly it is a book of the disillusionment. It implies 
 immense experience of Uving, of life long hved by many 
 generations in many conditions and long meditated upon 
 by many diverse minds. It is a book of the mature hfe, 
 and century-ripened. The subUmities, the enthusiasms, 
 the heroics of hfe are not here; the fiery hopes, the stim- 
 ulations, the divine despairs — there is nothing of that, 
 neither gospel, nor rallying-cry nor death -challenge. 
 These things have long been. But the man who is ac- 
 quainted with human nature in his own breast and in 
 Uving men, who commands the vistas of history, of hter- 
 ature, of various philosophies, who knows the past issues 
 of human hopes and toils, the man of experience, finds a 
 [179]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 certain justness in the thought of Montaigne that har- 
 monizes with the latter-day moods of Hfe and is the more 
 acceptable because it is graced with that lightness of 
 spirit, that not too serious view, that tone which might 
 so easily become mocking and yet never mocks. Though 
 the herald of the modern age, Montaigne was deeply im- 
 pUcated in the past, in what man has been. In the " Es- 
 says " one finds the lees of antiquity, and somewhat the 
 lees of life ; it is the book of an old mind, of an old man, 
 of a retirement from the world; to read it justly, the 
 reader must have lived. Montaigne requires an after- 
 noon light, and a mind content with the private life, 
 with reason and nature and good sense. 
 
 [180]
 
 Great Writers 
 
 VI
 
 SHAKSPERE 
 
 The primary thing in Shakspere was his sense of action. 
 He seized all life as action in his thoughts ; he led his own 
 life as action in himself, as a career. That is his Eng- 
 lishry. He was a practical man; as a boy he was enter- 
 prising, in his maturity he was discreet. The traditions 
 of his eariy days at Stratford show a lively, capable, 
 eager youth, active, adventurous, expedient, quick to get 
 into trouble, quick in marriage; and the flight from 
 Stratford was a departure into the large scene of life, a 
 going to London, to the field of ambition. The family 
 had seen better days, and was in difficulties ; he meant to 
 bear up the name; he succeeded, in the end, in re-estab- 
 lishing the family estate in his native place. The tradi- 
 tions of his early days in London show the same funda- 
 mental temperament; he had no scorn of beginnings, 
 whether he held horses at the theatre, or by whatever 
 door of trifling service he entered on the great scene that 
 [183]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 was to be his kingdom, he would get in where he could ; 
 he accepted the terms on which Ufe was to be led in his 
 time and place. He learned easily because he was facile 
 to receive; he learned much because he put what he 
 knew to use as soon as he knew it ; he was quick to ex- 
 periment with his faculties and what they found to work 
 with. The stage was developing comedy and tragedy and 
 a verbal style proper to display them ; there was a stock 
 of plays rapidly outgrown, a pubUc demand to be met, 
 money to be made. He made himself apprentice to the 
 best masters of comedy and tragedy, he tried his hand at 
 re-making the old plays, he used what he found on the 
 stage, adding what he could of prettiness and quibble, of 
 grace and softness in the phrase, of heat and vivacity in 
 the dialogue, of golden cadence, comic play, tragic 
 thrust; and gradually he moved forward, emerged, be- 
 came playwright and poet, the mark of passing and im- 
 potent mahce, popular with the many, well-beloved by 
 his comrades, successful. If the history of these days 
 were known in detail, it would not differ from the great 
 type shown in Scott, Cervantes ; infinite interest in life, 
 unceasing industry in work, the power to live which 
 makes men great, and wdth it the apparent unconscious- 
 ness of genius, the reahty of the individual hfe, the near 
 regard to the private good. Whatever else there may 
 have been, the theatre was to Shakspere a profession, a 
 [184]
 
 SHAKSPERE 
 career; he made himself master and head of it by the 
 toilsome process of daily hfe; and he measured his 
 success in it, in one way at least, by the substance of what 
 it brought him, wealth, position, a county name. 
 
 At London, where he led this career for twenty-five 
 years, he had complete worldly success. His life there 
 leaves two impressions on the mind. The first is that 
 of immense labour, not only in the composition of the 
 plays, but in the other necessary business of the stage 
 and management, the acting, the preparation, the pro- 
 vincial tours, the court performances, the hfe of the 
 theatre and its finances, the practical realities; it must 
 have been a very busy hfe, and its wearing effects are 
 plain in the rapid and deep maturing of his manhood, 
 and in his comparatively early death. The second impres- 
 sion is of the ease, quiet and friendliness of his temper- 
 ament, his companionableness and his reserve, a human 
 and noble nature; the characteristic epithets given him 
 that have survived from his friends' hps are the two 
 words " gentle " and " sweet " ; though a few ill-natured 
 phrases were flung at him, he escaped with the highest 
 good-fortune the venom that the hterary hfe vents even 
 on its favourites. He was helpful; in his youth he be- 
 friended Jonson, and in later years he collaborated with 
 younger men. His comrades of the theatre show him that 
 wholesome loyalty which mixes respect and affection so 
 [185]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 that they are indistinguishable. He seems to have had by 
 nature those unconscious, intimate, incommunicable 
 traits that oftenest come only from breeding and make 
 men free of the society where they are. Young South- 
 ampton was not only his patron, but his friend; and in 
 that difficult role of poet and patron Shakspere was 
 proud and happy in his noble friend, and gave the trib- 
 ute of affectionate compliment in verse and that glory 
 of style that lies in courtly hyberbole, and all that was 
 due from the greatest of poets, but he gave his heart also. 
 Shakspere accepted the conditions of the Uterary Ufe 
 with respect to rank and fortune in his day as simply as 
 he met the state of the theatre. It is Ukely there was no 
 better courtier when he went to court, as it is Ukely that 
 there was no better buyer when he went to view lands 
 and houses, no better judge of the pubUc taste in plays. 
 He was equal to the business of hfe on all sides that re- 
 quired worldly ability, and temperamentally as equal to 
 it in the things of affection and comradery, of the 
 heart, of humanity in social intercourse. The patron, the 
 mortgage belong in his life, together with the scores of 
 friends and the innumerable affairs to do; they are 
 naturally there, for he was a man hke others who Uved 
 the common hfe of man, earned and ate his bread in it, 
 and to whom this action of life in and about and for him- 
 self was a very palpable thing. It is not a life that has 
 [186]
 
 SHAKSPERE 
 left much record of itself, not diversified by adventure, 
 not the scene of known passions ; but the golden silences 
 that Ue hke autumn mould upon his memory are in har- 
 mony with that thought which discovers there a hfe, 
 dedicated indeed to the creative dream, but yet within the 
 hmitations of its own world distinguished by daily labour 
 and daily kindliness, not too self-conscious, storing up 
 provision for the future, respect from the world, the 
 affection of friends, the things that should accompany 
 old age — a life well-lived, well-acted, in its earthly 
 lines. Such a hfe is consistent with the highest genius 
 even in men in whom the sense of hfe as action is not so 
 supreme as it was in Shakspere ; in him it was born of 
 that genius where everything set with a great tide toward 
 reality. 
 
 Action is the core of the drama; it is what gives at- 
 tractive and arresting power to the word " dramatic, " 
 focuses the attention, makes the eye look and the spirit 
 expect at the fall of those syllables. To Shakspere, in his 
 youth, immersed and absorbed in the dramatic move- 
 ment that made a captive servant of him, mind, moods, 
 energy, ambition, hope — that overmastered him with 
 what was to be his fate therein, life was the object of his 
 thoughts, but hfe primarily as a story. The story of hfe 
 was there before him in the old plays on the stage, in the 
 books he read, in the tales he thumbed over; at first a 
 [187]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 story of English Kings and Italian lovers, of the convul- 
 sions of state, heart-break and the words of clowns, 
 comic confusions, tragic discords, enchanted woodlands. 
 He found the chronicle plays in vogue, fragments of 
 history; and here and there, beginning his art, he re- 
 estabUshed a scene, heightened a dialogue, concentrated 
 a passion of anger or pity ; it was piecemeal work by 
 which he came to the power at last of defining a plot, a 
 play of his own, an interpretation and representation of 
 the story in a way of his own. The material he used was 
 external, given to him, persons and incidents ; he did not 
 invent them, he found them; and his manipulation of 
 them at first was, naturally, mainly in the language, the 
 verbal investiture of person, act, scene, that part of the 
 work which was most flexible, most plastic, readiest for 
 a youthful hand and most tempting for hps that had 
 suddenly unlocked a flood of such poesy, eloquence and 
 passion in speech, colours of nature and the heart, as 
 had never before poured from an English fount. It is this 
 flow of language, vehement or smooth or impassioned, 
 reflecting natural beauty o. personal graces, prone to 
 pathos and sentiment, rhetorical, dragging along with it 
 all the affectations of the hour, experimenting with its 
 own powers, intoxicated \\4th its own poetry, exuberant 
 with its own life — it is this marvellously musical, facile, 
 intellectual power of language, this mastery that is not 
 [188]
 
 SHAKSPERE 
 merely verbal, but is of the essence of expression, poetic 
 not purely dramatic — it is this that in the earlier works 
 plays over the story, atmospheres it, inhabits it, and in 
 its surplus of light, feehng and imagery, in its IjTical 
 effusion, overflows without submerging the dramatic in- 
 terest, threatens the eminence of the action. From 
 "Love's Labour's Lost" to "A Midsummer Night's 
 Dream," this lyrical obsession mounts prevailing; 
 thereafter it recedes — the tints of the morning, the 
 bloom of spring, the hour of the bloom of hfe had passed. 
 Shakspere, loosing the passion of language to the full as 
 never EngUsh poet did, had not lost his foothold on the 
 reality of hfe, on the story, the drama, the action; and, 
 deepening in his dramatic faculty he came, in the end, to 
 that subtile mastery of language which belongs only to 
 the greatest genius, lords of the brief and broken phrase. 
 Four words created light; and something of that same 
 miracle lingers in the power of the poet who is truly di- 
 ^^ne. The gradual victory of dramatic over purely poetic 
 diction in Shakspere reflects the victory of hfe itself, of 
 the action over the illusion of hfe, in him. 
 
 There was a second rivalry with the dramatic instinct 
 in Shakspere besides this of the lyrical impulse. It lay in 
 the intellectual temptation, the power of the naked 
 thought. What is technically called the sentiment, that is, 
 the wise saying, the axiomatic verse in which the re- 
 [189]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 fleeting mind is condensed wdth a purely intellectual 
 value, was an inheritance of the drama from old time; 
 and Shakspere, particularly in his middle Ufe, was apt at 
 linking such counsels together or in developing them 
 from the dialogue. It is an analogous faculty that he em- 
 ploys in those wit-combats of the characters that are pre- 
 eminently intellectual in tone. The wit of Rosalind and 
 Beatrice is more closely united to the dialogue ; but in the 
 passages of advice, from Biron's gentle sermon on love 
 to the sage wisdom of Polonius and Ulysses, and even 
 on to Prospero's great farewell there is a recurring in- 
 terruption of the action in play after play, due to the 
 emergence of thought in control of the scene; and as 
 Shakspere's lyricism gives to the plays that atmosphere 
 which isolates them among the works of dramatic 
 genius and sets them apart in an unapproached realm of 
 creative art, so his wisdom gives to them that intellec- 
 tual dilatation by which they excel all others in majesty 
 of mind. Other dramatists have represented life with 
 equal impressiveness in its being, but none have repre- 
 sented hfe so conscious of its own significance. Here 
 again, as in his lyrical moment, Shakspere in his intel- 
 lectual moment seems to depart from the story, the 
 drama, the action, but he does not really depart, or if he 
 does so it is only to bring back to the drama the offerings 
 of all the Muses. And in a third tributary element of 
 [190]
 
 SHAKSPERE 
 the drama, in the spectacle, while he uses the embellish- 
 ment of the scene to the full measure of what his times 
 allowed, he introduces the masque as an adjunct, Uke a 
 song or a dance, harmonious with the scene but not an 
 essential of the action. These three things, then, diction, 
 sentiment and spectacle, which were the open tempta- 
 tion to woo him from the essential dramatic point of 
 view, the action, he either overcame or successfully sub- 
 dued them to the enrichment and enlargement of the 
 action ; the main drift of his art, the main purpose of his 
 mind were the same, with whatever slackening or bend- 
 ing of the current, toward the story of life pre-eminently, 
 toward character and event, toward reality in its most 
 human form. Beginning with the more intractable ma- 
 terial of history, he came to use preferably romantic 
 story in which his imagination was more free in creative 
 power; and in the end, to such a height did this power 
 reach that he seemed to create not only character and 
 event, but also the world in which they had their being; 
 to such a complete victory did his dramatic instinct, pre- 
 vaiHng over all other impulses, carry liim who always re- 
 mained at heart a dramatist. 
 
 Shakspere was so completely a dramatist, interested 
 in the action of life, that when he took the autobio- 
 graphical mask in the " Sonnets " he seems transformed 
 into his opposite, into the lyrical poet unlocking his own 
 [191]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 heart; here, it has been believed, he told his dearest se- 
 crets, his intimacies, the most sweet and bitter disgraces 
 of his days and nights, his springs and autumns ; and so 
 inspired is the dramatic action of his mind in this play in 
 the forms of the sonnet, if it be such, that it is only by an 
 effort of detachment, by reflection and judgment, that 
 one sees there only the working of that supreme faculty 
 under the appearances of personality. The secret of the 
 " Sonnets " has been so many times discovered, and es- 
 caped in the discovery, that this view, now best sup- 
 ported, may justly have its lease of Ufe in turn, and 
 the physical basis of fact on which the poet's imag- 
 ination worked — such strands and suggestions of ac- 
 tuality as he used in the romances — may be found in 
 Southampton's personality ; but the black lady, the dear, 
 disloyal friend, the rival poet wU still wear in their faces, 
 have in their form and moving, an insoluble mystery, 
 because, whatever the drama, they move in a cloud of 
 lyricism, intense with tenderness, sorrow, unavailing 
 cries, that here all seems the form and substance of the 
 soul itself. A dramatist who makes his own soul the 
 scene of the drama, using the forms of personality, must 
 necessarily leave a mysterious work ; but in the " Son- 
 nets " what is plain is the drama, what is obscure is only 
 the basis of the drama, whether it be fact or convention, 
 or mingled of both ; whatever be the personal element, it 
 [192]
 
 SHAKSPERE 
 is conceived, handled, developed dramatically, its truth 
 is at bottom dramatic truth. 
 
 And if it be difficult to trace Shakspere's personality 
 with any assured steps in the " Sonnets, " how much less 
 is it to be probed in the plays proper! Those attempts 
 that have been made to correlate the bare facts of his 
 history with the sequence of his works, to synchronize his 
 Ufe-moods with the comedies and the tragedies, to make 
 the plays render up the spiritual states of the man in his 
 personal being, are ingenious ; but the conditions of pro- 
 duction, when Elizabeth might ask any day for a " Mer- 
 ry Wives of Windsor, " or some noble family desire a hy- 
 meneal spectacle Uke " A Midsummer Night's Dream, " 
 or James be pleased with a Scotch theme, or the pubhc 
 itself, Uttle indulgent to the moods of those who pro- 
 vide entertainment, might have to be recaptured to the 
 play — such conditions are Uttle favourable to " pe- 
 riods " of the private soul. The chronology of the works, 
 too, is not convincing. Did Shakspere, in whose mind the 
 perspective of life varied no more than the perspective of 
 the heavens in the celestial telescope, think to have all 
 that world of his courtesy to his private fortunes in a 
 son's death, a friend's fall, a mistress's fickle change ? 
 Shakspere was of the objective type of genius, a trite but 
 useful phrase for a very palpable fact. He never mistook 
 his soul for the soul of the universe. He passed, as other 
 [193]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 
 men, from youth to manhood, and the deepening of his 
 nature in the process, as it was worked out under the 
 control of absorption in creative dramatic art is plainly 
 discerned; he seized hfe in its action more logically, 
 more ideally, more profoundly; he compassed and pen- 
 etrated and filled it with omnipresent thought; height 
 and depth, passion and fate and gloom, he laid it bare- 
 he saw it. He passed through the disillusionment; but it 
 was a disillusionment not of the suffering heart, but of 
 the seeing eye; and after the disillusionment came, 
 what comes to all, the lassitude, the indifference, the re- 
 pose, the relaxed sense of fate, the concession to opti- 
 mism, the fantastic world ; the calm of Shakspere was the 
 subsidence of life in him, the smoothing of the great 
 wave of passion, the stilling of the tumultuous voices of 
 thought. 
 
 Such a history he had, in whatever special forms of 
 personal feeling; it is the normal hfe of great genius, ab- 
 sorbing imaginatively the passion and thought of hfe in 
 the world; and from time to time, out of this continuing 
 personal reaction on life in normal growth there would 
 proceed modifying influences, hnes of choice in subject, 
 of intellectual direction, of creative mood, passional har- 
 monies blending with the given theme — to such a point 
 temperament would have its will, more or less, with the 
 work according to time and circumstances; but such a 
 
 [194]
 
 SHAKSPERE 
 continuing and aging mood attendant on the plays is a 
 far different thing from " periods " determinative of the 
 type of the plays in a sequence which makes them pro- 
 ceed from Shakspere's personal fortunes as a mortal 
 spirit with changes from cheerfulness to gloom and again 
 to equanimity. Shakspere was a dramatist by nature as 
 well as by profession, or he became subdued to what he 
 worked in; he was the servant of the public; and, much 
 more, he was fascinated by Ufe in its extemaUty, hfe as 
 it was in other men, other times, other places ; he was in- 
 satiate in informing himself of its story in history, in 
 novels and romances, in ancient and modern authors, 
 wherever it was to be found. He was not that egotist who 
 writes himself large and calls that the world ; art in him 
 was not self-revealing, it was the revelation of a world 
 that had been from the foundation of being and would 
 continue when his works were buried deeper than any 
 plummet could sound. This objectivity, this self-efface- 
 ment in art, this interest in the story of life, this absorp- 
 tion in life's movement, in action, is Shakspere's gift of 
 greatness. It explains his Hmitations, Spirituality, 
 properly speaking, the celestial immortaUty of man's 
 nature, is not found in Shakspere either in character, 
 thought or aspiration. The reUgious Ufe sleeps in his 
 works ; and many a generation will marvel at it. He was 
 interested in life, the action of hfe; and that is a thing 
 [195]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 confined to this world. He is mundane, secular, in a way 
 scientific ; he saw the spectacle as it is in time. 
 
 The second main consideration bearing on Shaks- 
 pere's genius is the fact that the world he saw, dealt with 
 and knew was an aristocratic worid. It was given to him 
 first historically, in those chronicles in which his hand 
 learned to mould the human stuff, a kingly worid of the 
 Henrys, the Richards and John, with feudal challenge, 
 battle incidents, the life of the council, murders in pris- 
 ons or on the block, treasons, dethronements, the sor- 
 rows of queens, Norfolk, Hotspur and Falconbridge; a 
 life focussed on aristocratic fortunes and pivoted on aris- 
 tocratic power. To Shakspere the people was always the 
 mob, and negligible. The sphere of humour, too, in which 
 the vulgar enters, is dependent on the aristocratic sphere 
 from the comedy of the camp-fire and the tavern to Bot- 
 tom's craftsmen and the court clowns, up to Lear's Fool. 
 Later, the Roman plays gave him the same aristocratic 
 state in an antique form, dictatorial, imperial, with the 
 mob of citizens though more in evidence, more con- 
 temptible. The ordered world for him was the world of 
 courtly life; all else, though contiguous or entering in for 
 entertainment or ser\dce or in the mass of battle, was es- 
 sentially subordinated, exteriorized, as environment. 
 The romances, which, after the chronicles, had given 
 him the raw material, reinforced his conception of Ufe 
 [196]
 
 SHAKSPERE 
 as an aristocratic structure by expanding it socially into a 
 community of gentle-folk, Venetian, Veronan, Paduan, 
 in Arden, Attica, Illyria, or on French or English mead- 
 ows ; a Ufe where everything breathed civility, the senti- 
 ment of high breeding in chivalry and courtesy, the cult 
 of phrase, the dress and behaviour, the interests, ambi- 
 tions, intrigues, recreations, language, manners and cus- 
 toms of an aristocratic ideal. Even in those regions of the 
 imagination, where he reared his own state in its lordliest 
 form, with the effect of an incantation of genius, in the 
 English realm of Lear, the Scotch court of Macbeth, the 
 throne of Denmark, the Venetian principality of Cyprus, 
 the Egypt of Antony, or in the woods of CymbeUne, the 
 country-side of Perdita, the island-kingdom of Prosper©, 
 he impressed upon it aristocracy in its most majestic, 
 noble and gentle forms as the seal of its being. Shaks- 
 pere's genius is, in fact, the finest flower of the aristo- 
 cratic ideal of life. 
 
 Aristocracy is, in a sense, the state of nature histori- 
 cally developed in society as the survival of the fittest in 
 the selfish struggle for existence. Shakspere received it as 
 the past of the world, contained in the forms of history 
 and romance, the life that had always been, in which the 
 masses, held in economic slavery under whatever name, 
 furnished that wealth monopolized by the nobles which 
 gave these latter hberty of the higher sphere of Hfe, the 
 [197]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 sphere of intelligence, ambition, art, where they were 
 enfranchised and armed for the possession of the chief 
 goods of life. Aristocracy, so based on the enforced 
 tribute of mankind, naturally develops individuaUty, 
 the open career for those who are in command of wealth, 
 opportunity, leisure; it spreads the scene for strong na- 
 tures, highly endowed, superfluous in vital force and sel- 
 fish desire ; it is the breeding place of human greatness of 
 the positive, self-assertive, world-conquering kind. 
 Shakspere received this aristocratic ideal from the times 
 in which hfe had been great, from the Greek, Roman, 
 English periods; but he received it also at a pecuHarly 
 fortunate moment in the special movement of its histori- 
 cal development ; he received it when the coarser, denser 
 forms of mihtary and tyrannic power, of feudaUsm, 
 monarchy and dogma, were dissolving in the finer, 
 milder, freer modes of rationahsm, individuahty, cul- 
 ture; he received it at a culminating moment of its excel- 
 lence — from the Italian Renaissance. 
 
 PersonaUty, the essential fruit of aristocracy, the 
 crowning victory of nature in working out her will, came 
 forth from the ItaUan Renaissance in one of its highest 
 forms, the form of superb personal power. The idea is so 
 native to Italy and has played so great a part in her his- 
 tory that it seems racial — a race-element in her great- 
 ness. It was then concentrated in the ideal of the 
 [198]
 
 SHAKSPERE 
 Renaissance prince, whether as a pattern in Machiavelli, 
 or as an illustration from history in the nobles and 
 leaders of the Italian cities; but stripped to its essentials 
 it is no more than the individual will to live, the domi- 
 nance of that will, the ideal of conquering the world to 
 oneself, of subduing life, of having one 's way, one's will, 
 one's desire, of the assertion of the power to live that is 
 the thirst of great souls. The aristocratic ideal of life in 
 the Italian Renaissance developed in the central line of 
 its advance in history this idea of the dominance of the 
 personal will in hfe, the prepotency of individuality ; and 
 in so doing it freed human faculty, energy and desire in a 
 way and to a degree which gave to Italy its brilliant period 
 of many-sided genius and impelled the human spirit in 
 every civiUzed country and recaptured the lost provinces 
 of Rome to the dominion of a spiritual civilization the seat 
 of whose power is in the ideals of men. The Renaissance 
 was so great a movement. Though not a material con- 
 quest, it was vaster in control than that of Alexander or 
 of the elder antique Rome. Shakspere took its full im- 
 pact, Uved in it, fed on it, absorbed its passions, its prin- 
 ciples, its being, became its spirit in the North, was its 
 transcendent and overwhelming genius in literature, its 
 greatest monument in time. This is Shakspere's position ; 
 he was the flower of the aristocratic ideal of life; he was 
 the crest of the Renaissance ; he was the incarnate spirit 
 [189]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 of that mighty power of life to Hve mightily which belongs 
 to the aristocratic ideal as a right of nature and was the 
 passion of the Renaissance in history. 
 
 The drama, it must be borne in mind, was always a 
 European art. Shakspere's universality, which is often 
 made the occasion of so much marvel, is in its origins 
 closely connected with this fact. The early English 
 drama, with its miracle-plays, moralities, school-come- 
 dies, Senecan imitations, displayed cosmopolitan traits 
 and originals belonging to a common mental culture and 
 a general artistic condition ; and the Elizabethan drama, 
 in its Shaksperian culmination, though locally English, 
 proceeded out of the European mind, its general past, 
 its ideas, principles, moods, its order of life, its accumu- 
 lation of sentiment and romance, its forms of imagina- 
 tion; and in this Shakspere from an early point in his 
 career was more deeply imbued than any of his contem- 
 poraries. What, then, constituted the European mind, 
 its intellectual memory and moral passion, its concep- 
 tion and ideal of life, its poetic culture and means of art, 
 was more variously, richly and profoundly present and 
 active in him than in any other writer. He may never 
 have been out of England ; but he was the most European 
 author then hving. It is not an accident that on his stage 
 locaUty ceases to exist. Italy has her immortaUty in the 
 drama more in Shakspere than in her own Uterature. 
 [200]
 
 SHAKSPERE 
 " Hamlet " is the chief literary monument of Denmark. 
 This does not happen by the caprice of an individual, 
 but marks that quality in Shakspere by \irtue of which 
 he is the genius of Europe. The human spirit, from time 
 to time, detaches from the world of known geography a 
 country of its own lying apart, a land for itself; such was 
 Arcadia, in which Sidney and others wandered; such 
 was the region of chivalry where Spenser and others 
 traversed the romantic scene ; and such was the realm of 
 Shakspere's stage, the magic circle where none dared 
 tread but he. It was a world abstracted from the great 
 scene of life in Europe as it then lay before the thoughts 
 of men, in its breadth out of the historic past, in its va- 
 riety of Uving energy, its mediaeval and classic garniture, 
 its Renaissance luminousness, space, vivacity; it was 
 this scene of the European consciousness of what hfe had 
 been and was, ideahzed and generalized, and made to 
 issue in poetry with the power and brilliancy of a new 
 creation, the realm of Shakspere's art. The aristocratic 
 ideal of hfe is its organic principle and determines the 
 quality of the scene, the nature of the event, the impulse 
 of the characters ; all the flowering of phrase and fancy, 
 of sentiment and passion, all the adornment of taste in 
 whatever form, all that constitutes mood, temperament 
 and atmosphere, is representative of the European 
 fashion of courtliness, scholarship, art, the reverie and 
 [201]
 
 GREAT WT?ITERS 
 dream that belong to the Renaissance characteristically, 
 its pastoral, dramatic, rhetorical modes, its vari-col- 
 oured romanticism; but, most cardinal of all, what is 
 the mainspring of its life, is the human force loosed in it, 
 that prepotency of the individual, that dominance of the 
 personal will, which was the master-spirit of the Ren- 
 aissance everj'where and finds in Shakspere's worid the 
 place of its great career. This is not a local, a national, an 
 English thing; it is a world-idea, and the imagination of 
 Shakspere, mastered by its inspiration found any coun- 
 try a fit stage for it in that environment of an ideal 
 courtly life which was also not local or provincial, but a 
 great world-scene. Shakspere's universality in matter 
 goes back to the fact that he was never anytliing else but 
 cosmopolitan, in the nature of his knowledge, 
 the ideahty of his art, the sources, compass and il- 
 lustrative power of his dramatic work. What is most con- 
 temporary, reaUstic and locally English in this work is 
 on its fringes; in its beginnings and interludes, sub- 
 ordinate; in proportion as the work becomes great, 
 profound, comprehensive, it possesses more purely the 
 European character, it develops ideal freedom, it be- 
 longs not to Italy or Denmark or England, but to the 
 genius of Europe. 
 
 The dawn of the Renaissance spirit, incarnating itself 
 in English dramatic poetry, was in Marlowe, who was 
 [202]
 
 SHAKSPERE 
 perhaps in his own passion of life more at one with the 
 heart of the Renaissance than was Shakspere, but he 
 was less nobly, less perfectly, less splendidly, at one with 
 it in its manifold fulness of expression. Marlowe first 
 put on the stage the career of great passions, characters 
 of immeasurable ambition and unquenchable thirst; 
 but in " Tamerlane," "The Jew of Malta" and " Faus- 
 tus, " the theme is not sufficiently correlated wdth the real 
 play of fact and force in human affairs, it is seized with 
 too much intellectual abstraction and presented too spec- 
 tacularly and fragmentarily in the scenes; some experi- 
 menting with the modifying power of history over im- 
 agination and invention was needed before it could find 
 its dramatic limits and free itself from fantasy, enthusi- 
 asm and exaggeration in artistic expression. Shakspere 
 followed Marlowe in turning to English history for the 
 material of his art. The idea of tragedy was, indeed, al- 
 ready defined for him in the European tradition as a 
 thing of the fall of princes, of royal misfortune and the 
 vicissitude of splendid fates ; and in this way Shakspere's 
 tragic course was charted out for him beforehand; but in 
 working out dramatically the lots of the English kings 
 he also kept a close hold on the idea of a life-force in 
 personality determining temperament, character and 
 the issues of the action. What in Marlowe was extrava- 
 gantly set forth as the fixed idea in his characters, bear- 
 [203]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 ing almost the impress of madness, remains in Shaks- 
 pere, but subdued to the requirements of the environ- 
 ment and of human nature, to probabiHty. " Richard 
 II " is a pathetic instance of the fall of a prince, but the 
 story is linked with that infatuation of the idea of di- 
 vine right which is the dominant idea of Richard, 
 absorbs the eloquence, grace and chivalry of his nature 
 and contains his fate. In " Richard III," the prepotency 
 of the selfish force develops its bloody way with a power 
 to take possession of the king's soul that recalls the self- 
 maddening tyranny of the Roman emperors, till he be- 
 comes the fiend, the enemy of society and of the state it- 
 self, whose fall clears the air Hke a departing thunder- 
 storm. Romeo exhibits the mastering of passion in the 
 youthful soul ; love in him is ecstasy. The dominance of 
 the personal will, possessed by an idea inciting it, assert- 
 ing itself with unbridled desire, naturally leads to mad- 
 ness, and in Shakspere's great characters of this sort 
 mania is never far off; in Macbeth there is the capital in- 
 stance of the blending of the borders between reason and 
 unreason, and, as is Shakspere's way, this elemental 
 trait in the play permeates it, objectified in the witches, 
 reduplicated in Lady Macbeth, but concentrated in 
 the vivid mental action, the bodily starts and stares, the 
 repeated challenge of fate, in Macbeth's shaking but 
 never quite dethroned "state of man." "Timon" is a 
 [204]
 
 SHAKSPERE 
 lesser illustration. "Hamlet" and "Lear" thrust this 
 part of life into the foreground; and in " Othello," the 
 near neighbourhood of the excess of hf e to madness, of the 
 noble nature to ruin through its own power to hve, to be 
 possessed by a passion, an idea, a sorrow, is the ground 
 of its tragic scene. The personal will is necessarily anti- 
 social, and hence opens in its career the whole field of 
 tragic conflict in endless ways ; the drama is its natural 
 scope in art, and there it is the most potent power to con- 
 jure with; it is, by far, the most interesting thing in the 
 whole of that action of Kfe which Shakspere contem- 
 plated so absorbingly. The Renaissance spirit concen- 
 trated and intensified the sense of it, carried it to the ex- 
 treme, made an ideal of it, in history; Shakspere took it 
 over into the sphere of imagination and then gave such 
 examples of it in the transcendent forms of art that his 
 characters became, each in its kind, the supreme models 
 of what is possible to human nature and faculty in per- 
 sonal force, the types of man. 
 
 The fulness of Ufe in all its forms, which makes the 
 plays great, has as its underlying basis this Hfe-force, 
 the affirmation of Ufe, in its energies, its desires, its reve- 
 lations, in the conscious spectacle of being, and with the 
 more brilhancy because of the transcendent ideaUzation 
 to which the scene of hfe here has been subjected. All 
 Shakspere's male characters are self-seekers, in a true 
 [205]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 sense; the exceptions, Kent, a feudal type, and Ho- 
 ratio, a modem form of the Kent temperament, are also 
 men of strength. Though with the visitation of thought, 
 melancholy, peculiar misfortune on the scene, there is 
 occasionally the sense of a withdrawal from life, in 
 Hamlet, Antonio, Hermione, it is rather a forced and 
 regretful retirement than a true withdrawal; the de- 
 nial of life is truly present in Shakspere only as an un- 
 shaped suggestion. The age was one of action, of faith in 
 life, and the ideals it projected were those of the positive, 
 achieving, realizing kind ; and in Shakspere the life-force 
 moved in his world of art with the fruitfulness, the teem- 
 ing variety, the creative overflow into being that it has in 
 nature. Men recognize and remember this life-force in 
 him by the immortal figures of the plays, Romeo, 
 Hamlet, Lear, the score or more that have entered 
 into the world's memory enduringly, eternal realities, 
 with ideal fascination, either for their beauty or their 
 intimacy with men's bosoms or their awe in fate or some 
 other mode of consanguinity with man that is Shaks- 
 pere's seal upon them; these figures best illustrate that 
 power of life and will to live, in high personal forms, 
 showing the far reach, the majesty, the pity and terror 
 of the forces of life in the soul in their energy accom- 
 plishing the utmost possible to man unfolding his na- 
 ture in the vicissitudes of fortune; but the whole Shaks- 
 [206]
 
 SHAKSPERE 
 perian world, no less than these, in its various planes of 
 character, incident and plot, is the outcome and reaUza- 
 tion in art of this same Hfe-force more widely diflFused in 
 humanity of every kind and sort. That infinite variety 
 that so distinguishes the plays, such that each seems a 
 fresh revelation of a new world, so embracing that they 
 seem in their wholeness to leave no lot in hfe unex- 
 pressed, no mortal joy or sorrow unrecorded in its own 
 cry, no thought almost untold, *— that scene of hfe from the 
 tavern-companions of Falstaff and the craftsmen of 
 Athens up to the solitude of Caesar in power, the soU- 
 tude of Lear in grief, the sohtude of Prospero in ms- 
 dom, — all this proceeds from the life-force manifesting 
 itself with the multiphcity and abundance of humanity. 
 Shakspere engaged his mind with the movement of life 
 in its wholeness ; he let the Hfe-force pour through him, 
 from clown and fool and trull up to the highest incarna- 
 tions of the will in passion, wisdom, sorrow, the types of 
 man; and this seen in imagination is the Shaksperian 
 world. He was not an observer, bringing back word from 
 this or that tract of life or group of mortals or peculiarity 
 of fortune ; he was a creator — his world is always 
 whole, as entire and perfect in the Indian boy of 
 Titania as in the Rome of Caesar. The spirit of the 
 Renaissance, insatiable for life, whispered to him this 
 secret ; but in the act and passion of creation he exceeded 
 [ 207 ]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 the Renaissance and took his station with those might- 
 iest few who are not for an age, but for all time. 
 
 The courtly sphere, the aristocratic ideal, the culmina- 
 tion of life in the career of great passions led up to that 
 triumph of hfe which is the spectacle the Shaksperian 
 world presents with inexhaustible profusion, splendour 
 and vitahty ; but this world, though an emanation of the 
 spirit of the Renaissance and its chmax in Uterature, 
 was itself sphered in a larger conception universal in the 
 tragic art; it Ues, Uke the antique drama, in fataUty, in 
 the mystery and under the sway of an infinity that en- 
 velops the life-force round about more profoundly and 
 densely than the dark ether envelops the forces and 
 imagery of nature. The prepotency of individuality, 
 the dominance of the personal will are the great forms of 
 life ; but the power to live, however supreme in its mani- 
 festation, is a wrestling with the unseen angel of hfe; 
 and to Shakspere in the long and brooding absorption 
 of his contemplation of the action of hfe in mortahty, 
 what finally emerges from the strife as the master-spirit 
 there is the dominance of fate against which the life- 
 force is shattered. It is commonly said that fate in the 
 antique drama is external and operates from without as 
 destiny, and that in the modern drama it is internal 
 and operates from within as character; the distinction 
 brings out the larger scope of personality and its greater 
 [208]
 
 SHAKSPERE 
 importance in the romantic drama of Shakspere ; but in 
 either case the fatality resides in the action, in the play 
 of the forces determining the tragic catastrophe, in that 
 which is essentially beyond and outside of the sphere of 
 the personal will and operates free from its control, 
 against its desire and to effect its ruin. The error, the 
 weakness, the cause that initiates the play of fate may be 
 of different degrees of ignorance or consciousness, of 
 generosity or criminahty, of responsibihty or irresponsi- 
 biUty ; but, once loosed in whatever way, fate in the end 
 rules the issue. In what is known as Shakspere's period of 
 tragic gloom, that is, in the plays of his manhood's ma- 
 turity, in which his creative genius works with its most 
 profound power in realizing the states of the soul, the 
 characteristic trait is the gradual emergence in his art of 
 the sense of fate in the world, its accumulation in his 
 mind, its possession of his genius which then gave forth 
 those dramas on which his fame as a master of the 
 knowledge of life most rests and in which fate controls the 
 scene of hfe in the wreck of fortune, the riving of the 
 soul within, the catastrophe where tragic death load- 
 ing the stage impresses the mind less as the penalty than 
 as a release of the sufferer from the power of life to 
 torture and betray, a dismissal of the soul to the peace 
 where life is not. To Macbeth, Othello, Lear and 
 also to Hamlet, death is welcome; and to the spectator 
 [209]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 also their death brings relief, calm, peace. Shakspere, 
 in these days pre-eminently saw fate as that against 
 which personality is shattered, not merely dramatically 
 by a star-crossed fortune as in Romeo, with the pathos 
 of the death of youth, beauty and passion, but more es- 
 sentially as by a law inherent in the greatness of the life- 
 force itself to destroy it; for these are not special but 
 typical instances of the action of life — slight changes of 
 circumstances might have altered the fortunes of Ro- 
 meo, but no change could ever have altered the fate of 
 Macbeth, Othello, Lear, Hamlet. In these four Shaks- 
 pere sets personality against fate, front to front, and the 
 story is felt to be a universal chapter of hfe, of the im- 
 plication of the human spirit in that vicissitude of na- 
 ture and fortune which has in every tongue borne the 
 same name and that is stronger than hfe. 
 
 The reahzation that such is the nature of human life 
 was attended in Shakspere's mind by a storm and 
 stress that is read not only in the great dramas, but also 
 in the cynical acquaintance with humanity shown in 
 " All's Well that Ends Well, " and in the savage temper 
 toward its baseness displayed in "Troilus and Cres- 
 sida. " The concentrated, intense, ideal reahzation of 
 the tragedy of existence, of humanity victimized in its 
 forms of noblest nature or of most superb power, though 
 most brilKant in the four great tragedies, is not confined 
 [210]
 
 SHAKSPERE 
 to them ; it extends and spreads into many others in dif- 
 ferent planes of character, mood and thought. The 
 action of Ufe takes on that quaUty of impenetrable 
 mystery which the face of hfe has always worn, in every 
 literature, in the highest works of imagination. Mys- 
 tery is an increasing element in Shakspere's dramas 
 from the first, continuing, growing in depth, growing also 
 in intangibihty ; poetically, it is etherealized in " A Mid- 
 summer Night's Dream " full of the idea of illusion in art 
 as the wood is of moonlight ; reflectively, it is precipitat- 
 ed in Hamlet's thought; and, at the end, as the illusion 
 of life it fills " The Tempest ; " but the finer and most se- 
 cret form of mystery in Shakspere is not poetical or 
 intellectual or metaphysical, but springs from the action 
 itself and is dramatic. It is in Macbeth's superstitious 
 interrogation of the witches, in Hamlet's questioning of 
 the soul in his soliloquy, in those half-lines of tragic 
 cUmax where life grows silent before the presence of 
 fate ; it is in Othello's mind-dazed question : 
 
 " Will you, I pray, demand that demi-devil 
 Why he hath thiis ensnared my soul and body," — 
 
 the mystery of the fates of man ; it is in Lear's invocation 
 of the elements: 
 
 " / never gave you kingdom, called you children," — 
 
 dismissing them from the moral world as if they alone 
 [211]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 were free where all was guiltiness in the worse storm of 
 lifebeatingon his white, old head. It is in such passages as 
 these, where Shakspere's dramatic faculty is at its light- 
 ning-stroke that the inner secrecy of the mystery is light- 
 ed up, shown but not revealed, in the depth of conscious- 
 ness. Reason has no solvent for it, justice does not meas- 
 ure with it, mercy is unknown to it. The attempt to make 
 fate ethical in Shakspere, to identify it with moral law in 
 the universe, however it be made, fails; it was not as 
 righteousness that he saw life; he saw it with the simple- 
 ness of his genius, as a dramatic struggle, and, emerg- 
 ing thence, the dominance of fate shattering life mys- 
 teriously, beyond the intelligible grasp of man's reason 
 or the moral sense. He saw, in other words, above all else, 
 the dramatic mystery of life. 
 
 Shakspere was thus, through and through, a drama- 
 tist; and he was the dramatist in whom the old tradition 
 of the art, even from ^Eschylus, as a representative of 
 the courtly Hfe and a tale of the fall of princes, cul- 
 minated. The idea of humanity, in the modem demo- 
 cratic sense, was never in his brain ; the types of man that 
 he created were, in their greatness, those of the aristo- 
 cratic life ; and the tragedy he set forth was not that of 
 the spirit of life, the modem world-pain, but of the ca- 
 reers of individuals highly endowed by nature or fortune 
 in a world which seemed to exist to be the theatre 
 [212]
 
 SHAKSPERE 
 of their will, ambition, passion; he was the dramatist 
 of a class-society. The aristocratic ideal of society 
 and of action in it, however, is the will of nature, and 
 still prevails in every state ; and it makes a universal ap- 
 peal to men. The ground of this appeal is little affected 
 by the absence in Shakspere of democratic sympathy; for 
 the scene of life which he does present includes all 
 classes ; human nature is common and constant, and the 
 career of life in fortune, ambition, passion is now the 
 same that he depicted; the Shaksperian world, however 
 modem conditions may be changed, is still life as it is 
 known to the thoughts of men. The dramatic mystery is 
 that which is closest to mankind in daily experience, the 
 mystery of what is done, of what happens ; the poetic, in- 
 tellectual, metaphysical modes of mystery exist for the 
 few, but the mystery of the event itself is for all, and it is 
 seized by them in Shakspere's way as not a thing of rea- 
 son or ethics, but as a fact impenetrable, leaving the soul 
 according to its degree affected by the scene. This is the 
 normal human attitude toward calamity, toward trag- 
 edy, of any kind ; its force expends itself not in explana- 
 tion, but in experience. The sense of life as action, too, 
 and the ideal of it as lying in the prepotency of individ- 
 uaUty, and the dominance of the personal will is natural 
 to all men, and the thing dearest to their bosoms as their 
 thought and desire of Kf e ; the power to U ve, — to loose 
 [213]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 the energies of the soul in achievement, enjoyment, ex- 
 perience, to aflSrm life in its fulness, variety, richness, in- 
 tensely, extremely insatiably, to the utmost of the force 
 that is in one — this is the impulse to self-expression, to 
 self-realization, that drives men in their ambitions and 
 passions of whatever nature, the action and movement 
 of Ufe in the world ; and in this world as it lies outspread 
 in the knowledge and thoughts of men brilliant personal 
 force most attracts admiration, confers fame and secures 
 imitation, oftenest without regard to moral quahty. 
 Force is the idol of life that is hardest to combat in civ- 
 ilizing man. In the Shaksperian world the affirmation of 
 life in general is as broadly various as in the world of 
 nature, and in individual types it reaches a height of 
 beauty, power and majesty that is unrivalled in nature 
 because seen through the ideahty of art, and these types 
 have a history and a revelation of their being such as is 
 only possible in imagination; men, consequently, pass- 
 ing into this world as they read or behold the plays jQnd 
 there that enlargement of hfe and its career, that inten- 
 sification and revelation of it, which, though denied to 
 their experience, truly endows them with the greatness 
 of life, gives them understanding of the soul and the fac- 
 ulties lodged in it, the heights and depths of its passion, 
 the reaches of its thoughts, the shadows of fatality amid 
 which it moves under the stars. The universal appeal of 
 [214]
 
 SHAKSPERE 
 Shakspere lies in the power with which he has seized hfe 
 in its intense forms, its richest efflorescence, its magical 
 fantasy, its fascination and horror, its \^lgar generahty, 
 its high types, its manias and humours, the whole of 
 hfe, and given it back to men as an increase of their own 
 power to live, a world in which they come to true con- 
 sciousness of themselves. Life is what men desire; 
 Shakspere gives them life, according to their own ideal, 
 the triumph of hfe, yet life which at its height is tragic 
 and shocks them with that mystery of the actual which 
 is the profoundest reality. 
 
 The secret of life solves the riddle of Shakspere, 
 whose greatness has no other mystery than the mystery 
 of the greatness of hfe. He is the spirit of hfe made 
 manifest in its own dramatic motion, imprisoned, em- 
 bodied and unveiled in art. Here are the fates of men, 
 grotesque, heroic, terrible, or stately in prosperity with 
 the ohve crown and the sheaf of Ceres, almost as many 
 in number as the lots set forth to be chosen by the souls 
 at birth. It is an earthly life hmited to the mortal scene ; 
 no illumination falls on it from heaven, no di\'inity in- 
 habits its sphere. It is essentially Pagan in its ideal, its 
 art and its philosophy. It is the supreme work of man's 
 hand so rendering life in its aspects of mortality. If one 
 were to mould in sculpture the face of hfe, it would be, 
 one thinks, that over which every joy and sorrow, every 
 [215]
 
 GREAT WRITERS 
 thought seems to have moved — the infinite of human 
 expression — leaving its trace in the hving flesh, — the 
 face of Shakspere. That would be, could it be won back 
 from time, the ideal face of life, the Sphinx of our 
 existence. 
 
 THE END 
 
 [216]
 
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