L'BRARV 
 
 "IVEasiTY OF 
 
 SAN DIEGO
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE
 
 &t . A'afitrn a/Lforfrtut. Jo/fory. 
 c
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 BY 
 
 ARTHUR RICKETT 
 
 1906 
 
 LONDON 
 
 J. M. DENT & CO. 
 
 29 & 30 BEDFORD STREET, W.C. 
 
 NEW YORK : E. P. DUTTON & CO.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PREFACE . . vii 
 
 THE MORALIST- 
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 3 
 
 JAMES MARTINEAU . -25 
 
 THE SCIENTIST- 
 
 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY . 55 
 
 THE 
 
 WiLLiAM WORDSWORTH . 89 
 
 KEATS AND ROSSETTI . 112 
 
 THE NOVELIST 
 
 THE GENIUS OF DICKENS . 143 
 
 THE VAGABOND- 
 
 WILLIAM HAZLITT . 189 
 
 THOMAS DE QUINCEY . . 205 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL GUIDE . 219 
 
 INDEX . 226
 
 ' ' Surely, whoever speaks to me in the right voice 
 Him or her I shall follow 
 As the water follows the moon silently 
 With fluid steps anywhere around the Globe." 
 
 WALT WHITMAN.
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THE papers in the present volume are not intended 
 as contributions to critical literature. They are of a 
 pioneer character, and are concerned rather with the 
 "personal equation" of the writers discussed than 
 with the purely literary aspects of their work. 
 Originally delivered in the form of lectures, they re- 
 tain the more colloquial form of " the thing spoken." 
 My excuse for publishing them is that in the form of 
 lectures they served to kindle interest in the 
 personalities of the writers and lead to a study of the 
 originals. 
 
 The authors dealt with cover many fields of 
 thought philosophy, science, poetry, fiction, criticism 
 but the guiding principle in the selection of names 
 has been to exhibit as great a diversity of tempera- 
 ment as possible. The " moralist " leads the way, as 
 the one who exhibits his temperament as much by 
 what he suppresses as by what he expresses of him- 
 self. And the series closes with the "vagabond," 
 who flings himself unreservedly at the reader, whims, 
 peculiarities and all. Thus an attempt at sequence 
 is made, not on literary but on psychological grounds. 
 From the moralist to the vagabond, self-revelation
 
 PREFACE 
 
 becomes gradually more intimate in its nature, 
 until the words spoken by Whitman of his Leaves 
 of Grass can be applied to the writings of the later 
 types : "This is no book ; who touches this touches 
 a man." 
 
 Too much has been said in elementary essays such 
 as these of the " messages " of this or that great 
 man; so even when dealing with the moralists the 
 " human note " has been emphasised in preference to 
 what may be called the " pulpit note" in literature. 
 
 Literature, indeed, has been regarded in these 
 fugitive papers as temperament expressed in terms of 
 art. 
 
 After all, the compelling power of the great organ 
 tones of literature depends largely upon the sweetness 
 of the " vox humana."
 
 THE PREACHER
 
 " Your business is to paint the souls of men." 
 
 BROWNING.
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 
 ONE cannot tabulate religious genius. It were 
 like picking up that sealed bottle of Arabian fame, 
 remarking to an onlooker, " There is a genie inside 
 here," and then dismissing the subject as if one had 
 measured the genie's dimensions and characteristics by 
 pointing to the bottle. Every genius has to creep inside 
 the narrow compass of some creed or formula : but if 
 you would wish to estimate him, do not do so by look- 
 ing at him through the formula, the dogma, the creed ; 
 try to detach him from his creed, and if he is not so 
 terrifying as the genie in the Arabian story, he may 
 equally amaze you as a student of character and a 
 seeker after truth. 
 
 Let us examine certain aspects of Newman's in- 
 fluence. At the outset we are met by the extra- 
 ordinary way in which Newman evades a characteristic 
 label. He has been called, and rightly so, a " mystic," 
 a " brilliant controversialist," a " scholar-recluse," 
 and yet the general impression concerning him 
 that he was a sensitive and kindly ascetic, with a 
 certain aloofness from the world of affairs, is not 
 quite a correct one. 
 
 So much has been written upon him from the theo- 
 logical and philosophical point of view, that the human 
 
 3
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 point of view has been obscured. In fact, if we speak 
 quite frankly, the view of the ordinary man as 
 regards Newman is that of a clever and rather crafty 
 old scholar, who lacked straightforwardness and 
 would try to entangle you in some dialectical diffi- 
 culty; one, moreover, who was at heart a bit of a 
 sceptic himself, and certainly not one who had much 
 about him likely to interest and attract other than the 
 theological students. 
 
 The phrase " mystic " carries within its popular 
 meaning something out of touch with everyday life. 
 It seems to denote a dweller in cloudland. And 
 a mystic in that sense Newman was not. Indeed, 
 he was less of a mystic than Maurice, and more 
 alive to the fluctuations of modern thought than 
 Kingsley. " His senses," says one of his intimate 
 friends, " were keenly alive to the small things of 
 earth. How delicately he weighs in Loss and Gain * 
 the respective attractions of sights, scents and sounds." 
 John Froude has told us how, in his Oxford days, he 
 was interested in everything which was going on in 
 science, and politics, and literature. He was a 
 mystic only in the sense that he was a poet and felt 
 that there was a great reality at the heart of things, 
 behind all the constant process of phenomena, and 
 hence comes a popular impression that he loved 
 the half lights of thought and shrunk from definite 
 statement. That he sheltered himself behind the 
 mysteries half afraid of them, yet constitutionally 
 * Problems and Persons ( WILFRID WARD). 
 
 4
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 unable to do without a superstitious worship of them 
 is quite wrong. 
 
 Newman, says one of his severest critics,* is like 
 Mill, a lover of clear, definite, tangible statements. 
 There is no danger with him of losing ourselves in 
 that mystical haze which irritates and bewilders the 
 ordinary commonsense of mankind. Indeed, his own 
 admissions support Mr Stephen's contention. From 
 the age of fifteen, he tells us, dogma had been the 
 fundamental principle of his religion. Literature 
 was his enemy, because by literature he meant the 
 anti-dogmatic principle the principle which would 
 convert religion into a sentiment, and therefore for 
 him into a dream, a mockery. No one, of course, 
 could be more sensitive to the mysterious element in 
 theology, but in his view dogma is not the less 
 definite for being mysterious. 
 
 His reputation as a controversialist has obscured 
 his very sensible, and alas! too rarely appreciated, 
 views as to the value of controversy. And yet he has 
 said that, if views were clearly stated and candidly 
 received, all controversy would be either superfluous 
 or useless superfluous to those who agreed in first 
 principles, useless to those who differed fundamentally. 
 He was singularly like Browning in his hatred of mere 
 academic discussion. With a man who came once 
 and pompously requested some points on the educa- 
 tion problem, he conversed earnestly (one can imagine 
 the twinkle in his eye) on the barley crop in Norfolk. 
 * Agnostics Apology (LESLIE STBPHRN . 
 5
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 Another visitor, who had girded himself up for an in- 
 tellectual discussion, he harangued on the number of 
 stoppages on the 1.30 train as contrasted with the 
 3.40. Then there is the Oxford story of Newman's 
 guest who introduced the Origin of Evil at dinner, and 
 produced a dissertation full of exact knowledge, and 
 apparently delivered with extreme absorbing interest, 
 as to the different ways of treating hot-house 
 grapes. 
 
 To the earnest, anxious student he was ever access- 
 ible; ready to help and advise, and kindly and 
 shrewd in counsel. But he had a keen insight into 
 character, and had no patience with pomposity or 
 priggishess, or idle curiosity. With all his learning 
 no one despised more heartily the mere pedant.* 
 What could be more happily expressed than this 
 criticism of the Casaubon type : " Such are only 
 possessed by their knowledge, not possessed of it; 
 nay, in matters of fact they are often even carried 
 away by it, without any volition of their own. . . . 
 I am not denying that a strong and ready memory is 
 in itself a treasure; I am not disparaging a well- 
 stored mind, though it be nothing besides, so that it 
 be sober, any more than I would despise a book- 
 seller's shop ; it is of great value to others even when 
 not to the owner. Nor am I banishing far from it 
 the possession of deep and multifarious learning 
 from my ideal university; they adorn it in the eyes 
 
 * Vide WILFRID WARD, Problems and Persons. Other of his 
 friends, also, bear this out. 
 
 6
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 of men. I do but say that they constitute no type of 
 the results at which it aims; that it is no fresh gain 
 to the intellect to have enlarged the memory at 
 the expense of faculties which are indisputably 
 higher." 
 
 Let us notice some special points about Newman's 
 personality as revealed in literature, which may serve 
 to explain his remarkable influence. 
 
 In the first place, his literary style expressed most 
 admirably the temper and tone of the writer. It 
 was a beautiful style not beautiful with the rich 
 glow of Ruskin's penmanship ; nor with the grace- 
 ful urbanity of Arnold ; nor with the fantastic 
 suggestiveness of De Quincey, but beautiful with a 
 limpid lucidity, a chastened eloquence, a gentle 
 persuasiveness. 
 
 Like Arnold and Ruskin he was a master of irony; 
 but he was more serious than Arnold and less volcanic 
 than Ruskin. His style is not so magnificent as 
 Ruskin's Ruskin at his best is unapproachable 
 but he had none of Ruskin's rhetorical devices which 
 marred the beauty of some of his prose. Few 
 writers are so unimpeachable in taste or wrote on so 
 consistently high a level as Newman. 
 
 None of his admirers have written more happily 
 about his style than Mr Hutton. 
 
 " It is a style," he writes, " that more nearly repre- 
 sents a clear atmosphere than any other which I know 
 in English literature. It flows round you, it presses 
 
 * Modern Guides of English Thought. 
 7
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 gently on every side of you, and yet like a steady 
 current carrying you in one direction too. On every 
 facet of your heart you feel the light touch of his pur- 
 pose, and yet you cannot escape the general drift of 
 his movements more than the ship can escape the 
 drift of the tide. He never said anything more char- 
 acteristic than when he expressed his conviction that 
 though there are a hundred difficulties in faith, into 
 all of which he could enter, the hundred difficulties 
 are not equal to a single doubt. That saying is most 
 characteristic of his style, which seems to be sensitive 
 in the highest degree to a multitude of hostile in- 
 fluences which are at once appreciated and resisted, 
 while one predominant and over-ruling power moves 
 steadily on." 
 
 Many people who have heard much of Newman's 
 style are disappointed on a first acquaintance, and 
 this is explicable if they look for those qualities that 
 impress one so in Martineau and Ruskin. There is a 
 severe simplicity about it which bewilders those who 
 connect a fine style necessarily with richness of colour- 
 ing. Hutton is exactly right when he speaks of its 
 luminousness as being the luminousness of the other. 
 The clear, liquid tranquillity which marks it is as 
 remarkable in its way and as potent an influence 
 upon the reader as the stately harmonies of Mar- 
 tineau or the vibrant rhetoric of Ruskin. There 
 is suavity and cogency here, and a perfectly just 
 appreciation of the spiritual basis of the highest poetry 
 spiritual, not necessarily religious, any more than 
 
 8
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 the sense of wonder and awe carries with it neces- 
 sarily a belief in a personal God. 
 
 Reading Newman's temperament through his de- 
 lightfully pellucid style, we are struck by certain per- 
 sonal characteristics which help to explain the deep 
 and far-reaching influence of the man. 
 
 First, I think, a peculiar power of sensitive 
 sympathy. 
 
 His was not a dominating personality that sweeps 
 everything before it. There are men poets, social 
 reformers who are possessed by a few vital ideas, 
 see these ideas under the brilliant light of enthusiasm 
 to the exclusion of others, and make their mark in the 
 world through their superb one-sidedness. 
 
 There is need of such men always. The great 
 reformer is ever such an one, and much of the practical 
 and constructive work of the world is done by such men. 
 
 There are others, critical by nature, who are keenly 
 sensitive to the pros and cons, and whose subtle intel- 
 lects expose them to difficulties of which the average 
 man knows nothing. Newman was a man of this 
 kind. None knew better than he that some kind of 
 active faith was essential to a man who wishes to do 
 some genuine work in life. He appreciated the 
 paralysing effect of doubt : he was alive to the criti- 
 cism of the scoffer that religion makes little difference 
 to many men's lives. He knew the seductive power 
 of the senses, for he was an artist in his own way, and 
 the possibilities of human nature for good and evil 
 appalled him. 
 
 9
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 And a good deal that he wrote which seemed 
 hesitating and casuistical, which provoked men of 
 simpler, rougher natures, was due to his sensitiveness 
 to every form of intellectual difficulty and to subtle 
 moral temptations and to his desire to meet them as 
 far as possible. 
 
 Beginning, it is said,* at Oxford among young men, 
 his equals in age many of them, passing into the com- 
 parative obscurity of the Birmingham Oratory, 
 living there unseen by the world at large, and holding 
 for many years no position of official importance, his 
 personality, so unobtrusive that it is hard to account 
 for it, made itself felt over the whole country. Lead- 
 ing the simple, consistent life of a priest, ever ready 
 to help those who came to him, or wrote to him for 
 advice, shunning the crowd, welcoming each indi- 
 vidual, helping each according to his character to live 
 rightly, never seeking influence for his own sake, 
 thinking only of those he was helping, grateful for 
 their trust but deeply feeling its sacredness before 
 God, and his responsibility for the use he made of it, 
 throwing himself into the position of each of those 
 who consulted him as if each were the only one, he 
 gained steadily in immediate influence as life went 
 on ; while the power of a devoted life, as a witness to 
 the unseen world, made its way to the crowds who 
 form public opinion. " It would be hard," says Mr 
 Wilfrid Ward, " to estimate the number of those who 
 sought his help during the last forty years of his life 
 
 * Problems and Persons (Wn.FRiD WARD). 
 IO
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 in theological matters, and many have been guided 
 by him in other matters. In his measure, and allow- 
 ing for the difference of gifts and circumstances, he 
 carried out the kind of work done by his own St 
 Philip, which early in his Catholic life he had spoken 
 of as the only work he had a call to do. As St 
 Philip, by his love for those who leant upon him, and 
 by his personal character, drew all men to him for 
 guidance and advice, so did Newman by the power 
 of his personality find himself the centre of influence 
 among vast numbers." 
 
 Of St Philip, Newman himself has written : "He 
 preferred to yield to the stream and direct the current 
 which he could not stop of science, literature, art and 
 fashion, and to sweeten and sanctify what God had 
 made very good and man had spoilt." 
 
 This exactly describes Newman himself. There was 
 something submissive and dependent about his attitude ; 
 he preferred to yield to the stream, but while yield- 
 ing he acquainted himself with the nature of every 
 current and cross-current : he was a clever navigator. 
 
 One result of Newman's influence has been to give 
 Englishmen a fairer appreciation of the Catholic posi- 
 tion a position which the Saxon mind has always 
 had a perverse tendency to misunderstand, much of 
 it being so alien to the practical spirit of the nation. 
 We are an ethical people, but we are not a religious 
 people; that is to say, we have plenty of good feeling 
 as to right and bad conduct, but little imagination as 
 to the borders of the finite and infinite. 
 
 II
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 Our debt to Newman in this respect, in stirring 
 our spiritual imagination, has been admirably alluded 
 to by Martineau in his writings. Martineau is not 
 alone, but I select Martineau, who in his theology so 
 profoundly differs from Newman and whose testi- 
 mony to Newman's greatness therefore is less open 
 to the charge of friendly leniency than the words of 
 friends and allies such as Mr Wilfrid Ward and Mr 
 W. S. Lilly, or even such a Newman enthusiast as the 
 late R. H. Hutton. Few even of educated English- 
 men, as Martineau says, have any suspicion of the 
 depth and solidity of the Catholic dogma, its wide 
 and various adaptations to wants ineffaceable from 
 the human heart, its wonderful fusion of the super- 
 natural into the natural life, its vast resources for a 
 powerful hold upon the conscience. A true British 
 Protestant, whose notions of Popery are limited to 
 what he hears from an evangelical curate, looks on 
 the whole system as an absolute mumming, and no 
 more believes that men of sense can seriously adopt 
 it than they will be converted to the practice of eating 
 their dinner with a Chinaman's chop-sticks instead of 
 the knife and fork. He pictures to himself a number 
 of celibate gentlemen who glide through a sort of 
 minuet by candle-light around the altar and keep the 
 Bible out of everybody's way, and make people 
 easy about their sins, and he is positive that no one 
 above a " poor Irishman " can fail to see through 
 such nonsense.* No doubt many well-meaning " go- 
 
 * Vide Essays and Ktvifit and Addresses (Martineau), vol. i. 
 12
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 to- meeting " folk still sturdily hold by this opinion. 
 The influence of men, however, like Newman and 
 Ward in particular, also of Pusey and Keble, and 
 many a high Anglican of to-day, has done much to 
 moderate this narrow-minded attitude. 
 
 And this brings me to the second characteristic of 
 Newman's his sincerity. 
 
 In so doing I know that I am venturing on con- 
 troversial ground, for many who admire his intel- 
 lectual power and admit to his charm of personality, 
 yet purse up their lips at what they call his " shifti- 
 ness " or " trickiness." He is held by some to have 
 justified his theological and ecclesiastical position at 
 the expense of his intellectual honesty. Many excel- 
 lent men have held this men so far apart as Charles 
 Kingsley and Leslie Stephen. Therefore, the charge 
 cannot be met by mere denial or evasion. He has not 
 needed champions both Roman and Anglican, but 
 they have been more interested perhaps as theo- 
 logians than psychologists to vindicate his character. 
 At any rate it seems worth while approaching the 
 question from a non-theological, non-ecclesiastical 
 point of view, and inquiring into the question of New- 
 man's sincerity and examining his controversial 
 methods. 
 
 One of the grave charges brought against him is 
 that his religion is a religion of fear. Another that he 
 was a sceptic who was afraid of his scepticism ; 
 another that he used facts for his own purpose as a 
 special pleader, desiring only to make the very best 
 
 13
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 of his case and to suppress facts that seemed hostile. 
 These three charges all fundamentally connected are 
 very serious ones. If they be true, then Newman's 
 influence has certainly been an unwholesome one, and 
 his very charm as a man and a writer had made his 
 teachings the more pernicious. 
 
 To deal with these charges in full would require 
 far more detailed consideration of his writings 
 than I have time to devote. But no consideration 
 of Newman, however brief, can avoid dealing broadly 
 with this hostile attack, and I must, after indicating 
 the lines of inquiry, leave you to follow the subject 
 up for yourselves. 
 
 Now let us briefly examine the scope and character 
 of Newman's important works. That is a necessary 
 preface. 
 
 First of all there are the " Tracts " by which he 
 endeavoured to fix a via media between Romanism 
 and Protestanism and to vindicate the Anglo-Catholic 
 position. That he attempted to read into the 
 " Thirty-Nine Articles " more than they could fairly 
 bear he would have admitted. Enthusiasm often 
 leads a man to defend an indefensible position, but it 
 does not follow that he is not perfectly sincere in his 
 defence. He would have failed in sincerity if, on 
 finding the weakness of his position, he had remained 
 in the Anglican Church. This he did not do, and it 
 cost him many a bitter pang to follow the logical 
 results of his own reasoning. 
 
 After his conversion Newman published some re- 
 14
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 markable books. The first his autobiography, his 
 spiritual autobiography, Apologia pro vita sua," 
 perhaps from our point of view the most significant 
 of his writings (1865). 
 
 To some this book seems a sophistical and evasive 
 defence of his religious opinions; to others a beauti- 
 fully sincere and earnest confession of faith. 
 
 Everything, you may say, depends upon whether 
 the reader is or is not a Catholic or an Anglican in 
 sympathy with the writer's doctrinal opinion. Not 
 at all. Everything depends upon how far the writer 
 faithfully and honestly interprets his own temperament. 
 
 What we have to look for is some keynote; that 
 found, the book becomes comprehensible. The key- 
 note may, I think, be found on page 49: " From the 
 age of fifteen, dogma has been the fundamental prin- 
 ciple of my religion. I know no other religion; I 
 cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion. 
 Religion as a mere sentiment is to me a dream and a 
 mockery." Here we have a very distinct point of 
 view, and one that must be thoroughly grasped before 
 we proceed further. There are three types of temper- 
 ament to which dogma appeals in a quite different way. 
 
 The first may be called the " passionate " tempera- 
 ment, the second the " perceptive," the third the 
 " reflective." This does not mean that passion is 
 alien to the second or reflection divorced from the 
 first; merely that passion, the impulsive nature, pre- 
 dominates in the one, and that reflection, the critical 
 spirit, predominates in the third. 
 
 15
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 The passionate temperament is a temperament 
 where strong impulses for good or evil exist: where 
 feeling is intense and where the need is felt of some 
 great co-ordinating power to bind the affections 
 together, and to give a directing force to the char- 
 acter. Some of the most lovable personalities in the 
 world have been of this kind. Most of the saints in 
 history, St Francis d'Assisi, St Augustine, have been 
 men of tidal emotion, and their weaknesses, their 
 lapses and the moral heights to which they climbed, 
 testify to this. 
 
 To such natures religion, when it appeals, must 
 appeal as some external authority. Faith must ex- 
 press itself in a ritual : belief crystallise into a 
 dogma. Knowing the weaknesses of human nature, 
 having gauged the cross-currents which deflect the 
 will first this way and then that, conscious of the 
 passion of inward effort to decide first hand in the 
 great problems of life, they turn with a sigh of relief 
 and aspiration towards some great church that has 
 continued down the ages; or towards some great 
 book that shall decide the questions that have be- 
 bewildered and amazed them. 
 
 Obedience is one of the first duties they strive after. 
 Those who trust to a Church rather than to a Book 
 are Catholics; the Protestant turns to the Book as 
 the external authority needed. In Newman's case, 
 of course, it was " The Church " that appealed as an 
 authority that quieted all questionings as the reputed 
 medium of supernatural grace. 
 
 16
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 With all his powerful intellect, with all his critical 
 appreciation, he felt the necessity in his religious life 
 for some external authority on which he could depend. 
 Self-reliance in spiritual matters looked to him like 
 puerile cock-sureness. 
 
 The perceptive temperament is the temperament of 
 the artist pure and simple. On the religious side art 
 is always pantheistic. Its aim, it has been said, is to 
 read off the expressiveness of things. It has no 
 need of dogma, for its feeling towards the infinite is 
 one that loses much of its beauty and meaning if 
 reduced to cold logic. It remains a feeling, an atti- 
 tude ; and although it suffers from the defects of all 
 purely subjective moods, and cannot be readily com- 
 municated to others, yet it is a mistake to think that 
 it is not strong because it has not wholly emerged out 
 of feeling into concrete thought. To its perceptions, 
 form, colour, sound, motion have a soul within them 
 whose life and activity they represent : and even 
 language, by flinging itself into the mould of rhythm 
 and music, acquires beyond its logical significance a 
 second meaning for the affections. The artist does not 
 fly from a waning universe and find in some charmed 
 circle in history or in literature a haven of refuge, a 
 solvent for the discord for the unseen to him is ever 
 strong to show a divine beauty while he seems to 
 stand before a curtain only half opaque, watching the 
 lights and shadows thrown on it from behind by the 
 ceaseless play of infinite thought. He melts the 
 barrier away that hides from mere sense and intellect, 
 B 17
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 the formative idea, and his glance of sympathy 
 changes them as the sunrise changes the grey land- 
 scape and discovers its latent glories.* 
 
 The third temperament is the temperament of the 
 scientific mind; that rejects dogma not because it 
 holds it superfluous but because it accounts it mis- 
 chievous. Clear intellectual comprehension, that is its 
 ideal and its test. What cannot be verified by human 
 experience is untrustworthy. " Science and her 
 methods gave me a resting-place independent of 
 authority and tradition." 
 
 What is abnormal is explained by extremists of this 
 school in physiological terms : all transcendental states 
 of piety are classified as morbid St Paul was an epi- 
 leptic ; St Theresa a martyr to hysteria ; Shelley's rap- 
 tures were a matter of sensitive nerves, and Browning's 
 optimism may be attributed to his sound digestion. 
 
 Temperament is explained in terms of medical 
 diathesis, and although with the more moderate agnos- 
 tics the cravings of man's religious feelings are allowed 
 some attenuated outlet, everywhere Logic is paramount. 
 
 Now, if I am right in my assumption, you may 
 agree or disagree with Newman's temperament, but 
 you cannot impugn his sincerity for attaching this 
 importance to the dogmatic principle. For him it 
 was absolutely of the highest importance. When he 
 spoke of the Godlessness in Nature, it was not because 
 he wished to drive men into the Catholic faith by dis- 
 
 * Vide MARTINEAU, " Distinctive Types of Christianity," and 
 other essays, where he follows out a similar line of thought. 
 
 18
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 paraging other possible sources of revelation, but 
 because the world of Nature had no appeal for him as 
 it had for Wordsworth and Shelley. There was 
 nothing wavering about his Theism. 
 
 " The contemplation of God and nothing but it, is 
 able fully to open and relieve the mind; to unlock, 
 occupy and fix our affections. It is this feeling of 
 simple and absolute confidence and communion 
 which soothes and satisfies those to whom it is vouch- 
 safed. We know that even our nearest friends enter 
 into us but partially, and hold intercourse with us 
 only at times, whereas the consciousness of a perfect 
 and enduring presence, and it alone, keeps our heart 
 open. If it be not bold to say it He who is infinite 
 alone can be its measure. He alone can answer to 
 that mysterious assemblage of feelings and thoughts 
 which it has within it." 
 
 That may have been written by a fanatic: by a 
 sceptic no. The dogmatic principle which he 
 asserts so passionately in his Apologia is worked out 
 with brilliant elaboration in two books, The Develop- 
 ment of Christian Doctrine (1845) and A Grammar 
 of Assent (1870). 
 
 The Development of Christian Doctrine, it has been 
 truly said, takes as its starting-point the incontestable 
 principle that Christianity, like every historical in- 
 stitution, has passed through a process of develop- 
 ment of growth in doctrine and custom, and was not 
 given to the world in the beginning in a perfect form. 
 He offers numbers of instances going to show that 
 
 19
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 orthodox Protestantism is under a delusion when It 
 supposes that all its doctrine and practices are taught 
 in Scripture and are prescribed therein, or are to be 
 directly deduced therefrom. It is impossible to 
 remain in the mere letter of Scripture, because the 
 necessities of interpretation, for instance, of such a 
 phrase as " The Word became flesh " lead at once to 
 a series of further questions. 
 
 Finally, in Scripture itself, the necessity of such a 
 progressive development is distinctly indicated, for 
 instance, in the parables of the " leaven " and the 
 " mustard seed."* 
 
 The historical use made of the evolutionary 
 idea anticipates to some extent Spencer's work. 
 There is much in the book of a highly debatable 
 character, and I fail to see the force of Newman's 
 argument that, in order to distinguish correct develop- 
 ment from false, an infallible authority outside the 
 development is required. To quote from the German 
 theologian, Dr Pfleiderer : " If Christianity is as a whole 
 a revelation, the results of its development must share 
 the guarantee of its credentials." Surely Newman 
 overlooked the fact that the alleged infallible authority 
 is itself a product of the general development, and 
 that it participates hi its changes and is therefore 
 subject, like every historical phenomenon, to the law 
 of relativity. The infallibility of any authority is a 
 question of historical evidence ; it is not a theological 
 problem, or only secondarily one. 
 
 * Vide Devtlopment of Theology (Giro PFLBIDERBR). 
 20
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 But criticism apart, Newman's essay is an extremely 
 instructive one, raising many questions of practical 
 interest, such as how far Christianity as taught to-day 
 is the genuine outcome of primitive customs ? how 
 far our preservative additions, our doctrines and our 
 glosses are corruptions? how far fairly derived? 
 
 In A Grammar of Assent Newman elaborated a 
 principle he had learnt from Keble, that religious con- 
 viction rests on emotional, not on intellectual, grounds. 
 
 That further, these grounds cannot be theoretically 
 proved, or logically justified, probability being con- 
 verted into certainty by a voluntary assent. 
 
 The doctrine of probability is borrowed and 
 developed from Butler, and Newman certainly has 
 much to say that is stimulating and suggestive. 
 Quite apart from its theological bearings there is a 
 profound psychological truth in his contention that 
 our opinions are so largely affected by instinctive 
 prepossession, temperamental likes and dislikes, so 
 little by logic; and that, estimating our views, these 
 peculiarities of our mental constitution, which no 
 arguments can alter, must be taken into consideration. 
 
 " I do not like thee, Dr Fell ; 
 The reason why I cannot tell." 
 
 But often we try to give a reason, and it is most 
 likely a sorry one, as the dislike of Dr Fell may arise 
 from no defects in the doctor, but from some un- 
 accountable repugnance in ourselves. 
 
 A and B write about cats. A is attracted towards 
 them, B dislikes them. They make him shudder. 
 
 21
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 If he tries to logically define his dislike he will bring 
 forth arguments showing how selfish they are, etc., 
 while the real reason is neglected. 
 
 Cleverly as Newman used the evolutionary idea, 
 more value still attaches to his conception of uncon- 
 scious thought, or in the language of modern science, 
 sub-conscious thought in moulding human life. 
 
 What one finds lacking in Newman's philosophy is 
 hopefulness and restfulness. One rises from reading 
 his writings with the impression of a troubled mind, 
 and it was this sensitiveness to the puny limitations 
 of human knowledge, and to the moral and intellec- 
 tual difficulties that beset the religious man, which 
 made men like Huxley and Leslie Stephen look upon 
 him as a sceptic at heart. I do not believe he was a 
 sceptic: I believe that he was a man of deep and 
 fervent piety, but with an excessive diffidence in 
 interpreting that piety in terms of religious philosophy. 
 One may agree fully with him that the constant 
 failures and mistakes of our powers of analysis do not 
 touch the truest springs of faith and trust. But his 
 depreciation of rational grounds, coupled with his in- 
 sistence on an external authority, does give oppor- 
 tunity, one must admit, for the enemy to smile. 
 
 He had a very powerful and subtle intellect, and 
 it alarmed him. That seems to me one way of 
 roughly summing up his attitude of mind. His 
 intellect seemed to lead him into regions of thought 
 which provided no consolation to the emotional side 
 of his nature. He vindicated, and rightly, a place for 
 
 22
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 the emotions in daily life and thought. But he went 
 further : he held that our deepest convictions cannot 
 find adequate intellectual symbols, mingled as they are 
 with half-conscious aspirations, longings and "trailing 
 clouds of glory " from other worlds. Here, too, I 
 think we may go with him; our deepest feelings 
 can never be satisfactorily translated into intellectual 
 formulae rational arguments. But and here some 
 of us will, I think, join issue with him he went further 
 still and, for fear of starving the emotional cravings 
 of his nature, he provided every manner of external 
 assistance whether of creed or of ritual to keep 
 alive the flame. It has been well said by Professor 
 William James, " that to an imagination used to the 
 perspectives of dignity and glory, the noble gospel 
 scheme dear to the Protestant mind, the Protestant 
 nature, seems to offer an almshouse for a palace." 
 It is much like the patriotic sentiment of those brought 
 up in ancient empires. How many emotions must 
 be frustrated of their object when one gives up the 
 titles of dignity, the crimson lights and blare of brass, 
 the gold embroidery, the plumed trooper, the fear 
 and trembling, and puts up with a president in a black 
 coat, who shakes hands with you and comes, it may 
 be, from a " home " upon a veldt and prairie with one 
 sitting-room and a Bible on its centre table. It 
 pauperises the monarchial imagination.* 
 
 Catholicism, it has been well said, offers a much 
 richer pasturage and shade to the fancy, is so indulgent 
 
 * Vide Varictits of Religious Experience (JAMES). 
 23
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 in its multifarious appeals to human nature, that Pro- 
 testants will always show to Catholic eyes the alms- 
 house physiognomy. To the Catholic the Protestant 
 seems wanting in adaptability and in imagination; 
 to the Protestant the Catholic seems to pander too 
 much to the senses, and to be over-lax where truth 
 is concerned. 
 
 Coleridge once said of a man that he never looked 
 at Nature except through bits of stained glass. It 
 might be said, I think, of Newman, that he rarely 
 looked at life except through the cloister window. The 
 window has very beautiful stained glass, with charm 
 and power to soothe when the glare of the noonday 
 sun is fierce. None knew better than Newman the 
 weaknesses of human nature and the magical in- 
 fluence stained glass exercises upon the spiritual 
 imagination of men and women. 
 
 For him, Emerson's adjuration to open the sky- 
 light of the soul to the breezes of heaven would be 
 directly to court a sort of spiritual pneumonia. Well, 
 the open-air cure is not, perhaps, for every constitu- 
 tion, and Newman knew how frail and sickly human 
 nature often is. And although many of us may think 
 that the open skylight makes for hardiness, yet our 
 spiritual physicians are by no means of a mind on the 
 matter. Each must find out for himself. Moreover, 
 even if he do not care for all the spiritual drugs that 
 Newman prescribes, there are aspects of his character 
 and work that cannot but appeal to the mind and 
 imagination of all thinking men, 
 
 24
 
 JAMES MARTINEAU 
 
 CERTAIN picturesque externals in the lives of Newman 
 and Robertson * have impressed themselves on the 
 popular imagination. Maurice is known chiefly 
 through his enthusiastic disciple, Kingsley. Yet he 
 wielded an influence on English thought almost as 
 penetrating as Newman and greater than Robertson. 
 
 There was no one man to interpret Martineau, 
 though indirectly he has been an intellectual and 
 spiritual influence upon the thought of the past 
 century second to none, f His thoughts have been 
 filtered through other minds; and his fervent ethical 
 genius has impressed almost every thoughtful man or 
 woman of culture. 
 
 The address that was presented to him on his 
 eighty-third birthday gives more idea of the affection 
 and respect which his genius commanded than 
 columns of ordinary panegyric. This address was 
 signed by the leading scholars and thinkers of Europe 
 and America, without distinction of sect or party. 
 The address, finally revised by Benjamin Jowett, 
 concluded in these words : 
 
 " You have taught your generation that both in 
 politics and religion there are truths above party, 
 
 * Robertson of Brighton. 
 
 t Robertson's sermons owe considerably to Martineau's En- 
 dtavffur's after a Christian Life. 
 
 25
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 independent of contemporary opinion, and which 
 cannot be overthrown, for their foundations are in the 
 heart of man; you have shown that there may be an 
 inward unity transcending the divisions of the 
 Christian world, and that the charity and sympathy 
 of Christians are not to be limited to those who bear 
 the name of Christ; you have sought to harmonise 
 the laws of the spiritual with the natural world, and 
 to give to each their due place in human lif e ; you have 
 preached a Christianity of the spirit and not of the 
 letter, which is inseparable from morality; you have 
 spoken to us of a hope beyond this world; you have 
 given rest to the minds of many. We admire the 
 simple record of a long life passed in the strenuous 
 fulfilment of duty, in preaching, in teaching the young 
 of both sexes, in writing books of permanent value, 
 a life which has never been distracted by controversy, 
 and in which personal interests and ambition have 
 never been allowed a place." 
 
 There is not a word of over-praise. Indeed, there 
 is a simple reticence about the phrasing that must 
 have gratified the recipient. His reply was character- 
 ised by that delicacy and modesty that always 
 informed all his personal references. " To be held of 
 any account by the elite of those to whom I have 
 habitually looked up, including representatives from 
 the foremost ranks of literature, science, philosophy, 
 religion and personal character is an honour simply 
 mysterious to me. To such an escort down the 
 declining path of life what can an old man do but 
 
 26
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 throw out a few faltering words of thanks and love 
 and reverence." 
 
 Some years before this, previous to the publication 
 of Martineau's most important contribution to philo- 
 sophical thought, Mr Gladstone had remarked of him, 
 " He is the greatest thinker of our age." It is clear 
 we are dealing with a personality of no mean power, 
 yet with certain qualities of temperament which have 
 militated against such a wide recognition of his genius 
 as might have been thought inevitable. 
 
 Turning to our classification of temperament, we 
 rind, in the case of Dr Martineau, a most unusual blend 
 of the perceptive the artistic temperament, and the 
 scientific the critical temperament. The perceptive 
 temperament dominated, and to its influence may be 
 attributed Martineau's ready response to the beauty 
 of the world of nature, the attractions of the fine 
 arts, the compelling power of the emotional life. It 
 may be traced in his growing literary style, in the 
 mystical piety of his devotional writings, in that 
 charming old-world courtesy and sweetness of manner. 
 
 It was the first thing that struck the listener who had 
 the privilege to hear Dr Martineau discourse on some 
 congenial subject. In the written word " that severe, 
 that earnest air," to quote Matthew Arnold's well- 
 known line, gave an austere asceticism to his thought 
 more apparent than real. But when face to face with 
 him a wonderful sweetness of disposition and gentle- 
 ness of manner disarmed his profound ethical idealism 
 of any harshness or narrowness. 
 
 27
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 Yet there was another side to his nature. With the 
 heart of a mediaeval saint, the disposition of a St 
 Francis, he had the keen, swift intellect of a modern 
 scientist, the dialectic ability of a Huxley. He 
 reminded one of those old ecclesiastics who were fully 
 girt up for battle beneath their flowing robes, and in 
 the presence of an enemy could wield a sword with 
 the dexterity of the professional soldier. 
 
 One must never forget that he was brought up to be 
 a civil engineer, and had a thorough training in mathe- 
 matics, physics and the mechanical sciences generally. 
 
 He had not Huxley's almost boyish love of a tussle, 
 and mere controversy was ever distasteful to him. 
 
 But when roused by unjust attack, or when he saw 
 some able thinker like Spencer or Tyndall under- 
 mining the Christian faith, there was no one more 
 ready to do battle, and no one more able to defend his 
 own position. 
 
 It is, I think, universally recognised by the ablest 
 materialists and agnostics that Martineau was their 
 most dangerous opponent. I can recall no thinker 
 who has done more intellectually to justify religious 
 faith and bring it into line with the latest discoveries 
 of science than the great Unitarian thinker who so 
 lately passed away. 
 
 In discussing the outlook of Martineau I wish to 
 treat him first as a critic, where the scientific side 
 of the man is most clearly exhibited. Secondly, I 
 wish to treat of him as a preacher, and here the per- 
 ceptive, the Greek element in his nature, is best 
 
 28
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 appreciated. Finally, I would like to touch upon his 
 work as a teacher, where the scientific and perceptive 
 sides meet and mingle. Before doing so it may be 
 interesting to note some personal characteristics which, 
 trivial as they may seem, are not without their bear- 
 ing upon the thinker. 
 
 In the early nineties Martineau's slight, active 
 figure could frequently be seen threading silently the 
 London streets and stopping to look into some favour- 
 ite book shop. Remembering that he was then over 
 eighty, his physical activity was remarkable. He 
 belonged indeed to the race of great old men who 
 defy the ravages of Time. 
 
 He was a magnificent walker, and in his eightieth 
 year thought nothing of a twenty-mile ramble. 
 There is a story of an American visiting him in his 
 Scottish home. One morning there arose a question 
 of diversion: should they walk or drive? Something 
 was said of a walk, and Dr Martineau, pointing to a 
 mountain eleven miles away, proposed a walk thither 
 and return. The American looked at the mountain 
 and gave it in favour of a drive. In his ninetieth year 
 he had to be seriously cautioned for alighting from an 
 omnibus in motion ; and he complained, as if it were 
 something extraordinary, that he was not able to run 
 upstairs as he was wont to do. 
 
 Truly a wonderful vitality, in comparison with 
 which Mr Gladstone's tree-chopping seems child's play. 
 
 Although a preacher for forty-two years, and a 
 college professor for forty-five, there was nothing 
 
 29
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 professorial or academic in his manner. He had a 
 personal charm, a graciousness which attracted young 
 men to him very speedily. There was nothing of the 
 professional cleric or of the dominie about him. He 
 had a delicate sense of humour, and his general 
 conversation was bright and attractive. Intimately 
 in touch with the politics, music and painting of the 
 day, he would treat of these with an ease and pleasant 
 allusiveness very attractive to listen to. He was fond 
 of a good story and would tell it with a special zest if 
 against himself, and no one was quicker to make fun 
 of the pomposity and peculiarities of learned pro- 
 fessors. He told me once about a certain German 
 Professor X, who declared oracularly that no one 
 could understand Hegel but himself. Unfortunately, 
 added Martineau, drily, nobody could understand 
 Professor X. 
 
 Yet whether talking to one in his musical voice 
 about some great problem in philosophy or ethics, 
 or touching lightly upon some topic of the day, one 
 was always conscious of a great and noble soul, and 
 a deeply serious mind. 
 
 As head for many years of the most influential 
 theological college in the country, and as co-editor of 
 a critical review of considerable brilliance, the critical 
 and analytical powers of Martineau were afforded 
 unusual scope for their display. 
 
 There has probably never been any writer at once 
 so able and so fair-minded in the realms of philosophy 
 and kindred subjects. " I could never be moved," 
 
 30
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 he declared, " to give an account of a book by pure 
 antipathy any more than by monotonous assent. 
 The whole interest of literary intercourse, like that 
 of all quickening friendship, is conditional on crossing 
 veins of likeness and unlikeness in thought and 
 character, deepening the zest and sympathy by the 
 need and the possibility of more. And true criticism 
 seems to me the recorded struggle of the reader's 
 mind into closer relations with an author whose inter- 
 mittent bursts, helpful as thev are, still do not enable 
 him clearly to see his way." 
 
 These sentences should be written in letters of gold, 
 and hung up as illuminated texts in the study of every 
 literary man. For they go to the very root of all 
 large-minded criticism. The critic is not a mere 
 caviller, a word splitter; he is an interpreter. In 
 bringing the would-be criticiser into contact with the 
 writer he will necessarily display points of divergence 
 from his own cast of mind; but his main object is to 
 present the subject criticised clearly and fairly before 
 the reader, and thus enable him to judge for himself. 
 
 And with Martineau as with all first-rate critics, 
 the feature that detaches itself for special admiration 
 is not the character of the criticism admirable as 
 that may be but the method of the critic. 
 
 Let us consider a few of these critiques. 
 
 Here is a passage or so from a study of John Henry 
 Newman. " Looking back on the whole influence of 
 Dr Newman's personality and writings we see in it a 
 great preponderance of good. A sense of the sanctity 
 
 31
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 of common duties and self-denials, of the grandeur 
 and power of historical communion and church life, 
 of the true place of beauty and art in worship, has 
 deeply penetrated into the newer religion of England. 
 For the re-union of religious and moral ends, for the 
 reconciliation of the near and temporal, many a heart 
 owes a debt of unspeakable gratitude to the literature 
 of the Oxford school. The one grand sin which we 
 must set off against these merits is a certain want of 
 unconditional and ultimate trust in their own 
 principles. Their system has too often the appear- 
 ance of being constructed on purpose as a refuge from 
 doubts they dare not face. Their intellectual men 
 have been fond of playing with fire and flinging about 
 brilliant scepticisms, eating into the very heart of 
 life, for the chance of inducing flight into their pro- 
 tecting fold. " To obey," they say, " is easier than 
 to believe; " so we will begin from the conscience that 
 we may end with assurance. Good ; but see that you 
 obey out of the belief you have, instead of with a view 
 to a belief which you have not. Conscience has a 
 right to you through and through and must be served 
 without terms, and vainly do you mount her sacred 
 steps, on knees of painful penance, if the thought of 
 your heart be to escape from the outer exposures and 
 threatening skies of doubt into the shelter of a ready 
 temple and the sympathy of a mighty throng. The 
 deepest form of scepticism is seen in the mind which 
 is in haste to believe; which resolves by some violent 
 spring to make an end of darkness, whether the light 
 
 32
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 attained be God's or not. Something of this unfaith 
 lurks in the spirit of the new Catholic party. ' They 
 recognise,' remarks Martineau in one of his flashes of 
 sarcasm, ' the ambassadorial credentials of conscience, 
 and show you in its casket of secrets the very signet of 
 the King of Kings ; on opening the despatch box you 
 find they have stuffed in all the creeds.' ' 
 
 Now I have quoted these passages of mingled 
 censure and appreciation because they afford a clear- 
 cut picture of Martineau's own habits of mind its 
 quickness to detect anything approaching intellectual 
 jugglery, its sensitiveness to all that was lovable or 
 admirable. Newman and Martineau stand at opposite 
 poles of thought the one the most brilliant defender 
 of dogma this age has ever seen; the other the most 
 uncompromising critic of a dogmatic system. Yet, 
 apart from Catholic apologists, such as Mr Wilfrid 
 Ward or Mr W. S. Lilly, one would not find a more 
 sympathetic interpretation of Newman's personality. 
 
 The service done by such a writer as Martineau then 
 is of great service to all earnest students of psychology. 
 In his mingled praise and blame we get a rational 
 presentment of a man. There is no attack on the 
 Catholic theology here. That is a matter for the 
 theological student. There is, however, an attack on 
 Newman's method his way of persuading men to 
 religion which is open to anyone to criticise. 
 
 One other illustration of Martineau's critical 
 ability I select from his remarks on Carlyle. After 
 some passages warmly praising the moral fervour of 
 c 33
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 Sartor Resartus, he analyses the " hero-worship " 
 tendency. " We know," he says, " that where he 
 discovers, as in Mirabeau, great force of mind, he is 
 ready to plead this as a bar of all objections against 
 character, and to insist that in spite of appearances, 
 such brightness of life must carry with it soundness of 
 conscience. But will he turn the problem round and 
 abide by it still? When he finds deep hid in the re- 
 treats of private life a goodness eminent and saintly, 
 a moral clearness and force, great in their way as 
 Mirabeau's keen-sightedness, will he accept the sign 
 in evidence of mighty intellect? Will he say that, 
 notwithstanding the meek and homely look, high 
 genius must assuredly be there? For him as for many 
 gifted and ungifted men, the force which will not be 
 stopped by any restraint on its way to great achieve- 
 ment, the genius which claims to be its own law and 
 will confess nothing diviner than itself, have an 
 irresistible fascination. His eye, overlooking the 
 landscape of humanity, always runs up to the brilliant 
 peaks of power, not indeed without a glance of love 
 and pity into many a retreat of quiet goodness that 
 lies beneath their shelter; but should the sudden 
 lightning or the seasonal melting of the world's ice- 
 barriers bring down a ruin on that green and feeble 
 life, his voice, after one faint cry of pathos, joins in 
 with the thunder and shouts with the triumph of the 
 avalanche. Ever watching the strife of the great 
 forces of the universe, he no doubt sides on the whole 
 against the Titans with the gods; but if the Titans 
 
 34
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 make a happy fling and send home a mountain or 
 two to the very beard of Zeus, he gets delighted with 
 the game on any terms and cries ' Bravo! ' " * 
 
 Surely an admirable piece of criticism on certain 
 aspects of Carlyle's teaching. 
 
 For sheer intellectual power the theological essays 
 of Martineau stand, however, easily first. Many years 
 ago an uncompromising materialist observed, " Dr 
 Martineau is the most formidable opponent we have; " 
 and no one can read his brilliant and closely-reasoned 
 attack upon the agnostic position of Tyndall without 
 admiration for the dialectical power displayed. 
 
 As a rule, controversies between theologians and 
 scientists make poor reading. The scientist has so 
 much the better of it, so far as argument goes. With 
 all his ability and dexterity Mr Gladstone fared badly 
 in his famous controversy in the pages of the 
 Nineteenth Century with Huxley. 
 
 On quite another footing were the dialectic duels 
 between Martineau and Tyndall, and Martineau and 
 Spencer. 
 
 Here was a case of Greek meeting Greek. And a 
 prettier logical display of fencing it would be hard 
 to find. Martineau was an ideal controversialist. 
 He never lost his temper; but when very provoked 
 would, under cover of the most polished courtesies 
 of speech, send in a few rapier-like lunges that caused 
 his opponent to wince. 
 
 One recalls Izaak Walton's instruction for the use 
 
 * Essays, Reviews and Addresses, Vol. I. 
 
 35
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 of the frog : " Put your hook through his mouth and 
 out at his gills, and in so doing use him as though you 
 loved him." 
 
 Martineau certainly provoked his opponents very 
 often in^the gentlest, kindest, but most unmistakable 
 fashion. To read his devotional writings you would 
 have rated him a poet with much of the dreamy 
 mystic in his composition. To read his criticisms you 
 would think him a physicist with a taste for theology. 
 
 Some years ago a friend, wishing to make a compila- 
 tion of extracts from his works, wrote to him for 
 permission. In his reply he said, " Messrs Longmans 
 recently applied to me for permission to issue just 
 such a compilation of extracts from my books as you 
 suggest. I declined it, from long and indeed constant 
 experience of utter disappointment with all antho- 
 logies of this kind formed by lifting out of their 
 context thoughts which in their place come home with 
 force to the reader. When the impression strikes 
 him he naturally refers it to the passage under his 
 eye at the moment and is not aware how dependent it 
 is upon the preparation with which he is brought up 
 to it by the preceding course of thought and tone of 
 feeling. Cut this away, the very same sentiment, 
 flung upon him as a sudden fragment, will have no 
 penetrating power to stir him from within, but only 
 sticks upon his memory, perhaps by one sharp point 
 of expression. I do not deny that there are writers 
 of great depth and wisdom who, themselves thinking 
 in epigrams, admit without injury of being thus taken 
 
 36
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 piecemeal; Carlyle sometimes, Emerson often. But 
 these intuitional and poetic natures are exceptional. 
 And level writers, dependent not on inspired glimpses, 
 but on continuous and coherently linked thought, 
 are wronged when they are pulled to pieces and made 
 to play the prophet instead of the pleader. As my 
 main work of life has been didactic, conformed to the 
 methods and requirements of logic, ethics and philo- 
 sophy, my literary habit has been moulded to the 
 pcdestris oratio and does not rise into the detached 
 flights required by the compiler of oracles." 
 
 There is much truth in this characteristically 
 modest letter, and one realises, directly an attempt 
 is made to illustrate Martineau's excellences as 
 a writer, how often they suffer by being wrested 
 from their context. Still, they do give a suggestion 
 as to the tone of his thought, and, couched in his 
 eloquent diction, carry with them no little power. 
 
 In passing from Martineau the critic to Martineau 
 the preacher we are conscious of a side of his char- 
 acter which would have surprised us much had we 
 not some ground plan of his temperament to guide us. 
 But the close observer will have noted behind the fine 
 gauze-work of his dialectic a white flame of powerful 
 emotion, and it is a significant characteristic of the 
 man that in the pulpit he should drop the weapons of 
 the controversialist and don the robes of the mystic. 
 
 His sermons are devotional poems, not trapped as 
 so many are with a cumbersome theology; indeed, 
 it would be hard to say to what theological school he 
 
 37
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 belonged, breathing at one moment the spiritual 
 fervour and beauty of Catholic piety, at the next 
 the clear intellectual individualism of Protestant 
 thought. 
 
 If they have any fault it is an undue compression of 
 thought, and, however adapted for leisurely reading 
 in the study, must have demanded the closest atten- 
 tion to the sermons when spoken in Liverpool or 
 London. He was not a great preacher in the same 
 way as were Newman and Robertson. His literary 
 style is too heavily charged with ornament to give 
 it that instantaneous power which the lucid periods 
 of Newman invariably possessed. There was a lack 
 of illustration and an avoidance of current problems 
 which made them less attractive to the ordinary 
 listener than the vigorous eloquence of Robertson. 
 None the less even when delivered as many have 
 testified the sermons carried with them a singular 
 charm and power. 
 
 The personality of the speaker with his tall spare 
 figure, ascetic face and fine luminous eyes ; the utter 
 absence of ostentation; the musical voice these 
 things challenged immediate attention. If at the 
 time the full beauty of the thoughts did not reach 
 home they remained in the mind and gradually dis- 
 closed themselves, and the spirit of devotional 
 simplicity, the atmosphere of high endeavour that 
 they breathed, exercised an influence that fascinated 
 even those to whom his theology was but a pretty 
 dream. 
 
 38
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 Many a notable preacher has turned for medi- 
 tative inspiration to those volumes of homily en- 
 titled Endeavours after a Christian Life and Hours 
 of Thought. 
 
 A certain stern melancholy broods over his writ- 
 ings, at times perhaps touching upon austerity, 
 which shows his full appreciation of the darker 
 problems of life, and the puzzles which no theologian, 
 however able, can unravel. Not for an instant did 
 it shake his faith; never did it move him to take 
 shelter behind any dogmatic creed or Church; but it 
 gave added emphasis to his ethical teaching, to his 
 insistence upon our following " the gleam." 
 
 With all his keen admiration of intellectual power 
 and poetic genius he never forgets this, as witness the 
 following passage from one of his sermons : 
 
 " It becomes a favourite maxim that genius is its 
 own law, and is appointed to legislate for others 
 rather than to be under rule itself. The maxim is the 
 more seductive because there is an important sense 
 in which it is really true. In relation to its own 
 special subject be it science or song it is the 
 attribute and necessity of genius to burst the limits of 
 earlier models, and create a type of new excellence to 
 which the canons of established criticisms do not 
 apply. When a Shakespeare has lived, the drama can 
 no longer be judged by the example of Sophocles and 
 the rules of Aristotle. To try the natural history of an 
 Owen or a Darwin by the measures of Linnaeus, and 
 the music of Beethoven and Mendelssohn by the 
 
 39
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 practice of Handel, would be a mere tenacious 
 pedantry. 
 
 " It is from the production of higher minds that we 
 rise to higher rules and leave the former bounds 
 behind. Nor is our moral and spiritual life any 
 exception to this principle. If ever we seize a purer 
 ideal, or are lifted into sublimer worship, it is because 
 some soul of deeper insight and holier aspiration has 
 shown us the way, has charged our vision and opened 
 to us a better than our best. But this is no escape 
 into lawlessness; it is an emergence from lower in 
 order to serve a higher law, a law not arbitrarily made 
 by the self-will of genius, but actually formed and 
 reverently followed in the reality of things. All 
 honour to these legislators of our humanity in the 
 several fields of their supremacy. But turn them not 
 from a blessing into a curse by extending your homage 
 to their incapacities and your indulgence to their 
 sins. That Bacon laid out the groundwork of all our 
 science makes no better of his meanness ; that Newton 
 worked out the lunar theory does not improve his 
 peevishness; that Byron wrote in strains of melody 
 and pathos makes sadder than before his want of 
 purity and reverence of mind. 
 
 " Such infinity belongs not to their insight but to 
 their blindness. . . . Precisely in proportion as 
 they yield to it is the range of their genius lowered. . . . 
 Within his special range we may freely own the title 
 of the man of genius to be a law to himself and to us, 
 seeing that these our admitted rules are not large 
 
 40
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 enough to cover the whole compass and achievements 
 of his faculty. But this, far from being a negation of 
 law or a personal immunity from it, simply identifies 
 him with its higher revelation, and only says that he 
 will be judged by a standard severer and sublimer 
 than our own. That he has the glorious bondage laid 
 upon him of a perfection beyond the limits of other's 
 vision." 
 
 This passage is characteristic of Martineau's dis- 
 position. Larger mental powers connote for him 
 necessarily a more penetrating moral insight; lapses 
 therefore from right conduct are viewed by him with 
 graver disapprobation than in the case of the average 
 individual. And thus, in his view, the great man 
 is the man with the wider vision, the firmer grasp on 
 " the things that are unseen." This view, however, 
 shuts out of sight the special temptations of the 
 artistic temperament. It ignores the kinship be- 
 tween genius and insanity. 
 
 Is Martineau's picture altogether psychologically 
 true? Is it not a fact that the finer appreciation 
 of poetic beauty is gained at the expense of the 
 physical organisation ? And this introduces a nerv- 
 ous instability that intensifies the power of certain 
 temptations. 
 
 The same highly-strung nervous system that ex- 
 presses itself in lyrical raptures may find an unfor- 
 tunate outlet in irritable moods or gusts of passion. 
 To say that genius always excuses these is, one may 
 argue with Martineau, mischievous ; the tendency to
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 idealise the very weaknesses of men of genius deserves 
 nothing but discouragement. Yet surely there are 
 occasions when allowances may be made for them 
 and not only for them but for all men. One good 
 effect of the scientific spirit has been to introduce 
 a larger charity in our moral judgments. A man 
 should be judged, surely, by the strength of his 
 temptations rather than by the brilliance of his 
 faculties ; and the strength of his temptation is a 
 matter of temperament, of organisation. Questions 
 of heredity, environment and education must be 
 taken into account in determining these approxi- 
 mately, for of course we can only determine them 
 approximately. 
 
 Otherwise, you might as well construe brilliancy 
 of complexion as a test of health, forgetting that the 
 hectic flush of the consumptive is a sign of a feeble 
 vitality. Greater intellectual foresight does not imply 
 greater moral insight. 
 
 The occasional note of austerity in Martineau's 
 judgments is due, probably, to his intense individu- 
 alism. His own temperament presented an un- 
 usually happy balance of tendencies; the scientific 
 kept in check the aesthetic, the aesthetic softened the 
 scientific. No undue preponderance showed itself 
 of any faculty. A better instance of mens sana in 
 corpore sano it would have been hard to find, and he 
 had, like all thoroughly healthy men, a kind of im- 
 patience of men and women of less healthy organisa- 
 tion. He looked upon morbid temperaments with 
 
 42
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 a certain chill compassion not unmixed with a faint 
 contempt. Perhaps modern opinion has swung over 
 much to other extreme, and the austerity and severity 
 of Martineau's moral judgments may supply a useful 
 corrective. But the occasional severity of his moral 
 judgments need some modification. 
 
 To turn now to Martineau the philosopher. 
 
 " No one," remarks Mr Carpenter most justly,* 
 " can fail to see that Martineau's interpretation of the 
 world and life is the issue of exalted character. Both 
 ethics and metaphysics rest for him on the incidents 
 of his inner history, and this supplies the clue to the 
 whole future of his thought." Two elements in his 
 education helped to shape all his future thought. " In 
 the first place he had a mechanical training; he was 
 familiarised with conceptions of matter and motion; 
 he learned to take a scientific view of the world, and 
 to explain its elementary relations mathematically as 
 a part of necessary truth. To this habit of mind 
 he remained faithful to his latest years, and this 
 enabled him to distinguish himself so brilliantly in 
 his dialectic warfare with scientists of the agnostic 
 school. 
 
 " In the second place he was taught to live under a 
 persistently high moral tension." A happy tempera- 
 ment he had assuredly ; but men similarly blessed do 
 not often use natural graces of mind and spirit so finely 
 as did James Martineau. His life reads like the life 
 of a mediaeval saint, and the splendour of his intellect 
 
 * James Martincau, by Professor ESTLIN CARPENTER. 
 
 43
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 was ever made to subserve the demands of his moral 
 nature. 
 
 He possessed the humility and simplicity char- 
 acteristic of all very great souls. 
 
 One can, of course, only notice certain broad 
 features of Martineau's philosophy. To do more 
 would involve a consideration of theological doctrines 
 beyond the scope of these papers. Our interest in 
 religious philosophy is the interest of the psycho- 
 logist, not of any theological school, and the difference 
 between the Theist and the Agnostic is a difference 
 of temperament rather than opinion. 
 
 Firstly, The strong individualism of Martineau's 
 
 philosophy. 
 Secondly, The special quality of its optimism. 
 
 Firstly, its individualism. 
 
 In their religious philosophy both Newman and 
 Martineau start from the same position that in the 
 sense of obligation or authority exercised by conscience 
 we find the basis for our belief in a spiritual world. 
 In Newman's case, however, this sense of conscience 
 is too faint to be relied upon absolutely, it needs 
 confirmation. The Being of God, he admits, is as 
 certain to him as the certainty of his own existence. 
 And yet his intellect remains dissatisfied with the 
 mere assurance of God, or from arguments drawn 
 from the general facts of human society and the course 
 of history. And he sees in the vast accumulation of 
 dogma and ritual provided by the Catholic Church a 
 
 44
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 solution for his difficulties. Distrusting the unaided 
 authority of his own mind he leans for support on this 
 infallible authority of the Church. 
 
 It is here that Martineau parts company with him. 
 The conscience and intellect of man, he asserts, give 
 the only reliable authority. Martineau sees in history 
 the continual struggle between truth and error; the 
 treasure is there, but it is in " earthen vessels," 
 and he can see no literature nor institution into 
 which errors both intellectual and moral have not 
 crept. 
 
 There is no uncertainty in his verdict upon popular 
 religion. " A conclusion is forced upon me on which 
 I cannot dwell without pain and dismay, i.e., that 
 Christianity as defined or understood in all the churches 
 which formulate it has been mainly evolved from 
 what is transient and perishable in its sources; from 
 what is unhistorical in its traditions, mythological in 
 its traditions, and misapprehended in the oracles of 
 its prophets From the fable of Eden to the im- 
 agination of the last trumpet, the whole story of the 
 divine order of the world is dislocated and deformed. 
 The spreading alienation of the intellectual classes of 
 European society from Christendom and the detention 
 of the rest in their spiritual culture at a level not much 
 above that of the Salvation Army, are social phe- 
 nomena which ought to bring home a very solemn 
 appeal to the conscience of stationary churches. 
 
 " For their long arrear of debt to the intelligence of 
 mankind they adroitly seek to make amends by 
 
 45
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 elaborate beauty of ritual art. The apology soothes 
 for a time, but it will not last for ever." 
 
 These be bold words, and might have been spoken 
 by a Spencer or Huxley. But a few passages later 
 we find this, the reverse of Spencerean : 
 
 " In the very constitution of the human soul there 
 is provision for an immediate apprehension of God. 
 But in the transient lights and shades of conscience 
 we pass on and ' know not who it is,' and not till we 
 see in another the victory that shames our own defeat 
 and are caught up by enthusiasm for some realised 
 heroism or sanctity do the authority of right and the 
 beauty of holiness come home to us as an appeal 
 literally divine. The train of the conspicuously 
 righteous in their several degrees are for us the real 
 angels that pass to and fro on the ladder that reaches 
 from earth to heaven. And if Jesus of Nazareth, in 
 virtue of the characteristics of His spirit, holds the 
 place of Prince of Saints and perfects the conditions 
 of the pure religious life, He thereby reveals the 
 highest possibilities of the human soul and their 
 dependence on habitual communion between man and 
 God." 
 
 Here then we have a free critical spirit and a 
 devotional spirit in juxtaposition. This is not the 
 place for attempting to show how Martineau aims at 
 justifying his position on intellectual grounds. I 
 simply have to record the nature of his belief; to 
 analyse the process by which he comes to his decision 
 is obviously foreign to our purpose. 
 
 46
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 With Martineau, therefore, authority is internal; 
 with Newman external. It is a mistake to urge, as 
 do certain sympathetic critics, i.e., Dr Mellone, that 
 Martineau rejects entirely dogmatic systems. He 
 does not do so. He realises that in the history of 
 thought even the most rigid and uncompromising 
 dogmas have contained germs of truth which have 
 given them vitality. What he denies is their 
 infallible authority. At the same time he imposes 
 obviously upon the individual a far weightier re- 
 sponsibility than does Newman. We are not all so 
 clear-sighted and fine-minded as Martineau. Some 
 are dwellers in the valley where mists and vapours 
 sweep across the soul, obscuring the light that is 
 never absent from the sun-flushed altitude of his 
 mind, and one can understand why Catholicism or 
 popular Protestanism found a far readier response 
 with the majority of men than the Unitarian faith 
 of Martineau. 
 
 This brings me to the central point of Martineau's 
 individualism his imperative sense of moral obliga- 
 tion. 
 
 It would be impossible with the space at my disposal 
 to follow Martineau into the intricacies of his elaborate 
 and powerful plea for moral intuition as opposed to 
 the prudential hypothesis of Bentham, Mill and 
 Herbert Spencer. I will try and state shortly the 
 points at issue, for they lie at the very root of Mar- 
 tineau's philosophy. " Conscience," urges Spencer, in 
 effect, " is a reflection of prudence. Man ever acts] with 
 
 47
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 reference to ends which must always be in some form 
 his pleasure, happiness, welfare." Again, " Happi- 
 ness," exclaims John Stuart Mill, " is the sole end of 
 human action and the promotion of it the test by 
 which to judge all human conduct. Those who 
 desire virtue for its own sake, desire it either because 
 the consciousness of it is a pleasure, or because the 
 consciousness of being without it is a pain, or for both 
 reasons united." 
 
 This philosophy is a highly persuasive one, and has 
 much to support it. Against this view Martineau 
 contends there are two criteria of judgment 
 prudence and conscience. Prudence is our regulative 
 principle in deciding upon the utilities of conduct; 
 conscience our light and guide in settling between con- 
 flicting motives. The former appoints for our welfare, 
 the latter for our character. Take an illustration 
 of the difference. Shall I buy a piece of land? This 
 question I answer rightly enough by reference to my 
 circumstances and tastes. Shall I right a wrong ? 
 Here I am called to another judgment. Not, Is 
 a certain course wiser ? but, Is a certain course better? 
 The pleasure that ensues from a right action is the 
 fruit of our choice, not its incentive. But if pleasure 
 be the end of action, how explain acts of heroism 
 and self-sacrifice or urge them on others? Because, 
 says the utilitarian, the happiness of the greatest 
 number is what we should aim at. But why should 
 a man incur some privation when it conflicts with the 
 only good at whose disposal you place him? By what 
 48
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 persuasion are you to move him to throw away his 
 all? Either you must tell him that the high conscious- 
 ness condensed into an hour of self-immolation all the 
 possibilities he foregoes in which case you bid him 
 consult for himself under pretence of martyrdom for 
 others or else you must speak to him in quite another 
 tone ; must remind him that when he knows the true, 
 when he sees the just, when he is haunted by the 
 appeal for mercy, a constraint which he cannot 
 question is put upon him to be their witness, however 
 long their dolorous way, however agonising their 
 Calvary. And, speaking thus, you altogether change 
 your voice, and from casting up the account-book of 
 greater happiness are caught and carried away into 
 the hymn of all the prophets.* 
 
 Seeing the unsatisfactory character of the old 
 utilitarianism, Herbert Spencer has explained this 
 intuition that bids us sacrifice ourselves for others, 
 as an inheritance transmitted from the habits of our 
 forefathers, and formed in them by slow accumula- 
 tion of personal experiments. Certainly, admits 
 Martineau, through the evolutionary process the 
 right becomes clearer and more dominating; but 
 an impulse originally selfish or calculated can 
 never evolve into one that is unselfish. The con- 
 straint of society, you urge, originates the intuition. 
 Transport yourselves to the Diet of Worms, and to whom 
 shall we look for the purer moral light ? Not to the 
 Emperor and the vast concourse of princes and nobles 
 
 * Seat of Authority in Religion. 
 D 49
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 and Church dignitaries, but to the one defiant hero 
 there. 
 
 I have indicated the line of thought to be found in 
 Martineau's writing, from his Types of Ethical Theory, 
 A Study of Religion, and A Seat of Authority in Re- 
 ligion, each of them rich in eloquent exposition and 
 searching criticism. 
 
 To turn in conclusion to the colour of Martineau's 
 philosophy. 
 
 That it is not pessimistic is, I think, apparent. 
 But in terming it optimistic some qualification is 
 necessary. 
 
 No student of Martineau's writings can resist the 
 feeling that a certain melancholy underlies them; 
 it might have been seen indeed in the pensive wistful- 
 ness of his fine brow ; it haunts his devotional books 
 and dominates his ethical teaching. Some as R. H. 
 Hutton have traced it to his " attenuated " Christian 
 faith. They think they can discern it in the con- 
 flict between his scientific tendencies and fervent 
 piety. 
 
 This theological explanation does not seem to me 
 quite satisfactory, for something of the same melan- 
 choly can be traced in the personality and writings of 
 both Newman and Maurice. Is it not due rather to a 
 certain Puritan element, a distinctive lack of joyful- 
 ness inseparable, perhaps, from men whose vocation 
 it is to be " voices," crying in the wilderness ? 
 
 A hardness of emotion, outside the range of religious 
 experience, tended I will not say to defective 
 
 50
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 sympathies, but to a want of flexibility in the 
 sympathies. 
 
 In Maurice's case it was more an inability to adjust 
 himself to the lighter amenities of life; a certain 
 shyness and reserve. Martineau, however, if endowed 
 with finer powers of adjustment to the ordinary duties 
 and pleasures of everyday life, was by nature more of 
 the scholar and recluse than Maurice, and less actively 
 interested than he in social politics. With Maurice 
 the community; with Martineau the individual. 
 
 Although Martineau's interests were wider than 
 those of Wordsworth, yet there was in his nature 
 the same stern, meditative rapture. Like Words- 
 worth's Michael, 
 
 " His mind was keen, 
 Intense and frugal ; apt for all affairs, 
 And watchful more than ordinary men." 
 
 Deeply as he loved mystics like Tauler and Pascal, 
 there was more of the logician than the mystic in his 
 own habits of thought. Despite his sensitive response 
 to the influences of the arts, he seemed to be always 
 posting moral sentries at each emotional outlet of 
 the soul, and regarded perhaps with too grudging an 
 eye the ebb and flow of ordinary desires and regrets. 
 But his was a great and beautiful soul. For fearless 
 candour, intellectual foresight and moral insight, our 
 age has seen no finer spirit than James Martineau.
 
 THE SCIENTIST
 
 " It may be that the gulfs will wash us down ; 
 It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, 
 And see the great Achilles, whom we knew ! " 
 
 TENNYSON.
 
 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 
 
 To mention " Huxley " to the orthodox theologian in 
 the eighties of the last century was like the proverbial 
 red rag to the bull, and it must be added that the 
 suggestion of theology upon the redoubtable scientist 
 had a similarly exciting effect. Pious parents kept 
 a stern eye upon the books brought into the house by 
 omnivorous-reading youth, for fear lest one of his 
 pernicious volumes should have strayed in and 
 be disseminating poison to the household. 
 
 When Huxley was appointed one of the scientific 
 lecturers at Edinburgh University, I have been told 
 the " verra guid " folk of the city were transported 
 with rage and terror. 
 
 Why heterodoxy should incapacitate a man from 
 teaching physiology is not perhaps apparent to our 
 more hardened minds ; but in those days there never 
 was such a " bold, bad man " as Thomas Henry 
 Huxley. He was the Mephistopheles of the evan- 
 gelical home and occupied a position similar to Lord 
 Byron in the earlier years of the century. 
 
 He had adopted Darwin's theories, and pressed 
 them into notice with polemical vigour in much the 
 same way as Kingsley had treated Maurice. The 
 result, however, was more sensational, as it seemed 
 
 55
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 little other than a determined attack upon the founda- 
 tions of the Christian faith. 
 
 There is little doubt that Huxley was fond of a 
 fight. He had a fine, lucid, literary style, a natural 
 aptitude for dialectics, and an impatience with the 
 cautious peradventures and hair-splitting logic dear 
 to many theologians. 
 
 But the popular impression of him gained, say by 
 reading his articles hi the Nineteenth Century and 
 watching him try a fall with Gladstone or Dr Wace, 
 needs to be corrected by the personal testimony of 
 those well acquainted with him. 
 
 In appearance, it has been said, he was above the 
 middle height, the white hair without parting was 
 brushed straight back, the lips firm and slightly com- 
 pressed; he had a mobile expression and (what the 
 current photographs do not represent) the eyes full 
 of fire were rather deep set beneath bushy eyebrows, 
 with a look of keenest interest in all around him, often 
 of great trustfulness. 
 
 In his manner and in his appearance there were 
 marked distinction and dignity. The general im- 
 pression left by his face was one of intellectual force 
 and activity rather than of scorn. 
 
 Tennyson and Newman, an intimate friend once 
 observed, always suggested more than they said. 
 There was an unspoken residuum behind their speech 
 which, as Wordsworth said on one occasion of the peak 
 of a Swiss mountain hidden behind the low clouds, 
 " You felt to be there though you could not see it." 
 
 56
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 Huxley, on the contrary, finished his thoughts com- 
 pletely and expressed them with the utmost precision. 
 There was not the ruggedness and the gaps which 
 marked Tennyson's speech, nor the pause, the reserve, 
 the obvious consciousness of suggestion on subjects 
 too wide and intricate for full expression which one 
 felt with Newman. 
 
 The symmetry and finish of Huxley's utterances 
 were so great that one could not bring one's self to 
 interrupt him, even when this completeness of form 
 seemed to be possible only through ignoring for the 
 moment much that should not be ignored. No doubt 
 the deafness, which increased with later years, made 
 his friends yet more ready rather to listen than to 
 talk; but the quickness of his perceptions was so 
 great that dialogue was, in its place, a matter of no 
 great difficulty. If he heard even a word or two he 
 had the clue to the rest and seldom failed to follow it 
 successfully. 
 
 The form of his conversation, as one might have 
 surmised, was dialectical rather than suggestive or 
 meditative. He was very positive in his conclusions, 
 not with the forced partisanship of a special pleader, 
 but with the lucid conviction of a man whose mind 
 was fully made up. He was like a lawyer who is 
 thoroughly convinced of the justice of his contention, 
 and " That is my case, my Lord," would have come 
 naturally at the end of his expositions.* Yet he was 
 not, as some have imagined, intolerant or unfair in 
 
 * Vide Problems and Persons (WlLFRID WARD). 
 
 57
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 debate, whether in private converse or in public. 
 Mr Wilfrid Ward, who, as a fervent disciple of New- 
 man, can certainly not be accused of bias in this 
 matter, has asserted that, so far as his own experience 
 went, the intellectual pleasure he seemed to find in 
 letting each side say its say and do its best prevented 
 the characteristics of the partisan from marring 
 intercourse. 
 
 The influence of the Metaphysical Society upon 
 Huxley's attitude towards theologians was important. 
 
 This remarkable society remarkable inasmuch as it 
 included the greatest thinkers of the time was 
 founded in 1869. The years immediately preceding 
 its formation had, it is said, probably stamped deep 
 upon Huxley's mind a sense of unjust treatment at 
 the hands of professional ecclesiastics. The advocate 
 of Darwinism, and the " higher criticism " of the 
 Scriptures and Huxley was in both ranks had been 
 for years treated simply as the enemies of religion. 
 The distinctions familiar to all of us now, and the 
 admission on all sides of a measure of truth in both 
 phases of speculation, were little thought of in the 
 sixties. The Origin of Species had appeared in 1859, 
 and Colenso had raised the Scripture question about 
 the same time 1859 to ^^9 had been for Huxley 
 years of war and with his very direct and practical 
 mind he saw in the theological protests of the hour 
 nothing but a thoroughly unjust persecution of him- 
 self and his friends for researches undertaken in the 
 interests of truth. The ecclesiastical " obstructives," 
 
 58
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 who condemned him without attending to his argu- 
 ments, remained in his mind for a long time as absolute 
 types of bigotry.* 
 
 The Metaphysical Society did much to bring about 
 a different state of feeling. It originated in a con- 
 versation between Mr James Knowles, editor of the 
 Nineteenth Century, and some friends, including 
 Tennyson. Tennyson suggested the formation of a 
 society, the main object of which should be the sub- 
 mitting to searching criticism the intellectual founda- 
 tions of the spreading agnosticism. " Something must 
 be done," he said, in his abrupt, emphatic manner, " to 
 put down these Agnostics." At first it was proposed 
 to confine the membership to thinkers of a Theistic 
 stamp. Well-known men were sounded as to their 
 willingness to join, among them Dr Martineau. It 
 was characteristic of Martineau's fearlessness that he 
 declined to join a society so constituted. 
 
 " I feel," he wrote, " the deepest interest in these 
 problems, and for the equal chance of gaining and 
 giving light would gladly join in discussing them with 
 Gnostics and Agnostics alike; but a society of 
 Gnostics to put down Agnostics I cannot approve and 
 would not join." 
 
 The scheme was accordingly altered to meet 
 Martineau's wishes, and able Agnostics like Professor 
 Tyndall and Huxley were invited and readily assented. 
 That able Catholic, Dr W. G. Ward (father of Mr 
 
 * Vide Problems and Persons (WILFRID WARD). W. G. Ward 
 and the Oxford Movement ( WILFRID WARD). 
 
 59
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 Wilfrid Ward) took an active part in inducing people 
 to join, and the society could boast of the most 
 remarkable list of names ever met with in a single 
 body. Of statesmen there were Mr Gladstone, Lord 
 Selborne and the Duke of Argyll ; prominent Church- 
 men such as Dean Stanley and F. D. Maurice; 
 Unitarians such as Martineau; Agnostic men of 
 science like Tyndall and Huxley; Agnostic men of 
 letters as Mr John Morley and Leslie Stephen. For 
 the rest, poets and journalists and lawyers of every 
 shade of belief, such as Tennyson, Browning, Sir 
 James Stephen, Sir Frederick Pollock, J. A. Froude, 
 R. H. Hutton, Mark Pattison, Ruskin, Henry Sidg- 
 wick, Sir William Gull, Dr Andrew Clark. 
 
 The first meeting took place at Willis's Rooms, 
 2ist of April 1869; but subsequently the Grosvenor 
 Hotel was chosen as the habitual field of encounter. 
 A good deal of anxiety was felt at first lest some of 
 the startling subjects of debate might, through the 
 medium of the hotel waiters, find their way to the 
 zealots of Exeter Hall. The fear was however 
 allayed when a member on arriving at the hotel was 
 thus greeted by the porter, " A member of the 
 Madrigal Society, sir, I suppose? " Possibly the 
 attendants observed the amount of harmony that 
 prevailed ; or was the porter a bit of a wag? Among 
 the various accounts of the proceedings and the im- 
 pressions of the members the most striking has been 
 furnished by Mr Hutton. 
 
 The following passages occur in an article contri- 
 60
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 buted to the Nineteenth Century by Mr R. H. 
 Hutton : 
 
 " At the meeting of the Metaphysical Society which 
 was held on the loth December 1872," he writes, 
 " Dr Ward was to have read a paper on the question, 
 ' Can Experience prove the Uniformity of Nature? ' 
 Middlemarch had been completed and published a 
 few days previously. The Claimant was still starring 
 it in the provinces in the interval between his first 
 trial and his second. Thus the dinner itself was 
 lively, though several of the more distinguished 
 members did not enter till the hour for reading the 
 paper had arrived. One might have heard Professor 
 Huxley flashing out a sceptical defence of the use of 
 the Bible in Board Schools at one end of the table, 
 Mr Fitzjames Stephen's deep bass remarks on the 
 Claimant's adroit use of his committal for perjury 
 at another, and an eager discussion of the various 
 merits of Lydgate and Rosamund at a third. Father 
 Dalgairns, one of Dr Newman's immediate followers, 
 who left the English Church and entered the Oratory 
 of St Philip Neri with him, a man of singular sweetness 
 and openness of character, with something of a French 
 type of playfulness in his expression, discoursed to me 
 eloquently on the noble ethical character of George 
 Eliot's novels, and the penetrating disbelief in all but 
 human excellence by which they are pervaded. And 
 as I listened to this eloquent exposition with one ear, 
 the sound of Professor Tyndall's Irish voice descanting 
 on the proposal for a ' prayer-gauge ' which had lately 
 
 61
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 been made in the Contemporary Review by testing the 
 efficacy of prayer on a selected hospital ward, capti- 
 vated the other. Everything alike spoke of the 
 extraordinary fermentations of opinion in the society 
 around us. Moral and intellectual yeast was as hard 
 at work in the men who met at that table as in the 
 period of the Renaissance itself. 
 
 " There was every type of spiritual and moral ex- 
 pression. The wistful and sanguine, I had almost 
 said hectic, idealism of James Hinton. The noble and 
 steadfast, but somewhat melancholy, faith which 
 seemed to be sculptured on Dr Martineau's massive 
 brow, shaded off into wistfulness in the glance of his 
 eyes. Professor Huxley, who always had a definite 
 standard for every question which he regarded as dis- 
 cussable at all, yet made you feel that his slender de- 
 finite creed in no respect represented the cravings of his 
 large nature. Professor TyndalTs eloquent addresses 
 frequently culminated with some pathetic indication of 
 the mystery which to him surrounded the moral life." 
 
 At the outset, however, judging from Mr Froude's 
 account, things did not move very smoothly. A 
 speaker at one of the first meetings laid down em- 
 phatically, as a necessary condition to success, that 
 no element of moral reprobation must appear in the 
 debates. There was a pause, and then Mr Ward said, 
 " While acquiescing in this condition as a general 
 rule I think it cannot be expected that Christian 
 thinkers shall give no sign of the horror with which 
 they would view the spread of such extreme opinions 
 
 62
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 as those advocated by Mr Huxley." Another pause 
 ensued and Mr Huxley said, " As Dr Ward has spoken 
 I must in fairness say that it will be very difficult for 
 me to conceal my feeling as to the intellectual degrada- 
 tion which would come of the general acceptance of 
 such views as Dr Ward holds." 
 
 This pleasing change of amenities did not augur well 
 for the brotherliness of the members, but it was the 
 one only piece of uncompromising acrimony. " From 
 that day onwards," says Mr Froude, " no word of the 
 kind was ever heard; perhaps the 'madrigal' sug- 
 gestion of the porter carried a possible ideal into the 
 minds of the members." 
 
 "We thought at first," said Huxley, "that it 
 would be a case of Kilkenny cats. Hats and coats 
 would be left in the hall before the meeting, but there 
 would be no wearers left after it was over to put them 
 on again. Instead of this we came to love each other 
 like brothers. We all expended so much charity, 
 that had it been money we should have been bankrupt. 
 Indeed," he adds, " the society died of too much love." 
 
 It certainly made for a more tolerant spirit among 
 men of every shade of opinion. If it did not " put 
 down" agnosticism, at anyrate it denned more 
 clearly the points at issue. 
 
 "He often resented," said Mr Wilfrid Ward, 
 " being identified with simple destruction in matters 
 of religious faith, and disclaimed all sympathy with 
 the scoffing spirit. His opposition to theology had 
 not meant," he said, " opposition to religion." He 
 
 63
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 wrote in 1894 : " Faulty and incorrect as is the 
 Christian definition of Theism, it is nearer the truth 
 than the creed of some Agnostics who conceive of no 
 unifying principle in the world." 
 
 In fact, the charge frequently levelled against 
 Huxley that he was a materialist is not a correct 
 one, and must be attributed to the common tendency 
 to confuse religious sentiment with theological 
 profession. Even Mr Hutton, who with all his 
 tolerant sympathy is often too theological in his 
 literary criticism, was greatly impressed by Huxley's 
 distaste for dogmatic materialism, and has recalled 
 the most celebrated passage in his most celebrated 
 essay describing human life as something like a great 
 game of chess between men and a hidden player, who 
 always plays on the same rules, but who, as Huxley 
 himself admitted, leaves men to find out by the use 
 of their own wits what those rules are.* 
 
 The passage is so characteristic of Huxley's attitude 
 of mind that it is worth quoting in its entirety. 
 
 " Suppose it were perfectly certain that the life and 
 future of every one of us would, one day or other, de- 
 pend upon his winning or losing a game at chess . Don' t 
 you think that we should all consider it to be a primary 
 duty to learn at least the names and the moves of the 
 pieces ; to have a notion of a gambit and a keen eye 
 for all the means of giving and getting out of check? 
 
 " Do you not think that we should look with a 
 
 * Vide Contemporary Thoughts and Thinkers (HUTTON), "The 
 Great Agnostic." 
 
 64
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 disapprobation amounting to scorn upon the father 
 who allowed his son, or the State which allowed its 
 members, to grow up without knowing a pawn from 
 a knight? Yet it is a very plain and elementary 
 truth that the life, the fortune and the happiness of 
 every one of us, and more or less of those who are 
 connected with us, do depend upon our knowing 
 something of the rules of a game infinitely more 
 difficult and complicated than chess. It is a game 
 which has been played for untold ages, every man and 
 woman of us being one of the two players in a game of 
 his or her own. The chess board is the world, the 
 pieces are phenomena of the universe, the rules of the 
 game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player 
 on the other side is hidden from us. We know that 
 his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we 
 know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake 
 or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance. To 
 the man who plays well the highest stakes are paid 
 with that sort of overflowing generosity with which 
 the strong shows delight in strength. And anyone 
 who plays ill is checkmated, without haste but 
 without remorse. My metaphor will remind some of 
 you of the famous picture in which is depicted Satan 
 playing at chess with man for his soul. Substitute 
 for the mocking fiend in that picture a calm, strong 
 angel who is playing for love, as we should say, and 
 would rather lose than win, and I should accept it as 
 an image of human life. Well, what I mean by 
 education is learning the rules of this mighty game." 
 E 65
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 One of Huxley's most noteworthy mental char- 
 acteristics was his clear and vigorous logical faculty. 
 But impressive in many ways as this illustration is, 
 it lays itself open most assuredly to logical criticism. 
 Can you call the unseen player " always fair, just and 
 patient " if he will checkmate " without remorse " an 
 opponent who in many cases has had no opportunities 
 of learning the rules of the game? On what grounds, 
 other than those of religious faith, could Huxley 
 justify his assertion that the unseen antagonist is 
 " a calm, strong angel who is playing for love and 
 would rather lose than win " ? 
 
 The picture, which would certainly irritate the 
 scientific critic, furnishes a signal instance of how 
 slight a hold logic has upon even the acutest mind, 
 when impelled by those idealising tendencies that 
 claim an equal voice in shaping our view about life. 
 
 So far a general sketch has been made of the man 
 and his temperament. Certain characteristics, how- 
 ever, demand ampler treatment before we can feel 
 that anything like a satisfactory portrait of Huxley 
 has been attempted. 
 
 In the first place I would note his practical common- 
 sense, often lacking in scientists no less than in 
 theologians. Secondly, his passionate integrity. 
 Thirdly, his ethical idealism. 
 
 His great success as a writer on scientific and 
 educational subjects is due to the fact that he was not 
 merely a clever theorist a doctrinaire. He was a man 
 of the world; he knew the practical difficulties that 
 
 66
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 encounter all teachers, for he was not only a man of 
 ideas but a man of action also. Perhaps he was 
 better as a man of action. However that may be, he 
 had that happy knack of adaptability which is the 
 secret of the success of many politicians. 
 
 Roughly speaking, the world may be divided into 
 men of thought and men of action, and properly 
 speaking the one is incomplete without the other. 
 
 We depend on our thinkers for stimulus and 
 inspiration, upon our men of action for showing the 
 workable nature of various hypotheses and turning the 
 dream of the idealist into practical account. The 
 first gives colour, the second substance, to life. 
 
 In the domain of science we have the examples of 
 Darwin and Huxley before us. No man of action 
 if the action is of any value is without ideas, but one 
 element must predominate. With Darwin it was 
 thought and logic; with Huxley it was rather action 
 and practicability. 
 
 His shrewd humour was invaluable here. It en- 
 abled him to detect flaws and weaknesses, and gave 
 penetration to his judgments. In a discussion about 
 some person whose great subtlety of mind was being 
 discussed, Huxley said that the constant over- 
 refinement of distinctions in his case destroyed all 
 distinctness. Anything could be explained away, and 
 so a thing came to mean the same as its opposite. 
 Someone asked, " Do you mean that he is untruth- 
 ful? " " No," replied Huxley, " he is not clear- 
 headed enough to tell a lie." 
 
 67
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 Dean Stanley's impressionable and imaginative 
 nature was brought out by him in an anecdote. 
 Stanley, keenly alive to the newest thought of the hour, 
 liberal by family and school tradition, had sympa- 
 thised in some degree with Colenso's treatment of the 
 Bible, yet his historical impressionableness was re- 
 markable. Huxley explained his position thus. 
 
 " Stanley could believe in anything of which he had 
 seen the supposed site, but was sceptical where he 
 had not seen. At a breakfast at Monckton Mimes', 
 just at the time of the Colenso row, Milnes asked me 
 my views on the Pentateuch, and I gave them. 
 Stanley differed from us. The account of creation in 
 Genesis he dismissed at once as unhistorical ; but the 
 call of Abraham and the historical narrative of the 
 Pentateuch he accepted. This was because he had 
 seen Palestine, but he wasn't present at the creation." 
 
 " It tickled his sense of humour," remarks Leslie 
 Stephen,* " in treating of miracles to call in' Newman 
 as an ally." Newman's doctrine of development 
 admitted equally that the Christian dogma was not 
 taught by the primitive Christians, and that its growth 
 was a process perfectly intelligible and required no 
 supernatural interpreter. Huxley's commonsense was 
 conspicuous in treating of many theological questions. 
 This may be admitted, I think, without necessarily 
 committing oneself to assent to all his conclusions. He 
 had no patience for mere academic subtleties, whether 
 of theology or science. He drew attention to this point. 
 
 * Studies of a Biographer. 
 
 68
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 Agnosticism, according to him, meant simply this, 
 that you are not to accept as an established fact 
 anything not fairly proved. 
 
 His practical commonsense led him into positions 
 which were often inconsistent though none the less 
 interesting on that account. He used materialistic 
 terminology and repudiated materialistic philosophy. 
 
 " Materialism and spiritualism," he said, " are 
 opposite poles of the same absurdity the absurdity of 
 assuming that we know anything about either spirit or 
 matter." In his essay upon evolution and ethics he 
 points out that though so he maintained evolution 
 accounts for morali ty, yet the principle of evolution is 
 not the ethical principle. The ethical progress of society 
 depends not on imitating the cosmic process, but in 
 combating it. And he works round to the conclusion 
 that love is the inspiring principle of a progressive 
 society. His bent of mind, however, was Carlylean 
 rather than Shelleyean. 
 
 He observed on one occasion to Tyndall, " The 
 world is neither wise nor just, but it makes up for its 
 folly and injustice by being damnably sentimental." 
 
 With sentimentality in any branch of thought, 
 notably political and social subjects, he had as little 
 sympathy as George Meredith. He once told an Irish 
 carman to drive fast and the man set off at a hard 
 gallop. " Do you know where you are going? " cried 
 Huxley. " No, yer honner, but onyway I'm drivin' 
 fast." He had no belief in brand-new panaceas for 
 social discontent. Merely " driving fast " without 
 
 69
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 any clear objective seemed to him as mischievous as 
 it was foolish. 
 
 He was, I said, passionately whole-hearted. " A 
 veritable passion for truth," remarks his son, Mr 
 Leonard Huxley, though perhaps the term " truth " 
 suggests more an abstract devotion than that love of 
 the concrete so pronounced in Huxley's case. He 
 had learned much from Carlyle, especially Sartor 
 Resartus. This book had shown him, he says, how 
 that a deep sense of religion was compatible with the 
 entire absence of theology. His strongest conviction, 
 he has told us, was that the one road to the alleviation 
 of human suffering was veracity of thought and action, 
 and the resolute facing of the world as it is when the 
 garment of make-believe by which pious hands have 
 hidden its uglier features is stripped off. " The only 
 religion which appeals to me," he wrote to Romanes, 
 " is prophetic Judaism. Add to it something from 
 the Stoics and something from Spinoza, and some- 
 thing from Goethe, and there is a religion for men." 
 
 He admitted that theologians had recognised 
 realities though in strange forms. Predestination, 
 original sin and the primacy of Satan in this world 
 were a good deal nearer the truth, he imagined, than 
 the comfortable optimism culminating in Pope's 
 doctrine, " Whatever is, is right." 
 
 On the death of his little son, to whom he had been 
 devoted, Charles Kingsley, in his warm-hearted, 
 generous way, had written him a letter of sympathy, 
 and pointed out incidentally some of the belief in 
 
 70
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 which he would himself have found consolation. In 
 his reply Huxley said he had no a priori objection to 
 the belief in immortality. But " it is totally without 
 evidence," and the assertion that an unproved and 
 unprovable doctrine is necessary to morality is 
 altogether repugnant to him. " The most sacred act 
 of a man's life is the assertion of a belief in truth." Men 
 may call him whatever hard names they please, but 
 they shall not call him a " liar." He would have 
 endorsed George Eliot's saying that " the highest 
 calling and election is to do without opium and live 
 through all our pain with conscious clear-eyed 
 endurance." 
 
 On educational matters there is the same plain 
 speaking out, though he touches here on less con- 
 troversial ground. 
 
 In one of his most stimulating essays on A Liberal 
 Education* he remarks, "To every one of us the world 
 was once as fresh and new as to Adam. And then 
 long before we were susceptible of any other mode of 
 instruction Nature took us in hand, and every minute 
 of waking life brought its educational influence, 
 shaping our actions into rough accordance with 
 Nature's laws, so that we might not be ended entirely 
 by too gross disobedience. . . . The question of 
 compulsory education is settled so far as Nature is 
 concerned. Her bill on that question was framed and 
 passed long ago. But like all compulsory legislation 
 that of Nature is harsh and wasteful in its operation. 
 
 * Science and Education. 
 71
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 Nature's discipline is not even a word and a blow, 
 but the blow without the word. It is left to you to 
 find out why your ears are boxed. 
 
 " The object of what we commonly call education 
 artificial education is to make good these defects in 
 Nature's methods. And a liberal education is an 
 artificial education which has not only prepared a man 
 to escape the great evils of disobedience to natural 
 laws, but has trained him to appreciate and seize upon 
 the rewards which Nature scatters with as free a hand 
 as her penalties. That man, I think, has had a liberal 
 education who has been so trained in youth that 
 his body is the ready servant of his will, and does with 
 ease and pleasure all the work that as a mechanism 
 it is capable of; whose intellect is a clear, cold logic 
 engine with all its parts of equal strength and in 
 smooth working order; ready like a steam engine to 
 be turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers 
 as well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind 
 is stored with a knowledge of the great and funda- 
 mental truths of Nature and of the laws of her opera- 
 tions, one who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and 
 fire, but whose passions are trained to come to heel 
 by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience, 
 who has learned to love all beauty, whether of Nature 
 or of Art, to hate all vileness and to respect others as 
 himself." * 
 
 With this idea Huxley looked around him and found 
 much fault with our universities and schools. He 
 
 * Science and Education. 
 72
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 missed what we call nowadays " the humanities," and 
 depreciated the mere academic culture and the super- 
 fluous information miscalled education. 
 
 Throughout his life Huxley insisted on the study of 
 physical science and literature as essential to a sound 
 education. He thoroughly embraced Arnold's dictum 
 that "a criticism of life" is the essence of culture, but 
 he objected to his further proposition that literature 
 contains the materials which suffice for the continua- 
 tion of such a criticism. Culture, he held in common 
 with Arnold, meant something quite different from 
 learning or technical skill. It implied the possession 
 of an ideal, and the habit of critically estimating the 
 value of things by comparison with a theoretic 
 standard. Perfect culture should supply a complete 
 theory of life based upon a clear knowledge alike of its 
 possibilities and of its limitations. But he could not 
 admit that either nations or individuals would really 
 advance if their common outfit drew nothing from the 
 stores of physical science. According to Huxley the 
 distinctive character of our own time lies in the vast 
 and constantly-increasing part which is played by 
 natural knowledge. In fact, the most elementary 
 acquaintance with the results of scientific investiga- 
 tion shows us that they offer a broad and striking 
 contradiction to the opinions so implicitly credited 
 and taught in the Middle Ages. It was only natural, 
 it may be said, that Huxley should lay such stress 
 upon our education in the physical sciences, and give 
 them the preference of a " classical education ' ' ; but few 
 
 73
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 educationalists would deny that there is much in what 
 he says which might be followed with advantage both 
 in schools and colleges. A grounding in the physical 
 sciences physiology, chemistry, geography would 
 afford a far better basis for the average man's educa- 
 tion than the smattering of Greek and Latin which 
 passes for a classical education. Arnold, with all 
 his fine insight into education problems, laid over- 
 much stress upon the literary and the classical side 
 of education. For Huxley was the last person to 
 question the importance of genuine literary education 
 or to suppose that intellectual culture can be complete 
 without it. 
 
 An exclusively scientific training, he says, will bring 
 about a mental twist as surely as an exclusively 
 literary training. The value of the cargo does not 
 compensate for a ship's being out of trim. 
 
 To turn to the third characteristic Huxley's 
 ethical idealism. 
 
 Spencer's important contribution to ethical thought 
 is his attempted reconstruction of ethical theory upon 
 a naturalistic basis. 
 
 It may be of use, however, to state in a few words 
 the general trend of his theory. 
 
 Conscience, in his view, is an inheritance trans- 
 mitted from the habits of our forefathers and formed 
 on them by slow accumulation of personal experi- 
 ments. Hence the sense of moral obligation. The 
 voice within us which proclaims certain things as 
 right, others as wrong, may be traced to some social 
 
 74
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 convenience in a primitive society. Men found out, 
 say, that unless they respected each other's rights of 
 property, society would dissolve: that mutual 
 forbearance in these matters was for the good of the 
 community. Thus the humble beginning of " Thou 
 shalt not steal." These moral intuitions, though the 
 results of accumulated experiences of utility, gradu- 
 ally organised and inherited, have come to be quite 
 independent of conscious experiences.* With this 
 view in its general bearings Huxley also agreed. 
 
 " The end of society," he says, " is peace and 
 mutual protection, so that the individual may reach 
 the fullest and highest life attainable by man. The 
 rules of conduct by which this end is to be attained 
 are discoverable like the other so-called laws of 
 nature by observation and experiment, and only in 
 that way. Some thousands of years of such experi- 
 ence have led to the generalisation that stealing and 
 murder, for example, are inconsistent with the ends 
 of society. There is no more doubt that they are so 
 than that unsupported stones tend to fall. The man 
 who steals or murders breaks his implied contract 
 with society and forfeits all protection. He becomes 
 an outlaw to be dealt with as any other feral creature." 
 
 Facts are, I admit, against the intuitionist, who 
 declares that every man has within him some divinely- 
 implanted instinct of right and wrong. But they 
 seem equally against the evolutionist, who finds in 
 every form of moral obligation some inheritance of 
 
 * Introduction to Herbert Spencer (Professor W. H. HUDSON). 
 
 75
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 the past, and who links together evolution in the 
 natural world and evolution in the world of 
 humanity. 
 
 And in his ethical theory Huxley, it seems to me, is 
 far more satisfactory, far clearer in his appreciation of 
 contradictory facts than Herbert Spencer. And this 
 is due to the fact, I think, that Spencer, with all his 
 magnificent intellect, always mistrusted the emotions 
 and seemed to have entertained an almost morbid 
 horror of being swayed by mere feeling. 
 
 Not so Huxley; even at the risk of being inconsist- 
 ent, he never shrank from giving expression to many 
 sentiments, instincts and promptings, for which he 
 had no logical label, and could not readily place in his 
 philosophy. 
 
 His remarkable work on Ethics and Evolution 
 deserves the closest consideration. 
 
 This work was, he explained, an effort to put the 
 Christian doctrine that Satan is the prince of this 
 world upon a scientific foundation. As it is by far 
 the most important contribution of the scientist to 
 ethical thought, I may be excused for dwelling on it 
 at some length. 
 
 Man, the animal, has worked his way to the head- 
 ship of the sentient world, and has become the superb 
 animal which he is by virtue of his success in the 
 struggle for existence. The conditions having been 
 of a certain order, man's organisation has adjusted 
 itself to them better than that of his competitors in 
 the cosmic strife. In the case of mankind, the self- 
 
 76
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 assertion, the unscrupulous seizing of all that can be 
 grasped, the tenacious holding of all that can be kept, 
 which constitutes the essence of the struggle for 
 existence, have answered. In his successful progress 
 throughout the savage state man has been largely 
 indebted to those qualities which he shares with the 
 ape and the tiger; his exceptional physical organisa- 
 tion; his cunning, his sociability, his curiosity and 
 his imitativeness ; his ruthless and ferocious destruc- 
 tiveness when his anger is roused by opposition. But 
 in proportion as men have passed from anarchy to 
 social organisation, and in proportion as civilisation 
 has grown in worth, these deeply-ingrained serviceable 
 qualities have become defects. " After the manner 
 of successful persons," says Huxley, " civilised man 
 would gladly kick down the ladder by which he has 
 climbed." He would be only too pleased to see 
 " the ape and tiger die." But they decline to suit 
 his convenience; and the unwelcome intrusion of 
 these boon companions of his hot youth into the 
 ranged existence of civil life adds pains and griefs 
 innumerable and immeasurably great to those which 
 the cosmic process brings on the mere animal. In 
 fact, civilised man brands all these ape and tiger 
 promptings with the name of "sins"; he punishes 
 many of the acts which flow from them as crimes; 
 and in extreme cases he does his best to put an end 
 to the survival of the fittest of former days by axe 
 and rope. 
 
 Now, whatever differences of opinion may exist 
 77
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 among experts, there is a general consciousness that 
 the ape and tiger methods of the struggle for existence 
 are not reconcilable with sound ethical principles. 
 
 So the position thus far reached by Huxley is that 
 the ideals of the animal man and the ethical man are 
 in direct conflict. 
 
 Yet, however diverse their views on philosophical 
 and religious matters, most men are agreed that the 
 proportion of good and evil in life may be very 
 sensibly affected by human action. Hence the 
 pressing interest of the question, To what extent 
 modern progress in natural knowledge, and more 
 especially the general outcome of that progress the 
 doctrine of evolution is competent to help us in the 
 great work of helping one another ? 
 
 The propounders of what are called the " ethics of 
 evolution" adduce a number of more or less sound 
 arguments in favour of the origin of the moral senti- 
 ments. But what about the immoral sentiments? 
 They have been as Spencer would readily admit 
 no less evolved; and admit therefore of as much 
 natural sanction for the one as the other. But you 
 may urge the immoral sentiments thieving, murder, 
 etc. would disrupt society. Therefore the others 
 have a superior claim upon us. But there are 
 qualities pity, compassion, self-sacrifice for which 
 I think we can find no justification on grounds of 
 utility for the high position into which we place 
 them. And are we going to say that thieving and 
 murder is only bad in so far as it would be what one 
 
 78
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 might call a social inconvenience? Huxley must, I 
 think, have had some such thoughts as these in his 
 mind when he wrote, " Cosmic evolution may teach 
 us how the good and the evil tendencies of man may 
 have come about; but in itself it is incompetent to 
 furnish any better reason why what we call good is 
 preferable to what we call evil than we had before." 
 Here, surely, he seizes the very kernel of the problem. 
 
 The " evolution " doctrine, every thoughtful man 
 must feel, throws a flood of light on the " how " of 
 things ; but in attempting to explain the " why " 
 Huxley virtually admits that it has failed. 
 
 " The ideal of the ethical man," he writes in an 
 essay published five years previous to the above 
 work, " is to limit his freedom of action to a sphere in 
 which he does not interfere with the freedom of 
 others; he seeks the common weal as much as his 
 own, and indeed as an essential part of his own 
 welfare. Peace is both the end and means with him, 
 and he founds his life on a more or less complete 
 self-restraint, which is the negation of the unlimited 
 struggle for existence. He tries to escape from his 
 place in the animal kingdom, founded on the free 
 development of the principle of non-moral evolution, 
 and to establish a kingdom of man, governed solely 
 upon the principle of moral evolution." 
 
 To Huxley we are indebted for the clearing up of a 
 popular misconception about the phrase " survival of 
 the fittest." There is, as he points out, an unfortun- 
 ate ambiguity in the phrase " fittest." " Fittest " 
 
 79
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 has a connotation of "best"; and about "best" 
 there hangs a moral flavour. In cosmic nature, 
 however, what is fittest depends upon the conditions. 
 If our hemisphere were to cool again the survival of 
 the fittest might bring about, in the vegetable king- 
 dom, a population of more and more stunted, and 
 humbler and humbler organisms, until the " fittest " 
 that survived might be nothing but lichens and 
 microscopic organisms. 
 
 And so we come to this. Social progress means a 
 checking of " the cosmic process " at every stage and 
 the substitution for it of another, which may be called 
 " the ethical process," the end of which is, not the 
 survival of those who may happen to be the fittest, in 
 respect of the whole of the conditions which obtain, 
 but of those who are ethically the best.* 
 
 " The ethical process," adds Huxley in a note, 
 " is, strictly speaking, also part of the general process 
 of evolution." 
 
 That, of course, no doubt may be so, but the quality 
 of the process is not the same, and it further opens up 
 more problems than it can solve. However, a further 
 question awaits us. 
 
 How could ethical nature, as the offspring of 
 cosmical nature, be at enmity with it ? Huxley meets 
 this question thus. 
 
 Taking, as an example, the ground on which his 
 house was built, he shows how the industry of man has 
 converted a patch of weed-choked, economically-un- 
 
 * Vide Evolution and Ethics. 
 80
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 productive soil into a fruitful garden, andhow, if the skill 
 and labour by which this has been done, are withdrawn, 
 Nature, whose action never pauses, will re-assert her 
 sway and convert the place into a wilderness. The 
 garden is a work of art, as is the house which stands 
 in it, as is everything that man has produced. And 
 the effect of all that he does is to oppose and for a 
 time arrest the cosmic process, limiting the area of 
 ceaseless struggle and competition. Applying this to 
 human society, which at its origin was as much a 
 product of organic necessity as that of the bees, " the 
 ape and tiger " instincts are found dormant. It was 
 based on selfishness. The race was to the swift and 
 the battle to the strong. Even then, however, in 
 the earliest grouping of a few families into clans, the 
 blood tie, whose source is in the parent, engendered a 
 sympathy which assured unity, and therefore some 
 restraint on individual assertion. For sympathy is 
 the germ plasm of ethics. Knowledge, the only 
 begetter of a wider sympathy, breaks down tribal 
 divisions, and with the obvious advantages which 
 co-operation secures, enlarges the narrow borders of 
 primitive altruism, limits the area of conflict, and 
 mitigates the horrors of a state of warfare which, at 
 the outset, was chronic. To this the state of mankind, 
 after thousands of years of advance from the feral 
 state, witnesses, since only in the minority of all who 
 have ever lived has that advance been made, and even 
 among these there needs small provocation to rouse 
 the lightly-sleeping tiger. Hence, whenever self- 
 F 81
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 restraint is practised, there is checking of the cosmic 
 process of bitter struggle by the ethical, denned by 
 Huxley as the " evolution of the feelings out of which 
 the primitive bonds of human society are so largely 
 forged into the organised and personified sympathy we 
 call ' conscience.' ' 
 
 But, as the scientist admits,* the theory of evolution 
 encourages no millenarian anticipations. Life as a 
 whole upon this globe is but a brief chapter of that 
 history, and the life of man a momentary episode in 
 the chapter. 
 
 The " human " note in Huxley is more vibrant than 
 in Spencer. No man can repress his emotional nature 
 sternly as he did, year after year, without suffering 
 some disruption in his nature. Spencer's was natur- 
 ally a kindly disposition, and he was not blind to the 
 suffering of his fellow-creatures or careless of their 
 welfare. But his social sympathies suffered from a 
 kind of chilly timidity; and he could not have said, as 
 did Huxley, " If I am to be remembered at all, I 
 would rather it should be as ' a man who did his best 
 to help the people ' than by any other title." 
 
 In some ways it must seem strange that Huxley 
 should have felt so high an admiration for Tennyson's 
 work as a thinker and artist. Tennyson's strong 
 views on immortality contrast with Huxley's emphatic 
 Agnosticism, and one would not have thought on a 
 first comparison that the two men had much in 
 common. But they had, and the more the two 
 
 * Professor Huxley (EDWARD CLODD). 
 82
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 personalities are considered the more remarkable, I 
 think, will be found the points of contact. There was 
 the same careful accuracy of observation and attention 
 to detail; the same testing of views and theories, and 
 the same prompt emotional temperament kept sternly 
 in check, and not always discoverable beneath a 
 rugged exterior. That curious mixture of scepticism 
 and wistfulness which runs through Tennyson's poetry 
 can be detected in the letters and conversation of 
 Huxley. Neither man would suffer fools gladly, and 
 each had a measure of reserve and a critical eye which 
 made them seem unsympathetic to the casual observer. 
 Yet each man was easily moved through his affections, 
 and each man has expressed in much the same 
 language his feeling as to the power of love in the 
 world. Much of Tennyson's work suggests the work 
 of an imaginative man of science a scientist with the 
 supreme gift of verse. 
 
 It will be urged, of course, that Tennyson's general 
 attitude towards Agnosticism (after In Memoriam) 
 was one of increasing dislike and impatience. This 
 is true ; but the most violent hostility always comes 
 from the men whose temperaments tend to approxi- 
 mate. The Low Churchman has more in common 
 with the Nonconformist than the High Churchman ; 
 but he is frequently more hostile in his attitude on 
 that very account. 
 
 Yet the difference in the case of these two men was 
 due not so much to difference of temperament (as in 
 the case of Wordsworth, for instance, whose entire 
 
 83
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 attitude of mind was wholly opposed to that of Huxley), 
 as to the greater predominance in Huxley's case of 
 the rationalistic spirit. Remember the difference in 
 the men's vocation, recollect the work in which Huxley 
 all his life was engaged, and you will marvel not that 
 the conclusions which Huxley reached were different, 
 but that he and Tennyson should have had so much 
 in common. 
 
 For at heart Huxley was an idealist. The scientific 
 spirit never swayed him so completely as it swayed 
 Herbert Spencer. 
 
 It gave him that power of sincerity, that dislike of 
 vague emotionalism that often passes currency as 
 religion. He hated sentimentalities in any form 
 most of all in religious dress and when he detected 
 them he laid about with a hearty good-will. 
 
 But to look upon him as merely a negative force is 
 a mistake. In his energy, perhaps, he uprooted some- 
 times harmless flowers as well as rank weeds. In his 
 love for clarity of thought he possibly underestimated 
 the valueof dimly-outlined feelings which strongly affect 
 our lives although incapable of sharp definition. But 
 no man better respected honesty of conviction (how- 
 ever that conviction might differ from his own) and 
 integrity of purpose. No man had a higher sense of 
 duty in private and civic life; with all his pugnacity 
 there was a strain of great tenderness and affection in 
 his nature. 
 
 " Men, my dear," he said in one of his delightful 
 letters to a friend, " are very queer animals, a mixture
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 of horse nervousness, ass stubbornness, and camel 
 malice, with an angel bobbing about unexpectedly 
 like the apple in the posset, and when they can do 
 exactly as they please are very hard to drive." 
 
 Some, I think, have seen only the " ass stubborn- 
 ness " and " camel malice " in Thomas Henry Huxley, 
 and have missed the " bobbing angel," which is a pity. 
 
 Beneath all his virile energy there was a passionate 
 wistfulness that in a less active, less self-controlled 
 nature would have made for pessimism. 
 
 But there is nothing in Huxley's stoic philosophy 
 of that poignant fatalism vibrant in the pleasure 
 gospel of Omar Khayyam. 
 
 Not for him the despairing call, " Let us eat and 
 drink, for to-morrow we die : " he is made of sterner 
 stuff and echoes rather the words of W. K. Clifford, 
 " Let us take hands and _help, for to-day we are 
 alive together."
 
 THE POET
 
 "Time may restore us in his course, 
 Goethe's sage mind and Byron's force ; 
 But where will Europe's latter hour 
 Again find Wordsworth's healing power ? " 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD.
 
 WORDSWORTH 
 
 CERTAIN philologists derive the words " minister " and 
 " minstrel " from the same root. This fact is not with- 
 out significance. The poet and the prophet are funda- 
 mentally at one. The bard, his " heart made quiet by 
 the deep power of joy, sees into the heart of things." 
 No mere " idle singer of an empty day " is he, but one, 
 in Tennyson's words, 
 
 "... bravely furnished all abroad to fling 
 
 The winged shafts cf truth, 
 
 To throng with stately blooms the breathing Spring 
 Of Hope and Youth." 
 
 The two poets of our age whose utterances have had 
 the most significant prophetic ring about them, and 
 who have seen into the heart of things more deeply 
 than any of their contemporaries, are, I think, William 
 Wordsworth and Robert Browning. 
 
 It would be hard to find a greater contrast in tempera- 
 ment and method than the reserved, austere recluse of 
 Rydal Water and the quick, eager man of the world 
 whom Tennyson once laughingly threatened, with 
 reference to his liking for dinner-parties, that he would 
 " die in a white tie." 
 
 Wordsworth profoundly interested in man caring 
 little for Tom, Dick and Harry; Browning loving Tom, 
 
 89
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 Dick and Harry better than all the "still sad music 
 of humanity" heard from meditative heights. 
 
 In short, they differed upon almost every point 
 except one and that one was that " the world's no 
 blot for us: it means intensely and means good." 
 Wordsworth and Browning were heartily agreed upon 
 this, and each in his own way set about to define some 
 philosophy of life in terms of poetic art, such as would 
 express this feeling. 
 
 Shelley's interpretation of the universe as permeated 
 by love appealed obviously more readily to Browning 
 than Wordsworth's interpretation of harmony, " a 
 central peace subsisting at the heartof endlessagitation." 
 But the artist in Shelley was greater than the teacher, 
 and in Wordsworth and Browning, great artists though 
 they were, their matter rather than their manner was 
 the primary consideration. 
 
 No doubt this didactic element often marred the 
 poetic value of their work. Let that be conceded. 
 The fact remains, in both poets the prophetic element 
 dominates to an unusual extent. 
 
 With Browning's philosophy I am not concerned in 
 this paper except to say that it supplements in the most 
 admirable way that of Wordsworth, and that after 
 seeking with the Lake poet 
 
 "The silence that is in the starry sky, 
 The sleep that is in the lonely hills," 
 
 and realising with him that 
 
 "The meanest flower that blows can bring 
 Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears, 
 QO
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 it is good for one's soul to leave nature - worship 
 for crowd-worship. All the same, Browning's crowd- 
 worship is appreciated the better for having one's 
 brain cleared and one's pulse steadied by the cool, 
 bracing air of the Cumbrian Hills. 
 
 I am not concerned here especially with what 
 Wordsworth esteemed his " message " to his genera- 
 tion. When a poet is most self-conscious of his message 
 he is the least convincing. The wind of inspiration 
 bloweth where it listeth, and when the poet laboured 
 to unburden his moral, his guardian angel, more often 
 than not, declined to be an accessory to the fact. The 
 moral of a poem is the spirit of the poem, its dynamic 
 quality; not, as Charles Lamb pithily said, a tag to be 
 appended like the " God send the good ship into har- 
 bour " at the end of a bill of lading. 
 
 But Wordsworth, especially in his medial years, was 
 a supreme artist, and the poet in him would have 
 nothing to do with the formal moralist. 
 
 The very reverse of Lamb in temperament, he yet 
 runs the same risk as Lamb did of being wrongly esti- 
 mated. Lamb, full of whims and caprices, extra- 
 vagant moods and a wilful childishness that puzzled 
 and offended serious men like Carlyle, was often put 
 down as a wild, irresponsible creature, amiable and 
 amusing, perhaps, but with no solid depth. And yet 
 as we know, those surface qualities which so charmed 
 some and so offended others, concealed a fine moral 
 beauty and astonishing strength of character. 
 
 Wordsworth, on the other hand, whose portentous 
 91
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 seriousness often moved the irrepressible Elia to some 
 prank, was obviously deficient in those touches of light 
 and shade, those little graces of disposition that endear 
 a man to his friends, and it is thought by many that he 
 was a cold, self-sufficient man. But he was not cold, 
 and behind his natural reserve glowed a strong, deep, 
 even violent feeling. His affection for his sister and 
 daughter bears witness to this. But he had subjected 
 his feelings to a rigorous self-control, knowing his own 
 passionate nature. 
 
 De Quincey speaks significantly of the brooding 
 intensity of his eye, and the bursts of anger at the report 
 of evil doings, and Coleridge has referred to him in some 
 memorable lines as an " ever-enduring man." 
 
 Among the many pen sketches of the man, that 
 of Carlyle is perhaps the happiest, especially the 
 unerring penetration shown in the concluding 
 sentence: 
 
 " He talked well in his way, with veracity, easy 
 brevity and force, as a wise tradesman would of his 
 tools and workshops, and as no unwise one would. His 
 voice was good, frank and sonorous, though practically 
 clear, distinct and forcible rather than melodious; the 
 tone of him business-like, sedately confident, no dis- 
 courtesy, yet no anxiety about being courteous; a fine, 
 wholesome rusticity, fresh as his mountain breezes, sat 
 well on the stalwart veteran and on all he said and 
 did. You would have said he was a usually taciturn 
 man, glad to unlock himself to audiences sympathetic 
 and intelligent when such offered itself. His face bore 
 
 92
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 marks of much, not always peaceful, meditation, the 
 look of it not bland or benevolent so much as close, 
 impregnable and hard. The eyes were not very brilliant 
 but they had a quiet clearness; there was enough of 
 brow and well-shaped; rather too much of cheek; face 
 of squarish shape and decidedly boyish ; large-boned, 
 lean, and still firm knit, tall and strong-looking when 
 he stood, a right good old steel-grey figure, with a fine 
 rustic simplicity and dignity about him, and a veracious 
 strength looking through him." 
 
 His treatment of Hartley Coleridge will serve to 
 extenuate many little ungracious mannerisms. When 
 all hope of reclaiming Hartley from drink was over, 
 Wordsworth paid for his lodgings, took care of him and 
 treated him with gentle, large-hearted consideration to 
 the day of his death. 
 
 It has been well said that " a man who had not some- 
 thing of the fighter in him could never have defied the 
 world as he defied it. His imaginative faculty made 
 him a poet, but under all his intellectual life there 
 throbbed the pulse of a valorous restlessness, and he 
 had in him the pith and sinew of the hero . . . not a 
 cheerful man, but a man who after a long battle has won 
 the secret of peace, and walks a solitary path, clothed 
 with silence, and winning from others the reverence due 
 to the hermit and the sage." * 
 
 Miss Martineau, in her interesting description of him, 
 
 has depicted him as being often attended by half a 
 
 score of cottagers' children, the youngest pulling at his 
 
 * Wordsworth, by Professor RALEIGH. 
 
 93
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 cloak or holding by his trousers, while he cut ash 
 switches out of the hedge for them. 
 
 It is a pretty touch, and may be taken with other 
 and less amiable vignettes of the " good old steel-grey 
 figure." 
 
 There was very little of the dreamer in Wordsworth, 
 scarcely any emotional by-play in his poetry. Imagina- 
 tion of a high order you will encounter constantly, but 
 scarcely a touch of those fancies so dear as a rule to the 
 poet's heart. He hoarded his emotional experiences 
 with jealous care and deliberate austerity, and before 
 exposing them to public view tested their worth at 
 the exacting mint of spiritual meditation. 
 
 Unlike his great contemporary, Coleridge, he de- 
 clined to drift with every chance current of emotion, 
 but steered his course with steady purpose towards his 
 goal, the oneness of man with the elemental forces of 
 life. 
 
 That this method of repression carried with it limita- 
 tions is obvious. Variety, light and shade must needs 
 be sacrificed. On the other hand, it certainly gave 
 depth and intensity, whence came what Matthew 
 Arnold finely called " the bare, sheer, penetrating 
 power " of his best work. 
 
 Nature to Wordsworth was not a puzzling mechanism 
 but a luminous organism. The relentlessness of 
 natural laws that appalled Tennyson, " A Nature red 
 in tooth and claw," scarce troubled Wordsworth at all. 
 He felt so strongly behind it all a pervading harmony 
 and brooding peace. The peace which Wordsworth 
 
 94
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 felt in the presence of the mountains and dales, the 
 woods and meadows, was not the dreamful ease of the 
 lotus land, for it induced oft "a noble restlessness." 
 It is, as he himself expresses it, 
 
 "A central peace, subsisting at the heart 
 Of endless agitation." 
 
 Wordsworth is sometimes spoken of as if he had 
 shirked as poet the wilder and sterner aspects of Nature, 
 and had contented himself with her sunnier moods. 
 (Really, to hear some people speak of him one would 
 think he had been some foolish old man with an un- 
 accountable weakness for pet lambs and blinking stars 
 and rhapsodies on wayside flowers.) The active prin- 
 ciple that speaks to Wordsworth's soul from daffodil 
 and primrose, from the blue sky and setting sun, is no 
 less to be found in an Alpine storm. In a fine passage 
 in " The Prelude " he tells us of 
 
 " Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn, 
 The torrents skirting from the clear blue sky, 
 The rocks that muttered close upon our ears, 
 Black drizzling crags that spake by the wayside 
 As if a voice were in them, the sick sight 
 And giddy prospect of the raving stream, 
 The unfettered clouds and region of the Heavens. 
 Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light 
 Were all like workings of the mind, the features 
 Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree, 
 Characters of the great Apocalypse, 
 The types and symbols of eternity, 
 Of first, and last, and midst, and without end." 
 
 No other poet has better realised the intimate vitality 
 95
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 of Nature, or pictured in more magnificent language 
 the coolness and the calm wrought into man's soul by 
 communion with the earth. 
 
 The presence of a mighty transcendent power, 
 manifesting itself in Nature, was as strong and as vivid 
 to Wordsworth's mind as was the presence of that 
 power, manifesting itself through the world of men and 
 women, vivid to the mind of Browning. The matter 
 of the universe was merely the vesture of a great 
 spiritual power ; a rock, a tree, a flower, a sunrise, were 
 for him varying manifestation of this unifying prin- 
 ciple. 
 
 Thus he speaks of times when 
 
 "The gross and visible frame of things 
 Relinquishes its hold upon the sense, 
 Yea, almost on the mind itself, and seems 
 All Unsubstantialised." 
 
 He gazes around him and 
 
 " Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth 
 And ocean's liquid mass in gladness lay 
 Beneath him. Far and wide the clouds were touched 
 And in their silent faces could be read 
 Unutterable love. Sound needed none, 
 Nor any voice of joy ; his spirit drank 
 The spectacle ; sensation, soul and form 
 All melted into him ; they swallowed up 
 His animal being ; in them did he live, 
 And by them did he live ; they were his life. 
 In such access of mind, in such high hour 
 Of visitation from the living God. 
 Thought was not ; in enjoyment it expired, 
 No thanks he breathed, he professed no regret ;
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 Rapt into still communion that transcends 
 The imperfect offices of prayer and praise 
 His mind was a thanksgiving to the power 
 That made him ; it was blessedness and love. " 
 
 And the peace that he finds everywhere at the heart 
 of Nature fills the poet's heart with a deep, abiding joy 
 not the ecstatic rapture of Shelley, but a rich, 
 measured contentment. 
 
 In the brightness of a spring morning he is conscious 
 of this joy: 
 
 " It was an April morning : fresh and clear. 
 The Rivulet, delighting in its strength, 
 Ran with a young man's speed ; and yet the voice 
 Of waters which the river had supplied 
 Was softened down into a vernal tone. 
 The spirit of enjoyment and desire, 
 And hopes and wishes, from all living things 
 Went circling, like a multitude of sounds." 
 
 And yet the placid lake can awaken pleasure just as 
 keen : 
 
 " The calm 
 
 And dead still water lay upon my mind 
 Even with a weight of pleasure, and the sky, 
 Never before so beautiful, sank down 
 Into my heart, and held me like a dream." 
 
 The last passage, with its beautiful simile, reminds 
 us of Wordsworth's superb power of actualising 
 abstract impressions, especially silence and its con- 
 verse sound. 
 
 He is the poet of the ear just as Shelley is the poet of 
 G 97
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 the eye, and never more felicitous than in conveying 
 some phase of silence, tone of sound. 
 
 The following passages will illustrate to some extent 
 the dominant characteristic, for, as Shelley said, 
 Wordsworth has awakened " a kind of thought in 
 sense." The silence of the hushed elements in a 
 famous sonnet : 
 
 " The winds that would be howling at all hours 
 And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers." 
 
 " To lie and listen to the mountain flood 
 Murmuring from Glaramara's inmost caves. 
 
 " ... A gentle shock of mild surprise 
 Had carried far into his heart, the voice 
 Of mountain torrents. " 
 
 How distinctively Wordsworthian these lines. 
 What poet other than Wordsworth would have pre- 
 ferred the sound to the pictorial effect of the torrent? 
 Shelley in particular would have delighted in dwelling 
 on the prismatic effect of the sunshine upon the waters. 
 Shelley, indeed, is a direct contrast, and insists on 
 colour where we might reasonably expect that sound 
 would have attracted him. Take his famous " Ode to 
 the Skylark." He is more concerned with colour effects 
 than the song of the bird. 
 
 " Higher still and higher 
 
 From the earth thou springest 
 Like a cloud of fire 
 The blue deep thou wingest." 
 
 Then again, in the well-known description of skating
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 ("The Prelude") with what suggestive power does 
 Wordsworth convey the still, frosty, sensitive atmo- 
 sphere : 
 
 " So that the darkness and the cold are fled. 
 
 Meanwhile the precipices rang aloud, 
 The leafless trees and every icy crag 
 Tinkled like iron, while far-distant hills 
 Into the tumult sent an alien sound 
 Of melancholy not unnoticed. " 
 
 For suggesting silence, the restfulness of evening, and 
 the spacious quietnesses of the country: 
 
 " It is a beauteous evening calm and free, 
 The holy time is quiet as a nun 
 Breathless with adoration, the broad sun 
 Is sinking down in its tranquillity." 
 
 " Love had he found in huts where poor men lie ; 
 His daily teachers had been woods and rills, 
 The silence that is in the starry sky, 
 The sleep that is among the lonely hills." 
 
 As a rule it is in broad, massive effects that Words- 
 worth excels, but he could also give us delicate vignettes 
 that Tennyson himself a master in this line has not 
 excelled. 
 
 As, for instance: 
 
 " Flaunting summer when she throws 
 Her soul into the briar rose." 
 
 " 'Twas summer and the sun had mounted high ; 
 Southward the landscape indistinctly glared 
 Through a pale steam, but all the northern downs 
 In clearest air ascending, showed far off 
 A surface dappled o'er with shadows fleecy 
 From brooding clouds." 
 
 99
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 Sketches like these live in the memory along with the 
 exquisite scenic pictures of Southern England in " In 
 Memoriam " and " Enoch Arden." 
 
 I might multiply illustrations of the joyousness of 
 Nature, but space prevents my doing so, and many will, 
 I am sure, recur to your minds. The poems throb with 
 this great elemental happiness, from the mountain 
 and river to the daffodils that " outdid the sparkling 
 waves in glee," and to the asseveration that " every 
 flower enjoys the air it breathes." 
 
 If we take such a phenomenon of Nature as a sunrise 
 and compare the distinctive treatment of other poets, 
 we shall get a clearer idea of the Wordsworthian point 
 of view than by any amount of elaborate analysis. 
 
 Here is Shelley: 
 
 " Lo, the sun upsprings behind ; 
 Broad, red, radiant, half reclined 
 On the level quivering line 
 Of the waters crystalline ; 
 And before that chasm of light, 
 As within a furnace bright, 
 Column, tower, and dome and spire, 
 Shine like obelisks of fire." 
 
 The delicate, ethereal music of Shelley sends up a 
 song of rapture. He asks for nothing more than to 
 enjoy the sheer loveliness of the vision. If it conveys 
 any intellectual idea, it is the idea of liberty. This you 
 may trace in the various allusions to sunrise in " Queen 
 Mab " and the " Revolt of Islam," and in the verse 
 quoted the morning light touches for him the city of his 
 dreams the great Republic. 
 100
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 Again: 
 
 " Let there be Light, said Liberty, 
 And like Sunrise from the sea 
 Athens arose." 
 
 Or else the sunrise seems to embroider some pagan fancy 
 as in the " Hymn of Apollo " : 
 
 " The sleepless Hours who watch me as I lie 
 Curtained with star-inwoven tapestries 
 From the broad moonlight of the sky ; 
 Fanning the busy dreams from my dim eyes, 
 Waken me when their master, the grey Dawn, 
 Tells them that Dreams and that the moon is gone. 
 
 Then I arise and climbing Heaven's blue dome, 
 I walk over the mountains and the waves, 
 Leaving my robe upon the ocean's foam ; 
 My footsteps pave the clouds with fire ; the caves 
 Are filled with my bright presence ; and the air 
 Leaves the green earth to my embraces bare." 
 
 Now listen to Keats : 
 
 " Rain-scented eglantine 
 
 Gave temperate sweets to that well-wooing Sun. 
 The lark was lost in him ; cold springs had run 
 To warm their chilliest bubble in the grass. 
 Man's voice was on the mountains, and the mass 
 Of Nature's lives and wonders puls'd ten-fold 
 To feel the sunrise and its glories old." 
 
 Note the difference in the atmosphere. With all its 
 shimmering loveliness, the sunrise of Shelley is like a 
 dream picture. The colouring is there, but you never 
 feel the sunrise. Now in Keats's lines there is the 
 human touch, the scent of the flowers awakened by the 
 sun's warmth, and the sound of human voices, the 
 multifold life of sentient things begins anew. 
 101
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 In Byron's verse, on the other hand, the poetic sensi- 
 bility of the poet to the pictorial beauties of sunrise but 
 subserve to suggest to his restless mind that another 
 day's enterprise has started. 
 
 "The morn is up again, the dewy morn 
 With breath all incense and with cheek all bloom, 
 Laughing the clouds away with playful scorn, 
 And living as if earth contained no tomb 
 And glowing into day : we may resume 
 The march of an existence." 
 
 Nature is a glorious background for man's energies 
 this seems to be Byron's thought. 
 
 Despite differences, one bond of union unites all 
 the romantic poets Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, 
 Shelley a passionate devotion to Nature which we do 
 not find in the later poets. Tennyson's feeling for 
 Nature is that of the artist rather than the lover, and 
 he has dwelt on her disquieting just as often as on her 
 harmonious moods. In " In Memoriam " the ex- 
 quisite etchings of sunrise and sunset, spring and 
 autumn, are closely interwoven with the spirit of the 
 mourner, and in the finest of all note the philosophic 
 under-note : 
 
 " And suck'd from out the distant gloom 
 A breeze began to tremble o'er 
 The large leaves of the sycamore, 
 And fluctuate all the still perfume. 
 
 And gathering freshlier overhead, 
 
 Rock'd the full-foliaged elms, and swung 
 The heavy-folded rose, and flung 
 
 The lilies to and fro, and said, 
 IO2
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 ' The dawn, the dawn, ' and died away ; 
 And East and West, without a breath 
 Mixt their dim lights like life and death, 
 
 To broaden into boundless day." 
 
 Note the change in the attitude, the minute exacti- 
 tude of one who was a scientist as well as an artist ; the 
 detached position, the breeze that ushers in the morn, 
 speaks to him of the mystery of life and death. The 
 very sunrise suggests metaphysics. He does not 
 identify himself with Nature. 
 
 It is not without significance that the reader of 
 Arnold's poetry finds plentiful allusions to sunset, but 
 not one, except perhaps a fleeting one-line, half-hearted 
 reference to sunrise. In Browning, however, we find 
 a suggestion of Shelley's attitude when he passes from 
 his pictures of men and manners to note some phase of 
 Nature. 
 
 The sunrise in " Pippa " is perhaps the most char- 
 acteristic : 
 
 " Day ! 
 
 Faster and more fast 
 O'er night's brim, day boils at last ; 
 Boils, pure gold over the cloud cup's brim 
 Where spurting and suppressed it lay, 
 For not a froth flake touched the rim 
 Of yonder gap in the solid gray 
 Of the Eastern cloud, an hour away ; 
 But forth one wavelet, then another curled ; 
 Till the whole sunrise, not to be suppressed, 
 Rose, reddened, and its seething breast 
 Flickered in bounds, grew gold, then overflowed the world." 
 
 There is a touch of the romantic passion here, nothing 
 103
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 of the botanist nor of the philosopher; a frank joy in 
 beauty of the sunrise. But with Browning the signi- 
 ficance lies in its testimony to the universal vitality of 
 Nature, and he hastens after this tribute to express : 
 
 " Oh, Day ! If I squander a wavelet of thee : 
 Then shame fall on Asolvo, mischief on me. " 
 
 There is nothing of the airy abstraction dear to Shelley. 
 Sunrise does not suggest liberty so much as practical 
 service. 
 
 Finally let us turn to Wordsworth. Of his many 
 descriptions I select the one early in " The Prelude " 
 as being the most typical: 
 
 " Magnificent 
 
 The morning rose in memorable pomp, 
 Glorious as e'er I had beheld in front 
 The sea lay laughing at a distance ; near 
 The solid mountain shone, bright as the clouds, 
 Grain-tinctured, drenched in empyrean light ; 
 And in the meadows and the lower grounds 
 Was all the sweetness of a common dawn 
 Dews, vapours, and the melody of birds. 
 And labourers going forth to till the fields. 
 
 My heart was full ; I made no vows, but vows 
 Were then made for me ; bond unknown to me 
 Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly, 
 A dedicated Spirit." 
 
 Thus the sunrise is for Wordsworth, as indeed is every 
 mood of Nature, a time of spiritual consecration. In 
 none of the other quotations whatever their merits 
 may be is there a suggestion of this identification 
 between Nature and man, where an ordinary sunrise, a 
 common dawn, comes into the poet's heart as a great 
 
 104
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 spiritual awakening. He is not content, as is Keats, 
 with depicting the earthly loveliness ; he can feel it no 
 less than he, but is chary of luxuriating in emotions that 
 he feels should be turned to spiritual account. Not 
 liberty, as with Shelley, but discipline is the keynote of 
 Wordsworth's philosophy. Nor with Browning is he 
 content to see in it one phase merely of the vitality in 
 the universe. It does not suggest practical duties: it 
 inspires practical duties. 
 
 I may, perhaps, better illustrate the difference 
 between Tennyson's and Wordsworth's treatment of 
 Nature if by an extract I remind you of the exquisite 
 scenic embroidery in " Maud." This lover's fancy: 
 
 " There has fallen a splendid tear 
 From the passion flower at the gate, 
 She is coming, my dove, my dear, 
 She is coming, my life, my fate ; 
 The red rose cries, ' She is near, she is near ' ; 
 And the white rose weeps, ' She is late." 
 The larkspur listens, ' I hear, I hear' ; 
 And the lily whispers, ' I wait.'" 
 
 Or this: 
 
 " I know the way she went 
 Here with her maiden posy, 
 For her feet have touched the meadows 
 And left the daisies rosy. " 
 
 Few could be blind to the artistic beauty of these grace- 
 ful fancies, but of course we know in our dull, prosaic 
 moods they are but " love's conceits," or what Ruskin 
 called the " pathetic fallacy." 
 105
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 Now, compare with these pretty fancies the vital 
 connection Wordsworth suggests between Nature and 
 a young girl's beauty in that familiar poem : 
 
 " Three years she grew in sun and shower, 
 Then Nature said, ' A lovelier flower ' 
 On earth was never sown ; 
 This child I to myself will take ; 
 She shall be mine, and I will make 
 A lady of mine own. 
 
 The floating clouds their state shall lend 
 
 To her ; for her the willows bend ; 
 
 Nor shall she fail to see 
 
 Even in the motions of the storm 
 
 Grace that shall mould the maiden's form 
 
 By silent sympathy. 
 
 The stars of midnight shall be dear 
 
 To her ; and she shall lean her ear 
 
 In many a secret place 
 
 Where rivulets dance their wayward round. 
 
 And beauty born of murmuring sound 
 
 Shall pass into her face ! " 
 
 Indeed, so far from being a mere poetic fancy, the 
 above poem is really a statement in terms of poetry, of 
 the great scientific generalisation, the conservation of 
 energy. And the latest results of science and the trend 
 of modern philosophy seem to me to support the Words- 
 worthian conception of Nature the conception of 
 an immanent and transcendent principle unifying the 
 phenomena of nature. 
 
 Rousseau's cry, " Return to Nature ! " carried with it 
 far deeper implications than, perhaps, he himself or his 
 contemporaries at first realised. 
 
 106
 
 JN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 The revival of romantic feeling that took place in the 
 closing years of the eighteenth century had turned the 
 thoughts of the poet from the boudoir and the town to 
 the cottage and the moorland. But from the time of 
 Thomson, through the work of Gray, Collins, Burns and 
 Cowper, till the publication of the Lyrical Ballads, 
 the awakening sense of wonder and passion had given 
 men not only new eyes and ears with which to observe 
 and appreciate Nature, but a sympathy with the 
 elemental naturalness and sincerity of rustic life. 
 Wordsworth loved the country no less for its rugged 
 sincerity than for its tranquil beauty. 
 
 The Arcadia of the elder poets, with its Strephons 
 and Chloes and pretty artificialities, was swept aside. 
 Wordsworth interpreted the spiritual significance of 
 the peasant ; Crabbe, with greater realism if less imagina- 
 tion, his actual condition and circumstances. Here 
 the country found its novelists as well as its poets. The 
 Brontes made the lonely wilds of Yorkshire articulate, 
 and in OUT day Thomas Hardy has found in the peasants 
 of Wessex a strength, tenacity and massive force of 
 character for which he looked in vain to the men and 
 women of the towns. Even the fastidious artist 
 Tennyson was most successful in his characterisation 
 when dealing with his Northern Farmer and other coun- 
 try folk. There was a certain rough, barbaric strain 
 in his nature that fitted him especially for this kind of 
 work. 
 
 Browning certainly had more to say of the men and 
 women in cities, and of the subtleties of the town, yet 
 107
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 he is rarely happier than dealing with elemental types, 
 and some of his most successful characterisations have 
 the breath of the country, like " Pippa," " Pompilia," 
 " Balaustion." 
 
 And this brings us to Wordsworth's treatment of 
 man. Nature had awakened his earliest inspiration; 
 under her influence he had dedicated himself to the life 
 of the interpretative imagination. And he saw man 
 if I may so put it through Nature's eyes, dwelling, 
 therefore, not on accidents of temperament and dis- 
 position that go to differentiate men and women from 
 each other, but on those primal qualities of humanity 
 where man and Nature touch and blend. 
 
 And thus his love of Nature is transferred to the 
 shepherd and simple dalesmen of the West, and after 
 them to ordinary men and women with ordinary joys 
 and sorrows. 
 
 The strong Republican sympathies of his earlier 
 years gave a glow to his pictures of rural life where the 
 real and ideal meet and blend, and where the humdrum 
 is spiritualised. In later years, when the latent con- 
 servatism of his nature gained the mastery, and when 
 he shrank from the Revolutionary watchword that 
 inspired Shelley throughout life, his characterisation is 
 less sure, and where once he had been content to let his 
 pictures tell their own tale, he is anxious to emphasise 
 some particular moral. 
 
 But already he had done much for the agricultural 
 poor that Dickens was to achieve later for the town 
 
 poor had drawn attention to the tender homeliness of 
 108
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 their lives, shown their fearless independence and 
 rugged sincerity. Indeed, the sentiment of that hack- 
 neyed strophe from " Lady Clara Vere de Vere " concern- 
 ing "kind hearts " and "simple faith" is more essen- 
 tially Wordsworthian than Tennysonian in spirit. And 
 his knowledge of peasant ways and of the peasant 
 character was gained by patient, watchful investiga- 
 tion. He believed in them and he admired them, and 
 with the passion of a scientist he collects eagerly facts 
 and traits that may help him to build up his portraits. 
 And it is ever one thing he is on the look-out for ; some- 
 thing to inspire man's higher faculties. He watches 
 men and women with the expectant gaze of a man who 
 is looking for some particular attitude or posture which 
 he is anxious to portray. No doubt by this method he 
 missed a great deal of rich human material, but he is a 
 moralist at heart, with one steady purpose in view, and 
 leaving aside much that was fascinating and perplex- 
 ing, he contents himself with a few broad, simple issues. 
 And there, at his best, he exhibits a massive splendour 
 of compelling power. There is a fine sedative influence 
 about Wordsworth's poetry which soothes and tran- 
 quillises rather than enervates, and John Stuart Mill, 
 distracted by the political problem of the day, turned 
 to him with infinite relief. " I felt myself," he says, 
 " at once better and happier as I came under their in- 
 fluence." The curative influence attributed to " light 
 rays," from which heat rays have been excluded, 
 suggests an analogy with the influence of Wordsworth's 
 work. The " heat rays " of poetry find little place in 
 109
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 his calm, meditative muse; all that can fever or dis- 
 tract has been eliminated. What remains is a benefi- 
 cent focus of cool light. Many have been the sick 
 minds since Mill's time on whom the " medicine " of 
 Wordsworth's poetry has wrought a like change. 
 
 Few poets neglect to pay homage to the moon and 
 nightingale. Indeed, from time immemorial they have 
 been considered as essentially poetic " properties." It 
 is characteristic of Wordsworth to openly confess a pre- 
 ference for the dove, regarding the emotional ecstasies 
 of the other bird with scarce-concealed disapproval. 
 Wordsworth regarded all extravagances of emotion 
 much as the ultra-puritan regards dancing. As for the 
 moon, so far from suggesting lovers' vows and pretty 
 sentimentalities to the poet, it gives him one of the 
 most striking illustrations of man's power to transform 
 his weaknesses to strength. 
 
 " Within the soul a faculty abides 
 That with interpositions which would hide 
 And darken, so can deal that they become 
 Contingencies of pomp, and serve to exalt 
 Her native brightness. As the ample moon 
 In the deep stillness of a summer even, 
 Rising behind a thick and lofty grove 
 Burns like an unconsuming fire of light 
 In the green trees, and kindling on all sides 
 Their leafy umbrage forms the dusky veil 
 Into a substance glorious as her own." 
 
 The mystery of moonlight has no attraction for 
 Wordsworth as it had for Coleridge. He does not 
 
 regard it primarily with the artist's eye, but with the 
 no
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 eye of the philosopher. Not that it failed to appeal to 
 the artist in him, but the artistic thrill is utilised by the 
 poet to illustrate a spiritual experience. There is 
 something magnificent about the way in which this 
 hardy Cumbrian poet resolutely shaped his imagina- 
 tive life, moulding his emotional experiences and sup- 
 pressing any fretful and fitful desires, with a view to 
 one harmonious whole. 
 
 Like one of the hills beneath which he dwelt there was 
 a grand severity and noble simplicity about his char- 
 acter. And in the lofty atmosphere of his thought we 
 catch a glimpse of 
 
 " . . . truths that wake 
 To perish never, 
 
 Which neither listlessness nor mad endeavour, 
 Nor all that is at enmity with joy, 
 
 Can utterly abolish or destroy ! " 
 
 III
 
 KEATS AND ROSSETTI 
 
 (The Ideal of the Artist) 
 
 EVERY poet must of necessity be attracted to whatever 
 is beautiful in the world beauty of form, sound or 
 tint. It was Wordsworth's mission to seek for beauty 
 in meadow and woodland and the mountain top, and 
 to interpret this beauty in spiritual terms. Coleridge 
 sought for the beauty that lay in the nebulous border- 
 land between the seen and the unseen. For Byron, 
 beauty was more an elemental force than a tranquil 
 spirit. Beauty to Keats was a religion, a faith, a creed. 
 It was not, as for Wordsworth and Coleridge, the 
 vesture in which a great truth is clad; it was truth in 
 its very essence. Shelley loved beauty also and wor- 
 shipped her, but she appeared to him in blood-coloured 
 robes, and he saw in her the Goddess of Freedom, 
 whereas for Keats she was the Goddess of Repose. The 
 Hellenic spirit touched both poets, but in different 
 ways. One of its characteristics, the passion for 
 liberty, burned with a pentecostal fire in the soul of 
 Shelley ; whereas Keats, in his finest work, gave 
 complete expression to its passion for beauty of form. 
 And if one may venture on so prosaic a subject as 
 mathematics for an illustration can it not be said that 
 in poets such as Keats, Tennyson and Rossetti we may 
 112
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 study the statics of beauty, whereas for its dynamics 
 we go to Shelley, Byron and Swinburne ? It is with the 
 former aspect of beauty that the following remarks are 
 concerned, for in those poets who love to contemplate 
 beauty in her reposeful moods one can follow most 
 clearly the ideal of the artists. Once regard beauty as 
 a force and you intellectualise her at once. In Shelley 
 particularly you cannot dissociate the sentiment of 
 beauty from the idea of liberty and certain social 
 ideals. 
 
 And to consider poets like Shelley and Byron apart 
 from the ideas they proclaimed is to do some injustice 
 to their work. I do not deny that fugitive lyrics of 
 Shelley may be enjoyed by anyone with music in his 
 soul and for whom the watchwords of the French 
 Revolution liberty, equality, fraternity are mean- 
 ingless phrases. But I do feel that much of the signi- 
 ficance of Shelley's work is lost, especially his longer 
 poems, unless they are approached by those to whom 
 the ideals of the Revolution are vital realities. And 
 unless one can thoroughly enter into the sickness of 
 heart and disillusionment that invaded many souls 
 after the ghastly hour of " The Terror," it is impossible 
 to estimate fairly the mood or rather moods of a 
 man like Byron. 
 
 But the object of this article is to study the artist 
 pure and simple. With the poet as politician or social 
 reformer it has no concern. It deals with the poet as 
 artist. And for this purpose I know of no two writers 
 in the last century who better lend themselves to this 
 H 113
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 treatment than Keats and Rossetti. Beauty, of course, 
 admits of no analysis, and no logic is potent to press 
 home its claim upon a mind insensible to its influence ; 
 while to those who instinctively feel the beauty in 
 things, as the flower instinctively turns towards the 
 sunlight, exposition may seem superfluous. And yet 
 I think it may be possible to distinguish certain char- 
 acteristics which, either separately or concurrently, 
 create an atmosphere of beauty. 
 These three suggest themselves: 
 
 (1) A fine congruity of manner and matter- 
 
 symmetry. 
 
 (2) The power of vitalising and transfiguring 
 
 commonplaces colour 
 
 (3) A subtle mingling of the sensuous and super- 
 
 sensuous perspective. 
 
 I have borrowed an analogy from a sister art to 
 better suggest my meaning. Any one of these may 
 contribute to the beauty of a picture, and they prevail 
 in varying degree according to the character of the 
 painter. Some are better as colourists, others excel as 
 draughtsmen. 
 
 Rossetti, of course, interests us in his double capacity 
 of painter and poet, but it is chiefly as a colourist that he 
 excels in his pictures, his draughtmanship being notori- 
 ously careless; whereas the symmetrical excellence of 
 his poems is extraordinarily fine. It seems to me that 
 he expressed his genius far more completely in litera- 
 ture than he did in painting. 
 
 Although not a painter, the pictorial suggestiveness 
 114
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 of Keats's poetry proved a fruitful inspiration to the 
 pre-Raphaelite group of which Rossetti was the most 
 distinguished representative. The extreme fondness 
 for elaboration of detail, and the outlook upon nature, 
 not as a rhythmic pageant of colour, but as a study in 
 still life, is especially noticeable in the paintings of this 
 school. It has been well said that the pre-Raphaelites 
 arranged "images and impressions as the Japanese 
 arrange flowers, so that each may keep its perfect 
 independence and colour." 
 
 The pre-Raphaelites, as the name implies, were 
 enamoured of the early Florentine painters who pre- 
 ceded Raphael, and it was because Keats resembled in 
 his methods the methods of these painters that they 
 were so attached to his poetry. It must not be thought, 
 however, that men like Rossetti, Millais and Holman 
 Hunt aimed merely at reproducing the characteristics 
 of the Tuscan school, which was admittedly crude in its 
 technique. They admired these painters chiefly for 
 their sincerity of aim and simple devotional feeling, 
 whereas they felt that the successors of Raphael were so 
 under the spell of his genius that all real individuality 
 was crushed. Ruskin, in his Modern Painters, had pro- 
 tested against the academic traditions which kept 
 young artists making school copies of Raphael. Pre- 
 Raphaelites recorded this protest in a practical manner. 
 In substance, therefore, it was a groping after individu- 
 ality, sincerity. Looking at the literary aspects of the 
 movement we can see in it a reaction from the complex, 
 philosophical poetry of the mid-century, a desire to 
 "5
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 return to the tradition of the romantic poets and to 
 restore the spirit of beauty to English verse. 
 
 Before discussing certain aspects of the work of 
 Keats and Rossetti some personal characteristics 
 invite attention. 
 
 Keats is commonly imagined as a sickly hysterical 
 youth. As a matter of fact he was a bright, enthusi- 
 astic youth, shy and reserved at times, but in the 
 company of friends sane and cheerful in talk, and often 
 with a vivacious humour of which there is little trace 
 in his work. Afterwards disease sapped his energies 
 and he became moody; but to the last he was brave 
 and stoical. The best side of Keats's nature is not 
 displayed in the love-letters to Fanny Brawne. 
 
 It has been thought of both Rossetti and Keats that 
 they were men who surrendered themselves to the 
 sensuous impressions of life, crying out, like the 
 mariners in Tennyson's poem, for " dreamful ease." 
 This is quite a mistake. Each man suffered from ill- 
 health, and disease sapped to some extent their powers 
 of volition. But each had power, grit and splendid 
 capacity for work. The critical faculty of Keats was 
 of fine quality, though of course his intellectual powers 
 were not commensurate with those of Rossetti. The 
 vapid emotionalism of the Esthetic School received 
 no encouragement from their master, Rossetti, who 
 insisted on the necessity for " fundamental brain- 
 work " in poetry. 
 
 Before chloral had shadowed his life and ruined his 
 nervous system Rossetti was as breezy, boisterous and 
 116
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 genial as an open-hearted boy. He was absolutely 
 devoid of affectation, generous in his praise of others, 
 and attracted his fellow-creatures by some personal 
 charm, or perhaps eccentricity, not in the least in- 
 fluenced by social worth and scarcely at all by intellec- 
 tual merit. 
 
 No doubt there is a strain of morbidity in both 
 Keats and Rossetti; indeed, it is inseparable from the 
 intense artistic temperament. But in neither case can 
 it be said to have injured their work, and it was kept 
 well in check by a strong commonsense. 
 
 In the warmth of his sympathies Keats was as re- 
 markable as Rossetti. Less virile than his successor, 
 and less dominating in his personality, he had, on the 
 other hand, a strain of tenderness and consideration for 
 others absent in Rossetti. 
 
 With these preliminary remarks I turn to a brief 
 consideration of their work. 
 
 It will be convenient to consider the characteristics 
 suggested separately. 
 
 (i) Symmetry. 
 
 In looking first of all at the poetry of Keats it is 
 natural to turn to the incomparable Odes, where the 
 poet's genius finds its completest expression. When 
 we realise that these poems were written within a 
 month or so of each other by a youth of twenty-four, 
 it is easier to appreciate what Tennyson meant when 
 he remarked that had Keats lived he would have been 
 " the greatest of us." Even as it is, for amazing beauty 
 117
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 of form they stand on a higher level than the fine Odes 
 of Wordsworth, and if at moments, as in the " Ode to a 
 Nightingale," the surge of romantic feeling seems to 
 overflow and passion touch the confines of hysteria, 
 it is marvellous on the whole that one with such a 
 sensitive, sensuous nature as Keats had should have 
 combined the warmth and glow of passion with the 
 splendid, deliberate restraint of classic art. 
 
 In his earlier work, in " Endymion " and " Isabella," 
 with all their richness of colour, the reader is conscious 
 of a brilliance that is often fatiguing to the eye, and 
 amidst lines of wonder and delight, ill-chosen and un- 
 pleasing phrases. But with the advent of " Hyperion " 
 the period of splendid immaturity had passed. 
 
 For many readers, no doubt, " Hyperion," with its 
 Olympic deities, is less interesting than " Endymion " 
 with its burden of restless love, or " Isabella " with its 
 tender sentiment. It has been objected that Milton's 
 influence is too overshadowing, and the fragment too 
 much in the nature of an experiment. 
 
 But the Miltonic influence, with its chastened 
 eloquence and stately sonorous music, was precisely 
 what Keats needed. An experiment no doubt it was, 
 and the poet did well to leave the poem a magnificent 
 fragment. Before " Hyperion " he had shown how 
 brilliant a colourist he was, but his draughtsmanship 
 had been defective. In the Odes the draughtsmanship 
 is only a shade less perfect than the colouring. 
 
 With the colouring, however, we are not concerned 
 for the moment. The draughtsmanship, the symmetry 
 1x8
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 claims our attention. Take as an instance the ex- 
 quisite " Ode on Autumn." 
 
 " Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, 
 Close bosom friend of the maturing sun ; 
 Conspiring with him how to load and bless 
 With fruit the vines that round the thatch eaves run ; 
 To bend with apples the moss'd cottage trees, 
 And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core." 
 
 How every word, every line, every suggestion carries 
 with it the autumnal atmosphere. Nor is there any 
 philosophising, as we should find with Tennyson, who 
 sees in autumn a time of decay, the herald of approach- 
 ing dissolution. 
 
 " The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, 
 The vapours weep their burdens to the ground." 
 
 Lovely lines, but there is a dirge about them. Not 
 so Keats; he can enjoy to the full the several delights of 
 the varying seasons. 
 
 Listen to him : 
 
 " Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they ? 
 Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, 
 While barred clouds bloom the soft dying day, 
 And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue ; 
 Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn 
 Among the river sallows, borne aloft, 
 Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies ; 
 And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourne ; 
 Hedge crickets sing ; and now with treble soft 
 The redbreast whistles from a garden croft, 
 And gathering swallows twitter in the skies." 
 
 Surely here is one of Nature's moods seized upon and 
 119
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 expressed unerringly in terms of art. The poetry 
 comes naturally as Keats was wont to declar poetry 
 should " as leaves to a tree." 
 
 He entered into the life of Nature as unreservedly as 
 Wordsworth and as passionately as Shelley. " The 
 setting sun," he writes, " will always set me to rights; 
 or if a sparrow come before my window, I take part in 
 its existence and pick about the gravel." 
 
 When he first began to write, shaken with the violence 
 of his own emotions, the acuteness of his sensibilities, 
 he could only stammer eloquently. The wealth of his 
 perceptive life bewildered and embarrassed him. 
 Gradually he found speech, and .although an Oriental 
 extravagance of emotion breaks out from time to time, 
 suggesting to our Western temperaments hysteria 
 rather than passion, no poet has excelled Keats at his 
 best for deliberate loveliness of workmanship. He 
 treats words as William Morris treated the handicrafts, 
 as though he loved them. Indeed, the thought that 
 inspired him as a poet, the thought condensed into those 
 well-known lines in the " Ode on a Grecian Urn " 
 
 " ' Beauty is truth, truth, beauty,' that is all 
 Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know," 
 
 lies at the very root of Ruskin's teaching and Morris's 
 social gospel. The insistence on beauty as a spiritual 
 principle carried with it new democratic ideals of which 
 probably Keats never thought, but which were to 
 bring literature and life into far more intimate rela- 
 tions, and it seems somewhat strange that the poet 
 120
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 whose work was the most secluded from the rush and 
 turmoil of daily life should have reminded us so 
 insistently of this eternal fact. Yet holding as he did 
 the oneness of beauty and truth just as did Goethe the 
 oneness of beauty and goodness the Pagan in him 
 cries out with despair when he meditates on the 
 transitoriness of life, and he feels that beauty itself 
 shares in the mutability. Thus in his " Ode to Melan- 
 choly " he exclaims, 
 
 " She dwells with Beauty Beauty that must die ; 
 And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips 
 Bidding adieu." 
 
 Exquisite alike its diction and pathos, it is really out 
 of harmony with the nobler and inspiring thought that 
 suggests the unperishable nature of beauty. The 
 persistent, energising power of beauty in which Shelley 
 insists so often is, it seems to me, a greater and worthier 
 thought. 
 
 "The love whose smile kindles the Universe, 
 The Beauty in which all things live and move." 
 
 This, however, is somewhat of a digression and does 
 not effect at anyrate the claims of Keats upon our 
 admiration for the noble substance and symmetry of 
 his best work. The particular mood of the poet is 
 independent of the power that he wields by the beauty 
 he disseminates. The artist jealous for his ideal, and 
 passionate in his attachment, suffers from despondencies 
 and humours from which men of grosser sensibilities 
 are free. And the thought underlying the " Ode on 
 121
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 Melancholy " is obvious enough. Inspiration and 
 longing are inseparable from melancholy, and the 
 deepest joys are mingled with sadness. If we want a 
 statement on the other side we may find it in a later 
 writer, a lesser artist, but a poet with a far larger view 
 of life Browning. 
 
 " A man's aim should exceed his grasp 
 Or what's a heaven for." 
 
 And yet unless one fully enters into the spirit of 
 Keats's work, with its " fine excess " of sensibility and 
 loveliness of texture, even the tonic influence of 
 Browning loses much of its significance. 
 
 " Rossetti," wrote Ruskin in Prceterita, " was really 
 not an Englishman, but a great Italian tormented in 
 the inferno of London." The Italian side of Rossetti's 
 temperament certainly impresses most of his work. 
 The frank voluptuousness of his wonderful sonnet 
 sequence, The House of Life, is the reverse of English. 
 The Northern temperament, naturally reserved and 
 secretive where the emotions of love and religion are 
 concerned, shrinks from dwelling on the sensuous mani- 
 festations of passion. And one may add that if it is 
 betrayed into doing so an aggressive coarseness dis- 
 plays itself at once. 
 
 This is not so with the Southern temperament; 
 fevered and morbid as their erotic and devotional litera- 
 ture may seem, it is never coarse. The reverential 
 devotion to the beauty of the body, which strikes most 
 Englishmen as mawkish and unwholesome, and not a 
 122
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 few as immoral, is far removed in spirit from mere 
 eroticism. The senses were for Rossetti sacramental 
 emblems of the spirit. In every department of thought 
 and emotion, not in love only, Rossetti sought for the 
 outward manifestations. Where Tennyson senti- 
 mentalises and Browning intellectualises, Rossetti read 
 off the physical expression of certain sides of life. But 
 he valued the physical expression, the outward 
 manifestation, not as does the mere sensualist as 
 something disconnected from the inner life, but as the 
 visible sign of the invisible power that moulds life or 
 character into beauty and nobility. He worshipped 
 beauty 
 
 " Whose speech Truth knows not from her thought, 
 Nor love her body from her soul." 
 
 But there was something other than the subtle sen- 
 suousness of the South in Rossetti's poetry. There was 
 behind it all an intellectual power, Northern in its grip, 
 clearness and restraint, which informs nearly all that 
 he wrote. Compare the love poems of Rossetti with 
 one of D'Annunzio's romances and you are conscious 
 at once of a fine sobriety and dignity in Rossetti's work 
 absent from the brilliant, hectic writing of the Italian 
 novelist. 
 
 There is a solid strength in Rossetti's best work just 
 as there is in Keats's a certain massive quality which 
 demands notice before we turn our attention to those 
 characteristics more obvious to the student colour and 
 mysticism. 
 
 123
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 In the " Burden of Nineveh " manner and matter 
 are perfectly fused. The huge winged stone bulls of 
 Nineveh start a reverie in the poet's mind in which he 
 thinks with misgiving on the civilisation of our own day. 
 He reflects how smugly we talk of the baseness of the 
 elder civilisations, and shake our heads at mention of 
 Babylon and Nineveh. Yet may it not be that this 
 bas-relief dug out from the ruins of Nineveh, and now 
 looking down from the walls of the British Museum, 
 will be discovered years hence in the ruins of London, 
 and the discoverers imagine it to be our God? 
 
 " Who finding in this desert place 
 His form, shall hold us for some race 
 That walked not in Christ's lowly ways, 
 But bowed its pride and vowed its praise 
 Unto the God of Nineveh." 
 
 A vein of grave and delicate satire runs throughout 
 the poem, and the splendid rhythm of the metre gives 
 it the fullest possible effect. To the lover who watches 
 the murmuring stream Rossetti has interpreted its 
 message in delicate and gracious music : 
 
 " What thing unto mine ear 
 Would'st thou convey what secret thing 
 O wandering water ever whispering? 
 Surely thy speech shall be of her. 
 Thou water, O thou whispering wanderer, 
 What message dost thou bring ? 
 Say, hath not Love leaned low 
 This hour beside thy far well-head, 
 And there through jealous hollowed fingers saw 
 The thing that most I long to know, " 
 124
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 The very cadence of the stream, with its soft ebb and 
 flow, seems to have been captured by the poet. Less 
 direct and universal in its appeal than Tennyson's 
 brook, it displays the same mastery for charging with 
 human emotion some aspect of Nature. 
 
 But the finest illustration of Rossetti's exquisite 
 workmanship and of its marvellous symmetrical excel- 
 lence is found in his sonnet sequence, The House of 
 Life. If there is any fault to find it is that the form 
 is too exquisite. So much care has been exercised 
 that we are over-conscious of the deliberation of the 
 artist at times. But despite a certain lack of freshness 
 and spontaneity at times, it contains some of the finest 
 love poems in the language, and takes its place beside 
 the memorable Sonnets from the Portuguese of Mrs 
 Browning. 
 
 His use of resonant classical words is especially 
 effective: 
 
 " Ah ! who shall dare to search through what sad maze 
 Henceforth their incommunicable ways 
 Follow the desultory feet of death ? " 
 
 (2) Colour: The power of vitalising and trans- 
 figuring facts. 
 
 One of the supreme gifts of the poetic faculty is the 
 glorification of what we term commonplaces of every- 
 day life. The greatest achievements of imaginative 
 art lie not in depicting the majestic and terrible one 
 needs no telescope to see the lightning but in the 
 revelation of the common bush. 
 
 125
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 " It is not," wrote Ruskin in his Modern Painters, 
 11 in the broad and fierce manifestation of the elemental 
 energies, not in the clash of the hail nor the drift of the 
 whirlwind, that the highest characters of the sublime 
 are developed." 
 
 A popular idea that great poetry must necessarily 
 deal with extraordinary and out-of-the-way subjects is 
 the very reverse of the truth. Poetry is great because 
 it deals with ordinary subjects in an extraordinary way. 
 Beauty loves best not the thunder and the whirlwind, 
 but the still, small voice. 
 
 Nowhere is it easier to test this than in the poetry of 
 Keats and Rossetti. Both poets had a fondness for 
 far-fetched subjects and recondite phrases. In Keats 
 the taste for the elaborately ornate was strongly 
 marked, and in both poets, Rossetti especially, a fond- 
 ness for the morbid and esoteric persisted. Yet their 
 highest achievements in verse do not rest on the exotic 
 charm, considerable as it may be, of their work but 
 in their simplicity and in their faithfulness to the facts 
 of life transfigured by poetic art. 
 
 " Lucent sirops tinct with cinnamon " 
 
 is a line of beauty. 
 
 But more beautiful are these lines depicting a trait 
 of Nature: 
 
 " A little noiseless noise among the leaves 
 Born of the very sigh that silence heaves. " 
 
 Truth and beauty are indeed blended in one in this 
 exquisite piece of imaginative observation. 
 
 126
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 Then again this stanza from the " Ode to a Nightin- 
 gale," how perfect the suggestion of a summer night. 
 A fact, vitalised: 
 
 " I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, 
 
 Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, 
 
 But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet 
 Wherewith the seasonable month endows 
 
 The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild ; 
 White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine ; 
 Fast fading violets covered up in leaves ; 
 
 And mid -May's eldest child, 
 The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, 
 The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves." 
 
 No far-fetched fantasy here a poet, the mood, and a 
 night in June and a matchless creation of art is the 
 result. 
 
 Nothing can be more characteristic of the elusiveness 
 of beauty than the fact that in those poems where 
 Keats most strenuously strives after beauty he should 
 be comparatively ineffectual. The reader is conscious 
 of an over-laden richness and ornate elaboration 
 which, though not without a certain attractiveness, 
 does little more than touch the fringe of beauty. 
 
 On the other hand, where the poets succeed, where 
 the breath of inspiration blows, then the great poets 
 like great mountains converge together, however dis- 
 tant their base, and the varying notes of their char- 
 acteristics as writers blend into one harmonious whole 
 of simplicity. 
 
 For opulence of colouring Rossetti is perhaps inferior 
 to Keats, but in the variety of his colour effects he 
 127
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 certainly rivals his predecessor. One never forgets 
 the pre-Raphaelite painter in his poetry. He draws 
 upon mediaeval art in his poems in a way that Keats, 
 who was not especially interested in pictures, never did. 
 There is the technique even of the mediaeval colourist 
 in such poems as " The Blessed Damozel " : 
 
 " The blessed Damozel leaned out 
 From the gold bar of Heaven 
 
 She had three lilies in her hand 
 
 And the stars in her hair were seven." 
 
 Again: 
 
 " And the souls mounting up to God 
 Went by her like their flames." 
 
 How exactly in the spirit of pictorial symbolism ! 
 And in such a modern poem as " Jenny " the poet 
 cannot resist recalling a picture by the Florentine 
 painters. Even when not written for pictures his 
 poems almost invariably suggest pictures. As a rule 
 there is greater elaboration of detail than we find in 
 Keats ; sometimes it is wearisome, but more often it is 
 finely effective. 
 
 Note the exquisite workmanship of these lines where 
 the painter peeps out : 
 
 "Thine eyes grey lit in shadowing hair above." 
 
 " But where wan water trembled in the grove 
 And the wan moon is all the light thereof." 
 
 "Sweet twining hedgeflowers stirred in no wise 
 On this June day ; and hand that clings in hand ; 
 Still glades ; and meeting faces scarcely fanned ; 
 128
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 An osier-odoured stream that draws the skies 
 Deep to its heart ; and mirrored eyes in eyes ; 
 Fresh hourly wonder o'er the Summer land 
 Of light and cloud ; and two souls softly spanned 
 With one o'er-arching heaven of smiles and sighs." 
 
 Of singular felicity are the last lines of the following : 
 
 " Together on his heart for ever true 
 
 As the cloud-foaming, firmamental blue 
 
 Rests on the blue line of a foamless sea * 
 li Where the long cloud, the long wood's counterpart, 
 
 Sheds doubled darkness up the labouring hill." 
 
 About his later poems there is an Oriental wealth 
 of colouring largely due to his literal use of archaic 
 words, but more effective is the simplicity of his earlier 
 manner. One could not deny a certain Eastern loveli- 
 ness to these lines : 
 
 "Gloom girt 'mid Spring-flushed apple growths she stands ; " 
 
 " That face, of Love's all-penetrative spell 
 Amulet, talisman and oracle 
 Betwixt the sun and moon, a mystery." 
 
 But of more compelling magic are these lines, Words- 
 worthian in their severe simplicity : 
 
 ' ' Her eyes were deeper than the depth 
 Of waters stilled at even." 
 
 In that remarkable poem, " A Last Confession," 
 where one can trace the influence of Browning, the 
 distinctive attitude of the colourist persists none the 
 less throughout. It is the story of a murder, and the 
 colour red gleams through the verse from the very 
 opening, where the man finds the child on the hills and 
 I 129
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 she tells him her parents had left her and walked into 
 the " great red light " down to the catastrophe, when 
 " sea and sky were blood and fire, and all the day was 
 one red blindness." 
 
 (3) Perspective: A subtle mingling of the sensuous 
 and super-sensuous. 
 
 In this characteristic, Coleridge and Rossetti of our 
 modern poets stand supreme. There are two poems of 
 Keats where the magic of mysticism is unmistakable, 
 the ballad of " La Belle Dame Sans Merci " and certain 
 lines from the " Ode to a Nightingale." Neither Cole- 
 ridge nor Rossetti have done anything finer Indeed, 
 the glamour of fairyland has been expressed once and 
 for all in the matchless lines from the Ode. But 
 looking at Keats's work as a whole, its beauty is not 
 the subtle obscure beauty of mystic suggestion so much 
 as the classic beauty of form and glow of colour. 
 
 To appreciate the ghostly power of Coleridge com- 
 pare Keats's "Lamia" with " Christabel." Where 
 Coleridge hints and suggests, Keats tries to impress by 
 describing. The serpent woman attracts him as an 
 artist she is wonderful fantasy for a poet's eye to 
 note and depict. Not so Geraldine, the witch in ' ' Chris- 
 tabel." It is the psychical rather than the physical 
 that attracts the elder poet. 
 
 All the unplumbed depths of personality, the eerie 
 fascination of a problem not to be expressed in terms 
 of humanity, affect him strongly. 
 
 The note of mystery is struck from the first : 
 130
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 " Tis the middle of night by the castle clock 
 And the owls have awakened the crowing cock 
 
 Tu-whit ! to-whoo ! 
 And hark again ! the crowing cock 
 
 How drowsily it crew." 
 
 Christabel and the " lady " pass by the dying brands 
 in the great hall: 
 
 " They pass the hall, that echoes still 
 Pass as lightly as you will. 
 The brands were flat, the brands were dying, 
 And in their own white ashes lying ; 
 But when the lady passed, there came 
 A tongue of light, a fit of flame, 
 And nothing else she saw thereby. " 
 
 Never once is she described, but her strange and 
 sinister nature is suggested by subtle hints and touches, 
 " A sight to dream of, not to tell," and the power of the 
 poet's imagination is felt throughout. 
 
 Compare the elaborate description of "Lamia": 
 
 " She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue, 
 Vermilion-spotted, golden, green and blue ; 
 Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard, 
 Eyed liked a peacock, and all crimson barr'd ; 
 And full of silver moons, that, as she breathed, 
 Dissolv'd, or brighter shone, or inter-wreathed 
 Their lustres with the gloomier tapestries 
 
 She seem'd, at once, some penanced lady elf, 
 
 Some demon'd mistress, or the demon's self. 
 
 Upon her crest she wore a wannish fire 
 
 Sprinkled with stars, like Ariadne's tiar : 
 
 Her head was serpent, but ah, bitter-sweet ! 
 
 She had a woman's mouth with all its pearls complete : 
 
 And for her eyes : what could such eyes do there 
 
 But weep, and weep, that they were born so fair ? "
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 A lovely piece of pictorial writing, like a glimpse of 
 some strange tapestry, but of mysticism not a trace. 
 And yet the poet who deliberately preferred the pic- 
 torial possibilities of " Lamia " to the subtle sugges- 
 tiveness invited by the theme was attracted by 
 mysticism in other directions. Metaphysical specula- 
 tion so attractive to Coleridge moved him not at all. 
 The elemental attractiveness of woman bewitched 
 him, where it only suggested domestic possibilities to 
 Coleridge. The mysticism of "La Belle Dame " is 
 another sort of mysticism to that of Coleridge; it is 
 the ancient mysticism of the body, not the mysticism 
 of metaphysic. 
 
 The primal glamour of sex lies at the root of the 
 wonderful ballad : 
 
 " I met a lady in the meads. 
 
 Full beautiful, a faery's child, 
 Her hair was long, her foot was light, 
 And her eyes were wild. 
 
 I set her on my pacing steed, 
 And nothing else saw all day long ; 
 
 For sideways would she lean, and sing 
 A faery's song. " 
 
 The human elements of old romance have never been 
 better apprehended than by Scott, nor has Coleridge 
 been excelled in his subtle treatment of its super- 
 naturalism, but on the sheer witchery of its fantasy 
 Keats, one feels, has said the last word, inspired by the 
 nightingale's song: 
 
 The same that ofttimes hath 
 Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam, 
 Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. 
 
 132
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 Never does Shelley, with all his dark caves and 
 spectral forms, approach the mystic awesomeness of 
 certain stanzas in the " Ancient Mariner," as, for in- 
 stance, these: 
 
 " Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down, 
 'Twas sad as sad could be, 
 And we did speak only to break 
 The silence of the sea 
 
 And the coming wind did roar more loud, 
 And the sails did sigh like sedge ; 
 And the rain pour'd down from one black cloud ; 
 The moon was at its edge. 
 
 The thick black cloud was cleft, and still 
 The moon was at its side : 
 Like waters shot from a high crag 
 The lightning fell with never a jag, 
 A river steep and wide." 
 
 Very different from this imaginative realism is the 
 mysticism of Shelley. With all its glamour there is 
 less power in it to arrest and impress than we find in 
 either Keats or Coleridge. It charms by its prismatic 
 fancies rather than by sheer intensity. The mystic 
 mantle of Coleridge was to fall neither on Keats nor 
 Shelley, but at a later age on Rossetti, for mysticism is 
 a fine mingling of the sensuous and super-sensuous, and 
 Shelley's muse seems often poised midway between the 
 two. 
 
 And what Coleridge did for the earlier years of the 
 century Rossetti did for the later years. After the 
 rush of poetry, charged and often heavily weighted 
 133
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 with practical problems of the hour, he brought back 
 the mystic spirit to our verse. Not the religious 
 mysticism of his sister and of Tennyson and Brown- 
 ing, but the mysticism of the artist, with its fascination 
 for the half-lights, for the undiscovered countries of 
 thought and feeling. He had the power of impressing 
 the imagination with splendid lines that suggested 
 some half-expressed thought, some dimly-shadowed 
 emotion, such lines as : 
 
 " Girt in dark growths, yet glimmering with one star." 
 " The ground-whirl of the perished leaves of Hope." 
 "Words, whose silence wastes and kills." 
 " The spacious vigil of the stars." 
 
 That wonderful poem, " The Blessed Damozel "- 
 wonderful had it been the mature work of the writer, 
 more wonderful considering he was quite a youth when 
 he wrote it is full of fine, subtle touches. It has a 
 freshness and spaciousness of imagination that is lack- 
 ing in some of his more ornate later pictures. 
 
 The Blessed Damozel, leaning out from the gold bar 
 of Heaven : 
 
 " From the fixed place of Heaven she saw 
 Time like a pulse shake fierce 
 Through all the worlds. Her gaze still strove 
 Within the gulf to pierce 
 Its path ; and now she spoke as when 
 The stars sang in their spheres. " 
 
 The sense of vastness is splendidly conveyed in these 
 lines. 
 
 134
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 Then follows a stanza worthy of Coleridge, perhaps 
 not uninspired by his magic: 
 
 The sun was gone now ; the curled moon 
 Was like a little feather 
 Fluttering far down the gulf; and now 
 She spoke thro' the still weather. 
 Her voice was like the voice the stars 
 Had when they sang together.'' 
 
 In contrast with this sense of immensity, where in a 
 bold line the earth is described as spinning in the void 
 like a fretful midge, comes the wistful longing of the 
 maiden for her lover still upon earth, and her passionate 
 prayers for him to come to her soon. 
 
 Coleridge alone could match the haunting mystery 
 of lines like these : 
 
 " Here high up in the balcony, 
 
 Sister Helen, 
 
 The moon flies face to face with me. 
 Outside it's merry in the wind's sake, 
 
 Sister Helen. 
 
 In the shaken trees the chill stars shake. 
 Hush, heard you a horse tread, as you spake, 
 
 Little brother ? " 
 
 All the witchery of twilight is here : 
 
 " When the leaf shadows at a breath, 
 Shrink in the road, and all the heath, 
 Forest and water far and wide 
 Lie with the mystery of death." 
 
 Sometimes, like Keats, he can suggest in a single 
 superb line: 
 
 " And her far seas moan as a single shell," 
 135
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 which deserves to rank with the exquisite line in Tenny- 
 son: 
 
 "Night slid down one long stream of sighing wind." 
 
 Each is perfect in form and suggestion. 
 
 What poet has more exquisitely caught the spirit of 
 the dream world, as seen through a lover's eye, as in 
 " Love's Nocturn " : 
 
 " Master of the murmuring courts 
 
 Where the shapes of sleep convene ! 
 Lo ! my spirit here exhorts 
 
 All the powers of thy demesne. 
 For their aid to woo my Queen 
 
 What reports 
 Yield thy jealous courts unseen ? 
 
 Vaporous, unaccountable, 
 
 Dream-world lies forlorn of light, 
 Hollow like a breathing shell. 
 
 Ah ! that from all dreams I might 
 Choose one dream and guide its flight ! 
 I know well 
 
 What her sleep should tell to-night." 
 
 Here a common psychical experience is wrought into 
 a thing of beauty by subtlety of treatment : 
 
 " I have been here before, 
 But when or how I cannot tell ; 
 I know the grass beyond the door, 
 
 The sweet keen smell, 
 The sighing sound, the lights around the shore." 
 
 The mystery of death and the poignancy of human 
 136
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 parting breathe through the following verse like a 
 sigh: 
 
 " A little while, a little love 
 The scattering autumn hoards for us 
 Whose bower is not yet ruinous, 
 Nor quite unleaved our songless grove. 
 Only across the shaken boughs 
 We hear the flood-tides seek the sea, 
 And deep, in both our hearts they rouse 
 One ail for thee and me." 
 
 The atmosphere of religion pervades the work of 
 Rossetti, whereas in Keats there is an entire absence of 
 it. Yet Rossetti no less than Keats was largely pagan 
 at heart and this divides them from poets like Words- 
 worth and Coleridge. There is not the poignant 
 fatalism of the " Rubaiyat " of Omar about their poetry. 
 Their attitude towards the Beyond is mainly one of 
 indifference, but a sense of the perishableness of beauty 
 and the transitoriness of life pervades their work. 
 
 With richer and more varied culture than Keats, 
 Rossetti was drawn to the artistic beauties of Catholi- 
 cism. Supernaturalism did not appeal to Keats: it 
 fascinated Rossetti. No poet has been more touched 
 by the aesthetics of religion than he, and no poet less 
 influenced, perhaps, by its dialectics. 
 
 It is interesting to compare his poetry in this respect 
 with Tennyson, to whom the problems of religious 
 philosophy were ever clamouring for an answer. 
 Rossetti looked on Christianity with the eye of an 
 artist; Tennyson and Browning with the eye of a 
 philosopher.
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 Of the ethical inspiration of music Browning has 
 sung, but for the mingled joy of sense and spirit we 
 must turn to Rossetti: 
 
 " O cool unto the sense of pain 
 That last night's sleep could not destroy ; 
 O warm unto the sense of joy 
 That dreams its life within the brain." 
 
 " The music lives upon my brain 
 Between your hands, within mine eyes ; 
 It stirs your lifted throat like pain, 
 An aching pulse of melodies." 
 
 " So in the song, the singers, joy and pain, 
 Its very parents, evermore expand 
 To bid the passion's full-grown birth remain, 
 By Art's transfiguring essence subtly spann'd ; 
 And from that song-cloud shaped as a man's hand 
 There comes the sound as of abundant rain." 
 
 These few illustrations from the abundant treasury 
 of Keats and Rossetti may perhaps indicate certain 
 aspects of the ideal of beauty which the poet-artist sets 
 before him. To seek for the beautiful in life and then 
 portray it is the aim of every poet, of a Shelley and 
 Tennyson no less than a Keats and Rossetti. But the 
 quest of the beautiful is the most clearly discernible in 
 the work of the poets chosen, for they were not, as were 
 other poets of the century, distracted by rival interests. 
 Both Keats and Rossetti seem to have lived as poets in 
 a little world of their own, a world of wonder and 
 delight, full of sweet sights and sounds, and out of ear- 
 shot of the roar and clamour of every-day life. In 
 broad human interest their work no doubt suffers as a 
 138
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 whole from comparison with the work of poets like 
 Tennyson and Browning, but granted the narrow limits 
 of their realms they rule supreme. And comforting 
 indeed it is to step aside from the dusty highway at 
 times into the enchanted garden where they dwell. 
 
 And one leaves them with the feeling that the prin- 
 ciple of beauty is no mere accident of form, but some- 
 thing that lies at the very heart of poetry. Possessing 
 it, the poet speaks " with authority," not as " one of 
 the scribes." 
 
 139
 
 THE NOVELIST
 
 " The good, the gentle, the ever noble Dickens, every inch of 
 him an honest man." CARLYI.E.
 
 CHARLES DICKENS 
 
 THE HUMORIST 
 
 THE extraordinary popularity which Dickens enjoyed 
 as a writer during his lifetime suffered a temporary 
 eclipse soon after his death, and is now again reasserting 
 itself. 
 
 Many admirers of Dickens can sympathise with 
 these tidal changes ; they can trace three stages in their 
 feelings towards the novelist. The first period of 
 whole-hearted allegiance and indiscriminate affection. 
 Then with the coming of the moustache and Byronic 
 humours (or, nowadays, Shavian humours) a period of 
 criticism, when spots were discovered on the sun, and 
 the subtle, more cynical humour of Thackeray proved 
 perhaps more agreeable to the palate. Finally, the 
 return to their first love, with an appreciation of the 
 amazing fact that our literary affections may be com- 
 prehensive enough to hold both Thackeray and Dickens. 
 The third stage shows a diminished ardour maybe for 
 the more farcical elements in the novelist's work, but 
 there is a far juster appreciation of the artistic power of 
 the writer, the vitality of his creations and the astound- 
 ing diversity of his humour. 
 
 The fastidious critic has long since solemnly cursed 
 the author of Pickwick much as the cardinal cursed 
 the jackdaw. 
 
 143
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 His reputation was declared a mushroom growth, 
 and must soon die away. Possibly owing to the 
 critic's agricultural eccentricities having led him 
 to mistake an oak for a mushroom the prediction 
 remains unaccomplished. 
 
 And yet few great writers probably are at once so 
 open to criticism and so independent of literary criticism 
 as Dickens. Whatever he may have lacked he never 
 lacked vitality, and vitality covers a multitude of 
 literary sins. 
 
 The democratic movement, with its wave of humani- 
 tarian feeling, that passed over England in the early 
 years of the nineteenth century, had Shelley for its 
 singer, Carlyle as its somewhat reluctant prophet, and 
 Dickens as its story-teller. Warm-hearted reformers 
 like Wilberforce, Ashley, Cobbett and Robert Owen 
 voiced the political needs of the time, while Dickens 
 sent the brilliant search-light of his humour over the 
 joys and sorrows of the poor. He gave an actuality, 
 a realism to the English novel which it had hitherto 
 lacked. His vivid pictures of late Georgian and early 
 Victorian England, his bitter invectives against certain 
 social institutions, and his inimitable satire of our 
 national weaknesses bespeak not only a man of rare 
 observation, but a man who knew by bitter experience 
 the life he was depicting. He was no " gentleman at 
 ease," writing about poverty in order to obtain fresh 
 local colour for his stories. He was a man of the 
 people. By dint of sheer force of character, and with 
 no help save that provided by his own pluck and 
 144
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 perseverance, he reached a position of comparative 
 affluence. But his childish sufferings and early 
 struggles had seared his imagination; they were always 
 present to his mind when he wrote about the poor, 
 inspiring his pen with that mingled pity and anger 
 always discernible in his social sketches. No scientific 
 inquirer he, balancing nicely the faults and merits of 
 the various sections of the community. He was 
 frankly a partisan, holds a brief for the poor and de- 
 clines to be briefed by the other side. From an almost 
 starving youth, unknown and unbefriended, he rose to a 
 position of fame which men of greater intellectual 
 power have never attained. When he died, his name 
 was a household word; it was not literary admiration 
 so much as personal affection which thousands of men 
 and women felt for the author of David Copperfield. 
 
 On the publication of Pickwick in 1837 tne English 
 novel was in need of some vitalising influence. The 
 deep- veined humanity of Fielding had found no worthy 
 successor. Scott had ransacked the Middle Ages to 
 colour his romances. Jane Austen's delicate filagree 
 work was too fragile for the wear and tear of ordinary 
 humanity. The modern psychological novel was as 
 yet unborn And the note of passionate revolt from the 
 Yorkshire moors and of sturdy radicalism from the 
 parsonage at Eversley had not yet been sounded. 
 
 The stage was clear. A brisk, alert young journalist, 
 " Box " entered. It was felt immediately that a new 
 force had come into English letters. Dickens came; 
 he joked; he conquered. 
 
 K 145
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 As a thinker we may not always find him satisfying. 
 As an artist we may demur to his over-insistence on 
 the primary colours, but the splendid humanity that 
 breaks through his writings is a source of continual 
 delight. Those of us who expect the novelist to be a 
 guide, philosopher, and friend, may object to his sum- 
 mary views on poetic justice. But as Hazlitt said 
 apropos of Wordsworth, let us take the gifts the gods 
 provide without grumbling. The author of Pickwick 
 never posed as a philosopher or undertook to be a 
 guide. He was content to be a friend, and a more 
 genial, inspiriting companion it would be hard to find. 
 
 Humorists like Dickens have what may be called 
 rainbow sympathies, where smiles constantly irradiate 
 the tears. Laughter and tears lie closely together, 
 and frequently invade one another's territory. Dickens 
 is never more effective than when he is smiling through 
 his tears. That scene in Copperfidd, where Mrs Creakle 
 breaks the news of his mother's death, is none the less 
 moving in its pathos for the delightful touches of the 
 small boy's morbid self-consciousness, and of Traddles 
 comforting him by drawing skeletons. Less familiar 
 but equally remarkable for its simplicity and poignancy 
 the better heightened by the humour of theCheap Jack 
 is the sketch from Dr Marigold. One cannot do without 
 the other. Humour divorced from pathos becomes 
 hard and cynical, and where there is no restraining 
 touch of humour pathos is apt to become maudlin and 
 mawkish. This is especially true in the case of Dickens, 
 as will be noted anon. The humour of Dickens is 
 146
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 always clean and wholesome; his satire is reserved for 
 what is mean and unlovely, but it carries no sneer with it. 
 It is not corrosive as is some satire; merely antiseptic. 
 
 Humour is not only of one kind, it is as varied in its 
 manifestations as temperament itself; there is the 
 quaint, whimsical humour of Charles Lamb, which 
 exhales from his writings like the scent of lavender 
 from old cupboards. There is the impudent, breezy 
 humour peculiar to certain American writers, such as 
 Mark Twain and Artemus Ward, which like a peevish 
 breeze twists all kinds of serious things into the most 
 ridiculous shapes. Then again there is the philosophic 
 humour of writers like George Eliot and Oliver Wendell 
 Holmes, whose humour expresses itself in pithy sayings 
 and witty metaphors. Wit, indeed, is a kind of sedate 
 elder brother to humour, more intellectual than its 
 relative, and more ordered in its general behaviour. 
 It is very difficult to dissociate wit and humour, but 
 comparatively easy to come across humour devoid of 
 wit. A good example of this may be found in two 
 characterisations, each remarkable in its way, by 
 George Eliot and Dickens Mrs Poyser and Mrs Gamp. 
 Mrs Peyser's humour is more of the intellectual and 
 philosophic order; for instance, " I can count a stocking 
 top while a man's getting his tongue ready, and when 
 he's out wi' his speech at last there's little broth to be 
 made on't." 
 
 Mrs Gamp's humour is, however, quite devoid of 
 any pretensions to intellectual acumen; it is merely 
 delightfully irresponsible nonsense. 
 147
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 " There are some happy creeturs as Time runs 
 backards with, and you are one, Mrs Mould ; not that he 
 need do nothing except use you in his most owdacious 
 ways for years to come, I'm sure for young you are 
 and will be. I says to Mrs Harris only t'other day last 
 Monday evening fortnight as ever dawned upon this 
 piligans's progress of a mortal wale, I says to Mrs H. 
 when she says to me, ' Years and their trials sets marks 
 upon us all.' ' Say not the words, Mrs H., if you and 
 me is to be continual friends, for such is not the case. 
 Mrs Mould is one of them as goes agen the observation 
 straight, and never, Mrs H., while I've a drop of breath 
 to draw will I set by and not stand up, don't think it.' 
 ' I ask yer pardon, ma'am,' says Mrs H., ' and I humbly 
 grant your grace, for if ever a woman lived as would see 
 her fellow-creatures into fits to serve her friends, well do 
 I know that woman's name is Sairey Gamp.' " 
 
 What does all this amount to? Simply Mrs Gamp's 
 way of telling Mrs Mould that she looked young for her 
 years. Mrs Poyser, had she been disposed to pay any 
 compliment (which is doubtful), would have crystallised 
 her views in a pithy saying, e.g., " Well, Mrs Mould, 
 there seems no such word as autumn in your vocabu- 
 lary. I reckon you're one o' them evergreens as 
 blooms all the year round." 
 
 The distinguishing quality of Dickens's humour is 
 its exuberant prodigality. Fielding is as shrewd in 
 his satire; Goldsmith can equal him in the quaint 
 humanity of his pictures ; Thackeray often excels in 
 delicacy of touch ; George Eliot in intellectual quality; 
 148
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 but in mere quantity of humour Dickens holds his own 
 against all comers. He deals with us royally, flinging 
 his humour broadcast right and left. Never was there 
 such a literary spendthrift. This it is that gives such 
 astounding vitality to his books, that makes his 
 descriptions glow with startling reality, that carries 
 away the reader even against his own critical judg- 
 ment. For sheer force and vitality one must, to find 
 an equal, go back to Rabelais. Perhaps he is not 
 impeccable always on matters of taste, but considering 
 the ground he travelled over, the wide field of observa- 
 tion, the wonder is that he rose so well and so often 
 above vulgarities and buffooneries. . On the whole, 
 no cleaner, saner humorist ever put pen to paper. In 
 his later books his humour is on the whole less spon- 
 taneous, less fertile than in his earlier ones. Roughly 
 speaking, one may say that he reached the zenith of 
 his powers as a humorist in David Copperfield. But 
 even this requires some reservation. For there are 
 certain passages in Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and 
 especially in Great Expectations, where he more than 
 compensates for his flagging exuberance in subtlety 
 of treatment and delicacy of touch. An interesting 
 comparison may be made between the description of 
 little Paul and his friends, and that of Pip and his 
 friends. Each of these scenes is excellent in its way, 
 but if we must choose between the two the greater 
 artistic restraint and the fuller humanity of the latter 
 scene should be given the preference. The humour of 
 Dickens expresses itself in three ways : 
 149
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 (1) In sheer high spirits and breathless caricature. 
 This way, of course, as might be expected, receives its 
 most effective illustration in his earlier days. Pickwick 
 and Nicholas Nickleby are rich in illustration of farcical 
 writing of the first order. For instance, the downfall 
 of Stiggins, the account of the Eatenswill Election, 
 and the squabble of the editors ; and the Trial Scene. 
 
 (2) In the second place, his humour expresses itself 
 in satire, when he wished to lash some especial vice or 
 weakness, particularly that of hypocrisy. The pages 
 of Dickens are remarkably rich in illustrations of 
 various grades of hypocrites, the bibulous Stiggins, 
 the fulsome Pumblechook, the inane Sapsea, the 
 cringing Uriah, the oily Chadband, the slimy Casby; 
 but the most brilliant of these is undoubtedly Peck- 
 sniff. "Mr Pecksniff was a moral man. Perhaps there 
 never was a more moral man than Mr Pecksniff, 
 especially in his conversation and correspondence. 
 He was a most exemplary man, fuller of virtuous 
 precept than a copy-book. Some people likened him 
 to a direction-post, which is always telling the way to 
 a place and never goes there; but these were his 
 enemies, the shadows cast by his brightness, that was 
 all. His very throat was moral. You saw a good 
 deal of it. You looked over a very low fence of white 
 cravat and there it lay a valley between two jutting 
 heights of collar, serene and whiskerless before you. 
 It seemed to say on the part of Mr Pecksniff, ' There 
 is no deception, ladies and gentlemen, all is peace, a 
 holy calm pervades me.' " 
 
 150
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 (3) In the third place, his humour expressed itself 
 in fantastic description. He weaves round a subject 
 a series of verbal conceits, and makes an arabesque 
 of the simplest themes. Like Browning he seems 
 irresistibly drawn to the grotesque in art. The 
 description of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters is 
 wonderfully similar in treatment to such poems as 
 " Up jumped Tokay on our Table " (Browning). 
 
 " The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters as a tavern 
 of a dropsical appearance had long settled down into 
 a state of hale infirmity. In its whole constitution it 
 had not a straight floor, and hardly a straight line; 
 but it had outlasted, and clearly would outlast, many 
 a better-trimmed building, many a sprucer public- 
 house. Externally it was a narrow, lopsided wooden 
 jumble of corpulent windows heaped upon one another 
 as you might heap as many toppling oranges, with a 
 crazy wooden verandah impending over the water; 
 indeed, the whole house, inclusive of the complaining 
 flagstaff on the roof, impended over- the water, but 
 seemed to have got into the state of a faint-hearted 
 diver who has paused so long on the brink that he will 
 never go in at all " (Our Mutual Friend). 
 
 Again there is the same love of grotesque fancy in 
 his descriptions of Nature. One recalls the well- 
 known passage of the east wind playing pranks with 
 Toby Veck, or the marvellous picture of the snowstorm 
 in the "Holly Tree Inn." The French critic, Taine, saw 
 in these fantastic touches merely an exhibition of a 
 feverish imagination. It seems to me you might as
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 well stigmatise " Childe Roland to the dark tower 
 came " as feverish because of its like predilection for 
 bizarre effects. Dickens takes a keen delight in 
 grotesquerie of any kind. He lingers with evident relish 
 over his personal descriptions. Thus he speaks of 
 Hiram Grewgious in Edwin Drood. 
 
 " He was an arid, sandy man, who, if he had been 
 put into a grinding-mill, looked as if he would have 
 ground immediately into high-dried snuff. He had a 
 scanty, flat crop of hair, in colour and consistency like 
 some very mangy, yellow fur tippet ; it was so unlike 
 hair that it must have been a wig, but for the stupend- 
 ous improbability of anybody's voluntarily sporting 
 such a head. The little play of features that his face 
 presented was cut deep into it in a few hard curves 
 that made it more like work, and he had certain notches 
 on his forehead which looked as though Nature had 
 been about to touch them with sensibility and refine- 
 ment when she had impatiently thrown away the 
 chisel and said, ' I really cannot be worried to finish 
 off this man; let him go as he is.' " 
 
 In considering the pathos of Dickens, those passages 
 for instance which do not admit of any humorous 
 element, one must speak with more reservation. 
 Exaggeration is not fatal to humour; indeed, it is 
 essential to the effectiveness of a satire and is the very 
 bed-rock of farce. But exaggeration is fatal to 
 pathos. It is true that humour and pathos are 
 different ways of looking at the same thing. But it 
 is less easy to command tears than a smile. Pathos is 
 
 152
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 a more delicate matter than humour. Exaggeration 
 and over-emphasis are its deadly enemies. In real 
 life it is not the hysterical people who move us most. 
 It is the dumb agony, the few broken words of anguish 
 that go to the heart. The deepest pathos of life lies 
 in its eloquent silences, not in its rhetorical tirades; 
 and what affects us in the world about moves us equally 
 in the world of books. In place of those flowery 
 passages paragraph after paragraph that follow 
 upon the death of Little Nell, how much more telling 
 would have been a few simple lines? Later on 
 Dickens would never have written like this. In 
 Dombey he is more restrained; in Copperfield better 
 still. Nothing could be more effective in its unpre- 
 tentious pathos than the death of Barkis, or the death 
 of Dora. Brevity, restraint, simplicity, these be the 
 three notes wanted to strike the chord of pathos. 
 
 Where, however, the scene is one where humour and 
 pathos intermingle Dickens shows his mastery once 
 more. Great Expectations is saturated with pathos 
 of this kind humorous pathos pathetic humour; 
 where the fancy chuckles and the heart aches, a 
 humour that caresses, a pathos that brightens. 
 
 Other instances we may find in the Marshalsea 
 scenes of Little Dorrit, and the Christmas books and 
 stories abound in them. 
 
 In the forties of the last century, when the first of 
 
 Dickens's Christmas stories saw the light, there was 
 
 considerable need of the Christmas spirit; social 
 
 discontent was rampant everywhere, the country was 
 
 153
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 still suffering from the financial drain of the Napole- 
 onic war; the poorer classes were suffering terribly 
 from the evils of the factory system; the flush of 
 poetry and romance which had coloured the horizon 
 some years before had faded away; Carlyle was 
 already fulminating, like some old Hebrew prophet, 
 at the iniquities of the age; the middle classes were 
 apathetic and suspicious; the poorer classes sullen 
 and discontented; a world indeed that needed simple 
 humanity and the sunny cheerfulness of the Christmas 
 Carol. Tennyson in his way was no less striving to 
 emphasise the necessity for a brighter outlook, and in 
 those stanzas of "In Memoriam " beginning with 
 " Ring out, wild bells," he also formulated a kind of 
 message of the chimes not without its effect upon his 
 generation. A good many people do not care for 
 poetry, regarding it with Carlyle's friend as " thepro- 
 dooction of a rude age," whereas the simple domestic 
 story, with the humours and tendernesses of everyday 
 life appeals to every understanding. If one will only 
 compare the multitudinous Christmas stories that are 
 written nowadays with the Christmas tales of Dickens, 
 then one will appreciate more than ever the beauty 
 and moral stimulus of that novelist's work. The 
 feeling that Dickens in his Christmas books did so 
 much to deepen the feeling of kindliness, of universal 
 love, of practical sympathy, is absent from the 
 majority of these volumes written for Christmas time. 
 It may be said that Dickens's Christmas is largely 
 convention, yet it is a convention to which these 
 154
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 books owe their existence, and the tender, tolerant, 
 generous spirit of Dickens influences few of them. 
 The Christmas message of Dickens, we have been 
 told, is a roast-beef-and-plum-pudding-and-plenty-to- 
 drink message. It was so to this extent only that he 
 recognised that nothing could be hoped for in the way 
 of social uplifting while men and women and little 
 children know what hunger is, that it is cant to talk 
 of the blessings of poverty, or to force a sermon upon 
 an empty stomach. 
 
 And thus it is that the Christmas stories of Dickens 
 touch us as do few others, inasmuch as they carry 
 within them the sunshine of a gentle-hearted gaiety. 
 No scene of his so darkly drawn but had its rainbow ; 
 and therein lies the compelling charm of stories like 
 The Carol, The Chimes and The Cricket on the Hearth. 
 In fact, Dickens seemed to say, " Feed before you 
 moralise ; satisfy the hunger of these poor folk before 
 you try to teach them what to do and what not to do." 
 A simple enough lesson, but one all the same that was 
 badly needed. Too much of the piety of the time 
 was hard and unsympathetic, and one is reminded of 
 the sensible old woman in one of George Eliot's early 
 stories who remarked about the parson's housekeeper, 
 " I have nothing to say agin her piety, my dear, but 
 I know very well I shouldn't like her to cook my 
 vittles. When a man comes in hungry and tired piety 
 won't feed him, I reckon. Hard carrots lie heavy on 
 the stomach, piety or no piety. I called in one day 
 when she was dishing up Mr Tryan's dinner, and I 
 155
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 could see as his potatoes was as watery as watery. 
 It's right enough to be spiritual, I'm no enemy to 
 that, but I like my potatoes mealy. I don't see as 
 anyone'll get to heaven any the sooner for not digesting 
 their dinners, provided they don't die sooner." And 
 this practical philosophy appealed very strongly to 
 Dickens, and no one has illustrated its truth more 
 picturesquely or more humorously. 
 
 Of the Christmas books themselves what shall we 
 say ? They are sermons in raisin-stones. He preaches 
 homilies on turkeys, and even extracts a moral from 
 sage and onions. To regard these Christmas stories 
 merely as literary productions, to criticise them 
 exclusively from the artistic standpoint, would be a 
 great mistake; not that they lack power or charm, 
 not that they do not supply considerable poetic fancy 
 and humorous invention. But we have to regard 
 them as primarily instinct with a definite moral 
 purpose. To write with a purpose is always a risky 
 thing; there is so much danger that the writer will 
 sacrifice the humanity of his picture to the special 
 object-lesson he wishes to draw. The only possible 
 thing to justify a writer is success. Dickens's books 
 were, on the whole, a success, and the Christmas 
 books may be described truly, to adopt Thackeray's 
 phrase, as national benefits. 
 
 There are some books from which we rise with the 
 
 knowledge that our souls are the sweeter and saner 
 
 for what we have read. Little wonder that Charles 
 
 Lamb should have suggested that a grace might be 
 
 156
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 said before certain books. And among such books 
 none have exerted a more compelling influence towards 
 a greater tolerance for men and women, a livelier 
 sympathy for the poor and outcast, than the Christmas 
 stories of Dickens. 
 
 THE PICTORIAL ARTIST 
 
 " And a breezy, goose-skinned, red-eyed, stony- toed, 
 tooth-chattering place it was to wait in, in the winter 
 time, as Toby Veck well knew. The wind came tear- 
 ing round the corner especially the east wind as if 
 it had sallied forth express from the confines of the 
 earth to have a blow at Toby. And oftentimes it 
 seemed to come upon him sooner than expected, for 
 turning round the corner and passing Toby, it would 
 suddenly wheel round again as if it cried, ' Why, here 
 he is.' Incontinently his little white apron would 
 be caught up over his head, and Toby himself, all 
 aslant, and facing now in this direction, now in that, 
 would be so banged and buffeted, and tousled, and 
 worried and hustled and lifted off his feet, as to render 
 it a state of things but one degree removed from a 
 positive miracle that he wasn't carried up bodily into 
 the air, as a colony of snails sometimes are, and rained 
 down again, to the great astonishment of the natives 
 in some stray corner of the world where ticket-porters 
 are unknown." 
 
 The playfulness of the wind is a favourite fancy of 
 157
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 his. Probably many recollect the passage from 
 Martin Chuzzlewit of the wind and the dead leaves. 
 
 " It was a small tyranny for a respectable wind to 
 go wreaking its vengeance on such poor creatures as 
 the fallen leaves, but this wind, happening to come up 
 with a great heap of them, did so disperse and scatter 
 them that they fled away pell-mell, some here, some 
 there, rolling over each other, whirling round and 
 round upon their thin edges, taking frantic flights into 
 the air and playing all manner of extraordinary 
 gambols in the extremity of their distress. . . . The 
 scared leaves only flew the faster for all this, and a 
 giddy chase it was, for they got into unfrequented 
 places, where there was no outlet, and where the pur- 
 suer kept them eddying round and round for his 
 pleasure, and they crept under the eaves of houses and 
 clung tightly to the sides of hay ricks, like bats, and 
 tore in at open chamber windows, and cowered close 
 to hedges, and, in short, went anywhere for safety." 
 
 I think that if Dickens had seen a " host of golden 
 daffodils " as Wordsworth did, he would have played 
 with the notion of their ruffled excitability under the 
 influence of the breeze in some such way as he does 
 above, and with this difference, that whereas Words- 
 worth deduces a moral from them, Dickens extracts 
 an illustration from them. 
 
 Wordsworth was a believer in those moods where 
 
 ' ' With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony 
 And the deep power of joy, 
 We see into the heart of things. " 
 I 5 8
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 It is doubtful whether " the power of harmony " 
 ever appealed to Dickens. Joy with him was rather 
 a matter of animal exuberance, of humorous cheerful- 
 ness. One thing is certain, Nature appealed to him 
 in a very different way from that in which she ap- 
 pealed to poets like Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron or 
 Browning. For Nature apart from man, for Nature 
 in her solitary moods, he has as little care as Tennyson. 
 He could not have sung with Byron : 
 
 " To sit on rocks, to muse o'er flood and fell, 
 To slowly trace the forest's shady scene, 
 Where things that own not man's dominion dwell, 
 And mortal foot had ne'er or rarely been. 
 To climb the trackless mountain all unseen 
 With the wild flock that never needs a fold, 
 Alone o'er steeps and foaming falls to lean 
 This is not solitude : 'tis but to hold 
 Converse with Nature's charms, and view her stores unroll'd." 
 
 This most certainly would have been solitude for 
 Dickens. He was a man of the town, a lover of 
 crowds ; one to whom the roar of Fleet Street was as 
 fascinating as the rush of a mountain torrent to Words- 
 worth Indeed, he loved the Strand and Fleet Street 
 as dearly as did another Charles. A striking proof of 
 this may be seen in his inability to find inspiration for 
 his books in the most beautiful scenery away from 
 London. Neither Switzerland nor the South of France 
 produced any impression of note, and his letters are 
 full of desire for the noise and bustle of his beloved 
 London. Italy, that was the very breath of life to 
 159
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 Shelley and Browning, and stimulated the imagination 
 of George Eliot and George Meredith, produced from 
 Dickens one of his least satisfactory books. 
 
 Yet he has given us some wonderful pen pictures 
 as backgrounds for his stories, though these scenic 
 descriptions are never drawn for themselves, but, as 
 with Tennyson, to give added emotional colouring to 
 the picture. He uses certain moods of Nature as a 
 kind of leit-motif to give dramatic effectiveness to the 
 story. Indeed, his style as a writer is as sensitive as 
 a musician in taking on the mood of the moment. In 
 the striking description of the Essex marshes at the 
 beginning of Great Expectations, with its creeping fog 
 and flat loneliness, his language becomes almost a 
 mist of words and phrases. In his description of a 
 coach ride the language quickens and slackens, be- 
 comes rollicking or deliberate, according to the pace 
 of the coach. In reading the ride of Tom Pinch to 
 London, one recalls the famous lines in Homer 
 and Virgil, where the sound of the horses' hoofs is 
 imitated in the rhythm. What especially attracts 
 him in Nature is just what we should expect from a 
 man of his temperament her restless vitality. No 
 writer can depict a storm more graphically. As for 
 the wind, it sweeps through his novels and Christmas 
 stories, whether blustering cheerily through Pickwick 
 or wailing through The Chimes. Not a novel but has 
 some picturesque passage relating to the wind god in 
 one of his moods. He is always happy in describing 
 any scene full of movement, animation, variety. That 
 160
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 is why he excels in his coach rides. He conveys so 
 admirably the sense of physical exhilaration. His 
 descriptions of journeys from country to town abound 
 in rich observation, but the physical experiences are 
 especially emphasised. Very little is said of those 
 mental states of feeling dear to Thomas Hardy. 
 Egdon Heath would have been little more than a wind- 
 blown ridge to Dickens. There was nothing of the 
 philosopher in his temperament. As a rule, novelists 
 have a preference for the summer-time. But Dickens 
 not only gives the preference to winter, but is far more 
 effective in his winter sketches. Often he describes 
 cold weather with the genial appreciation of a full- 
 blooded man; at other times, perhaps, some early 
 experience inspiring him or the sight of some wretched, 
 shivering beggar, he describes the miseries of the cold 
 with a Dantesque power of imagination. And yet, 
 on examining them, it will be found that these Nature 
 touches are brought in only to round off a scene: a 
 bright frosty morning serves as an excellent set-off to 
 Christmas in the home ; a stormy night as a prelude 
 to a murder ; the severity of winter heightens the effect 
 of the satire against the Yorkshire schools, and the 
 London fog serves as a convenient symbol for the 
 Court of Chancery. 
 
 This brings us to a characteristic of Dickens which 
 to many people seems his most attractive quality as 
 a writer. I mean his faculty for painting forcibly and 
 vividly some dramatic situation. But though a 
 source of strength to him, it is not infrequently a 
 L 161
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 source also of weakness. In his earlier books especi- 
 ally, his love of a good situation often leads him to be 
 merely theatrical when he wishes to be dramatic. 
 Thus, that Ainsworthian villain, Monks, inOliver Twist, 
 those "twopenny-coloured" aristocrats in Nicholas 
 Nickleby, and even the last moments of little Paul, 
 are theatrical, that is to say, artificial when they 
 should be dramatic and natural. The scene in which 
 Nicholas Nickleby rounds upon Squeers and thrashes 
 him before the school is undoubtedly one that lends 
 itself to dramatic effect, but as described, much of its 
 poignancy is lost by the stageyness of the young man's 
 declamations. " Wretch, touch him again at your 
 peril. I will not stand by and see it done. My blood 
 is up. By Heaven, I will not spare you if you drive 
 me on. . . . My indignation is aggravated by the 
 cruelties practised on helpless infancy." What 
 young fellow would ever have indulged in such stilted, 
 high-flown language? The fact is that Dickens, 
 despite his satires and burlesques of the transpontine 
 drama, had no little sympathy with it, and in his 
 earlier books especially he invariably turns on the 
 limelight when he feels that a situation has arrived. 
 The above speech is not unworthy of Crummies. It 
 is interesting to compare this with the scene be- 
 tween Mr Mell and Steerforth in David Copper field, and 
 note the greater superiority of the latter. The Tale of 
 Two Cities belongs by internal evidence to post- 
 Copperfield days. There is so much opportunity here 
 for theatrical situations and tawdry effects. Dickens 
 162
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 could never have written so simply and powerfully 
 in the early days of his career. It is true that one 
 effective scene that between Miss Pross and Mme. 
 Defarge loses some of its intensity through an 
 irritating mannerism of the writer, but the concluding 
 scene, hackneyed though it is, between Sidney Carton 
 and the little sempstress, is one of the most powerful, 
 most moving scenes Dickens has given us. It has the 
 elements of genuine drama, simplicity, restraint, 
 dignity. 
 
 But, after all, it is as a painter of London life that he 
 excels. For his minute realism and for his pheno- 
 menal powers of observation he has been praised on 
 all sides, yet even Walter Bagehot's happy phrase 
 about him that he could describe London " like a 
 special correspondent for posterity " scarcely sums 
 up his unique descriptive power. His retentive 
 memory, his keen perceptions, his genius for minutiae 
 are remarkable enough, certainly, and impress all 
 that he wrote. But more remarkable even than the 
 sights he witnessed and the things he observed is the 
 fantastic imagination that read new and distinctive 
 meanings into what he witnessed and observed. It is 
 not the " special correspondent " in him so much as the 
 humorist in him that gives such vitality to his pictures 
 of London life. Apparently the most objective of 
 writers, he is really intensely subjective, as every 
 great humorist must be. He lulls us by the familiarity 
 of his settings, into the belief that he is a realist. But 
 his realism lies only on the surface, and his pictures of 
 163
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 London life are magnificent pieces of idealised descrip- 
 tion, sometimes as fantastic as a passage from Notre 
 Dame. With all its mannerisms there is the element 
 of greatness about Dickens's style. For colour, 
 movement and variety it is a remarkable style. 
 Tawdry and mannered at times, if you will, but, 
 despite this, fascinating, arresting, and with the im- 
 press of the writer's infectious personality. 
 
 The foregoing are a few examples of Dickens's power 
 as a pictorial artist, though it is impossible in this 
 brief paper to give a fitting idea of the wealth and 
 variety of their manifestations. No writer has sur- 
 passed Dickens in his vivid and remarkable delinea- 
 tions of London life, and the style he adopts is typical 
 of the man: vivid colouring, restless movement, 
 countless detail, fantastic images, these are the 
 characteristics of Dickens as a prose writer, and the 
 style is the man. Many have imitated him, but have 
 only succeeded in catching the mannerisms, and 
 Dickens's literary style still remains, despite faults and 
 imperfections, among the great styles of the best 
 masters of English prose. 
 
 164
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 HIS CHARACTER PAINTING 
 
 When reading the novels of Dickens I am reminded, 
 curiously enough, of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. I 
 say curiously enough, because at first sight there is no 
 very marked resemblance between the seductive and 
 deceitful magician and the Victorian novelist. One is 
 ready to admit fundamentally the analogy does not 
 hold good. The seductive strains which Dickens 
 plays upon the enchanted instrument of his art do not 
 hold forth illusory promises of comforts and delights, 
 at least none but the confirmed cynic would argue 
 that they did so ; but none the less in certain parti- 
 culars there is a peculiar relationship existing between 
 the Pied Piper and the author of Copperfield. We see 
 before us the streets of the city, crowded with ordinary 
 citizens, everything going on in its usual hum-drum 
 way. Into the streets steps the Piper, and to his 
 mouth " lays his pipe of smooth, straight cane." 
 Then there comes a change, the sound of the magic 
 music, and after a moment or so of " the rumbling 
 and grumbling," strange creatures leap out of unsus- 
 pected nooks and crannies; the street is crowded 
 with " grotesques " of every variety; no one had sus- 
 pected their presence there before, but here they are, 
 a strange and uncouth crowd, following the master 
 magician obediently, and filling the air with all sorts 
 of strange sounds. No sooner have they gone from 
 sight than once more is the enchanted instrument 
 165
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 brought into requisition. There come dulcet sounds, 
 " such soft, sweet notes as e'er musician's cunning 
 never yet gave the enraptured air." Then lo! and 
 behold, a rustling and a bustling, " all the little boys 
 and girls with rosy cheeks and flaxen curls," in short, 
 after the grotesques come the children ; for each the 
 music of the Piper has a special significance. Now if 
 we consider the characters of Dickens generally, we 
 shall find that those who stand out with the most 
 vivid significance in our minds are the children and 
 the grotesques. Apart from these there are many 
 successes, many failures, of characterisation, but with 
 these he is uniformly and amazingly successful. There 
 are no failures. 
 
 What is our feeling after closing a novel of Dickens 
 some vital book, such as Copperfield or Great Ex- 
 pectations? How should we interpret our feelings? 
 Do we feel we have been interested in the history of 
 conflicting motives, of moral and intellectual subtleties, 
 that we have been unravelling the complicated skein 
 of character? We may feel this after putting down 
 The Mill on the Floss or Middlemarch, not after Copper- 
 field or Great Expectations. Have we been stirred 
 with some delicate satire of certain social types ? Has 
 our fancy been tickled with an elaborate picture of 
 English manners? Again, I think not. This is re- 
 served for us when we read Thackeray; it does not 
 interpret our feelings after reading Dickens. Do we 
 feel we have been in the world of contending passions, 
 of fierce elemental forces? Certainly we feel this 
 166
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 when closing Notre Dame or Les Miserables. but this 
 is not our feeling with Dickens. What, then, is the 
 nature of our feelings? We feel that we have been 
 living in some quaint, picturesque world, inhabited 
 by a variety of human beings whose every detail of 
 manner, appearance and dress is impressed upon our 
 memory. We know most of the characters as well as 
 if we had been living with them in the same house and 
 observed them day by day. We remember their 
 favourite tricks of speech, we know what kind of 
 clothes they wore mostly shabby ; how they looked; 
 we can hear the inflection of the voice; in fact, we 
 know as much about the outward man and as little about 
 the inward man as we do about the people to whom 
 we are introduced from time to time, and whose life is 
 necessarily a matter for speculation and guess. Someone 
 shambles along with the remark, " It's of no conse- 
 quence, thank ye," and we remark, " Here comes 
 Toots." We associate Major Bagstock with being 
 " devilish sly," and Uriah Keep with protestations of 
 'umbleness. We should know Mr Dorrit by his 
 hemming and humming if nothing else, and by the 
 inflection of his cough we should recognise that Mr 
 Snagsby was in the neighbourhood. Equally sure 
 should we be in the physical details of our acquaint- 
 ances : the shape of Mr Bagnet's eyebrows, the unifor- 
 mity of Mr Carker's teeth, the colour of Toby Veck's 
 nose, and of Joe Gargery's whitey-blue eyes, Silas 
 Wegg's wooden leg and the square wooden face of 
 Wemmick. In fact, the entire anatomy and physi- 
 167
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 ology of Dickens's characters is perfectly plain to 
 us. 
 
 Now all this has been made the basis of a strong 
 hostile criticism against the reality of Dickens's 
 creations. It has been said that when not incarna- 
 tions of certain qualities they are merely puppets 
 with certain tricks and mannerisms, insisted upon in 
 a wearisome manner to distract our attention from 
 the wooden and lifeless character of the people 
 described. Mr Pecksniff, it is said, is hypocrisy 
 personified; Mr Dombey pride personified; Tom 
 Pinch amiability personified; in each case a special 
 quality is so magnified that we lose sight of all other 
 traits and characteristics. The Dickens enthusiast 
 will repel this accusation with indignation, and say 
 that to him at anyrate the characters are emphatically 
 alive. But we must not rest content with mere 
 assertion. Is there any basis of truth in this criticism, 
 and if so, how much is false and how much true? 
 Now it cannot be denied that Dickens has in certain 
 cases rounded off his characters rather in order to 
 point some moral, or to add definiteness to a satire, 
 than to present a reasonable human being. There 
 are a good many Pecksniffs in the world, but who 
 would venture to say that they kept up so persistently 
 the moral pose as does the character in Martin 
 Chuzzlewit. Nor does it follow that a Pecksniff must 
 be a man of no intellectual weight whatever. As a 
 matter of fact we know that hypocrisy and ability 
 very often go hand in hand. And although Mr 
 168
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 Pecksniff's architectural futilities are amusing enough, 
 they detract, we must admit, from the lifelike char- 
 acter of the representation. The fact is, that Dickens 
 has drawn a certain number of satirical portraits which 
 are outside the range of his characterisations at large, 
 and to these cases the adverse criticisms mentioned 
 may with some fairness be applied, not otherwise. 
 For the rest it is not Dickens who has over-stated, but 
 we who fail in our observation. Broadly speaking, 
 the characters of Dickens fall into two main divisions 
 
 1. The normal. 
 
 2. The abnormal. 
 
 With the first class we can group many of his men, 
 notably the so-called heroes of the story, and the 
 majority of his women and children. The second 
 division may be further sub-divided into 
 
 (a) Satirical portraits. (Drawn for a special 
 
 purpose.) 
 (6) The villains. 
 (c) The grotesques. 
 
 The last group mentioned would be sufficient of 
 themselves to refute the criticism that the characters 
 of Dickens are unreal. Few characters in fiction 
 dwell so vividly in our recollection as do these queer, 
 uncouth personages. 
 
 Close the novels and go out into the street, and 
 whilst the memory of these portraits is with you, 
 look around at people you meet every day. Why, 
 the world is alive with Dickens's characters; they 
 brush past us in the street, look at us from the pulpit, 
 169
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 confront us in the city office and in the Law Courts, 
 jostle against us in train and 'bus. 
 
 There is a pretty little story by the author of John 
 Halifax, where a godmother (what convenient people 
 these fairy godmothers are!) provides a little lame boy 
 with a magic cloak and some magic glasses, whereby 
 the child can sail over all kinds of places, and see 
 all that is going on in the world below. So is it with 
 Dickens. He provides us with the cloak and the glasses , 
 and with these glasses even the streets, and the people 
 whom we talk to and thought we were familiar with, 
 reveal a new significance. More than this, although he 
 takes us into all kinds of dark places, yet the magic cloak 
 keeps us far enough above the earth, and we see down 
 through the clouds and mist, being ourselves in the bright, 
 invigorating atmosphere of his humour and tenderness 
 
 But it is time now for us to descend from generalisa- 
 tion to a more detailed study of the character painting. 
 
 First, the normal characters. 
 
 I take these first because here, with certain ex- 
 ceptions, Dickens is the least happy and the least 
 individual. He has a genius for transforming geese 
 into swans, for pointing out the possibilities of ugly 
 ducklings. He can make you a silk purse of a sow's 
 ear, or a tolerable imitation thereof, and discover a 
 gleam of gold in the most unpromising soil. Never- 
 theless putting aside the children some eccentricity 
 of manner, some mental twist, some intellectual 
 slowness is required by him in order to obtain the 
 fullest effects of his art. With the average young 
 170
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 man and young woman, and with people who have 
 nothing superficially to differentiate them, he is less 
 interested, and seems rather at a loss how to treat 
 them. How shadowy are Martin Chuzzlewit, Nicholas 
 Nickleby and Walter Gay compared with Tom Pinch, 
 Newman Noggs and Captain Cuttle. Why is this? 
 Partly, no doubt, because these characters are less 
 adapted to his methods of character delineation; 
 they make no call upon his sense of humour, nor do 
 they arouse his satirical purpose. Partly also because 
 Dickens does not concern himself with the spiritual 
 history of men and women; and here an interesting 
 contrast is afforded by the writings of George Eliot. 
 Her method of character study is precisely the reverse 
 of Dickens's. Dickens treats of his characters 
 primarily from without, and only such characteristics 
 as may express themselves externally are dwelt upon 
 by him. George Eliot conducts you within; she is 
 first and foremost anxious to show you the growth 
 and expansion of the inward man or woman that 
 something we call the soul. It is only secondarily, 
 and even that not always, that she is concerned with 
 the externals of her characters. Dickens was not a 
 scientific student of character; he was a shrewd 
 observer of certain types of character, and although 
 he did not confine his character studies altogether to 
 these types, yet he was rarely successful when he 
 diverged from them. 
 
 Physical beauty did not appeal strongly to Dickens 
 as it did to Thackeray. As a novelist and a senti- 
 171
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 mentalist he was bound to pay some homage at the 
 shrine of feminine grace and charm; but his descrip- 
 tion of such strikes the reader as strained and artificial. 
 Compare the strained sentimentality of his picture of 
 Ruth Pinch, meant to convey her personal attractive- 
 ness, with that of George Eliot's convincing description 
 of Hetty Sorrel's beauty. He could convey many 
 things with his picturesque and powerful pen, but the 
 subtle charm of sex was not among them. 
 
 The tragedy of sensitive, ill-used children is a 
 tragedy that Dickens could draw with force, tender- 
 ness and imaginative insight; but the tragedy of love, 
 the tragedy of pitiful passions, of futile affections, 
 the tragedy of Juliet, of Maggie Tulliver, of Tess of 
 the D'Urbervilles, is outside his range altogether. 
 Estella is little more than a youthful edition of Edith 
 Dombey. She has been brought up by Miss Havisham 
 (another of Dickens's failures) to look with contempt 
 on affection and sentiment. She is drilled into a hard, 
 cynical young woman, who breaks hearts as a pastime. 
 The beautiful woman without a heart is common enough 
 in fiction, but never was anyone more devoid of sem- 
 blance to humanity thanEstella. She does not talk like a 
 creature of flesh and blood, but as a personified theory. 
 
 Pip, deeply in love with her, tells her of his feelings. 
 
 " It seems," said Estella, very calmly, " that there 
 are sentiments and fancies I don't know how to call 
 them which I am not able to comprehend. When 
 you say you love me I know what you mean, as a form 
 of words, but nothing more; you address nothing in 
 
 172
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 my heart; you touch nothing there. I don't care for 
 what you say at all." 
 
 Is this the language of a cynical young woman, or, 
 indeed, of any young woman? 
 
 With another type of woman Dickens is far more 
 successful. With women past their first youth, who 
 are eccentric in their ways, who have little or no 
 physical charm and often no mental brilliance, yet 
 who have a certain soundness and sweetness of heart, 
 with women of this type Dickens is extraordinarily 
 happy. And although these fall within the grotesque 
 group they may be considered here while dealing with 
 the women. Of this class Betsey Trotwood, Miss La 
 Creevy and Miss Pross may be cited as noteworthy 
 examples. Betsey Trotwood is easily first; indeed, 
 she ranks among one of Dickens's unqualified successes, 
 and from the moment when she administers the strange 
 mixture of restoratives to her young nephew ("I am 
 sure I tasted linseed water, anchovy sauce and salad 
 dressing ") to her kindly hints to David about Agnes, 
 almost at the end of the book, she attracts us to her; 
 what a dear, golden-hearted old lady she must have 
 made, her little peculiarities and occasional acerbity 
 just giving an agreeable fillip to her sterling qualities. 
 Long may her type exist to sweeten human life and 
 to help the many Mr Dicks floating about the world ! 
 
 With another class of woman also Dickens was no 
 
 less successful. It is a class calling rather for shrewd 
 
 observation than for psychological analysis, and 
 
 therefore well within his range. This type is drawn 
 
 173
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 almost entirely from the lower middle-class, and have 
 one attribute at anyrate in common thorough-going 
 disagreeableness Mrs Gamp, Mrs Prig, Mrs Joe, Mrs 
 Snagsby, Mrs Varden, Mrs Sowerberry,Mrs Gummidge, 
 Miss Miggs, Mrs MacStinger, Mrs Jellyby and Mrs 
 Pocket, to mention a few. What a detestable collec- 
 tion of females; what an unpromising assortment 
 of minor vices! Yes, minor vices; they haven't 
 enough character to be even vicious on a big scale. 
 Yet with what amazing art they are drawn, not a 
 repulsive feature missed, and yet etched in with such 
 humorous twists and twirls that you cannot help 
 laughing at them, however foolish or contemptible 
 they may be. Of the London landlady no one had a 
 wider knowledge than Dickens; it is amazing the 
 varieties he gives you of a type which one would 
 have thought admitted of so few. Mrs Bardell 
 belongs, perhaps, to the region of farcical romance; 
 but there is enough life about Mrs Raddles too much 
 for poor Bob Sawyer. Mrs Crupp is painfully actual ; 
 she " does for " David Copperfield, and it would be 
 hard to compute the number of unfortunate young 
 men she had " done for " very completely. Mrs 
 Todgers, who would probably have objected to be 
 classed as a landlady, has some good points. She is 
 by no means altogether the calculating vixen at the 
 same time one would like to see her only at rare 
 intervals. Mrs Lirriper, who gives the name to 
 one of his short stories, is the most human, and perhaps 
 it is unfair to class her among the disagreeables; but
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 we fancy she would rather get on the " nerves," her 
 kindliness notwithstanding. 
 
 Taken on the whole then we must pronounce 
 Dickens's women characters as ineffective, except 
 where they are either eccentric or disagreeable. 
 Accepting these qualifications, he has contributed 
 some remarkably humorous and not a few genuinely 
 pathetic figures to the world of noveldom; two at 
 anyrate destined to rank among the immortals of 
 fiction Mrs Gamp and Betsey Trotwood. 
 
 It is hard to overpraise Dickens's sketches of 
 child life. Dickens did not describe a child he 
 became a child for the time being. He lived over 
 again his own childish days. Hence the poignancy and 
 actuality of his pictures. Perhaps on occasion his 
 sentimentalism and his love for a " curtain," as in the 
 death-scene of Pip and Joe the crossing-sweeper, 
 leads him to utter a false note or so. But the false 
 notes are very rare. And the beauty, imaginative 
 delicacy, and tender humour, of his pictures of child life 
 need no encomium at this date. The merits of his 
 three notable studies of sensitive, nervous childhood, 
 Paul, David and Pip, are universally recognised. 
 Here obviously his own temperament is speaking. 
 But he was also extremely happy in describing 
 children and young people of other temperaments 
 than his own. There is Robin Toodle, the robustious 
 offspring of the nurse in Dombey and Son; Noah 
 Claypole, the loutish charity boy, is another type; 
 Joe, the crossing-sweeper, is a typical little Cockney lad ; 
 175
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 Traddles and Steerforth as boys at school are admirable 
 studies in contrast. How lifelike is this description : 
 
 " Poor Traddles in a tight, sky-blue suit that made 
 his arms and legs like German sausages, he was the 
 merriest and most miserable of all the boys. He was 
 always being caned I think he was caned every day, 
 except on holiday Monday, when he was only rulered 
 on both hands, and was always going to write to his 
 uncle about it, and never did. After laying his head 
 on the desk for a little while he would cheer up some- 
 how, begin to laugh again and draw skeletons all over 
 his slate before his eyes were dry. I used to wonder 
 what comfort Traddles found in drawing skeletons, 
 and for some time looked upon him as a sort of hermit, 
 who reminded himself by those symbols of mortality 
 that caning couldn't last for ever, but I believe he only 
 did it because they were easy and didn't want any 
 features." 
 
 In his Christmas story, The Haunted Man, there are 
 some spirited sketches of the small Titterbys; of 
 Dolphus, a newspaper boy, cetat ten, who hit upon the 
 brilliant invention of varying the first vowel in the word, 
 "paper," and thus imparting a colour and interest 
 in the day's routine. So before daylight he would 
 yell " morning pa-per," an hour before noon " morning 
 pap-per," which about two changed to " morning 
 pip-per," which in a couple of hours changed to 
 " morning popper," and so declined with the sun into 
 " evening pup-per," to the great relief and comfort of 
 
 this young gentleman's spirits. 
 176
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 Who can readily forget, moreover, the amusingly 
 precocious children in the " Holly Tree Inn " story, a 
 story abounding in touches of sympathetic observa- 
 tion of children's ways. But no doubt the most en- 
 during of his sketches of precocious children is the 
 poor little half-starved slavey in The Old Curiosity 
 Shop, a far more vital study than poor Little Nell. 
 The curious mixture of worldly shrewdness and child- 
 like sweetness is admirably suggested. Almost 
 driven insane through ill-treatment, a natural strain 
 of goodness survives the ill-treatment of Sally Brass. 
 The scenes between Dick Swiveller and the Mar- 
 chioness are the most delightful and the most enduring 
 in this novel, though we cannot agree with Mr Swiveller 
 that Sophronia Sphynx, albeit " euphonious and gen- 
 teel," was a name worthy of her. 
 
 To pass from the normal to the abnormal is to pass 
 at once from a group of characterisations which 
 greatly vary in merit to a group that with a few 
 reservations concerning the bold, bad villains are 
 uniformly and extraordinarily successful. It is to pass 
 from a territory, in which other writers of less power 
 have succeeded often much better than our author, to 
 a little domain of which Dickens is the master and 
 ruler ; in which he is unapproachable 
 
 Never alone come the eccentrics! The bad char- 
 acters the out-and-out bad characters succeed just 
 where we should expect them to succeed, and fail 
 where we should expect them to fail. Where they 
 present merely studies in coarse brutality, animal 
 M 177
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 ferocity combined with the intelligence of the " rough " 
 or " cad," they are effective enough. The cowardice 
 of the " bully," the savage anger and treachery of the 
 blackguard, is excellently depicted. Sykes and Fagin, 
 Jonas Chuzzlewit, and, on the whole, Quilp, serve 
 their purpose well enough. But not every devil may 
 be detected by his cloven foot, nor every villain by his 
 scowl. Yet unless Dickens could show some physical 
 manifestation of the soul, could hint by a deformity of 
 limb the deformity of moral fibre, he was unable to 
 impress the reader with the personality of the char- 
 acter. Carker's villainy seems so inseparably bound up 
 with his gleaming white teeth, that we are almost per- 
 suaded that were he to become on a sudden toothless 
 he would ipso facto develop into a highly virtuous 
 gentleman . He suggests a study in molars and morals ! 
 
 Dickens is, as has been said, in no sense a psycho- 
 logist. His work is impressionistic, not analytical. 
 When he elaborates his portrait, it is not to show the 
 quality of motives so much as the quantity of waist- 
 coat buttons. Such as they are, however, the villains 
 as a rule serve their purpose well, and where they fail, 
 as in the case of Carker, Monk, Eugene Wrayburn and 
 Uriah Heep, it is because some psychological insight 
 into the workings of the mind is wanted to give vitality 
 and reality to the picture. 
 
 To turn now to the class of grotesques which play 
 
 the most conspicuous share in his writings. Here 
 
 physical uncouthness and mental disability, ranging 
 
 from good-natured stupidity down to sheer imbecility, 
 
 178
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 is shown combined with sterling moral qualities in 
 particular, tenderness and sympathy. The recipe 
 for the characters is not especially promising, and one 
 would surmise that they would quickly weary. This, 
 however, is certainly not the case. From Newman 
 Noggs, who appeared in Nickleby, down to Joe Gar- 
 gery in Great Expectations, each creation is a fresh 
 delight, each has some new and unexpected touch of 
 humour, and with none of them would we part. Some 
 are lovable, some are merely amusing, but ail of them 
 are creatures of warm flesh and blood to be reckoned 
 among the friends of our imagination. 
 
 And here let me say that by the phrase abnormal I 
 do not mean unnatural or necessarily cranky though 
 some are cranks but characters removed from the 
 ordinary average human being by reason of certain 
 peculiarities or eccentricities of temperament. Joe 
 Gargery is not the normal blacksmith ; he is abnormal, 
 luckily for us, and his oddities are irradiated by the 
 searchlight of the author's penetrating humour. Yet 
 he is perfectly natural; we may never have met Joe, 
 but we feel we might meet him at any moment. He 
 is a genuine creation. 
 
 "Joe being invited to sit down to table, looked all 
 round the room for a suitable spot on which to deposit 
 his hat, as if it were only on some few very rare sub- 
 stances in nature that it could find a resting-place, and 
 ultimately stood it on an extreme corner of the 
 chimneypiece, from which it ever afterwards fell off 
 
 at intervals. 
 
 179
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 " ' Do you like tea or coffee, Mr Gargery? ' asked 
 Herbert. 
 
 " ' Thankee, sir,' said Joe, stiff from head to foot, 
 ' I'll take whichever is most agreeable to yourself.' 
 
 " ' What do you say to coffee? ' 
 
 " ' Thankee, sir,' returned Joe, evidently dispirited 
 by the proposal ; ' since you are so kind as to make 
 choice of coffee, I will not run contrary to your opinions. 
 But don't you never find it a little 'eating? ' 
 
 " ' Say tea, then,' said Herbert, pouring it out. 
 
 " Here Joe's hat tumbled off the mantelpiece and 
 he started out of his chair, and fitted it to the same 
 exact spot, as if it were an absolute point of good 
 breeding that it should tumble off again soon. 
 
 " ' When did you come to town, Mr Gargery? ' 
 
 "'Were it yesterday afternoon?' said Joe, after 
 coughing behind his hand as if he had had time to 
 catch the whooping cough since he came. ' No, it 
 were not, yes it were. Yes, it were yesterday after- 
 noon ' (with an appearance of mingled wisdom, relief 
 and strict impartiality). 
 
 " ' Have you seen anything of London yet? 
 
 " ' Why, yes, sir,' said Joe. ' Me and Wopsle went 
 off straight to look at the Blacking Ware'us. But we 
 didn't find it come up with its likeness to the red bills 
 on shop doors; which I mean to say,' added Joe, 'as 
 it is there drawd too architectooralororal.' 
 
 " I really believe Joe would have prolonged the 
 word (mightily expressive to my mind of some archi- 
 tecture that I know) into a perfect chorus, but for his 
 180
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 attention being providentially attracted by his hat, 
 which was toppling. Indeed, it demanded from him 
 a constant attention and a quickness of eye and hand 
 very like that exacted by wicket keeping. He made 
 extraordinary play with it, and showed the greatest 
 skill now rushing at it and catching it neatly as it 
 dropped; now merely stopping it midway, beating it 
 up, and humouring it in various parts of the room, and 
 against a good deal of the pattern of the wall, finally 
 splashing it into the slop basin, where I took the liberty 
 of laying hands on it." 
 
 Apart from the perfect touches of characterisation, 
 what a genius for " stage business " this and similar 
 passages show. One can well believe how excellent 
 an actor Dickens was. 
 
 On similar lines, though not with such delicacy of 
 touch or such play of humorous fancy, is the char- 
 acter of Mr Peggotty drawn. Peggotty loses in interest 
 somehow when he goes in quest of Emily, whereas Joe 
 grows upon us as the story proceeds, and is perhaps 
 the most lovable of all Dickens's characters, the 
 strength and tenderness of the man being portrayed 
 with infinite skill. 
 
 Excellent as studies of trustful simplicity are the 
 characters of Tom Pinch and his first cousin, Bob 
 Cratchit, who idealises Scrooge in a way not altogether 
 dissimilar from that of Pinch! 
 
 Belonging, of course, to these grotesques are certain 
 female characters we have glanced at already when 
 dealing with Dickens's women: Betsey Trotwood, 
 
 181
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 Miss Pross, Mrs Gamp, Betsey Prig. It is curious 
 how sure is his touch and effective his portraiture 
 when grotesquerie, involving some measure of humor- 
 ous fantasy, enter into the character. Putting aside 
 the shrewd and crazy women, he scarcely ever draws 
 a live woman except as a grotesque. Among the male 
 characters also, many of his most striking successes 
 are grotesques, but he has drawn some interesting 
 portraits apart from these, e.g., Pip, Steerforth, 
 Traddles, Jaggers, Tulkinghorn, and for the matter of 
 that, the majority of his lawyers. Two, however, of 
 his most notable paintings must be classed with the 
 " grotesques," even though, as in the case of Joe and 
 Mr Peggotty, the grotesque element only faintly 
 colours the portrait and does not interfere with its life- 
 like character. I allude to Dick Swiveller and Mr 
 Micawber. Stripped of their engaging personalities and 
 looked at through the cold eye of criticism, it is diffi- 
 cult to see anything especially attractive about them. 
 Dick is a chronic tippler, rarely sober, a shiftless 
 Bohemian, alternating between getting into drink and 
 into debt 
 
 Surely a man who might be held up as an awful 
 example by the temperance party, yet as seen by 
 the humorous and sympathetic eye of Dickens his 
 failings fall into insignificance, even his intemperance 
 is presented in a merry, fantastic light; whereas the 
 good-heartedness of the character and the happy-go- 
 lucky mercurial temperament is emphasised and 
 dwelt upon with rare skill. We are made to feel that 
 
 182
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 there is a refinement about the man, that he is not only 
 a " good sort " at heart, but that under happier cir- 
 cumstances " the fire of soul would have been kindled 
 at the taper of conviviality " of a more moderate 
 character. 
 
 Mr Micawber is another type of the attractive mer- 
 curial temperament, ready to look on the bright side 
 of things at the smallest provocation. Apart from 
 this, the needy, improvident man would have served 
 the stern moralist's purposes almost as well as 
 Swiveller. But really we are scarcely conscious of 
 his faults, so delighted are we by his company. This, 
 it may be said, is due to the author making unfair use 
 of his gift of humour, and idealising the man out of all 
 human probability. That he idealises may be ad- 
 mitted. All his characters are idealised one way or 
 the other. That is part of his method. That it is 
 done to an inartistic extent, that it deprives the char- 
 acter of human interest we cannot admit. Surely we 
 can recall many persons whose charm of manner or 
 whose personal magnetism has affected us so strongly 
 that we have been inclined to overlook their weak- 
 nesses and condone their faults, faults that in less 
 sympathetic or attractive characters would have pro- 
 voked disgust and disapprobation. 
 
 Here comes in the special and most enduring value 
 of Dickens's character-painting. So sure is his touch, 
 so vital his imagination, that the credibility or psycho- 
 logic accuracy of a character study scarcely affects 
 its success at all. Some of his frankest caricatures 
 183
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 live with us, as do few of the correctly-drawn person- 
 ages of other novelists. So intensely does he believe 
 in Pecksniff, Stiggins, Chadband, Scrooge, ay, and 
 his Winkles and Tupmans too, that we also are com- 
 pelled to believe in them. The reformed Scrooge 
 screaming out of the window for the largest turkey, 
 or digging the astonished Cratchit in the ribs, is out- 
 rageously improbable. But, improbable or not, 
 Scrooge is alive and declines to be dismissed into the 
 limbo of forgotten worthies. And are not many of 
 Dickens's characterisations wrought into the very 
 texture of our thoughts, impressed upon our imagina- 
 tion as are few characters even in real life? 
 
 Artistic defects (though these I think have been 
 exaggerated) count for little where there is such splen- 
 did, superabundant vitality. 
 
 For beneath all his caricature, his fantasy, there is 
 the same elemental force and zest for life that one finds 
 in Walt Whitman, and what Whitman did for poetry 
 Dickens did for the fiction of his day humanised it, 
 democratised it, energised it. 
 
 " Fellowship is Heaven, lack of fellowship is Hell," 
 wrote William Morris, and if there is any one idea 
 underlying the multifarious characterisations of 
 Charles Dickens, it is this idea of the supreme value of 
 fellowship which transfigures the meanest, the most 
 dull-witted personages into saints and heroes. 
 
 Betsey Trotwood's famous advice to her nephew 
 fairly epitomises the teaching of Dickens. " Never 
 be mean, never be false, never be cruel." " Never be 
 184
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 mean," that is the burden of his Christmas books. 
 " Never be false," that sentiment runs beneath all his 
 satire. " Never be cruel," that is the mainspring of 
 his tender humour his compassion for the weak, the 
 infirm, the oppressed. 
 
 185
 
 THE VAGABOND
 
 " Before men made us citizens, great 
 Nature made us men." 
 
 LOWELL.
 
 WILLIAM HAZLITT 
 
 WEDNESDAY evening in Inner Temple Lane, a dingy 
 room with low ceiling and a scarcity of furniture. 
 Books and old prints look upon the intruder with 
 sedate and watchful eyes. An atmosphere of musty 
 antiquity and tobacco smoke. On the sideboard 
 there is a cold joint of beef, and beside it a big jug of 
 porter, from which guests may refresh themselves at 
 will. 
 
 Beside the fireplace towers the corpulent but impos- 
 ing figure of Coleridge. He is talking rapidly in his 
 rich, sonorous voice to an attentive circle of listeners, 
 his blue eye flashing with inspiration and enthusiasm 
 as he warms to his subject. Beside him is a stiff, 
 angular figure clad in grey worsted, half listening, 
 half meditating need we specify him as the poet of 
 Rydal Mount? The host Charles Lamb a little 
 man with a big head and a sly, whimsical expression, 
 stands at some distance from the other, interjecting 
 some humorous comment on his friend's outpouring. 
 Leaning against the wall is Hazlitt, a man of middle 
 height, with dark hair curling over his forehead, quick 
 restless eyes, and somewhat defiant expression. 
 A little man with a sallow-looking visage, bright eyes 
 and an exquisitely musical voice, breaks in upon the 
 189
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 conversation at times, and is listened to with an atten- 
 tion scarcely less rapt than that accorded to Coleridge. 
 This is Thomas de Quincey, and Hazlitt and he vie 
 with each other in shabbiness of attire. A remark- 
 able gathering, truly, of genius and Bohemianism. 
 But while several of the gathering had a strain of 
 wildness in them none were so unmistakably vagabonds 
 of literature as Hazlitt and De Quincey. Lamb and 
 Hazlitt are often bracketed together as literary 
 Bohemians, but Lamb's Bohemianism was quite on 
 the surface. He was at heart devoted to convention, 
 and when released from his drudgery of clerkship he 
 has frankly confessed how potent an influence routine 
 had been and still was in his life. Even his wanderings 
 on paper are more apparent than real, and there is a 
 method in his quaintest fantasies. But Hazlitt was a 
 vagabond, a wanderer in the fullest sense, and there 
 was something of the untamed about both him and 
 De Quincey. Two extraordinary interesting person- 
 alities in an age of interesting personalities. 
 
 Wordsworth claimed for imaginative vision an 
 inner veracity, a power of penetrating to the root of 
 things, but it was Coleridge who first appropriated this 
 faculty of the imagination for critical purposes. Thus 
 he made criticism, no less than poetry, a creative art. 
 
 Hazlitt was his lineal successor in criticism just as 
 Frederick Denison Maurice was in theological thought, 
 and if not so great in insight, yet transcended his 
 master in lucidity and brilliance. Criticism in the 
 eighteenth century had been for the most part hard 
 190
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 and mechanical ; the cold light of logic and reason 
 according to the ideals of the time was considered a 
 sufficient equipment. And so we find Dr Johnson 
 airily disposing of Lycidas as " easy, vulgar and 
 therefore disgusting "; Lord Lansdowne declining to 
 discuss Shakespeare's soliloquies on the ground that 
 " not one in all his works could be excused by Reason 
 or Nature." Sometimes a critic was kindly enough 
 to attempt to improve the poor Elizabethan. Dryden 
 assisted to give symmetry to the Tempest by devising 
 as a mate for Miranda a man who had never seen a 
 maid. Pope was offended by Shakespeare's " wrong 
 choice of subjects," and charitably concludes that it 
 was due to the fact that he was dependent for his sub- 
 sistence on pleasing the taste of tradesmen and 
 mechanics. 
 
 But at the close of the century a revolution took 
 place in critical as in other regions of thought. 
 Lessing led the way in Germany, followed by Cole- 
 ridge in England. And the method of this new school 
 was to interpret, to sympathetically identify oneself 
 with the author, learn his secrets and unfold them. 
 This needs a more than common strength and plasti- 
 city of imagination, but in the hands of masters like 
 Goethe, Schlegel, Lessing, Victor Hugo, Coleridge, 
 Hazlitt and Lamb, wonders were accomplished. 
 Each stood by himself in outlook and predilections, 
 one excelling where another failed, but each carried 
 the freshness and eagerness of the ardent imagination 
 into their work. 
 
 191
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 Lamb, of course, is far better known to the general 
 reader than Hazlitt. Like Dickens, " the gentle 
 Charles " is a household word, whereas Hazlitt is little 
 more than a name in a catalogue to many. Yet as a 
 critic it may be doubted whether Lamb is any better 
 known than Hazlitt. Lamb's fame as the whimsical 
 Elia, his picturesque personality and his charming 
 extravagances as a letter-writer, have somewhat 
 obscured his reputation as the author of Specimens 
 of English Dramatic Poets Contemporary with 
 Shakespeare, yet it must not be forgotten that with 
 his fine literary epicureanism he re-discovered the old 
 dramatic poets, and opened up a new world to future 
 scholars and litterateurs. Hazlitt, more wayward and 
 capricious in his tastes, is not so safe a guide as Lamb, 
 but where he enjoyed and appreciated no man could 
 better convey this enjoyment to others. And even 
 better than his literary portraits with all their daring 
 brilliance are his essays on men and things, which for 
 discursive wisdom and freshness of thought almost 
 equal those of Montaigne. As Hazlitt truly said, 
 Montaigne is the pioneer of this style of essay writing, 
 being the first who had the courage to say as an author 
 what he felt as a man. 
 
 Although in later life Hazlitt's strange humours and 
 bursts of petty feeling made him difficult to get on 
 with and proved very trying to his friends, yet in 
 earlier days before ill-health had soured his temper 
 and vicissitudes of fortune made him bitter he was 
 a youth of singular charm. Silent and reserved with 
 192
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 strangers, he was a most delightful conversationalist 
 to those whom he cared for, abounding in enthusiasm 
 and quick to respond to the enthusiasm of others. 
 Lacking Coleridge's remarkable powers of expression, 
 he was far more intelligible and more amenable to 
 suggestions from others. No one could be fairer in 
 argument than he, though at times, when he sat down 
 to write as when dealing with Byron personal pre- 
 judices would carry away his cooler judgment. 
 
 At this time he was an itinerant young portrait 
 painter with a taste for philosophy. But dissatisfied 
 with his artistic power, he turned his attention more 
 assiduously to philosophy and politics. He seems to 
 have been a clever painter without the patience to 
 master properly the career of his art. Like some of 
 his literary portraits, however, at a later date, his 
 paintings were often more dashing than recognisable. 
 Southey thought that the portrait of Coleridge re- 
 sembled "a horse-stealer on his trial, evidently guilty, 
 but clever enough to have a chance of getting off." 
 Many were mere pot-boilers, and were chiefly valuable 
 as providing him with a little ready cash. On one 
 occasion, we are told, he hurried over the portrait of a 
 rich manufacturer in desperate anxiety to pocket the 
 five guineas, and after achieving his end, hurried away 
 to dine on sausages and mashed potatoes. " While 
 they were getting ready," he says, " and I could hear 
 them hissing in the pan, I read a volume of Gil 
 Bias, containing an account of the fair Aurora." 
 
 But if he gave up the brush he never gave up paint- 
 N 193
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 ing, and his brilliant audacities in prose have survived 
 his experiments in pigment. 
 
 Shy and reserved as he was, no one could be more 
 confidential with a pen in hand. Every essay is a 
 fragment of autobiography and every sentence a con- 
 fession. There is something of Rousseau's senti- 
 mental garrulousness about Hazlitt, and this increases 
 the human interest of his writings. We may dissent 
 from his conclusions, or take exception to certain 
 moods, but he never bores us. 
 
 As examples of his powers of portraiture a passage 
 or so from his papers on Wordsworth and Tom Moore 
 will suffice. Here we shall find mingled honey and 
 gall. 
 
 What could be better than the eulogism of Words- 
 worth, " He gathers manna in the wilderness, he 
 strikes the barren rock for the gushing moisture. 
 He elevates the mean by the strength of his own 
 aspirations; he clothes the naked with beauty and 
 grandeur from the stores of his own recollections. 
 No cypress grove loads his verse with funeral song, 
 but his imagination lends a sense of joy 
 
 " l To the bare trees and mountains bare, 
 And grass in the green fields. ' 
 
 No storm, no shipwreck, startles us by its horrors, 
 but the rainbow lifts its head in the clouds and the 
 breeze sighs through the withered fern. No sad 
 vicissitude of Fate, no overwhelming catastrophe in 
 Nature deforms his page; but the dewdrop glitters 
 194
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 on the bending flower, the tear collects in the glistening 
 eye. As the lark ascends from its low bed and salutes 
 the morning skies, so Mr Wordsworth's unpretending 
 muse in russet guise scales the summit of reflection, 
 while it makes the round earth its footstool and its 
 home." 
 
 But the man who wrote these honeyed words could 
 write also words of gall, as that genial but certainly 
 second-rate poet, Tom Moore, found to his cost. It 
 would be hard to deny the truth of the criticism, 
 despite its almost brutal frankness. 
 
 " Mr Moore has a little mistaken the art of poetry 
 for the cosmetic art. He makes out an inventory 
 of beauty, the smile on the lips, the dimple on the 
 cheeks, item golden locks, item a pair of blue wings, 
 and thinks it a character and story. This dissipated, 
 fulsome, painted patchwork style may succeed in the 
 levity and languor of the boudoir, but it is not the 
 style of Parnassus, nor a passport to immortality. 
 We cannot except the Irish melodies from the same 
 criticism. If these national airs do indeed express 
 the soul of impassioned feeling in his countrymen, 
 the case of Ireland is hopeless. There are no tones 
 to waken liberty, to console humanity. Mr Moore 
 converts the wild harp of Erin into a musical snuff-box." 
 
 While lacking the profound sagacity of his master 
 Coleridge Coleridge at his best the Coleridge of the 
 " Essay on Poetry " and the commentator on Shake- 
 speare, he far excels him in lucidity of expression and 
 in range of subject. 
 
 195
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 More interesting, however, than these clever 
 portraits are his Miscellaneous Essays and Table 
 Talk, as they enable the writer better to display his 
 wit, fancy and originality of thought. How pro- 
 foundly suggestive is his essay on " Cant and 
 Hypocrisy." The following fragment may convey 
 some idea of the line of thought, but the essay must 
 be read in its entirety to be fairly appreciated. 
 
 " We often see that a person condemns in another 
 the very thing he is guilty of himself. Is this 
 hypocrisy? Not necessarily [is Hazlitt's reply]. If 
 he really feels none of the disgust and abhorrence he 
 expresses, this is quackery and impudence. But if 
 he really expresses what he feels then this is not 
 hypocrisy, but want of strength in the moral sense. 
 All morality consists in squaring one's actions and 
 sentiments to one's ideas of what is fit and proper, and 
 it is the incessant struggle and alternate triumph of 
 the two principles that is one great source of all the 
 good and evil in the world. The mind of man is like 
 a clock that is always running down and requires to 
 be as constantly wound up. The ideal principle is 
 the master key that winds it up, and without which it 
 will come to a stand. A man is only a thorough 
 hypocrite when he has not even the wish to be what 
 he appears. Anyone may yield to temptation and 
 yet feel a sincere love and aspiration after virtue. 
 The hypocrisy of priests has been a butt for ridicule in 
 all ages, but I am not sure that there has not been 
 more wit than philosophy in it. I cannot admit that 
 
 196
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 though he may exaggerate or even make an ostenta- 
 tious display of religion and virtue through habit and 
 spiritual pride, that this is a proof he has not those 
 sentiments in his heart, or that his whole behaviour 
 is the mere acting of a part. One of the finest re- 
 marks that has been made in modern times is that of 
 Lord Shaftesbury, that there is no such thing as a 
 perfect Theist or an absolute Atheist, that whatever 
 may be the general conviction entertained on the 
 subject the evidence is not, and cannot be at all times 
 equally present to the mind ; that, even if it were, we 
 are not in the same humour to perceive it; a fit of 
 gout, a shower of rain shake our best-established 
 conclusions. The grossnesses of religion and its 
 stickling for mere forms as its essence have given a 
 handle, and a just one, to impugners. At the Feast 
 of Ramadan, says Voltaire, the Mussulmans wash and 
 pray five times a day, and then fall to cutting one 
 another's throats again with the greatest deliberation 
 and goodwill. The two things, I grant, are sufficiently 
 at variance, but they are, I contend, equally sincere 
 in both. Thus, though I think there is very little 
 downright hypocrisy in the world, I do think there 
 is a good deal of cant. Though few people have the 
 face to set up for the very thing they in their hearts 
 despise, we almost all want to be thought better than 
 we are, and affect a greater admiration or abhorrence 
 of certain things than we really feel. Cant is the 
 voluntary overcharging or prolongation of a real 
 sentiment ; hypocrisy is the setting up a pretension to 
 197
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 a feeling you never had and have no wish for. There 
 are people who are made up of cant, but who have not 
 sincerity enough to be hypocrites, that is, have not 
 hearty dislike or contempt enough of anything to give 
 the lie to their puling profession of admiration and 
 esteem for it." 
 
 Again. What could be truer in substance and more 
 striking in treatment than this, from another essay on 
 Vulgarity and Affectation 
 
 " A thing is not vulgar merely because it is common. 
 Nothing is vulgar that is natural, spontaneous, 
 unavoidable. Grossness is not vulgarity, ignorance 
 is not vulgarity, awkwardness is not vulgarity; but 
 all these become vulgar when they are affected and 
 shown off on the authority of others, or to fall in with 
 the fashion or the company we keep. Caliban is 
 coarse enough, but surely he is not vulgar. Nothing 
 original, nothing real can be vulgar. The upper are 
 not wiser than the lower orders, because they resolve 
 to differ from them. The fashionable have the 
 advantage of the unfashionable in nothing but the 
 fashion. The truly vulgar are the herd of pretenders 
 to what they do not feel, and to what is not natural to 
 them, whether in high or low life." 
 
 His habit of introducing personal matter into his 
 essays gives frequently a pleasant intimate flavour to 
 his writing, and your interest in the written matter is 
 none the less because of the interesting glimpses 
 afforded of the writer's personality. 
 
 He will tell you with gleeful particularity of detail
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 the exact circumstances in which he first made the 
 acquaintance of certain books. 
 
 He will recall how he sat up half the night to read 
 Paul and Virginia, which he picked up at an inn at 
 Bridgewater, after being drenched in the rain all day; 
 he mentions how he sat down to read Rousseau at the 
 inn at Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry and cold 
 chicken. In a beautiful passage he describes the 
 time when he walked between Wrexham and Llan- 
 gollen, his imagination aglow with some lines of 
 Coleridge, and says that ever after the beauty of the 
 hill-girt valley was inseparably connected in his mind 
 with the glamour of Coleridge's verse and his own 
 tumultuous, revolutionary sympathies. This walk 
 in North Wales seems to have been to him what that 
 Cambrian walk was to Wordsworth a time of rapture 
 and consecration. 
 
 In his essay on " The Conversation of Authors," he 
 takes a look out of a window first, tells us what he sees, 
 and uses his comments as tags to moralise on, or as 
 fresh illustrations for some theory he is elaborating. 
 In another essay the sight of a spider crawling along 
 the floor furnishes the preamble. In another a thunder- 
 storm suggests an analogy with his own explosive 
 moods. At another time he tells you he is looking 
 forward to pastry for dinner. At another time he 
 changes from one place to another whilst writing an 
 essay. The new environment suggests a flow of 
 fresh ideas, ideas that frankly bear little relation to 
 the matter preceding. No matter, Hazlitt resolved 
 199
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 to let his subject suffer rather than himself. He has 
 a fresh fund of new ideas and means to bring them in 
 somehow. And so we get a big digression, fascinating 
 but discursive to a degree. Dearly as he valued the 
 warmth and colour of life there was more than a touch 
 of the recluse about him, and he was the reverse of a 
 sociable man, rarely showing his qualities of mind to 
 any but one or two chosen souls. " One of the 
 pleasantest things in life," he says, " is going on a 
 journey, but I like to go by myself. I cannot see the 
 wit of walking and talking at the same time. When 
 I am in the country I wish to vegetate like the country. 
 I am not for criticising hedgerows and black cattle. 
 I go out of town to forget the town and all that is in it. 
 There are those who for this purpose go to watering- 
 places and carry the metropolis with them. I like 
 more elbow room and fewer encumbrances. Give 
 me the clear blue sky over my head and the green turf 
 beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a 
 three hours' march to dinner, and then to thinking." 
 This is the Hazlitt that captivated Stevenson, the 
 delightful gossip whose influence is so marked in many 
 of Stevenson's graceful essays. 
 
 With all his love of philosophy and serious thought 
 he hated the man who never relaxes. There is no 
 starch in Hazlitt's writings. Says he, "I hate to be 
 always wise or aiming at wisdom. I do not desire to 
 be always posing myself and others with the ques- 
 tions of fate, free-will, fore-knowledge absolute, etc. 
 I must occasionally lie fallow. Give a man a 
 200
 
 [N MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 tongue in his head, a throb of pleasure in his heart, 
 and he will be glad to share it with the first person 
 he meets." 
 
 There was something of the Mrs Gummidge about 
 him. His friends were many, but he bleed to feel he 
 was unbefriended. It gave a relish to his solitary 
 moods. Yet he was good and modest at heart, and 
 when on one occasion the urbane Leigh Hunt gave him 
 a piece of his own mind quite in the Hazlitt vein, all 
 he said was, " By Gad, there's a great deal in what 
 you say." 
 
 Hazlitt belonged to the race of splendid vagabonds. 
 There are certain men born with a gipsy strain in the 
 blood, a certain restless itch of temperament which 
 places them naturally in the position of revolters. 
 Like the proverbial Irishman they are " agin the 
 government," no matter what government. They 
 are spiritual even when not physical wanderers 
 over the face of the earth, chafing against the mildest 
 conventions of society, with something of the elemental 
 wildness of the ancient earth about them. This 
 masonic sign of vagabondage places in the same 
 spiritual fraternity men as different in genius and 
 disposition as Thoreau, Whitman, Hazlitt, De 
 Quincey, Borrow and Richard Jeffries. It drove 
 Thoreau to the woods at Maine, sent Whitman 
 chanting his blithe and uncouth songs along " the 
 Open Road," attracted Borrow to those aliens from 
 civilisation, the gipsies, and made Jeffries far more at 
 home listening to the song of the bird in the 
 201
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 hedgerows of Sussex than conversing with his fellow- 
 men. 
 
 Excepting Whitman, a kind of anti-social sentiment 
 animates the vagabond; he is on closer terms of 
 intimacy with the birds and flowers than with his 
 kind, and even the hearty brotherliness of Whitman 
 has in it the rough friendliness of wind and sun. He 
 loves every man and woman, but no man or woman in 
 particular. He loves them in so far as they are part 
 of Nature, but there is little that is personal in his 
 attachments. 
 
 Hazlitt, of course, was a fervent republican, he 
 was also a devoted admirer of Napoleon. Some have 
 professed to see an inconsistency here. But the 
 republican surely by virtue of his dislike for artificial 
 aristocracies is drawn naturally towards the aris- 
 tocracy of genius wherever he may find it 
 
 Hazlitt attacked Byron because he fancied, unfairly, 
 his revolt was a pose; but the two men had much in 
 common. Hazlitt is the Byron of prose. There is the 
 same immense vitality in the Table Talk and 
 Spirit of the Age, the same changeableness of mood, 
 the same salt of humour, sting of satire, and something 
 of the same strange mixture of idealist and cynical 
 man of the world, as we see in Beppo and Don Juan. 
 And beneath all their wilfulness each was a great man 
 at heart. Down below all Byron's affectation and 
 mannerism lay a strain of almost fierce sincerity. 
 Shelley discerned it when others did not; just as 
 Charles Lamb, with his unerring insight, never failed 
 202
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 to see the finer side of Hazlitt. He declared that 
 Hazlitt in a natural and healthy state was the finest 
 and wisest of spirits breathing. Unhappily, in the 
 last few years of his life it could hardly be said that 
 Hazlitt ever was in a natural and healthy state. And 
 yet he was not a miserable man. The vagabond is 
 never really miserable. He may rave and growl, 
 but there's a suppressed smile in his eye all the time. 
 Hazlitt was nearly always in debt, but he accepted his 
 impecuniosity with Micawber-like cheerfulness, and his 
 last recorded words were, " Well, I've had a happy life." 
 
 A wandering, varied life, though devoid of striking 
 incident, the life of a literary man perpetually strugg- 
 ling with financial difficulties, yet who wrote his best, 
 perhaps, when duns were at the door. A man of 
 gusty and wayward affections, an inveterate senti- 
 mentalist with little constancy of affection in his 
 attachments with women, one is not surprised at the 
 failure of his married life with the matter-of-fact Miss 
 Stoddart, or the unsatisfactory character of his 
 subsequent experiments in sentiment. 
 
 To those, however, who treated gently his moodi- 
 ness (as did Charles Lamb), he was sour as he might 
 seem at times in their presence passionately loyal; 
 on the surface a cold man, he was at heart a deeply 
 affectionate one. Like other men of his temper, if 
 he fell foul of his friends sometimes he could not bear 
 others doing so. If he was quick in detecting some 
 fancied slight to himself he was equally sensitive on 
 behalf of others. 
 
 203
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 As a boy of eight he had written to his father : 
 
 " If we had not came to America we should not have 
 been away from one another. I think, for my part, 
 it would have been a great deal better if the white 
 people had not found it out. Let the others have it 
 to themselves for it was made for them." * 
 
 " The child is father of the man." He was quite 
 ready to abuse Columbus at the prospect of a personal 
 separation for a few weeks. 
 
 To find the true man one must read his writings; 
 a couple of essays will tell more than the completest 
 biography of outward events, and his writings are full 
 of a brilliant suggestiveness, a freshness of thought, 
 a lucidity of imagination. One of the finest critics 
 in an age of fine critics, to have read Hazlitt is an 
 epoch in one's literary life, because to have read him 
 once means that you will read him again and again 
 with increasing pleasure and appreciation. 
 
 A masterful, erratic genius; a strange, complex, 
 interesting personality, and an enduring power in 
 English letters. 
 
 * Memoirs of William Hazlilt (WILLIAM CAREW HAZLITT). 
 Vol. I. 
 
 204
 
 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 As one of the interesting vagabonds of literature 
 Thomas de Quincey takes his place beside William 
 Hazlitt. Civilisation has no charm for such men, and 
 the ordinary routine of life irks them. For intellectual 
 stamina and sheer dynamic power Hazlitt is certainly 
 superior. As a critic he had a keener eye, a mellower 
 taste ; as a man his was the more commanding person- 
 ality. But as a literary artist De Quincey has no 
 rival in his own peculiar province, and as a man, with 
 all his eccentricities, his puerilities, there was a certain 
 gracious charm about his character to which Hazlitt 
 assuredly could lay no claim. And a vagabond always, 
 whether in the outer world or in the world of the 
 imagination. 
 
 From early days, when as a boy he slept on the bare 
 hillsides in Wales, cheerfully trusting to some chance 
 kindness for food and drink, throughout his London 
 struggles and his peregrinations in " stoney-hearted 
 Oxford Street," down to the days of his brilliant 
 reputation in Edinburgh, he was the same fantastic 
 dreamer, restless spirit, grotesque child. Yes, he 
 was a vagabond child. He never grew up, he never 
 gained experience, and was even less familiar with the 
 ways of the world than Leigh Hunt. Fleeced of his 
 205
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 money when he was a struggling journalist in London, 
 and the easiest dupe possible for the unscrupulous, 
 he never became cynical or lost faith in human nature. 
 He was as generous and tender-hearted as Lamb. 
 Fame and affluence came but the vagabond child 
 never changed. His friends at Edinburgh rarely 
 knew where to find him, and when they chanced on 
 him he was as meanly dressed as if he had scarcely a 
 penny in the world. Were he wanted for a dinner- 
 party and there was a fine wisdom in his conversa- 
 tion it was the hardest thing in the world to persuade 
 him to come. And if he did come he presented the 
 strangest appearance in his tattered attire. But 
 that was a slight set-off to his companionship. Like 
 Coleridge, however, when he had a fancy for his 
 company he would stay on in the most unexpected 
 way, at times sublimely oblivious to any inconvenience 
 he might be occasioning a stay of some weeks might 
 be so that the difficulty of persuading him to come 
 shrank into insignificance beside the task of suggesting 
 to him to go. A story is told in the life of Christopher 
 North how that he dined with the Professor one night, 
 was detained for the night by a heavy storm of rain, 
 and prolonged his impromptu visit for a year. 
 
 Of the merit of his own work he had a just appre- 
 ciation, but of its financial value not the slightest, and 
 he made a strange figure seeking out editors and 
 publishers when he was sixty, with a big reputation, 
 as if he were the veriest tyro hawking articles. But 
 he liked it. One feels sure he liked the shiftless, 
 206
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 nomadic life. To have regarded his fame as a sound 
 business asset would have annoyed him extremely. 
 He loved uncertainties and perad ventures. And so 
 he made even the actualities of his life seem unreal and 
 illusory. At one time it has been said he went into 
 hiding to avoid arrest for debt, when all the time large 
 sums of money were due to him and his debts were 
 quite insignificant. 
 
 But I may be reminded that he was an inveterate 
 " opium-eater," that his eccentricities were doubtless 
 due to the effect of the drug upon his nervous system. 
 No doubt many of his wonderful fancies may be traced 
 to the stimulus of the narcotic. 
 
 But opium merely unlocked the treasure casket. 
 To assert, as some have done, that De Quincey's per- 
 sonal peculiarities and " impassioned prose " are the 
 result of opium eating is beside the mark. It were 
 as correct to say that Elia's essays may be explained 
 in terms of porter, and that Hazlitt bitter brilliance 
 is the result of taking strong tea. 
 
 The vagabond is born not made, and literary fame 
 may not be purchased in medicine phials. 
 
 The friend of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb and 
 Hazlitt, his admiration for the Lake Poet was greater 
 even than that of Hazlitt's. It is interesting to note 
 how this admiration for the genius of Wordsworth, 
 accompanied by ample appreciation of his defects as 
 a man and master, characterised men so different in 
 temperament as those that went to make up the Lamb 
 circle. Towards Lamb and Coleridge he was greatly 
 207
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 attracted, and for Lamb especially entertained a 
 strong affection. But his appreciation of Hazlitt was 
 modified by his inability to attune himself to Hazlitt's 
 curious moods. 
 
 There was a touch of the vagabond about Coleridge, 
 no little also, to adapt Henley's verdict on Stevenson, 
 of the Shorter Catechist. But there was nothing of 
 the preacher in De Quincey. Yet deep in his soul 
 there was that love of mysticism, that passion for the 
 half lights of mediaevalism we find in Coleridge. His 
 spiritual affinities with Coleridge were indeed con- 
 siderable, and some of the weird effects he creates in 
 prose are similar to those of " The Ancient Mariner " 
 and " Christabel." But nothing that he has written in 
 prose can take rank with these unique poems. The 
 splendid naivete and superb simplicity of Coleridge 
 at his best is alien to the genius of De Quincey. Nor 
 was he a force like Coleridge. Yet his influence upon 
 English and American literature is marked. Haw- 
 thorne and Edgar Allen Poe owe no slight debt to 
 his fantasies, and the prose style of Mr Swinburne 
 bears distinct traces of De Quincey's rhythmic 
 cadences. 
 
 In the more complex cadences of Ruskin's liquid 
 prose, on the other hand, I can find no trace of any 
 influence save that of the Old Testament, and possibly 
 Sir Thomas Browne, a lineal ancestor of every " prose- 
 poet." 
 
 Indeed, the special form of literary art " prose- 
 poetry " which De Quincey took as his especial pro- 
 208
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 vince did not emanate from him, though none have 
 rivalled him in the extraordinary flow of his imagery. 
 His literary style is like the purple haze of a summer 
 evening through which we dimly apprehend the shape 
 and contour of the scenery surrounding, all things 
 taking on a strange hue and unsubstantiality. 
 
 The cadences of verse are not foreign to the Eliza- 
 bethan prose writers, but the greatest stimulus to 
 lyrical prose was probably given by the translation of 
 the Bible in the reign of James The melodious and 
 gracious beauty of the Old Testament English vividly 
 impressed the prose writers of succeeding generations. 
 John Bunyan's wonderful allegory is couched in the 
 ancient simplicity and noble diction of the Book he 
 loved so well, and Milton's eloquent prose echoes the 
 sonorous music of Israel. 
 
 Swift also may be instanced, who, harsh and 
 savage as were his satires, yet glows with the apoca- 
 lyptic passion of the Hebrew Prophets. 
 
 These men had " messages " of ethical import to 
 deliver. De Quincey had no message. The true 
 vagabond mislikes the pulpit: not that he has no 
 beautiful things to say usually, indeed, he is an 
 inveterate idealist but he is too restless to stand in 
 one position, and if he mounted the pulpit stairs one 
 minute would be sliding down the rails the next. The 
 reader who seeks for solid intellectual fare had better 
 avoid De Quincey, but if he has dined already, then 
 the delicate, literary confections of the author of the 
 Confessions of an Opium Eater will serve admirably, 
 o 209
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 Who better to assist one " to chew the cud of a by- 
 gone vision? " 
 
 Impassioned prose meant to De Quincey something 
 other than the lyrical prose of his predecessors. Per- 
 haps " impassioned " is scarcely the right word for it. 
 There is little of the fire and energy that gives the term 
 a peculiar appropriation when applied to Modern 
 Painters or some of Mr Swinburne's essays. The 
 emotions are too attenuated, too elaborately beaten 
 out, and the delicate rhythmic modulations of such 
 dream-pieces as " Suspiria de Profundis" arrest us 
 chiefly through their haunting rhythmic and imagina- 
 tive sensibility. 
 
 A certain ghostly element pervades nearly every- 
 thing that he has written; at times it gives his prose 
 an atmosphere of eeriness that enthralls. 
 
 There are two sides to the imaginative faculty; one 
 bathed in sunlight, the other in moonlight. Some 
 writers, as Scott, excel in one, some, as Hawthorne, in 
 another, a very few, like Shakespeare, in both. To 
 writers such as De Quincey, Hawthorne and Edgar 
 Allen Poe has been granted a peculiar gift of impart- 
 ing the moonlight effects of imagination. 
 
 This power it is that gives the glamour and subtle 
 suggestiveness to De Quincey's prose. What could 
 be more delicately impressive than his description of 
 his first eventful journey to London, the prelude to 
 the terrible sufferings and privations he was to undergo. 
 
 " So sweet, so ghostly, in its soft, golden smiles, 
 silent as a dream, and quiet as the dying trance of a 
 210
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 saint, faded through all its stages this departing day, 
 along the whole length of which I bade farewell for 
 many a year to Wales, and farewell to summer. In 
 the very aspect and the sepulchral stillness of the 
 motionless day, as solemnly it wore away through 
 morning, noontide, afternoon, to meet the darkness 
 that was hurrying to swallow up its beauty, I had a 
 fantastic feeling as though I read the very language of 
 resignation when bending before some irresistible 
 agency. And at intervals I heard in how different a 
 key! the raving, the everlasting uproar of that 
 dreadful metropolis, which at every step was coming 
 nearer, and beckoning (as it seemed) to myself for 
 purposes as dim, for issues as incalculable, as the path 
 of cannon-shots fired at random and in darkness. 
 
 " For nearly two hours I had heard fierce winds 
 arising, and the whole atmosphere had by this time 
 become one vast laboratory of hostile movements in 
 all directions. Such a chaos, such a distracting 
 wilderness of dim sights and of those awful ' sounds 
 that live in darkness,' never had I consciously wit- 
 nessed. Rightly, and by a true instinct, had I made 
 my farewell adieus to summer. All through the day, 
 Wales and her grand mountain ranges Penmaen- 
 mawr, Snowdon, Cader Idris had divided my thoughts 
 with London. But now rose London, sole, dark, 
 infinite, brooding over the whole capacities of my 
 heart. Other object, other thought, I could not 
 admit. Long before midnight the whole household 
 211
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 (with the exception of a solitary waiter) had retired to 
 rest. Two hours, at least, were left to me, after 
 twelve o'clock had struck, for heart-shaking reflec- 
 tions. . . . The unusual dimensions of the rooms, 
 especially their towering height, brought up continu- 
 ally and obstinately, through natural links of asso- 
 ciated feelings or images, the mighty vision of London 
 waiting for me afar off. An altitude of nineteen or 
 twenty feet showed itself unavoidably upon an exag- 
 gerated scale in some of the smaller side-rooms, meant 
 probably for cards or for refreshments. This single 
 feature of the rooms, their unusual altitude, and the 
 echoing hollowness which had become the exponent of 
 that altitude, this one terrific feature (for terrific it 
 was in the effect), together with crowding and evane- 
 scent images of the flying feet that so often had spread 
 gladness through these halls on the wings of youth and 
 hope at seasons when every room rang with music: all 
 this, rising in tumultuous vision, whilst the dead hours 
 of night were stealing along, all around me, household 
 and town, sleeping, and whilst against the windows 
 more and more the storm outside was raving, and to 
 all appearance endlessly growing, threw me into the 
 deadliest condition of nervous emotion under contra- 
 dictory forces, high over which predominated horror 
 recoiling from that unfathomed abyss in London 
 into which I was now so wilfully precipitating 
 myself." 
 
 A wonderful book, The Confessions of an Opium 
 Eater, a fascinating human document revealing as 
 212
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 strange and picturesque a figure as did the Confes- 
 sions of Rousseau. 
 
 Everyone knows how the sad childhood and 
 struggling youth of Charles Dickens powerfully 
 affected his sensitive mind and gave to his pictures of 
 poverty and distress such poignancy and amazing 
 actuality. 
 
 But the sufferings of De Quincey, though probably 
 more prolonged and severe, affect the reader of his 
 autobiographical fragments far less acutely. And 
 this is so because the writer dwells so comparatively 
 slightly upon the pains and privations, and so in- 
 sistently on the fantastic reveries and waking dreams 
 they invoked. 
 
 Dickens could never recall his youthful days save 
 with a hot shame of indignation. De Quincey treats 
 his most painful experiences as so much material for 
 his artistic powers. The anguish of the man was 
 merged in the joy of the artist. There is the same 
 deliberate self-consciousness in certain fine passages 
 of the Confessions that we find in the De Profundis of 
 a later artist in prose Oscar Wilde. 
 
 To the fastidious artist, experiences which have 
 racked the soul and left the flesh raw and quivering 
 are matters for joy rather than regret. As Emerson 
 says, " What would painter do, or what would poet or 
 saint do, but for the crucifixions and hells? " 
 
 In his dealings with men and women he was tender 
 and considerate, without the selfishness and self- 
 absorption found in many with the artistic tempera- 
 213
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 ment. But when he took pen in hand the man is 
 merged in the maker of phrases. Take the following 
 passage on his friend Lloyd, which is resonant with 
 stately music: 
 
 " Charles Lloyd never returned to Brathay after he 
 had once been removed from it, and the removal of 
 his family soon followed. . . . But often and often, 
 in years after all was gone, I have passed old Brathay, 
 or have gone over purposely after dark, about the 
 time when, for many a year, I used to go over to spend 
 the evening; and seating myself on a stone by the side 
 of the mountain river Brathay, have stayed for hours 
 listening to the same sound to which so often Charles 
 Lloyd and I used to hearken together with profound 
 emotion and awe, the sound of pealing anthems, as if 
 streaming from the open portals of some illimitable 
 cathedral; for such a sound does actually arise, in 
 many states of the weather, from the peculiar action 
 of the river Brathay upon its rocky bed, and many 
 times I have heard it, of a quiet night, when no 
 stranger could have been persuaded to believe it other 
 than the sound of choral chanting, distant, solemn, 
 saintly. . . . Since the ruin or dispersion of that 
 household, after the smoke had ceased to ascend from 
 their hearth, or the garden walk to re-echo their voices, 
 oftentimes, when lying by the river side, I have 
 listened to the same aerial saintly sound, whilst look- 
 ing back to that night, long hidden in the frost of 
 receding years, when Charles and Sophia Lloyd, now 
 lying in foreign graves, first dawned upon me, coming 
 214
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 suddenly out of rain and darkness, then young, rich, 
 happy, full of hope, belted with young children (of 
 whom also most are long dead), and standing appar- 
 ently on the verge of a labyrinth of golden hours." 
 
 Beautiful, no doubt, but even at his highest moment 
 De Quincey lacked the supreme gift of the literary 
 artist simplicity. Almost every other qualification 
 he had, but the absence of this massive elemental 
 quality gives an air of preciosity to his work. The 
 art of concealing art was denied him. Yet granting 
 that, his effects are the effects of a brilliant virtuoso 
 few men fiddled more wonderful harmonics on the 
 English language than De Quincey. 
 
 " De Quincey," said Leslie Stephen, " resembles the 
 story-tellers mentioned by some Eastern travellers. 
 So extraordinary is their power of face, and so skil- 
 fully modulated are the inflections of their voices, that 
 even a European ignorant of the language can follow 
 the narrative with absorbing interest. One may 
 fancy that if De Quincey's language were emptied of 
 all meaning whatever, the mere sound of the words 
 would move us, as the lovely word Mesopotamia 
 moved Whitefield's hearers." Like most writers who 
 are temperamentally meditative and reflective, things 
 heard appealed more powerfully than things seen. 
 Like Wordsworth, he was " all ear." Prose in his 
 hands becomes nearer akin to the art of music than to 
 the art of painting, to which more usually literature 
 approximates. But though musical, it is no chance 
 melody, no ^Eolian strain that captures our fancy. 
 215
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 Like one of Bach's fugues, it is built up deliberately 
 and with mathematical precision. He was a dreamer, 
 but he was also a logician. He spun cobwebs, truly, 
 but if at a distance they seemed delicate, unsubstan- 
 tial, hazy, a closer scrutiny would reveal the fine pre- 
 cision of lines and elaborate regularity of fretwork. 
 Why the cobweb should be a synonym for chaotic, 
 purposeless work, it is hard to see; as well take the 
 spider who sits motionless in the web for a mystic shut 
 off from all the affairs of life. Possibly flies occasion- 
 ally take this view to their undoing. 
 
 Prose of this kind, personal, intimate, fantastic 
 prose, lends itself readily to whimsicalities of humour. 
 But the lighter moods ill-suited De Quincey's char- 
 acteristics. He does not smile through his tears like 
 Charles Lamb; his pathos and tenderness, exquisite 
 in their way, lack the vibrant humanity of Elia. 
 There are flashes of the same elfish love of exaggeration 
 that was the salt of life to Lamb, but the humour is 
 harder and coarser in texture. At least so it seems to 
 me, though with some critics I know De Quincey 
 takes a high place as humorist. But he is over fond 
 of clowning. There is nothing very droll, for instance, 
 in calling Josephus "Mr Joe," or Cicero " Kikero," 
 and even in the famous essay on " Murder as One of 
 the Fine Arts," where a certain paradoxical fun displays 
 itself, there are passages of dismally forced hilarity. 
 
 He lacked the sense of actuality, the " sympathy 
 with the seamy side of life," to quote Carlyle's sugges- 
 tive phrase, which lies at the root of vital humour. 
 216
 
 IN MODERN LITERATURE 
 
 But if this weakens certain aspects of his work, it 
 strengthens others, especially the mystical suggestive- 
 ness of his writings. 
 
 No writer has given a more vivid impression of the 
 mystery of London, the sense of immensity in its 
 surging crowds, the tragic loneliness in its glittering 
 thoroughfares, and for a delicate perception of the 
 symbolism in ordinary sights and sounds few can sur- 
 pass him. To him, " the knocking on the gate in 
 Macbeth " assumes a strange, compelling significance. 
 We realise the horror of the preceding scene in an un- 
 expected way, and connect the world of brooding 
 horrors with the world of palpitating reality. He is 
 enamoured of the pageantry of life and his romantic 
 sympathies attached themselves naturally to institu- 
 tions made picturesque by the ivy and lichen of tradi- 
 tion. His Toryism lay in his attraction for mediae- 
 valism, " with lore far-brought from out the storied 
 past." The baser elements of Toryism, however, 
 found no soil in De Quincey's mind. His sympathies 
 with the poor were very real and profound, as indeed 
 they had reason to be when one remembers his experi- 
 ences of them. 
 
 His pity for suffering humanity was no mere senti- 
 mentalism, but gave a strong, moral idealism to his 
 thought. The genuine vagabond, with all his wilful- 
 ness and eccentricities, has always a sound heart, and 
 a special tenderness for the alien and outcast. The 
 genuine vagabond, moreover, is further known by 
 this the life and fascination of the town may attract 
 217
 
 PERSONAL FORCES 
 
 him, but the call of the earth is the one imperative 
 voice he heeds. Hazlitt and De Quincey, no less than 
 Thoreau, Whitman, Borrow and Jeffries, loved better 
 than all the brilliance of the city the " good, gigantic 
 smile o' the brown old earth." 
 
 De Quincey was always looking back in his success- 
 ful Edinburgh days to the quiet, delightful time at 
 Grasmere, and to the little familiar rose-covered 
 cottage where he spent so many happy years. 
 
 218
 
 OUTLINE SCHEME OF READING 
 FOR STUDENTS 
 
 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN (1801-1890). 
 
 1 80 1. Born, London, February 21. 
 1833. The Arians of the Fourth Century (first book). 
 1841. Tract XC. 
 
 1845. Received into the Roman Church. 
 Development of Christian Doctrine. 
 1 848. Loss and Gain. 
 1855. Callista. 
 
 1864-5. Apologia Pro Vita Sud. 
 1870. A Grammar of Assent. 
 1890. Died August u. 
 
 Excellent short biography by Dr Barry (Hodder & 
 Stoughton). An interesting monograph, also by R. H. 
 Hutton (Methuen & Co.). Mr Hutton's best study of New- 
 man, however, is in the volume, Modern Guides in Matters 
 of Faith; he writes from a liberal, High Anglican point of 
 view. Students should read the Apologia first of all a fine 
 piece of spiritual autobiography. This may be followed by 
 the essay on Development and A Grammar of Assent. The 
 sermons are published in a uniform series of volumes, and 
 if less picturesque than F. W. Robertson's, and inferior in 
 depth of thought to James Martineau's, are certainly among 
 the finest sermons in the language. 
 
 As regards criticism of Newman's work, consult the 
 
 writings of Mr Wilfred Ward (especially Problems and 
 
 Persons, Witnesses to the Unseen], and of Mr W. S. Lilly 
 
 for the Roman Catholic point of view ; of R. H. Hutton 
 
 219
 
 OUTLINE SCHEME OF READING 
 
 (Cardinal Newman, Modern Guides in Matters of Faith, 
 Contemporary Thought and Thinkers} for the broad 
 Anglican point of view ; of James Martineau (notably 
 Essays, Reviews and Addresses, vol. i) for the Unitarian 
 standpoint ; and of Leslie Stephen ( The Agnostic's Apology} 
 where the Agnostic standpoint is ably indicated. 
 
 The most violent attack on Newman by the author of 
 Philomythus should not be read until the student has 
 grasped the general outline of Newman's thought and is 
 able to judge for himself. Philomythus is a brilliant but 
 one-sided presentment of Newman's teaching. 
 
 JAMES MARTINEAU (1805-1900). 
 
 1836. The Rationale of Religious Enquiry. 
 
 1841. Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy at Man- 
 chester New College. 
 
 1843-7. Endeavours after the Christian Life (two vols., 
 sermons). 
 
 1857. Pastor, Little Portland Street Chapel. 
 
 1858- Studies of Christianity. 
 
 1876-80. Hours of Thought on Sacred Things (two vols., 
 sermons). 
 
 1882. A Study of Spinoza. 
 
 1885. Types of Ethical Theory (two vols., historical and 
 critical). 
 
 1888, A Study of Religion (two vols., mainly philo- 
 sophical). 
 
 1890. The Sect of Authority and Religion (his last word 
 
 on religious philosophy). 
 
 1891. Essays, Reviews and Addresses (collection of articles 
 
 ranging over many years). 
 1900. Died, London. 
 
 The standard biography, Life and Letters of James 
 Martineau, by Prof. Drummond (two vols. : Nisbet & Co.). 
 
 22O
 
 FOR STUDENTS 
 
 A brief biography and one recommended as a preliminary 
 study, by Prof. Estlin Carpenter. The student is advised 
 to read some of the shorter philosophical and critical 
 studies in the Essays, Reviews and Addresses before essay- 
 ing the larger works. The latter should be read in historical 
 order, as they supplement one another very largely. 
 
 For criticism of Martineau's philosophy see studies by 
 Prof. Upton, Prof. Henry Jones, Dr A. W. Mellone (Leaders 
 of Religious Thought}, all more or less sympathetic and 
 helpfully expository. See R. H. Hutton (Contemporary 
 Thought and Thinkers) for an appreciation, but more dis- 
 tinctively theological criticism. The best statement of the 
 materialist's position is in Dr Maudsley's Natural Causes 
 and Supernatural Seernings. 
 
 Students not versed in ethical philosophy may usefully 
 turn to A History of Ethics by Prof. Sidgwick, before read- 
 ing Martineau's philosophical writings. 
 
 An excellent analysis of Dr. Martineau's teachings is found 
 in Mr. A. W. Jackson's monograph, James Martineau. 
 
 PROF. HUXLEY (1825-1893). 
 
 1825. Born at Ealing, May 4. 
 
 1851. Elected Fellow of the Royal Society. 
 
 1852. Received Gold Medal of the Royal Society. 
 
 1857. Appointed Fullerian Professor of Comparative 
 Anatomy at the Royal Institution. 
 
 1859. Reviewed the Origin of Species in The Times (26th 
 December). 
 
 1863. Published Afan's Place in Nature. 
 
 1869. Joined the Metaphysical Society. 
 
 1870. Elected member of the first School Board of London. 
 Published Lay Sermons. 
 
 1 88 1. Published Science and Culture. 
 1893. Delivered Romanes' Lecture at Oxford (Evolution 
 and Ethics). 
 
 221
 
 OUTLINE SCHEME OF READING 
 
 1893-4. The Collected Essays (nine vols. : Macmillan & 
 
 Co.). 
 1895. Died June 29. 
 
 The standard biography by his son, Leonard Huxley. A 
 good, critical biography (especially valuable in pointing out 
 constructive aspects of Huxley's work) by Mr Edward 
 Clodd (Blackwood & Son. 2s. 6d.). 
 
 By way of introduction the article on Huxley in Chamber?* 
 Encyclopedia of English Literature may be read. 
 
 From the general reader's point of view, who does not 
 wish to study the more technical aspects of Huxley's scientific 
 work, the volumes entitled Science and Education and Evolu- 
 tion and Ethics are the most suggestive. 
 
 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-1850). 
 
 1770. Born at Cockermouth, Cumberland, April 7. 
 
 1798. Lyrical Ballads. 
 
 1843. Poet Laureate. 
 
 1850. Died at Rydal Mount. 
 
 The best short biographical study by F. W. H. Myers. 
 The best critical study by Prof. Raleigh. The best ex- 
 position of his religious philosophy by Rev. Stopford Brooke 
 ( Theology in the English Poets}. An excellent account of 
 his work and of his " place " among the " Revolutionary " 
 Poets by Prof. C. H. Herford (The Age of Wordsworth]. 
 The best selection of his poems by Matthew Arnold, with 
 fine critical introduction. Admirable essay on " the ethics of 
 Wordsworth " by Leslie Stephen (Hours in a Library}. An 
 interesting volume of essays entitled (Wordsworthiana). 
 Helpful essays by Mr W. J. Dawson (Makers of Modern 
 Poetry: Hodder & Stoughton). Mr Dawson has published 
 three excellent volumes for the literary student, Makers of 
 Modern Poetry, Makers of Modern Prose, Makers of Modern 
 Fiction. 
 
 222
 
 FOR STUDENTS 
 
 JOHN KEATS (1795-1821). 
 
 1795. Born, Moorfields, London, October 29. 
 1817. Poems first published. 
 1821. Died Rome. 
 
 An excellent biographical study by Mr Sidney Colvin 
 (" English Men of Letters " Series). One of the best editions 
 of his poems, The Poetical Works of John Keats, edited by 
 H. Buxton Forman (Reeves & Turner). See, for the literary 
 tendencies of his time, TJie History of Romanticism in the 
 Nineteenth Century,^ Prof. Henry A. Beers (Kegan Paul & 
 Co.). Suggestive essays by J. R. Lowell and Matthew 
 Arnold. 
 
 DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI (1828-1882). 
 
 1828. Born at London, May 12. 
 1870. Poems (first volume). 
 1880. (second volume). 
 1882. Died, Birchington, April 9. 
 
 Best biographical study by Mr E. F. Benson. The Life 
 and Letters, edited by Mr Wm. Rossetti, throws interesting 
 sidelights on his personality. Cheap edition in one volume 
 of his poems, edited by Wm. Rossetti. An excellent ap- 
 preciation of the poet in Living English Poets by H. 
 Buxton Forman. See also History of Romanticism in the 
 Nineteenth Century for account of the pre-Raphaelite move- 
 ment. 
 
 CHARLES DICKENS (1812-1870). 
 
 1812. Born, Portsmouth, February 7. 
 
 1833. A Dinner at Poplar Walk (first original paper 
 
 published in Monthly Magazine). 
 1836. Sketches by Boz. 
 Pickwick Papers (first number). 
 223
 
 OUTLINE SCHEME OF READING 
 
 1838. Oliver Twist. 
 
 1 839. Nicholas Nickleby. 
 
 1840. The Old Curiosity Shop. 
 
 1 84 1 . Barnaby Rudge. 
 1 842 A merican Notes. 
 1843. Martin Chuzzlewit. 
 
 The Christmas Carol. 
 1 846. Dombey and Son. 
 1 849. David Copperfield. 
 1852. Bleak House. 
 
 1854. Hard Times. 
 
 1855. Little Dorrit. 
 
 1859. -4 Tale of Two Cities. 
 1 86 r. 77/2 Uncommercial Traveller. 
 1 864. 0r Mutual Friend. 
 1870. Mystery of Edwin Drood (unfinished). 
 Died at Gad's Hill, June 6. 
 
 Life by John Forster (an abridged edition recently 
 published, but the student is recommended to study the 
 original). Best critical study by George Gissing (Black- 
 wood & Son. 2s. 6d.). Interesting study from French 
 point of view, by Taine, History of English Literature, vol. 
 iv. (translated by Van Laun). Forster's Life may be 
 supplemented by Mr F. Kitten's biography. The Dickens' 
 student should consult The Childhood and Youth of Dickens, 
 by Robert Langton'(Hutchison & Co.), and The Real Dickens 
 Land by H. Snowden Ward (Chapman & Hall). There is 
 a useful Dickens' Dictionary in the Daily News Memorial 
 Edition. 
 
 WILLIAM HAZLITT (1778-1830). 
 
 1778. Born, Maidstone, April 10. 
 
 1805. Essays on the Principles of Human Action. 
 
 1 806. Free Thoughts on Public Affairs. 
 
 1817. The Round Table (Essays on Men and Manners). 
 224
 
 FOR STUDENTS 
 
 1817. Characters of Shakespeare. 
 1818-21. Lectures on the English Poets. 
 
 Lectures on Dramatic Literature of Age of 
 
 Elizabeth. 
 1821. Table Talk. 
 
 1825. Spirit of the Age (contains some of his finest work). 
 1 828-30. Life of Buonaparte. 
 
 Memoirs by William Carew Hazlitt (1867). This is the 
 only authoritative life. See also Four Generations of a 
 Literary Family, by W. Carew Hazlitt (1897 : George Red- 
 way). A good short monograph by Augustine Birrell. See 
 also excellent essay by Leslie Stephen (Hours in a Library). 
 Perhaps the best introduction to his personality and work is 
 a volume edited by Mr Alexander Ireland, the best (and 
 only complete) edition of his work, published by J. M. Dent 
 &Co. 
 
 THOMAS DE QUINCEY (1785-1859). 
 
 1785. Born in Manchester, August 15. 
 
 1821. Confessions of an Opium Eater (London Magazine). 
 
 1828. In Edinburgh. Contributed to Black-wood, The 
 
 Quarterly, Taifs Magazine, Hogg's Instructor. 
 1 844. The Logic of Political Economy. 
 1859. Died in Edinburgh, December 8. 
 
 Collected edition of his writings, edited by David Masson, 
 in fourteen vols. An excellent little monograph by Mr H. S. 
 Salt (" Bell's Miniature Series of Great Writers "). See also 
 De Quincey, by David Masson ("English Men of Letters" 
 Series). Perhaps the best edition of The Confessions of an 
 Opium Eater is that edited by Dr Richard Garnett (Kegan 
 Paul). An interesting collection of personalia, De Quincey 
 and His Friends, written and collected by James Hogg 
 (1895). See Mr W. J. Dawson's Essay on De Quincey in 
 Makers of Modern Prose (Hodder & Stoughton). 
 P 225
 
 INDEX 
 
 Ancient Mariner, 133 
 Anthologies, Martineau on, 36 
 Art and Dogma, 17 ; and religion, 17 
 Artist, the Ideal of the, 112 
 Authority, views of Martineau and 
 Newman, 44 
 
 B 
 
 BEAUTY, various views on, 112; charac- 
 teristics of, 114 ; Keats on, 120 
 
 Bleak House, 149 
 
 Blessed Damoze I, 128, 134 
 
 Burden of Nineveh, 124 
 
 Browning, compared with Dickens, 
 151, 159 ; with Keats, 122, 139 ; with 
 Wordsworth, 89, 103, 107 
 
 CARLYLE, Martineau on, 33 
 Ckimes, The, 155, 160 
 Christabel, 130. 131 
 Christianity of the Churches, Mar- 
 tineau on, 45 
 
 Christmas Carol, The, 154 
 Christmas Spirit, 153 
 Coleridge compared with Keats, 112, 
 
 113, 130, 137; with De Quincey, 208 ; 
 
 with Rossetti, 130, 133, 135, 137; 
 
 with Shelley, 133 ; with Wordsworth, 
 
 94, no, 112 
 
 Confessions of an Opium Eater, 212 
 Conscience, Huxley on, 75 ; Martineau 
 
 and Newman on, 44 ; Mill on, 48 ; 
 
 Spencer on, 48 ; Martineau, Spencer 
 
 and Mill compared, 47 
 Cricket on the Hearth, 155 
 Criticism, imagination in, 190 
 
 David Copperfield, 145, 146, 149, 153, 
 
 162, 166 
 Democratic movement, 144 
 
 226 
 
 Dickens, Charles, 143 ; W. Bagehot 
 on, 163 ; Carlyle on, 142 ; characters 
 classified, 169 ; character painting, 
 165 ; child characters, 166, 171, 
 175; compared with Browning, 151, 
 159 ; Byron, 159 ; Fielding, 148 ; 
 George Eliot, 148, 166, 171 ; Gold- 
 smith, 148 ; Hardy, 161 ; Lamb, 159 ; 
 Meredith, 160 ; Rabelais, 149 ; Shel- 
 ley, 159; Tennyson, 154, 159, 160; 
 Thackeray, 148, 171 ; Victor Hugo, 
 164, 167 ; Wordsworth, 159 ; and 
 Christmas Spirit, 153 ; dramatic 
 quality, 161 ; early and late work 
 compared, 149, 153; fantastic de- 
 scription, 151, 165 ; high spirits and 
 caricature, 150 ; humour, 146, 148, 
 163 ; literary spendthrift, 149 ; an 
 impressionist, 178 ; and London, 159, 
 163 ; and love, 172 ; and Nature, 
 159 ; pathos, 152 ; not psychologist, 
 171, 178 ; satire, 150 ; women, 171 
 
 Dogma and Art, 17 
 
 Dogma, Martineau's attitude to, 33, 
 47 ; Newman's attitude to, 5, 15, 18 
 
 Dombey and Son, 153 
 
 EDUCATION, Huxley on, 65, 71 
 Edwin Drood, 152 
 Ethics and Evolution, 76 
 
 GENIUS, Martineau on, 39 
 Gladstone on Martineau, 27 
 Great Expectations, 149, 153, 160, 166, 
 179 
 
 Haunted Man, 176 
 
 Hazlitt, 189 ; "Cant and Hypocrisy," 
 106 ; compared with Byron, 202 ; 
 Coleridge, 195 ; Lamb, 192 ; and 
 Lamb, 203 ; De Quincey, 205 ; Rous- 
 seau, 194 ; definition of Morality,
 
 INDEX 
 
 227 
 
 192 ; intimacy in writings, 194, 198 ; 
 recluse, 200 ; " Vulgarity and 
 Affectation," 198 
 
 Hero Worship, Martineau on, 34 
 
 House of Life, 122, 125 
 
 Humour and Pathos, 146, 152 ; of 
 various writers compared, 147 ; and 
 Wit, 147 
 
 H uxley, 55 ; chess metaphor, 64 ; com- 
 pared with Meredith, 69 ; _ with 
 Tennyson, 82 ; as controversialist, 
 56; on Education. 67, 71 ; humour 
 of, 67 ; idealism of, 74, 84 ; and 
 Metaphysical Society, 58 ; not 
 materialist, 64 ; and Spencer, the 
 human note, 82 ; on social progress, 
 80 
 
 Hymn of A folio, 101 
 
 Hyperion, 118 
 
 I 
 
 /* MetHoriam. 102 
 Isabella, 118 
 
 Jenny, 128 
 
 K 
 
 KEATS, 112 ; absence of religious 
 atmosphere, 137 ; compared with 
 Browning, 122, 139 ; Byron, 112 ; 
 Coleridge, 112, 113, 130, 137 ; Goethe, 
 121 ; Rossetti, 112, 116, 123, 126, 
 127, 130, 1315, 137 ; Shelley, 112, 113, 
 120, 121 ; Scott, 132 ; Swinburne, 
 113; Tennyson, 112, 119, 139; 
 Wordsworth, 101, 112, 120, 137; 
 personal characteristics, 116 ; and 
 Nature, 120 
 
 La Belle Dame sans Merci, 130, 132 
 
 Lamia, 130, 131, 132 
 
 Liberty, the Keynote to Shelley, 105, 
 
 112 
 
 Little Dorrit, 149, 153 
 London, De Quincey and, 217 
 ,, Dickens and, 159, 163 
 Love's Nocturne, 136 
 
 M 
 
 Martin Ckuzzlewit, 168 
 
 Martineau, 25 ; compared with Mau- 
 
 rice, 57; Newman, 33, 44, 46; 
 Spencer and Mill on conscience, 47 ; 
 controversialist, 28, 35, 43 ; critic, 30 ; 
 preacher, 37 ; teacher, 43 ; belief of, 
 46 ; dogma, 33, 47 ; individualism of, 
 42 ; philosophy of, 44, 50 ; scientific 
 training, 28, 43 ; temperament of. 27 ; 
 view of anthologies, 36 ; of Carlyle, 
 33; of conscience, 45,47 ; of genius, 
 39 ; of hero-worship, 34 ; of New- 
 man, 12, 31 ; of popular religion, 45 ; 
 of Spencer's evolutionary theory of 
 ethics, 49 ; Carpenter's view of, 43 ; 
 Gladstone's view of, 27 ; works, 39, 
 
 Maud, 105 
 
 Metaphysical Society, 58 ; influence on 
 
 Huxley, 63 
 Miscellaneous Essays of Hazlitt, 
 
 196 
 
 Modern Painters, 115, 126, 210 
 Moralist, The, i 
 
 X 
 
 NATURE POETS, 107 
 
 Nature and Dickens, 159 ; and Roman- 
 tic Poets, 102 ; and Tennyson, 103 ; 
 and Wordsworth, 94, 95, 102, 104, 
 106 
 
 Newman, 3 ; compared with Kingsley, 
 4 ; Martineau, 33, 44, 46 ; Maurice, 
 4 ; charges against, 13 ; and con- 
 science, 44 ; and controversy, 5 ; and 
 dogma, 5; doubt of, 22, 32; evolu- 
 tion of Christianity, 19 ; and learn- 
 ing, 6 ; and literature, 5 ; probability, 
 doctrine of, 21 ; religious conviction, 
 basis of his, 21 ; sincerity of, 13 ; 
 style of, 7 ; sympathy of, 9 ; tem- 
 perament of, 9 ; his Theism, 19 ; 
 Mutton's view of, 7 ; Kingsley's, 13 ; 
 Martineau's, 12, 31; Leslie Stephen s, 
 5> >3i Ward's, 4, 10; works, 14, 19, 
 
 21 
 
 Nicholas Nickleoy, 150, 162, 179 
 Novelist, The, 141 
 
 
 
 Ode on Autumn, 119; on a Grecian 
 Um, 120; to Melancholy, 121; to 
 a Nightingale, 118, 127, 130 ; to the 
 Skylark, 98 
 
 Old Curiosity Shop, 153, 177 
 
 Oliver Twist, 162 
 
 Our Mutual Friend, 151
 
 228 
 
 INDEX 
 
 PATHOS and Humour, 146, 152 
 Pathos of Dickens, 152 
 Pickwick Papers, 145, 150, 160 
 Pippa Passes, 103 
 Poet, The, 87 ; Poet as Artist, 113 
 Prteterita, 122 
 Prelude, The, 95 , 99, 106 
 Pre-Raphaelites, 115 
 Prose-poetry, 208 
 
 Queen Mob, too 
 
 De Quincey, 205 ; compared with 
 Coleridge, 208 ; with Hazlitt, 205 ; 
 with Lamb, 206, 216 : with Words- 
 worth, 215 ; logician, 216 ; and Lon- 
 don, 217 ; mysticism, 208 ; prose- 
 poetry, 208 ; simplicity, lack of, 215 
 
 R 
 
 RELIGION, Keats and Rossetti, 137 ; 
 popular, Martineau on, 45 
 
 Revolt of Islam, 100 
 
 Romantic poets, devotion to Nature, 
 102 
 
 Rossetti, 112 ; compared with Brown- 
 ing, 123, 134, 137, 139; with Cole- 
 ridge, 130, 133, 137 ; with Keats, 
 112, 116, 123, 126, 127, 130, 135, 137 ; 
 with Tennyson, 123, 125, 134, 136, 
 '37i J 39 i personal characteristics, 
 116 
 
 SCIENCE and Dogma, 18 
 
 Scientist, The, 53 
 
 Stat of Authority in Religion, 50 
 
 Shelley compared with Coleridge, 133 ; 
 with Keats, 121 ; with Wordsworth, 
 98, 100, 108 ; and liberty, 105, 112 ; 
 poet of the eye, 98 
 
 Social Progress, Huxley on, 80 
 Spirit oftke Age, 202 
 Study of Religion, 50 
 
 Table Talk of Hazlitt, 196, 202 
 
 Tale of Two Cities, 162 
 
 Temperament in relation to Dogma, 15 
 
 Tennyson compared with Dickens, 
 T 54> !59i J 6o ; with Huxley, 82 ; with 
 Keats, 117; with Wordsworth, 99, 
 103, 107; view of Keats, 117; and 
 Nature, 103 
 
 Thackeray compared with Dickens, 
 148, 171 
 
 Thought and action, 67 
 
 Tracts of Newman, 14 
 
 Types of Ethical Theory, 50 
 
 VAGABOND, The, 201 ; and idealist, 209 
 
 W 
 
 WIT and Humour, 147 
 
 Wordsworth compared with Arnold, 
 103; with Browning, 89, 103, 107; 
 with Byron, 102, 112; with Cole- 
 ridge, 94, no, 112; with Crabbe, 
 107 ; with Dickens, 159 ; with Keats, 
 101, 112, 137 ; with Lamb, 91 ; with 
 Rossetti, 137 ; with Shelley, 98, 100, 
 108 ; with Tennyson, 99, 102, 105, 
 107, 109 ; Carlyle's, Coleridge's and 
 de Quincey's view of, 92 ; Hazlitt's, 
 194; "curative influence," 109; 
 economy of emotion, 94, 105, no; 
 ear, poet of the, 97 ; and man, 108 ; 
 and Nature, 94, 96, 102, 104 ; Nature 
 and man identified, 104, 106 ; and 
 the peasant, 108 ; philosophy, disci- 
 pline the keynote of, 105 ; republican 
 sympathies. 108
 
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