The Old Rome and the New 
 
 AND 
 
 Other Studies 
 
 BY 
 
 W. J. STILLMAN 
 
 AUTHOR OF "ON THE TRACK OF ULYSSES," "EARLY ITALIAN- 
 PAINTERS," ETC. 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
 
 Cbe iRiverst&e ipress, Cambridge 
 
 1898
 
 PS 
 
 To 
 
 Professor CHARLES ELIOT NORTON of Harvard 
 University, sole survivor of that luminous circle in 
 which once shone Lowell, Longfellow, Emerson, 
 Holmes, Agassis, etc. -circle to whose intellectual 
 hospitality I owe my imprimatur for American 
 letters this Volume is affectionately dedicated, in 
 memory of our forty years of fraternal relation 
 and sympathy. 
 
 THE AUTHOR 
 
 644356
 
 PREFACE 
 
 The papers comprised in this volume have been 
 printed in various magazines and reviews in 
 England and America during the years between 
 1867 (My Experience in a Greek Quarantine) to 
 1895 (The Old Rome and the New), the only earlier 
 paper being " The Subjective of It" the date of 
 which I cannot recall, nearer than to say that it 
 was one o/ % the first contributions I made to the 
 Atlantic, when Lowell was the Editor, and its 
 articles were printed anonymously. They are 
 selections from the wreckage of a life which has 
 reached the limits beyond which it cannot be said 
 that there is no hope, but at which reasonable men 
 should be resigned if there should be none, and 
 at which the highest good seems tranquillity, and 
 the highest wisdom resignation. Of that life in 
 its entirety, not uninteresting in adventure, and 
 marked by some strange experiences in men and 
 things, I hope shortly to tell the story. The most 
 of what I have written during it is well lost, un 
 signed in pages of periodicals from which I have 
 no desire to hunt it out. But the natural and 
 harmless vanity of a man who has earned his 
 bread by literature is to hope that something may 
 survive him, which shall serve to keep him alive, 
 at least in the memory of his descendants and
 
 PREFACE 
 
 those of the friends who walked the same road 
 with him, at the same time. And with this let 
 us be content few, indeed, are they whose writing 
 survives their epoch, and in the multitudinous drift 
 of humanity into oblivion, let us console ourselves 
 that we are always in the enormous majority. 
 
 Beginning, as most young writers do, with more 
 ambition than sound knowledge of my competence, 
 I had the good fortune to learn soon that the 
 opinions of young men are rarely worth preserving, 
 though their art may be so, and I then decided 
 that I would publish nothing before I should be 
 forty: when I was forty I postponed to fifty: at 
 fifty I said, sixty is not too late: and at sixty I 
 had still too much to learn and I would trust to 
 seventy. And now, at seventy, I would fain wait 
 a little longer, were eighty assured, feeling my 
 incompetence more keenly than even at thirty. 
 Partial infractions of such a resolution could not 
 be avoided by a man who had only his pen in 
 place of a fortune, but I can honestly say that of 
 my own ambition I have sent out nothing between 
 book-covers except from a sense of the obligation 
 to make known things which I thought the world 
 ought to know, like the history of the Cretan in 
 surrection of 1866, and the heroic revolt of the 
 Slavs of Herzegovina in 1876. But I have been 
 true to my principles in that, though xvhat I wrote 
 in my immaturer state is now put forth in a book, 
 I have revised and re-considered what I then wrote, 
 and am prepared to stand or fall in the opinion 
 of my critics by what is printed. Whatever there
 
 PREFACE 
 
 is of narration in the following pages is fact, even 
 to the curious experience recorded in " The Subjec 
 tive of It" with the exception of an unimportant 
 detail in the Quarantine story, which as a whole is 
 a re-arrangement of actual incidents, but drawn 
 from two distinct experiences; but where they are 
 the expression of opinions I hold them with a 
 deference for that collective wisdom which finally 
 prevails over all error. I belong to my epoch and 
 do not pretend to be wiser than it; and if in 
 relation to Art I hold my opinions strongly, it is 
 because I have done my best during fifty years to 
 fit myself by the study of all early and great Art 
 to form them. If in the two Art studies there 
 are repetitions, this was hardly to be avoided in 
 two papers written with a long interval for differ 
 ent periodicals on the same theme. The same idea 
 appears in different relations, and to condense the 
 two into a single article I found impossible. Let 
 me hope that repetitio juvat. 
 
 Milford, Surrey, 1897.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 EMI 
 
 THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW ... 1 
 
 MARATHON AND ITS BRIGANDS ... 25 
 
 MY EXPERIENCE IN A GREEK QUARANTINE . 40 
 
 AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON . . 63 
 
 JOHN RUSKIN ..... 92 
 
 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS . . . 128 
 THE DECAY OF ART . . . .168 
 
 THE REVIVAL OF ART . . . . 198 
 
 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT . . . . 232 
 
 THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP 265
 
 THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW 
 
 THERE is something in the fascination of Rome 
 that escapes my power of analysis. A genera 
 tion has passed, and a second is on its way, since 
 I first came under its witchery; everything is 
 changed in it that can be changed in a city; 
 what can be done to break the antique charm 
 has been done, as if in malice mutilation, reno 
 vation, desecration: and still it keeps the charm, 
 like a masterpiece of Greek sculpture which has 
 gone through the hands of barbarians, and come 
 out shattered, maimed, and so defaced that only 
 the eye of an artist can see what the artist 
 meant by it. It is not its history nor its topo 
 graphy, neither its architecture nor its art, that 
 makes it what it is : something of all these, 
 perhaps, but beyond these something that defies 
 definition a kind of spiritual polarity which 
 made it from the beginning the point to which 
 turned whatever there was of aspiration in the 
 Old World, and, long before the first wall was 
 built on either Aventine or Palatine, determined 
 its history fatally ; and that, time after time, 
 when an enemy had broken its strength and 
 subjected its people, brought the remnant back 
 to renew the struggle against time, and make 
 the declaration of eternity, " Urbs Eterna" It 
 
 A
 
 2 THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW 
 
 is not by many the oldest imperial site, and it 
 has absorbed cities centuries older than itself, 
 and which were probably such when the Ager 
 Romanus was being formed by the eruptions of 
 the Alban volcanoes. For Rome is built on some 
 of the newest land on the earth, and Father 
 Tiber once found the sea at the northern edge of 
 the plain. The wandering tribes of Latin shep 
 herds, who built their huts on the Aventine, 
 probably came down from their Sabine hills as 
 soon as the cinders turned to soil, and goats found 
 browsing and sheep grazing; and ever since men 
 have obeyed this unique attraction. 
 
 In Hellas humanity found the expression of the 
 virtues and qualities, weak and strong, of its 
 youth : art, poetry, the perception of the beautiful, 
 the first maturing of philosophic intuition, the 
 harmony and the inspiration of a happy, healthy, 
 intellectual life, over which no shadow of oppres 
 sion, spiritual or political, had come the perfect 
 perception of the beautiful and the ideal which is 
 the visible form of the spiritually true; and with 
 these defects of youth, that precocious humanity 
 which was never to become manhood, but which 
 would never again be rivalled as youth. In Rome 
 humanity " came of age," as we say of the 
 youth of twenty-one; judgment and power and 
 common sense, the strong hand of empery, the 
 fixed determination of him who has found his 
 vocation, namely, to rule the world, came to it. 
 Here the civic virtues set up their school ; heroism 
 of the sterner vein, law, which brought the
 
 THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW 3 
 
 sacrifice of the impulse to principle, and the 
 individual to the state, and so evolved civilisation 
 and empire. What the Greek was in his bloom- 
 time he remains, less the virtues which belong 
 to youth, plus the vices of decay. So the Roman 
 ran through the flush of manhood to its decline; 
 youth he never had, and a serene and sublime old 
 age he did not reach, but the manhood was long 
 and tenacious, dying finally by the vices of man 
 hood as the Greek by the vices of youth, yet 
 dying hard and late. It was as if the Roman 
 character were exhaled from the soil, and possessed 
 from birth a dogged vitality like that of some of 
 the lower organisms, foreign to all ideal beyond 
 that of the Civis Romanus ; producing at no epoch 
 the finer fruits of the human nature ; borrowing 
 its religion from Etruria, Greece, Egypt, Jerusalem, 
 or Constantinople, its art from Athens or Tuscany ; 
 no great original artist* ever to this day coming 
 to the surface from the depths of that state- 
 incrusted existence. All that was finest the 
 Roman had to borrow, but he borrowed it as he 
 learned to use it. Only one thing Rome created 
 for humanity as Greece had created art the 
 organisation of the res publica and law, which is 
 its logarithm. 
 
 But why Rome should have fallen where it did 
 is to me inexplicable. Climb the Capitol tower, 
 and you see below you a group of insignificant 
 
 * With the sole exception, so far as I know, of Giovanni Costa, the 
 living landscape painter, one of the type of Th. Rousseau, whom he 
 resembles more than any other.
 
 4 THE OLD EOME AND THE NEW 
 
 elevations in the midst of a wide plain, bounded 
 on two sides by ranges of limestone hills, the 
 nurseries of the Volscian, Hernican, Sabine, Um- 
 brian, and Etruscan powers; and on the other 
 two the plain melts into the sea, some fifteen 
 miles away. It is neither a sea site nor a hill 
 site, this group of little hillocks, which the ancients 
 called their seven monies and we call the "seven 
 hills." Nor, puzzling my brains for years, have I 
 ever been able to understand why, from physical 
 causes, Rome should have been Rome, and Athens 
 only Athens. I used to think, when reading the 
 .rfEneid at school, that jEneas was a fiction of 
 Roman vanity, envious of the demigod founders 
 of other states; but, divested of some of the 
 purely mythological elements, the Trojan migra 
 tion to Latium is shown, by the most recent 
 archaeological discoveries, to have some foundation 
 in fact. To get at it, however, we must first 
 understand that the Trojans were a race of the 
 same stock as the Greeks, and that the feud 
 which ended in a struggle that is known, or 
 symbolised, as the siege of Troy, was really the 
 first recorded of the rivalries by which the Greeks 
 committed racial suicide, not a war between Asia 
 and Europe. The more I study the evidences of 
 authenticity in the ancient traditions, even those 
 which are so mingled with theistic mythology 
 that we have generally considered them as in 
 explicable fable, the more I am convinced that 
 usually these traditions contain a solid basis of 
 historical fact. Through the series relating to
 
 THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW 5 
 
 the Greek and Italian civilisations there runs a 
 thread indicating an extremely early community, 
 and that the movement began in Italy and went 
 eastward to Asia Minor, returning later through 
 Greece to Italy. Of this movement, known in all 
 the early traditions as Pelasgic, the Greek and 
 Trojan agglomerations were final and contem 
 porary results. Amongst the traditions bearing 
 directly on the Pelasgic origin of Troy is one 
 recorded by Virgil, who says that Dardanus came 
 from Italy. He is supposed to have gone from 
 Cortona, which was the stronghold and latest 
 refuge of the Pelasgi, so far as we know, and we 
 have the tradition of the building of the first 
 walls of Troy by Hercules and Neptune, who were 
 distinctly Pelasgic gods, of the stock of Saturn, 
 whose realm was Italy. The worship of Athena, 
 the patroness of Troy, and the protection offered 
 by Juno, the patroness of the Argives, the heirs 
 and descendants of the wall-building Pelasgi in 
 the Peloponnesus, a protection so warm as to 
 cool her friendship for the Argives themselves, 
 are further arguments for the identity of the 
 races; and the subsequent migrations of Trojans 
 and Greeks together to Italy and Sicily bring us 
 almost to historical tradition. Segestse was settled 
 by a band of Greeks with a Trojan leader, and 
 the earliest traditions of Trojan movements 
 mention the presence of Greeks. Virgil represents 
 the settlement in the Tiber region of -ZEneas and 
 his clan, while we have the corresponding tradi 
 tion that Falerii was founded by a colony from
 
 6 THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW 
 
 Argos, who built there a copy of the great temple 
 of Hera in the Argolid. The recent excavations 
 on the site of that city show that, though for 
 centuries considered Etruscan, and really included 
 in the so-called Etruscan league against Rome, 
 Falerii was never Etruscan, but for centuries 
 preserved its Greek character, becoming Italicised 
 only shortly before the period of the great Roman 
 movement northward, not far from the time 
 when Veii came under the rule of Rome. 
 
 The systematic excavations being made in the 
 country about Rome have had for one surprising 
 result, besides showing that the Greek individuality 
 of Falerii was preserved till the Roman conquest, 
 the indication that the influence of the Greek 
 colonisation of that city, or something accom 
 panying it, extended over the entire region, 
 traces of the same arts being found at Antemnae, 
 Lanuvium, Alatri, and Veii. This does not apply 
 to the ordinary art of Etruria, which was derived 
 from the Greek, but took on a colour of Etruscan 
 temperament in its development ; for this Faliscan 
 art is quite distinct in all its forms from anything 
 Etruscan, and it maintains its type to the period 
 just prior to the Roman dominion. The objects 
 found in the Faliscan excavations, now in the new 
 Roman museum of the Villa Julia, give us the 
 history of that city from the earliest period of 
 Italic civilisation to the destruction by the Romans. 
 The first pages of this record tell the universal 
 story of the Italic tribes from the shores of the 
 Basilicata to the Apennines a common civilisation
 
 THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW 7 
 
 extending back to an epoch of immense antiquity, 
 which the students of it think they can carry 
 back beyond fifteen centuries B.C. It is probable 
 that this was a composite race in which the 
 Siculi, the Umbri, and the Pelasgi were the prin 
 cipal elements, the last dominating until merged 
 in the Italic. The distinctive Greek contributions 
 in the stratification of the deposits begin not 
 later than the eighth century B.C., Attic pottery 
 being found in the tombs, but of an extremely 
 archaic type; and the evidence grows stronger 
 till the sixth century, when the ceramics are very 
 largely of well-known Attic types, and, though 
 always accompanied by home-made ware of a 
 rude character, finally reach the highest attain 
 ment of Greek production. The tombs also give 
 evidence of great riches and intimate commerce 
 with Greece, vases being found bearing names of 
 Attic painters. During the sixth and fifth cen 
 turies the Attic influence is supreme; with the 
 fourth a change takes place, and the imported 
 work appears no longer, but in its place a Faliscan 
 art, which is in some cases of extreme beauty, 
 though it is the beauty of the decline of art, 
 which continues till the time of the destruction. 
 The fragments of the statuary found in the 
 temples are of a pure Greek art, and though of 
 terra cotta they are as fine as anything of the 
 fourth and third centuries discovered in Greece. 
 The inscriptions which appear in the fourth 
 century are in Latin, archaic but distinctly Latin, 
 and one vase, which is an excellent copy of Greek
 
 8 THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW 
 
 work, bears the names of the Olympian deities 
 in the Greek characters of the time, but in Latin 
 "Minerva" for "Athena," "Cupido" for "Eros," and 
 "Zeus Pater" for "Zeus." The Latinisation has 
 become complete. The beginning of this change, 
 and the severance from Greece and the loss of 
 Greek commerce must have taken place about 
 a century before the time of the capture of Veii 
 and Falerii by the Romans. 
 
 The slight researches in the Ager Veientinus 
 have given similar objects; and as we know that 
 the patroness of Veii was Juno, shown by the 
 legend of the taking of the city and the removal 
 of the image of that goddess to the Aventine, we 
 may expect that in the future systematic excava 
 tions we shall find the same evidences of the 
 affinity of that city with Falerii which we find 
 both nearer and farther away. Thus, the revela 
 tions of archaeology confirm the Virgilian tradition, 
 and that other which states that before Rome 
 there was an Hellenic influence imposed on the 
 development of the Tiber valley, and that, under 
 the hypothesis that the Trojan and Greek were 
 of the same stock, it may literally be true that a 
 Trojan chief led a band of emigrants to the Latin 
 shores; but the tradition of the foundation of 
 Alba Longa, like that of every other foundation 
 by the Greek migrations, must be taken as mean 
 ing that the emigrants occupied a city already in 
 existence, and apparently united with the former 
 population. When the same kind of researches 
 which have been so productive at Falerii shall
 
 THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW 9 
 
 have been carried out at Ardea, Lavinium, and 
 Laurentum, localities particularly identified with 
 the traditions of the ^Eneid, and at which no 
 excavations have been made, we shall know more 
 about the general character and local variations 
 of the so-called Trojan migration; but we know 
 already there is the highest probability that they 
 were all under the same influences, and that the 
 line of demarkation of the region so influenced 
 was somewhat to the north of Falerii, beyond 
 which the immigration imposing itself on the com 
 posite Italic element was Etruscan, no evidence of 
 which is found in Falerii or in the Latin towns; 
 and as on both sides of this line appears the 
 evidence of the earlier uniform Italic civilisation, 
 we have the right to assume that the Hellenic and 
 Etruscan immigrations were so nearly coincident 
 that the one locally excluded the other, and that 
 they were both superposed on the Italic popula 
 tion, which here became Latin and in the north 
 Etruscan. Of this so modified stock, the central 
 point of gathering became Rome on the south 
 and Clusium on the north. 
 
 From that time forward Rome has been the 
 most powerful centre of attraction on the surface 
 of the earth, first to the Old World, and later to 
 the New. Even to-day, wreck as it is of its old 
 glory, it is more peculiarly the " city of the soul " 
 than any other that we visit. With due respect 
 for the theories of others, this is to me un 
 accounted for by any evident reason; neither the 
 republic, nor the empire, nor the church can
 
 10 THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW 
 
 explain it, but rather this mysterious attraction 
 explains them. When I first came to Rome there 
 was a curious phenomenon which struck me the 
 gathering together of peasants from the outlying 
 villages on festal days, at certain localities where 
 there was no visible attraction, neither wine shop 
 nor lottery office, and not even an open place for 
 the gathering, but a narrow street and a narrower 
 sidewalk. One of these spots, which I was in the 
 habit of passing, I found, by reference to the map 
 of the ancient city, to be in the space once occupied 
 by the forum of Nerva; and the only solution of 
 the problem that appears to me is that, in a 
 remote epoch, this had been the marketing place 
 of the ancestors of these peasants, who, by the 
 unintelligent, hereditary habit, always gathered 
 there to hear the news and meet their gossips or 
 clients. Rome was then full of such survivals of 
 ancient customs, some of which continue, as may 
 be seen in the Piazza Montanara, where the agri 
 cultural labourers still go in their picturesque 
 costumes to make their engagements with the 
 padroni. 
 
 In those days the Pope was king; life was cast 
 in the mediaeval mould; all progress was an 
 offence, not only to the custom of the place, but 
 to the fitness of it, and the new-comer had hardly 
 ceased to be new when he became conservative 
 and citizen of this imperial Lotophagitis. Exis 
 tence was a dream, and almost as cheap as one ; 
 there was no morning paper to harry our serenity, 
 or thrust the daily disaster of a distant and in-
 
 THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW 11 
 
 different community on our tranquillity; we 
 learned of most events when they had ceased to 
 be startling. After the church, art was the theme 
 of most thought, and the artist was the most 
 important being after the priest. Roman life had 
 its tides high spring at Christmas and Easter, and 
 dead ebb at midsummer but there was never any 
 bustle or fever of business ; there was no growth ; 
 there were no new houses ; there was no blocking 
 the streets with building material, no laying of 
 drains or disturbance of the soil, no enterprise, 
 and no new trades. The head of the great hospital 
 of St. Spirito was one of my friends, and in con 
 junction with him and two or three capitalists I 
 organised a syndicate to supply the hospitals and 
 city with American ice at the price, delivered at 
 Civita Vecchia, of the snow, which was otherwise 
 the only resource, delivered at the pits on the 
 Alban hills, where it was stored for summer use. 
 But the offer was refused; it would have dis 
 turbed the vested rights of the snow-harvesters. 
 The sick in the hospitals had been so served for 
 hundreds of years, and might be still. Every 
 innovation was resisted as of the devil, and the 
 possible horse of Troy for stealthy invasion. Rome 
 had so maintained its position for the centuries of 
 the papal rule ; why change ? 
 
 Outside this compact, grey, silent city, in which 
 the picturesqueness of the ensemble was so in 
 contradiction to the stiffness and general ugliness 
 of the details, was a cordon of gardens and vine 
 yards overlying ancient villa sites, abounding in
 
 12 THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW 
 
 the most interesting material ; ruins in an almost 
 infinite variety in their pathetic abandon to the 
 dissolving influences of nature baths, tombs, 
 temples, theatres, palaces, aqueducts; and outside 
 them, and the most picturesque of all, the old 
 Aurelian wall, which meandered across highway 
 and through villa grounds, a simulacrum of de 
 fence, but a most eloquent record of dead empire, 
 marking the recession of its inhabited region ; 
 then, beyond the debatable ground between occu 
 pation and desolation, came the Campagna. The 
 Campagna of Rome has become the commonplace 
 of poet and orator when they have to deal with 
 fallen grandeur, but no poet or orator, unless he 
 were a painter, ever saw more than a fraction of 
 its beauty; few even of the landscape painters 
 have seen it all. There were, in those years of 
 which I write, some who passed their lives in the 
 hunt for its " subjects " ; painting till the twilight 
 came on; hurrying in to pass the gates before 
 they closed for the night, reckless of the chill and 
 the night-mists which even in midsummer follow 
 the day, content to run the risks of malaria if 
 so they might catch the intoxicating impressions 
 of that unique and supreme nightfall, with its 
 tremulous purple sky behind the purpler Alban 
 hills at the east, and its mellow gold at the west, 
 blinding the eyes more by the expanse of its 
 glow than its brilliancy, more by the deep in 
 tensity of its light than by glare ; by that luminous 
 depth which is more the quality of the Italian 
 atmosphere than the intensity of its blue, or the
 
 THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW 13 
 
 variety of colour on the sunset clouds. He who 
 lived amidst these influences in the young enthu 
 siasm of art and beautiful nature will remember 
 the Campagna as he will remember no other 
 landscape on earth; it is like a phrase of the 
 noblest poetry, ineffaceable from its unapproach 
 able simplicity. In those days, the joyous fra 
 ternity of the brush were to be seen on every 
 road that led into the Campagna, at almost every 
 season of the year. Down the Tiber, even within 
 the city walls, pictures made to hand met the eye 
 at every turn of the river; one found Claude and 
 Turner wherever one went. 
 
 That phase of Rome is gone forever gone as 
 surely as the simplicity and stern morality of the 
 republic, the splendour of the empire, or the 
 moral oppression of the papal rule. Rome can 
 no more be the home of art again than it can 
 be the seat of universal empire or the patrimony 
 of St. Peter. What has come is not so clear. The 
 Romans of to-day have none of the distinctive 
 virtues of either preceding epoch, except military 
 courage, which the Italians have never lacked, 
 though they have not always been fortunate in 
 the employment of it. Taste was never a char 
 acteristic of Rome at any age, but in the great 
 days the Romans built well. This cannot be said 
 now, and all that is most modern is most exe 
 crable; all that is oldest is most execrated and 
 profaned. The new barbarians who, in the present 
 dispensation, swoop down from cisalpine Gaul, 
 reared in the civic ideals of Genoa and Turin,
 
 14 THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW 
 
 have no sympathy with the monumental records 
 of Rome, and no conception of anything to replace 
 them. The Rome of 1870 was dirty, but dignified ; 
 inconvenient for people with modern tastes, but 
 most comfortable for those who had adapted 
 themselves to its mediaeval ways. The Rome of 
 1897 is comfortable for nobody; the miles of 
 new streets are filled mainly with huge, ugly 
 tenement houses, stuccoed flimsies, abhorrent 
 without and inhospitable within a tasteless 
 waste, where the highest virtue is fragility and 
 the noblest destiny demolition. Of the delightful 
 gardens which used to exist within the circuit of 
 the wall of Aurelianus, the only considerable frag 
 ment remaining is that of the English Embassy; 
 and that, too, had been marked out in building lots, 
 and has been saved only by the protest of Her 
 Majesty's Government backed by the Times and 
 the Italian archaeological authorities. The famous 
 Ludovisi gardens, the pride of papal Rome, and 
 amongst the most beautiful in Europe, have been 
 built over, and the vengeful lover of Old Rome 
 sees with a malignant satisfaction the long rows 
 of untenanted windows of the huge apartment 
 houses of the quarter, over whose portals, newest 
 in stucco and whitewash, he reads the last remnant 
 of the language of the Romans, "Est locanda" 
 The Ludovisi gardens were offered to the muni 
 cipality for 3,000,000 lire, and refused, while it 
 spent 3,700,000 lire in the purchase and demolition 
 of a single palace on the Corso, to make a vacant 
 space less than the hundredth part of the gardens.
 
 THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW 15 
 
 The transformation of Rome during the past 
 twenty years is unique in the history of civilisa 
 tion for barbarism, extravagance, and corruption; 
 never since the world began was so much money 
 spent to do so much evil. 
 
 But Rome survives it, as it has survived the 
 wrecking of the Goths, the Vandals, the Constable 
 de Bourbon; survives even the Barbari and the 
 Barberini. The Campagna still undulates into 
 distance, if somewhat encroached on near the 
 walls, and the arches of the Claudian aqueduct 
 still measure off the space with their gigantic 
 stride; the Appian Way is not made a modern 
 cemetery, and there is left material for the artist 
 who has the courage to return; Aricia, Nemi, 
 Tivoli, and the far-off Olevano remain unchanged. 
 The papal city has been comparatively little altered 
 by the expropriations except along the Tiber, and 
 nobody need go to the new quarter who does not 
 choose so to do. Life is dear, too dear for the 
 cosmopolitan artist folk who used to make one of 
 the principal attractions of the city to westerners, 
 and with very few notable exceptions they are 
 succeeded by modern Italians, of whose art little 
 is to be said. There is old Giovanni Costa, like 
 Titian, outliving the school of poetic landscape, 
 and generously teaching its traditions to such as 
 will learn them and the Academy of France, until 
 lately presided over by the veteran Hebert, the 
 last of the school of healthy religious thought 
 in painting that to which surfaces were not 
 enough, and who were more troubled as to what
 
 16 THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW 
 
 they should paint than how they should paint it: 
 but neither the one nor the other has had much 
 influence on the younger men. The Cafe Greco, 
 founded in the day of Salvator Rosa, has become a 
 German pastry-cookery, and the place where once 
 all the artists of Rome used to meet, along with 
 poets and the minor brood of the Muses, is no 
 longer to be recognised by the relic-hunter. De 
 tails disappear, but the eternal city looms above 
 them like Mont Blanc over the little intervening 
 hills when seen from a distance, or like St. Peter's 
 from the Campagna, and will do so when the 
 present system is in ruins and ivy grows over the 
 new quarter. All these crudities will disappear; 
 this pinchbeck Paris is only another illusion which 
 time will dissipate, and Rome will be again what 
 it has always been from its republican days, even 
 though the new republic comes and the papacy 
 departs, a centre of attraction to a spiritual cos 
 mopolitan population, never a centre of trade or 
 business; and the people who know it are not 
 those who are born in it, but those who are born 
 to it and its liberties of thought. 
 
 In the cosmopolitan sense, it was a great mis 
 fortune that Rome became the capital of Italy, 
 but it was fated. The same attraction that drew 
 the Greek, the Sabine, the Gaul and the Carlov- 
 ingian, the Etruscan Pontifex Maximus and St. 
 Paul, has brought the Garibaldian and the house 
 of Savoy. But, after all, the interference with 
 the true enjoyment of Rome by its real citizen 
 is not great of material. It will be a place of
 
 THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW 17 
 
 pilgrimage to the Catholic when the Pope has 
 gone, if he ever goes; the historian, the archae 
 ologist, the poet, and the artist will always be its 
 citizens, though holding no allegiance to Pope or 
 King, subject neither to taxation nor conscription, 
 and though disinterested in its real estate. He 
 owns it who feels its spiritual (not ecclesiastical) 
 attraction. To him there is no city on the earth 
 which can content him after it. He may live 
 in New York or London, Venice or Naples, but 
 will always be more or less a stranger there, 
 and be ready to go back to Rome. The new 
 civilisation, while it has done much to disfigure 
 and degrade the city, has also done much to im 
 prove it: made it cleaner and healthier, expelled 
 the highway robbers from the streets and the 
 brigands from the Campagna matters of less 
 importance to the true Roman than to the pros 
 perous man of business, but to none indifferent. 
 Life is dearer than it used to be, but the rate 
 of insurance on it is lower and the ratio of the 
 doctor's bill less, and the cost is not prohibitory 
 to the man of small means. He who lives in 
 his own house in Mayfair or Fifth Avenue is 
 content in Rome with a small apartment in a 
 crooked street, and on the third or fourth storey, 
 and does not so stand on state but that he has 
 his dinner in from the nearest cook-shop and 
 his wine by the flask ; has one servant, instead of 
 three which he used to have when on his social 
 dignity; uses cabs, and thinks it no derogation 
 not to keep a carriage, and so lives on the rent
 
 18 THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW 
 
 of his house in Mayfair. There are still quarters 
 to be found in the old palaces in the papal city, 
 but for people accustomed to fires there is some 
 times a difficulty in keeping warm; for the 
 Italians have a superstition about fires, and so 
 it happens that instead of the cheerful grate 
 one has to be content with a stove, whose pipe 
 may go out at the window, in one or two of 
 the chambers, and be dependent on the rarely 
 absent sun for the rest. The fuel is dear, but 
 then little is wanted, and there are few days 
 when one cannot enjoy the outdoors and the 
 sunshine. 
 
 Society there is none. The Romans are not a 
 hospitable people, but one does not come to be 
 with them. They are much divided into cliques 
 and classes, and the great families content them 
 selves in general with one great ball each year; 
 very exclusive, and, if I may judge by hearsay of 
 the foreigners who now and then attend, very 
 dull. With two or three exceptions, the high 
 nobility of Rome are as much of the Middle Ages 
 as the old churches, and to the spiritual Roman 
 they are mere shadows; we walk through and 
 past them, and know not they are there. As a 
 general thing, foreign society is organised apart. 
 The old Roman aristocracy is divided into Blacks 
 and Whites, Pope or King, and the two sections 
 never mingle; the embassies from the same 
 government to the Vatican and the Quirinal have 
 no relations with each other, and the Blacks are 
 not in the books of the embassies to the King,
 
 THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW 19 
 
 or the Whites invited to the receptions of those 
 to the Pope. If the new-comer will see the world 
 and can, he must choose under which colour he 
 will take it, but in any case he will not find what 
 in western lands is known as hospitality. 
 
 One of the most prominent English statesmen 
 said to me one day, in Rome, that the life of 
 public men was getting to be so laborious in the 
 new political conditions in England that it would 
 soon be a necessity to take refuge abroad from 
 the constant demands of one's constituents, and 
 that Italy, as the only available place of rest 
 and refuge, would be more and more resorted 
 to by them. Switzerland was useful only for a 
 portion of the year ; France was not far enough 
 or restful enough; and so it must happen that 
 Italy would become, to an increasing extent, the 
 refuge of overworked statesmen. And of Italian 
 cities, there is no question of the greater avail 
 ability of Rome over all others. Florence is more 
 interesting in the art of the Middle Ages ; Venice 
 holds the palm for its picturesqueness in the 
 spring and early summer, but its winters are 
 bleak and cheerless; Naples draws more from its 
 surroundings, Sorrento and Capri, than it offers 
 in itself; but Rome contains all that is most 
 interesting in Italy. The superstition as to its 
 sanitary condition is the bugbear which most 
 militates against it. This runs back into the 
 dark ages, but is unjustified by any statistics to 
 which I can get access. In a residence of nearly 
 a dozen years in the aggregate, and extending
 
 20 THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW 
 
 over a period of nearly thirty, I have never had 
 in my family a single serious illness or a case 
 of typhoid or malaria, and in my personal 
 acquaintance I have never known half-a-dozen 
 cases of intermittent or malarial fever, and not 
 one of any gravity; while in a residence of five 
 years in Florence we had eight cases of typhoid 
 amongst seven persons. I have repeatedly stayed 
 in Rome through the entire summer without 
 any discomfort or inconvenience, and the late 
 English ambassador, Lord Saville, was accustomed 
 to spend his summers at the Embassy, saying 
 that he found no place so comfortable all the 
 year round as Rome. I have never met with 
 a case of the so-called "pernicious" fever, and 
 the physicians whom I know, and who attend 
 foreigners mostly, bear a like testimony. Dr 
 Drummond, who has practised here for years, 
 says that he never saw a case. The instances of 
 malarial fever I have known were similar to the 
 intermittents of our own country annoying, but 
 not dangerous. The statistics of the Italian 
 sanitary department are drawn up with the 
 greatest care and exactitude, and for the pur 
 pose of improving the sanitary condition of the 
 country, therefore with no reference to publica 
 tion or to foreign opinion; and I have before me 
 those of the deaths by malarial fevers for the 
 commune of Rome, including the Campagna and 
 the outlying towns and villages, Ostia and its 
 marshes, to the sea, with all the malarial districts 
 in the Ager Romanus; the division of the city
 
 THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW 21 
 
 from these being impracticable, as the peasants 
 all come to the Roman hospitals for treatment. 
 In these returns, out of a population of over 
 500,000, the total of deaths by malarial fevers was, 
 in 1890, 308. The amelioration of the condition 
 of public health under the government of Crispi 
 can be judged from the diminution in the deaths, 
 which has been from 600 in 1887, gradually and 
 regularly, to 300 in the past year. With a system 
 of thermal establishments such as the ancient 
 Romans had, the deaths by malarial fevers would 
 be still less ; for there is no agency more effective 
 in extirpating malaria than the vapour bath, yet 
 there is not a tolerable Roman bath in Rome. 
 
 I am in continual receipt of letters asking if it 
 is safe to come to Rome as early as October, or 
 if it is safe to stay as late as May; and not un- 
 frequently I meet people who think that the visit 
 at any season is dangerous to life! Nothing is 
 so invincible as superstition. If we leave Rome 
 at all for the summer, it is only about the first of 
 August, and we return by the end of September; 
 not one-tenth of the population leaves, and the 
 death-rate is lower in summer than in winter. 
 From the first of November till the August rains 
 begin to fall, the worst parts of the Campagna 
 may safely be visited, if the sunset hours are 
 avoided, and even in the intervening months the 
 midday is free from danger ; but from the first 
 rains of August to the time of the setting in of 
 frost, it is not wise to be in most parts of the 
 Campagna towards sunset, though there are
 
 22 THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW 
 
 sections in which it is not safe to go to sleep 
 at night in any season. The whole question of 
 malaria in Italy is one of exaggerated import 
 ance. I have travelled in the worst parts of the 
 Maremme, which are regarded as the most deadly 
 and malarial of Italy, as late as the latter half 
 of June, and have found the harvesters at work 
 in gangs, and very few cases of fever anywhere; 
 while at Grosseto, the capital of the Maremme, 
 which the guide-books tell us is abandoned by 
 the inhabitants on the first of May, I found the 
 entire population on the ramparts listening to 
 the band till late into the evening, and none 
 had as yet gone to the hills, which they do only 
 to a limited extent the first of July. I had an 
 introduction to one family, the mother of which, 
 whose life had always been passed in Grosseto, had 
 never known, at the age of sixty, what inter 
 mittent fever was. I know of no district of Italy 
 in which it is not practicable to travel ten 
 months out of the twelve, if one takes the pre 
 cautions not to sleep in a malarial locality, or 
 drink water that is not known to be pure. 
 
 Typhoids are common in all great cities, but in 
 Rome less so than in most cities of its size; and 
 the returns to the sanitary authorities are a 
 proof that their frequency is diminishing in pro 
 portion as the rigorous regulations are effective 
 and evasion is prevented. The water supply of 
 Rome is probably the best as to purity and the 
 most abundant in quantity of any furnished to 
 great cities. Typhoid very rarely occurs among
 
 THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW 23 
 
 the inhabitants of the better class except from 
 drinking water at some wayside, or temporarily 
 infected, spring. The main supply, that by the 
 Acqua Marcia, is secure against pollution, and is 
 everywhere accessible, so that no house need be 
 without it. The sanitary laws are inflexible, and 
 the tenant of a neglected house has always the 
 remedy in his own hands. I have no hesitation 
 in saying that a person in moderate circumstances, 
 able to choose his quarters, can pass the months 
 between September and July in Rome under as 
 favourable conditions of health and comfort as 
 in any city in Europe ; and, with less precautions 
 against the heat than in New York one must take 
 against the cold, he may pass the entire year. 
 
 In summer, too, we have excellent seaside 
 resorts Anzio and Palo, and our hill country 
 at Albano, Aricia, Nemi, Frascati, and the other 
 castelli; and if there were a little enterprise in 
 Italy, we should have summer resorts in the 
 Abruzzi delightful in their sanitary and pictur 
 esque features, but this remains for future 
 generations. Now a civilised man can hardly 
 pass a day in any of the mountain villages or 
 towns ; filthy they are, beyond exaggeration. It 
 is enough to insist on the advantages of Rome 
 as a winter station, and as the fittest city of 
 winter refuge for the exhausted and disabled, 
 hors de coiribat in the battle of life, to whom 
 political affinities are immaterial; for the refugees 
 from the nervous pressure of America, the social, 
 political, and business burdens of England; from
 
 24 THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW 
 
 the immitigable boredom of German life, as well 
 as the glittering superficiality of Parisian: all 
 such may meet here on the neutral ground of 
 traditions, memories, and associations that ante 
 date all our national divisions, and even all ex 
 isting nationalities. Quod est in votis.
 
 MARATHON AND ITS BRIGANDS 
 
 THE trip from Athens to Marathon is no joke, 
 especially in summer, and when brigands are 
 known to be sauntering unmolested along Mount 
 Parnes, a night's walk away. Yet, when Messrs 
 Goodenough and Cookson, American and English 
 consular officials, escaped from Constantinople for 
 a holiday, and stirred me out of my hot quarters 
 at Athens to show them the lions, etc., of course 
 it became necessary to put this excursion in the 
 programme. It was in August of 1869, and we 
 knew that there were brigands at Phylse, and did 
 not know that they were not nearer. In fact, the 
 people of Athens were so panic-stricken that 
 they would not go into the outskirts of the town 
 in the evening ; it was clear to the popular appre 
 hension that we were besieged, and that the roi 
 des brigands, whoever he might be for the time, 
 was ruler of all the country round. 
 
 So, as our trip was to be in the nature of an 
 invasion of an enemy's country, I decided to make 
 it a surprise, and with strict injunctions of 
 secrecy on all around, went, at nightfall of the 
 day before we were to make the excursion, to 
 the Commandant de place and asked an escort 
 "not that there was any use in it, but the 
 
 25
 
 26 MARATHON AND ITS BRIGANDS 
 
 strangers were anxious," etc. The Commandant 
 stroked his moustache, expressed his sense of the 
 high honour of having been permitted to make 
 my acquaintance, offered me a cigarette, and we 
 talked European politics, the Cretan insurrection, 
 etc., and he assured me, as I rose to take my leave, 
 that an escort of cavalry should be waiting at 
 my door at 5 A.M. the next day. I went at 10 
 P.M. to the owner of horses and carriages and 
 ordered a carriage for the early hour, and a 
 relay of horses to be sent forward at once to the 
 half-way station. I knew that if, even then, one 
 of the friends of the brigands in town (by force 
 of circumstances I should have said the carriage- 
 owner, if I had been pressed to select one) should 
 send word to his colleagues that four distin 
 guished foreigners, of whom two certainly were 
 ambassadors, were to start for Marathon on the 
 morrow, they would not get the news before 
 morning, and would not dare cross the plain by 
 day, so that we could reach Athens again before 
 they could get upon our road. 
 
 I awoke with the grey dawn and heard the 
 hoofs of the troopers' horses clattering on the 
 pavement in front of the house, and, running 
 over to the hotel, found my friends wasting the 
 precious coolness in deliberate breakfast. I in 
 spected the horses, bullied the driver for having 
 brought us the shabbiest carriage in Athens (by 
 way of cutting down in advance his claim for 
 backsheesh, or extra pay on any score), inter 
 jected a little Western celerity into the Eastern
 
 MARATHON AND ITS BRIGANDS 27 
 
 combination, and we started, picking up the 
 escort en route. The road (that which conducts 
 to Chalcis) is very good for a few miles, and 
 we rattled along until we had passed Hymettus 
 and emerged on the plains which slope towards 
 Euboea, when we turned sharp off by a bad 
 waggon-track, rather than carriage-road, through 
 the olive-orchards, and then through a pine- 
 forest as solitary as the backwoods of America. 
 No habitation, man, or grazing beast even, was 
 to be seen ; no tinkle of goat-bells to be heard. 
 In the midst of this forest, by the side of a 
 brook, seeming at first sight a succession of 
 stagnant pools, bordered by a luxuriant growth 
 of blackberries, oleanders, and rich grass, we 
 found our relay waiting. There was no delay in 
 changing, and about 10 A.M. we emerged from 
 the wood on the marsh - bordered plain of 
 Marathon. 
 
 The blue sea now breaks farther out than 
 when the Persian keels fretted it and marked 
 the sand that now lies hundreds of feet inland; 
 and many acres of the marsh, where, doubtless, 
 Persian bones and Persian trophies are bedded 
 to this day, are now solid earth. We drove up 
 to the mound through the maize-fields, and be 
 tween the strips of vineyard, where the villagers 
 of New Marathon were watching the early 
 grapes; and having climbed the mound, made 
 its circuit, and hunted for fragments of flint 
 instruments, which form one of the items of 
 interest at Marathon, we bought of the patriarch
 
 28 MARATHON AND ITS BRIGANDS 
 
 of the adjoining fields who sat under a shelter 
 of reeds guarding his riches, lest they took to 
 themselves wings a supply of water-melons, 
 scarcely ripe grapes, and cantaloupes; each trooper 
 confiscating one of the former, and quenching 
 his thirst in the saddle. Then, having listened 
 to the guide's tale of the battle, oft told, and 
 ever growing in wondrous inequalities of heroism 
 and butchery: and looked where he told us (and 
 Murray, ever-to-be-consulted, confirmed,) that the 
 Greeks held their position and the Persians 
 landed : having, in short, " done " the place after 
 the manner of the guide-book-led tourist, we 
 drove back to the edge of the forest for shelter 
 from the intense sun while we lunched. 
 
 I think that timete Danaos must be one of 
 the things birched into us at school, for, with an 
 immense liking for the race, I have an instinctive 
 distrust of the preternatural shrewdness of the 
 true Achaian, and our driver was of the genuine 
 type, and had an uncanny way of looking across 
 the bridge of his nose towards the mountains, 
 which made me uneasy. 
 
 However, we lunched, drank copiously of good 
 wine of Phalerum, while the driver pottered 
 about his carriage and horses, to such good 
 purpose that, when finally we started on the 
 home road, we had not gone half-a-mile before 
 the carriage came to a standstill, out of order. 
 One of the wheels refused to revolve. Nothing 
 was broken, so far as could be seen; but no 
 efforts of all the persons concerned could make
 
 MARATHON AND ITS BRIGANDS 29 
 
 the wheel turn, or get it off its axle. The ever- 
 to-be-suspected citizen of Athens begged us, with 
 much serenity, to compose and assure ourselves, 
 and be comfortable while he sent to Athens for 
 another carriage. My misgivings coming to a 
 head very rapidly, I asked him when the carriage 
 would arrive; and he replied, in the happiest and 
 most confident tone, that he hoped that it would 
 get there by nightfall. "Very well," said I, "we 
 will go and send it and you will stay and watch 
 this carriage." The look of blank amazement and 
 despair which came on his face as I pronounced 
 this decision, as unappealable as a sentence of 
 Minos, as he saw in my face and in the air of 
 the commander of my squad when I pronounced 
 it, was a revelation. Unhitching the horses, and 
 dismounting two of the troopers, we rode back to 
 the relay post at the little bridge, where the 
 party of Lord Muncaster was captured not many 
 months later, and there halted to wait for one of 
 the dismounted men, who had been charged with 
 a photographic camera, and had not kept up 
 with us. Meanwhile, one of the troopers rode on 
 to the next hamlet to see if some kind of trap 
 could not be obtained; for, between foot- weariness 
 and saddle - soreness, we were all desirous to 
 change our method of locomotion. Our escort 
 was thus diminished to two the corporal and 
 one private. The place was a capital one for an 
 ambush, as the capturers of Lord Muncaster's 
 party found it, and I looked into the thick trees 
 growing each side of the brook on the bank
 
 30 MARATHON AND ITS BRIGANDS 
 
 overlooking it, and in the bed of it above us, 
 with a certain nervousness, which increased 
 when, after half-an-hour's waiting, the remaining 
 trooper was sent back to look for the missing 
 camera and its bearer. 
 
 There was nothing for it, however, but to wait 
 till the escort reassembled; and we lit our cigar 
 ettes and lay down under the pine-trees. A cir 
 cumstance that assured me somewhat was, that 
 I found the troopers' carbines all unloaded (they 
 were old-fashioned flint-lock smooth-bores) and 
 that there was not a single cartridge in the 
 company, from which I saw that they at least 
 anticipated no danger. The corporal was a jolly, 
 good-humoured veteran, whose air was that of 
 a man ready for any emergency or danger. I 
 asked him if he thought there was any ground 
 for fear that, if we were obliged to wait long 
 there, we might be carried off by some of the 
 country - people, brigands pro tempore? He re 
 plied with the significant Greek negative, a 
 silent pointing upward of the nose, accompanied by 
 a slight arching of the brows, and, after another 
 puff or two of his cigarette, said: "No; we know 
 all the brigands, and generally know where they 
 are. They could not stay here twenty-four hours 
 without our knowing it, and we know that there 
 have been none on this side of Pentelicus for 
 several days. The common people here," he 
 added, " are very honest and quiet, but very 
 poor." 
 
 " Perhaps," ejaculated Cookson, " the one because
 
 MARATHON AND ITS BRIGANDS 31 
 
 the other put whichever you please as cause or 
 effect in this country." 
 
 " I was a brigand myself once," said the 
 corporal, after the pause in the conversation had 
 lasted a few minutes; whereupon we all looked 
 at him anew, and with a little more animation; 
 and he added, as if in partial disclaimer, "but 
 it was only for a few months." 
 
 " But how did it happen ? " I asked ; for though 
 I knew that there had been brigands in the 
 Cabinet in Greece, I did not suppose that the 
 post of corporal in the mounted gendarmerie was 
 a temptation to a gay rover who had felt the 
 delight of outlawry. 
 
 "It was in this way," replied he. "I used to 
 live in Acarnania, and, in one of the elections, 
 there was a gentleman who had great influence 
 in two or three of the villages, and who came 
 from Athens to help the other side; and, as we 
 knew that if these villages went against us we 
 should lose the election, it was necessary to get 
 rid of him. The chiefs of our party tried to 
 draw him over to us; but, as he would not come, 
 we had to get up a quarrel in the street, and he 
 was killed. I was one of those who made the 
 fight. I did not strike a blow, but I ran with the 
 others to the mountains to wait till it all could 
 be made right again. But, in spite of everything, 
 the other side got the election and so we could 
 not go back. If our men had been elected we 
 should have been pardoned. So we went up to 
 the Phthiotide and joined a band there, three of
 
 32 MARATHON AND ITS BRIGANDS 
 
 us; I stayed two years before I had a chance of 
 getting back, and that came in the beginning of 
 the Cretan insurrection, when many of the bands 
 went over to fight with the Turks. When I did 
 get back they made me corporal, as you see me; 
 and, when there is any necessity to hunt the 
 brigands, I generally go with the expedition, for 
 I know all the roads. But this Government don't 
 trouble them much. You see, General Soutzo, 
 the Minister of War, has got an estate up in the 
 brigands' country, and he knows very well that 
 if he troubles them too much it will be plundered ; 
 and then it's no use running after them, for the 
 moment an expedition starts they all go to the 
 frontier, and are ready to cross over and get 
 Turkish protection; and there are always some 
 Turkish subjects in the bands, who make it all 
 right with the guards." 
 
 "Did you ever make any prizes while you were 
 in the band?" I asked. 
 
 " No great gentlemen ; only a few Wallachian 
 and Bulgarian merchants. The bands don't like 
 to trouble Franks, unless it is a lord or some 
 very rich man who can pay a big ransom, for the 
 affair makes so much more trouble when it is a 
 Frank, and they get pursued and have to leave 
 their families for a long time : and it don't do," 
 he ejaculated, with a shrug. 
 
 "But have they families with them?" I asked. 
 
 "Perhaps," suggested Cookson, "they have as 
 many as they have hiding-places." 
 
 The corporal's nose went up in the air with a
 
 MARATHON AND ITS BRIGANDS 33 
 
 quiet expression of his evident feeling that we 
 did not in the least understand the respectability 
 of the kleptic calling, as he replied, "No; they 
 always stay near their families, except when the 
 expeditions are out, and get their supplies from 
 their relations. You must know that when Com- 
 oundouros was First Minister, there were some 
 bands in the Morea, and the nomarch of Argos. 
 the same who caught Kitzos, sent all the families 
 of the brigands over to the islands, and they had 
 to come in and surrender in a few weeks; all but 
 one band near Patras, and they would have 
 come too, if Bulgaris had not come in First 
 Minister, and sent the nomarch away, because 
 they said he violated the Constitution. That is 
 what makes the country so poor, this changing 
 the Ministers all the time; and the King, he's of 
 no use, only costs thirty million drachmas a 
 year " ; and the politician born shrugged his 
 shoulders with an expression of contempt for 
 such a state of things. He proceeded, however, 
 after a moment : " The chiefs never allow the 
 members of their bands to marry or steal women 
 if they are already married, because it always 
 makes trouble, and the women betray the bands 
 to punish them. One of our band one day stole 
 a very pretty girl from a village near Lamia ; 
 and when the chief ordered him to take her back, 
 and he refused and threatened to leave the band, 
 the chief shot him dead, and sent the girl home. 
 Her father paid us well by giving information of 
 a rich Bulgarian wool-merchant, who was buy-
 
 34 MARATHON AND ITS BRIGANDS 
 
 ing wool in the mountains near Lamia, and 
 we carried him off, and got twenty thousand 
 drachmas ransom. That was the best capture we 
 made while I was in the band. We tried to 
 catch an English lord once who was going over 
 to the Euboaa; but some of the people told Mr. 
 Noel, an English gentleman who lives at Achmet 
 Aga, and he sent the lord warning." 
 
 "How did you know he was a lord?" I asked. 
 
 "Oh, one of the band had a cousin who was 
 a waiter in the hotel where the lord lived, and 
 he sent us word that he was coming, and that 
 he had so much money that he did not know 
 how to spend it; for he bought all kinds of an 
 tiquities for whatever price people asked him, 
 and gave backsheesh like a fool. If we had 
 caught him we should have made him pay ten 
 thousand pounds ransom, and then we should 
 have gone over the frontier and bought property 
 in Epirus, and become Turkish subjects. Ten 
 thousand pounds is a good deal of money," he 
 appended, by way of reflection. 
 
 Here he got up and walked across the bridge 
 to the brink of the opposite bank, and listened 
 if he could catch any sound of the horse of the 
 trooper sent after the missing footman. Nothing. 
 What could the matter be? Had they both been 
 gobbled up by the brigands? Their firearms, I 
 knew, were not loaded, and they could not even 
 fire a shot of warning for us. There was, how 
 ever, nothing to do but wait; and wait we did. 
 The troopers' saddles were very bad; one of the
 
 MARATHON AND ITS BRIGANDS 35 
 
 party was no horseman, and was already both 
 footsore and saddle-sore, for we had come twelve 
 miles since the break-down ; another was a cripple 
 and to get back to Athens afoot was, therefore, 
 to two of us impossible. Then we had only three 
 available horses : the corporal being too portly 
 and equestrian to get home afoot, two of the 
 gendarmes being away with their horses, and the 
 man who had brought the relay horses having 
 started for Athens on one of his spare beasts to 
 hurry up the other carriage. Of the remaining 
 three, none had saddles; and the two which 
 had brought us from Marathon were thoroughly 
 jaded. We had ten or twelve miles still to go, 
 and the prospect was not a pleasant one. 
 
 Presently the trooper who had been sent back 
 came clattering along with the news that the 
 missing comrade was not to be found. He had 
 ridden back to the carriage, and found no trace 
 of him on the road. The other, sent after a 
 vehicle, had not returned, and it was now nearly 
 mid-afternoon. We all grew nervous and irrit 
 able, and I confidently expected to see the dirty 
 fustanella appear in the bushes around. Cookson 
 began, in Stamboul Greek, with strong English 
 accent, to abuse the Government and Greece in 
 general, to which the corporal replied imperturb- 
 ably, for the Greeks are too much in the habit of 
 hearing their State berated to think much about 
 it ; and it sometimes occurs to me that, as they do 
 really, in general, receive more abuse than they 
 deserve, it may have had the effect of diminishing
 
 36 MARATHON AND ITS BRIGANDS 
 
 the self-respect which man or nation must possess, 
 to win the respect of others. So the corporal 
 re-echoed the epithets levelled at the Ministers, 
 and abused the King, who, he said, might better 
 matters if he were not so given up to his 
 favourites. It is hard quarrelling with a man 
 who takes your side in the quarrel, and we had 
 to stop berating the Government, as the corporal 
 beat us out and out in virulence. 
 
 "But tell me, Stavros," said I, at length, 
 "what would you do if you were Minister of 
 War to put down brigandage?" 
 
 " Do ! " replied he, the feather of imagination 
 tickling his importance so that he became really 
 ministerial in dignity. "I would very soon stop 
 it. I would make the villages pay all the ran 
 soms which were taken in their territory. I 
 would do as the nomarch of Argos did, and 
 send the families of all the brigands out to live 
 in the islands, and I would have all brigands 
 shot as soon as taken, instead of being sent 
 as they are now, to the Palamidi, to wait for 
 a new election, and then be pardoned to go into 
 the provinces to make influence. But the Turk 
 ish Government must work with ours, or there 
 cannot be an end to it. Why, not a year ago, 
 when we were going to fight the Turks about 
 the Ennosis, and Hobart Pacha went to Syra 
 to take her, I was with an expedition to look 
 at the boundary near Arta, and the brigands 
 took two of our officers who slept in a village 
 without sentinels, and carried them over the
 
 MARATHON AND ITS BRIGANDS 37 
 
 frontiers, and kept them, in the Turkish guard 
 house for ransom, and the Turkish captain had 
 part of the ransom. You might as well attempt 
 to shut all the fish into Piraeus harbour as to 
 try to shut the brigands off from the boundary. 
 If all the lazy regulars who live in the barracks 
 of Athens, and do nothing but set guard at the 
 palace and march about town, were put on the 
 boundary, they wouldn't keep a man from pass 
 ing when he liked. But they might watch the 
 villagers, to keep the brigands from coming 
 down to get bread or powder, or from capturing 
 any one, and in time they would be starved out. 
 But they must send the families away that 
 will stop them quicker than anything else." 
 
 "But," I said, "that is illegal it's against the 
 Constitution." 
 
 " Bah ! " said the indignant soldier, " we hear 
 of the Constitution when it serves the Ministers 
 never when it protects the people. The Con 
 stitution is like the middle of a fast* you may 
 do what you like with it. There are sixty brig 
 ands in chains now in the Palamidi, and I'll lay 
 a wager that forty will be pardoned in a year, 
 and yet the Constitution does not permit the 
 pardoning of a brigand without the Chambers. 
 I know fellows who have been released two or 
 three times. It is all very well to talk of con 
 stitutions and laws; but I think that Ministers 
 
 * The practice of many in Greece is to keep only the first and 
 last weeks of the long fasts. Strict devotees keep the whole, 146 
 days of each year.
 
 38 MARATHON AND ITS BRIGANDS 
 
 make them for their own good, and keep them 
 when they like. In my opinion, the law that 
 does the work is the law we want, and if I 
 was Minister I would make law enough to do 
 what I wanted. I know a butcher in Athens 
 who has a brother a brigand in a band near 
 Galaxidi, and he keeps the band informed of all 
 people going there; and I suppose if we put 
 him in prison, as he deserves, there would be a 
 great talk about the Constitution; but, if I had 
 my way, I would lock him up in the Palamidi, 
 and his lawyers with him. Your Constitutions 
 
 may be all very well in other countries, but " 
 
 and he finished by a thumb over his shoulder. 
 "Constitution!" he ejaculated again, after a 
 little, with a contemptuous shrug, as though his 
 ideas had been rumbling away in some inner 
 cavern, and had come out in an echo. 
 
 It grew late when the man sent in search of 
 a vehicle returned, saying that nothing was to 
 be found. The missing man must be abandoned, 
 and we must push on as we could, hoping, on 
 the high road, to fall in with some means of 
 transport. The two troopers gave up their 
 horses cheerfully in view of backsheesh, the two 
 best of the carriage-horses bore the other two 
 of us, and without other mishaps we journeyed 
 along as far as the road, when at a half-fortified 
 metochi, we found a butcher's cart, which, filled 
 with straw and packed densely with the four 
 of us, in addition to the guide and driver, served 
 to bring us with much pain to Athens, where
 
 MARATHON AND ITS BRIGANDS 39 
 
 we arrived about 10 P.M. The missing trooper 
 was waiting at the metochi. 
 
 The next day, about sunset, I happened to 
 meet the carriage returning, and had the curi 
 osity to ask our driver what was the matter. 
 
 "Only a nail which had got between the axle 
 and wheel and would not let it turn." 
 
 "Ah!" I said, "how did the nail get there?" 
 
 The driver shrugged his shoulders with a bland 
 smile, which might be understood to mean any 
 thing you pleased. / took it to mean that he 
 knew when and why the nail got in; and, had 
 I been Stavros' model Minister, I should certainly 
 have sent him to the Palamidi forthwith.
 
 MY EXPERIENCE IN A GREEK 
 QUARANTINE 
 
 HAVING occasion during the summer of 1865 to 
 go from Crete to European terra-firma, I was 
 obliged to go to Syra, the entrepot of the Levant, 
 to take passage in the Austrian Lloyd's steamer; 
 but as the cholera panic and the restrictions laid 
 on the steamers from all Turkish ports had virtu 
 ally stopped regular communication with Greek 
 ports, I took a passage in an English "Brixham 
 schooner" which had come out with a cargo of 
 soda, etc. Our island had had no case of cholera, 
 and indeed has never been visited by it ; its 
 general healthfulness was all that could be de 
 sired by the most exacting Board of Health, and 
 as, moreover, we were fortified with English, 
 Turkish, and Greek bills of health, I anticipated 
 at the worst a detention of four or five days 
 previous to being permitted to land. 
 
 We had a charming run of thirty odd hours, 
 with just wind enough to make a landsman love 
 the sea, and sighting Syra in the morning, stood 
 directly in for the port. Half-a-mile off the 
 mole-head we met a man-of-war's boat, the Greek 
 blue and white stripes flying out from the stern, 
 and received a most peremptory warning to go 
 40
 
 EXPERIENCE IN A GREEK QUARANTINE 41 
 
 no nearer, fearfully shouted from a safe distance ; 
 and on learning that we were from a Turkish 
 port, the officer ordered us off to Delos for eleven 
 days' quarantine, not daring even to look at our 
 bill of health or hear any protest or explanations. 
 Those who have been at Syra may remember 
 to the west of that port, and about ten miles 
 away, a low, bare, and rocky island, which few 
 people ever visit, and on which only two or 
 three herdsmen live. On closer inspection one 
 finds that what seemed to be one is really two 
 islands, the larger called sometimes Rhenee, and 
 sometimes the greater Delos, the smaller the true 
 Delos, site of the famous temple of Apollo. In 
 a bay on the south-eastern side of the former, the 
 schooner cast anchor, and the so-called lazaretto 
 being only an insignificant collection of huts, 
 built of rough boards, I elected to perform 
 quarantine on board. In fact, the bare, dry, even 
 burnt look of the island, without a shrub, a 
 spring, or a living thing on it except a few 
 guardiani and some luckless passengers of an 
 English steamer which had preceded us by a 
 few days, gave small hope of being able to pass 
 eleven days of idleness endurably, in the heat of 
 midsummer, where the sun is as fervent as it is 
 on the south side of a Greek island. The steamer 
 was from Alexandria, with over two hundred 
 passengers on board, mostly Syriotes and other 
 Greeks flying from the cholera, then in the 
 beginning of its fury at that city; therefore they 
 were most naturally put into quarantine. Their
 
 42 EXPERIENCE IN A GREEK QUARANTINE 
 
 term was fourteen days, I believe, of which 
 nearly a week had passed without any symptoms 
 of sickness of any kind. We were near enough 
 to hail across to her on still days and hear the 
 complaints of the captain roared at sympathetic 
 ears in good broad English, and witness by eye 
 and ear the facts I am about to narrate, which 
 I challenge the most patriotic and mendacious 
 inhabitant of Syra to contradict. 
 
 The captain of the steamer having, like myself, 
 only calculated on a few days' observation, had 
 provided himself with sufficient stores for the 
 time for his few cabin passengers, the great bulk 
 of those on board being deck passengers, who 
 provide themselves with food for the voyage. 
 These had been exhausted soon after their arrival 
 at quarantine; and the captain, praying in vain 
 for supplies from the authorities of Syra, began 
 to give out his ship's supplies; for it was impos 
 sible, as he said, to see the poor people starve. 
 But these supplies, abundant for his proper ends, 
 would go but a little way in feeding that hungry 
 multitude, and were threatened with exhaustion 
 before the townspeople should awaken their 
 Christianity from its sleep of, I imagine, about 
 seventeen centuries. The captain appealed in 
 vain to them to save their countrymen from 
 starvation. They were not bound, they said, to 
 provide food for people because they found them 
 in quarantine. So the captain gave out all his 
 stores, little by little, and shouted across to us to 
 know if we had any to spare. The Sylph carried
 
 EXPERIENCE IN A GREEK QUARANTINE 43 
 
 a crew of five men, and we naturally had two 
 or three barrels of hard bread and salt beef 
 stowed away for emergencies; and though what 
 we could give them, with proper regard to our 
 own needs, could be little more than a few 
 hours' respite from starvation, it was impossible 
 to withhold it. 
 
 The captain was an incarnate protest, a deck- 
 walking imprecation on the miserly authorities 
 of Syra. The people in his ship were not his 
 own countrymen, but Greeks; he was under no 
 obligation to provide a mouthful for one of 
 them; they had no money to buy, and he had 
 no authority to buy for them except from his 
 own funds to have done which he must have 
 been a Roman prince or an English banker. So 
 he wrote, and begged, and protested. He wrote 
 to the English consul, Mr. Lloyd, and Mr. Lloyd 
 stormed at the nomarch and demarch by turns 
 in vain. The Syriotes would not send, and the 
 consul could not, save a little for the captain 
 and crew; and provisions were not only not 
 supplied by the Board of Health, but permission to 
 carry them off to the steamer was denied those 
 who would have taken them, so great was the 
 panic at the idea of communication with the ship. 
 Mr. Lloyd succeeded now and then in sending a 
 small supply by the guarda-costa, and they bought 
 now and then a kid of the herdsmen on the 
 "clean" part of the island, at exorbitant rates. 
 But they, too, finally refused to communicate ; and 
 then the captain wrote to the consul I saw the
 
 44 EXPERIENCE IN A GREEK QUARANTINE 
 
 letter afterwards "For three days my men have 
 had no bread, and two of them have gone 
 raving mad." Amongst the cabin passengers was 
 a Frenchwoman, pregnant and near her confine 
 ment; for her the captain begged for a doctor 
 or nurse in vain none would venture; and when 
 the time was come the poor mother had only 
 the kindly care of the captain and her fellow- 
 passengers, among whom was no woman or 
 person competent to care for her. Fortunately, 
 she passed through her trial safely. 
 
 In the meanwhile, Mr. Lloyd kept up his pro 
 tests and remonstrances to people and Govern 
 ment protested against the inhumanity and the 
 illegality of the whole thing begged for relief to 
 deaf ears : " Better," they said, " that a few should 
 suffer than that forty thousand should incur 
 the peril of cholera. To allow people to carry 
 provisions to the island was to run danger 
 of communication with contagion." The only 
 reply of any significance that Mr. Lloyd got was 
 a threat of burning his house over his head if 
 he persisted in attempting to bring cholera into 
 Syra. 
 
 We, faintly realising the nature of this little 
 turmoil, lay quietly under the intense sun waiting 
 the lapse of time. The Greeks on the steamer 
 might starve, but we were perhaps thankful that 
 they were only Greeks; we should wear through 
 well enough, and then be free. Mr. Lloyd finally 
 wrote to Athens; the Government at Athens 
 ordered an examination; and then the demos,
 
 EXPERIENCE IN A GREEK QUARANTINE 45 
 
 under compulsion, voted meagre supplies to their 
 famished countrymen. 
 
 But our fates were merciless. A few days, very 
 few, before the steamer's time had expired, a ship 
 arrived from Alexandria which actually had the 
 cholera on board ! Twenty or more had died and 
 were thrown overboard on the voyage, as we 
 afterwards learned, and several more were sick. 
 As she came into the quarantine anchoring-ground 
 and cast anchor, she dragged some distance, and 
 seemed in a fair way to drift against the armed 
 cutter which was doing duty as guarda-costa and 
 capo-guardiano. The brave captain (I hope he 
 wasn't a sailor) ran out his guns and prepared 
 to sink the ship and all on board, lest she should 
 come into contact with him. That scene is one 
 I shall never forget and hardly ever forgive: the 
 huddled passengers driven on deck by the pesti 
 lence and heat, and, doubtless, already in a frenzy 
 of fear from the perils within, found themselves 
 met on the threshold of deliverance from their 
 awful fellow-voyager by the open mouths of Greek 
 carronades. Women shrieked and men howled 
 with fright ; all prayed, supplicating the gods and 
 the captain. The guarda-costa people were in a 
 worse panic, if possible shouted orders and 
 counter-orders, ran out a gun and ran it in again, 
 threatened, prayed and cursed, as though doom 
 was on them. This horror of the cholera seemed 
 to have become a madness in the Greek mind. 
 Our sailors gave the wretches the benefit of much 
 good and strong English, which I fear was sadly
 
 46 EXPERIENCE IN A GREEK QUARANTINE 
 
 wasted, and would have been equally so had it 
 been equally good Greek; but I noticed that our 
 guardiano was stricken with fear at the bare idea 
 of the vicinity of the infected ship. What the 
 extent of the contagion was we knew not, of 
 course; but the hurrying and trepidation of the 
 people on board, and in the boat which came along 
 side, made it evident that something unusual was 
 going on. The boat lay far off, and the officers 
 shouted very loudly ; and we heard afterwards 
 from the quarantine-boat that there were four 
 or five dead of cholera on board, whom they 
 wanted to send on shore to be buried, but this 
 was refused as dangerous ! then to be permitted 
 to sink them in the sea this was still less to be 
 allowed. They begged for a doctor no one would 
 go : guardiani even would not go 011 board for any 
 compensation, and they rowed away, leaving her to 
 her fate. We shortly after received an intimation 
 that by reason of this new arrival all ships in quar 
 antine at that time must stay fourteen days more ! 
 My own wrath at Greek inhumanity had been 
 already so largely excited that I could get no 
 angrier at this new tyranny in fact, I thought 
 more of the steamer and its already half-starved, 
 and even, in some cases, dying people, than of 
 myself; and if I had had the pestilence in the 
 hollow of my hand, I should, I fear, have visited 
 Syra as Egypt never was visited. But the most 
 appalling thought was of that luckless ship with 
 Death holding revel on her, and the living bound 
 to the dead.
 
 EXPERIENCE IN A GREEK QUARANTINE 47 
 
 Here was the ship of the ancient mariner, in 
 sooth anchored only, but with anchors almost 
 useless on that tranquil sea, the fiery sun above, 
 and the glassy water below, and nothing to break 
 that awful monotony but the merciless quarantine- 
 boat coming to ask and refuse. We could see the 
 people on the ship gather on the forecastle and in 
 the rigging, looking out to the land, which, brown 
 and dry as it was, was to them a refuge. The 
 second and the third day came, and the dead 
 multiplied, until ten or a dozen corpses were on 
 board. Still no physician, no landing, no burial 
 even ; and the plague-stricken ship and its dying 
 cargo lay still under the August sun. The third 
 day the crew received permission to put the bodies 
 overboard, tied with ropes, that they might not 
 drift away and carry to some accursed Greek com 
 munity the plague it merited. I may be unjust, 
 but those days have made me detest and abhor 
 the very name of Syra and its people. We saw the 
 dead lowered overboard, one by one, and with 
 glasses could see them floating alongside, horrible 
 to sight and fancy. 
 
 I am only dealing with facts facts which will 
 be confirmed by the testimony of many who 
 passed those broiling August days in that quaran 
 tine. No physician could be found in Syra who 
 had humanity enough to hear the cry of that 
 suffering company, or venture on the plague- 
 stricken ship. They latterly got permission to 
 bury the dead, all but one mother and child, who 
 drifted loose, and were cast on some unknown
 
 48 EXPERIENCE IN A GREEK QUARANTINE 
 
 shore, or fed the fishes ; subsequently a Danish 
 physician came, a volunteer from I regret to say 
 I know not where, nor even do I know his name. 
 I did not think then to enable myself to render 
 him the honour he deserves; and finally the sick 
 were landed. There had been a hundred and forty 
 passengers on board when the ship left Alexandria, 
 and there were over a hundred when she came to 
 quarantine the untouched remaining on board 
 until they were attacked in their turn, and were 
 carried ashore to die. Their provisions, too, were 
 failing, and at last starvation came to help the 
 pestilence. 
 
 I sought distraction and pastime amongst the 
 sailors, of whom two had attracted my attention 
 during the run over. One of them I judged to be 
 an American at first sight, the incarnation of " go- 
 a-head" and nervous energy. I had seen him at 
 the wheel the first day out, as I sat aft taking my 
 fruit after dinner, and tempted him to affability 
 by a huge slice of melon, which he ate without 
 ever taking his eye for more than an instant from 
 the course of the schooner. The next day they 
 were apples that broke the silence ; when, abruptly 
 turning round to me, he asked if I was a free 
 mason. He was, and evidently did not understand 
 how one could treat a sailor with courtesy or kind 
 ness without some such motive as that mystic 
 brotherhood is supposed to furnish. He wore a 
 black wide-awake crowded close down to his eyes, 
 which looked sharp out from under black, clear- 
 drawn eyebrows. His nose was prominent, pointed,
 
 EXPERIENCE IN A GREEK QUARANTINE 49 
 
 and straight, and his mouth full of decision; lips 
 close-pressed, and chin small and slightly retreat 
 ing. He carried his head habitually a little for 
 ward, as if on the look-out, and reminded me in 
 his ensemble more of a clipper than anything I 
 ever saw in flesh. He was taciturn, however, and 
 absolutely refused to talk of himself. The other, 
 who responded to the name of Bill, was certainly 
 one of the best examples of the English sailor I 
 have ever met robust, thick-set, with large brain 
 and full beard, a frank blue eye, and an off-hand 
 manner familiar to all who permitted it, but re 
 spectful to the highest degree, and speaking the 
 English of a man who had had some education. 
 In the first days of our imprisonment he had sur 
 prised me not a little by offering to lend me some 
 old numbers of reviews and magazines, written 
 on the margins of which I found some shrewd 
 comments, and with some bits of drawing. I am 
 not going to write his story, and shall not repeat 
 what I learned of a life ruined by an uncontrol 
 lable spirit of adventure and unimproved oppor 
 tunities ; I have only to do with him now as he 
 wove himself into the web of our quarantine 
 life. 
 
 It was from Bill that I learned what I first 
 knew of Aleck; that he was, as I supposed, an 
 American, had been in the Confederate service, 
 and had even served on the Alabama. After 
 finding out so much, I tried hard to make him 
 talk about himself, but in vain. He was respect 
 ful, but not communicative on any subject, and 
 
 D
 
 50 EXPERIENCE IN A GREEK QUARANTINE 
 
 least so on himself. But the new excitement of 
 the cholera-ship and its horrors made a certain 
 difference. I certainly felt more like getting near 
 my fellow-men, and they, and especially Aleck, 
 were more oblivious of the difference between 
 them and me. The immediate cause of the break 
 ing of the ice was the sight of a poor woman 
 standing on the poop of the cholera-ship as she 
 swung towards us from her anchorage, before a 
 slight easterly air, that brought the woman's 
 voice down to us in supplications which we could 
 from time to time partially distinguish, and which 
 were for bread, bread, bread! We could see 
 others on board climbing on the bulwarks, stand 
 ing on the poop or forecastle, according to the 
 end of the ship which drifted nearest us; but we 
 could hear no other voice, though we doubted 
 not that many were joined with hers. Beside 
 her we saw, later, another female figure, whom, 
 by the aid of the glass, I believed I could make 
 out to be her daughter. The latter made no 
 sound that we could hear, but sat mutely or stood 
 with her arm around the other, while ever and 
 anon we heard that heartrending cry, "Psomil 
 psomi ! " (bread ! bread !). At sunset that day we 
 were all together on the forecastle, better friends 
 through our common pity. We proposed to our 
 taciturn guardiano to send some bread on board 
 the ship, but he absolutely refused to lend himself 
 to any such risk of contagion, and forbade any 
 attempt to communicate either with the ship or 
 the shore where the sick were; and, to tell the
 
 EXPERIENCE IN A GREEK QUARANTINE 51 
 
 truth, it was not pleasant to contemplate the 
 chances of being put in quarantine for an addi 
 tional indefinite term, for having, even in a kindly 
 work, come in real or fancied contact with the 
 disease. But as the authority of the guardiano 
 was absolute, we could do nothing in the matter 
 openly, though it was determined in council by 
 us three to do something in some way, if relief 
 was not brought soon. 
 
 From the forecastle next morning we saw in 
 the early light the two hapless creatures in the 
 same position. Bill, looking over into the water 
 thoughtfully, asked if there were many sharks in 
 those waters. I replied that I had never seen but 
 one, inquiring why he asked. "Why," said he, 
 "I think I could get some grub over to those 
 women if you could manage the guardiano" "It 
 isn't much of a swim," I replied, " but as to carry 
 ing the prog, you will find that more difficult." 
 "Well," said he, "I have carried a pretty good 
 load in the water before now, and can float enough 
 to keep those women from starving. I lived in the 
 Sandwich Islands once, and though I don't stand 
 out of the water like a Kanaka, I have carried 
 my clothes on my head many a mile without 
 wetting them, and a few pounds of bread won't 
 sink me." Here his eye twinkled as if he had a 
 story to tell, and I waited for it. "I commanded 
 a lorcha transport during the last war in China," 
 he began, after a moment, "and one day, while 
 we were in Canton, I was walking through one 
 of the streets with my mate, an Englishman,
 
 52 EXPERIENCE IN A GREEK QUARANTINE 
 
 and we stopped to look in a joss-house. There 
 was a joss there of pure silver, about fourteen 
 inches high, and I made up my mind to have 
 him. We two were the only Europeans on board, 
 and the first dark stormy night we took the boat 
 and went ashore well armed. The joss-house had 
 no guard but the priests, and the night was so 
 bad that we broke the door down and got in 
 without the outsiders knowing it, and carried 
 the joss off easily enough; but the next day we 
 had row enough to pay for it. Every vessel in 
 the river was searched, and if I had had him on 
 board he would have been found and we should 
 have caught it, for the officers were in earnest 
 about it, and the Chinese in a fury. I knew 
 
 there would be the d 1 to pay in the morning, 
 
 so I put a cord around his neck, and went down 
 and hung him to the lower pintle of the rudder, 
 and left him there till the hue-and-cry was over, 
 and then brought him up. He weighed forty-two 
 pounds. I think I could do more in this case 
 than then." "Do it then," said I; "I'll help you 
 all I can: but we won't let the captain or any 
 of the men know of it!" "Oh, I'll put that all 
 right," said Aleck. "Jones has the first watch 
 to-night, and I '11 change with him ; and as for the 
 guardiano, he's a sleepy cuss, and I reckon won't 
 give himself the trouble to look on deck after 
 he turns in he never has, any way ; and if you 'd 
 like to keep watch with me, sir, I think we can 
 manage it." "But, Bill," I added, "look out for 
 the guarda-costa : if they see anything in the
 
 EXPERIENCE IN A GREEK QUARANTINE 53 
 
 water moving between the vessels, they'll fire at 
 it, certainly." "That won't trouble me," replied 
 the imperturbable tar. " I have run the blockade 
 in the American war thirteen times, and had 
 bigger balls than that fellow can throw whizzing 
 about my head, and fired by better gunners than 
 they have got aboard there. Why, sir, we ran 
 almost into one of their Monitors one night, and 
 had eight 15-inch shot fired at us without being 
 hit; and in all the thirteen trips in and out we 
 never were hit but once, and then the ball only 
 took off the head of the look-out forward." 
 
 And so we arranged it that Bill should swim off 
 to the ship as soon as it was dark, and trusting 
 to fortune to get the provisions aboard without 
 discovery, we were to hang overboard a light for 
 him to swim back to. 
 
 "That ship reminds me," said Bill, after a long 
 pause, "of a trip I made once in an English ship 
 to Senegal. We went up the river to load, and 
 while we lay there waiting for cargo to come 
 down, we had one of the worst yellow fevers 
 break out on the ship I ever saw. The first man 
 who was taken with it died in three hours, 
 and that day two more were taken and died 
 before dark, and in three days we lost all but 
 seven of the crew, one after the other not one 
 was sick more than six hours and then the mate 
 was taken sick. The first thing I knew of it was 
 that he said to me, 'Bill, give me a good glass 
 of grog, and fill my pipe ; I want one good smoke 
 and a drink before I die.' ' Oh, nonsense,' says I,
 
 54 EXPERIENCE IN A GREEK QUARANTINE 
 
 'you are no more likely to die than I am.' 'I 
 know very well I have got it,' said he ; ' and when 
 I am dead bury me deep enough so that the land 
 crabs can't dig me up.' Sure enough he died that 
 afternoon, and we took him ashore before night 
 and buried him in a good deep grave. In two 
 days more there were only the captain and I 
 alive on the ship. And there we lay ten days 
 till we heard that an English man-of-war was 
 off the mouth of the river, and the captain sent 
 a native boat down to ask him to send up men to 
 work the ship out of the river. The man-of-war 
 sent word that they wouldn't send men up the 
 river, but if we could work her down with natives, 
 they would give us men to get the ship home to 
 England, and so we got out, but a deuce of a time 
 we had of it getting down. I suppose they feel 
 on that ship pretty much as I did those ten days." 
 All day long we heard at intervals that pitiful 
 cry, "Bread! bread!" faintly coming over the 
 water. It was more tolerable than the day 
 before, because we knew that relief would go 
 with nightfall. And so, as the dark came, we 
 made up a packet of hard bread with a little 
 cold meat and a bottle of wine, and binding it 
 securely between Bill's shoulders, and with a 
 pointed stick on top of it, in case, as he said, "a 
 shark should want to take the prog from him," 
 he slipped down into the water, stripped to his 
 drawers, and struck out for the cholera-ship so 
 quietly that you might have thought it a little 
 school of guard-fish.
 
 EXPERIENCE IN A GREEK QUARANTINE 55 
 
 We sat on the forecastle watching and waiting. 
 I said nothing, and where two are together and 
 one will not talk, the other sometimes will. Aleck 
 finally broke silence with "Women are mighty 
 curious things. I'll bet that old one don't touch 
 a mouthful till t'other has eaten, and I don't 
 believe she would have made half the fuss she 
 did if she had been alone. In the beginning of 
 the American war I belonged to a regiment of 
 mounted riflemen, and we were sent into Eastern 
 Tennessee, where there was a good deal of bush 
 whacking about that time. We were picketed 
 one day in a line about two miles long across 
 country, and I was on the extreme left. I took 
 my saddle off, holsters and all, and hung it on 
 a branch of a peach-tree, and my carbine on 
 another. We knew there were no Yankees near, 
 and so I was kind o' off guard, eating peaches. 
 By-and-by I saw a young woman coming down 
 to where I was, on horseback. She wanted to 
 know if there were many of the boys near, and 
 if they would buy some milk of her if she took 
 it down to them. I said I thought they would, 
 and took about a quart myself ; and as she hadn't 
 much more, I emptied the water out of my canteen 
 and took the rest. Says she, 'If you'll come up 
 to the house yonder, I've got something better 
 than that : you may have some good peach brandy 
 some of your fellows might like a little.' I said 
 I'd go, and she says, 'You needn't take your 
 saddle or carbine, it's just a step, and they are 
 safe enough here there's nobody about.' So I
 
 56 EXPERIENCE IN A GREEK QUARANTINE 
 
 mounted bareback, and she led the way. When 
 we passed the bars where she came in, she says, 
 ' You ride on a step, and I '11 get down and put up 
 the bars.' I went on, and as she came up behind, 
 she says pretty sharp, 'Ride a little faster, if you 
 please.' I looked round, and she had a revolver 
 pointed straight at my head, and I saw that she 
 knew how to use it. I had left everything behind 
 me like a fool, and had to give in and obey orders. 
 'That's the house, if you please,' she says, and 
 showed me a house in the edge of the woods a 
 quarter of a mile away. We got there, and she 
 told me to get down and eat something, for she 
 was going to give me a long ride into the Yankee 
 lines, about twenty miles away. Her father came 
 out and abused me like a thief, and told me that 
 he was going to have me sent into the Federal 
 lines to be hung. It seems he had had a son 
 hung the week before by some of the Confeder 
 ates, and was going to have his revenge out of 
 me. I ate pretty well, for I thought I might need 
 it before I got any more, and then the old fellow 
 began to curse me and abuse me like anything. 
 He said he would shoot me on the spot if it 
 wasn't that he'd rather have me hung; and in 
 stead of giving me my own horse, he took the 
 worst one he had in his stables, and they put 
 me on that with my feet tied together under 
 his belly. Luckily they didn't tie my hands, for 
 they thought I had no arms, and couldn't help 
 myself; but I always carried a small revolver 
 in my shirt bosom. The girl kept too sharp
 
 EXPERIENCE IN A GREEK QUARANTINE 57 
 
 watch on me for me to use it. She never turned 
 her revolver from me, and I knew that the first 
 suspicious move I made I was a dead man. We 
 went about ten miles in this way, when my 
 old crow-bait gave out and wouldn't go any 
 farther. She wouldn't trust me afoot, and so 
 had to give up her own horse, but she kept 
 the bridle in her own hands, and walked ahead 
 with one eye turned back on me, and the revolver 
 cocked with her finger on the trigger, so that I 
 never had a chance to put my hand in my bosom. 
 We finally came to a spring, and she asked me 
 if I wanted to drink: I didn't feel much like 
 drinking, but I said yes, and so she let me down. 
 I put my head down to the water, and at the 
 same time put my hand down where the revolver 
 was, and pulled it forward where I could put my 
 hand on it easily ; but she was on the watch and 
 I couldn't pull it out. I mounted again, and the 
 first time she was off her guard a little I fired, 
 and broke the arm she held the pistol in. 'Now,' 
 says I, 'it's my turn: you'll please get on that 
 horse and we '11 go back.' She didn't flinch or say 
 a word, but got on the horse, and I tied her legs 
 as they had mine, and we went back to the 
 house. The old man he heard us come up to 
 the door and looked out of the window. He 
 turned as pale as a sheet and ran for his rifle. 
 I knew what he was after, and pushed the door 
 in before he was loaded. Says I, 'You may put 
 that shooting-iron down and come with me.' He 
 wasn't as brave as the girl, but it was no use to
 
 58 EXPERIENCE IN A GREEK QUARANTINE 
 
 resist, and he knew it ; so he came along. About 
 half-way back we met some of our fellows who 
 had missed me, and come out to look me up. 
 
 They took them both, and " He paused a 
 
 moment, and lowering his tone, added, " I don't 
 know what they did with them, but I know 
 
 d well what they would have done with me." 
 
 I replied, after a pause, "I suppose they hanged 
 them both?" Aleck nodded his head without 
 looking up, and seemed anxious to drop the 
 subject. 
 
 "But," said I, rather disposed to work the vein 
 of communicativeness, but not anxious to hear 
 any more such adventures, "I thought you had 
 been in the Confederate navy?" "I was," said 
 Aleck. " I was with Semmes everywhere he went ; 
 I was in the naval brigade and blockade-running, 
 and on the Alabama all the while he commanded 
 her." " But not when she sank, I suppose ? " I 
 rejoined. " Well, I was, and was picked up with 
 him by the Deerhound" "It was a pretty sharp 
 fight, wasn't it ? " I suggestingly asked. " It was 
 that," replied Aleck, but he didn't care about 
 enlarging. " I suppose it was the eleven-inch 
 shells that did her business?" "Oh, no," said 
 he, coming to a kind of confessional, "we 
 never had any chance; we had no gunners to 
 compare with the Kearsages. Our gunners fired 
 by routine, and when they had the gun loaded, 
 fired it off blind. They never changed the eleva 
 tion of their guns all the fight, and the Kearsage 
 was working up to us all the while, taking
 
 EXPERIENCE IN A GREEK QUARANTINE 59 
 
 advantage of every time she was hid by smoke 
 to work a little nearer, and then her gunners 
 took aim for every shot." "Then it isn't true 
 that the Alabama tried to board the Kearsage?" 
 "No, sir; she did her best to get away from her 
 from the time the fight commenced: we knew 
 well that if we got in range of her Dahlgren 
 howitzers she would sink us in ten minutes." 
 "But," I asked, "don't you believe that Semmes 
 supposed he would whip the Kearsage when he 
 went out to fight her?" "No: he was bullied 
 into it, and took good care to leave all his 
 valuables on shore, and had a life-preserver on 
 through the fight. I saw him put it on, and 
 I thought if it was wise in him it wouldn't be 
 foolish in me, and I put one on too. When 
 Semmes saw that the ship was going down, he 
 told us all to swim who could, and was one of 
 the first to jump into the water, and we all 
 made for the Deerhound. I was a long way 
 ahead of Semmes, and when I came up to the 
 Deerhounds boat they asked me if I was Semmes 
 before they would take me in. I said I wasn't, 
 and then they asked me what I was on the 
 Alabama. Said I, 'No matter what I was on 
 the Alabama, I shall be a dead man soon if 
 you don't take me in.' They asked me again 
 if I was an officer or a seaman, and wouldn't 
 take me in until I told them that I was an 
 officer." "But," said I, "did they actually refuse 
 to pick up common seamen, and leave them to 
 drown ? " " They did that," replied he wrath-
 
 60 EXPERIENCE IN A GREEK QUARANTINE 
 
 fully, " and as soon as they had Semmes on board 
 they made tracks as fast as they knew how, 
 and left everybody else to drown or be picked 
 up by the Kearsage" 
 
 " Time to show the light, I reckon," said Aleck, 
 after his ebullition had subsided, and proceeded 
 to put over the bows the light agreed on. Half- 
 an-hour after Bill had started on his voyage we 
 heard his whistle from below the forechains, and 
 heaving him a line brought him in cautiously. 
 He slipped down to change his clothing and add 
 to it, and then came up to render an account 
 of his doings. He had, as he anticipated, found 
 more difficulty in getting on board the ship than 
 in getting to it. He had found the poor women 
 on the quarter-deck all order and shipkeeping 
 abandoned, and no look-out anywhere. The pas 
 sengers were sleeping on deck or sitting around 
 it, moaning and weeping. He dared not call to 
 the women for fear of disturbing the guardiani 
 and of attracting the attention of the other pas 
 sengers, to whom his small supply would have 
 been but a mouthful. He swam round and round 
 looking for a loose rope's-end in vain, and finally 
 did what we should have supposed certain to 
 lead to his discovery climbed up the cable and 
 over the bows, throwing over his shoulders the 
 first garment he found on the disorderly deck, 
 and slowly walked the whole length of the ship : 
 when, having deposited the provisions at the side 
 of the unfortunate ones, signifying that they 
 were to inform no one and keep them to them-
 
 EXPERIENCE IN A GREEK QUARANTINE 61 
 
 selves, as well as his few words of Greek would 
 let him, he dropped overboard by a line from 
 the quarter, and leaving them in mute and 
 motionless wonder, came back as quietly as he 
 had gone. Bill couldn't resist the temptation 
 next morning of waving a big white cloth at 
 the ship, a signal which attracted the immediate 
 attention and suspicion of our watchful guardi- 
 ano, who, with an effervescence of useless Greek, 
 delivered his mind on the subject of contumacia 
 and communication, at which we all laughed: 
 we felt merrier that morning than for many 
 days past. 
 
 In fact, though we saw for several days more 
 the boat going back and forwards from the ship 
 to the shore, and knew that they went to bury 
 the dead, could see them buried even with our 
 glasses, we never felt so oppressed by the horror 
 of it since Bill's chivalric swim. We finished 
 without other incident our appointed two weeks, 
 and had soon the satisfaction of knowing that 
 public clamour had obliged Syra to recognise the 
 claims of humanity, and send food to the starving. 
 
 We had to undergo a five days' " observation " 
 behind the lighthouse island off the port, in 
 company with the English steamer, which was, 
 moreover, threatened with a third fortnight; 
 which she escaped only by the energetic remon 
 strances of the British consul, backed up by the 
 Legation at Athens, who persuaded the central 
 government to send orders to Syra that the 
 steamer should be admitted to pratique. A Greek
 
 62 EXPERIENCE IN A GREEK QUARANTINE 
 
 man-of-war was accordingly sent from the Piraeus 
 to Syra with a commission to ascertain the truth 
 of the complaints of Mr. Lloyd, and finding them 
 well - founded, ordered the admittance of the 
 steamer to pratique; but so great was the terror 
 of the population and the timidity of the com 
 mission, that the latter ceded to the threats of 
 a revolution, and compromised on admitting the 
 passengers to the lazaretto of Syra and sending 
 the ship away. If all these things are not 
 recorded in the chronicles of that city, they are 
 in the minds of many who were martyrs to the 
 inhuman cowardice of Syra, and who will bear 
 me testimony that every occurrence of which public 
 recognition could be taken in the above narrative is 
 strictly true. As for the yarns, I tell them, as 
 nearly as I can remember, as they were told 
 me, and believe them.
 
 AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON 
 
 WHAT survives of the seven wonders of the 
 world may mainly be seen in London, itself the 
 eighth and greatest, not only for what of the 
 Old World and older times it holds, but for the 
 living, growing marvel that it is, the highest 
 achievement of the agglomerating human spirit. 
 With all the years I have known it, and the 
 times I have been in and out of it, I find at 
 every return that I scarcely know how great 
 it is, or realise how wise and how wicked, how 
 noble and how stolid. Mighty and wealthy 
 beyond any dreams of Arabian Nights; wrapping 
 in its tortuous folds all extremes of human 
 existence; by turns, a city of palaces, and the 
 nest of the highest and divinest human impulse, 
 and the smoke-blackened, fog-wrapped, dingy, 
 gloomy capital of Cimmeria ; plague latent in its 
 alleys, and utter destitution driving their people 
 to death and all degradation in clouds like the 
 flies that perish it seems the very focus of 
 life-and-death ferment, quickening and releasing 
 at once what is divinest and most infernal in 
 the human heart, and ripening both as no other 
 city built by human hands has done. 
 
 Visit it for the first time from the south, if 
 possible, in the autumn, and towards the close of 
 
 63
 
 64 AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON 
 
 day, when the grey incertitude lies on the 
 mighty city. You will have come through the 
 lovely country of Kent, Hampshire, and Surrey, 
 garden of England, the little compact villages 
 twinkling by the railway side, the ever-green 
 fields chasing the parks, and the parks following 
 the downs, in an unbroken succession of lovely 
 landscapes; then the villages come closer to 
 gether, and you see the houses begin to lose 
 their pagan aspect and grow up storeys higher 
 villas suburb houses, miles of suburbs with 
 intervals yet to become city; and then you 
 come on the outskirts of the world's metropolis, 
 no longer suburbs pushing off for better air, 
 but low, dingy haunts of labour and poverty, 
 packed and involved in economic leaseholds on 
 earth's surface scarcely more than graveyard 
 room. You look down into the streets into 
 the windows, down chimney-pots even; and the 
 din of unnumbered streets, the smoke of myriad 
 chimneys, and the twinkle of lamps as the 
 very stars of heaven for their multitude, come 
 up to you whirling along dizzily above it all. 
 You hear the hum of the world below you, 
 and, as far as the eye can catch the gleam of 
 gas-light through the space around, there is an 
 unbroken, endless wilderness of houses. Wider 
 streets yawn and send up a sudden, stronger 
 pulsation of sound, but no change beyond. 
 Lights burn dimmer, smoke grows denser, the 
 indefinite grows more and more indefinite. 
 You wonder what would happen if a broken
 
 AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON 65 
 
 rail should send your train off that line of 
 arches which overstretches London the high 
 way of the age of mechanism bringing you 
 into the capital and working centre of the 
 modern mechanical system; and while you 
 wonder still, your train flashes out as into mid 
 air, and you see on both sides a grey and hazy 
 tide, twinkling with wavy lights and spanned 
 with bridges, either vista ending in mystery. 
 This is Father Thames; after the Tiber, greatest 
 of rivers. Here the history of modern civilisa 
 tion centres ; and from Caesar to William of 
 Orange the possession of this water-course has 
 been a main motive in struggles which have 
 widened, deepened, and established human rights 
 and wise government more than those of all 
 other civilised countries in the same epoch. 
 For the Thames made London, and the salt 
 sea which ebbs and flows at its doors has kept 
 alive liberty and prosperity through disasters 
 which would have destroyed an inland town 
 many times; and that municipal independence, 
 which has never failed London, is the source 
 of all that is healthiest and most nobly con 
 servative in our modern political organisation. 
 
 As the river vanishes from sight, your train 
 slows within the vast and mysterious structure, 
 last creation of architecture, where sight and 
 hearing are alike confounded; calls and cries, 
 whistles and bells, a score of locomotives coming 
 and going, trains entering and trains departing, 
 a ceaseless flood and ebb of passengers, be- 
 
 E
 
 66 AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON 
 
 wildering, confusing to every sense but their 
 own, yet each ticketed to his destination and 
 surely directed to his train. The system, the 
 consummate order with which the demands of 
 a commerce so vast are met and satisfied, the 
 comparative quiet, the want of bustle and fussi- 
 ness, impress the American more than anything 
 else in this first impression of London. One 
 can but recall the Romans, the great builders 
 and organisers, the masters of all good system 
 of civic things in the old time as these are in 
 our day. 
 
 This is the side of English character which 
 imposes on me, compels me to a deference and 
 respect which deepen as I know the more of it. 
 In taste, they are barbarians ; in the application 
 of the principles of political or social science 
 they are arribr6s and too tenaciously conserva 
 tive; but they build better than they know, by 
 an intuition ; and the gravitation of the national 
 character is, in spite of their prejudices against 
 progress, carrying them to the best and safest 
 form of civilisation that based on an inborn 
 morality, love of justice, and respect for human 
 rights. It seems strange, looking at the history 
 of England at her imperial policy of to-day, 
 at such huge violations of both justice and 
 human rights as are involved in her church 
 system, at her rule in India, at her arbitrary 
 and, at times, wicked domineering over weak 
 and disorganised nations to talk of love of 
 both justice and human rights as traits of
 
 AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON 67 
 
 English character. But no man can live in 
 London long and not understand the problem. 
 The acts which in his government the English 
 man consents to, in his individual capacity he 
 abhors; and while his fleets beat down the 
 unoffending gates of China and his armies 
 commit huge fillibusterings in India, there is no 
 great city in the world where a stranger is so 
 certain of justice, or the weak are so effectually 
 upheld against the strong, as in London. The 
 law is blind, crooked, and perverse, but sure 
 and equal; its administration is on the practice 
 of bygone ages, slow, reticular, complicated; 
 but where it is a question of justice, no human 
 jurisprudence is more effective or impartial. It is 
 too much a city of shopkeepers but of great 
 shopkeepers, with a large mercantile morality 
 such as accounts for a commercial power and 
 prosperity unrivalled since the world began.* 
 What London does, it does slowly but well. 
 English civilisation is not full of fine-spun theories 
 and declamatory recognitions, but is, in all the 
 personal relations, profoundly moral, and (if some 
 times mistakenly) religious as well; and if the 
 morality be of a rather uncharitable type, and 
 the religion brings out now and then its Jugger 
 naut car, it is at least something that it main 
 tains the steady pursuit of human well-being. 
 All that is hard and unsympathetic, ugly and 
 
 * The little London shopkeepers cheat you with the readiness of their 
 Italian colleagues, but the big traders know the value of commercial 
 morality as it is understood in no other nation.
 
 68 AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON 
 
 unsentimental, in London, you see as you drive 
 or walk from the station to your hotel; all 
 that is servile and snobbish, and respectable and 
 extortionate, after you have got there; and as 
 you sit by your window in the dim November 
 evening, waiting for your coal fire to break the 
 chill which begins to enter your soul, I misdoubt 
 much if you do not begin to forswear England. 
 
 All that man has done for London has been 
 to the eye ill done; nature has been bounteous 
 to her as to few cities. Illimitable liberty of 
 growth, equal facility of access, a plain country 
 round, and the sea at its gates; the railway 
 radiating and the tide ebbing and flowing with 
 the traffic sustained by the wealth accumulated 
 in centuries. No one knows how rich she is, and 
 no one who has not wandered about her for 
 weeks can conjecture how huge. We may talk 
 of our western empire and our admirable ports, 
 of our growth and our growing wealth; but 
 here is, and will remain for generations, the 
 centre of the commercial and political world, 
 the focus of intellectual activity, and the mint 
 of thought. Here ferments the largest and most 
 highly-developed humanity which as yet the uni 
 versal mother has given birth to, and here the 
 whole world's intellect comes to pay its homage. 
 We boast, but out of this mint of London comes 
 most of what is newest as well as of what is 
 rarest in human work. " Solitude is the nurse 
 of all great thought," but society is its mother; 
 and, in London, society is more complex and
 
 AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON 69 
 
 solitude more easy of access than in any other 
 of all the aggregations of men. The seclusion 
 of the backwoods is not more complete, so far 
 as intellectual or social influences are concerned, 
 than lodgings in some of the out-of-the-way 
 quarters of London. The extremes meet the 
 publicity of the court journal and a privacy 
 which defies the detective police; a wealth, not 
 of individuals, as with us, but of classes, which 
 suspends the laws of political economy, and a 
 concomitant poverty which threatens one day to 
 subvert them; vortices of prosperity and misery, 
 into which society at its extremes rushes with 
 accelerating and concentrating velocity; here a 
 quarter where, in teeming filth, humanity is 
 crowded out of existence, hour by hour, with a 
 destitution and degradation of woe uniquely the 
 property of London a bottomless pit of misery, 
 emergence from which into anything by death 
 must be light and life; and then a region of 
 palaces, with a luxury and profusion such as 
 England's kings, even two hundred years ago, 
 would have held as fabulous : whatever there is 
 of most opposite and extreme in life or death, 
 in power or utter impotence, in having or want 
 ing, is here. 
 
 London is one of the few perennial sensations 
 of this world like the sea, a primeval forest, 
 Sahara, or the multitude of stars, all measur 
 able, doubtless, but in terms between which and 
 the infinite we can no more perceive the dis 
 tinction than we can from the top of St. Paul's
 
 70 AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON 
 
 perceive the margin of the city. You enter it 
 not knowing exactly where, and when you leave 
 it you do so by so fine degrees that you have 
 not been able to say where the town ended and 
 the country began. It draws all England to it. 
 It pervades the realm. Even the cabmen do not 
 know the whole of it. When you have spent 
 months exploring it, you find some day a new 
 quarter opening to your eyes. I believe that no 
 one can appreciate it fully but an American 
 thoroughly versed in English history and in the 
 practical knowledge of his own country. To him 
 all the historical associations have the mingled 
 charms of novelty and antiquity; there is the 
 delightful surprise of seeing a real and vitalised 
 antiquity, which strikes him much like going 
 into Barbarossa's cavern and finding the Middle 
 Ages just waking up. In his picture gallery 
 nothing is cheapened by common uses, and no 
 thing lost by contradictory associations ; Henry 
 VIII.'s palace has not been forever a barber's 
 shop, or the Strand a tide-way of shopkeeping. 
 Familiarity breeds contempt, indeed, and no 
 London-bred boy can have a reverence for an 
 antiquity he saw white-washed yesterday. We 
 come to the old scenes with an ancestral rever 
 ence for objects which are not only England's 
 but ours in which we have the romantic in 
 terest of historical cause without the galling 
 burden of political effect. English associations 
 are to us utterly delightful, and London especi 
 ally a huge romance, a bazaar of the Arabian
 
 AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON 71 
 
 Nights, in which at one time we encounter 
 Cromwell, and at another Dick Whittington. 
 
 But do not imagine that you can get the char 
 acteristic impression of London by running over it. 
 When curiosity is satisfied and such familiarity as 
 a stranger can get is attained, it will still be reserved 
 for some moment of a sublime quiet and removal 
 from details to give you the key-note of its great 
 ness. Where I used to live, in a suburb five miles 
 from St. Paul's, when sitting by my study window, 
 sight-lost from the city proper, I could hear the 
 roar of the traffic, like the sea on a rocky shore 
 the rush of incessant trains along the iron ways, 
 the rumble of myriads of drays along hundreds of 
 miles of stone-paved streets (for which wood is now 
 being in part substituted), each no more to the 
 general symphony than the hum of a gnat to the 
 sounds of a summer day a volume of sound un- 
 intermitting from dawn till dark. Yet I was 
 bowered in green trees, with cowslip and daisy- 
 flecked fields spread out under my eyes not a 
 spire, not a chimney-stack of the metropolis visible ; 
 and the carols of larks and thrushes, the song of 
 the nightingale, run through the web of sounds 
 like gold and silver threads through a dingy fabric, 
 with the twitter of scores of sparrows like tiny 
 spangles thrown on at random. Out of the 
 monotone bursts the individual roar of a nearer 
 train, the scream of a whistle, and the roar dies 
 away again into the sullen monody. This is audible 
 London. 
 
 If you want to see what the traffic of London is
 
 72 AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON 
 
 like, go to Clapham Junction, where the great 
 railway systems connect. The rails lie together 
 like the wires of a grand piano. System and 
 organisation have done their best, and nearly two 
 thousand trains a day run over them. It is a 
 bewilderment. In and out, coming, going, slow 
 trains and fast trains : one side of you halts a train, 
 and while you watch its wheels slowing, an express 
 rushes past on the other side like a tornado of 
 iron ; no shrieking of whistles or clanging of bells 
 as on our railways they keep their signals for 
 their officials, and outsiders must expose themselves 
 at their own risks only a rush, a blast of wind 
 that almost takes your breath or draws you into 
 its eddy when it has gone by, a torrent of carriage 
 windows, and you see the rear of the last carriage 
 shrinking before your eyes as it leaves you ; and 
 the fast express has come and gone in a space of 
 time which you could hardly find on the dial of 
 your watch. Up and down the lines you see signal- 
 posts and semaphores arms working; by night 
 lamps green, red, white, the language of the 
 railway, but no confusion; every man knows his 
 place, or forgets it at his bodily peril. You ask 
 the official when your train is due: "In two 
 minutes " ; and as the clock hands point, the train 
 comes. He knows to the second when it left the 
 last station, whether it be on table-time or behind 
 it, as it generally is ; every movement is recorded, 
 and every train has its place and moment. A 
 tunnel-way for passengers connects the whole, so 
 that no one is allowed to cross the rails except the
 
 AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON 73 
 
 officials, who grow foolhardy and now and then 
 come to grief. The guard at the junction told me 
 one day of the killing of one of the porters, who 
 undertook to cross the line in front of the fast 
 express, and was struck midway the rails by the 
 full front of the locomotive. He was knocked like a 
 ball twenty feet, and when they reached him there 
 was no quiver even in his flesh. If a shot from a 
 twenty-inch Rodman gun had hit him, it would 
 not have expunged life more completely and 
 instantaneously. It is a saying of the denizens 
 about Clapham Junction, that, on the average, one 
 man is killed every six weeks. One wonders, after 
 having watched the traffic a half -hour, that some 
 one is not killed every day. Look cityward and 
 see the trains flying diverging eastward, west 
 ward, northward, line under line three deep, 
 crossing each other, diving under or going over, 
 but never on the same level, and then sweeping by 
 long curves round the huge circumference of 
 suburban London, a girdle of iron, meeting, 
 crossing, uniting, separating again on the opposite 
 side. 
 
 Neither the sounds nor the sights of London 
 impressed me as did its labyrinth of railways ; 
 no other evidence of the power and intelligence 
 of England has ever seemed to me like this 
 stupendous accumulation of engineering accom 
 plishment : tunnels under the river and bridges 
 over it ; the long arcades of the railway approaches, 
 and the still more surprising vaults of the under 
 ground tunnelling under the dense houses, with an
 
 74 AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON 
 
 inner circle of communication the most surprising 
 engineering feat in the world, and perhaps the 
 most costly, considering its extent, the cost being 
 1,000,000 per mile, and all to help you get about 
 the city quicker. If the enterprise be astonishing, 
 how much more the need which impelled it and 
 maintains it. 
 
 But, imperial as London is in all that pertains 
 to industrial and commercial power, it is in the 
 architectural manifestations of metropolitanism 
 (except size) as provincial as New York or Boston. 
 It is impossible to say that architectural feeling is 
 exotic in England, not knowing with absolute 
 certainty whether they were Englishmen who 
 built the magnificent old cathedrals or not ; but 
 it does seem that, since the race was what it is, 
 anything aesthetic is a chance flower, and of so 
 rare occurrence that its exceptionality its want 
 of visible cause and effect in precedent or succes 
 sion proves the rule more clearly than though 
 no example had ever been found. The cities of 
 the civilised and half-civilised world will not 
 furnish another such collection of hideous public 
 edifices, with so little originality, so little sense 
 of fitness or artistic insight, as the capital of 
 England shows. A man who could develop 
 artistic fire in such surroundings must be of a 
 genius irrepressible by any compression of cir 
 cumstance. St. Paul's is a squat parody on St. 
 Peter's, with everything that is ugly of the 
 original and no advantage of position like it 
 no approaches, no ensemble, a petrified infraction
 
 AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON 75 
 
 of common-sense and aesthetic judgment. The 
 British Museum is an ill-harmonised pot-pourri 
 of Greek motives; Trafalgar square, a curious 
 antithesis to the Place de la Concorde, with the 
 elaborate imitation of that freak of some bar 
 barous Roman, "Pompey's Pillar," instead of the 
 obelisk, and that ludicrous combination of the 
 shut-up and elongated, the National Gallery, 
 crowning it. Even most of the later buildings, 
 when there is a determined effort to be original, 
 impress the stranger as ghastly evolutions of the 
 stuff of which nightmares are made. All things 
 impress one with an immense sense of solidity 
 and stolidity, and, if I am not over-fanciful, with 
 a latent contempt of the outside as compared 
 with the inside of the house, inherent in the 
 English nature. What that most characteristic 
 defect of London its smoke may have to do 
 with this utter want of sympathy with the ex 
 teriors of their buildings in the minds of modern 
 Londoners, I can only conjecture; but if the city 
 were another Venice, it could only be kept beauti 
 ful by pouring its canals daily over its buildings. 
 I recall some of those dreary days of my first 
 November, 1852, when, sitting by my hotel window 
 in the City, I used to look out into the midday 
 gloom under the impenetrable veil, with a shadow- 
 less world before me, and recall the oppression of 
 this inversion of fantastic elements, where by 
 day the air was thick and oppressive, and when 
 night fell the stars came out with their little 
 consolations for the loss of the greater luminary,
 
 76 AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON 
 
 and could see the black flakes of condensed coal- 
 smoke come drifting, floating down like the first 
 flakes of a snow-fall a snow of soot, visible, 
 palpable, disastrous to gloves and linen as to 
 stonework and to colour in all things. And what 
 is odd, too, this comes from the very love of 
 brightness and cheeriness at home. Offer to the 
 Englishman to-morrow a fuel which would heat 
 his house without flame or smoke ; give him 
 furnaces which would consume all his fuel in 
 some subterranean recess, like our own, and he 
 would utterly and peremptorily refuse the boon. 
 To him his open grate and its cheerful flame, 
 pitchy and smoke-evolving as it is, are the roc's 
 egg to his home. London may be dingy and 
 smoky, Stygian in darkness and diurnal in its 
 Egyptian curse, but his glad hearth shall glow 
 while soft coal comes from the mine. It shall 
 darken and gloom until it is a new Pompeii of 
 drifting soot from its million chimney-volcanoes, 
 before the individual love of light and comfort 
 shall become civic, and London burn her own 
 smoke ! 
 
 Civilisation and Christianity are in all inter 
 mediate stages at odds ; the former in the highest 
 ferment does but disengage the latter as a vola 
 tile essence. Civilisation brings out by inexorable 
 logic those extremes of human condition from 
 both of which Agur prayed to be preserved. The 
 rich grow richer and the poor poorer, and the 
 laws of political economy go on asserting them 
 selves, by which we see that he who has the
 
 AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON 77 
 
 power, has a law by which he may make it greater, 
 and he who has it not shall lose even the little 
 he seems to have; and as in London the energy 
 of political economy and of progressive civilisa 
 tion have found their largest expression, we must 
 expect to find men divided into the widest ex- 
 .tremes of social condition wealth fabulous and 
 poverty incredible. To one who has tried the 
 hard side of human existence and known how 
 little will keep a man or woman from the grave, 
 it is enough to say that men and women die 
 statistically in London from starvation not the 
 sudden death of men shut in a dungeon so to 
 die, but with long and unrelieved deprivation just 
 sufficient to make them waste away with intoler 
 able craving, mocked by the merest dalliance with 
 alimentation. Some such in their involuntary 
 apotheosis I have seen with their gaunt faces 
 glued to those flaming windows of the Cheapside 
 chop-houses, looking with hungry eyes and tremu 
 lous lips at the piles of luscious steaks and saddles 
 of prime mutton, the hell of Tantalus without his 
 sin, for these are mostly the honest, as honesty 
 goes in London streets stand with unmoving 
 faces and unconscious of whatever goes on around 
 them, like fascinated beings unable to break away 
 from the charm. I remember especially a young 
 girl, not over twelve, whose face I saw pressed 
 against the window-pane of a restaurant where 
 I was lunching one day a grave, hollow-eyed 
 creature, who, without a smile or a change of 
 any feature save the rolling of her eyes from one
 
 78 AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON 
 
 dainty to another during the whole of my lunch- 
 time, fed her only available sense on this phantom 
 banquet but who, when on going out I offered 
 her a huge piece of plain cake, refused it in fright 
 and with crimsoned cheeks, as though I had caught 
 her in theft; and it was only after repeated in 
 sistence, and on my telling her to take it home 
 to the little ones (for there are always little ones 
 in this case), that she took it, bewildered, and 
 went her way. 
 
 Spiritual gravitation is as irresistible as physical, 
 and men fly to its centre as grains of sand to the 
 earth; the weaker and the less individual they 
 are, the sooner they obey the law; only the few 
 who have the centrifugal power of self-assertion 
 can live content away from others. The clod 
 hopper who digs and never dreams or knows 
 what lies beyond his farm remains rustic; but 
 once he has come within the attraction of the 
 aggregate humanity of the city, he drifts helpless 
 into the vortex, and rots and dies in the mass of 
 corrupted humanity helpless in himself, because 
 he had not strength to stand alone, and hopeless, 
 because there are so many like him that no 
 human prevision could care for all the poor of 
 a great city like London. It is no place for the 
 helpless and the friendless, and yet it is precisely 
 those who drift most readily to it. There seems 
 to be a universal belief among the very poor that 
 help is only in great cities. Dick Whittington 
 entertained a very common superstition and 
 strengthened it; and Heaven only knows how
 
 AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON 79 
 
 many, with this golden dream in their hearts, 
 have gone to London to die in its dirt or drown 
 in its tide. And once in the city, the deluded 
 never leave it; the company in misery which it 
 offers to them is better than any emigration ; the 
 fascination of crowds is stronger, even with better 
 men and women, than any good in solitary inde 
 pendence. This and the innate laziness of man 
 kind, the insanity to escape all bonds of labour, 
 are more the causes of the destitution and misery 
 of London than any social wrong or want of 
 charity and benevolence in the wealthy. These 
 great cities will always be crowded to the last 
 limits of their capacity. Relieve the importunate 
 and improvident of to-day by a determinate 
 provision, and to-morrow there will appear mys 
 teriously as many new improvidents and un 
 fortunates, candidates for the same provision; 
 the whole realm of beggary and imprevision will 
 make a hitch forward, and the serried line will 
 still stand like that at the post-office windows 
 or theatre doors at times, waiting for another 
 vacancy and pushing on, always as long, always 
 as miserable, and all the more improvident as 
 provision is made by others. This is the poverty 
 of London: not a chance-come misfortune which 
 some sad widow may have in a country village, 
 her support and provider being suddenly gone, 
 struggling with a new and straiter living to 
 which in time she adapts herself or dies; not a 
 sudden cutting away of the small margin and a 
 distress in the house for rent, which hard work-
 
 80 AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON 
 
 ing sometimes gives a labourer, but an habitual 
 living on what may come through picking up by 
 chance pilfering and stealth to the worse and 
 slow starvation to the better natures, with gradual 
 extinction of all that is human to all squalor, 
 filth, a sinking till sense of degradation is lost 
 and the poor soul slides into utter vice as a boat 
 adrift goes down into the sea. 
 
 Look into the quarters of this poverty: for 
 convenience, in some of the streets about Good 
 man's Fields, swarming like ant-hills : shoals of 
 children of all ages below four or five encum 
 bering the road-way, careless of carriage wheels, 
 for no vehicle ever enters here except the huck 
 ster's cart or the parish hearse; frousy, sodden, 
 beer-soaked faces of women thrust out at the 
 windows, cursing their brats who cry in the dirt 
 below; sauntering men who look at you, if you 
 are decently dressed, as if your personal safety 
 were a wrong and injustice to them; young girls, 
 filthy, slatternly, leering, jeering, and ogling, 
 imagination can readily conceive what for. Men 
 do not grow to manhood in such slums and sun 
 less ways, or women to virtue or dignity. All is 
 squalor and filth and utter degradation of the 
 divine image. And this is one of the inevitable 
 results of the highest civilisation, as certainly as 
 that London is greatest and most civic of all 
 great cities. 
 
 For the other great result you have not far 
 to go. In that region of grim and forbidding 
 palaces, which, like AH Baba's cave, are nothing
 
 AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON 81 
 
 to him who has not, but everything for him 
 who has, the "open sesame," any one will answer 
 our purpose this one, for instance, with a 
 covered way from the door to the street, lest its 
 dainty inmates should catch a drop of rain on 
 the way to their carriage. Within all is order 
 and decorous silence. The foot falls on deep- 
 piled carpets. In the intonation of the low-toned 
 command is the highest expression of that incom 
 municable, indescribable, and, except by genera 
 tions of cultivation, unattainable quality we call 
 high breeding. In the reply to it is that perfect 
 antithesis in breeding, which we ought to call 
 low the profound, unquestioning, and unhesi 
 tating prostration of self of the traditional hered 
 itary " servant, " disciplined like a soldier, who, 
 as his master never permits himself to express 
 a disturbing emotion, never allows himself an 
 expression of surprise or a word of comment ; 
 whose self-command is as great as his master's, 
 perhaps greater a well apparelled statue, save 
 when an order is given ; whose bows and defer 
 ence for his master's guests are graduated by the 
 distance at which they sit from the head of the 
 table ; a human creature that sees nothing, 
 knows nothing, and believes nothing which his 
 master does not expect him to see and know and 
 believe ; who, if he thinks of a heaven at all, 
 never dreams that it can be the same thing for 
 his master and himself: he hopes to meet his 
 father and grandfather and great-grandfather in 
 the servants' hall of that celestial abode where 
 
 F
 
 82 AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON 
 
 his master and all the family for countless gener 
 ations will dwell in their mundane state ; his 
 brains could no more take in the parable of 
 Dives and Lazarus than the laws of Kepler, and 
 the most insensate Chartist or Radical could 
 never inspire in him an ambition to be any 
 thing beyond butler in his master's mansion. 
 
 All the gorgeousness and luxury about them 
 master and servant are the fit trappings of 
 the gentleman's estate. They two make one, a 
 kind of social centaur, a single brain and a 
 double body. The civic mechanism necessitates 
 other grades of mankind, but this is the summit 
 level. The centaur may be the highest expres 
 sion of human culture; he may be a mere vehicle 
 of pleasures betting, horse-racing, with no con 
 ception of or respect for that culture. He is to 
 all the world the personation of human dignity, 
 and the King or Queen is only the head of his 
 order. He may enjoy the refinements his ances 
 tors' wealth has gathered round him, and justify 
 his position, or he may bury himself deeper in 
 stultifying indulgences by the weight of it be 
 the best or worst of men; he is still the cynosure 
 of the Old World's regards milord Anglais. In 
 his sphere the echo of social wants and wrongs 
 dies away ; the tenants on his estate are as well 
 cared for as his favourite flocks, and he does his 
 duty to all who depend socially on him. Beyond, 
 all is ignored which disturbs the serenity of that 
 earthly heaven in whose immobility he abides. For 
 his existence, civilisation, law, order, the church,
 
 AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON 83 
 
 army, and navy are the guaranties and pre-requis- 
 ites. It is for him, according to the original theory 
 of the British constitution, that the state exists. 
 
 In other European countries of approximate 
 civilisation, his congener has gone under ; he, 
 wiser, draws up to him the social elements that 
 might menace his supremacy, and which, by their 
 necessity to the state, are necessary to him 
 the banker, the successful administrator, soldier, 
 admiral, and even the church, whose power is not 
 of this world, is led in by its lord bishops. So 
 that the centaur, being the governing and the 
 governed in one, wins over from any possible 
 opposition, whatever elements may be assimilated 
 to his class, which outside its limits might be 
 dangerous, and so fights off the fate which has 
 befallen his congeners of the Continent. 
 
 In the strictest social creed of the centaur, it is 
 held as an essential to this assimilation that the 
 candidate shall not only never have done any 
 thing useful for its due compensation, but that 
 society shall not be able to remember when one 
 of his ancestors did so, the bluest blood being 
 that of him whose remote forefather did but 
 follow the original centaurial proposition of 
 taking all that they wanted wherever they found 
 it, and, by levying contributions on all the classes 
 of society, enabling his remotest heirs and suc 
 cessors to enjoy the proceeds in complete and 
 reputable abstention from gain by any useful 
 employment useless labour, such as breeding 
 and running race-horses, etc., or unpaid labour
 
 84 AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON 
 
 in science and art being perfectly allowable and 
 possibly praiseworthy, with centaurial honours. 
 
 Although socially dominant in all England, the 
 centaur is only to be known in London in 
 perfection, or the extent of his dominance to 
 be recognised. He must have his residence in 
 London, no matter how many others he may 
 have, and it must be worthy his position. There 
 are here and there certain literary and intellec 
 tual heresies and heretics refusing to recognise 
 centaurdom as the highest of human good ; but, 
 in general, the people accept the distinction by 
 which, when they are overridden by the cen 
 taurs, they are privileged to override some one 
 else in the grade below them, and each one in 
 the long file of social gradation is permitted and 
 perhaps expected to be a toady to the superior, 
 and a bully to the inferior grades. And down 
 to the very substratum of beggars and crossing- 
 sweepers, there is a keen recognition of the 
 social stamp of "useless" and "useful," and an 
 inherent contempt of the latter individual as 
 such. I have noticed scores of times that, when 
 I was carrying a package through the streets of 
 London, the beggars and sweepers paid no atten 
 tion to me. The centaur and the beggar agree 
 in one thing, that a man who carries his own 
 parcels is beneath their social recognition. 
 
 It is to London, as the centre of all that 
 England is or can be, that these two classes 
 gravitate the poles of civilised humanity; no 
 where but in London could they find their com-
 
 AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON 85 
 
 mensurate importance, and here they attain their 
 highest perfection and greatest development. 
 Beggary and aristocracy are the productions par 
 excellence of the metropolis of civilisation; the 
 traits which, even more than its size and wealth, 
 distinguish it from all the cities of the earth. 
 
 And from all this antagonism of extremes, 
 from all the heat and ferment of this alembic 
 of humanity there comes not only much refuse 
 dead matter which goes back to decay and 
 first disorganisation but there distils the truest, 
 divinest spirit humanity can embody. Here does 
 but disengage more quickly and more perfectly, 
 what may be of better than aristocracy and 
 more beautiful than court or state. If the 
 individual is securest in his individuality, if the 
 one talent is best buried in the retirement of 
 rustic life, if philosopher and poet find in their 
 hearts to say with their Roman confrere, "Procul, 
 procul este profana" and float tranquilly down 
 the stream of life alone, yet in the thickest 
 melee is the most strength won; and in spite 
 of the terrible perversion of Christianity, and 
 the palsying condition of social organisation, 
 one can find here the rarest types of Christian 
 and of mankind. Who escapes humanity shuns 
 God. 
 
 I am not a lover of great cities; their ambi 
 tions and ideals, their vulgarities and their 
 urbanities, are alike distasteful to me; but I 
 must say that I have known in London the 
 most angelic natures that it has ever been in
 
 86 AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON 
 
 my lot to encounter. Perhaps I should have seen 
 still better if my eyes had been open wider. 
 
 And it is in this very class which I have, in 
 no disparaging sense, termed centauric, the aris 
 tocracy, where social independence has reached 
 its highest, that we find here and there, cased 
 like the flower and fruit of this mighty growth, 
 in extraneous and deciduous leafage, that best 
 type of humanity as the world knows it, the 
 true English gentlefolk beings whose exterior 
 decorum may be counterfeited by an emulator, 
 whose inmost gentleness and courtesy may be 
 shadowed forth in peer or peasant who love 
 their kind, and feel the common bond of divine 
 birth ; but whose most perfect expression of noble 
 demeanour and large - heartedness can only be 
 found where the best type of mind has been 
 permitted the largest and richest culture and the 
 completest freedom of hereditary development in 
 the most favourable external circumstances. There 
 are nobles and noblemen men who seem to be 
 conscious only that surrounding men are lower 
 than they; and others whose illumination per 
 vades every one near them and brings all up 
 into the same world of light and sweetness. 
 The prestige of nobility is founded on a true 
 human instinct; occasionally one finds an English 
 nobleman who justifies its existence, and makes 
 us snobs in spite of our democracy. 
 
 I could, I am certain, point to Americans who, 
 in every substantial trait of the gentleman, will 
 stand comparison with any aristocrat born men
 
 AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON 87 
 
 in whom gentlehood has grown to hereditary 
 ripeness; the third and fourth generations of 
 men who have cultivated on American soil the 
 virtues of honesty, morality, sincerity, courtesy, 
 self-abnegation, humanity, benevolence; men and 
 women whose babyhood was cradled in those 
 influences which make what we call "good breed 
 ing," and to whom the various vulgarities of our 
 parvenu princes are as foreign as to the bluest- 
 blooded heir of Norman fortune; and this is to 
 me a more grateful and sympathetic type of 
 humanity than that of its English congener. But 
 to this will always be lacking one grace which 
 that may possess the majesty of the born 
 legislator and ruler; the air of habitual com 
 mand and control, hereditary as are all generic 
 traits, good or bad, and which imposes itself on 
 the consciousness of all men. This, be it for the 
 bettering or the worsering of the type, is to 
 our democratic, ruled, levelled, and ballot-boxed 
 civilisation forbidden forever; and the fustian 
 heredities of quickly and perhaps ill-made million 
 aires, for ever so many times told, will never be 
 other than a curious caricature of it. Theoretic 
 ally, we must gainsay it; but when all is said, 
 be it of our original paradise-planting, or a devil's 
 graft got among the thorns and thistles of our 
 exile, the growth of a certain reverence for a 
 time-honoured nobility has become a part of 
 every gentle nature, which only time and as 
 siduity can, but which they certainly will eradi 
 cate but not to-day, nor while the English
 
 88 AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON 
 
 nobility is what, as a whole, it is. We may 
 prefer, in our struggles of race, the independence 
 of the Athenian hoplite, of the quick-footed 
 runner; but the centaur had his side of the 
 story, and the same marble immortalises them 
 both. 
 
 We Americans are fond of talking of being 
 our own masters; but the man who is his own 
 master is also his own servant. A well-dis 
 ciplined army is the type of highest human de 
 velopment compassionate, unflinching strategy 
 in its head; intelligent, unhesitating and unques 
 tioning obedience in its body. He who in an 
 army will exercise his own judgment and will, is 
 a mutineer. Independence means isolation and 
 incompletion ; association is the true life, social, 
 political, and spiritual. 
 
 The empire of England owes its existence to 
 this phenomenon. The brain to command coupled 
 with the nerve to obey, and both to care less 
 for annihilation than for defeat; the will to 
 lead and the will to follow, co-ordination as if 
 of brain and hand; the union of antitheses in an 
 existence more effective and powerful, socially 
 and politically, than the most perfect individu 
 ality that is what I mean by the centaur, a 
 higher evolution of civic life than our boasted 
 political equality and personal independence. 
 This makes empire possible and reconcilable 
 with the good of ruler and ruled alike. And 
 more than this, it is the greatest element in that 
 cause which has for effect that, while every other
 
 AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON 89 
 
 wealthy nation in our time is drifting into a 
 social conflict of ominous outlook, with grow 
 ing political and social corruption, England has 
 steadily risen in civic and political purity. 
 Wherever else I look, in Europe, at least, I see 
 only reform by revolution, while in England it 
 comes steadily by law. 
 
 London is indeed a microcosm, not merely that 
 it is large, but because everything is in it; and 
 with all its intense commonplaceness and hum 
 drum conservatism, there is a degree of un 
 expectedness which keeps one on an intellectual 
 alert. No city grows like it; yet you pass from 
 quarters of new palaces, on ground which even 
 I remember as once an expanse of kitchen- 
 gardens as remote from metropolitanism as the 
 hop-fields of Kent, to others where the dinginess 
 of the Middle Ages seems to linger, and where 
 the only change of the century past must be 
 of deaths and births; into "no thoroughfare" 
 squares, round which the flood of improvement 
 has swept without entering; into places that 
 impress one with the idea of antiquity far more 
 than does the Parthenon or the Colosseum, dusty, 
 grassy, and silent, where, if you chance to see 
 a merry, playing child, it startles you as an an 
 achronism. One day, perhaps, the republic and 
 the proletary and the boulevard will come: be 
 sure that they will be to the breaking of many 
 hearts grown old in a world of circumstance and 
 association which will not suffer change. 
 
 But, to the mere passenger, London's most
 
 90 AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON 
 
 attractive point is her suburban wealth the 
 lovely wedding of city and country in Richmond, 
 Twickenham, and Barnes, and so all round by 
 Clapham, Dulwich, Norwood, and the Crystal 
 Palace, but especially near the Thames, whose 
 lovely windings, with frequent villages and luxu 
 riant meadows always green with that vivid 
 greenness which no climate besides this can boast 
 of, remind me of the early-summer Mohawk in 
 its most gentle portions. Great glades of oak and 
 elm come down to the water's edge, and a sward 
 that all the year round is like a carpet, with a 
 river-fringe of willows and flags, and the swans 
 going in and out undisturbed, following the ebb 
 down to the city even, and the flood back to 
 their homes, running the gauntlet of steamer 
 and wherry, with none to make them afraid; 
 and the lazy, picturesque barges drift down from 
 their inland markets, catching the ebb while 
 it serves, and waiting at anchor till it comes 
 again, their rusty tackle and tawny sails so 
 unlike what our seafaring man would settle his 
 fancy to, and yet so beloved by painters and 
 etchers. 
 
 Yes, London ends as it began, with the Thames. 
 The dreamy reaches of its upper course, with 
 their framing of rural picturesqueness, their 
 wealth of park and villa, the meed and stimulus at 
 once of the greatest of commercial communities, 
 run by insensible degrees of change into those so 
 unlike in all surroundings, so stirring and vibrant 
 with commerce and speculation; and the two
 
 AN AMERICAN'S REVERIE OVER LONDON 91 
 
 extremes, corresponding as heart and brain the 
 one to the other, or as root and branch, are what 
 makes the life and immensity of London, and, in 
 one sense, of England. Above the river in which 
 the miserable perish and on which the fortunate 
 grow rich, runs the other tide whose flood leads 
 On to fortune, whose sources are in the sea empire, 
 and which debouches in the lands of the little 
 island; above the river of the painters and poets, 
 winding through the downs and meadows of the 
 rarest of cultivated landscape out to the reaches 
 where the melancholy sea breeds its fogs and 
 damp east winds, is that of the merchant and 
 politician, having its springs in the uttermost 
 parts of the earth, and pouring out its golden 
 tribute on the lands whence the other steals its 
 drift and ooze. Ill dawns the day for humanity 
 when England's prosperity finds its final flood.
 
 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 I WAS sitting one afternoon with Longfellow, on 
 the porch of the old house at Cambridge, when 
 the conversation turned on intellectual develop 
 ment, and he referred to a curious phenomenon, 
 of which he instanced several cases, and which he 
 compared to the double stars, of two minds not 
 personally related but forming a binary system, 
 revolving simultaneously around each other and 
 around some principle which they regarded in 
 different lights. I do not remember his instances, 
 but that which at once came to my mind was the 
 very interesting one of Turner and Ruskin. The 
 complementary relation of the great writer and 
 the imaginative painter is one of the most indeed, 
 the most interesting that I know in intellectual 
 history : the one a master in all that belongs to 
 verbal expression but singularly deficient in the 
 gifts of the artist, feeble in drawing, with a most 
 inaccurate perception of colour and no power of 
 invention; the other the most stupendous of 
 idealists, the most consummate master of colour 
 orchestration the world has ever seen, but so 
 curiously devoid of the gifts of language that he 
 could hardly learn to write grammatically or coher- 
 
 92
 
 JOHN RUSKIN 93 
 
 ently, and when he spoke, omitting so many words 
 that often his utterances, like those of a child, 
 required interpretation by one accustomed to his 
 ways before a stranger could understand them. 
 Ruskin is a man reared and moulded in the 
 straightest Puritanism, abhorring uncleanness of 
 all kinds, generous to extravagance, moved by the 
 noblest humanitarian impulses, morbidly averse 
 to anything that partakes of sensuality, and re 
 sponsive as a young girl to appeals to his ten 
 derness and compassion. Turner was a miser ; 
 churlish ; a satyr in his morals not merely a 
 sensualist, but satisfied only by occasional in 
 dulgences in the most degrading debauchery? and 
 even in his painting sometimes giving expression 
 to images so filthy that when, after his death, the 
 trustees came to overhaul his sketches, there were 
 many which they were obliged to destroy in regard 
 for common decency. It is hardly possible to 
 conceive of a more complete antithesis than that 
 in the natures of these two, who turn, and will 
 turn so long as English art and English letters 
 endure, around the same centre of art and each 
 around the other. In fact, to the great majority 
 of our race Turner is seen through the eyes of 
 Ruskin, and Ruskin is only known as the eulogist 
 of Turner. 
 
 The conjunction leaves both misunderstood by 
 the general mind. Ruskin looks at the works of 
 the great landscape painter much as the latter 
 looked at nature not for what is in the thing 
 looked at, but for the sentiments it awakens. The
 
 94 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 world's art does not present anything to rival 
 Turner's in its defiance of nature. He used nature 
 when it pleased him to do so, but when it pleased 
 him better he belied her with the most reckless 
 audacity. He had absolutely no respect for truth. 
 His colour was the most splendid of impossibilities, 
 and his topography like the geography of dreams ; 
 yet Ruskin has spent a great deal of his life in 
 persuading himself and the world that that colour 
 was scientifically correct, and in hunting for the 
 points of view from which he drew his composi 
 tions. His conviction that Turner was always 
 doing his best, if in a mysterious way, to tell the 
 truth about nature is invincible. Early in the 
 period of my acquaintance with him we had a 
 vivacious discussion on this matter in his own 
 house; and to convince him that Turner was 
 quite indifferent as to matters of natural pheno 
 mena, I called Ruskin's attention to the view out 
 of the window, which was of the Surrey hills, a 
 rolling country whose grassy heights were basking 
 in a glorious summer sunlight and backed by a 
 pure blue sky, requesting him then to have 
 brought down from the room where it was hung 
 a drawing by Turner in which a similar effect was 
 treated. The hill in nature was, as it always will 
 be if covered by vegetation and under the same 
 circumstances, distinctly darker than the sky; 
 Turner's was relieved in pale yellow green against 
 a deep blue sky, stippled down to a delicious aerial 
 profundity. Ruskin gave up the case in point, but 
 still clung to the general rule. In fact, having
 
 JOHN RUSKIN 95 
 
 begun his system of art teaching on the hypothesis 
 that Turner's way of seeing nature was scientific 
 ally the most correct that art knew, he had never 
 been able to abandon it and admit that Turner 
 only sought, as was the case, chromatic relations 
 which had no more to do with facts of colour than 
 the music of Mendelssohn's " Wedding March " 
 has to do with the emotions of the occasion on 
 which it is played. His assumption of Turner's 
 veracity is the corner-stone of his system, and 
 its rejection would be the demolition of that 
 system. 
 
 His art criticism is radically and irretrievably 
 wrong. That which makes art what it is, as art, 
 has absolutely nothing to do with the phenomena 
 of nature. Even limiting the term Art to that 
 form of it embraced in Design, this is true. The 
 end of art, as art, is decoration; and the earliest, 
 as well as some of the most exquisite decoration we 
 know of, is in combination of forms and colours 
 which are not borrowed from nature. Some of the 
 best art in the world is devoted to the invention 
 of purely conventional forms for purely decorative 
 purposes, and in decorative work any attempt at 
 distinct naturalism is at once felt as degrading the 
 decoration. One day that Ruskin and myself were 
 discussing the theory of art, he asked me to 
 formulate one. I complied, with this, "Art is the 
 harmonic (rhythmic or melodic) expression of 
 human emotion." He expressed himself so pleased 
 with it that he asked permission to give it in a note 
 to one of the later volumes of " Modern Painters,"
 
 96 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 which he was then passing through the press. It 
 never appeared. On second thought, he doubtless 
 perceived that it clashed with the expressions he 
 had employed in the work. Art does not lie in 
 representing nature, but in the manner of repre 
 senting her, and may equally be employed in 
 invented and conventional forms, as in repeating 
 hers. Naturalism and art are the eternal antithesis 
 as one rises the other sinks in the scale of the 
 general results. No art can be gauged by its 
 fidelity to nature unless we admit in that term the 
 wider sense which makes nature of the human 
 soul and all that is the sense of music, the per 
 ception of beauty, the grasp of imagination, " the 
 light that never was, on sea or land," as well as 
 that which serves the lens of the photographer; 
 and Ruskin's own work, his teaching in his classes, 
 and his application of his own standards to all 
 great work, show that he understands the term 
 " fidelity to nature " to mean the adherence to 
 physical facts, the scientific aspects of nature. 
 Greek art he never has really sympathised with, 
 nor at heart accepted as supreme, though years 
 after he took the position he never has avowedly 
 abandoned, he found that in Greek coinage there 
 were artistic qualities of the highest refinement; 
 but Watts has told me that Ruskin expressed his 
 surprise that the artist could keep before him so 
 ugly a thing as the Oxford Venus, a cast of which 
 was in his studio, and that he pronounced the horse 
 an animal devoid of all beauty. In my opinion, he 
 cares nothing for the plastic qualities of art, or for
 
 JOHN RUSKIN 97 
 
 the human figure, otherwise than as it embodies 
 human and moral dignity. The diverse and in 
 congruous criticisms he makes on Titian, Michael 
 Angelo, and Raphael, put side by side with his 
 notes on Holman Hunt, on George Leslie and Miss 
 Thompson in the Royal Academy, and Miss 
 Alexander's drawings, show his appreciation of 
 figure art to be absolutely without any criterion 
 of style or motive in figure painting, if this were 
 not already apparent from his contradictions at 
 different periods of his life. These are puzzling to 
 the casual reader. When he says, in the early part 
 of "Modern Painters," that the work of Michael 
 Angelo in general, the Madonna di San Sisto, and 
 some other works are at the height of human 
 excellence, and later demolishes poor Buonarotti 
 like a bad plaster cast, and sets Raphael down as a 
 mere posturer and dexterous academician, one is at 
 a loss to reconcile his opinions with any standard. 
 The fact, I believe to be, that his early art education, 
 which was in great part due to J. D. Harding, a 
 painter of high executive powers and keen appre 
 ciation of technical abilities in the Italian painters, 
 was in the vein of orthodox standards ; that while 
 under the influence of his reverence for his teachers 
 he accepted the judgment which they, in common 
 with most artists, have passed on the old masters ; 
 but that when left to himself, with no kind of sym 
 pathy with ideal figure art, nor, I believe, with any 
 form of figure art as such, but with a passion for 
 landscape, a curious enthusiasm for what is minute 
 and intense in execution, and an over-weening 
 
 G
 
 98 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 estimate of his own standards and opinions, he 
 gradually lost all this vicarious appreciation, and 
 retained of his admiration of old art only what was 
 in accordance with his own feelings i.e.) the in 
 tensity of moral and religious fervour, and, above 
 all, anything that savoured of mysticism, the ascetic 
 and didactic, especially the art of the schools of 
 religious passion. This was due to the profound 
 devotional feeling which was the basis of his 
 intellectual nature. He said to me once that he 
 was a long time in doubt whether he should give 
 himself to the church or to art. So far as the 
 world is concerned I think he took the wrong road. 
 In the church he might not have been, as his father 
 hoped, a bishop, for his views have been too 
 individual for church discipline, but I believe he 
 would have produced a more beneficial effect on 
 his age than if he had been. As an art critic he 
 has been like one writing on the sea-sands: his 
 system and his doctrines of art are repudiated by 
 every thoughtful artist I know. Art in certain 
 forms touches him profoundly but only emotion 
 ally. Although he drew earnestly for years, he 
 never seemed to understand style in drawing, 
 master as he is of style (sui generis) in language; 
 his perception of colour is so deficient that he 
 appears to me unable to recognise the true optical 
 colour of any object ; that is, its colour in sunshine 
 as distinguished from its colour in shadow or its 
 local colour; and in painting from nature he is 
 always best pleased with what is most like Turner. 
 I painted or sketched with him during a summer in
 
 JOHN RUSKIN 99 
 
 Switzerland, and therefore I do not speak from a 
 moral consciousness. What he most admired in 
 my work, and sought in his own, was excessive 
 elaboration and photographic fidelity, and he did 
 not easily apprehend the larger relations of the 
 landscape. He used to wonder at my getting over 
 the detail so fast; but he always got angry with 
 the work when I reached a point where I found 
 it necessary to bring the masses into relation 
 according to my own ideas. At Chamonix I one 
 day began a large study of the Mer de Glace from 
 opposite the glacier, looking up it with the Aiguille 
 de Dru in the centre of the distance. The whole 
 subject was rapidly laid in in general effect until 
 it got down to the foreground, where I began 
 finishing elaborately, to his entire satisfaction, 
 which continued for several days, and until I 
 pointed out to him a difficulty which it puzzled me 
 to get over without violating the topographical 
 fidelity of the study. There were several of the 
 main lines of the distance which formed approxi 
 mately radii from a point of no importance in the 
 composition. He had not noticed it ; but when I 
 pointed it out he got into a state of vexation, and, 
 declaring that nothing could be done with a subject 
 which had such an awkward accident in it, insisted 
 on my giving up the study, saying he would not 
 stay in Chamonix for me to finish it. As I was his 
 guest I complied with his wish, and we left the 
 valley the next day. 
 
 This capriciousness is a characteristic of the 
 man. In spite of the womanly tenderness of his
 
 100 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 nature, which is, when favourably moved, of a 
 kindliness which measures no sacrifice, he is 
 capable, under impulse, of treating a friend of 
 one day with the most contemptuous aversion on 
 the next, for some whim no more important than 
 that which drove us out of Chamonix. 
 
 There is in his character a curious form of in 
 dividuality, so accentuated and so imperious that 
 it produces in him the sense of his own infallibility. 
 He once wrote of his opinions as not matters 
 of opinion but as positive knowledge ; yet, in 
 personal intercourse, one finds nothing of the dog 
 matism which is so notable a feature in his 
 writing. He listened to all objections, and often 
 acknowledged, during discussion, the inconse 
 quence of his conclusions ; and during the long 
 and vigorous debates which occupied our Swiss 
 evenings, he not infrequently admitted error, but 
 on the next day held the old ground as firmly 
 as ever. His intellect, with all its power and 
 intensity, is of the purely feminine type. The 
 love of purity ; the quick, kindly, and unreasoning 
 impulse; the uncompromising self-sacrifice when 
 the feeling is on him, and the illogical self- 
 assertion in reaction when it has passed; the 
 passionate admiration of power; the wayward 
 ness and often inexplicable fickleness all are 
 there. But behind all these feminine traits there 
 is the no less feminine quality of passionate love 
 of justice, flecked, on occasions of personal impli 
 cation, with acts of great injustice ; there is a 
 general inexhaustible tenderness, with occasional
 
 JOHN RUSKIN 101 
 
 instances of absolute cruelty. Any present judg 
 ment of him, as a whole, is difficult if not impos 
 sible, because there are in him several different 
 individuals, and the perspective in which we now 
 see them, makes of his position, as an art teacher, 
 the most prominent element of his personality; 
 whereas, in my persuasion, his art teaching is, 
 in his own nature and work, subordinate to his 
 moral and humanitarian ideals. He always saw 
 art through a religious medium, and this made 
 him, from the beginning, strain his system of 
 teaching and criticism to meet the demand of 
 direct truth to nature, the roots of his enthusiasm 
 and reverence being not in art but in nature, and 
 in her beneficial influence on humanity. 
 
 A little incident of our Alpine summer will 
 illustrate this view of his character better than 
 all my appreciations. During our stay at Geneva 
 he had some mountain drawing to do at the Perte 
 du Rhone, and asked me to drive down with him. 
 Not far from the point of view which he had 
 selected was a group of wretched dwellings, mis 
 called cottages, but which in America they call 
 shanties; not the picturesque wall - and - thatch 
 structures which the word cottage calls up in 
 England, but built of boards, shabby without 
 being picturesque, and, to my American notions, 
 only capable of association with poverty and dis 
 comfort. Ruskin asked me to draw them while 
 he was drawing the mountains. The subject was 
 anything but attractive or pictorial, and though it 
 should have been enough for me that he wished me
 
 102 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 to draw it carefully, I only obeyed my own feeling 
 and made a careless ten minutes' pencil drawing, all 
 the thing was worth to me. When Ruskin drove 
 up to take me in on the way back to Geneva and 
 saw what I had done, he was and, I must say, 
 with good reason offended at the indifferent way 
 in which I had complied with his request, and, after 
 a few reproachful words, threw himself back in 
 the carriage in a sullen temper. I replied that 
 the subject did not interest me, and that the prin 
 cipal feeling I had in looking at it was that it 
 must be a wretched home for human beings, and 
 promised more fevers than anything else; and 
 that, in short, I did not think it worth drawing. 
 Nothing more was said by either of us until we 
 had driven half-way back to Geneva, when he 
 broke out with, "You are right, Stillman, about 
 those cottages ; your way of looking at them was 
 nobler than mine, and now, for the first time in 
 my life, I understand how anybody can live in 
 America." It has always seemed to me that this 
 was a true epitome of the man's nature first, the 
 aesthetic outside view of the matter, then the 
 humanitarian, overpowering it; the womanish 
 pettishness, and the generous admission of his 
 error when seen; and, after this confession, his 
 greater cordiality to me for he always valued 
 more any one who brought him a new idea, 
 though he often broke friendship with those who 
 differed from him too strongly. 
 
 Besides this absorbing passion for the spiritual 
 ideal, the mental constitution whose compass was
 
 JOHN RUSKIN 103 
 
 set to the immovable pole of the most exalted 
 morality, he had a curious facility for seeing 
 art as he wished to. He saw through his feelings 
 and prepossessions, and even looking at nature 
 he only saw certain things, and those in general 
 through his predisposition. So he always held 
 Turner true although the thing he saw was false. 
 In one drawing, where Turner has given the full 
 moon rising in cool night-mists at the left of the 
 picture and the sun setting golden at the right, 
 Ruskin explains it as intended to be two pictures. 
 He praises Turner for mingled effects of sunlight 
 and moonlight when he ought to know that the 
 full moon will cast no shadow until the sun has 
 set nearly or quite an hour. Turner continually 
 puts figures in full light in the foreground of a 
 picture which has the sun setting in the view, the 
 shadows on the figures being consequently on the 
 side nearest the sun, yet Ruskin has never 
 admitted the painter's indifference to the facts of 
 nature. 
 
 II 
 
 To the world at large Ruskin's reputation, even 
 as an art critic, rests on the first volume of his 
 "Modern Painters." Very few people have read 
 the second volume, and fewer still the whole five, 
 though the early editions have been sold and 
 others since. Of this first volume, what most 
 impressed the general public was not the sound 
 ness of his views of art, of which it could not
 
 104 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 judge at all, or his knowledge of nature, of which 
 it could judge but little, but his eloquence, his mag 
 nificent diction. Take, for instance, the following 
 from the comparison of Turner with Poussin, which 
 every reader of the book will remember as what 
 is called a " word picture " of extraordinary power : 
 
 "But as I climbed the long slopes of the Alban mount, 
 the storm swept finally to the north, and the noble outline 
 of the domes of Albano, and the graceful darkness of its 
 ilex grove rose against pure streaks of alternate blue and 
 amber, the upper sky gradually flushing through the last 
 fragments of rain-cloud in deep, palpitating azure, half 
 ether and half dew. The noonday sun came slanting 
 down the rocky slopes of La Riccia, and its masses of 
 entangled and tall foliage, whose autumnal tints were mixed 
 with the wet verdure of a thousand evergreens, were pene 
 trated with it as with rain. I cannot call it colour, it was 
 conflagration. Purple, and crimson, and scarlet, like the curtains 
 of God's tabernacle, the rejoicing trees sank into the valley in 
 showers of light, every separate leaf quivering with bouyant and 
 burning life, each, as it turned to reflect or to transmit the sun 
 beam, first a torch and then an emerald. Far up into the 
 recesses of the valley, the green vistas arched like the hollows 
 of mighty waves of some crystalline sea, with the arbutus flowers 
 dashed along their flanks for foam, and silver flakes of orange 
 spray tossed into the air around them, breaking over the gray walls 
 of rock into a thousand separate stars, fading and kindling alter 
 nately as the weak wind lifted or let them fall. Every glade of 
 grass burned like the golden floor of heaven, opening in 
 sudden gleams as the foliage broke and closed above it as 
 sheet lightning opens in a cloud at sunset ; the motionless masses of 
 dark rock dark though flushed with scarlet lichen casting their 
 quiet shadows across its restless radiance, the fountain under 
 neath them filling its marble hollow with blue mist and 
 fitful sound, and, over all, the multitudinous bars of amber
 
 JOHN RUSKIN 105 
 
 and rose, the sacred clouds that have no darkness, and only 
 exist to illumine, were seen in fathomless intervals, between 
 the solemn and orbed repose of the stone pines passing to 
 lose themselves in the last white, blinding lustre of the 
 measureless line, where the Campagna melted into the blaze 
 of the sea." 
 
 Magnificent this is as rhetoric, but, if intended 
 to show the shortcomings of Poussin or the 
 attainments of Turner, it is as exaggerated for 
 one as it is unfair for the other; for the effects 
 there described are no more in the power of 
 colour than in the feeling of either of those artists. 
 It is not nature-painting at all; neither true to 
 the sense nor to the details of nature. As mastery 
 of the English language I shall not attempt to 
 criticise it, but as statement of what is to be seen 
 in nature or rendered in art it bears about the 
 same relation to the most ideal and orchestral 
 effects of Turner as those do to sober nature. I 
 have put in italics certain expressions to which 
 I ask the grave critical attention of the reader. I 
 leave out, for the moment, the singular topo 
 graphical inaccuracies which, in a work devoted 
 to truth of nature, ought to claim some attention ; 
 but, in such a work, we may ask the sober meaning 
 of such expressions as "Purple, and crimson, and 
 scarlet, like the curtains of God's tabernacle"; 
 "Every separate leaf quivering with buoyant and 
 burning life, each, as it turned to reflect or to 
 transmit the sunbeam, first a torch and then an 
 emerald"; the rocks "dark though flushed with 
 scarlet lichen casting their quiet shadows across
 
 106 JOHN BUSKIN 
 
 its restless radiance " [why restless radiance, except, 
 like much else in the passage, for alliteration?]. 
 The colour epithets, to an artist, only express a 
 crudity of pigment as unlike Turner as nature; 
 the "arbutus flowers dashed along their flanks" 
 . . . "silver flakes of orange spray [dreamed of 
 from some other locality, for neither exists at 
 Aricia] tossed into the air around them . . . into 
 a thousand separate stars"; and "every separate 
 leaf," show as great contempt for the possibilities 
 of painting in the rendering of detail for the 
 human eye as indifference to the aims of land 
 scape painting, either according to Poussin or 
 Turner. The "Purple, and crimson, and scarlet, 
 like the curtains of God's tabernacle," is apocalyp 
 tic, not naturalistic, and the entire passage, when 
 we consider that it is part of an essay intended 
 to advocate the close adherence to the facts of 
 nature in landscape painting, can only be put 
 aside as passing legitimate criticism or justifiable 
 comparison. It is safe to say that, of a thousand 
 landscape painters and amateurs habituated to 
 look at nature, taking the best and the most 
 trivial, not one who had passed by Aricia would 
 recognise as fact a single characteristic of the 
 description by Ruskin. I know the place better 
 than I do London or New York, and am confident 
 in saying that neither in the ensemble nor in the 
 detail is there anything there which Ruskin 
 imagines he saw. Much is mere sound, allitera 
 tion which is in place in poetry but not in art 
 criticism, and much only the expression of vague
 
 JOHN RUSKIN 107 
 
 imaginings far less like nature than the great 
 scenic compositions of John Martin. 
 
 Take another instance from the section on the 
 sea ("Truth of Water," this being the description 
 of a picture, the Slave Ship). Again I italicise 
 the passages to which I wish to call attention 
 as demanding analysis and criticism. 
 
 " It is a sunset on the Atlantic after prolonged storm ; but 
 the storm is partially lulled, and the torn and streaming 
 rain-clouds are moving in scarlet lines to lose themselves in the 
 hollow of the night. The whole surface of the sea included in 
 the picture is divided into two ridges of enormous swell, not 
 high nor local, but a broad heaving of the whole ocean like 
 the lifting of its bosom by deep-drawn breath after the 
 torture of the storm. Between these two ridges the fire of 
 the sunset falls along the trough of the sea, dyeing it with 
 an awful but glorious light, the intense and lurid splendour of 
 which burns like gold and bathes like blood. . . . Purple and 
 blue the lurid shadows of tlie hollow breakers are cast on the mist 
 of the night, which gathers cold and low, advancing like the shadow 
 of death upon the guilty ship as it labours amidst the lightning 
 of the sea, its thin masts written upon the sky in lines of 
 blood girded with condemnation in that fearful hue which signs 
 the sky with horror, and mixes its flaming flood with the sunlight, 
 and, cast far along tlie desolate heave of the sepulchral waves, in 
 carnadines the multitudinous sea. I believe, if I were reduced to 
 rest Turner's claim to immortality upon any single work, I 
 should choose this. Its daring conception ideal in the highest 
 sense of the word is fused on the purest truth and wrought out 
 with the concentrated knowledge of a life . . . and the whole 
 picture is dedicated to the most sublime of subjects and impres 
 sions (completing thus the perfect system of all truth which 
 we have shown to be formed by Turner's works) the power, 
 majesty, and deathfulness of the open, deep, illimitable sea."
 
 108 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 "Burns like gold and bathes like blood" is, of 
 course, again for alliteration; "Purple and blue 
 the lurid shadows," etc., part for the sing of the 
 sentence and part poetic imagination utterly un- 
 suggested and unsuggestable by painting; "that 
 fearful hue," etc., to " multitudinous sea," is simply 
 fine writing which, when it conveys a false im 
 pression, or no impression legitimate to its pro 
 fessed purpose, is a literary vice, as it is in this 
 case, where the purpose is the description of a 
 picture. 
 
 Ruskin supposes this picture to be an attempt 
 to pourtray the deep sea, but neither he nor Turner 
 was ever out of soundings : how should one paint, 
 or the other recognise, the fathomless as distin 
 guished from the shallow seas? The fact is, that 
 the sea in the Slave Ship is a long ground- 
 swell, resembling the watery mountains one may 
 see on the open Atlantic no more than the water 
 below a rapid. This form of swell and the 
 "hollow breakers" are never found except when 
 the sea is shoaling. In the deep Atlantic, after 
 a long gale, such as Ruskin supposes (I have seen 
 it at its worst once only in 70,000 miles, more or 
 less, of ocean travel by sail and steam), the great 
 waves lift to heights such that Turner's Slave 
 Ship would be hidden between two of them. 
 They hang over you like impending doom; and, 
 just when you think that the ship must be buried 
 in five seconds, the forefoot of the wave reaches 
 you, and the ship suddenly begins to rise, and 
 in another five seconds you are on the summit
 
 JOHN RUSKIN 109 
 
 looking out over the heaving expanse black, 
 save as it is foam-driven, fitfully rising and 
 falling, apparently without law or order and, 
 after being poised an instant, you feel the ship 
 going from under you again; your breath almost 
 leaves you with the rapidity of the descent, and 
 you are buried once more in the deep trough of 
 the sea for another brief space. Out of the 
 flanks of these great waves jump and start, fit 
 fully and unaccountably, lesser hillocks, to drop 
 and disappear again; but, when the crest of one 
 conies towards you, you see no hollow breaker, 
 for the crest simply pitches forward and slides 
 down the slope there is no combing. 
 
 Then, as to truth, Turner's whole picture is a 
 flagrant falsehood. The most gorgeous colours 
 of a sunset are in it painted in a sky where the 
 sun has still half an hour or more to sink to the 
 horizon ; and this license the artist habitually 
 took, although, as every artist knows, these 
 colours never come till after the sun is below 
 the horizon. A suggestion of them is given by a 
 winter sunset in the smoke of London, but there 
 is not the least suggestion of the chromatic scale 
 Turner uses. Lowell used to say that Turner 
 learned to paint sunsets in London ; but the 
 London smoke sunset is a display in tonality 
 more like Cuyp than Turner, sometimes gorgeous 
 but never brilliant colour. Cuyp was a tonalist, 
 Turner a colourist, and Turner in the Slave 
 Ship reached the highest attainment I know in 
 colour orchestration. The picture is in a flame of
 
 110 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 sunset colours ; but, in the lower left-hand corner, 
 is a bit of blue and white, the American flag, 
 which, like the blare of a trumpet in a florid 
 passage of music, throws the whole scheme into 
 a startling contrast. The clouds are not the 
 " torn and streaming rain-clouds " of an after- 
 storm sky, but full-bellied, rolling wind-clouds, so 
 far as they are structurally true to anything ; 
 subtly modelled and modulated, but, as a whole, as 
 utterly impossible a sky as the sea is an utterly 
 impossible sea. It is a marvellous picture : I do 
 not yield to Ruskin in admiration of it as art, or 
 admire it less for its daring license and contempt 
 of nature's details; one can only say that it is 
 magnificent, but it is not nature. Ruskin's 
 feeling as to art may have been, au fond, 
 correct; but it was so disturbed and perverted by 
 his theories and the settled conviction that art 
 was simply the uncompromising rendering of 
 nature as she appears to the bodily vision, that 
 he left out of all consideration the subjective* 
 transformation of natural truth which is the 
 basis of art; or, if he reckoned it in, it was to 
 persuade himself that it was due to a peculiarity 
 of vision in the painter. It is impossible to 
 reconcile all the inconsistencies into which this 
 theory led him; such as the exaltation of painters 
 who were mere naturalists, like Brett, or utterly 
 unimaginative realists, like Holman Hunt, and 
 the extraordinary judgment which he pronounced 
 
 * I remember that he used to express the strongest abhorrence of the 
 terms "subjective" and "objective" as German nonsense.
 
 JOHN RUSKIN 111 
 
 on Millais in his pamphlet on Pre-Raphaelitism 
 which phase of art he desired to consider the 
 consequence of his teaching, though, as I have 
 heard Rossetti say, none of the Brotherhood had 
 ever read ten pages of his writing before Ruskin 
 had constituted himself their advocate. In some 
 respects this little book may be considered the 
 summing up of his art teachings, and the 
 violence done to logic and art alike in his parallel 
 between Millais and Turner is the clearest state 
 ments of his errors we possess. The function of 
 the painter is here defined clearly and chiefly to 
 be topographer and historian. 
 
 "Suppose that, after disciplining themselves so as to be 
 able to draw with unerring precision each the particular 
 kind of subject in which he most delighted, they had 
 separated into two great armies of historians and natura 
 lists; that the first had painted with absolute faithfulness 
 every edifice, every city, every battle-field, every scene of 
 the slightest historical interest, precisely and completely 
 rendering their aspect at the time; and that their com 
 panions, according to their several powers, had painted with 
 like fidelity the plants and animals, the natural scenery and 
 the atmospherical phenomena of every country on the 
 earth ; suppose that a faithful and complete record were 
 now in our museums of every building destroyed by war, 
 or time, or innovation during these last 200 years; suppose 
 that each recess of every mountain chain of Europe had 
 been penetrated and its rocks drawn with such accuracy 
 that the geologist's diagram was no longer necessary; 
 suppose that every tree of the forest had been drawn in 
 its noblest aspect, every beast of the field in its savage 
 life that all these gatherings were already in our national 
 galleries, and that the painters of the present day were
 
 112 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 labouring happily and earnestly to multiply them and put 
 such knowledge more and more within reach of the common 
 people would not that be a more honourable life for them 
 than gaining precarious bread by ' bright effects ' ? " 
 
 One may reply, safely enough, that such a life 
 is honourable in the sense that it is honest, but 
 if the honour is that of which artists are most 
 ambitious, it is equally safe to say that there 
 is very little of it to be gained in that life. And 
 this method of study has always been the basis 
 of Ruskin's instruction instruction for this 
 and other reasons utterly wasted so far as the 
 proper cultivation of art is concerned. I re 
 member how, when Ruskin's drawing-book was 
 published, an artist whose feeling for all the 
 nobler qualities of art I have rarely known 
 equalled, and a personal friend and admirer of 
 Ruskin, said to me, "He should not have printed 
 that ; we know now just what he does not know." 
 It is not so much that he ignores the greater 
 gifts, but that he conceives that they can be 
 trained or developed by this kind of ant-like pro 
 ceeding going over the earth as an insect, not 
 even as a bird. But it is in the comparison 
 of the two painters whom he chooses as types 
 that we most clearly recognise the failure to 
 distinguish between the two forms of so-called 
 art. 
 
 "Suppose, for instance, two men, equally honest, equally 
 industrious, equally impressed with a humble desire to render 
 some part of what they saw in nature faithfully, and other 
 wise trained in convictions such as I have above endeavoured
 
 JOHN RUSKIN 113 
 
 to induce. But one of them is quiet in temperament, has a 
 feeble memory, no invention, and excessively keen sight. 
 The other is impatient in temperament, has a memory which 
 nothing escapes, an invention which never rests, and is com 
 paratively near-sighted. Set them both free in the same 
 field in a mountain valley. One sees everything, small and 
 large, with almost the same clearness ; mountains and grass 
 hoppers alike ; the leaves on the branches, the veins on the 
 pebbles, the bubbles in the stream; but he can remember 
 nothing and invent nothing. Patiently he sets himself his 
 mighty task; abandoning at once all thought of seizing 
 transient effects, or giving general impressions of that which 
 his eyes present to him in microscopical dissection, he 
 chooses some small portion out of the infinite scene, and 
 calculates with courage the number of weeks which must 
 elapse before he can do justice to the intensity of his percep 
 tions or the fullness of matter in his subject. Meanwhile, 
 the other has been watching the change of the clouds and 
 the march of the light along the mountain-sides ; he beholds 
 the whole scene in broad, soft masses of true gradation, and 
 the very feebleness of his sight is in some sort an advantage to him 
 in making him more sensible of the aerial mystery of distance and 
 hiding from him the multitudes of circumstances which it would have 
 been impossible for him to represent. ... I have supposed the 
 feebleness of sight in this last and of invention in the first 
 painter, that the contrast between them may be the more 
 striking; but with very slight modification both the char 
 acters are real. Grant to the first considerable inventive 
 power with exquisite sense of colour, and give to the 
 second, in addition to all his other faculties, the eye of 
 an eagle, and the first is John Everett Millais, the 
 second Joseph Mallord William Turner." "And thus Pre- 
 Raphaelitism and Raphaelitism and Turnerism are all one 
 and the same thing, so far as education can influence 
 them; they are different in their choice, different in their 
 faculties, but all the same in this, that Raphael himself, so 
 
 H
 
 114 JOHN BUSKIN 
 
 far as he was great, and all who preceded or followed him 
 who ever were great, became so by painting the truths around 
 them as they appeared to each man's mind, not as he had 
 been taught to see them except by the God who made both 
 him and them." 
 
 And yet, between the first and last sentences 
 which I have quoted, the author has gone 
 through a detailed account of the development 
 of Turner's art, showing that it was a con 
 tinuous evolution of conventional forms of 
 treatment borrowed from earlier painters. He 
 is obliged, to complete his antithesis, to suppose 
 Turner feeble of sight, because he could in no 
 other way consistent with his theory (and every 
 thing is always bent to his theories) account for 
 his ignoring "the multitudes of circumstances 
 which it would have been impossible for him 
 to represent," whereas the simple fact was that 
 Turner had, as he afterwards admits, an eagle's 
 eye, and simply ignored whatever in nature did 
 not suit his purpose. Turner was bred on con 
 ventions ; he began in the style of the men 
 about him, Girtin and his kind; he went through 
 the schools of Loutherbourg, Poussin, Claude, 
 Vandervelde, imitating everybody except the most 
 naturalistic of the Dutchmen, but never from the 
 beginning to the end of his career painting 
 from nature, or in any other way than from 
 memory, and always in a conventional manner 
 very much influenced by the early landscape 
 painters of the true subjective school, to which 
 he belonged in character, faculties, and method;
 
 JOHN RUSKIN 115 
 
 while Millais was a naturalist, who had no 
 invention, no idealism, but was always working 
 imitatively, and from direct vision, which Turner 
 never did. Turner was influenced, and happily, 
 by Claude to the last day of his life, though 
 not always obeying the influence to the same 
 apparent degree. 
 
 Of Ruskin the writer, aside from the art 
 critic, it is surely superfluous for me to say any 
 thing: for mastery of our language, the greater 
 authorities long ago have given him his place; 
 the multitude of petty critics and pinchbeck 
 rhetoricians, who pay him the tribute of tawdry 
 imitation, is the ever-present testimony to his 
 power and masterhood. Probably no prose 
 writer of this century has had so many choice 
 extracts made from his writings passages of 
 gorgeous description, passionate exhortation, path 
 etic appeal, or apostolic denunciation; and cer 
 tainly no one has so moulded the style of all the 
 writers of a class as he, for there scarcely can 
 be found a would-be art critic who does not 
 struggle to fill his throat with Ruskin's thunders, 
 so that a flood of Ruskin and water threatens 
 all taste and all study of art. As an example 
 of his diction take the description of "Schaff- 
 hausen " : 
 
 " Stand for half an hour beside the Fall of Schaffhausen, 
 on the north side where the rapids are long, and watch how 
 the vault of water first bends, unbroken in pure polished 
 velocity, over the arching rocks at the brow of the cataract, 
 covering them with a dome of crystal twenty feet thick, so
 
 116 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 swift that its motion is unseen except when a foam globe 
 from above darts over it like a falling star; and how the 
 trees are lighted above it under all their leaves at the 
 instant that it breaks into foam ; and how all the hollows of 
 that foam burn with green fire like so much shattering 
 chrysoprase ; and how ever and anon, startling you with its 
 white flash, a jet of spray leaps hissing out of the fall like 
 a rocket, bursting in the wind and driven away in dust, 
 filling the air with light; and how, through the curdling 
 wreaths of the restless crashing abyss below, the blue of the 
 water, paled by the foam in its body, shows purer than the 
 sky through white rain-cloud ; while the shuddering iris stoops 
 in tremulous stillness over all, fading and flushing alternately 
 through the clioking spray and shattered sunshine, hiding itself 
 at last among the thick golden leaves, which toss to and fro 
 in sympathy with the wild water; their dripping masses, 
 lifted at intervals, like sheaves of loaded corn, by some 
 stronger gush from the cataract, and bowed again upon the 
 mossy rocks as its roar dies away; the dew gushing from 
 their thick branches through drooping clusters of emerald 
 herbage, and sparkling in white threads along the dark rocks of 
 the shore, feeding the lichens which chase and chequer them with 
 purple and silver." 
 
 In the expression of what may be seen in a 
 waterfall, and the suggestion of what may be 
 felt, but seen by no bodily eye, is there any 
 thing in our language that is comparable to 
 this? But is it fair to ask art to realise it? 
 Who shall paint "the shuddering iris fading and 
 flushing alternately through the choking spray 
 and shattered sunshine?" It is beyond the 
 province of art to emulate this vein of feeling, 
 as much as to paint Shelley's "flames mingling 
 with sunset." But how many hapless phaetons
 
 JOHN RUSKIN 117 
 
 has our Apollo of the pen thus sent tumbling 
 down on us, entangled in their "predicates and 
 six," or sixty! Description a la Ruskin has 
 become a disease of the literature of the gener 
 ation, and your novelist coolly stops you in the 
 crisis of his story to describe a sunset in two 
 or three pages which, when all is said, compare 
 with Ruskin as a satyr with Hyperion. 
 
 Ill 
 
 THUS Ruskin obstinately bent all his con 
 clusions and observations to his doctrines what 
 he wanted to see he saw, nothing else. The 
 summer before one of my early visits to England, 
 I had painted a picture in what I believed the 
 spirit of his teachings, being then one of the 
 most enthusiastic of his disciples. I had con 
 ceived a death-struggle between a hunter and a 
 buck, in which they had fallen together over a 
 ledge of rock and lay in death at its foot. I had 
 searched the forest around where I camped in 
 the Adirondacks until I found the ledge which 
 suited the conception, and painted it carefully, 
 with the red sunset light coming aslant through 
 the forest and falling on the perpendicular cliff, 
 at the foot of which was a dense, dank growth 
 of ferns, all painted on the spot and in the 
 sunset light. At the foot, where they would fall, 
 I put my guide, locked with a huge buck, and 
 painted them as carefully as I knew how the 
 man from life and the buck immediately after I
 
 118 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 had killed him. I took it with me to London, 
 and one day Ruskin came into my studio, and, 
 seeing the picture, exclaimed with a gesture of 
 disgust, "Why do you have this stinking carrion 
 in your picture? Put it out, it's filthy, it stinks!" 
 etc. I was too much under his influence to 
 weigh his judgment against mine, and painted it 
 out accordingly. Dante Rossetti, who had seen 
 and liked the picture as it was, coming in again 
 a few days after, exclaimed, "What have you 
 done to your picture ? " I explained, and with 
 strong irritation in his manner he replied, 
 " You 've spoiled your picture," and walked 
 straight out of the room. I had spoiled it; for 
 everything in it had been chosen and painted 
 with reference to this deadly duel, with which 
 Ruskin had no sympathy. Death oppressed him, 
 whence his annoyance with the picture; but that 
 he was olfactorily impressed, as he was, could 
 only be explained by the fact that, as always, 
 he felt what he imagined or wished to see. He 
 wanted to see truth in Turner's drawings, and he 
 made his truth accordingly. I can but regard his 
 influence on modern landscape painting as per 
 nicious from beginning to end ; and, coinciding as 
 it did with the advent of a great naturalistic and, 
 therefore, anti-artistic tendency in all branches 
 of study, it was even more disastrous than it 
 would have been in ordinary circumstances. 
 
 His architectural work, " Stones of Venice," etc., 
 I am not so competent to judge, but I believe 
 that, while on the one hand he did great good by
 
 JOHN RUSKIN 119 
 
 bringing out the virtues of Gothic architecture 
 and awakening the interest of the world in the 
 art that was passing away, on the other hand he 
 did harm by repressing the influence of the 
 better form of Renaissance, which is often of the 
 noblest and truest art, and is far more adapted 
 .to our modern ways of work and uses than is the 
 Gothic. He uses here the same bitter polemics 
 and biased judgment as in the "Modern Painters." 
 In the lovely little Renaissance church of the 
 Miracoli at Venice, where are the most exquisite 
 decorations in that style of which I know, Ruskin 
 finds among the arabesques a chilcFs head tied by 
 its locks among the tendrils of the vegetation, 
 and inveighs bitterly against the brutality of such 
 a conception as putting a bodiless head in the 
 decoration. But he never stops to see that it is 
 a cherub among other cherubim, and that, as it 
 is in the character of the cherub to have no 
 body, the tying of one of them by the hair to 
 the vine is only a bit of playful invention in 
 which there is no brutality whatever, but the 
 most seraphic of practical jokes on the bodiless 
 and helpless state of the charming little creature ; 
 a creature which, in Gothic days, might have been 
 believed in as an actuality, but which the Renais 
 sance only looked at as a fiction of mythology 
 with the Tritons and Sirens, and therefore with 
 no reverence. But with Greek art, all that in any 
 way sympathised with its dominant character 
 meets his anathema. It seems to me that even 
 in architecture his influence is not catholic, but
 
 120 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 is tinged by his devotional tendencies, although 
 he introduces an element of common sense into 
 the criticism of architecture unknown before 
 him. 
 
 But Ruskin's true position is higher than that 
 of art critic in any possible development. It is 
 as a moralist and a reformer, and in his passion 
 ate love of humanity (not inconsistent with 
 much bitterness, and even unmerited, at times, 
 to individual men) that we must recognise him. 
 His place is in the pulpit, speaking largely and 
 in the unsectarian sense. Truth is multiform, 
 but of one essence, and, such as he sees it, he is 
 always faithful to it. I have taken large ex 
 ception to his ideas and teachings in respect to 
 art because I feel that they are misleading. His 
 mistakes in art are in some measure due to his 
 fundamental mistake of measuring it by its 
 moral powers and influence, and the roots of 
 the error are so deeply involved in his character 
 and mental development that it can never be 
 uprooted. It is difficult for me (perhaps for any 
 of his contemporaries) to judge him as a whole; 
 because, besides being his contemporary and a 
 sufferer by what I now perceive to be the fatal 
 error of his system, I was for so many years 
 his close personal friend ; and because, while I 
 do not agree with his tenets and am obliged by 
 my own sense of right to combat many of his 
 teachings, I still retain the personal affection 
 for him of those years which are dear to mem 
 ory, and reverence the man as I know him; and
 
 JOHN RUSKIN 121 
 
 because I most desire that he should be judged 
 rightly as a man who, for moral greatness, has 
 few equals in his day, and who deserves an 
 honour and distinction which he has not re 
 ceived, and in a selfish and sordid world will 
 not receive, but which I believe time will give 
 him that of being one who gave his whole 
 life and substance to the furtherance of what he 
 believed to be the true happiness and elevation 
 of his fellow-men. Even were he the sound 
 art critic so many people take him to be, his 
 real nature rises above that office as much as 
 humanity rises above art. When we wish to 
 compare him with men of his kind, it must be 
 with Plato or Savonarola rather than with Hazlitt 
 or Hamerton. Art cannot be clearly estimated 
 in any connection with morality, and Ruskin 
 could never, any more than Plato or Savonarola, 
 escape the condition of being in every fibre of 
 his nature a moralist and not an artist, and as 
 he advanced in life the ethical side of his nature 
 more and more asserted its mastery, though less 
 and less in theological terms. 
 
 If I have assumed the right to pass judgment 
 on his art teachings, it is because I have devoted 
 most of my life to the study of art and more 
 years than Ruskin had when he finished his 
 most important books; but when I come to the 
 moral problem, so vast, so profound and moment 
 ous in comparison with any questions of culture, 
 I have not the presumption to judge a man 
 whose moral nature I know to be so exceptional,
 
 122 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 and winged to flights that I can only honour 
 from below. Here we enter into a world where 
 only the Judge of all life can pronounce and 
 where my opinion must be respectful, for the 
 unquestionable loftiness and unselfishness of his 
 nature, and the consecration of his life to the 
 advancement of truth as he has seen it, give 
 him, to me, an authority I dare not debate with, 
 and which I insist on all the more because I 
 know the world does not accord it to him. No 
 one has yet dared answer Pilate, and I have no 
 disposition to judge whether Ruskin's social re 
 forms and political theories are hi accordance 
 with eternal truth or not whether they are 
 practical or not is, perhaps, a question of epoch 
 simply. 
 
 As an indication of Ruskin's position more 
 free, possibly, because more personal than those 
 given in his early works I quote part of one 
 of his first letters to me (about 1851). I had 
 been involved in mystical speculation, partly 
 growing out of the second volume of "Modern 
 Painters," and had written to him for counsel. 
 
 " I did not, indeed, understand the length to which your 
 views were carried when I saw you here, or I should have 
 asked you much more about them than I did ; and your 
 present letter leaves me still thus far in the dark that I do 
 not know whether you only have a strong conviction that 
 there is such a message to be received from all things, or 
 whether in any sort you think you have understood and can 
 interpret it, for how otherwise should your persuasion of 
 the fact be so strong? I never thought of such a thing 
 being possible before, and now that you have suggested it
 
 JOHN RUSKIN 123 
 
 to me I can only imagine that by rightly understanding as 
 much of the nature of everything as ordinary watchfulness 
 will enable any man to perceive, we might, if we looked for 
 it, find in everything some special moral lesson or type of 
 particular truth, and that then one might find a language in 
 the whole world before unfelt like that which is forever 
 given to the ravens or to the lilies of the field by Christ's 
 speaking of them. This, I think, you might very easily 
 accomplish so far as to give the first idea and example ; then 
 it seems to me that every thoughtful man who succeeded 
 you would be able to add some types or words to the new 
 language, but all this quite independently of any Mystery 
 in the Thing or Inspiration in the Person, any more than 
 there is Mystery in the cleaning of a Room covered with 
 dust of which you remember Bunyan makes so beautiful a 
 spiritual application, so that one can never more see the 
 thing done without being interested. If there be mystery 
 in things requiring revelation, I cannot tell on what terms 
 it might be vouchsafed us, nor in any way help you to greater 
 certainty of conviction, but my advice to you would be on 
 no account to agitate nor grieve yourself nor look for 
 inspiration for assuredly many of our noblest English minds 
 have been entirely overthrown by doing so but to go on 
 doing what you are quite sure is right ; that is, striving for 
 constant purity of thought, purpose and word : not on any 
 account overworking yourself especially in headwork but 
 accustoming yourself to look for the spiritual meaning of 
 things just as easily to be seen as their natural meaning; 
 and fortifying yourself against the hardening effect of your 
 society, by good literature. You should read much and 
 generally old books ; but above all avoid German books and 
 all Germanists except Carlyle, whom read as much as you 
 can or like : read George Herbert and Spenser and 
 Wordsworth and Homer, all constantly; Young's "Night 
 Thoughts," Crabbe and, of course, Shakespeare, Bacon and 
 Jeremy Taylor and Bunyan ; do not smile if I mention also
 
 124 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 " Robinson Crusoe " and the " Arabian Nights," for standard 
 places on your shelves. I say read Homer : I do not know 
 if you can read Greek, but I think it would be healthy work 
 for you to teach it to yourself if you cannot, and then I 
 would add to my list Plato but I cannot conceive a good 
 translation of Plato. I had nearly forgotten one of the chief 
 of all Dante. But in doing this, do not strive to keep 
 yourself in an elevated state of spirituality. No man who 
 earnestly believed in God and the next world was ever 
 petrified or materialised in heart, whatever society he kept. 
 Do whatever you can, however simple or commonplace, in 
 your art; do not force your spirituality on your American 
 friends. Try to do what they admire as well as they would 
 have it, unless it cost you too much but do not despise 
 it because commonplace. Do not strive to do what you feel 
 to be above your strength. God requires that of no man. 
 Do what you feel happy in doing: mingle some physical 
 science with your imaginative studies ; and be sure that God 
 will take care to lead you into the fulfilment of whatever 
 tasks he has ready for you, and will show you what they 
 are in his own time. 
 
 " Thank you for your sketch of American art. I do hope 
 that your countrymen will look upon it, in time, as all 
 other great nations have looked upon it at their greatest 
 times, as an object for their united aim and strongest efforts. 
 I apprehend that their deficiency in landscape has a deep 
 root the want of historical associations. Every year of your 
 national existence will give more power to your landscape 
 painting then, do you not want architecture 1 Our chil 
 dren's taste is fed with Ruins of Abbeys. I believe the 
 first thing you have to do is to build a few Arabic palaces by 
 way of novelty one brick of jacinth and one of jasper. . . . 
 
 "Write to me whenever you are at leisure and think I 
 can be of use to you with sympathy or in any way, and 
 believe me always interested in your welfare and very 
 faithfully yours, J. RUSKIN."
 
 JOHN RUSKIN 125 
 
 I could not quote from his published works so 
 condensed a summary of the creed of the man: 
 it maintains the supremacy of the moral element 
 which has obtained in his life-work taken as a 
 whole. 
 
 That comparatively few people have read the 
 "Fors Clavigera" I know, for, having occasion to 
 complete my set not long since, I found that 
 several of the numbers supplied me by the 
 publisher were from the first thousand, published 
 years ago; and yet, this is the work which more 
 than any other gives us a clear insight into the 
 character and mental tendencies of Ruskin. He 
 is here at his ease, not bound by any preposses 
 sions and theories; wayward, outspoken, indif 
 ferent to praise or blame; speaking with full 
 possession of himself and frank appreciation of 
 his audience, addressing himself " to the workmen 
 and labourers of Great Britain," not so much in 
 the hope that they would come to fill his school, 
 but because he knew that only by the poor and 
 the despised by the great world was there any 
 hope of the reconstruction of society, as he 
 dreamed it, being effected or accepted. The drift 
 of all Ruskin's preaching (and I use the word in 
 its noble sense) is a protest against materialism 
 in ourselves, impurity in our studies and desires, 
 and selfishness in our conduct towards our fellow- 
 men. 
 
 He considers himself the pupil of Carlyle for 
 me, he floats in a purer air than Carlyle ever 
 breathed. As a feminine nature he was capti-
 
 126 JOHN BUSKIN 
 
 vated by the robust masculine force of his great 
 countryman, and there was, in the imperial theory 
 of Carlyle, much that chimed with Ruskin's own 
 ideas of human government. The Chelsean, re 
 gretfully looking back to the day of absolutism 
 and brutal domination of the appointed king, was, 
 in a certain sense, a sympathetic reply to Ruskin's 
 longings for a firm and orderly government when 
 he felt the quicksands of the transitional order 
 of the day yielding under his feet ; but, in reality, 
 the two regarded Rule from points as far re 
 moved from each other as those of Luther and 
 Voltaire. Carlyle's ideal was one of a Royal 
 Necessity, an incarnate law indifferent to the 
 crushed in its marchings and rulings burly, 
 brutal, contemptuous of the luckless individual 
 or the overtaken straggler; his Rule exists not 
 for the sake of humanity, but for that of Order, 
 as if Order and Rule were called out for their 
 own sake; he puffs into perdition the trivial 
 details of individual men, closing accounts by 
 ignoring the fractions. Ruskin loses sight of no 
 detail, but calls in to the benefit of his Order 
 and Rule every child and likeness of a child in 
 larger form, full of a tenderness which is utterly 
 human yet inexhaustible. Carlyle's Ruler is like 
 a Viking's god, his conception utterly pagan; 
 Ruskin's is Christlike ; Carlyle's word is like the 
 mace of Charlemagne, Ruskin's like the sword of 
 the Angel Gabriel ; if Ruskin is notably egotistical, 
 Carlyle is utterly selfish ; if Ruskin dogmatises like 
 an Evangelist, Carlyle poses as a Prophet; and
 
 JOHN BUSKIN 127 
 
 the difference, when we come to sum up all the 
 qualities, moral, intellectual, and literary, seems 
 to me to be in favour of Ruskin. Their ideals 
 are similarly antithetical Ruskin's lying in a 
 hopeful future, an unattainable Utopia, perhaps, 
 but still a blessed dream; Carlyle's in a return 
 to a brutal and barren past, made forever impos 
 sible by the successful assertion of human indi 
 viduality, and for whose irrevocability we thank 
 God with all our hearts and in all hope of human 
 progress. The public estimate has not overrated 
 Ruskin, just as he had not overrated Turner, 
 because the aggregate impression of power re 
 ceived was adequate to the cause; but in the one 
 case, as in the other, the mistake has been relative, 
 and consisted in mis-estimating the genius and 
 attributing the highest value to the wrong item 
 in the aggregate. I may be mistaken in my 
 estimate of Ruskin, but I believe that the future 
 will exalt him above it rather than depress him 
 below it.
 
 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 
 
 IT has been repeatedly said in my hearing, by 
 men who had come to know Lowell personally, 
 after having known his works, that he was better 
 than anything he had done. No one knew this 
 so well as those who knew him best. I made 
 my acquaintance with his works in the days of 
 early artistic enthusiasms, when I used to visit 
 the studio of William Page, the poet's intimate 
 friend and ardent admirer, to whose almost 
 inspired (oracular, certainly) improvisations on 
 art and poetry I used to listen till my young 
 blood ran quick, and my own enthusiasms made 
 me see what was never to be seen again, even in 
 dreams. Page used to recite Lowell's poems 
 with his own commentary, so subtly fantastic at 
 times that it made one think he had taken part in 
 the composition of the poet's text, or thought he 
 had, at least. I only remember as then in print 
 the volume of early poems, and the Sir Launfal in 
 a small separate volume. There was much in the 
 poems which appealed powerfully to the green 
 and sentimental stage of mental growth in which 
 I then was, and I learned most of them by heart, 
 together with the Sir Launfal. I spent the 
 following autumn at a lighthouse on the coast 
 of New England, studying the sea in its multi- 
 
 128
 
 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 129 
 
 form phases, and the two volumes were all the 
 literature I carried with me. But I remember 
 saying, about that time, to a common friend of 
 Page and myself, that the author wanted only 
 the ripening of a great sorrow to bring out his 
 greater powers. The poems seemed to me, even 
 then, only the overflow of a mind so full of poetic 
 thought that verse flowed from it as water from 
 a deep spring, giving out what would run to 
 waste if not turned to some direct use. 
 
 It was not long after this that my criticism 
 was to be tested by life. Lowell's wife died, 
 leaving him in that gloom from which came the 
 series of short poems, to my mind the best ex 
 pression of the finest side of the man's nature 
 "The Wind-Harp," "Auf Wiedersehen," "Palinode," 
 " Ode to Happiness," and " The Dead House," * 
 expressions of the passion of bereavement at 
 work in a strong and healthy nature, not crushed, 
 but bowed down; for he was under the influence 
 of a sane and elastic sorrow which did not 
 paralyse, but turned his mental activity to the 
 presentation of the overpowering passion, genuine, 
 pure, and without a trace of the artifice or 
 inflation of the aftermath of grief. The only 
 thing that I know in English poetry which affects 
 me similarly, is the "Break, break, break" of 
 
 * There are, amongst the poems written previous to this date, two 
 which are of the same passion, and due to the death of his little 
 daughter Rose. But even in those there is a measure of restraint, 
 as if the bereavement were tempered by participation. They do not 
 go to the very depths of the man's nature as do the " Wind-Harp " 
 and " Ode to Happiness." 
 
 I
 
 130 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 
 
 Tennyson, and there the freshness of passion has 
 given place to the consciousness of art and the 
 study of form. It was in this phase of his life 
 that I made Lowell's acquaintance. 
 
 I was about commencing the publication in 
 company with John Durand, son of a former 
 president of the Academy of Design of an art 
 journal, The Crayon, and went to Cambridge 
 to solicit the assistance of those writers whose 
 work in any way sympathised with the object of 
 our journal. If I remember rightly, I had no 
 letter of introduction, but presented myself on 
 the strength of my mission, and was received by 
 Lowell with the princely courtesy which was his 
 manner. I was full of my project, which seemed 
 to me, in my enthusiasm, evangelical; for I was 
 set to preach and labour for the revival of art, 
 and he accepted me on my own ground, with 
 entire sympathy. One of his letters, written a 
 little later, when our acquaintance had ripened 
 into friendship, has such a significance as a revela 
 tion of the state of his mind at that time, that 
 I do not believe I need apologise for introducing 
 it, though it is very personal to me; it would 
 not tell its story if I left out the personal part. 
 I wanted something of his for the opening 
 number of the paper, and he had sent me a 
 passage from his "Pictures from Appledore," 
 which he entitled "August Afternoon." I wanted 
 him to be on board at "the launch," and I had 
 also a poem of Bryant's, that called "A Rain 
 Dream" in his published volume; but the scheme
 
 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 131 
 
 of the journal did not admit more than one such 
 notable contribution in each number, so I had to 
 choose between Bryant and Lowell as the poet 
 of the occasion. It is to this that he alludes in 
 the letter. 
 
 GKUB STREET, 1th Dec'r, 1854. 
 
 MY DEAR SIR, I am sorry to have kept your 
 proofs so long, but I was absent from home the 
 day they came. 
 
 I don't know now whether I sent you the right 
 part of the poem, but I wished to give you the 
 most paletty part first; and I am now so over 
 whelmed with lectures and Grub Street that I 
 have literally not time to copy the introductory 
 verses describing the island. But, my dear sir, 
 if Bryant has given you a poem, you should put 
 that in your first number, by all means. It will 
 do you more good than many of mine, and your 
 first duty is to your Crayon-child, wherever you 
 are not obliged to sacrifice any principle to it. 
 Don't mind me in the least, /wish your journal 
 to succeed. Remember that success is the only 
 atmosphere through which your ideas will look 
 lovely to the public you wish to influence. Bryant's 
 name will help you more than mine; therefore, 
 take him first. Not that I like to give up my 
 place on board at the launch, either, for I am 
 sure it will be a graceful one. 
 
 You mustn't talk of Christmas gifts and things. 
 I shall think you mean to keep me in Grub Street 
 in spite of myself. [I had intended to send his 
 daughter something for Christmas, and suppose
 
 132 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 
 
 I must have asked some question about her tastes.] 
 I positively will not be paid in any way, if I may 
 say so after being more than paid by your beauti 
 ful drawings, which M. likes as well as I do, and 
 declares a preference for the larger one, " On the " 
 
 I can't make out the name, but I shall call it 
 
 the Lethe, that drowsy water with tree-dreams 
 in it, so smooth and sleek and soaked with sun, 
 it seems a drink of it would quench the thirst of 
 all sad memories. Only, no Lethe can, for we are 
 our own saddest memories a hundred a day. 
 I thank you for them most heartily, and for 
 your letter as well. 
 
 I am glad you had a pleasant time here. / 
 had, and you made me fifteen years younger 
 while you stayed. When a man gets to my age, 
 enthusiasms don't often knock at the door of his 
 garret. I am all the more charmed with them 
 when they come. A youth full of such pure 
 intensity of hope and faith and purpose, what 
 is he but the breath of a resurrection-trumpet to 
 us stiffened old fellows, bidding us up out of our 
 clay and earth if we would not be too late? 
 
 Your inspiration is still to you a living mistress ; 
 make her immortal in her promptings and her 
 consolations by imaging her truly in art. Mine 
 looks at me with eyes of paler flame and beckons 
 across a gulf. You came into my loneliness like 
 an incarnate aspiration. And it is dreary enough 
 sometimes; for a mountain peak, on whose snow 
 your foot makes the first mortal print, is not so 
 lonely as a room full of happy faces from which
 
 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 133 
 
 one is missing forever. This was originally the 
 fifth stanza of "The Wind-Harp": 
 
 " tress that so oft on my heart hath lain, 
 Rocked to rest within rest by its thankful beating, 
 Say, which is harder, to bear the pain 
 Of laughter and light, or to wait in vain, 
 'Neath the unleaved tree, the impossible meeting ? 
 If Death's lips be icy, Life gives, I wis, 
 Some kisses more clay-cold and darkening than his ! " 
 
 Forgive me, but you spoke of it first. [I had in 
 a letter spoken of "The Wind-Harp," which he 
 had read to me, on my visit already alluded to, in 
 its then incomplete state.] 
 
 I have done better than send you a poem; I 
 have got you a subscriber. On this momentous 
 topic I shall enlarge no further than to say that 
 I wish to be put on your list also in my capacity 
 as gentleman, and not author. I will not be dead 
 headed. I respect my profession too much. . . . 
 
 Heartily and hopefully yours, 
 
 J. R. LOWELL. 
 
 It is forty -five years since that letter was 
 written, but I can never read it again without 
 the reflection, pale though it be, of the pathos 
 which rests on that visit to his study when he 
 read me " The Wind-Harp," and we sat silent long 
 into the twilight of the autumn day, the bare 
 boughs of the elm-trees outside his windows 
 cutting against the sky; and his little daughter 
 came in after her lessons. When she left the 
 room, I spoke of the delicate chiselling of her
 
 134 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 
 
 features, and he replied by pointing to her 
 mother's portrait on the study wall. 
 
 Perhaps I overrate my own way of looking at 
 Lowell, but in that letter there seems the ex 
 pression of his character, writ large. Out of the 
 depth of the shadow over his life, in the solitude 
 of his study, with nothing but associations of his 
 wrecked happiness permitted around him, the 
 kindly sympathy with a new aspiration wakened 
 him to a momentary gaiety, his humour flashed 
 out irrepressible, and his large heart turned its 
 warmest side to the new friend, who came only 
 to make new calls on his benevolence ; that is, to 
 give him another opportunity to bestow himself 
 on others. There is in it the generosity, the 
 pathos, the subtle humour, the worldly wisdom, 
 and the self-forgetfulness which we who knew 
 him recognise, drawn against the dark back 
 ground of his bereaved life. There was in Lowell 
 no distinction to be found between the man and 
 the poet. What he wrote he felt. No line of his 
 but was the glow of what he felt and acted to 
 his fellow-men. It is possible, therefore, that for 
 us who knew him, and to whom his sunny nature 
 showed its warmest side, it is impossible to see 
 his work as it will be seen by those who did not 
 know him. It would be quite impossible for me 
 to criticise Lowell's work as I could that of a 
 man I never knew; the halo of his personality 
 surrounds the object of criticism and makes the 
 critical vision indistinct. I loved the man with 
 a passion no other man had ever awakened in
 
 135 
 
 me, one which often recalled to me the love of 
 David for Jonathan. 
 
 The letter, at this long distance, confounds 
 itself with the visit which preceded it. I had 
 stayed with him at Elmwood, and we had talked 
 of many things which provoke confidence, had 
 visited his favourite bits of landscape in the 
 classic fields, Beaver Brook, the Waverley Oaks, 
 etc., and, in the dusk of the day, chance, or some 
 spiritual induction, had led him into speaking of 
 his griefs, charily, half apologetically; and when 
 a man can speak of his griefs to another, there 
 are two ties established, one of a sympathy in 
 them, and the other of that lightening of the 
 soul from the putting them into words, which 
 seems to incur an obligation where really one is 
 conferred. It was in this confidence that he read 
 me the " Ode to Happiness," the first full ex 
 pression of his sorrow he had made to me ; and 
 I quite broke down, and stole to the window to 
 hide my tears. Perhaps certain trivial troubles 
 of my own, but which, at the time, seemed to me 
 as grave as death, put me in tune with his mood, 
 and so our friendship found its first minor chord. 
 
 Nothing would have induced me to take his 
 advice and give any other the place I intended 
 for him at "the launch," so the first number of 
 The Crayon contained the bit of his " Appledore " 
 study, of which he sent me two more fragments 
 later on. He took the liveliest interest in the 
 paper as long as I remained at the head of it, 
 and, amongst other things, wrote for it the
 
 136 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 
 
 " Invita Minerva," in the proof - correcting of 
 which he allowed himself one of the quaint, and 
 to my mind delightful, bits of eccentric diction 
 he was so fond of, but rarely indulged in. The 
 second line, which in the collected poems stands, 
 "The pennon'd reeds, that, as the west wind blew," 
 
 was so written originally; but, in the correction 
 of proof, was changed to "in the west wind blue," 
 and was so printed in The Crayon. 
 
 The next letter I have from him for the 
 minor letters and the manuscripts seem all to 
 have gone to the autograph-hunters is dated the 
 week after The Crayon had been launched. I have 
 no recollection of what I had written, but I do 
 remember that on reading the "Auf Wiedersehen," 
 printed in one of the magazines of the day 
 I think Putnam's, I sent him some verses which 
 that poem called out, and in which, possibly, I 
 had tried, not to console, for the folly of that I 
 even then knew, but to mingle a sympathetic 
 pain with his. 
 
 ELMWOOD, llth Jan. 1855. 
 
 MY DEAR FRIEND, I fear you have thought me 
 very cold and ungrateful not to have answered 
 sooner (if it were only with God bless you) your 
 very kind and tender letter. I cannot say more 
 of it than that it came to my heart like the 
 words of a woman. I need not write how en 
 tirely grateful I am for it. 
 
 I have delayed writing till I found a chance to 
 copy some more "Appledore" for you. I have sent
 
 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 137 
 
 a tolerably long bit this time, for I suppose you 
 will like something to fill up as much as may be. 
 So, look upon it as a large canvas that will at 
 least cover bare wall. I have had your two 
 drawings framed, and they hang up now on the 
 inside of my door, and please everybody that 
 sees them, me above all. 
 
 I have been fearfully busy with my lectures ! 
 And so nervous about them, too ! I had never 
 spoken in public. There was a great rush for 
 tickets (the lectures were gratis), only one in five 
 of the applicants being supplied, and altogether 
 I was quite taken aback. I had no idea that 
 there would be such a desire to hear me. 
 
 I delivered my first lecture to a crowded hall 
 on Tuesday night, and I believe I have succeeded. 
 The lecture was somewhat abstract, but I kept 
 the audience perfectly still for an hour and a 
 quarter. (They are in the habit of going out at 
 the end of the hour.) I delivered it again yester 
 day to another crowd, and was equally success 
 ful ; so I think I am safe now. But I have six 
 yet to write, and am consequently very busy and 
 pressed for time. 
 
 I felt anxious, of course, for I had a double 
 responsibility. The lectures [before the Lowell 
 Institute] were founded by a cousin of mine, and 
 the trustee is another cousin ; so I wished not 
 only to do credit to myself and my name, but 
 to justify my relative in appointing me to 
 lecture. 
 
 It is all over now, and as far as the public is
 
 138 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 
 
 concerned I have succeeded ; but the lectures 
 keep me awake and make me lean. 
 
 I am quite sensible now that I did not do Mr. 
 Bryant justice in the Fable. But there was no 
 personal feeling in what I said, though I have 
 regretted what I did say because it might seem 
 personal. I am now asked to write a review of 
 his poems for the North American. If I do, I 
 shall try to do him justice. 
 
 I think he has been more fortunate in Flemish 
 pictures than I, if he does not find in "Apple- 
 dore" a sentiment that is wanting in them. One 
 of the best fragments is yet to come. . . . 
 
 Yours, J. R. LOWELL. 
 
 His allusion to Bryant was due to my having 
 told him that the latter was always a little sore 
 at Lowell's treatment of him in the Fable for 
 Critics, and especially at the lines which became 
 a commonplace of criticism : 
 
 " If he stir you at all, it is just, on my soul, 
 Like being stirred up with the very North Pole ; " 
 
 and as, just before taking charge of The Crayon, 
 I had been on the staff of Bryant's Evening Post 
 and on friendly terms with the poet, I had 
 become aware of the impression, and desired to 
 efface it. The opportunity occurred a little later, 
 on the occasion of Lowell's departure for Europe, 
 when I gave him a dinner in New York, to 
 which I invited Bryant ; and seating them to 
 gether, with no regard to precedence (they had 
 never seen each other before), I left them to
 
 139 
 
 themselves. Though there were of the company 
 Charles Sumner, C. F. Briggs (Harry Franco), 
 Whipple, Bayard Taylor, and other of Lowell's 
 old friends, he devoted himself to Bryant the 
 entire evening, and completely fascinated him. 
 Anxious to gather the elder poet's impression, 
 I left Lowell and Taylor at Oscanyan's Cafe 
 smoking their nargilehs, and walked home with 
 Bryant, soon satisfying myself. The criticism of 
 Bryant on the "Appledore," in which he spoke 
 of it as like a Flemish picture in its fidelity, 
 was not intended to be one of disparagement, 
 though Lowell so regarded it. 
 
 Those who have no acquaintance with the 
 literary life of the day I am dealing with, can 
 hardly understand how limited then was the 
 range of Lowell's possession of the public. It 
 was usual, amongst his friends, to speak of him 
 as the "most Shakespearean man since Shake 
 speare"; but, by the American public even, he 
 was hardly held as more than a brilliant dilet 
 tante. His carelessness of the form of his earlier 
 work, his evident slight estimation of it, and the 
 extraordinary ease with which it was thrown off, 
 all contributed to this impression. The Biglow 
 Papers were political squibs, of the true position 
 of which, as literature, no one then had a just 
 conception, blown about as the papers were in 
 the winds which grew to the great tempest of 
 our civil war, and they were read with partisan 
 eyes. The Fable for Critics was limited in its 
 range of audience, and, treated as a controversial
 
 140 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 
 
 and personal jeu cTesprit, attacked and defended 
 without serious study; while the serious poems 
 were so unequal, and, as he afterwards recognised, 
 in some cases so unworthy his powers, that they 
 diminished the impression of the mass of his work. 
 He set so little value on what cost him no labour 
 for he wrote verse more easily than prose 
 that he never gave himself the trouble of polish 
 ing or pruning, and the early volume contains 
 much that is juvenile and open to sharp criticism, 
 rendered all the more certain by his own pungency 
 as critic. He knew his own value, as we know 
 it now, but it was the value in posse which he 
 felt; for his work of the moment he had little 
 concern. Had he held more conceit of his verse 
 and more anxiety about public opinion, he cer 
 tainly would have suppressed much of his early 
 work, to his better reputation in later years. The 
 lectures referred to in the letter last quoted 
 showed him in another light, and justified the 
 faith of his friends in his large intellectual posses 
 sions. They drove him into deep water, and he 
 was obliged to swim in mare magno; their pre 
 paration involved work which, in his melancholy 
 and loneliness, was necessary to bring him out of 
 the morbid condition into which he had fallen 
 when I first knew him. He had become hypo- 
 chondriacal, and, at the time of my first visit, had 
 begun to nurse imaginary ills, and brooded much 
 by himself, with a hopeless feeling as to his 
 future condition, which he made no effort to 
 throw off. The lectures forcibly brought him up
 
 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 141 
 
 out of the depths, and he resumed his normal life. 
 With all his strength of feeling and impulsive 
 activity, his was too healthy a nature to remain 
 long in morbid conditions, and once he had set 
 about resisting them he rapidly returned to 
 healthy work. On the 25th of January, a fort 
 night later than the last letter, he wrote me: 
 
 ". . . I came very near forgetting my proof 
 sheets altogether, but I have delivered five of my 
 lectures now, and on Friday shall have half 
 finished my course. Meanwhile, I have only a 
 week's start, so that I have to work hard; what 
 with inevitable interruptions. . . . 
 
 "Do not think that I feel the less interest in 
 you and yours because I write such scrawls. I 
 am not used to being tied to hours or driven. 
 I have always waited on the good genius, and he 
 will not come for being sent after by express; so 
 I am in a feeze half the time." 
 
 And a few days later, but without date except 
 "Elm wood," he says: 
 
 "I shall have done grinding for the Philistines 
 next Saturday, and it will give me, I need not 
 say, the greatest pleasure to see you. ... I have 
 been meaning for some time to write you a word, 
 merely to say that Longfellow told me the other 
 day that he would send you the first poem he 
 had that was suitable for your purpose. Perhaps 
 he has written; if not, I shall be glad to be the 
 herald. 
 
 "You will like to hear (but it is at present a 
 semi -secret) that I am to be nominated next
 
 142 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 
 
 Thursday to fill Longfellow's place in the college. 
 It was all very pleasant, for the place sought me, 
 and not I it. 
 
 "I have only to deliver two courses of lectures 
 in the year; have all the rest of the time to my 
 self, and the salary will make me independent. 
 If the overseers of the college confirm the ap 
 pointment of the Corporation (of which there 
 is little doubt), I shall go abroad for a year to 
 Germany and Spain to acquire the languages. 
 
 "So, by the time you come, I shall probably be 
 Professor Lowell, at your service, and shall expect 
 immense respect in consequence. Take care after 
 that how you squire or mister me. I have not 
 discovered the dulness of The Crayon, and only 
 hope its point will be sharp enough to draw the 
 public. If I go to Berlin, I will send you some 
 sketches of the gallery there. Spain, too, is rich." 
 
 He was so scornful of money, when his friends 
 were concerned, that he seemed to be independent 
 of his labour; but we see the satisfaction with 
 which he welcomes the independence of the 
 salaried professor, and I am sure that the greater 
 feeling in his own mind was that he could afford 
 to be more generous. I never heard him speak 
 of money except to refuse to be paid it, and in 
 the above communication. At that moment of 
 my life, I was perhaps better prepared to be 
 liberal with him than he with me, but any com 
 pensation beyond a drawing or study from nature 
 was always absolutely refused to the last of our 
 journalistic relations ; and when, later in life,
 
 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 143 
 
 fortune left me on the shoals, he insisted on 
 putting me, on occasion, on my feet again, with 
 all the love of a brother and the delicacy of a 
 poet, and always with some excuse of an unex 
 pected good fortune which he wished to partake 
 with some one. 
 
 "Greater than anything he ever did," they used 
 to say; but how much greater, and how much 
 nobler than any work can be, no one knows so 
 well as I. His heart ran even with his brain, and, 
 when there was a chance, outran it. He had twin 
 faults: he under-estimated his own work, and 
 tinted that of his friends with the colours of his 
 esteem. In one of the exhibitions of our National 
 Academy, I had a large study of a bit of Adiron 
 dack forest and lake, of which one of the critics 
 had spoken in strongly damnatory terms, and 
 Lowell wrote me of it: 
 
 ELMWOOD, 2lst May 1855. 
 
 MY DEAR FRIEND, "It being granted that the 
 earth is a hollow cube " " But I beg your pardon, 
 my dear sir, I granted no such thing." "Well, 
 then, it being necessary to the purposes of this 
 argument that the earth should be a hollow cube, 
 which is precisely the same thing, I go on to 
 demonstrate," etc. 
 
 Now, what does he mean by saying that your 
 picture is "an unpleasingly grouped assemblage 
 of unpleasing natural objects?" Is a hemlock 
 trunk unpleasing? Is the silvery-grey bole of a 
 sloping birch unpleasing? Is the beech stem, 
 plashed with wavering pools of watery sunshine,
 
 144 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 
 
 unpleasing? And pray tell me how, in a picture, 
 a thing can be " literally rendered." There is no 
 such matter possible. The closer the imitation, 
 in giving rounded or irregular shapes, perspective, 
 etc., on a flat surface, the greater have been the 
 difficulties overcome, and the greater the imagina 
 tion in being able to see things as they truly are, 
 and not as they seem. To make a model of a 
 beech stem is quite another affair. We would 
 rather have a section of the real thing. Is there 
 not a difference even in daguerreotypes in favour 
 of the man who is enough of an artist to choose 
 the right moment and point of view? And even 
 were the tree trunk a deformed one, were it ever 
 so ugly, mis-shapen, warty, scrofulous, carious, 
 what you will, it is one of the curious psycho 
 logical facts that it is yet not unpleasing. For, 
 while any lusus naturce in anything that breathes 
 is hateful, a fanciful resemblance to the diseases 
 and deformities of animal life in anything that 
 merely grows appeals at once to our sense of the 
 odd, the humorous, the grotesque; or else is not 
 disagreeable, because it is a likeness upward and 
 not downward. But this glances toward a deeper 
 deep, and I forbear. Anyhow, I like your picture 
 and the idea of it ; only, you must make interest 
 with Aquarius to water your lake a little. But 
 
 " When they talked of their Raphaels, Correggios, and stuff, 
 He shifted his trumpet, and only took snuff." 
 
 Or, let me translate a proverb from the Feejee 
 dialect :
 
 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 145 
 
 " That which we like, likes us : 
 No need of any fuss." 
 
 Nay, take this other, which I this moment copy 
 from the walls of a house just unburied at 
 Pompeii : 
 
 " Perchance the thing I banish, me expels; 
 Be chary, ostracizer, of your shells ! 
 Madman, thou deem'st thyself sublimely free, 
 And ly'st on straw in that crampt cell of Thee." 
 
 Or, perhaps, this is a better translation of the last 
 couplet : 
 
 " Thou deem'st thyself a King, poor crazy elf, 
 Chained to the wall of that crampt cell, Thyself." 
 
 The Feejee Islanders (who love curried Calvinists 
 and minced missionary) and the Pompeians (who 
 got up such suicidal fireworks for the entertain 
 ment of Admiral Pliny) knew a thing or two, 
 nevertheless ! 
 
 It is a glorious, blue, north-westerly sky; the 
 oak woods are pink with buds; the linnets, cat 
 birds, fire-hangbirds, and robins are all singing 
 hymeneals to the Spring, and she trembles through 
 all her wreaths of new-born leaves and seems 
 equally pleased with each of them. She does not 
 say, "Oh, Linnet, put yourself to school with 
 Maestro Catbird," nor "Be silent, Robin, my boy, 
 till you can sing like Signer Robert of Lincoln." 
 Per Bacco ! did not brave Masaccio paint St Peter 
 right in the streets of Florence, working a miracle 
 with vulgar Florentines all about him, and did 
 not Raphael and Michael say that the Brancacci 
 
 chapel was their school ? . . . 
 
 K
 
 146 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 
 
 In a letter of a little earlier date (10th of May 
 1855) he gives another instance of his constant 
 thoughtfulness for others : 
 
 "... I saw Longfellow yesterday, and reminded 
 him of his promise to send you a poem; and he 
 renewed it, but said that he had not anything he 
 liked well enow to send. I told him that it did 
 not much matter for a long poem, and that his 
 name would be of service to The Crayon now that 
 it was seeking an introduction to the world. I 
 know that he means rightly, and only hope that 
 he will send you something while it can be of 
 commercial advantage to you. Don't be shocked 
 at my market-place view of the thing; I feel as 
 wise as a woman when I find anybody with a 
 beard who seems a worse manager than I, and 
 one has a right to be shrewd for his friend. Mean 
 while, I send you some verses of my own, which 
 you may like or not, as you please. They are very 
 much at your service if you want them, and per 
 haps Professor Lowell's name may be of use. . . . 
 As soon as we have a leaf or two I shall expect 
 a visit from you. I will write and let you know 
 when our winter is over. Our spring is like 
 that delicacy, a frozen plum pudding, which cheats 
 every uninitiated person into an impromptu tooth 
 ache. It looks as if it ought to be hot, and it is 
 Nova Zembla focussed." 
 
 Following these letters there is a wide gap in 
 my file. I have no memorandum of the time 
 of his sailing for Germany, but in the letter of 
 May 10th he says, "Think of anything I can do
 
 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 147 
 
 for you on the other side. I go to Germany first " ; 
 and the next letter I have is dated from Dresden. 
 I was overworked on The Crayon, and he on his 
 German studies ; for he was not a man to do less 
 than his utmost when he had accepted his duty. 
 But this is dated October 14, 1855, and shows 
 already the renewed intellectual activity at full 
 swing. The wit and humour, which in our first 
 acquaintance only flashed out in intervals of gloom, 
 begin to take the upper hand again. 
 
 . . . You may lay it to anything you like, except 
 my having forgotten you, that I have not written 
 sooner. I have thought of you only too much, 
 for I wished, when I wrote, to send you something 
 for The Crayon-, and not finding aught to write 
 about, you began to haunt me and shake your 
 printer's-inky locks at me only, unhappily, the case 
 was the reverse of Banquo's, since thou couldst 
 say I'd not done it. Now, this would not do. I 
 would not have a friendship which I value so much, 
 more than any contracted in these later years, 
 associated with any uneasy thought. So I resolved 
 to lay the ghost at once, as we can all blue ghosts 
 that haunt us, in a sea of ink. What have I to 
 say that I had not a month ago ? Nothing ; but 
 then I will write and manfully say so. I can, at 
 least, tell you how warm a feeling I have towards 
 you, and that is something. But for The Crayon ? 
 That we will see presently. First, I must thank 
 you for the likeness of yourself, which you may 
 be sure I am glad to have with me, and for your
 
 148 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 
 
 letters. Only, why so short? One would think 
 you were writing across Broadway instead of the 
 Atlantic. But I will give it a good turn by think 
 ing that you do not feel me far away from you, 
 as truly I am not. About Griswold and the rest 
 of it I understand nothing, and care as little, unless 
 for its troubling you. When I get over here, it is 
 the Styx that is between me and America. I have 
 drunk Lethe water to wash down Nepenthe with, 
 and have forgotten everything but my friends, 
 like a happy shade. What care we careless spirits 
 for what troubled us in the flesh ? " My little 
 man," says Wordsworth to Pope, when they meet 
 in the Fortunate Islands, " I am sorry to say " 
 the wretch ! he is not sorry a bit " that your 
 poems are not so much read as once." " My what ? 
 Ah ! poems yes, I think I did write some things 
 once. And so they don't read 'em, eh ? Tis all 
 one for that I wouldn't read 'em myself. Come 
 in, Mr a a I beg your pardon ah, Woodwarth ? 
 Yes, come in, Mr Woodwarth, and try the Lethe : 
 'tis the best spring in the place; and you will 
 meet some eminent characters in the pump-room." 
 So it goes. Give yourself no more trouble about 
 the picture. As it is one, I suppose I may say 
 hang the picture ! But I dare be sworn you have 
 forgotten all about it by this time. 
 
 But for The Crayon what have I seen? Why, 
 I have seen the Van Eyck at Ghent, and liked it 
 so well that I have never a word to say about it. 
 And I saw the Memlings at Bruges what a place 
 it is! a bit of Italy drifted away northward and
 
 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 149 
 
 stranded like an erratic boulder in Flanders and 
 I liked those so well that I am equally dumb there- 
 anent. And I saw the Rubenses in Antwerp, 
 which have all been skinned alive by the restorers, 
 and which they have put into a little room fenced 
 off from the cathedral, so that they may get a 
 franc out of every stranger who comes there 
 the Jews ! " Is not my Father's house a house of 
 prayer? But ye have made it a den of thieves." 
 There has been great power and passion in those 
 pictures Rubens is a poem translated out of Low 
 Dutch into Italian ; but in the little doghole where 
 they are, one cannot see them. What was meant 
 to be seen at forty feet shall one see at fifteen ? 
 Offer a man a magnifying-glass to look at an 
 elephant with ! Somehow I feel inclined to say 
 "He was a great gentleman, that Rubens," but 
 great man seems a little too much. But great he 
 surely was in some sense or other you feel that. 
 Then I saw all the Dutch pictures at the Hague ; 
 but I think that Rembrandt, the greatest imagina 
 tion these low countries ever produced, is better 
 seen here in Dresden, than at the Hague. As for 
 Paul Potter's famous Bull, it is no more to be 
 compared with Rosa Bonheur's Horse Fair than 
 a stuffed and varnished dolphin with a living one. 
 Here there are some wonderful pictures. Titian's 
 Tribute-Money is marvellously great ; the head 
 of Christ the noblest and most pathetic I have 
 ever seen, full of a magnificent sadness. There is 
 also a truly delicious Claude, and deep rock-em 
 bedded bay so liquidly dark and cool ! There is a
 
 150 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 
 
 Holy Family by Holbein, too, pathetically prosaic. 
 I forgot to speak of an Albert Diirer at the Hague, 
 a portrait of the future emperor (Maximilian, I 
 think) as a child of three years, with an apple in 
 his hand instead of the globe of empire which 
 was afterward, if I remember, so heavy for him. 
 Is it not a pretty fancy? But I have really got 
 something for The Crayon this is not, but must 
 wait till next week's mail an account of a visit 
 I made to Retsch. It is late now, and I am not 
 in a good mood, either. I have heard bad news 
 not of M., thank God! 
 
 You might make an item out of this that the 
 King of Saxony allows no copies to be made in 
 the gallery, in order that the artists here may 
 choose original subjects and paint them out of 
 their own experience. Also Bendemann (their 
 best painter here) is making a good picture, very 
 pure and classic, out of the meeting of Ulysses 
 with Nausicaa, in the Odyssey. But I must say 
 good-night and God bless you! I have so much 
 writing of German to do that my eyes can't bear 
 much night work, and it is near twelve. Sunday 
 is my only holiday. Next week, then. . . . 
 
 The visit to Retsch never came. Lowell always 
 planned more than any mortal man could do; he 
 laid schemes of work like bridges with one abut 
 ment in time and the other in eternity. He had 
 too much to do, and I, on the other side, became 
 so overborne by my editorial duties The Crayon 
 going to leeward all the time then that our
 
 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 151 
 
 correspondence flagged. The next word I have 
 from him shows the man overworked and de 
 jected, but doing his duty to his position. 
 
 DRESDEN, 18th Feb'y 1856. ' 
 
 MY DEAR FRIEND, I reproach myself bitterly 
 for not having sooner answered your letter, but 
 what is the use of spurring an already beaten- 
 out horse ? What energy can self-reproach com 
 municate to a man who has barely resolution 
 enough to do what is necessary for the day, 
 and who shoves everything else over into the 
 never-coming to-morrow? To say all in one 
 word, I have been passing a very wretched 
 winter. I have been out of health and out of 
 spirits, gnawed a great part^ of the time by an 
 insatiable home-sickness, and deprived of my 
 usual means of ridding myself of bad thoughts 
 by putting them into verse ; for I have always 
 felt that I was here for the specific end of 
 learning German, and not of pleasing myself. 
 
 Just now I am better in body and mind. My 
 cure has been wrought by my resolving to run 
 away for a month into Italy. Think of it 
 Italy ! I shall see Page and Norton and the 
 grave of our little Walter.* I can hardly believe 
 that I am going, and in ten days. 
 
 What you tell me about The Crayon, you 
 may be sure fills me with a very sincere regret. 
 It does not need to tell you how much interest 
 
 * Lowell's little boy, who died at Rome, and is buried in the 
 Protestant cemetery there.
 
 152 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 
 
 I took in it and you; and, what is better, my 
 interest in it was not that merely of a friend of 
 yours, but sprang from a conviction that it would 
 do much for the aesthetic culture of our people. 
 I am very sorry on every account that it is to be 
 given up. I had hoped so much from it. It is a 
 consolation to me that you will be restored to 
 the practice instead of the criticism and exposi 
 tion of art, and that we shall get some more 
 pictures like the one which took so strong a 
 hold of me in the New York exhibition. I shall 
 hope to become the possessor of one myself, after 
 I get quietly settled again at Elmwood with 
 the Old Man of the Sea of my first course of 
 lectures off my shoulders. You must come and 
 make me a visit, and I will show you some nice 
 studies of landscape in our neighbourhood, and 
 especially one bit of primitive forest that I know 
 within a mile and a half of our house. 
 
 I have been studying like a dog no, dogs don't 
 study, I mean a learned pig this winter, and I 
 think my horizon has grown wider, and that when 
 I come back I shall be worth more to my friends. 
 I have learned the boundaries of my knowledge, 
 and Terra Incognita does not take so much space 
 on my maps. In German, I have every reason 
 to be satisfied with my progress, though I should 
 have learned more of the colloquial language if 
 I had had spirits enough to go into any society. 
 But already the foreboding of Italy fills me with 
 a new life and soul. I feel as if I had been living 
 with no outlook on my south side, and as if a
 
 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 153 
 
 wall had been toppled over which had darkened 
 all my windows in that direction. Bodily 
 and spiritually I have suffered here with cold, 
 but, God be thanked, it will soon be over. 
 
 My great solace (or distraction) has been the 
 theatre, which is here excellent. I not only get a 
 lesson in German, but I have learned much of the 
 technology of the stage. For historical accuracy 
 in costume and scenery, I have never seen any 
 thing comparable. An artistic nicety and scrupu 
 lousness extends itself to the most inconsidered 
 trifles in which so much of illusion consists, and 
 which commonly are so bungled as to draw 
 attention instead of evading it by an absorption 
 in the universal. 
 
 If I had known that I was going to London, 
 I should have been extremely pleased to have 
 made the acquaintance of Ruskin. But my jour 
 ney thither was sudden and flighty, and I saw 
 nobody except Hogarth, Turner, and Rembrandt. 
 Hogarth's Marriage a la Mode and Rembrandt's 
 Jacob's Dream, at Dulwich College, gave me 
 invaluable suggestions. 
 
 It will not be long now, I hope, before I see 
 you at Elmwood; for you must make me a 
 visit as soon as I get warm in my study again. 
 It is all Berg ab now, and I shall ere long feel 
 the swing of our Atlantic once more. The very 
 thought revives me. We seaboard fellows cannot 
 live long without snuffing salt water. Let me 
 hear from you in Italy; tell me what you are 
 painting and all about yourself. As soon as I
 
 154 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 
 
 am myself again, I shall try to make my friend 
 ship of some worth to you. But always I am 
 your affectionate friend, 
 
 J. R. L. 
 
 The next gap in the correspondence is one of 
 over a year. I do not remember, and have no 
 record of the time, when he married his second 
 wife, Frances Dunlap; but the revolution she 
 brought about in his life had begun before his 
 friends knew the causes of it. She was one of 
 the rarest and most sympathetic creatures I have 
 ever known. She was the governess of Lowell's 
 daughter, when I first went to stay at Elmwood, 
 and I then felt the charm of her character. She 
 was a sincere Swedenborgian, with the serene 
 faith and spiritual outlook I have generally found 
 to be characteristic of that sect ; with a warmth 
 of spiritual sympathy of which I have known 
 few so remarkable instances; a fine and subtle 
 faculty of appreciation, serious and tender, which 
 was to Lowell like an enfolding of the Divine Spirit. 
 The only particular in which the sympathy failed 
 was in the feeling that she had in regard to his 
 humorous poems. She disliked the vein. It was 
 not that she lacked humour or the appreciation 
 of his, but she thought that kind of literature 
 unworthy of him. This she said to me more than 
 once. But, aside from this, she fitted him like the 
 air around him. He had felt the charm of her 
 character before he went to Europe, and had begun 
 to bend to it ; but, as he said to me after his mar-
 
 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 155 
 
 riage, he would make no sign till he had tested 
 by a prolonged absence the solidity of the feeling 
 he had felt growing up. He waited, therefore, 
 till his visit to Germany had satisfied him that it 
 was sympathy, and not propinquity, that lay at 
 the root of his inclination for her, before declaring 
 himself. No married life could be more fortunate 
 in all respects except one they had no children. 
 But for all that his life required she was to him 
 healing from sorrow and a defence against all 
 trouble, a very spring of life and hope. A letter 
 from Cambridge (May 14, 1857) must have been 
 written in the interval between his return from 
 Germany and this change in his life, for he had 
 begun his work at the university. 
 
 ... I am glad you do not forget me, though I 
 seem so memoryless and ungrateful. I shall be 
 better one of these days, I hope. While my 
 lectures are on my mind I am not myself, and 
 I seem to see all the poetry drying out of me. 
 I droop on my rocks and hear the surge of the 
 living waters, but they will not reach me till 
 some extraordinary springtide, and maybe not 
 then. . . . 
 
 When you come, I wish you to come straight 
 here. We can house you for a while [he was 
 then living with his friend, Dr Estes Howe, in 
 Cambridge, Elmwood having been let for a 
 term] at any rate, and the word "board" is 
 hateful to me. Just now there is a sister of 
 Mrs here, with the biggest baby that ever
 
 156 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 
 
 was seen. If the nurse were in proportion, the 
 house would have to be greatened. And there 
 is also the biggest (and nicest) young lady from 
 Ohio. So where could I put you at night, unless 
 I hung you up or leaned you up in a corner, like 
 a beau as you are? But the drift of things will 
 go on, and they will float away on it before 
 long, and then there will be a bed, and that 
 will be better. I will let you know when. I 
 shall be jolly and companionable by that time, 
 which I was not when you were here before, 
 for I could think of nothing but the lectures 
 which were before me. Perhaps you were right 
 about it and I have no business here. How 
 ever, we die at last and go where there are no 
 lectures. 
 
 The apple-trees are in blossom, but I have 
 hardly had time to see them. Horse-chestnuts are 
 in leaf, and linnets and robins sing; but there 
 are not so many birds here as at Elmwood 
 not so many anywhere as there used to be, and 
 I think the cares of life weigh on them so that 
 they can't sing. We have had only a day or 
 two of warm weather yet. Spring seems like 
 an ill-arranged scene at the theatre that hitches 
 and won't slide forward, and we see winter 
 through the gaps. Bring May with you when 
 you come remember that. Tell me what your 
 plans are, and when you have arranged to come 
 hitherward and when you would rather. . . . 
 
 Your affectionate 
 
 J. R. L.
 
 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 157 
 
 In the next letter there are landmarks of our 
 separate journeys in life. Lowell had married 
 Miss Dunlap ; we had made our first excursion 
 to the Adirondacks; the Atlantic Monthly had 
 been founded, with Lowell as its editor. I had 
 become his contributor, as he had been mine. 
 In one of my letters after his marriage, I had 
 written to congratulate him, saying that I had 
 already written one letter (probably on hearing 
 of the engagement) and had suppressed it, as too 
 enthusiastic and perhaps boyish. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE, 28th October 1857. 
 
 MY DEAR STILLMAN, Thank you for your 
 letters, especially that from the dear old Adiron 
 dacks. Though written in pencil, it did my 
 heart more good than my eyes harm, only it 
 made me homesick to be back again 
 
 "A chasing the wild-deer and following the roe." 
 
 Your last I ought to have answered a week 
 ago; but when I stop payment of letters I do it 
 altogether, and, like a man of honour, allow no 
 favoured creditors. 
 
 I should like the article very much. Make it 
 about >ix or seven pages (print), and at the same 
 time be as lively and as solid as you can. You 
 may have full swing. This is like ordering so 
 many pints of inspiration, eh ? as if Castaly 
 were bottled up like Congress water and sent 
 all over the country for sale. Well, never mind, 
 make it as good as you can. Instructive articles 
 should be sweetened as much as possible, for people
 
 158 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 
 
 don't naturally like to learn anything, and prefer 
 taking their information as much as they can 
 in disguise. 
 
 Why did you not send me the enthusiastic 
 letter you say you suppressed? I should have 
 been delighted with it. For God's sake, don't 
 let your enthusiasm go! it is your good genius. 
 When we have once lost it, we would give all 
 the barren rest of our lives to get back but a 
 day of it. Your letter would have hit in the 
 white, too, for I am as happy as I can be, and 
 thank God continually. I have known and 
 honoured my wife for years, but I find some 
 new good in her daily. So you may be as warm 
 as you like in your congratulations. . . . 
 
 Affectionately yours, 
 
 J. K. LOWELL. 
 
 I think it was in the summer of the next year 
 that I went to Cambridge to live, and was 
 thenceforward mainly divided in my occupations 
 between the Adirondacks and the vicinity of 
 "the Oaks" at Waverley until I went to Europe, 
 in the autumn of 1859. Each summer we made 
 an excursion into the Adirondacks, and formed 
 the club which took its name from that region. 
 Under the circumstances, few letters passed be 
 tween us, for we were not long without seeing 
 each other until I went abroad. Lowell was 
 indeed very happy in his married life, and 
 amongst the pictures Memory will keep on her 
 tablet for me, till Death passes his sponge over
 
 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 159 
 
 it once for all, is one of his wife lying in a long 
 chair under the trees at Dr Howe's, when the 
 sun was getting cool, and laughing with her low, 
 musical laugh at a contest in punning between 
 Lowell and myself, hand passibus cequis, but in 
 which he found enough to provoke his wit to 
 activity; her almost Oriental eyes twinkling with 
 fun, half closed and flashing from one to the 
 other of us; her low, sweet forehead, wide 
 between the temples; mouth wreathing with 
 humour; and the whole frame, lithe and fragile, 
 laughing with her eyes at his extravagant and 
 rollicking word-play. One would hardly have 
 said that she was a beautiful woman, but fasci 
 nating she was in the happiest sense of the 
 word, with all the fascination of pure and 
 perfect womanhood and perfect happiness. 
 
 In those days the boy was still riotous in 
 Lowell ; and, until the war came, with its heart 
 breaking for him and his, and he entered into 
 the larger sphere of public affairs, the escapades 
 of his overflowing and juvenile vitality were 
 irrepressible. In the Adirondacks he cast off 
 all dignity, was one of the best and most 
 devoted shots with the rifle, but proposed to 
 introduce, by regulation, archery for our deer- 
 hunting. He was the life of the company, al 
 ways running over with fun and contrivance of 
 merriment. I remember once, coming home from 
 Boston with those members of the Saturday Club 
 who lived in Cambridge Agassiz, Howe, Holmes, 
 Lowell, and others, that in the midst of a grave
 
 160 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 
 
 discussion between Agassiz and himself upon 
 the authority of the Scriptures, Lowell, pass 
 ing through the exit from the college grounds, 
 vaulted suddenly on one of the great stone 
 columns, clapped his hands to his sides, gave a 
 lusty cockcrow, and hopped down again to pursue 
 the argument, insisting on the admission of the 
 Psalms amongst the inspired books. Nothing 
 human was foreign to his sympathies. He 
 knew that I really loved him and was grateful 
 for it; and, though I continually offended his 
 sense of fitness and decorum, doing things 
 wanting in tact and refinement, in sheer and 
 green, if belated, boyishness and want of judg 
 ment, he never took offence, but treated me 
 as a younger brother; for he understood my 
 feeling for him, uncouth as were its forms at 
 times; and his benevolence towards me never 
 faltered, though the diverging circumstances of 
 our lives carried us farther and farther apart. 
 His bitter griefs and bereavements during and 
 following our war, his troubles, personal and 
 patriotic, his absorption later in official duties, 
 the accumulating burdens which would have 
 crushed the energies of a smaller man, left his 
 serenity undisturbed; even the disgusting attacks 
 of the Irishry and the politicians, on account of 
 his action in England, only raised a philosophic 
 sarcasm. He was so much "greater than any 
 thing he ever did" that I would rather every 
 line he ever wrote were blotted from my memory 
 than that I should forget the days I spent at
 
 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 161 
 
 Elmwood, or those we spent in the greenwood 
 of the Adirondacks; but one and the other 
 locality, like all those in which I knew him, 
 are forever lonely and desolate to me. 
 
 The latest word I have from him was written 
 from the Legation in London, in answer to one 
 inquiring if he had received a bit of Albanian 
 work I had sent him from Montenegro, a new 
 tip to the sheath of a yataghan of some rare 
 and early Albanian silver work, which I had sent 
 him before, but which then lacked its original 
 tip. It is dated 7th of March 1882. 
 
 . . . Yes, my dear Stillman, the tip of the sheath 
 arrived safely, and is thought very pretty, although 
 it does not come up to the old work, and could 
 not fairly be called on for such a feat in practical 
 aesthetics. We like it. 
 
 You have learned to be satirical in the neigh 
 bourhood of the Aristophanic Theatre, but I shake 
 off your sarcasms, not as the lion, but as the 
 duck the dewdrop from his back. I may fairly 
 answer in the Gospel words, "silver and gold 
 have I none," for I am so near my wit's end that 
 I have neither speech nor silence, or feel so, at 
 least. [I had written to ask him to exchange some 
 of his golden silence for a little silver speech.] 
 
 But I had enough sentiment left to be a good 
 deal upset by the story of your murder [a telegram 
 from Cettinje had announced that I had been 
 decapitated in Albania], though I did not believe 
 it. I hate the electric telegraph worse than ever,
 
 162 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 
 
 If you come across an ancient statue, send it 
 me by post, and I will pay you in the metal with 
 so much of which you credit me. Mrs Lowell 
 sends her kindest regards, and I remain 
 Affectionately always yours, 
 
 J. R. LOWELL. 
 
 The handwriting begins to show age it is 
 tremulous, and the letters are writ large. Death 
 only, if even death, could extinguish the kindly 
 thought, the fine sense of humour, the affectionate 
 fidelity to the past and its ties; nothing had 
 changed in him to the last. WTien last I saw 
 him, shortly before his recall from London, he 
 certainly showed the signs of age, but I think 
 less than I; the kindly caress in his voice, the 
 flash of humour in his eye, the masterhood in 
 his port, were there as I had known them thirty 
 years before. Wrinkles and grey hair were there, 
 and the tremulousness of the hand in writing; 
 but the mind, though sobered by such sorrows 
 as few men bear, was as serene and spiritual 
 as ever. I could imagine that he laboured under 
 his dispensations as a good ship in a storm, 
 burying his head at times under the wave, but 
 rising to it, shaking off the weight, and keeping 
 on. 
 
 Sufficient time has gone by since the death of 
 Lowell for the world to begin to form a judg 
 ment on the poet, unbiassed by his influence as a 
 man oh those around him ; but to those who, like 
 myself, lived in unrestrained intimacy with him,
 
 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 163 
 
 this judgment is impossible, and I will not profess 
 it. Yet it seems to me that he stands as the most 
 perfect representative of the American of New 
 England which has appeared i.e., the American 
 as he resulted from the hereditary qualities of 
 the Mother-country developed under the surround 
 ings in which New England became a nation, and 
 before the influences born in the war of secession 
 had begun to transform it to what it now is. Be 
 it for better or for worse, the United States is 
 not what it was in the days when Lowell grew 
 up, when the struggle between principles and 
 policies was still fierce and the slavery question 
 made men conscious of a moral responsibility in 
 the nation, the sense of which has now, it seems 
 to me, died out. The change may be, as Lowell 
 hoped, and as we will hope, one of growth, one 
 in which the ultimate character is hidden in the 
 process of metamorphosis, and the final form may 
 be what the passionate patriotism of Lowell pre 
 figured it in his Commemoration Ode : 
 
 "O! Beautiful my Country ! ours once more, 
 Smoothing thy gold of war-dishevelled hair 
 O'er such sweet brows as never other wore, 
 
 And letting thy set lips, 
 
 Freed from wrath's pale eclipse, 
 The rosy edges of their smile lay bare. 
 What words divine of lover or of poet 
 Could tell our love and make thee know it 
 Among the nations bright beyond compare ? " 
 
 and if not, then Lowell remains as the best fruit 
 on a tree prematurely blasted. To me, perhaps, 
 in the blindness of a friendship of whose extremity
 
 164 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 
 
 he was completely worthy as well as of what 
 was much better, he seems the shadowing forth, 
 as the type of the possible future American, bred 
 from the best of the world's stock, in the largest 
 of the world's pastures, and destined, if the destiny 
 of the world is towards perfection, to justify the 
 faith of Americans in their stock. But this is, 
 perhaps, too far away even for those who read this 
 to be able to say whether I am a true prophet or 
 not; it seems to me that my country is, at any 
 rate, destined to become the greatest state or the 
 greatest failure of all time; and, in the former 
 case, Lowell will be remembered as the first in 
 time of the citizens of its Parnassus. I have 
 known, loved, and even more, reverenced Emerson ; 
 have known well Longfellow, Holmes, Bryant, and 
 most of the men who in that moment of our 
 national existence made it eloquent, but Lowell 
 was, I think, the one most completely and largely 
 American. 
 
 I doubt if any foreigner to the land, and, per 
 haps, even the American of the future, could feel 
 the presence in what Lowell has left of a certain 
 crisp naivet^, which suggests his Hosea Biglow 
 rubbed through the university a freshness which 
 in a curious way suggests to me the bloom on 
 an untouched and scarcely ripe plum, or what 
 to an extreme classicist may seem want of polish, 
 but which is really the New England impatience 
 at convention, and, if you will, the evidence of 
 the stage of unripeness of the national culture of 
 his day (though it was not always present), and
 
 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 165 
 
 which seems to conventional criticism the indica 
 tion of crudity in the poet. I think it was in 
 him largely due to a feeling that what was best 
 was what was most spontaneous, and that it 
 was to be spoiled, not finished by the retouching, 
 that the poet was to be brought to perfection 
 in the whole, and not by labour over the parts, 
 and by isolated efforts. If, and when, the educa 
 tion was complete the instantaneous work would 
 show it, seemed to me to be his feeling. He 
 said to me once, and this was after his return 
 from Germany, "I must read and study more 
 before I return to production," as if he felt that 
 in the future the mould must be polished and 
 not the casting. 
 
 His sense of the beauty of American landscape 
 was intense, more so I am persuaded even than 
 Bryant's, though less in the nature of landscape 
 painting, and more as background for human 
 interest, like a distance of Titian's. The passage 
 from the Vision of Sir Launfall: 
 
 "A single crow from his tree-top bleak 
 From his shining feathers shed off the cold sun," 
 
 is to me the best image of the New England winter 
 I have ever read, and the picture of the winter- 
 palace in the same poem, though of a mingled 
 fancy and imagination, like so much of Lowell's 
 poetry, is a study in the marshes of the Charles 
 River meadows at a winter low-tide, with the 
 thermometer at Zero Fahrenheit. And what was 
 in his work the best painted landscape, was, un-
 
 166 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 
 
 mistakably, American subject ; the bracing winter, 
 the rapid and bursting spring, the Indian summer, 
 are all treated as not even Bryant would or could 
 have treated them. It was enough that a thing 
 was peculiarly American that he should love it 
 with all his heart ; not in chauvinistic narrow 
 ness of feeling and no one who knew him in 
 England could doubt that but in the passionate 
 preference for his childhood's surroundings, which 
 was willing to see in the crudeness of the New 
 England landscape, with its rail fences and its 
 white - painted farmhouses and its utilitarian 
 uniformity, the bare canvasses on which his 
 fancy painted the memories of boyhood, and in 
 which all that was most tender in the past, of 
 mother and son, of wife and husband, of the 
 graves where he laid his first-born, and 
 
 "That blinding anguish of forsaken clay" 
 
 which was his first bereavement every form and 
 phase of all that was material around him was 
 in this wise mixed with the purest passions human 
 nature is capable of. Through all the home-poems 
 Lowell has left runs this golden thread of sun 
 shine from the sun which shone in the days of 
 a pure and exalted youth, whose dreams and 
 memories are better and dearer than the realities 
 of the most prosperous later life. In the warmth 
 of this light all Lowell's imagery is more or less 
 steeped, and the landscape which the landscape 
 painter turns from as beyond pictures, was the 
 ever-beautiful world in which Lowell lived. It
 
 167 
 
 may be the fancy of one to whom the man was 
 dear as woman, but to me the passionate purity 
 of Lowell's life glows in his poetry; and this, as 
 well as other associations which are beyond im 
 parting, blind the critic in me. 
 
 " What words divine of lover or of poet 
 Could tell our love and make thee know it ? "
 
 THE DECAY OF ART 
 
 THAT no grave inquiry into the causes of the 
 decline in art in modern times should have taken 
 place at a time when scientific investigation 
 ranges over every branch of human cognitions, 
 is only to be explained by the conviction held 
 even in highly organised political communities, 
 that art in general has no especial function in 
 a national life, and may be left out of the curri 
 culum of the citizen of the world and he be 
 none the worse citizen for it, or that art is 
 merely the representation of nature's facts and 
 so simply the accessory to science, and as such 
 comprehended in it. But we have the unques 
 tionable fact that every nation which has pro 
 gressed beyond the most primitive barbarism, 
 has, before beginning that phase of civilisation 
 which is characterised mainly by the accumula 
 tion of superfluities, been most intensely interested 
 in and largely influenced by not only poetry and 
 music, but that process of beautifying one's self 
 and surroundings which is the vital principle of 
 art. "Ornament was before dress," and the daily 
 lives of innumerable artists prove that a man may 
 be content with deprivation of a serious character 
 and be happy even in unrecompensed devotion 
 to art; the ambition of life satisfied with vic- 
 
 168
 
 THE DECAY OF ART 169 
 
 tories that have no victims, and gains that make 
 no one the poorer. It is a question philosophy 
 may well take up in earnest : how far the strain 
 of modern life, the inordinate inequalities in 
 society, and the extravagance of large classes of 
 it, might be modified by restoring the arts, as 
 far as cultivation can accomplish it, to the in 
 fluence they held in the life of Greece in 500 
 to 400 B.C., and more or less as long as the 
 Greeks remained free. It is perfectly true that 
 art has seen some of its best phases coinciding 
 with a debauched social condition and a degraded 
 national life; but, in these cases, the art itself 
 became rapidly debauched and formal, as did re 
 ligion; but no art ever originated in debauchery 
 or, in its noblest alliances, long survived a healthy 
 intellectual activity, more or less accompanied by 
 moral soundness. In the best art of a demoral 
 ised people there are visible the symptoms of 
 decomposition moral gangrene. 
 
 That art is, and always has been, in a sense, 
 the exponent of the real character of a nation 
 is a fact noted by philosophers and writers on 
 art for a long time. That if the life shapes the 
 art, there must be in some degree a counter- 
 influence of the art over the life, seems to be 
 settled by the laws of cause and effect, as well 
 as that that influence might, under favour 
 able circumstances, prove analogous to that of 
 literature, and equally important in its cultiva 
 tion. What is certain is, that in our veritable 
 life, the purely mental existence, the elements
 
 170 THE DECAY OF ART 
 
 which comprise the various forms of pleasure 
 are, the normal activity of the intellectual 
 powers, and the perception of beauty. 
 
 The question which arises, and which it is rash 
 for any man to offer a reply to, is this : Has 
 modern life become so differentiated from that 
 of the early stages of human existence that the 
 influence of beauty and the dependent influence 
 of art become no longer essential to the health 
 ful progress of the human intellect ? And beyond 
 this lies a question to which Plato gives an un 
 hesitating answer: Whether beauty be not the 
 chief witness to man's immortality? a motive of 
 greater moment, if such a thing could be shown, 
 than his present content. 
 
 I indicate this scope of a possible inquiry partly 
 to show its possible importance, and partly to indi 
 cate the particular branch of it which I wish now 
 to examine. Why have the arts of design steadily 
 and everywhere fallen off in excellence and in 
 fluence in modern times? On the philosophical 
 side it would be easy to answer that it was due 
 to the materialism of the modern life; but this, 
 while perfectly true, is still a remote cause, be 
 cause we have, in individual cases, found gross 
 materialism in the artist not inconsistent with 
 grandeur and great power in his art. A certain 
 analogy between religion and art is found in 
 the relation of both to modern scientific research. 
 The spirit of exact inquiry, arxl the limitation 
 of our cognitions to material and demonstrable 
 phenomena, is waging war on that entire range
 
 THE DECAY OF ART 171 
 
 of spiritual faculties, perceptions, emotions, on 
 which all religious systems have been founded 
 and in which lie the true roots of art. Is the 
 decay of art due to the same tendencies ? If yes, 
 is it not clear that the official and collective 
 efforts to restore art are as futile for this restora 
 tion as those of state churches to reform our 
 morality? Nevertheless, there is to most minds, 
 even scientific, an indefinable and inevitable re 
 cognition of something, beyond and above, which 
 has not fallen under these attacks and which we 
 must find out. 
 
 But science and nature cannot go wrong. In 
 the light of positive knowledge and physical de 
 monstration we cannot regret beliefs whose bases 
 are disproved. It is useless to shut out light. If 
 we must face the destruction of the ideal, let us 
 accept the inevitable with at least the courage of 
 the ignorant and fanatic, and not waste strength 
 in defence of delusions. Yet there is, perhaps, 
 more danger in the too hasty deduction of truth 
 from phenomena than in delaying our adhesions 
 to what seem well-proved facts. We have always 
 a right to wait, and, remembering past revolu 
 tions of thought, to question finality in human 
 discovery ; while admitting, as an abstract ques 
 tion, that exact science must lead ultimately to 
 final truth. And convinced of this, I still believe 
 in Religion, and, as I am not without hope that 
 Science may some day show us immortality, and 
 that matter is not all, so I trust that we shall 
 find even in the Actual the proof that the Ideal
 
 172 THE DECAY OF ART 
 
 is something better and nobler than the Actual's 
 accidental results, and that Art is no more bound 
 to follow Nature than Religion to serve Science. 
 
 I have no intention here to attack this compli 
 cated and contested question, and have thus far 
 approached it only to show on what ground and by 
 what analogies, amongst others, the legitimacy and 
 supremacy of subjective or ideal art can be sup 
 ported. For at present we have to deal with two 
 distinct forms of so-called art, of which the elder 
 and true form, the subjective, is an art of ex 
 pression, whereof the vital quality is that it shall 
 convey, not the facts and actual phenomena which 
 constitute the anatomy of nature, but the emotions 
 and impressions of the artist, in which all the 
 visible forms are but the symbols of language 
 in which the artist, without any restriction of 
 realistic fidelity, shall show forth what he con 
 siders artistic truth or ideal beauty in any of its 
 related forms of positive or negative. The other 
 form, objective, or realistic art, which is entirely 
 the development of the naturalistic spirit, depends, 
 for its relative value and standing, upon the fidelity 
 which it shows to natural phenomena it is the art, 
 if it be art, of facts and physics, of the anatomist, 
 the geologist, the botanist, and the portraitist. 
 The methods, the appeals, the faculties, and the 
 results of these two are antithetical they are 
 related as science and poetry, or, to use a less 
 generally comprehensible, but by genuine art 
 students perfectly understood, comparison, as Truth 
 and Fact; one free with all the liberty of the
 
 THE DECAY OF ART 173 
 
 imaginative life, and the other bound in obedience 
 to the accidents of nature. It is the former of these 
 which has fallen into decay and which is the 
 subject of our inquiry. But en passant, I will call 
 attention to the fact which explains itself, that the 
 noblest technique has arisen in the art of expres 
 sion, and that, for certain forms of it, we have to 
 seek the highest in antique or Renaissance art. 
 
 The realistic or naturalistic art is a purely 
 modern conception. It had been long foreshadowed 
 by a literary movement, whereby the great in 
 tellectual interest has gradually shifted from the 
 epic to the pictures of society and humanity in the 
 modern novel. The popular literature had its in 
 termediate phase of romanticism like art, and has 
 finally, like it again, settled down to questions of 
 realism; but, as poetry preceded art by unknown 
 centuries, so its ultimate development into the 
 realism, which seems the chief interest of the 
 modern intellect, long preceded the corresponding 
 development of art. 
 
 The parallel offers interesting study for thinkers 
 on all the forms of thought-development, but what 
 is of especial interest from the point of view which 
 it is my intention to take, is the important bearing 
 it ought to have on the questions of art education, 
 in which our society seems to hold so high but so 
 unintelligent an interest. The question at issue 
 is practical : I am persuaded that a complete ex 
 planation of the reason of this decay would 
 ultimately lead, firstly, to a true understanding of 
 the proper and unique value of the arts of design
 
 174 THE DECAY OF ART 
 
 and visible appeal ; and, secondly, to a measurable 
 restoration to their true and productive channels 
 of the energies and appreciation which in other 
 ages gave us an art, compared to which ours is a 
 pigmy. 
 
 This decadence can be disputed by no one with 
 the most moderate knowledge of art or feeling 
 for it. It does not consist merely in the sinking 
 of the ideal standard, or the incidental variation 
 of national temperament; it is shown in the 
 most purely technical qualities, as well as the 
 intellectual. There were men who painted con 
 temporaneously with, or immediately after, the 
 great Renaissance painters, whom we scarcely 
 know by name, yet whose work is frequently 
 confounded with that of their great masters 
 merely on account of its technical excellence. 
 Without any intellectual dignity, it shows an 
 executive power and excellence of method which 
 no painter of our time can equal; and, even in 
 work absolutely unassignable to any known 
 painter, we find examples of such a thorough 
 mastery of the material and power of hand as 
 would give any living painter distinct precedence 
 in modern art. 
 
 It is no answer to these statements to say that 
 our age does not want what past ages demanded 
 and accepted as the best; that Titian's work 
 would not find purchasers if done to-day; and 
 that no one would go to see the Sistine Chapel 
 if a living painter had painted it the fact re 
 mains that no one to-day can do the work of
 
 THE DECAY OF ART 175 
 
 Titian even with Titian's doing of it before him, 
 and that no man living can match a study of 
 Michael Angelo for one of his figures, not to 
 speak of his Sistine Chapel. 
 
 I will not go back to Greek sculpture, whose 
 supremacy no one contests, but only to that 
 lovely and faithful dream of it which came with 
 the Italian Renaissance in the works of the 
 Pisani, Mino Da Fiesole, Donatello, Michael 
 Angelo, Giovanni da Bologna, all men who had 
 caught the spirit of Greek art however much 
 they faltered and wavered in giving it form, and 
 challenge the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries 
 to show us anything born of the same heaven 
 and earth. Of the great painters of the same 
 epoch of art development we have no more a 
 single peer in the modern schools Dore for 
 Buonarotti, Makart for Veronese, Munkacsy for 
 Tintoretto, Ingres for Raphael, and Delacroix 
 for Titian. 
 
 And, in spite of all this, we pay artists as 
 artists never were paid before, unless by the 
 caprice of some reckless or imperial spendthrift 
 in exceptional cases; munificence becomes ex 
 travagance, prodigality, and what we get for its 
 highest prices is Meissonier and Millais; for 
 schools we have the Royal Academy, South 
 Kensington, the Nicole des Beaux Arts, and cruder 
 American imitations; but Meissonier stands at 
 the head of orthodox art in France, as Millais 
 did in England. Nor is it merely a question 
 of national temperament the countrymen of
 
 176 THE DECAY OF ART 
 
 Velasquez, of Rubens, of Titian, of Holbein are 
 in no other plight than we; still less is it a 
 question of decaying intellect, as the mental 
 activity of the whole race shows. Neither the 
 multitude of devotees, the intensity of application 
 of the mental capacity, the social encouragement, 
 nor the adequacy of pecuniary reward, is lacking. 
 There are many painters paid as painters never 
 were before in proportion to the art they pro 
 duce feted, courted, knighted and decorated ; and 
 the further we go in this road the more is art 
 heartless, mechanical, vain. 
 
 The reason is to seek. Science turns her back 
 on the subject, and the universities dismiss art 
 from the category of studies and pass it over 
 mainly to the painters to discourse on, ignoring 
 the psychological law that no mind can be 
 productively analytical and synthetical at the 
 same time; and the artist, being perforce a 
 synthesist, cannot be expected to analyse the art 
 which he is, if a true artist, occupied in building. 
 There is no case, except that of Leonardo da 
 Vinci, where we find high speculative or analy 
 tical power combined with great artistic gifts, 
 and this case is precisely the one which proves 
 my proposition, for Da Vinci, even in his art, 
 was a naturalist rather than a poet; he was of 
 a generation in which every form of mental 
 activity and social movement sympathised with 
 art, and especially he had, in extraordinary degree, 
 the mechanical gifts which have so great an 
 importance in technical art, and correspond so
 
 THE DECAY OF ART 177 
 
 closely in their mental position with the great 
 executive faculties of the artist, so that to him 
 painting was the most apparent outlet for his 
 energies. Had he lived in our age he had most 
 certainly been an engineer and mechanician; for, 
 even in the quality of his art, it is the scientific 
 and imitative elements which dominate, while the 
 imaginative and emotional, which, above all, dis 
 tinguish the great art of all time, are curiously 
 deficient. Of a sincerely devout though question 
 ing mind, his religion led him to art by one tie, 
 while the difficulty of then attaining to social 
 position without high birth and family influence 
 made art almost the only avenue to eminence for 
 men of great intellectual activity, disposed neither 
 to the church nor to the army. And as it was, 
 we see that his art enlisted but a small part of 
 his study, while his note-books in all their pre 
 cepts point rather to the naturalistic than the 
 artistic side of painting, though not by modern 
 methods. 
 
 Therefore it is that when we demand general 
 critical powers, and such analysis of art as is 
 necessary to evolve the laws by which its study 
 must be directed, it is quite useless to look to 
 the artists to serve us. It has, indeed, passed 
 into a common saying that an artist is never 
 a competent critic; but this, like most other 
 popular proverbs, only expresses the vulgar and 
 superficial side of the truth it relates to, the 
 truth being that, while artists are generally il 
 logical and one-sided in their appreciation of any 
 
 M
 
 178 THE DECAY OF ART 
 
 special form of art, there is no possibility of 
 being a competent critic of art without some 
 thing of that technical training which, when 
 successful in a high degree, makes the artist of 
 distinction. If we could but collect and reduce 
 to system the occasional criticisms and dicta of 
 men like Watts, J. F. Millet, Rossetti, Dela 
 croix, Burne- Jones, Th. Rousseau, etc., we should 
 have a body of precepts and criticisms such as 
 no writer on art has ever given or can ever 
 give us; but the peculiar form of intellectual 
 activity which is needed to put this corpus in- 
 scriptionum into a logical and consequent form, 
 as a code of art, is not compatible with the 
 artistic intellect. Da Vinci began such a book, 
 but it still remains in the form of notes. No 
 man not practically versed in art to such an 
 extent that he can at least measure the diffi 
 culties to be met, and appreciate the skill that 
 has overcome them; whose eye is not trained by 
 practice in drawing so that he may judge dis 
 criminatingly of the forms before him; and who 
 has not, moreover, made himself thoroughly ac 
 quainted with the body of evidence to be collected 
 from the great work of the old schools ; who 
 does not know, in fact, both nature and art by 
 intimate and special study can have any valid 
 authority in criticism of art in any form. We 
 have a much completer scientific basis for criticism 
 of music than of painting, but no one proposes 
 to write musical criticisms without mastering 
 counterpoint and acquiring some practical and
 
 THE DECAY OF ART 179 
 
 executive knowledge of the elements of music. 
 In art criticism such effrontery is of everyday 
 occurrence. 
 
 It is one thing to enumerate abstract principles 
 of criticism, which may be evolved by analogy 
 from well-ascertained parallels in other intellec 
 tual studies, and another to apply them in such 
 a way as to give sound, concrete judgments on 
 particular forms of art. Of the former kind of 
 generalisation about art, we have many excellent 
 examples in the writing of men whose opinions 
 on individual works of art are absurdly whim 
 sical and inconsequent. The name of Professor 
 Kuskin will at once be put forward as that of 
 the critic who has best fulfilled all the conditions 
 imposed on the ideal critic, and he would be a 
 rash man who contested his claim to the first 
 place, or his splendid services to modern thought. 
 But, in point of fact, and so far as the claims of 
 the highest art are concerned, he has simply 
 retarded their recognition by basing all his teach 
 ing on direct study of nature, and insisting on a 
 realistic basis for art. So far as I know, the best 
 result of practical knowledge of art, applied to 
 the elucidation of the principles of criticisms, is 
 in the works of Mr Hamerton. Sir Joshua 
 Reynolds has left us a series of lectures and 
 some fragmentary notes which are of great value 
 in the technical education of the artist, but 
 which in nowise attempt any explanation of the 
 principles of art from the logical side, or trench 
 on its philosophy.
 
 180 THE DECAY OF ART 
 
 The German philosophers have, on the other 
 hand, contributed much valuable material to the 
 study of that philosophy, and we owe to them 
 such basis for its development as we possess; 
 though, in every attempt to apply their funda 
 mental principles to education or concrete criti 
 cism, they fail through want of catholicity of 
 appreciation. We owe to them the clear state 
 ment of the fundamental distinction between the 
 elements which constitute the dualism of art, the 
 objective and subjective, as well as the formulation 
 of the science of the aesthetic. Baumgarten, to 
 whom the honour of having projected this 
 science belongs, defines it as "the theory of the 
 liberal arts, inferior to gnoseology, the art of 
 beautiful thought, . . . the science of sense cogni 
 tion." But the value of this very valid advance 
 in art philosophy was not realised by Baum 
 garten, because the nomenclature of art was, as 
 it still is, in no state to supply the terms of the 
 logical discussion. There was no definition of an 
 art which constituted a definite distinction from 
 a science. What was an art at one time became 
 a science later, and the confusion common to his 
 day betrayed him into an inconsistency which 
 now makes his essay more or less absurd. But 
 his definition of aesthetics as the science of the 
 beautiful remains to us. We are still too much 
 encumbered by the nomenclature which betrayed 
 him, and under which any definite assertion may 
 be met by another which pre-supposes an entirely 
 different conception of art. We have the fine
 
 THE DECAY OF ART 181 
 
 arts, the polite arts, the useful arts; the art 
 which is simply skill in doing anything, equiva 
 lent to the Greek TC'XVT] the secret of doing 
 anything, the rule for which becomes matter of 
 science when established. It may be a trick or 
 it may be a Greek sculpture that engages us, 
 and we may have, to discuss it, masters of arts 
 who know no art. An artist may be a Titian, 
 a Beethoven, an actor, a dancer, a singer, a 
 juggler, a pickpocket; the tailor, the milliner, 
 any workman, may be "quite an artist in his 
 way." How can we define art or the artist? 
 We must avail ourselves of that natural process 
 of differentiation in terminology which is con 
 tinually going on, and according to which the 
 leading claimants to the general rank of artist 
 are distinguished by their peculiar appellations. 
 A composer is taken to mean the writer of music, 
 a poet the writer of verse, a musician the per 
 former of music, and the performer of plays an 
 actor; even the sculptor has a range of work so 
 definite and distinct that, though no one ques 
 tions the quality of his art, he is generally 
 known as a sculptor rather than by the wider 
 term, and so a prevailing (which might well be 
 made authoritative) acceptation of the words art 
 and artist, when in nowise qualified, implies the 
 arts of design and those who follow them. Even 
 in the arts of design a common and, perhaps, 
 unconscious distinction is put forward of greater 
 or less, one painter being known as a true artist, 
 and another only as an unintelligent imitator or
 
 182 THE DECAY OF ART 
 
 copyist. This custom does not consider photo 
 graphy an art or a photographer an artist, and 
 as the work of a painter approaches the quality 
 of photography we recognise that it recedes from 
 art. 
 
 I believe this development of a more definite 
 terminology to be in accordance with the true 
 philosophy of art, and that it points to the severe 
 definition of the Artist as the Creator. 
 
 " The artist saw his statue of the soul 
 Was perfect ; so with one regretful stroke 
 The earthen model into fragments broke, 
 And without her the impoverished seasons roll." 
 
 The supreme artist is the idealist, and the imi 
 tator of nature is the artist only in a lower and 
 secondary sense, and this distinction has become a 
 differentiated conclusion in general English speech 
 and thought. Baumgarten's aesthetics, the science 
 of the beautiful, is, therefore, the science of art in 
 its restricted sense of design ; and design, in its 
 severe and only logical sense, is the creation (from 
 the material stored in the imagination) of a visible 
 ideal. We can in nowise admit to a parity with 
 the idealist any realist, no matter how trium 
 phant. The question is not one of comparison, but 
 of contrast; the distinction is radical; it is that 
 between poetry and science, the imagination and 
 simple vision. Extreme illustrations will be found 
 in J. F. Millet and Meissonier, each magnificent 
 examples of the two classes of minds, each success 
 ful in its aim, and each, alas ! a type as well of the 
 estimation in which modern society hold them :
 
 THE DECAY OF ART 183 
 
 Millet, the most subtle and masterly example of 
 the pure Greek method of approaching art, dying in 
 comparative poverty and neglect; and Meissonier, 
 the extreme manifestation of the purely modern 
 spirit, realism reduced to its last expression, 
 wealthy and idolised, the object of the shallow 
 enthusiasms of a society that hardly cares to study 
 what it admires. It is impossible, on any sound 
 theory of art, to put together work so radically, 
 as well as superficially, distinct no rules of criti 
 cism or precept of schools will embrace both. 
 
 To contribute ever so little to the clear setting 
 forth of those cardinal distinctions, which must 
 underlie all productive criticism and so aid in 
 forming a sound theory of art education, it is 
 necessary to go back to the radical distinctions 
 between these two kinds of art, and to make it 
 impossible to confound the paths of approach. It 
 may be possible to walk alternately in both if it 
 were desirable, but it ought not to be possible to 
 confound them or mistake one for the other. 
 
 Professor Ruskin, with all his power and 
 subtlety of thought (and I regard the second 
 volume of " Modern Painters " the most pregnant 
 contribution of our generation to a sound aes 
 thetic literature), has, me judice, missed the re 
 forms he had at heart by his rejection in theory 
 and practice of the fundamental distinction of 
 objective and subjective, and by his insistence 
 on rigid realisation of nature as a method of art 
 education. That element in art which makes it 
 such is not its fidelity to nature but its personality ;
 
 184 THE DECAY OF ART 
 
 the way in which the artist arranges, subordinates, 
 harmonises the material which he borrows or in 
 vents; in the majesty or sweetness of his com 
 position, the harmony and pathos or splendour of 
 his colour; all those things which in poetry, in 
 music, give rank as poet or musician. The law is 
 the same in all the arts ; it is always the subjective 
 element which determines the place of the artist. 
 In music and in poetry there is no room for 
 confusion on this subject; and, to one who will 
 reflect, it is no less clear that the whole power 
 of painting over the emotions is due to qualities 
 which are entirely independent of any question of 
 representation of natural objects. Even is it true 
 that the glow of sunset and the gloom of twilight 
 owe their fascination and the power they have over 
 the artist mainly to the liberty they give to escape 
 from the facts of nature, from the domination of 
 an inflexible materialism. If painting owed its 
 power to the representation of nature, the noon 
 day should have more value to the painter than the 
 evening, which everybody knows is not the fact, and 
 as twilight, as phenomenon, has no more value or 
 rarity than daylight, it appears that the value it 
 has is in a certain correspondence with moods of 
 the mind more grateful and potent than the 
 perception of facts. This points to a metaphysical 
 investigation, in which I do not enter farther than 
 to state my conclusion that twilight and others 
 of the greater phases of nature, which have a 
 special artistic appeal, owe it, not to the fact that 
 they are forms of phenomena, but to the relation
 
 THE DECAY OF ART 185 
 
 between them and certain moods inherent in the 
 human mind i.e., to their subjectivity, just as, 
 in a larger way, physical beauty owes its fascina 
 tion, not to its being a fact, but to its accord with 
 certain unexplained chords of human emotion. 
 
 Art is simply the harmonic expression of human 
 emotion. Where there is no emotion there is no 
 art, except in that secondary sense which has 
 been pointed out, and which relates to the primary 
 as the letter to the spirit. Nature furnishes 
 symbols but no language. The arts which are 
 the legitimate daughters of the muse are, dancing, 
 music, poetry, sculpture and painting so in the 
 order of their birth; if organic nature has been 
 called in to nurse the latter more openly than the 
 former, the parentage is nowise changed. The 
 entire quality of all art is misrepresented and mis 
 understood by any other hypothesis. The law 
 which controls the poem or symphony is the same 
 which guides the pencil or chisel of the true artist. 
 
 That all great art be it of school or individual 
 obeys this law, is capable of proof. It is only, 
 moreover, as part of human life and motive that 
 it has any claim to the consideration we give it. 
 If, as I believe to be beyond doubt, the art impulse 
 is the first of the humanities in the race as in 
 the child, then, in the highest conception of life, 
 is it equally true that art is, for the happiness of 
 the race, a necessity, and its wise fostering a part 
 of true political economy, of which human happi 
 ness is the legitimate end. Every human being, 
 in proportion as the child-like nature survives in
 
 186 THE DECAY OF ART 
 
 him, is dependent on art for his happiness, and 
 the happiest are those to whom art has longest 
 kept its realities. 
 
 This, in most men's experience of their kind, 
 is a commonplace, interpret it as we may ; but in 
 modern culture it is ignored in a twofold and 
 singular manner. Art is commonly held a too 
 trivial branch of study for adult intellects; or, 
 where provision is made for its culture, we ignore 
 the facts that its roots are entirely in the 
 emotional i.e., subjective or poetic i.e., creative 
 (iroUw, I make) faculties, and not at all in the 
 objective or scientific, which latter when cultivated 
 per se are not only antipathetic but destructive 
 to art. The scientist is the natural enemy of art 
 in every form, as the scientific tendency is to the 
 emotional, which is the indispensable aliment of art. 
 All the great schools of painting and sculpture 
 have been purely subjective in their origin and 
 development, and all have been in the former 
 purely decorative; abstract or subjective forms of 
 decoration in all cases preceding imitative or natu 
 ralistic an unmistakable indication that the earli 
 est pictorial impulse was creative and not imitative. 
 The schools grew by the sapient accumulation of 
 sound tradition and the development of the ideal 
 of beauty, always regarded originally as super 
 human. All grew up as schools of music still 
 grow, and to all these came a time when they 
 began to lean on nature-study and so on realism 
 and scientific methods of looking at nature, in 
 which were the causes of decay. No great school
 
 THE DECAY OF ART 187 
 
 ever was founded on the direct or objective study 
 of nature, nor, at its prime, was any school ever 
 guilty of it ; but the moment the subjective method 
 which was its life gave way to the objective or 
 scientific method, the art began to go down. The 
 moment of completest triumph, in which art 
 seemed to have added to its proper charm that 
 of the realistic fidelity which wins the universal 
 applause, was that in which decline began. This 
 was the epoch of Praxiteles and Scopas, of Titian 
 and Raphael ; and when, finally, at Bologna, the 
 academy model took the place of the ideal, there 
 was no longer any hope of any school of art. 
 
 The reason for this is not difficult to state. 
 The genuine creative art or ideal art is only 
 possible where there is full liberty to embody 
 distinct and homogeneous conceptions which, so 
 far as the word can be properly applied to human 
 work, are creations; and here the mental concep 
 tion must be so clear in the mind of the artist 
 that it serves the mental vision as the type of 
 which the work of art is the visible embodiment. 
 In all great design this vital quality is most 
 clearly evident ; but when constant and concurrent 
 reference to the model is kept up this is not pos 
 sible, and the slightest indication of the model 
 shown in design is immediately destructive of 
 this supreme quality of art. The great artists 
 of past ages have left us no specific declaration 
 in words of their recognition of this law, but 
 the internal evidence in their works is abun 
 dant. There can be no doubt that the Greek
 
 188 THE DECAY OF ART 
 
 sculptors never worked directly from nature, 
 but from an intimate knowledge, in which the 
 perfectly-trained eye co-operated with the habit 
 of working from an ideal developed through 
 a subtle sense of the beautiful in form, whereof 
 the complete realisation was no more to be found 
 in any visible natural type then than now. We 
 know the same to be true of Michael Angelo ; 
 and in all the work of the great painters of the 
 Italian schools, we find constant and unmistakable 
 indications that they did not work before nature. 
 Of the greatest of living idealists, and, in the 
 noble sense of art, the highest modern example 
 of the combination of its greatest qualities, G. F. 
 Watts, we have the distinct and invariable rule 
 never to work from the model in any ideal (i.e., 
 other than portrait) work. 
 
 Not only is this the immutable law of all great 
 art, but I maintain that the scientific study of 
 nature, whether as anatomy, geology, or botany, 
 is obnoxious in a high degree to the development 
 of the great qualities of design. Beauty, which 
 is the loftiest of all the attributes of art, is 
 purely a visible and therefore superficial quality. 
 To know the structure of the human body, to be 
 able to create the bones and their articulations, 
 the muscles and their insertions, is to confuse the 
 ideal perception with things which are not of 
 vision but of another kind of knowledge. We 
 know that the Greeks had no knowledge of 
 anatomy or of the use of the muscular system; 
 that they regarded the strength of the body as
 
 THE DECAY OF ART 189 
 
 in the bones to which the muscles were merely 
 protecting cushions. We can see in Michael Angelo 
 the ostentation of the anatomist showing through 
 the perception of the ideal, and marring it in spite 
 of his immense and unapproached imaginative 
 power, and in the lesser men of the school of 
 Raphael can follow the decadence that came from 
 this pride of knowledge. But, even then, the 
 habit of direct study of the subject from nature, 
 or the attempt to so represent the scene that it 
 should appear an actuality an historical tran 
 script of the scene was unknown. 
 
 The Dutch painters, though they sought the 
 most trivial details in nature, never became 
 entirely objective in their work, and only approxi 
 mately in still life. In their landscape and sea 
 pieces the colouring and rendering of detail are 
 purely conventional, and aim, not at reproducing 
 the colour of nature, but at giving harmonies in 
 various keys of grey colour, and at expressing the 
 quality of natural objects by peculiarities of exe 
 cution which are not at all inspired directly by, 
 or true to, the detail of nature. 
 
 Down to the last of the great schools, that of 
 Rembrandt, Teniers and Rubens, the deference to 
 nature, except in portraiture, never went further 
 than to make sketches from nature, in which the 
 essential qualities were recorded in such a way as 
 to leave the artist at full liberty to modify in 
 his painting either tone or form to suit his indi 
 vidual feeling. Hobbema and Ruysdael, who, of 
 all the Dutch painters, came nearest to the minor
 
 190 THE DECAY OF ART 
 
 facts of nature, clearly never painted from her 
 directly or used her otherwise than as a vehicle 
 for their ideals of composition and colour. 
 
 That true and delightful school of English land- 
 scapists which began with Girtin, was completely 
 subjective in its methods and in its appeals, and 
 is the only collective movement in English art 
 which deserves the name of a distinctive school. 
 So far as it had any artistic progenitors, it was 
 due to the influence of Claude, Poussin, and the 
 Dutch landscapists, but with a robust individu 
 ality and fresh poetic feeling which no other 
 landscape had ever shown, a near and intimate 
 inspiration from the larger qualities of unsophisti 
 cated nature, which made it more poetic than any 
 prior school of landscape had been. Turner, who 
 was its greatest master, and who attained the 
 highest expression of subjective art of his time- 
 possibly of all time was in no period of his career 
 a student of nature in the modern acceptation 
 of that term. No painter ever so nonchalantly 
 defied all the actualities, or took such startling 
 liberties with the broader verities of landscape 
 as he. It was not merely topography that he 
 upset and the mountains that he marshalled 
 about, but he outdid Joshua in the liberties he 
 took with the sun and moon. If he ever realised 
 a tint of actual nature, it was simply because in 
 his chromatic scale it happened to hit the note 
 he wanted. An audacious defiance of facts was 
 not enough ; he set at nought the larger laws, and 
 his colour from the beginning to the end of his
 
 THE DECAY OF ART 191 
 
 career was a constantly widening and complicating 
 scheme of chromatic harmonies as perfectly sub 
 jective as a symphony. Light, space, colour ; that 
 subtle synthesis of lines and forms which his most 
 influential master Claude taught him and which 
 we call composition ; modulation of tint which 
 never left a vacant space in any portion of his 
 work; orchestration as complex, as masterly, as 
 ever musician mastered these were what he 
 sought ; and if the forms of nature and her com 
 binations furnished him with the elements of his 
 work, he accepted them certainly, but with the 
 liberty which belongs to one to whom nature is 
 a useful servant, not an imperious mistress. 
 
 When the full force of the poetic tendency 
 which produced this school of English landscape- 
 painters was broken by the rise and fascination 
 of nature-painting, I do not know. The work was 
 done ere Turner died; and with him, Linnell, S. 
 Palmer, and some minor men of the same general 
 tendency, the school disappeared. It died out as 
 the Greek and the Italian schools had died, from 
 a method of study initiated by portraiture and 
 the sudden recognition of an interest in nature 
 never felt before by the general mind. The Dutch 
 painters had long held a controlling influence 
 over the dilettanti of England, as painters whose 
 work could be partially understood by men who 
 had no knowledge of art a copper kettle of 
 Ostade or Teniers gave more real pleasure to the 
 average buyer of pictures than a Madonna of 
 Raphael or Botticelli, though the Dutchman only
 
 192 THE DECAY OF ART 
 
 did such things as tours de force, and to show his 
 skill. His system of study was still more subjec 
 tive than objective; but when the modern land 
 scape and genre painter brought into painting a 
 clear unconventional way of seeing nature, and 
 uncompromising fidelity in rendering facts re 
 quiring neither knowledge of, nor feeling for, art 
 in its public, or poetic insight in its painter, it 
 developed intellectual indolence in the latter and 
 flattered the ignorance and conceit of the former, 
 and brought into existence what is commonly 
 supposed to be a rational art, but which is, in 
 reality, the negation of art. 
 
 There is one interesting phenomenon that is 
 connected with this arrival of a school of art at 
 its climax and its subsequent rapid decay, which 
 deserves explanation. In the subjective method, 
 or working " out of one's head," as the common 
 expression goes, the mind forms certain conven 
 tional modes of expression, and follows these with 
 an increasing approach to fidelity until the art 
 reaches that point which we take for the acme, 
 so near to perfection is it when seen from our 
 lower plane. Then, whether by law or by a re 
 curring chance, the artist finds his way to reali 
 sation, the more or less literal reproduction of 
 what nature puts before him generally, I believe, 
 through intellectual indolence; perhaps more or 
 less through methods induced by portraiture, and 
 persisted in on account of the charm which all 
 men have felt who ever made a faithful study 
 from nature, and which appeals to new sources of
 
 THE DECAY OF ART 193 
 
 enjoyment. In the satisfaction due to successful 
 and complete imitation lies a triumph far more 
 facile than those of the ideal method, and which 
 appeals to that general appreciation to which few 
 men are great enough to be indifferent; for the 
 artist above most men craves the appreciation 
 of his fellow-men. This change seems to have 
 occurred generally, if not invariably, at the close 
 of long periods of purely artistic activity, and 
 after rapid increase of civic and individual pros 
 perity, when the comparatively uneducated taste 
 of the community at large was the court to which 
 the artist appealed. Then, with this lowered 
 standard and sacrifice of the ideal, nature became 
 the mistress of the school, and the old way and 
 the old insight departed. Art was no longer 
 expression, poetry, but a representation, a simula 
 tion, more or less earnest, of an actuality: first, 
 history, sacred or profane or commonplace; and 
 so in time came genre, story-painting, etc., etc., 
 with much pride in rendering of stuffs and 
 illusions, of light and shade, descending to a kind 
 of intelligent photography. 
 
 And so it happens that in our time we have only 
 sporadic cases of the true method of the study 
 of art, and that beside them occurs a form of art 
 which was never known in the days of the ideal 
 art viz., the strictly historical, of which Ford 
 Madox Brown was in England the most con 
 spicuous example, and of which much might be 
 said, but by me at present only that it relates 
 to the art of the ideal, the supreme art whose 
 
 N
 
 194 THE DECAY OF ART 
 
 loss we deplore, as history does to poetry and 
 music. 
 
 That the inspiration is not extinct, we have 
 proof in our own days, in France, in Delacroix, 
 J. F. Millet in intellectual ability quite the peers 
 of the men of the great schools in America, in 
 Allston, and in England, in Watts, Burne- Jones, 
 Rossetti : each of the great type, eminent, distinct, 
 entirely individual, but each, unfortunately, com 
 pelled to work out his results alone, groping for 
 the true method by the aid of the light remaining 
 to us in the works of the great masters of the 
 Greek and Italian schools, but with no leading or 
 following of their own time.* 
 
 Since the days of the great Renaissance masters, 
 no man has comprehended so fully and applied so 
 successfully the spirit of Greek art as Watts, and 
 none has caught so perfectly that of the Renais 
 sance as Burne-Jones. Rossetti, like Turner, stood 
 alone. He even less resembled all his predecessors, 
 and has been followed by no disciples. For felicity 
 of imaginative design, nothing in art surpasses 
 some of the work of his youth such draw 
 ings, for instance, as his Cassandra, Hamlet, 
 and the Magdalen's First Sight of Christ; or, in 
 chromatic brilliancy and weird harmony, some of 
 the water-colour drawings, all drawn to the 
 minutest details from imaginative vision. What 
 
 * It is in my personal knowledge that Mr Watts has said that he 
 would have been a better painter if he had had the advantage of a 
 training in youth in Titian's studio, instead of arriving late by his own 
 research at the proper methods of execution.
 
 THE DECAY OF ART 195 
 
 he might have done for art, had his life and health 
 been spared, we can only conjecture ; but what he 
 has left is a page of art history, brilliant, indeed, 
 but even more suggestive of what might have 
 been. If, again, we demand technical "mastery," 
 the knowledge of the processes which are required 
 in art production, that which was the qualifica 
 tion to become a teacher in the great Italian 
 schools, there is only, in England, W. B. Richmond, 
 competent to do in a workmanlike manner any 
 work set before him, without which competence 
 no man can be called a "master." 
 
 The public of to-day prefers a form of art which 
 shall require no previous study, and make no 
 appeal to faculties beyond keen optics. It likes 
 work studded with fine bits of realism and whose 
 story lies on the surface. A thoroughly realistic 
 perception of natural colour (not so common a 
 gift, however, as the public imagines) and a 
 masterly execution are sufficient to secure the 
 painter's position. Imagination and imaginative 
 fusion, and the sense of ideal beauty which make 
 what is commonly called "high art" and may be 
 called true art, are no longer necessary to place 
 the artist in the position of authority which would 
 give rise to a school. The great schools of art 
 were founded in the search for these supreme 
 qualities. The artists went into them as students 
 of music now go in youth to study while the hand 
 and thought are flexible Titian and Michael 
 Angelo at eight and ten years of age and the 
 whole course of study was one which widened and
 
 196 THE DECAY OF ART 
 
 deepened the intellectual nature in the direction 
 of art. This early entry into the school, invari 
 able in the practice of the great schools, is, to my 
 opinion, the condition sine qua non of any mastery 
 in painting and sculpture as in music, or in the 
 acquisition of any other language. Expression 
 must be unconscious to be supreme. The minor 
 men were caught up by the power and influence 
 of the masters' minds into the majesty of the 
 school, and the masters quickened and stimulated 
 each other's genius. The morbid vanity of indi 
 vidualism, tending to eccentricity, did not carry 
 men out of the sound traditions of their masters, 
 but the true scholars laboured collectively for the 
 attainment of the ideal of their school. Now, 
 stat nominis umbra there is no school. Drawing 
 classes there are, and lessons at so much an hour, 
 but no masters, and therefore no schools. The 
 drawing and painting classes teach technical vir 
 tues, and all classes, painters, and exhibitions, 
 exalt the imitation of nature as the end of art. 
 
 The end it is, but in another sense its grave. 
 To know nature and employ her terms for the 
 expression of the artist's ideal, is a widely different 
 thing from the imitation of her forms and facts. 
 The former is an education, it wakens a kinship 
 to all great thought and all great thinkers; the 
 latter narrows and dwarfs the intellect and ex 
 terminates the imagination. So long as the 
 modern thinker only accepts realism and nature- 
 reproduction as art, art education must remain 
 a shallow and unimportant branch of modern in-
 
 THE DECAY OF ART 197 
 
 tellectual development, and art stay where it is 
 the servant of all fashions and fancies, huckster 
 of stuffs and bric-a-brac, tableaux vivants and still 
 life, archaeological restorations and mediaeval poses 
 plastiques anything and everything but essential 
 truth and ideal beauty. If this is to be the con 
 clusion of the education on which we are concen 
 trating our forces, it is hardly necessary to say 
 that the play is not worth the candle.
 
 THE REVIVAL OF ART 
 
 IN one of his most important and suggestive 
 essays, that on Culture, Emerson has the follow 
 ing sentence: "Whilst all the world is in pursuit 
 of power, and of wealth as a means of power, 
 culture corrects the theory of success." No man 
 was better qualified to estimate the qualities and 
 value of culture by his own experience, or to 
 judge of the dignity or the reverse, of success, 
 by the daily spectacle all round him of the most 
 successful pursuit of power and wealth that any 
 society has ever afforded viz., that in the great 
 commonwealth of the American Republic. He 
 stood at the head of its culture ; and, in a country 
 where intellect has only to choose the path to 
 power and accept the sacrifices and compensa 
 tions demanded to acquire it, he remained in 
 different to it and the means to it, died poor 
 and indifferent to politics and other distinction 
 than that his culture gave him. Emerson has 
 often been called the American Plato, and 
 amongst the mental qualities which justify the 
 claim was the curious insensibility to the attrac 
 tions of art. Plato had no place in his com 
 munity for the artist; Emerson, in a time and 
 state of society in which nature has brought art 
 nearer to the daily life of men, through the 
 193
 
 THE REVIVAL OF ART 199 
 
 invention of landscape, photography, etc., etc., 
 remained all his life insensible in a remarkable 
 degree to contemporary art. He felt nature 
 as the ancient Greeks seem to have felt her, 
 apart from the human subjective uses of her; 
 and this trait, in the mental conformation of a 
 man so typical of the race which seems to be 
 evolving the type of civilisation for the next 
 phase of human development, is a phenomenon 
 which invites study. We talk a great deal about 
 art, and spend a great deal of time and money 
 on it, but it is a serious question if art has any 
 more hold on the modern mind, or has any more 
 share in modern culture than alchemy or astro 
 logy. And when I say that it is a serious 
 question, I mean not only that it is one that 
 may have serious import, but that it may be 
 seriously held in the negative as well as positive, 
 and seriously debated. But to debate it, to main 
 tain either the negative or the positive, it is 
 necessary to understand with precision what art 
 means; and if, in the grave deliberations the 
 subject may call up, it should be discovered that 
 it is a necessary part of modern culture, this 
 understanding must be applied to the system of 
 education devoted to it. 
 
 I do not recognise the ignorant and substan 
 tially superstitious respect, often amounting to 
 reverence, for the artist, and begetting an im 
 pulsive patronage of him, as implying or leading 
 to a knowledge of art it is a feeling strong in 
 proportion to the ignorance of art in the indi-
 
 200 THE REVIVAL OF ART 
 
 vidual, and is a phenomenon of the religious 
 nature, a shadow of the lingering reverence for 
 a creator, and, as given to art, is strongest in 
 weak minds. It is that which impels so many 
 to think they must "do something for art"; 
 leads to some intelligent, but more unintelligent 
 patronage of it by individuals, schemes of art 
 schools and art education by communities, in 
 which the patronage of artists and fostering of 
 art are confounded sometimes identified, some 
 times mistaken, the one for the other, to the 
 injury of both. The artist is no more entitled 
 to respect or charity, much less to reverence, 
 than any other brain worker; that he excites 
 our wonder by feats of legerdemain, tours de 
 force, tricks of the brush, or audacities of tech 
 nique is due purely to our ignorance, and counts 
 for the artisan, not for the artist; in true art 
 the means are so completely subordinated to the 
 end that they are not, and ought not to be, 
 noticed. Nor is fidelity to nature any more the 
 standard to which we should bring our critical 
 measures to be tried; the photograph is truer to 
 nature than any art can be, and is yet the very 
 antipodes of art. Yet, these are the qualities 
 which determine the exhibition success, the fame 
 and fortune of the artist; and, by the theory of 
 success, determine the nature of the education of 
 the artist so far as the public has anything to 
 do with it. The dominant virtues in the general 
 estimation and in the success of the Royal 
 Academy exhibitions are, first, clever brush
 
 THE REVIVAL OF ART 201 
 
 work ; and second, fidelity to the facts of nature. 
 And with these ideals in view, the education in 
 art of our public, and to a greater or less extent 
 of our artist, is shaped. If the general public is 
 content, it is an argument to strengthen the case 
 of those who maintain that the uses of art are 
 matters of the past, and that of its finer qualities, 
 as of its true methods, we are in equal ignorance 
 and indifference. 
 
 And yet we have under our eyes, and held up 
 to our admiration, the products of the two great 
 schools of the past, the Greek and the Italian 
 Renaissance, which all thoughtful students of art 
 recognise as beyond modern rivalries; with the 
 contemporary Japanese, in which, with an antip 
 odal difference of motive and temperament, the 
 fundamental system is the same, and the success 
 due to the same processes of thought and work 
 as those of the Greek and Italian schools. These 
 processes are absolutely antagonistic to those of 
 the modern European schools without exception, 
 the difference between the latter being rather 
 one of processes and handiwork than in concep 
 tion of the purposes of art, or more or less vital 
 affinity with the essential motives of art, in the 
 correct theory of it. The English school is, with 
 very few but most notable exceptions, only an 
 aggregation of more or less clever amateurs; the 
 German, a mistaken philosophical worship of the 
 mass of matter we call the world, and humanity, 
 without a trace of imagination or spirituality; 
 and the French, of the moment, while technically
 
 202 THE REVIVAL OF ART 
 
 at the head of modern art, is but the apotheosis 
 of brush work and the speculum of the surface 
 of things, as devoid of vitality, as cold and sterile 
 as the surface of the moon. It is useless to call 
 up men like Millet, Th. Rousseau, and two or 
 three more: they are voted out of the scheme 
 of to-day, and form no part of the French system 
 any more than Watts, Burne-Jones, and Rossetti 
 of the English. These are survivals of a condi 
 tion of the human intellect which, though once 
 normal, has ceased to be so. 
 
 The steady degradation of art, almost without 
 distinction of form, with only rare and isolated 
 recurrences of the true spirit, from the six 
 teenth century to the day we live in, and which 
 I have elsewhere attempted to explain, is in 
 itself the indication of the remedy, if the study 
 of art is to be healthily revived. As an evolu 
 tionary problem, it is one of the most interesting 
 and not the least important in the history of 
 culture. Is the question a purely historical one ? 
 Its practical solution is indicated more or less 
 clearly by the analogies of every branch of the 
 history of thought, and is shown with absolute 
 precision in the philosophy of the arts taken 
 collectively, their individual history, in which 
 the law of evolution is shown, and, if we would 
 study it, in the development of the individual 
 artist ; it is visible in music, in poetry, the dance, 
 in sculpture, and in painting sister arts where 
 true arts, and as such subject to the same laws, 
 and, in fact, only various forms of the same
 
 THE REVIVAL OF ART 203 
 
 passion; that of expressing our emotions in 
 rhythmic forms; of manifesting in communi 
 cable and sympathetic modes and ideal types 
 the absolute and individual self. If the arts, 
 born of one motive, appear in diverse guise, it 
 is because each of our faculties demands a 
 distinct appeal, and, for the satisfaction of its 
 peculiar emotion, a distinct language. In each 
 and all the artist is a creator, borrowing the 
 language of nature only when it serves his 
 purpose; but he is nowise her clerk or mirror 
 that is the mission of the scientist. But 
 creation is governed by the law of evolution 
 nature did not escape this law and the artist 
 cannot the true art was evolved, the false art 
 is borrowed. 
 
 Poetry and music have their motives and 
 method so rooted in our spiritual natures that 
 they can only be degraded by sensuality; but 
 even then the art may keep its fineness, because, 
 after all, the most intense sensuality has its 
 roots in the spiritual nature, and it is only in 
 its escape from the divine order and precedence 
 that its vice lies. The dance we may consider 
 a dependence of music ; and these are immortal, 
 in no peril of extinction. It is only to sculpture 
 and painting that death can come ; that form 
 of death that keeps a body and loses the soul. 
 Materialism is the deadly enemy of all the arts; 
 but music and poetry cannot be materialised: 
 they are born in human emotion, and will only 
 die with it. Painting and sculpture are material-
 
 204 THE REVIVAL OF ART 
 
 ised by subjection to the facts of nature. They 
 draw their language, the prime elements of their 
 creation, from a visible world, so full in its 
 vocabulary that the artist cannot escape from 
 the suggestion of its terms, if he would be 
 understood. Colour is, and in its highest ex 
 pressions can only be, subjective, to be treated 
 like music, orchestrally ; but the element of 
 form is necessarily dependent on nature for the 
 intelligibility of its terms and types, the artist 
 having only the faculty of exalting and refining 
 her forms into what we recognise as the ideal; 
 but the essential condition of all the arts of 
 design becoming true art is in their being ex 
 pression not imitation; that their statements 
 and imagery shall be evolved from the mind 
 of the artist, not copied from natural models; 
 be creation, not repetition; and in the degree 
 that this condition is fulfilled does the work 
 become more or less purely a work of art. The 
 form of materialism which menaces the arts of 
 design is therefore science. The antagonism is 
 inexorable but logical, and the position cannot 
 be escaped from. Photography is the absolute 
 negation of art; and if to-morrow it could 
 succeed in reproducing all the tints of nature, 
 it would only be the more antagonistic, if that 
 were possible, to the true artistic qualities. 
 "The letter killeth, the spirit giveth life," and 
 though artistic creation does not involve the 
 creation of the prime material, no more does, 
 so far as science teaches, the creation of the
 
 THE REVIVAL OF ART 205 
 
 world ; the old material takes new forms, that 
 is all. The idealist gets his materials from 
 nature, but he recasts them in expression; the 
 realist, who is no artist, repeats them as he gets 
 them. This is the fundamental distinction in all 
 design; the copyist is not an artist. 
 
 It is this and not the choice of subject, or the 
 more or less decided tendency of a painter or 
 a school, which constitutes the distinction be 
 tween "high," or true art and "low," or spurious 
 art; the test is not in fidelity to nature, but to 
 one's own self. Giotto and Turner, Orcagna and 
 Blake, Phidias and Michael Angelo, are alike types 
 of the highest attainment; the modern realistic 
 (? naturalistic) painters and the "Derby Day" 
 school, the incident and costume painters of 
 whatever school, are at the other end of the 
 scale, more or less redeemed by purely technical 
 power, but by no measure of it to be raised to 
 the higher rank. Not that the distinction can 
 be drawn sharply, so that we can in every case 
 say that painters shall fall in one or the other 
 category; but just in the proportion that an 
 artist depends on his model or the actual material 
 furnished by nature, so is he removed from pure 
 art. Nature is a noble mistress, and there is 
 nothing degrading in the most absolute subjec 
 tion to her ; but let us not for that confound 
 the distinctions, the recognition of which lies at 
 the bottom of sound criticism. The painter, 
 whose devotion to nature is such that he never 
 leaves or varies from her, may be, and is likely
 
 206 THE REVIVAL OF ART 
 
 to be, a happier man than if he were a true 
 artist; but he is not an artist any more than 
 a photographer is one. Michael Angelo studied 
 the human figure profoundly, probably more in 
 tensely than any modern painter, and worked 
 from the knowledge he had acquired; but it is 
 on record, and is shown by the internal evidence 
 of his work, that he never worked directly from 
 the model in his matured works. Giotto very 
 certainly never used the model at all; and 
 Turner never could paint from nature. To men 
 of this type the external image disturbs the 
 ideal, which is so complete that it admits no 
 interference; as Turner is reported to have said, 
 "Nature put him out," and this is a true con 
 dition. In Blake it was so developed that it 
 became a morbid vision. 
 
 I have asked, without attempting to answer 
 the question, in a prior essay, Is it necessary that 
 art should be revived to the degree of importance 
 it possessed in former times? I think not, but I 
 hold my opinion as disputable. If the contrary 
 is the truth, we must understand the law of the 
 evolution of art and the element of our nature 
 from which it draws its vitality, and not waste 
 energy and existence in trying to make figs grow 
 on thistles, or art at South Kensington. Some 
 one said long ago what is to the profound student 
 of religions a fundamental truth "The nearer 
 the church, the farther from God"; and in strict 
 analogy with this I may say, the nearer to nature, 
 the farther from art. I maintain it by the history
 
 THE REVIVAL OF ART 207 
 
 of art, and by the demonstration of the law 
 which governs all the arts of the ideals, as well as 
 by the analysis of the method of working of the 
 individual artist. This does not hinder that the 
 church may become the guide to divine wisdom, 
 as nature may lead to art, but never through 
 slavery; but, to state it broadly, the subjection 
 of reason to authority, or individual feeling to 
 the hard and fast aspects of the physical world, 
 is utterly antagonistic to the individuality which 
 is the end of the development of the man or 
 the artist. As religion was made for man, and 
 not man for religion, so art was not made for 
 nature, but nature for art, looking at the matter 
 from the artist's point of view. The modern 
 conception of the arts of design is that they are 
 intended as the mirror of nature; the ancient 
 and true one, that it was the outcome of the 
 emotions, aspirations, and imaginative or spiritual 
 conceptions of the artist; to the old master the 
 facts of nature were the vocabulary of his 
 language, to the new they are the types of his 
 achievement; the former employed her forms to 
 define his visions, the latter only mimics them; 
 the former expresses an idea, the latter imitates 
 a surface. Art has changed its public, forgotten 
 its origin, and is no longer the teacher of hu 
 manity, the message of the gods, but the syco 
 phant of vulgarity and ignorance ; or, at its best 
 and would it were never worse employed! the 
 servant of science. 
 Who accepts nature as the supreme authority,
 
 208 THE REVIVAL OF ART 
 
 from which no appeal can lie, may be a scientist 
 but never an artist. To the latter she offers 
 suggestions but lays down no law. When what 
 she brings him suits his purposes, he builds it in; 
 when not, which is oftener the case, he hammers 
 it into his own shape. Her facts are accidents; 
 and what he wants is the very truth, the ideal.* 
 If, from the beginning, his visions do not surpass 
 the actualities he sees about him, if the passion 
 of expression has not laid hold of him before the 
 love of nature awakens in him, there is little or 
 no probability of his having in him the material 
 of success. The evolution of the individual follows 
 the general law; and that, in all art, is that 
 invention precedes imitation. Pure decoration 
 with arbitrary forms, generally geometrical, pre 
 cedes the representation of natural objects. This 
 passion for decoration and the harmonious ar 
 rangement of forms, sounds, colours, or move 
 ments, is the essential element of all art. The 
 love of nature is a distinct and completely sub 
 ordinate element. Without the recognition of 
 this law the development of a true and progressive 
 art, the foundation of a school, is impossible. In 
 music, the absolute subjection of the objective to 
 the subjective, to the complete concealment of the 
 former where it existed, makes the law clear to 
 the dullest mind; in poetry, it is equally clear to 
 those who have the ear for form, even if some 
 times confused by those who confound the dignity 
 
 * The ideal of art is the perfection of form, but in nature all forms 
 are accidental and imperfect.
 
 THE REVIVAL OF ART 209 
 
 of thought for the perfection of form, or, as in 
 Whitman, mistaking the material for the form 
 and ignoring the essential distinction between 
 prose and poetry; but in painting and sculpture, 
 the modern doctrine, ruinously, as earnestly and 
 eloquently, maintained by Ruskin, gives the ob 
 jective the absolute supremacy, making fidelity 
 to nature the standard of excellence in art, com 
 pletely reversing the artistic law. Until this 
 heresy is recognised for what it is pure fallacy 
 the arts of design can never be cultivated on the 
 true basis. 
 
 What, then, is to be done to bring about a 
 healthy revival of art on a foundation of education 
 which shall secure its continued vitality? I am 
 supposing, for the sake of my argument, that this 
 is possible and necessary, of which I am not at 
 all convinced. The first thing to be done, in the 
 contrary case, is to banish from our criticism the 
 false standard, and admit the possibility of a work 
 of art being the better the less it is like nature (I 
 do not say that divergence from nature is neces 
 sarily an approach to art, but that it may be so ; 
 in any case, the fidelity to nature has no relation 
 whatever to the quality of the art) ; and to estab 
 lish as the very foundation of the system of 
 education that only the impression of nature is 
 to be aimed at, even if it is in contradiction to 
 the facts, and that memory and the record of 
 impression are to be put in the first place in the 
 acquisitions of the artist. We cannot go back to 
 the childlike simplicity of all archaic art, with its 
 
 o
 
 210 THE REVIVAL OF ART 
 
 dominant unsophisticated rendering of the central 
 idea, and its normal and evolutionary attainment 
 of perfection; we know too much of the fruit of 
 the tree of knowledge to accept its greenness, 
 and science has already too much forereached on 
 art for the latter to begin again, with the capital 
 of the days of Greek myths and the Italian re 
 awakening, as all archaic art did, surrounded by 
 the circumstances which excite the creative im 
 pulse, with the simplest, most direct expression 
 of a dominant idea, and without reference to any 
 non-essential facts, time and ripening knowledge 
 adding step by step the deficient traits. What 
 is to be done must be done with the recognition 
 that we have been on a false road, on which we 
 cannot now return, but must find the best cross- 
 path to regain it. The simple satisfaction with 
 which the artist in the childhood of art, as the 
 child in his art, saw grow under his eye the image 
 of his thought, is replaced by a mixed emotion 
 in which the knowledge of the non-essential is 
 too large a part to be slighted in the record. 
 
 And in this process we must return to the 
 springs of art. The law is the same for all: the 
 young poet trains his rhythmical sense by the 
 reading of the best verse; the young musician 
 in the music of his predecessors. The artist of 
 form cannot escape from the law; if the emotion 
 which inspires him is not supreme over all fact, 
 remoulding, even suppressing or reversing it at 
 need, casting it fused into the mould of his con 
 ception, if he does not accept the evolutionary
 
 THE REVIVAL OF ART 211 
 
 law and absorb what went before him, his work 
 will not be art. The distinction is radical and 
 decides the very life of work or worker ; it makes 
 the difference between science and art, poetry and 
 prose, music and talk, dance and locomotion; and 
 the system of education which does not recog 
 nise and work from the distinction is doomed 
 to eternal futility. From this there is no escape. 
 I appeal to the history of art. The earliest 
 work of the great Greek school is scarcely dis 
 tinguishable from the archaic work of all barbaric 
 tribes; rude attempts to make visible an ideal, 
 mostly of its conceptions of Deity, in which it is 
 impossible not to see the analogy with the first 
 efforts of children to shape resemblance of the 
 things they love; this was, and is, invariably the 
 presentation of conceptions, not studies from an 
 object. The ideal was slowly worked out by the 
 universal process of evolution, generation after 
 generation working out the same problem of the 
 ideal, the pupil carrying the work of his master 
 a little further as he perceived the incomplete 
 ness of what was done before, but always in the 
 sense of more perfect expression; finally arriving 
 at a perception of nature idealised, the perfect 
 types of beauty which no later epoch has re-dis 
 covered. And to the thorough student of Greek 
 art it is brought home by a thousand details of 
 internal evidence, that this slow attainment of 
 perfection was the result, not of any system of 
 copying nature, but by the gradual evolution, 
 through centuries, of the perception of the ideal
 
 212 THE REVIVAL OF ART 
 
 of form, attained through the simultaneous de 
 velopment of technical refinement and the power 
 of retaining passing impressions of nature, and 
 through the mutual reaction of these on each 
 other. 
 
 The caviller will say that it matters not how 
 the facts of nature came into the work it was 
 the nature, after all, which furnished the forms, 
 and that the most perfect of the Greek works 
 are those which are most like nature. But this 
 is not true in fact, and is utterly false as general 
 isation. Nature never furnishes a perfect form, 
 and supplies us with no criterion by which we 
 can distinguish the more from the less beautiful. 
 Nature tends to perfect beauty when she is re 
 garded as a whole ; but some of the noblest Greek 
 statues contain violations of anatomical truth 
 which no modern French sculptor would, or dare, 
 be guilty of, but which were intentional and 
 necessary to the beauty of form and expression. 
 The artist found the lines and forms he wanted : 
 where the anatomy came right it was because 
 his memory was precise and tenacious, and the 
 facts did not interfere with his ideal form ; he 
 saw the god in his imagination and gave him the 
 form of highest beauty as he conceived it, and 
 when in later days he saw the athlete in action, 
 his memory retained the forms that gave the 
 figure its expression; he knew nothing of an 
 atomy or the function of the muscles, which, in 
 the science of his day, were only the cushions 
 which protected the bones in which all strength
 
 THE REVIVAL OF ART 213 
 
 was supposed to lie; his vision of what was on 
 the surface was undimmed by theories of what 
 was underneath, and his powers of observation 
 of every variation and characteristic of external 
 form, and his retention of what he saw, were so 
 highly developed that the use of the model was 
 superfluous his vision of the ideal was truer 
 than the actuality of flesh and blood. This might 
 seem incredible did we not know that it was 
 the case with Michael Angelo, who worked on the 
 marble without even a clay model to guide him. 
 
 Taking the entire course of Greek art from the 
 most archaic period down to the Pergamenean 
 school, we see that the development of the per 
 fection of form was so slow as to be only 
 recognised as an evolution, and no internal evi 
 dence of the direct copying of nature is to be 
 found in the whole field; but when the inten 
 tional fidelity to nature becomes evident, as in 
 the Dying Gladiator (although the pose plastique, 
 which is the shadow of coming death to all art, 
 is not yet apparent), we recognise that art is in 
 its decline, fidelity to facts has begun to shoulder 
 the perception of beauty, and the reign of the 
 ideal has come to its end. 
 
 The same phenomenon appears in the history 
 of the Italian Renaissance. The decay following 
 the decline of all motives of art, in Greece, Rome, 
 and Byzantium, consequent, perhaps, on the moral 
 and political debasement, had brought all the arts 
 to one dead level of mechanical achievement. 
 Byzantine art is the synonym of all that is most
 
 214 THE REVIVAL OF ART 
 
 mechanical and prescriptive, but with the posses 
 sions of its technique much was prepared for a 
 revival, and the decorative instinct was always 
 there potent and healthy. And out of the sleep 
 of centuries came the new birth, not, as the 
 fables run, from the inspiration of a single man 
 or from a recognition of nature, but from the 
 general awakening of the intellectual and moral 
 life of Italy. Cimabue was only one of its 
 manifestations. Sienna, if we had her record, 
 might come before Florence, and certainly, in 
 her Duccio, was superior to the master of Giotto 
 I am even inclined to believe not inferior to 
 Giotto himself. But in Giotto we have the sum 
 of all the qualities which told in the revival. 
 What we find in his art is what we find in the 
 early Greek, with something beyond, due to the 
 evolution of humanity at large to a fuller life 
 and a wider range of faculties; but it is an art 
 of the ideal, not of the model; pure expression, 
 in which the faculty of imaginative vision appears 
 in a startling power, and in which there is the 
 clearest internal evidence that he never used the 
 model. His ideal differed from that of the Greek 
 as the mediaeval Italian did from the fellow- 
 citizen of Pericles, and the ideal of the Renais 
 sance was not that of physical perfection, but of 
 spiritual glory and struggle, not of Apollo but 
 of Christ. The intellectual processes are, how 
 ever, the same. If, in the work of Giotto, the 
 internal evidence of the purely ideal method be 
 obscured, it is abundant in that of his pupils
 
 THE REVIVAL OF ART 215 
 
 and immediate successors, whose absolutely sub 
 jective method is beyond dispute. And from 
 Giotto onward there is a steady development in 
 the direction of a larger comprehension of the 
 qualities of the art and a fuller grasp of its 
 alphabet; though, while in Giotto every detail is 
 a part of his story and in his successors they 
 become more or less conventional symbols, the 
 underlying idea is the same. The undivided 
 purpose of the work was the expression of the 
 idea which inspired the artist, never the repre 
 sentation of nature except as a part of the 
 vocabulary. 
 
 The climax of this ecstatic art came in Fra 
 Angelico, not a great imagination but a wonderful 
 visionary, whose pictures are probably the most 
 perfect expressions we have of the purely subjec 
 tive art, produced under the exaltation of religious 
 emotion, and probably drawn from what the artist 
 believed to be revelations of the heavenly world, 
 and actually seen by him. The work of William 
 Blake was probably as purely subjective, but there 
 seems to me a taint of insanity in the vision; not 
 the pure ecstacy kept, in Fra Angelico, a con 
 sistent element by the intensity of his religious 
 passion, and in Blake replaced by an abnormal 
 obsession. In the work of Fra Angelico's great 
 pupil, Benozzo Gozzoli, I find for the first time 
 the evidence of the direct and prosaic reference 
 to nature for certain facts, forms, and the real 
 semblance of the personages with whom the artist 
 came in contact, and who became to a large
 
 216 THE REVIVAL OF ART 
 
 extent the dramatis personce of his pictures ; but 
 Gozzoli only made drawings from the person, 
 which he used as memoranda when working on 
 the picture. After him the practice became 
 general to draw from the figure, and in some 
 cases from cast draperies; but it is only in Fra 
 Fillippo that we find the employment of actual 
 types of the everyday world for the sacred per 
 sonages, and not till long after that do we find 
 the posing of the figure for dramatic action, while 
 actual painting from life in the final work is not 
 indicated till we reach the Carracci, in their so- 
 called revival of art, which was really the death 
 blow to it. It is probable that Raphael and 
 Titian drew their portraits from life on the 
 canvas direct in the preparation, on which they 
 afterward got their colour without the model; 
 and, in the case of Titian r we have not only the 
 internal evidence, but that of tradition to show 
 that he did not paint from nature in the modern 
 way, but on the basis of an accurate likeness, 
 done in monochrome, followed by his conven 
 tional scheme of colour in the conventional 
 technical method, borrowed from Bellini, and con 
 tinued through the Venetian school till its close. 
 All through the great period of the Renaissance 
 the figures were evidently drawn from know 
 ledge, in many cases acquired by the most severe 
 drawing from nature, but the design was made 
 from that knowledge, not from the model, which 
 served merely for the better understanding of 
 the subject. What the Greeks did we do not
 
 THE REVIVAL OF ART 217 
 
 know by direct tradition, but we know that the 
 absurd legends of their composing figures from 
 the various members of different individuals, a 
 leg from one and an arm from another, can 
 have had no foundation in fact. No one who 
 knows the modus operandi of the artistic mind 
 can be in doubt as to that no ideal image, even 
 of a landscape, can be constructed in that way. 
 The true idealist is he who, having the most 
 complete knowledge of nature, uses her materials 
 freely for his own purposes. She has her laws, 
 and the idealist learns them and follows them 
 as far as they serve his purposes. 
 
 The mental operations of the copyist and those 
 of the idealist are diametrically opposed, whether 
 the former copies nature or the work of another 
 artist. With the former there is a constant 
 measuring, comparing, a process of balancing in 
 the mind far more laborious than the process of 
 expression of conception in the imagination or 
 memory. A modern school of painting has 
 assumed the title of "impressionist," apparently 
 ignorant of the fact that all true art is im 
 pressionist in the proper sense of the term, as 
 all naturalistic representation is science, and not, 
 strictly speaking, art at all. The majority of 
 people nowadays prefer the latter: they know, 
 more or less, what resembles what they see, and 
 what they like; this world, familiar to them, 
 may be worthier than that of the idealist and 
 artist; that is a matter of taste not of discussion. 
 But let us not confound terms and definitions
 
 218 THE REVIVAL OF ART 
 
 if what we want is art, let us understand its 
 character: if what we want is nature, let us 
 recognise the fact and have done with it, but 
 not wander in uncertainty as to what we are 
 talking about. 
 
 Much of the confusion in the world of general 
 thought on the subject of the ideal, is due to 
 the confusion between the two accepted mean 
 ings of the word. The broad and comprehensive, 
 and, therefore, the primary meaning, is the de 
 signation of what is present to the imagination 
 as opposed to the palpable and materialised 
 the theory of the thing, as opposed to the accom 
 plishment of it; the secondary meaning is some 
 thing which is produced in conformity to that 
 hypothetical perfection, because, as we recognise 
 the imperfection of actual things, we admit that 
 we must seek a perfect image in the regions of 
 imagination i.e., of ideas. But, when we come 
 to scientific discussion of the nature of art, we 
 must recur to the primary use of the term, and 
 recognise that whatever is the embodiment of a 
 mental conception is ideal ; and in any possible 
 combination of the ideal and the actual, that 
 part of the combination which makes it art is 
 that which it owes to the mind of the artist, 
 and not that which it derives from the material 
 world. When, then, we propose to cultivate art 
 by setting the would-be artist to painting from 
 nature directly, we take a road which may in 
 time permit him to become an artist, but which 
 is not the true and direct way, and which may,
 
 THE REVIVAL OF ART 219 
 
 indeed, divert him entirely from his aim, and 
 is not, therefore, to be advised as the basis of an 
 education, though it may be that best adapted 
 to an education in what I will designate as 
 scientific graphics, and the only method for men 
 who have no ideal faculties. The essential con 
 ditions of a true art education, if we are to 
 develop a genuine school, are the cultivation, 
 above all others, of the faculties of rapid obser 
 vation and retention of the significant facts, and 
 putting before the eye the essential truths of 
 what was seen, memorising the flitting panorama 
 of nature and training the power of conception 
 and the imagination by exercising and depending 
 on them. Hamerton has given some most in 
 teresting observations on the method of memoris 
 ing as a system of art training, and the history 
 of modern art is full of cases of the power to 
 be so attained. To work from knowledge of the 
 reality of things, rather than from information 
 of their superficial aspects, is the end to be kept 
 in view : to get rid of the model as far as 
 possible is the first step to the right education, 
 dependence on the model the obstacle to it. The 
 shadow of science is the eclipse of art. 
 
 I have said that I do not know that the re 
 vival of art is of any importance to humanity. 
 I admit the possibility of its utter inutility to the 
 spiritual or intellectual evolution of the race, of 
 its having finished its work as an agent in that 
 evolution, and having, in general, a purely his 
 torical value. I perceive, in the study of its
 
 220 THE REVIVAL OF ART 
 
 history, that there have been epochs in which 
 it served only to gratify vanity and ostentation, 
 and it seems to me that we are now in such an 
 epoch ; but as in the past these morbid conditions 
 have had reactions of healthy life, it is not per 
 mitted from an historical parallel to conclude that 
 the future does not contain an art as genuine 
 as any in the past. But two things must be 
 noted by the philosophical student viz., that the 
 great evolutions of true art have always had 
 their origin in some general passion supervening 
 on the love of decoration, no fiat of ruler or 
 official forcing-process ever having succeeded in 
 initiating one ; and that they have invariably 
 been followed, and been stifled by, naturalistic 
 tendencies. Nature has in every case killed art. 
 The devotion to naturalism has, in all the past 
 schools, been recognised by thoughtful criticism 
 as the "decline of art." The reason is evident. 
 The servile study of nature supersedes the exer 
 cise of those faculties on which I have shown the 
 successful pursuit of art to depend; the vulgar 
 taste applauds what it can understand the super 
 ficial aspect of things, imitation, illusion, etc. ; 
 and the Academies, Royal and National, and the 
 various societies, in their exhibitions and search 
 of popularity, follow and confirm the vulgar 
 opinion, which can never be otherwise than 
 grossly ignorant; and only the artistic genius of 
 inflexible fibre resists the current, and is generally 
 ignored. The annual exhibitions are the grave 
 of all that is best in art: individuality of the
 
 THE REVIVAL OF ART 221 
 
 finer kind, refinement, simplicity which is a form 
 of religion, and pure intellectual purpose these 
 are trampled out by the eager feet of those who 
 give a morning to the work of a year, are un 
 recognised in the competition of brilliant technical 
 surfaces, and are finally buried in the ignorant 
 comment of the hurried daily press, compelled to 
 pronounce judgment without consideration, and 
 generally without the most elementary know 
 ledge of the subject. No labour of any human 
 worker is ever subjected to such degradation as 
 is art to-day under the criticism of the daily 
 paper. Now and then a true artist fights his 
 way to his proper place by sheer intellectual 
 power and patient endurance; but others, as true 
 in aim, if of minor force, are never recognised 
 till they are dead, if even then. 
 
 Under the hypothesis, then, that art is to be 
 revived and cultivated, the study of the works 
 and methods of the genuine schools of art in 
 past times is of the highest and primary import 
 ance is, in fact, the foundation of our schools to 
 be. The mimicry of ancient forms, the adoption 
 of antique or mediaeval themes, or the affectation 
 of a manner that was spontaneous to a mind that 
 came to activity under influences utterly diverse 
 from those under which we live, have nothing to 
 do with art, and in no wise aid us. Whether the 
 Greeks believed in the gods whose images they 
 carved, or the Cinquecentists in the holy men 
 and women they painted, is to us utterly im 
 material. What they have given us is the method
 
 222 THE REVIVAL OF ART 
 
 by which they attained excellence in art, and the 
 law at the root of it. That their faith in their 
 saints had anything to do with that excellence I 
 do not believe, or that any revival of such faith 
 is necessary for a new art. The history of art 
 does not indicate it, and the biography of the 
 artists denies it. What the old art teaches, in 
 whatever form it took, is that the art is in the 
 artist, and not in nature; and from Archermos 
 to Praxiteles, as from Cimabue to Raphael, the 
 development is one of accumulating knowledge 
 going hand-in-hand with an increasing skill and 
 technical resources, in which the evidence is un 
 mistakable to who can read it, that the study 
 of nature was indirect, and that scientific know 
 ledge of things never came to disturb the order 
 of ideal creation. The Greek sculpture was not 
 cursed by a knowledge of anatomy; and, after 
 Michael Angelo had introduced it, the sculpture 
 of Italy became a mere muscular inanity. We 
 cannot now go so far as to ignore anatomy, but 
 we can cease to study it, and recognise no more 
 of it than the Greek could see and show; no 
 more of it than is necessary to express the idea 
 that animates us, remembering always that fidelity 
 to the conception is the first obligation of art, 
 fidelity to nature a secondary matter, and some 
 times counter-indicated by the primary law, and 
 out of the question. 
 
 These considerations only add, however, to the 
 gravity of the question I have already asked and 
 which no individual can answer, but a race and
 
 THE REVIVAL OF ART 223 
 
 an epoch Does the world want art any longer? 
 Has it, in the present state of human progress, 
 any place which will justify the devotion to it of 
 the class of minds which once found in it the 
 enthusiasm of their youth and the content of 
 their ripe years ? Is it with the race, as with the 
 individual, that 
 
 "There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, 
 The earth, and every common sight, 
 
 To me did seem 
 Apparelled in celestial light, 
 The glory and the freshness of a dream. 
 It is not as it has been of yore ; 
 Turn whereso'er I may, 
 
 By night or day, 
 The things which I have seen I now can see no more"? 
 
 and must we be content, like the apostle of na 
 ture, the passion and exaltation of the youth of 
 humanity being outgrown, to look back at what 
 the bloom-time has left us, and 
 
 " . . . . rather find 
 Strength in what remains behind, 
 In the primal sympathy 
 Which having been must ever be : 
 In the soothing thoughts that spring 
 Out of human suffering ; 
 In the faith that looks through death, 
 In years that bring the philosophic mind"? 
 
 Is not this unquestionable indication of the 
 operation of the law of collective evolution on 
 the progress of the race an indication also of the 
 futility of our schemes for collective art educa 
 tion? Is it not the case that the feeling which 
 alone can make fruitful all these schemes now
 
 224 THE REVIVAL OF ART 
 
 only occurs in rare individuals who may be con 
 sidered survivals of a prior and more youthful 
 state of humanity, which is now in the "years 
 that bring the philosophic mind"? No one can 
 admit that the human intellect is weaker than it 
 was five or twenty centuries ago; but it is cer 
 tain that if we take the pains to study what was 
 done five centuries ago in painting, or twenty 
 centuries ago in sculpture, and compare it with 
 the best work of to-day, we shall find the latter 
 trivial and 'prentice work compared with the 
 ordinary work of men whose names are lost in 
 the lustre of a school. 
 
 Then, little men inspired by the Zeitgeist, painted 
 greatly; now, our great men fail to reach the 
 technical achievement of the little men of them. 
 There is only one living painter who can treat a 
 portrait as a Venetian painter of 1550 A.D. would 
 have done it, and how differently in the mastery 
 of his material! If we go to the work of wider 
 range, the Campo Santo of Pisa, the Stanze, the 
 Sistine Chapel, the distance becomes an abyss ; the 
 simplest fragment of a Greek statue of 450 B.C. 
 shows us that the best sculpture of this century, 
 even the French, is only a happy child-work, not 
 even to be put in sight of Donatello or Michael 
 Angelo. The reason is simple, and already in 
 dicated. The early men grew up in a system in 
 which the power of expression was taught from 
 childhood; they acquired method as the musician 
 does now, and the tendency of the opinion of their 
 time was to keep them in the good method.
 
 THE REVIVAL OF ART 225 
 
 Beginning as apprentices, they grew to be masters ; 
 art was not a diversion, but a serious occupation, 
 to which fathers sent their sons when boys as to 
 other trades, and they learned to express ideas 
 as soon as ideas began to form, and before they 
 had acquired scientific perception ; and, having ac 
 quired the power to express thought, power grew 
 as the thought enlarged. We begin late as amat 
 eurs; we see surfaces, and contemporary taste 
 likes surfaces, but nothing serious; we lean on 
 the model, and cannot escape it because we dare 
 not risk to be caught out of drawing ; the concep 
 tion is never clear because we never trust it, and 
 we must compare our work, touch by touch, with 
 the model; we are never free, and we end in 
 pose plastique, the caricature of art. The purely 
 mechanical habit of reproducing the thing set 
 before us, deferring to scientific exactitude as if 
 it were authority in art, has little by little ex 
 tinguished in the modern mind the sense of the 
 ideal, just as an absorption in the material life 
 in its insatiable and ever-increasing claims, stifles, 
 and finally entirely eliminates, the spiritual facul 
 ties. If there be no vital relation between the 
 two, there is, at least, an analogy. I shall not 
 discuss the question whether religion by which 
 I mean the spiritual life, not a creed or a church 
 is necessary to human progress or happiness, 
 any more than I should maintain that art, in its 
 highest acceptation, is so; indeed, I have honest 
 doubts whether art is necessary or greatly use 
 ful; but I have the clearest perception of the 
 
 p
 
 226 THE REVIVAL OF ART 
 
 truth that, in the one case as in the other, the 
 devotion to the material stifles the ideal. The 
 natural sciences, the model, Fact which is acci 
 dent, fidelity to nature, to use the common term 
 is the negation of the ideal and the extinction 
 of the perception of the beautiful, which are in 
 turn the highest witnesses of the spiritual life. 
 Few men love nature more than I do, and few 
 have spent time in more patient and reverential 
 record of her material features by the most 
 scrupulous copying of landscape; but I recognise 
 that if I had ever possessed the higher gifts of 
 the artist, this devotion to the shell of nature 
 was the most efficient method for their ex 
 tinction. 
 
 I know nothing more melancholy to one who 
 has gone through the university of art, the silent 
 schools of the long-past centuries Greece, Tuscany, 
 Venice, Holland of the Van Eycks, and Germany 
 of Diirer than to walk through a modern art 
 exhibition and hear the comments of a public 
 which, if not wise, is the only one art has to look 
 to ; the enthusiasm for the superficialities and un 
 intelligent reproduction of a world of accidents, 
 spending its admiration on tricks of the brush 
 and curiosities of texture, while the genuine ex 
 pressions of artistic feeling, rari nantes in gurgite 
 vasto, soon to be forgotten as well, are passed 
 with a joke or a sneer of incomprehension as 
 affectations or absurd archaisms ; or, what is 
 almost as fatal in education in art, respected not 
 because they are the result of the real art motive,
 
 THE REVIVAL OF ART 227 
 
 but on account of some incidental characteristic 
 of the artist, an eccentricity which is attributed 
 to a peculiarity of vision, or the discovery of a 
 new process of painting. But this is the con 
 dition of public appreciation, not only in Eng 
 land and America, but even in France, where 
 the national temperament is more favourable to 
 the development of aesthetic feeling. 
 
 As I have said, no individual can answer the 
 question I have asked Do we want art any 
 longer? But if I were called on to answer my 
 own question, I would say, No! We want por 
 traiture, because the leading motive in the 
 majority is vanity, and the highest virtue 
 domestic affection. For the awakening of the 
 highest artistic faculties we have neither the 
 desire nor the ability. We understand vaguely 
 what is like nature, and we confound the repre 
 sentation of nature with art. People who take 
 to art in the feeling that it is a better amuse 
 ment than any other, are too far advanced in 
 life to acquire a really noble execution, just as 
 they would be in music; and they always depend 
 on nature because it is the easiest way to get 
 along. The establishment of schools in the old 
 and true sense of the word, where the training 
 should begin with the development of the in 
 tellect, and correct habits of working should be 
 acquired before the critical faculties are at work, 
 in which a regular apprenticeship should be gone 
 through, the process by which alone a master 
 can be made, is, in the present state of things,
 
 228 THE REVIVAL OF ART 
 
 impossible. If in some more or less remote 
 future a reaction should follow the present 
 temper and art find a new world, we may have 
 prepared the way for it by the recognition of its 
 true principles, and, above all, the clear under 
 standing that its fundamental law is that in its 
 sphere art is supreme, and nature only its bricks 
 and mortar. So long as we confound fidelity to 
 nature with excellence in art, we ignore that 
 law. 
 
 NOTE. The following quotations from a note 
 of Mr Watts, which I am permitted to make 
 public, written after reading the foregoing essay 
 in MS., will certainly entitle the views which 
 they discuss to a certain degree of consideration, 
 and will have an intrinsic value as the con 
 clusions of one whom I am compelled to regard 
 as the profoundest thinker on art with whose 
 opinions I am conversant: 
 
 "I agree so much with the general tenor of 
 your article that it is what I am always saying. 
 There are two or three points I might wish to 
 discuss upon the question of art education. 
 Certainly I do not think modern art education a 
 good one, but I think education in art necessary. 
 The language of art is not quite a natural one, 
 since it is not possessed by all. The great artist, 
 like the great poet, may forget his means as he 
 forgets himself in his work; but to do this, his 
 means must be entirely sufficient. When Words 
 worth wrote the " Imitations of Immortality," he
 
 THE REVIVAL OF ART 229 
 
 never had to think of his grammar or his spell 
 ing: such a necessity must have crippled his 
 utterances. The soldier fighting for his life does 
 not think about the rules of fence, but for the 
 perfect handling of his weapons, and he has had 
 to learn to use them. The greatest art must 
 deal with the human figure, the strongest appeal 
 to humanity can only be made through humanity. 
 Michael Angelo was not a better artist for giving 
 twelve years to the study of anatomy, perhaps 
 the worse; but a very considerable knowledge 
 of, and acquaintance with, the structure of the 
 human frame is absolutely necessary, an acquaint 
 ance difficult for him to acquire in northern 
 climates and in modern times. The artist ac 
 quainted with the human structure through the 
 medium of his restricted observation alone, will 
 find himself in the position of the musician who 
 composes by ear. This may suffice for his melody, 
 but without knowledge of counterpoint he will 
 not be able to set down in writing the compli 
 cations of his harmony. Painting from the model 
 is a thing I entirely disapprove of: I never do 
 it and have never done it, never setting up the 
 model in a fixed position, though referring to it 
 occasionally when knowledge or memory may be 
 at fault; but there should be no hesitation for 
 want of knowledge, and the more elevated the 
 intention the more necessary that there should 
 be no obvious violations of grammar in art. 
 Also, I think that you should make it under 
 stood that you admit that even painting from still
 
 230 THE REVIVAL OF ART 
 
 life and subjects where dexterous imitation and 
 beautiful workmanship are interesting and pleas 
 ing, is still art in a degree and worthy of praise, 
 as all things done conscientiously are : this, while 
 you rightly insist that reality is fatal to the 
 dignity of higher endeavour. ... I should not 
 like my method of study to be misunderstood : 
 though not painting from the model, I do not 
 depend upon knowledge, still less memory, alone, 
 but, for example, get any one who may be about 
 to lend me a wrist or an elbow, not merely in 
 the position required but turning the joint about, 
 not to copy but to refresh my knowledge. This 
 is probably what Phidias did with greater oppor 
 tunities. I do the same thing that is to say, 
 study more than I have immediate occasion to 
 represent when painting a portrait. For example, 
 if I am painting a full-face, I endeavour to learn 
 the profile, that I may not depend on the light 
 and shadow alone for the form of the features. 
 I do not hesitate to repeat that I consider the 
 painting from the model in a set position a 
 pernicious practice, but the study of nature is 
 another thing and cannot be dispensed with. 
 ... I think you may have remarked that I pur 
 posely avoid display of anatomical knowledge 
 in my figures, and all reference to creeds in my 
 subjects." 
 
 These views of the great artist are in no wise 
 in conflict with those I have tried to expound, 
 though, as he writes in the nature of a general 
 approval, he dwells on the points on which he
 
 THE REVIVAL OF ART 231 
 
 desires to qualify my statements; but I do not 
 exclude a lower form of art, which I have noted 
 as "low, or spurious art," and the excellence of 
 which is in the perfection of its means, not in 
 the nobility of its ends, and to be respected as 
 we should respect a versifier whose grammar and 
 diction were faultless, but who was quite devoid 
 of poetic inspiration. Nature is noble, and the 
 most scrupulous rendering of her, in every at 
 tainable aspect, is worthy commendation as 
 handicraft ; but even here we are in a way which 
 leads to the antipodes of the true and supreme 
 art that of the ideal, the creative. There is one 
 honour of the hand and another of the brain, 
 and they rarely go to the same work.
 
 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 
 
 TowAED8 the close of a dreamy August day, in 
 company with a half-dozen friends, members of 
 that circle of literary men who made the American 
 Cambridge more eminent in American literary life 
 than it has been before or since, I was watching 
 the waning of the day in our camp on the sheet 
 of water in the Adirondacks known as "Tupper's 
 Lake," and mingling in a desultory conversation, 
 ranging from rifles and the shape of the bullets 
 we used, to spiritualism. The camp was built on 
 the bold shore of the lake, whose waters, the un- 
 tremulous mirror of the mountains and unbroken 
 forest around and the cloudless sky above, showed 
 only in blue fragments through the interstices of 
 the leafy veil that shut us in. The forest was un 
 broken to the water's edge, and even out over the 
 water itself the firs and cedars stretched their 
 gaunt limbs, with here and there a moisture-loving 
 white birch, so that from the very shore one sees 
 only suggestive bits of sky and distance; while 
 from where we were lying, sky, hills, and water 
 were all blue alike, and undistinguishable alike, 
 glimpses of a world of sunshine which the cool 
 and grateful shadow we lay in made more delicious 
 to the thought. We were sheltered in right 
 woodsman's style; our little house of fresh-peeled 
 
 232
 
 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 233 
 
 bark of spruces, twelve feet by nine, open only to 
 the east, towards the lake, protected us from wind 
 and rain, and the primeval forest shut round us 
 so closely that no eyes could pierce a pistol shot 
 into their green recesses. There were blue-jays 
 about us, making the woods ring with their 
 querulous cries, and a single osprey could be 
 heard circling and screaming above the water as 
 he sailed, watching for a supper in the lake. 
 
 Three of the party were asleep; the others, 
 amongst whom was Lowell, talked desultorily, 
 quietly and low, as if the drowsiness had half 
 conquered them too. The conversation had turned 
 to spiritualism, through my narrating some 
 singular experiences I had met with in the way 
 of presentiments and second-sight during a three 
 months' sojourn in the woods the summer before. 
 There is something wonderfully exciting to the 
 imagination in the wilderness, after the first im 
 pression of monotony and lonesomeness has gone, 
 and there comes the necessity to animate this so 
 vacant world with something ; to people it if even 
 with shadows. And so the pines lift themselves 
 grimly against the twilight sky, and the meanings 
 of the woods become full of meaning and mystery. 
 Living, therefore, as I had done in the wilderness, 
 summer after summer, until there is no place in 
 the world so much like a home to me as a bark 
 "camp" in the Adirondack, I had come to be 
 what most people would call morbid, but what I 
 felt to be simply sensitive to the things around, 
 which we never see, but to which we at times
 
 234 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 
 
 pay the deference of a tremor of inexplicable 
 fear, a quicker and less deeply-drawn breath, an 
 involuntary turning of the head to see some 
 thing which we know we shall not see and are 
 glad that we do not, all which things we laugh 
 at as childish when they have passed, yet tremble 
 at as readily when they come again. 
 
 Lowell, in spite of the poet in him, had a strong 
 vein of metaphysic, and looked at those matters 
 with a cold analysis; and yet his imagination at 
 times was so active that his images worked out 
 their own solutions, while he looked on, and he 
 had wonders to tell of, passing mine by a degree ; 
 his experiences were more remarkable than mine, 
 and yet he had an explanation for everything 
 which I could not put aside, though not always 
 convinced. " Yes," said he, as he rose and knocked 
 the ashes out of his meerschaum to join in the row 
 the doctor suggested to watch the sunset from the 
 lake, " yes, I believe in your kind of spiritual world, 
 but that it is purely subjective." I was silenced 
 in a moment. This single sentence, spoken like 
 the conviction of a lifetime, produced an effect 
 his logic had not. He had opened to me a new 
 world of marvels and mysteries ; he had not con 
 vinced me that I was wrong in my own theories, 
 so much as opened to suggestion new paths of 
 explanation, and had turned the spiritual world 
 into myself. The phase of spiritual existence 
 which had been real to me melted away into the 
 thinness of an incompleted dream ; but as it 
 melted, it revealed a real world beyond, which I
 
 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 235 
 
 had not dreamed of before, or at least had never 
 realised in the true sense of the term. Still, 
 amongst phantoms, the subjective world flamed 
 out on me as the world beyond all things. I had 
 played with the words and phrases relating to 
 Subjectivity and Objectivity, and understood them 
 as terms of logic, but now their rca/lily suddenly 
 flashed on me, seen in the round. I looked through 
 the range of human cognitions, and found from 
 beginning to end only the proclamation of the 
 presence of the arch - magician, Imagination. I 
 had often said to myself : " The universe is sub 
 jective to Deity, objective to me ; but if I am 
 in His image, what is that in me which corre 
 sponds to the Creator in Him?" Here I found 
 myself at last, the creator of a universe of un- 
 substantialities all of the stuff that dreams are 
 made of, and all alike unconsciously evoked, 
 whether the dreams of sleep or the hauntings of 
 waking hours. I grew bewildered as the realisa 
 tion of the thought, not merely its intellectual 
 perception, loomed up in its infinite significance ; 
 and a thousand facts and phenomena, which had 
 been standing around my little circle of vision, 
 burst into light and recognition, as though they 
 had been waiting beyond the verge for the magic 
 words. Lowell had spoken them. 
 
 Silent, almost for the moment unconscious of 
 external things, I walked down to the shore. 
 Taking our seats in one of the boats, we pushed 
 off on the quiet water. There was no flaw in 
 the mirror which gave us a duplicated world.
 
 236 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 
 
 Line for line, tint for tint, the noble mountain 
 that lifted itself at the east, robed in primeval 
 forest to its very summit, and then suffused with 
 the rosy light of the setting sun, sunk behind the 
 ridge behind us, was reproduced in the void below. 
 Tlic^shadows of the western upland began to climb 
 the opposite Huffs of the lake shore. We pulled 
 well out into the iat? and lay on our oars. If any 
 thing was said I do not remember it. I was as 
 one who had just heard words from the dead, and 
 hears as prattle all the sounds of common life. 
 My eyes, my ears, were opened anew to nature, 
 and it seemed as if a new sense had been given 
 me. I felt as I had never felt before, the cold 
 gloom of the shadow creep up, ridge after ridge, 
 towards the solitary peak, irresistibly and trium 
 phantly encroaching on the light which fought 
 back towards the summit, where it must yield at 
 last. It drew back over ravines and gorges, over 
 the unbroken wildernesses of firs which covered 
 all the upper portion of the mountain, deepening 
 its rose tint, and gaining in intensity what it lost 
 in expanse, diminished to a hand-breadth, to a 
 point, and, flickering an instant, went out, leaving 
 in the whole range of vision no speck of sunlight 
 to relieve the immensity of gloomy shadow. I 
 had come under a spell; for, often as I had seen 
 the sunset in these mountains and over the lakes, 
 I had never before felt as I now felt that I was 
 a part of the landscape, and that it was to me 
 something more than rocks and trees. The sun 
 light had died on it. Holmes took up the oars,
 
 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 237 
 
 and our silently - moving boat broke the glassy 
 surface again. All around us no distinction was 
 visible between the landscape above and that 
 below, no water-line could be found ; and to the 
 west, where the sky was still glowing and golden, 
 with faint bands of crimson cirrus flaming along 
 across the deep and tremulous blue, growing violet 
 as the sun sank lower, we could distinguish 
 nothing in the landscape but vague and vacil 
 lating waves of retreating forest. Neither sound 
 nor motion of animate or inanimate thing dis 
 turbed the scene, save that of the oars, with the 
 long lines of blue which ran off from the wake 
 of the boat into the mystery closing behind us. 
 A rifle-shot rang out from the landing and rolled 
 in multitudinous echoes around the lake, dying 
 away in faintest thunders and murmurs from the 
 ravines which harrowed the mountain-sides. It 
 was the call to supper, and we pulled back to the 
 light of the camp-fire which was now glimmering 
 through the trees which shut in our camp. 
 
 Supper over, the smokers lighted their pipes, 
 and a rambling conversation began on the sights 
 and sounds of the day. For my part, unable to 
 quiet the uneasy questioning which possessed me, 
 or to take part in a conversation which had no 
 meaning for me in my mood, I wandered down 
 to the shore, and, entering my boat, pushed idly 
 out into the lake to be alone. The uneasy ques 
 tion still stirred within me; and now, looking 
 towards the north-west, where the sky still glowed 
 faintly with the failing twilight, a long line of
 
 238 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 
 
 pines, gaunt and humanesque as no other tree 
 but our North- American white pine is, was relieved 
 in massy blackness against the golden grey, like 
 a procession of giants. They were mostly in 
 groups of two or three, with now and then an 
 isolated one, stretching along the horizon, losing 
 themselves in the gloom of the northern moun 
 tains. The weirdness of the scene caught my 
 excited imagination in an instant, and I became 
 conscious of two mental phenomena. The first 
 was an impression of motion in the trees, as if 
 they were marching eastward, which, whimsical 
 as it was, I had not the power to dispel. I 
 trembled from head to foot under the conscious 
 ness of this supernatural vitality. My rational 
 faculties were as clear as ever they had been, 
 and I understood perfectly that the semblance 
 of motion, delusive as it was, was owing to two 
 characteristics of the pine viz., that it follows the 
 shores of the lakes in long lines, rarely growing 
 at a distance from the water, except when it 
 follows, in the same orderly arrangement, the 
 rocky ridges; and that, from its height above all 
 the other forest trees, it catches the full force of 
 the prevalent westerly winds, and grows, slightly 
 leaning to the east, like a person walking. These 
 traits of the trees explained entirely the pheno 
 menon; yet the knowledge of them had not the 
 least effect on my imagination, which remained 
 deluded. I was awestruck, as though the phan 
 toms of some antedeluvian race had risen from 
 the Adirondack valleys, and were marching in
 
 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 239 
 
 silence to their old fanes on the mountain-tops. 
 I cowered in the boat under an absolute nervous 
 chill of apprehension. 
 
 The second phenomenon was that I heard a voice 
 which said distinctly these words, " The procession 
 of the Anakim ! " and, at the same moment, I 
 became conscious of some disembodied spiritual 
 being standing near me, as we sometimes are 
 aware of the presence of a friend without having 
 seen him. Everybody accustomed to solitary 
 thought has probably recognised this form of 
 mental action, and speculated on the strange 
 duality of our natures implied in it. The spirit 
 ualists call it " impressional communication," and 
 abandon themselves to its vagaries in the belief 
 that it is the speech of angels ; thinking men find 
 in it a mystery of our mental organisation, and 
 avail themselves of it under the direction of their 
 reason. I at present speculated with the philos 
 ophers; but my imagination, stronger than my 
 reason, refused the explanation, and assured me 
 that something spoke. I sat still as long as, 
 alone, I could keep down the spectral horror that 
 grew on me, and, paddling back to the landing, I 
 took refuge in the camp, feeling only reassured in 
 the presence of my companions. 
 
 But even then my attendant DaBmon did not 
 leave me, for now I heard the question, asked in 
 a taunting tone, "Subjective or objective?" 
 
 I asked myself in reply: "Am I sane or 
 mad?" 
 
 "Quite sane, but with your eyes opened to
 
 240 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 
 
 something new!" was the reply, as instantaneous 
 as thought. 
 
 On such occasions as ours, men get back easily 
 to the primitive usage and conditions of humanity. 
 We had arisen at dawn; darkness brought the 
 desire to rest. Our beds were made of the boughs 
 of the fir-trees, spread over the flooring of the 
 "shanty," with a trimming of the twigs of the 
 fragrant Arbor Vitce, on which we spread our 
 selves, side by side, with our feet to a huge 
 camp-fire, and all except myself were soon asleep. 
 I lay long, excited, watching the occasional gleam 
 of a star through the boughs overhead, and find 
 ing in their twinkling further sign of my fellow 
 ship with nature, my new state of existence, and 
 they seemed to be winking to me as to one who 
 shared the secret of their existence. The moan 
 ing of the tall pine trees overhead had a new 
 sound and significance, which it seemed as if I 
 must come to understand everything was new 
 and strange nature and I had everything in 
 common. I slept at length a strange kind of 
 sleep; for when the guides awoke me in broad 
 daylight, I was conscious of a feeling as if some 
 one had been talking with me all night. 
 
 In broad day, with my companions, and in 
 motion, the terror passed, and the influences of 
 the previous evening seemed to keep a distance; 
 but I was aware that they were in waiting for 
 the moment when I should be alone again. The 
 day was as brilliant, as tranquil as its predecessor, 
 and the council decided that it should be devoted
 
 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 241 
 
 to a deer drive, for we had eaten the last 
 of our venison at breakfast. The members of 
 the company were assigned their places at the 
 points where the deer was most likely to pass 
 to take the water, while, with my guide, Steve 
 Martin, I went up Bog River to start him, The 
 river a dark, sluggish stream, about fifty feet 
 wide is the outlet of a chain of lakes above, and 
 is a favourite feeding-ground for the deer who 
 come for the leaves of the Nuphar Lutea which 
 partly fill the stream. We surprised one, and 
 giving him a shot as he went out, I wounded 
 him, but not seriously enough to stop his running, 
 and landing, we put the dog on his track and 
 went back to wait. The deer ran back into the 
 hills, and we could only follow his motions by 
 the occasional baying of the hound. It came 
 and went, circling round, and the old habit of 
 the hunter came to fill my mind and chase away 
 the pre-occupations of the night. The purely 
 animal excitement of the chase is, perhaps, the 
 best remedy for an over-strained mind, and I 
 was for the moment a beast of prey. As the 
 deer, after twice doubling, had taken the direc 
 tion of the lake, we felt sure that he would take 
 the water there, and we slowly paddled down 
 stream. The emotions of the hunt had, as I 
 thought, brought me back to a natural state of 
 mind; and as I lay in the stern of the boat, 
 looking up at the blue sky, steeping in the 
 healthy sunlight which penetrated soul and 
 body, and the brain lulled into lethargy by the 
 
 Q
 
 242 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 
 
 unbroken silence and monotony of the scene, I 
 looked back to the experience of the night before 
 as a curious dream. I asked myself wherein it 
 differed from a dream, and instantly my Daemon 
 replied, "In nowise." The instant reply startled 
 me, but the sunshine had dispelled the terror, 
 and I asked, as a matter of course, "But if no 
 more than a dream, it amounts to nothing." It 
 answered me, "But when a man dreams wide 
 awake ? " I pondered and hesitated in my thought, 
 and it went on, "And how do you know that 
 dreams are nothing? They are as real, while 
 they last, as your waking thoughts; your dream- 
 life imposes on your consciousness with the im 
 pression of its reality your waking-life does no 
 more ; you wake to one and sleep to the other. 
 Which is the real and which the false, since you 
 assume that one is false ? " I could only ask 
 myself again the eternal question, " Objective or 
 subjective?" and the Daemon made no further 
 suggestion. At this instant we heard the report 
 of a gun from the lake, and Steve said, "The 
 deer is in that's the doctor's shot-gun." And we 
 knew that the deer was killed, as the doctor 
 had a double-barrelled shot-gun, and if he had 
 missed with the first shot would have fired the 
 second, and we pulled back to camp. 
 
 Arriving at the landing, we found the guides 
 dressing the deer and the company preparing 
 for dinner. The rest of the day passed in fishing, 
 in exploring the nooks and islands of the lake, 
 and my usual frame of mind returned. As the
 
 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 243 
 
 night came on, the excitement of the evening 
 before returned, and I determined to stay in 
 camp through the evening; not that I feared 
 the ghostly society which had haunted me out 
 on the lake, for with the experience it had 
 become familiar, but I wanted to see if the 
 mental action was produced by solitude, or if it 
 would come in society. The company went in 
 part out for a row, and part sat down to cards 
 by candle light and the huge fire of green logs. 
 I retired to the shanty and threw myself down 
 on my blankets ; but then I felt the Dasmon 
 sitting by me, ready to be questioned. 
 
 Then came suddenly a flash of doubt as to the 
 theological status of my ghostly vis-a-vis, and I 
 abruptly asked, "Who are you?" "Nobody," 
 replied the Daemon, oracularly. 
 
 This I knew in one sense to be true, and I 
 replied, "But you know what I mean. Don't 
 trifle. Of what nature is your personality?" 
 
 "Do you think," it replied, "that personality 
 is necessary to existence? We are spirit." 
 
 " But wherein, save in the having or not having 
 a body, do you differ from me?" 
 
 "In all the consequences of that difference." 
 
 "Very well, go on." 
 
 "Do you not see that without your circum 
 stances you are only half a being? that you are 
 shaped by the action and reaction between your 
 own mind and surrounding things, and that your 
 mind is only the medium of this action and 
 reaction? Do you not see that without this
 
 244 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 
 
 there would have been no consciousness of self, 
 and consequently neither individuality nor person 
 ality? Remove those circumstances by removing 
 the body, and do you not remove personality?" 
 
 "But," said I, "you certainly have individuality, 
 and wherein does that differ from personality?" 
 
 " Possibly you commit two mistakes," replied 
 the Daemon. "As to the distinction, it is one 
 with a difference. You are personal to yourself, 
 individual to others; and we, though individual 
 to you, may still be impersonal. If spirit takes 
 form from having something to act on, the fact 
 that we act on you is sufficient, so far as you are 
 concerned, to develop individuality." 
 
 I hesitated, puzzled. 
 
 It went on : " Don't you see that the inertia 
 of spirit is motion, as that of matter is rest? 
 Now, compare this universal spirit to a river 
 flowing always but tranquilly, and which in itself 
 gives no evidence of motion, save where it meets 
 with some inert point of resistance. This point 
 of resistance has the effect of action in itself, 
 and you attribute to it all the eddies and ripples 
 produced. You must see that your own immo 
 bility is the cause of the phenomena of life which 
 give you your own apparent existence; our in 
 dividuality to you may be just as much the effect 
 of your own personality ; you find us responsive 
 only to your own mental state." 
 
 I was conscious of a sophistry somewhere, but 
 could not for the life of me detect it. I thought 
 of the Tempter ; I almost feared to listen to
 
 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 245 
 
 another word ; but the Daemon seemed so fair, 
 so rational, responding only to my questions, and 
 above all so confident of truth, that I could not 
 entertain my fears. 
 
 " But," said I finally, " if my personality is owing 
 to my physical circumstances, to my body and its 
 inertise, what is the body itself owing to?" 
 
 "All physical or organic existence is owing to 
 the antagonism between particles of matter, 
 fixed and resistant, and the all-pervading, ever- 
 flowing spirit, the different inertiae conflict; and 
 end by combining in an organic being, since 
 neither can be annihilated or transmuted. Per 
 haps we may tell you after a time how this 
 antagonism commences; at present you would 
 hardly be able to comprehend it clearly." 
 
 This I felt, for I was already getting confused 
 with the questions that suggested themselves to 
 me as to the relations between spirit and matter. 
 I asked once more, " Have you never been 
 personal, as I am, for instance ? Have you not 
 at some time had a body and a name?" 
 
 "Perhaps," was the reply; "but it was so long 
 ago, and the trifling circumstances you call living, 
 with all their direct and recognisable effects, 
 pass away so soon, that it is impossible to recall 
 anything of it. There seems a kind of conscious 
 ness when we have something to act against, as 
 against your mind at the present moment; but 
 as to name, and all unsubstantial distinctive- 
 ness, what is the use of them where there is no 
 possibility of confusion or mistake as regards an
 
 246 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 
 
 identity which has not the most trivial import 
 ance? We have said that we are spirit; and 
 when we say that matter is one and spirit one, 
 we have gone behind individual identity." 
 
 "But," asked I, "am I to lose my individual 
 existence, to become finally merged in a uni 
 versal impersonality? What, then, is the object 
 of life?" 
 
 " You see the plants and animals all around 
 you growing up and passing away each entering 
 its little orbit, and sweeping through this sphere 
 of cognisance back again to the same mystery 
 that it emerged from ; you never ask the question 
 as to them, but for yourself you are anxious. 
 If you had not been, would creation have been 
 the less creation? If you cease, will it not still 
 be as great? Truly, though, your mistake is one 
 of too little, not of too much. You assume that 
 the animals will be annihilated; but, in fact, 
 nothing dies. The very crystals into which the 
 so-called primitive substances are formed, and 
 which are the first forms of organisation, have a 
 spirit in them. If you could decompose the 
 crystal, would you annihilate what made it such? 
 The plant decomposes and absorbs the crystal, 
 and it becomes a part of a higher, or more 
 complex organisation, equally dependent on the 
 originating motive; and, if it is cut down and 
 cast into the oven, is the organic element food 
 for the flames. You, the animal, do but exist 
 through the absorption of these vegetable and 
 derived substances, and why should you claim
 
 247 
 
 exemption from the analogical law of absorption 
 and aggregation? You killed a deer to-day 
 the flesh you will appropriate to supply the 
 wants of your own material organisation; but 
 the life, the spirit which made that flesh a deer, 
 in obedience to which that shell of external 
 appearance is moulded you missed that. You 
 can trace the body in its metamorphoses ; but 
 for this impalpable, active, and only real part of 
 the being, it were folly to assume that it is more 
 perishable, more evanescent than the matter of 
 which it was the master. And why should not 
 you, as well as the deer, go back into the Great 
 Life from which you came ? As to the purpose 
 in creation, why should there be any other than 
 that which existence always shows, of creation?" 
 I was silent, pondering as to how I should form 
 my questions on a subject which seemed to me 
 that of Hamlet, to be or not to be, and the 
 Daemon, as if following my thought, said: "Do 
 not understand that we affirm or the contrary 
 as to what you consider the indispensable form 
 of being we only seek to put your own ideas on 
 the subject on the true path ; we cannot help you 
 to more truth than you have fitted your mind to 
 assimilate. You puzzle yourself uselessly on the 
 finer distinctions which must be drawn to make 
 the distinction between matter and spirit clear. 
 Your ideas are stereotyped in certain forms, and 
 that which does not find its type amongst those 
 you know is not recognisable by you. Is there 
 any distinction which you can recognise between
 
 248 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 
 
 you and the deer you killed to-day, which justifies 
 you in assuming a right to immortality and future 
 individuality that the deer had not? Are you 
 who daily violate the laws of your spiritual 
 existence more worthy than he who never vio 
 lated one?" 
 
 I had been slowly coming to the perception of 
 the fact that all the leading ideas of the Daemon 
 were put in the form of questions, as if from a 
 cautious non-committalism, or as if it dared not 
 in plain words affirm that they were the absolute 
 truth. I felt that there was another side to the 
 matter, and was confident that I should sooner 
 or later detect the sophistry of my Daemon; but 
 then I did not feel competent to carry the subject 
 further, and was sensible of a readiness on the 
 part of my interlocutor to cease. I wondered at 
 this, and if it implied weariness on its part, and 
 it was instantly replied : " We always answer to 
 your mind; when that ceases to act, there ceases 
 to be the reaction." I cried out in my mind in 
 utter bewilderment " Objective or subjective ? " 
 and, longing for some diverson of my mind from 
 the train of thought, called on the guides to make 
 a " blaze," and I felt that the physical light would 
 be a relief to the mental obscurity. In the course 
 of a few minutes, the guides had piled on the fire 
 a huge mass of the finer branches of the trees 
 which had served us for fuel, and the immense 
 column of flames which rose, frightening the birds 
 from their perches, into a confused clamour, 
 threw into the shanty a heat which made me
 
 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 249 
 
 drowsy, and when my companions returned from 
 their row I was asleep. 
 
 It was determined the next morning in council 
 to move; and one of the guides informing me 
 that there had been opened a new "carry" by 
 which we might cross from the Upper Tupper's 
 Lake, ten miles up the Bog River, directly to the 
 Forked Lake, and thence following the usual 
 route down the Raquette River and through Long 
 Lake, we could reach Martin's on Saranack Lakes, 
 where we should find our conveyances out to the 
 settlements, with only a short retracing of the 
 road we had come by, we hurriedly packed our 
 traps after breakfast and were off. 
 
 The boating up Bog River is hard work; there 
 are many shallows over which the boats must be 
 dragged, and "carries" round which everything 
 must be carried on the backs of the men, one of 
 these being three miles long, so that, work as we 
 all might, the day had drawn to a close before 
 we were well embarked on the upper lake, and 
 it was nightfall before we reached the camp, left 
 by a former visitor, where we intended to sleep. 
 I had worked hard all day, always sharing the 
 work of the guides, but in a dreamy state, as if 
 the dead-weights I carried were only the phantoms 
 of something, and I was a fantasy carrying them 
 the actual had become visionary, and my imag 
 inations nudged and jostled me almost off the 
 ways of reason. But I had no time for a stance 
 with the Daemon, and the fatigue left me too 
 disposed for sleep to allow of night-questionings.
 
 250 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 
 
 The next day we had several miles of new paths 
 to bush out, cutting the smaller trees, for we 
 found the information as to the road to be in 
 correct ; so that, in fact, we had two days of severe 
 chopping and dragging before we were again in 
 boating regions. All this had put me into a 
 healthier state of mind than I had been in for 
 a long time, for I had come into the woods very 
 much exhausted by overwork, to which was due, 
 probably, my wanderings of imagination ; and the 
 day or two following, devoted to the work of 
 the camp, with the necessary fishing and hunting 
 required to keep a large party of men with re 
 newed appetites, gave me, the master of the hunt 
 and commissary-general, too much to do to think 
 of mental phenomena. But the hurry over and 
 repose come, the mental condition returned. Re 
 commencing the migration towards home, we ran 
 down the lake to its outlet, and, as we turned a 
 point, a wide and picturesque view came into 
 sight a long vista, at the extreme distance of 
 which rose a faint, solitary peak, to which Steve 
 pointed, saying with a tone of emphasis, "Blue 
 Mountain." The effect was to attach to the 
 distant peak the glamour of the mental condi 
 tion in which I had been: a strange and unac 
 countable attraction to it came over me, as if 
 some fatality awaited me there, the solution of 
 the mysterious influences which I had been under 
 during the days past. I have thought of it since, 
 many times; and have noticed in more than one 
 case of insanity with which I had come into
 
 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 251 
 
 contact, that when the diseased mind had been 
 prepared by some circumstance for a new delu 
 sion, the slightest trifle sufficed to create it. 
 From that moment my mind was " suggestioned," 
 to use a word much employed lately to define 
 what we still cannot any better explain, by the 
 idea of something to be seen or learned at the 
 Blue Mountain, of which the only notable fact 
 that I could learn was that it was, as I could 
 see, a solitary peak in the midst of a chain of 
 small lakes, difficult of access, and, therefore, 
 almost unvisited. My plans for the summer 
 were to see my friends through their visit to 
 the lakes; and when they had used up their 
 vacation to see them off, and return to the 
 most primeval forest remaining and spend the 
 remainder of the summer there, until the cold of 
 autumn drove me back. The run down the 
 Raquette River occupied several days of motion 
 and hard work, and there was no opening for 
 my delusions. The company once consigned to 
 civilisation again, I took my way back to the 
 upper waters, and with Steve and Carlo alone 
 for society, built myself a comfortable camp on 
 the Raquette Lake, within sight of the Blue 
 Mountain. Steve objected to fighting our way 
 up there; for, after all, we were still more or 
 less dependent on the half-civilisation of the 
 trappers and squatters who were here and there 
 to be found on the principal lakes, where they 
 carried on in winter the business of "lumbering," 
 cutting and hauling the trees which form the
 
 252 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 
 
 value of the mountain region, too remote from 
 all communication with the ways of commerce to 
 be useful for cultivation, and too barren when 
 the forest is cleared away. The occasional log- 
 cabins, which form the headquarters for the 
 lumbermen in the winter, generally furnish sup 
 plies for the hunters and fishermen for the part 
 of the year when sporting is possible, and from 
 them we were obliged to draw our flour, salt 
 pork, etc. etc., which, with the game and fish 
 which we caught, formed our subsistence. On 
 the Blue Lakes there was not a settler, and for 
 many miles from it, measured as the distances 
 are there measured, through labyrinths of forest 
 and meandering streams, which are often the 
 only way by which, with great labour, one can 
 force his way through, no human habitation 
 existed. Steve had not my motive for getting 
 there, and knew the hardships too well to be 
 willing to put himself in the way of them use 
 lessly: his wood-craft was older than mine, and 
 so I submitted to his judgment and we camped 
 on Raquette Lake. In all the operations of 
 settling for some weeks, finding subjects for my 
 sketching and making the camp comfortable, my 
 mind was healthily occupied, and I heard nothing 
 of my ghostly friend; till, one evening when 
 I had paddled out on the lake to enjoy the 
 night and the multitude of its stars, which 
 never elsewhere seemed so great as in that pure 
 air, I felt it beside me without warning. 
 "Well," I said, "you have come back."
 
 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 253 
 
 "Come back!" it said. "Will you never get 
 rid of your miserable notions of space, and learn 
 that there is no separation but that of feeling, 
 no nearness but that of sympathy? If you had 
 cared enough to be near us, we should have been 
 with you constantly." 
 
 I was anxious to get to the subject of latent 
 interest, and did not care to discuss a point which 
 in one and the highest sense I was agreed with 
 the Daemon on. "What," I asked, "was that 
 impulse which urges me to go to the Blue Moun 
 tain? Shall I find there anything supernatural?" 
 
 "Anything supernatural? What is there above 
 nature or outside of it?" 
 
 "But nothing is without cause; and, for an 
 emotion so strong as I experienced on the sight of 
 that mountain, there must have been one." I was, 
 without knowing it, already under the control of 
 the influence, be it delusion, be it mystery, which 
 had possessed me, and I no longer resisted the 
 impression of its reality. I began to feel it as a re 
 sponsible being, something beyond and above me. 
 
 " Very likely ! If you go after the cause you will 
 find it ! Did you expect to find some beautiful 
 enchantress keeping her court on the mountain- 
 top with a suite of fairies?" 
 
 I winced ; for, absurd as it may seem, that very 
 idea, half-formed, undeveloped from the latent 
 self-ridicule involved in it, had appeared to my 
 consciousness though I had hardly recognised it 
 I replied, at a loss for a reply, " And are there no 
 such things possible ? "
 
 254 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 
 
 "All things are possible to the imagination." 
 
 "To create?" 
 
 " Most certainly ! Is not creation the act 
 of bringing into existence? and does not your 
 Hamlet exist as immortally and really as your 
 Shakespeare? The only true existence, is it not 
 that of the idea? Have you not seen the pines 
 transfigured ? " 
 
 " And if I imagined a race of fairies inhabiting 
 the Blue Mountain, should I find them?" 
 
 " If you imagined them, yes ! But the imagina 
 tion is not voluntary; it works to supply a 
 necessity ; its function is creation, and creation is 
 needed only to fill a vacuum. The wild Arab, 
 feeling his own insignificance, and comprehending 
 the necessity of a Creating Power, finds between 
 himself and that Power, which to him, as to you 
 the other day, assumes a personality, an immense 
 distance, and fills the space with an intermediate 
 race, half-divine, half-human. It was the mental 
 necessity for the fairy which created the fairy. 
 You do not feel the same distance between your 
 self and the Creator, and so you do not call into 
 existence a creative race of the same character 
 the attempts of an enlightened race to write new 
 fairy stories, not believing in fairies, shows the in 
 compatibility ; but has not your own imagination 
 furnished you with images to which you may give 
 your reverence? It may be that you diminish 
 that distance by degrading the Great First Cause 
 to an image of your own personality, and so you 
 are not as wise as the Arab, who at once admits it
 
 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 255 
 
 to be incomprehensible and therefore beyond his 
 thought. Each man shapes that which he looks 
 up to by his fears or his desires, and these in their 
 turn are the results of his development and the 
 measure of its degree." 
 
 " But God the Father, is He not the Great First 
 Cause, the Supreme Creator ? " 
 
 "Is it not as we said, that you measure the 
 Supreme by yourself? Can you not comprehend 
 a supreme law, an order which controls all 
 things?" This touched on a theme which I had 
 a dread of opening to myself, having once already 
 had an experience of scepticism which left painful 
 memories, and I did not think a distinct reply. 
 The Daemon, after a pause, went on: "You seem 
 always to depend on a form for your recognitions ; 
 is not a form the result of some action, and how 
 can the result be the finality ? Every form is the 
 form of something; of what is your conception 
 of Deity the form of?" 
 
 Not wishing to carry this subject further, for 
 I felt my incompetence to completely master it, 
 and the recurrence in this mysterious manner of 
 the question which had forced itself on me at 
 other times and in other ways, I shrank from 
 this discussion, and, as the hiatus must be filled, 
 I turned the inquiry on my interlocutor. 
 
 "Tell me," I said; "do you not take cognisance 
 of my personality? Do you read my past and 
 future ? " 
 
 "Your past and your future are contained in 
 your present. Who can analyse what you are,
 
 256 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 
 
 can see the things which made you such; for 
 effect contains its cause to see the future it needs 
 only to know the laws which govern all things. 
 It is a simple problem : you being given, with the 
 inevitable tendencies to which you are subject, 
 the result is your future; the flight of one of 
 your rifle balls cannot be calculated with greater 
 certainty." 
 
 "But how shall we learn those laws?" I asked. 
 
 "You contain them all, for you are the result 
 of them; and they are always the same, not one 
 for your beginning and another for your continu 
 ance. Man is the complete embodiment of all 
 the laws thus far developed, and you have only 
 to know yourself to know the history of creation." 
 
 This I could not deny to be true in one sense; 
 but, wearied and perplexed, I declined to ask any 
 thing further. I returned to camp and went to 
 sleep. Several days passed without any progress 
 in my knowledge of this strange influence, or 
 what it might be, though I was more constantly 
 sensible to its pressure every day; and, at the 
 same time, the incomprehensible sympathy with 
 nature, for I know not what else to call it, seemed 
 growing stronger as the time went on and more 
 startling in the effects it produced on the land 
 scape. The influence was no longer confined to 
 twilight, but made noonday mystical ; and I began 
 to hear strange sounds and words spoken by 
 disembodied voices, as had once before happened 
 at the beginning, but now continually. They 
 were not accompanied by that feeling of a per-
 
 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 257 
 
 sonal presence as when the Daemon was present. 
 It seemed as if the vibrations in the air shaped 
 themselves into words, some of them of the 
 strangest and most unexpected significance. I 
 heard my name called, and on one occasion 
 actually crossed the lake to ferry over what I 
 supposed to be a friend come to see me ; and heard 
 wild laughing at night. I asked the Daemon what 
 it meant, and only received a guarded answer, 
 "You would be wiser not knowing too much." 
 
 Ere many days of this solitary life had passed, 
 alone mentally, for with Steve I never conversed 
 but of the material want of our condition, I found 
 my whole existence taken up with these fantasies. 
 I determined to make my excursion to the Blue 
 Mountain; and sending Steve down to the post- 
 office, a three days' trip, I took my boat, with 
 Carlo and my rifle and two days' food, and pushed 
 off. The outlet of the Blue Mountain lakes, like 
 those of all the Adirondack lakes, is narrow, dark, 
 and shut in by forest, which scarcely permits 
 landing anywhere. Now and then a log fallen 
 into the stream compels the voyager to get out 
 and lift his boat over; then a shallow rapid must 
 be dragged over; and when the stream is clear 
 of obstructions, it is too narrow for any mode 
 of propulsion but poling or paddling. I worked 
 along in these various ways till long past mid 
 day, and then I came out on a wide stretch of 
 marshy land, through which the stream filtered 
 with scarcely a visible or navigable channel, and 
 beyond which lay the lake, and beyond the lake
 
 258 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 
 
 the Blue Mountain, the foreground being occupied 
 with fir scrub a few feet high, and partly shutting 
 out of view the lake itself, along the shore of 
 which was the usual line of forest trees, amongst 
 them occasional tall white pines, like those which 
 had at first bewildered me. Of these, two stood 
 at the exit of the stream from the lake, and 
 already the weird feeling of the earlier days 
 seized me. They seemed to forbid my entrance. 
 I drew up my boat on the boggy shore and 
 climbed into the tallest tamarack that grew there, 
 high enough to look over the low wood and see 
 the farther shore of the lake itself. 
 
 Never shall I forget what I saw from that 
 swaying lookout. Before me was the mountain, 
 clothed in forest to within a few hundred feet 
 from the summit, which showed bare rock with 
 firs clinging in the clefts and on the tables, and 
 which was crowned by what seemed to me a 
 walled city, the parapets of whose walls cut 
 with a sharp, straight line against the sky, and 
 beyond showed spire and turret and the tops of 
 tall trees. The walls must have been, to my 
 measuring, at least a hundred feet high, gauged 
 by the trees, and I could see here and there 
 between the groups of firs traces of a road 
 coming down the mountain side. In a saner 
 moment, I should have seen that this was only 
 the accident of the formation, but then it kindled 
 me like inspiration. And then I heard one of 
 those mocking voices in the air say, "The city 
 of Silence," as one had before said, "The pro-
 
 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 259 
 
 cession of the Anakim." It seemed at the moment 
 that I had only to launch through the air to 
 reach the city, and why I did not attempt it I 
 could hardly say. My blood rushed through my 
 veins with a mad energy, and my brain seemed 
 to have been replaced by some ethereal substance 
 and to be capable of floating me off as if it were 
 a balloon. Yet I clung and looked, my whole 
 soul in my eyes, and had no thought of losing 
 the spectacle even for an instant, were it to 
 reach the city itself. The glorious glamour of 
 that place and moment, who can comprehend 
 it? The wind swung my tree-top to and fro, 
 and I climbed up it until the tree bent with my 
 weight like a twig with a bird's. 
 
 Presently I heard bells and strains of music, 
 as though all the military bands of a large city 
 were coming together on the walls; and the 
 sounds rose and fell with the wind one moment 
 entirely lost, another full and triumphant. Then 
 I heard the sound of hunting horns and the 
 baying of a pack of hounds, deep-mouthed, as 
 if a hunting party were coming down the moun 
 tain-side. Nearer and nearer they came, and 
 I heard merry laughing and shouting as they 
 swept through the valley, and I had a horrible 
 dread lest they should find me and drive me, 
 intruding, from the enchanted land. 
 
 The agitation grew so that I determined, coute 
 qui coute, to fathom the mystery. I descended 
 to the ground and pushed my way through to 
 the lake. Near the guardian pines they lost
 
 260 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 
 
 their menace; and when I had, after long and 
 hard work, launched my boat on the waters, I 
 found no mystery the mountain-top before me 
 was a common-place mountain-top, and all the 
 enchantment had withdrawn again. There was 
 a fever in my blood, and a fainting weakness 
 took the place of the mad enthusiasm of an 
 hour before. I felt that to return to Raquette 
 Lake was beyond my powers, and to pass the 
 night there was nothing but to sleep under my 
 overturned boat on the fir branches. With Carlo 
 to keep guard, I knew that I was in no danger 
 from the wolves, and I had food enough for him 
 and me. I looked about the lake to find the 
 most promising place for a sleeping-place, with 
 a water-source; and, while I watched, I caught 
 sight of a thin column of smoke rising from the 
 trees at the farther end of the sheet of water. 
 
 Sick from the reaction of my delusions, in 
 wardly ashamed of them and of myself, I 
 paddled slowly down to the place whence the 
 smoke arose. I found there a camp, deserted 
 for the moment; and, drawing the boat up on 
 the shore, I sat down on the bed of branches 
 in the camp to await the return of the owner 
 and ask for a night's lodging. I was weak, and, 
 trembling from the reaction, for the eager quest 
 of the morning was dead, I fell asleep, and woke 
 at the growl of Carlo, announcing an approaching 
 footstep. The owner of the camp was not far 
 away, and welcomed me in his rough cordiality, 
 with few words, to share his lodgings. He was
 
 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 261 
 
 a trapper engaged in running his lines for the 
 next winter's sable trapping. He cut some 
 venison steaks and I produced some bread, which 
 he had not eaten for days, and we, having eaten 
 heartily, lay down and slept till daylight. How 
 dull and grey the landscape was in the morning 
 twilight! My host, willing to take the oppor 
 tunity to go down to Wilbur's on Raquette Lake 
 for supplies, accepted my invitation to a seat in 
 my boat and give me the aid of his stronger 
 arm to work our way back. The dull and 
 matter-of-fact life of the next day or two was 
 beyond my power to lighten by any effort or 
 labour, and it was not till three or four days 
 had passed that I cared to approach my Daemon. 
 To my question as to the meaning of my experi 
 ence of a few days before, it replied, "It was a 
 freak of your imagination." 
 
 " But what is this imagination, then ? " I asked, 
 "which, being a faculty of my own, yet masters 
 my reason?" 
 
 " Not at all a faculty, but your very highest self, 
 your own life in an activity, perhaps abnormal, 
 or even morbid, but always your own life in 
 creative function. Your reason is a faculty, and 
 is always subject to the purposes of your ima 
 gination. If, instead of regarding imagination 
 as an appendage to your mental organisation, 
 you had conceived it as it is, the highest 
 state of your whole being, your life in its 
 noblest function, you would have seen why it 
 is that it works unconsciously, just as you live
 
 262 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 
 
 unconsciously and involuntarily. Men set their 
 reason and feeling to subdue what they consider 
 a treacherous element in themselves; they only 
 succeed in dwarfing their natures and material 
 ising and stifling their best selves, and succeed 
 in keeping imagination inert while reason has 
 the control; but when reason rests in sleep and 
 you cease to live to the material world, imagina 
 tion resumes its normal power. You dream; it 
 is only the revival or imperfect issue of the 
 creation you suppress when awake. You consider 
 the sights and sounds of your late experience to 
 be follies; you reason imagination demonstrates 
 its power by overturning your reason and deceiv 
 ing your very senses. The madman, in whom 
 reason has gone definitely to sleep, has nothing 
 left him but his imagination and the habits of 
 his appetites; but his imagination has only lost 
 the guide to its evolution, which is all that your 
 reason is." 
 
 "You speak of its creations," I replied. "I 
 understand this in a certain sense; but, if these 
 were such, would they not insist on permanence? 
 and can anything created perish?" 
 
 " Nonsense ! what will these trees be to-morrow ? 
 and the rocks you are sitting on, are they not 
 changing to vegetation under you? The only 
 creation is that of ideas; things are thin shadows. 
 If man is not imaginative i.e., creative he is 
 still undeveloped," 
 
 "But is not such an assumption trenching on 
 the supremacy of God?" I asked.
 
 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 263 
 
 " What do you understand by ' God,' and where 
 do you place Him ? " 
 
 "An infinitely wise and loving Controller of 
 events, of course," I said. "I do not attempt to 
 define Him, but I recognise Him." 
 
 "Did you ever find anyone whose ideas of God 
 were the same as your own?" it asked. 
 
 "Not entirely." 
 
 "Then your God is not the same as the God of 
 other men; from the Feejeean to the Christian 
 there is a wide range. Of course, there is a first 
 great principle of life; but this personality you 
 all worship is it not a creation of your own?" 
 
 I now felt this to be the ultimate end of the 
 Daemon's urging: it recurred too often not to 
 be designed. Led on by the sophistry of the 
 Tempter. I had floated on unconsciously to this 
 issue, practically admitting, and half-believing all; 
 but when this suggestion stood completely un 
 clothed before me, everything in me revolted 
 from the abyss it opened. For an instant all 
 was chaos, and the very order of nature seemed 
 disorder. Life and light vanished from the face 
 of the earth; my night made all things dead 
 and dark. An universe without a God ! Creation 
 seemed in that moment but a galvanised corpse. 
 "SVhat my emotions were in that brief space no 
 one who has not felt them can conceive. My 
 first impulse was to finish with all questionings 
 in death; with the next I was swept back to the 
 old life of unhesitating faith and daily reverence 
 for the Creator, and I cried from the depth of
 
 264 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 
 
 despair, "God deliver me from the body of this 
 death!" It was but a moment and then there 
 came in the place of the cold questioning voice 
 of the Daemon one of ineffable music, repeating 
 words familiar from my childhood and lovely in 
 my past, "Ye believe in God believe also in me." 
 The hot tears for another moment blotted out 
 the world from sight. I said passionately to the 
 questioner, "Now, who are you? what are you?" 
 "Your own doubts," was the reply, and it was as 
 if I spoke to myself. Little by little I grew 
 clearer, and after the state had long gone by, it 
 seemed as if I had been in a long and troubled 
 dream. But the experience never came back 
 the lesson was learned.
 
 THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP 
 
 I REMEMBER that in one of his early letters to me, 
 Professor Ruskin expressed the opinion that the 
 character of American landscape was such as not 
 to favour invention, but that its largeness must 
 give the art a high degree of grandeur, once 
 excited. It was true, for the sameness of the wild 
 nature is not much relieved by the incomplete 
 domestication, where men have improved its 
 humanisation it lacks the appeals to human 
 sympathy and imagination which are made by 
 the landscape of an old country, and what 
 Theodore Rousseau used to call intimit, which is 
 partially interpreted by our feeling of association 
 the presence of a "light that never was on sea 
 or land." I have always found that it lacked the 
 quality of the pictorial, which is so abounding in 
 English and Italian scenery and some parts of 
 the lands of France, and the search for the pictur 
 esque was one of the great pre-occupations of the 
 landscape painter when I was a student. In de 
 fault of a motive in the familiar scenes, we used 
 to frequent the wild ones, and the great, un- 
 tracked wildernesses of the Northern states were 
 a field of study and search of emotion the 
 sentiment of savage nature, since the picturesque 
 was not at our doors. The huge forest of the 
 
 30QQ
 
 266 THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP 
 
 Adirondack region of New York state, threaded 
 by rivers, and interspersed with lakes of all sizes 
 from Champlain, where fleets once fought, to the 
 tiny sheets of water where the skiff passes with 
 difficulty through the fields of pond-lilies, was 
 that which most caught my imagination ; and for 
 several years I passed the summer there, more 
 fascinated by the solitude and savagery of it than 
 by anything paintable I found there. The rela 
 tions with Lowell and the University town of 
 Cambridge, alluded to in another paper, led him 
 and some of his friends to share the fortunes of 
 one of my excursions, recorded in "The Sub 
 jective of It," and from this to the formation of 
 a club, known as the Adirondack, amongst whose 
 members were Lowell, Emerson, Agassiz, Professor 
 Jeffries Wyman (the rare scientific genius taken 
 from his studies too soon for the honour of his 
 country), Dr Estes Howe, Judge Hoar (General 
 Grant's Attorney -General later on), S. G. Ward, 
 J. M. Forbes, and others amongst the leading 
 personages of Boston and Cambridge. The club 
 existed until the war absorbed all the thought of 
 its members, and the estate of over 20,000 acres 
 of untouched and primitive forest in the wildest 
 and most beautiful part of the Adirondacks was 
 allowed to be re-conveyed to the lumber cutters. 
 But the first meeting was of unique interest, 
 from its having given rise to incidents and records 
 which survived the duration of the club. Chief 
 amongst these is the poem in which Emerson re 
 corded his impressions of the first contact with
 
 THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP 267 
 
 primeval nature. The excursion also brought the 
 section into an unenviable notoriety, and so set 
 the fashion of luxurious camping out, and pur 
 chase of tracts of land in the forest, which have, 
 in the sequence, destroyed its original character 
 altogether. Then the wolf howled and the bear 
 prowled about our camps, and more than once 
 have I heard the cry of the panther (Felis puma) 
 as it skirted our vicinity ; the grey eagle was al 
 most the commonest of birds, and one might pass 
 a fortnight in the forest without seeing another 
 human being. The estate, which we afterwards 
 purchased at tax sale, included a pretty lake a mile 
 and a half long, with islands, all untouched still 
 by the lumberer's axe, the forest standing as it 
 had stood before Columbus sailed from Palos ; and 
 the larger lake where we made our initiatory 
 meeting, though of easier access, was in the 
 same condition. The condition of the club meet 
 ing was, that for six weeks the camp should 
 be open to all the members and guests invited 
 by the committee, after or before which members 
 were free to invite their friends and occupy the 
 camp without restriction, each person having his 
 own guide and boat and exploring the forest 
 around or remaining in camp at pleasure, forming 
 parties or moving independently, lapsing as far 
 as might be into the original state of society. 
 
 The mountain country, which is known collec 
 tively as the " Adirondack," is an elevated plateau 
 of the Laurentian range, lying between the valleys 
 of the Mohawk and St Lawrence, deeply cut by
 
 268 THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP 
 
 vales and gorges amongst the granite hills, and 
 in every depression holding a lake, the water 
 connection of which, with its companions, gives 
 rise to the characteristic feature of the region, 
 each chain of lakes forming a water - course, 
 through which lie the routes which explore the 
 entire region, it being rarely the case that more 
 than a mile separates the water of one chain 
 from that of another. The guides use light boats, 
 which they can easily carry on their shoulders 
 from one water to the next, and so they traverse 
 the entire mountain country freely. The lake 
 where our first encampment was made was known 
 as Follansbee Pond (the term lake being, in the 
 section, reserved for a sheet of several miles in 
 length), and it lies in a cul-de-sac of the chain of 
 lakes and streams named after one of the first 
 of the Jesuit explorers of the northern states, 
 Pere Raquette. Being elected captain of the 
 hunt and chief guide of the club, it depended on 
 me also, as the oldest woodsman, to select the 
 locality and superintend the construction of the 
 camp, and the choice was determined by the 
 facility of access, the abundance of game, and the 
 fact that the lake was out of any route to regions 
 beyond, giving the maximum of seclusion, as the 
 etiquette of the woods prevented another party 
 camping near us. 
 
 Follansbee was then a rare and beautiful piece 
 of untouched nature, divided from the highway, 
 the Raquette, by a marsh of several miles of 
 weary navigation, shut in by the hills on all sides
 
 THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP 269 
 
 but that by which we entered, the forest still 
 unscarred, and the tall white pines standing in 
 files along the lake shores and up over the ridges, 
 not a scar of axe or fire being visible as we 
 searched the shore for a fitting spot to make our 
 vacation lodging-place. Many things are requisite 
 for a good camping-ground, and to fix one is a 
 thing to be learned. First and indispensable is a 
 spring of good water near by; then a dry and 
 elevated plateau, wooded with "hard wood," 
 beeches, birch, and maple with level ground for 
 the camp, free from the tangle of undergrowth 
 which makes the fir thicket impenetrable ; then 
 a smooth sandy beach on which the boats may 
 be drawn at night, and which may be approached 
 without danger from the rocks, and on which 
 loading or unloading is easy. Ours was one of 
 the best I have ever seen at the head of the lake, 
 with beach, spring, and maple grove. Two of the 
 hugest maples I ever saw gave us the shelter of 
 their spreading branches and the supports to the 
 camp walls. Here we placed our ridge-pole, laid 
 our roof of bark of firs (stripped from trees far 
 away in the forest, not to disfigure our dwelling- 
 place with stripped and dying trees), cut an open 
 path to the lake-side, and then left our house to 
 the naiads and dryads, and hurried back forty 
 miles to meet our guests at Martin's Landing. 
 
 A generation has gone by since that unique 
 meet, and of those who were at it only John 
 Holmes (a younger brother of Oliver Wendell) 
 and I now survive. The voices of that merry
 
 270 THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP 
 
 assemblage of "wise and polite" vacation-keepers 
 come to us from the land of dreams ; the echoes 
 they wakened in the wild wood give place to the 
 tender and tearful evocation of poetic memory ; 
 they and their summering have passed into the 
 traditions of the later camp-fires, where the guides 
 tell of the "Philosophers' Camp," of the very 
 location of which they have lost the knowledge. 
 But Emerson, the philosopher whose genius was 
 fittest to the temple in which we all worshipped, 
 its high priest and oracle, has left his history 
 of the meeting in his poem, "The Adirondacs. A 
 Journal. Dedicated to my fellow - travellers in 
 August, 1858," and to which my prose may serve 
 as commentary, to be written before I have done 
 with the memory. I, the youngest, the steward 
 of that memorable company, the master of the 
 hunt, the insect preserved in the amber of the 
 poet's verse, 
 
 " Our guide's guide, and Commodore, 
 Crusoe, Crusader, Pius ^Eneas," 
 
 purpose to frame, even if in a poor way, this 
 picture of a gathering unique in the history of 
 vacations ; this record, which is to those who 
 know and love unsophisticated nature the most 
 curiously truthful and interesting existing revela 
 tion of her aspect, seen for the first time with a 
 mind trained to the finest shades of impression 
 and reflection the most Homeric and Hellenic of 
 all nature-poems ever written. 
 
 This was not the solitude of Thoreau's Walden 
 Pond, where isolation kept within the sound of a
 
 THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP 271 
 
 dinner-horn, and where no bird, leaf, or tree was 
 ignorant of the daily footfall of idlers and curious, 
 but a virgin forest, where the crack of our rifles 
 reached no other human ear, and where the care 
 lessly wandering foot found no path to lead it 
 back to camp, and the inexpert, once out of hear 
 ing of camp-call, or out of sight of the water, 
 was in imminent danger of having his bones 
 picked by the wolves that listened dismayed 
 to the sounds of our unaccustomed invasion. 
 This was "the forest primeval." Hardly a trace 
 of it now exists as we then knew it. The 
 lumberer; the reckless sportsman with his 
 camp-fires and his more reckless and careless 
 guide; the axe and the fire, have left no large 
 expanse of virgin forest in all the Adirondack 
 region, and every year effaces the original aspect 
 of it more completely. Then there were no 
 song-birds, companions of mankind; no familiar 
 sound of the paternal fields greeted the wise men 
 of the East : but the weird laugh of the loon, the 
 scream of the osprey or the grey eagle; and of 
 the minor featherings, the friendly Canada jay 
 or the chickadee, only greeted us. 
 
 I had done all I could to induce Longfellow and 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes to join the party, but the 
 latter was too closely identified with the Hub in all 
 his mental operations to care for unhumanised 
 nature, and Longfellow was too strongly attached 
 to the conditions of completely civilised life to 
 enjoy roughing it in flannels and sleeping on fir 
 boughs. The company of his great-brained friends
 
 272 THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP 
 
 was a temptation at times, I think ; but lie hated 
 killing animals, had. no interest in fishing, and 
 was too settled in his habits to enjoy so great a 
 change. Possibly he was decided in his refusal by 
 Emerson's purchase of a rifle. "Is it true that 
 Emerson is going to take a gun?" he asked me. 
 "Yes," I replied. "Then I shall not go," he said; 
 " somebody will be shot." 
 
 Emerson's record plunges in medias res. He gives 
 a line to Champlain : 
 
 "Thence, in strong country cart, rode up the forks 
 Of the Ausable stream, intent to reach 
 The Adirondac lakes. At Martin's Beach 
 We chose our boats, each man a boat and guide, 
 Ten men, ten guides, our company all told." 
 
 But here I must correct my evangelist. I was 
 Agassiz's guide and rowed my own boat, sharing 
 with the guides whatever work there was for all. 
 I could not have kept in proper subordination so 
 large a company of men, collected from all parts 
 of the woods, though with all the care in selection 
 possible under the circumstances, if I had not been 
 ready to do my share of any work I called on them 
 for. I not only rowed my own boat, but carried 
 my own axe and rifle, and my boat when necessary. 
 From one cause I missed, to my infinite regret, the 
 hearing of Emerson's first impressions of the forest. 
 I had been building a new boat for the occasion, 
 and it lacked several hours' work when the com 
 pany started up the lakes at midday, I only 
 following toward sunset, and overtaking them at 
 midnight at the "Indian Carry," then a mere
 
 THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP 273 
 
 pathway a mile long, through dense pine groves, 
 between the Saranac and Raquette chains of lakes, 
 with a lumberer's hut at each end. A violent rain 
 storm greeted our entry into the wilderness, and I 
 arrived after the company were dried and had 
 eaten, myself drenched like a water-rat. 
 
 Emerson wrote out his "Adirondacs" after he 
 had returned to Concord, and it is curious to see 
 in what a Greek way he condensed and idealised 
 his impressions, forgetting all details which inter 
 fered with symmetry. 
 
 "Next morn we swept with oars the Saranac, 
 With skies of benediction, to Round Lake, 
 Where all the sacred mountains drew around us, 
 Tahawus, Seaward,* Maclntyre, Baldhead, 
 And other Titans without muse or name. 
 Pleased with these grand companions, we glide on, 
 Instead of flowers, crowned with a wreath of hills. 
 We made our distance wider, boat from boat, 
 As each would hear the oracle alone. 
 By the bright morn the gay flotilla slid 
 Through files of flags that gleamed like bayonets, 
 Through gold-moth-haunted beds of pickerel-flower, 
 Through scented banks of lilies white and gold, 
 Where the deer feeds at night, the teal by day. 
 On through the Upper Saranac, and up 
 Pere Raquette stream, to a small tortuous pass 
 Winding through grassy shallows in and out, 
 Two creeping miles of rushes, pads, and sponge, 
 To Follansbee Water and the Lake of Loons." 
 
 The poet has painted his picture with the group 
 ing of an artist's imagination. The drenching day 
 of arrival, the night of discomfort at the hut on 
 the "carry," and the "carry" itself, the journey 
 
 * Mount Seward, south of the Saranacs, the common name being 
 repudiated by Emerson.
 
 274 THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP 
 
 through the " Spectacle Ponds," a curious and most 
 picturesque part of the second day, with the row 
 down the charming stream that forms the water 
 way to the Baquette proper all are dismissed 
 as useless detail, while the "two creeping miles" 
 of the marshy outlet of Follansbee, up which we 
 had to pole and push, are remembered through 
 Agassiz's discovery there of a fresh-water sponge 
 till then unknown. But to Emerson, as to most 
 men who are receptive to nature's message, the 
 forest was the overpowering fact. 
 
 " We climb the bank, 
 And in the twilight of the forest noon 
 Wield the first axe these echoes ever heard." 
 
 The "twilight of the forest noon" is the most 
 concentrated expression of the one dominant 
 sentiment of a poetic mind on first entering this 
 eternal silence and shadow. His catalogue of 
 trees is in error: 
 
 "The wood was sovran with centennial trees 
 Oak, cedar, maple, poplar, beech, and fir, 
 Linden and spruce." 
 
 There is no oak, linden, or poplar in these forests. 
 He had passed them in the Ausable valley on his 
 way up, and probably forgot their exact habitat. 
 But the impression of the first night clung to him 
 with all its detail. No modern man knew the "great 
 god Pan " as Emerson knew him, not even Keats, 
 and the falling asleep in the arms of the universal 
 mother, whose dearest child Pan was, must have 
 left its influence on him long after he had recorded 
 the poetic version of the experience.
 
 THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP 275 
 
 " ' Welcome!' the wood-god murmured through the leaves, 
 ' Welcome, though late, unknowing, yet known to me.' 
 Evening drew on ; stars peeped through maple-boughs, 
 Which o'erhung, like a cloud,* our camping-fire. 
 Decayed millennial trunks, like moonlight flecks, 
 Lit with phosphoric crumbs t the forest iioor." 
 
 Lowell named the camping-place " Camp Maple," 
 from the huge maples under which we had pitched 
 our house of bark ; but tradition has long known 
 it as the " Philosophers' Camp," though, like Troy, 
 its site is unknown to all the subsequent genera 
 tions of guides, and I doubt if in all the Adiron 
 dack country there is a man except my old guide, 
 Steve Martin, who could point out the place where 
 it stood. 
 
 To me the forest was familiar. I knew it as a 
 boy charged with sophomorical sentiment, casting 
 about to find what inspiration I ought to borrow 
 from nature ; and I had ploughed the field too 
 often to find any genuine crop on it. I had passed 
 months painting in the glades, had wandered and 
 boated in the forest and on the streams till I felt 
 the points of the compass in the dark, and knew 
 its material fact as I knew my bedroom; but I 
 had come to look on it as one does on one of those 
 curious shells which some insects cast, and which 
 keep the form from which the life has escaped. 
 It was to me empty; it no longer lured me with 
 
 * This is a singularly faithful expression of the appearance of the 
 massive foliage of those lofty trees lighted by the camp-fires beneath. 
 
 t The decayed tree-trunks, falling into ruin, often looked like 
 glow-worms in the dark of night, their phosphorescence being fre 
 quently brilliant.
 
 276 THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP 
 
 any emotion beyond that of quiet, the charm of 
 Lethe, the fascination of an almost complete 
 negation of intellectual existence, and absolute 
 rest. I was therefore profoundly interested in 
 Emerson's first impressions, arid we were much 
 together. I rowed him into the innermost re 
 cesses of Follansbee Water, and would, at his 
 request, sometimes land him in a solitary part 
 of the lake-shore, and leave him to his emotions 
 or studies. We had no post, and letters neither 
 came nor went, and so, probably, none record the 
 moment's mood; but well I remember how he 
 marvelled at the completeness of the circle of 
 life in the forest. He examined the guides, 
 and me as one of them, with the interest of a 
 discoverer of a new race. Me he had known 
 in another phase of existence at the club, in 
 the multitude, one of the atoms of the social 
 whole. To find me axe in hand, ready for the 
 elementary functions of a savage life to fell the 
 trees, to kill the deer, or catch the trout, and at 
 need to cook them in this to him new phe 
 nomenon of a rounded and self-sufficient individu 
 ality, waiting for, and waited on, by no one, he 
 received a conception of life which had the same 
 attraction in its completeness and roundness that 
 a larger and fully organised existence would have 
 had. It was a form of independence which he 
 had never realised before, and he paid it the 
 respect of a new discovery. He had become weary 
 of the social completeness as a study, it seemed 
 to me; it was too large and exacting. But now
 
 THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP 277 
 
 he found a man who could be taken up as a 
 specimen, and studied as an individual, as Agassiz 
 would have studied a fossil; and all this was 
 new. 
 
 Emerson, as I read him, had no self-sufficiency. 
 He lived and felt with the minimum of personal 
 colour, reflecting nature and man; and the study 
 of the guide, the savage man thrown out of 
 society like a chip from a log under the axe of 
 the chopper, returning to the status of pure in 
 dividuality men such as our guides were 
 aroused in the philosopher the enthusiasm of a 
 new fact. He often spoke of it, and watched the 
 men as a naturalist does the animals he classifies. 
 I remember Longfellow's once saying of Emerson 
 that he used his friends as one did lemons when 
 he could squeeze nothing more from them, he 
 threw them away; but this, while in one sense 
 true, does Emerson a radical injustice. He had no 
 vanity, no self-importance; truth and philosophy 
 were so supreme in their hold on him that neither 
 his self nor any other self was worth so much as 
 the solution of a problem in life. To get this 
 solution he was willing to squeeze himself like a 
 lemon, if need were ; and why should he be other 
 wise disposed to his neighbour ? There are others 
 who knew Emerson better than I did or could, 
 and possibly Longfellow did, though that obser 
 vation makes me doubt that there was any real 
 sympathy between them. But what seems to me 
 the truth is, that Emerson instinctively divided 
 men into two classes, with one of which he formed
 
 278 THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP 
 
 personal attachments which, though tranquil and 
 undemonstrative, as was his nature, were lasting ; 
 in the other he simply found his objects of study, 
 problems to be solved and their solutions recorded. 
 There was the least conceivable self-assertion in 
 him; he was the best listener a genuine thinker, 
 or one whom he thought to be such, ever had; 
 and always seemed to prefer to listen rather 
 than to talk, to observe and study rather than 
 to discourse. So he did not say much before 
 nature; he took in her influences as the earth 
 takes the rain. He was minutely interested in 
 seeing how the old guides reversed the tendencies 
 of civilisation: how when they went to sleep on 
 the ground they put on their coats, but took 
 them off when they got up; wore their hats in 
 camp, but went on the lake bareheaded. 
 
 The entire absorption of his personality in the 
 subject-matter of study was childlike ; he left no 
 cranny of novelty unsearched. I remember that 
 one Sunday morning, when the state of the larder 
 made it necessary for the guides to get a deer, 
 Emerson was more disposed for quiet meditation, 
 having at that time no interest in the hunt ; so 
 I took him in my boat, and while those of the 
 company whose habits did not interfere with the 
 enjoyment of the chase on Sunday went to the 
 watching-posts with the guides, we sought the 
 remotest nook of the lake-shore. It was a 
 magnificent morning, and in the silence of the 
 forest the baying of the hounds, as they took 
 the scent on the hills above us and followed
 
 THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP 279 
 
 the deer in his doublings and evasions, filled the 
 air, and the echoes redoubled the music. When 
 the deer are in good condition, as in August, they 
 generally take a long run before they come to 
 water, and we heard the dogs sweeping round 
 over the hills at the farther end of the lake, and 
 coming back, ranging to and fro, till the expect 
 ancy and the new sensation grew in effect on 
 Emerson, and he could resist no longer. "Let 
 us go after the deer ! " he exclaimed ; and though, 
 having come out for meditation, we had no gun 
 with us, we were soon flying down the lake from 
 our remotest corner to where the baying led to 
 the shore. But we were too late; Lowell had 
 already killed the deer before we got there. 
 
 It was interesting to see how Emerson grew 
 into the camp life. As at first he had refused to 
 carry a rifle, and decided to take one only for 
 uniformity, so, in the early days of our forest 
 residence, he declined to take any part in the 
 hunting or fishing; but we had not been long 
 in camp before he caught the temper of the 
 occasion, and began to desire to kill his deer. 
 Luck failed him in the drives in which he took 
 part, the deer always coming in to some other 
 watcher, and we decided to try night-hunting 
 i.e., stealing up to the deer as they browse in 
 the pads along the shallow water, carrying in 
 the bow of the boat a light which blinds the 
 animal, the lantern throwing all its light for 
 ward, and the hunter sitting invisible in the 
 shadow. This manner of hunting is possible only
 
 280 THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP 
 
 on very dark nights, and was resorted to only 
 when venison was needed and the drive had 
 failed. If the man who paddles the boat is 
 dexterous, the deer can be approached to within 
 a few yards without being alarmed; but in the 
 darkness it is very difficult for those not accus 
 tomed to the appearance of the animal to dis 
 tinguish him from the rocks or shrubs around, 
 for in the intent examination of the strange 
 phenomenon of the light he remains motionless, 
 except that now and then he will beat the water 
 with his hoofs to drive away the flies. We took 
 the best guide at the paddle, Emerson taking the 
 firing-seat behind the lamp, and I in the middle 
 with my rifle ready, in case he missed his shot. 
 
 We went down the lake to the large bay at 
 the left of the outlet, now noted on the map of 
 the State survey as "Agassiz Bay," which is a 
 mistake, for we named this "Osprey Bay," from 
 the osprey nest in one of its tall pines, the bay 
 opposite the camp at the south end of the lake 
 being named in honour of Agassiz. The shore 
 is an alternation of stretches of sandy beach 
 where the white pond - lily thrives, and off ers 
 food for the deer, and rocky points separate the 
 beaches as if by screens, so that any movement 
 in one of the little bays is not visible in another. 
 There is something weird in silently gliding along 
 a spectral diorama of irrecognisable landscape, 
 with rocks and trees slipping by like phantasms; 
 for the motion of the boat is not distinguishable, 
 and the only sound is the occasional grating of
 
 THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP 281 
 
 the rushes on the bottom of the boat. It is, in 
 fact, the most exciting form of deer-hunting for 
 certain temperaments, and the poet was strongly 
 impressed. The practised ear of the guide soon 
 caught the sound of the footfall of a deer mak 
 ing his way down to the shore, and he turned 
 the glare of the lamp on the beach, moving 
 directly on him till he was within twenty yards. 
 The signal to fire was given and repeated, but 
 Emerson could distinguish nothing. "Shoot!" 
 finally whispered the guide in the faintest breath. 
 " Shoot ! " I repeated nearer. But the deer was 
 invisible to him, and we drifted to a boat's length 
 from him before the animal took fright and 
 bolted for the woods, undisturbed by a hasty 
 shot I sent after him, and we heard his triumph 
 ant whistle and gallop dying away in the forest 
 depths. Emerson was stupefied. We rounded 
 the next point, and found a deer already on the 
 feeding - ground, to repeat the experience. The 
 deer stood broadside to him, in full view, in 
 the shallow water; but, straining his vision to 
 the utmost, he could distinguish nothing like a 
 deer, and when we had got so near that the 
 same result was imminent, I fired, and the buck 
 fell dead. "Well," said Emerson, "if that was 
 a deer, I shall fire at the first square thing I 
 see"; but we saw no more that night. He 
 records the impression: 
 
 " Or, later yet, beneath a lighted jack, 
 In the boat's bows, a silent night-hunter
 
 282 THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP 
 
 Stealing with paddle to the feeding-grounds 
 Of the red deer, to aim at a square mist. 
 Hark to that muffled roar ! A tree in the woods 
 Is fallen : but hush ! it has not scared the buck, 
 Who stands astonished at the meteor light, 
 Then turns to bound away, is it too late?" 
 
 Each disappointment, however, plunged him more 
 deeply into the excitement of the chase, and he 
 was most anxious to kill his deer before he went 
 home, unable to resist the contagion of the passion 
 for it. He said to me one day, " I must kill a deer 
 before we go home, even if the guide has to 
 hold him by the tail." At that season of the year, 
 when the deer are in their " short coat," the body 
 sinks at once if shot in the deep water; and on 
 overtaking the quarry in the lake, if the deer-slayer 
 was not sure of his shot, the guide used to run 
 the boat alongside of it, and catch it by the tail, 
 when the shot became a sure one. As we hunted 
 only when we needed the meat, we did not risk 
 the loss of the deer, and when a poor shot held 
 the gun, the quarry was caught by the tail and 
 killed in this unsportsmanlike way. That survival 
 of the earliest passion of the primitive man, the 
 passion of the chase, overcame even the philo 
 sophic mind of Emerson, once exposed to the 
 original influences, and he recognised his ancestral 
 bent. Few of us who live an active life fail to 
 be attracted by this first of all occupations of 
 the yet uncivilised man. Emerson never had the 
 gratification of his desire; the deer never came 
 to him on the drive, and his repetition of the 
 night-hunt was no more successful.
 
 THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP 283 
 
 The starry magnificence of those nights, with 
 their pure mountain air, was another source of 
 delight hardly to be imagined by those who have 
 not known it by experience. There seemed to be 
 more stars visible than anywhere else I had ever 
 been, and we were often out on the lake till near 
 midnight ; 
 
 "Or, in the evening twilight's latest red, 
 Beholding the procession of the pines," 
 
 a curious phenomenon, now, with the ravages of 
 fire and axe, become a thing of the past. The 
 tall white pines, which when full grown rise from 
 one hundred and fifty to two hundred feet, 
 towering nearly half their height above the mass 
 of deciduous trees, and beyond the protection 
 which the solid forest gives against the dominant 
 west winds, acquire a leaning to the east; and as 
 they grew in long lines along the shores, or 
 followed the rocky ridges up the mountain sides, 
 they seemed to be gigantic human beings moving 
 in procession to the east. I had the year before 
 painted a picture of the subject, and Emerson had 
 been struck by it at the AthenEeum exhibition; 
 and when we were established in camp, almost 
 the first thing he asked to see was the " procession 
 of the pines"; and our last evening on the lake 
 was spent together watching the glow dying out 
 behind a noble line of the marching pines on the 
 shore of Follansbee Water. 
 
 In memory of that summer, and the intimacy 
 of camp life which strips the man of all dis 
 guises, Emerson seems to me to be magnified
 
 284 THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP 
 
 with the lapse of time, as Mont Blanc towers 
 above his fellows with distance. For Lowell, I 
 had a passionate personal attachment to which 
 death and time have only given a twilight glory; 
 for Agassiz, I had the feeling which all had who 
 came under the magic of his colossal individu 
 ality the myriad-minded one to whom nothing 
 came amiss or unfamiliar, and who had a facet 
 for every man he came in contact with. His 
 inexhaustible bonhomie won even the guides to 
 a personal fealty they showed no other of our 
 band; his wide science gave us continual lectures 
 on all the elements of nature no plant, no 
 insect, no quadruped hiding its secret from him. 
 The lessons he taught us of the leaves of the 
 pine, and of the vicissitudes of the Laurentian 
 range, in one of whose hollows we lay; the 
 way he drew new facts from the lake, and knew 
 them when he saw them, as though he had set 
 his seal on them before they were known ; the 
 daily dissection of the fish, the deer, the mice 
 (for which he had brought his traps), were 
 studies in which we were his assistants and 
 pupils. All this made being with him not only 
 "a liberal education," but perpetual sunshine and 
 good fortune. When we went out, I at the 
 oars and he at the dredge or insect-net, or 
 examining the plants by the marsh-side, his spirit 
 was a perpetual spring of science. When he and 
 Wyman entered on the discussion of a scientific 
 subject (and they always worked together), 
 science seemed as easy as versification when
 
 THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP 285 
 
 Lowell was in the mood, and all sat around 
 inhaling wisdom with the mountain air. Nothing 
 could have been, to any man with the scientific 
 bent, more intensely interesting than the academy 
 of two of the greatest scientists of their day. 
 Wyman's was a gentle, womanlike nature, modest 
 to a fault, utterly absorbed in his science, and 
 free from a shadow of pretension. He was 
 held by many to be the greater scientist, but 
 the personality of Agassiz towered over every 
 other about him, and won all suffrages for the 
 day. But looking back across the gulf which 
 hides all the details of life, the eternal absence 
 which forgets personal qualities, the calm, platonic 
 serenity of Emerson stands out from all our 
 company as a crystallisation of impersonal and 
 universal humanity; no vexation, no mishap 
 could disturb his philosophy, or rob him of its 
 lesson. 
 
 At our dinners, the semblance of which life will 
 never offer me again, the gods sent their best 
 accompaniments and influences health, appetite, 
 wit, and poetry, with good digestion. 
 
 "Our foaming ale we drank from hunters' pans- 
 Ale, and a sup of wine. Our steward gave 
 Venison and trout, potatoes, beans, wheat-bread. 
 All ate like abbots, and, if any missed 
 Their wonted convenience, cheerly hid the loss 
 With hunter's appetite and peals of mirth." 
 
 Lowell was the Magnus Apollo of the camp. 
 His Castalian humour, his unceasing play of wit 
 and erudition poetry and the best of the poets
 
 286 THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP 
 
 always on tap at the table all know them who 
 knew him well, though not many as I did; but 
 when he sat on one side of the table, and Judge 
 Hoar (the most pyrotechnical wit I have ever 
 known) and he were matching table-talk, with 
 Emerson and Agassiz to sit as umpires and 
 revive the vein as it menaced to flag, Holmes 
 and Estes Howe not silent in the well-matched 
 contest, the forest echoed with such laughter as 
 no club ever knew, and the owls came in the 
 trees overhead to wonder. These were symposia 
 to which fortune has invited few men, and 
 which no one invited could ever forget. 
 
 The magical quality of the forest is that of 
 oblivion of all that is left in the busy world 
 of past trouble and coming care. The steeds 
 that brought us in had no place behind for black 
 care. We lived, as Emerson says, 
 
 " Lords of this realm, 
 
 Bounded by dawn and sunset, and the day 
 Rounded by hours where each outdid the last 
 In miracles of pomp, we must be proud, 
 As if associates of the sylvan gods. 
 We seemed the dwellers of the zodiac, 
 So pure the Alpine element we breathed, 
 So light, so lofty pictures came and went." 
 
 At sunrise, the guides and we who had cares 
 of the camp were afoot ; fires were refreshed, 
 bathers went out, and a boat went to look at 
 the set lines for trout. Breakfast was at eight. 
 Then we practised firing at a mark, a few rounds 
 each, the scientists dissected their specimens, and
 
 THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP 287 
 
 the guides did the " house-work." I made a study 
 as the memorial of the event the morning hour 
 in the camp : Agassiz and Wyman on one side 
 dissecting a trout, with the assistance of Howe 
 and Holmes; on the other, the firing party, 
 Lowell, Judge Hoar, and the rest of us, except 
 Emerson, who professed to be neither rifleman 
 nor anatomist, but with a pilgrim's staff in hand 
 took a place alone and between the two groups, 
 with an intentional symbolism of his position in 
 the world. Then, if venison was wanted, we set 
 the hunt; or those who chose to wander did so, 
 explored the streams and woods around, botan- 
 ised, hunted specimens, or fished. 
 
 "Ask you, how went the hours? 
 All day we swept the lake, searched every cove, 
 North from Camp Maple, south to Osprey Bay, 
 Watching when the loud dogs should drive in deer, 
 Or whipping its rough surface for a trout ; 
 Or, bathers, diving from the rock at noon ; 
 Challenging Echo by our guns and cries ; 
 Or listening to the laughter of the loon. 
 
 Our heroes tried their rifles at a mark, 
 Six rods, sixteen, twenty, or forty-five; 
 Sometimes their wits at sally and retort, 
 With laughter sudden as the crack of rifle ; 
 Or parties scaled the near acclivities, 
 Competing seekers of a rumoured lake, 
 Whose unauthenticated waves we named 
 Lake Probability, our carbuncle, 
 Long sought, not found. 
 
 Two doctors in the camp 
 
 Dissected the slain deer, weighed the trout's brain, 
 Captured the lizard, salamander, shrew,
 
 288 THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP 
 
 Crab, mice, snail, dragon-fly, minnow, and moth ; 
 
 Insatiate skill in water or in air 
 
 Waved the scoop-net, and nothing came amiss ; 
 
 The while, one leaden pot of alcohol 
 
 Gave an impartial tomb to all the kinds. 
 
 Not less the ambitious botanist sought plants 
 
 Orchis and gentian, fern and long whip-scirpus, 
 
 Rosy polygonum, lake-margin's pride, 
 
 Hypnum and hydnum, mushroom, sponge, and moss, 
 
 Or harebell nodding in the gorge of falls." 
 
 A pleasant life it was; there was no prevention 
 of debtor or creditor, no due-bills or trouble of 
 business; all had put affairs by for a certain 
 time, and day by day the Lethean silence lured 
 us deeper into its magic recesses. The outside 
 world was but a dream. No visitor intruded on 
 our presence. We ate a deer every day, and 
 the venison was such as no king ever tasted, 
 and our lake furnished trout in perfection. The 
 larder was always provided: not often was the 
 drive without its deer, and if by chance two 
 were killed in one day, we killed none the next, 
 for we tolerated no waste or wanton killing, 
 and the osprey, the eagle, and the loon had in 
 us friends. The effect of this life alike on the 
 physical and mental condition was such as only 
 experience can estimate. It was wonderful to see 
 how the healing of the mighty mother cured the 
 ailments we brought with us. It was nothing new 
 to me, but to the newcomers it was like enchant 
 ment. Agassiz came suffering from rheumatism 
 and overwork, but four days sufficed to restore 
 him to his normal condition. The dust that
 
 THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP 289 
 
 the turmoil of civilisation throws into the mental 
 mechanism was no longer allowed to wear or 
 weary; life and all its problems came out in a 
 much less complex light, and the conditions of 
 existence seemed simplified. Why should men 
 be anxious for more, when with little we fared 
 so well, or were so easily provided? No com 
 plication of this problem was forced on the 
 mind, which was left in this so facile solution 
 of it that it seemed to clear the future of all its 
 difficulties. We seemed to have got back into 
 a not too greatly-changed Eden, whose imperious 
 ties to the outer world were hidden for the day 
 in the waters and woods that lay between us 
 and it. We had at last come to the state where 
 what each man was and had made of himself 
 was the real measure of his relation to the 
 world, and the universal mother took us all on 
 the same terms, the worst prodigal reckoned as 
 good as he who had endured guiltlessly his 
 temptation, the worst violator of her laws with 
 the least sinner. 
 
 " So fast will Nature acclimate her sons, 
 Though late returning to her pristine ways. 
 Off soundings, seamen do not suffer cold ; 
 And in the forest, delicate clerks, unbrowned, 
 Sleep on the fragrant brush, as on down-beds. 
 Up with the dawn, they fancied the light air 
 That circled freshly in their forest dress 
 Made them to boys again. Happier that they 
 Slipped off their pack of duties, leagues behind, 
 At the first mounting of the giant stairs. 
 No placard on these rocks warned to the polls, 
 No door-bell heralded a visitor, 
 T
 
 290 THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP 
 
 No courier waits, no letter came or went, 
 
 Nothing was ploughed, or reaped, or bought, or sold. 
 
 The frost might glitter, it would blight no crop ; 
 
 The falling rain would spoil no holiday. 
 
 We were made freemen of the forest laws, 
 
 All dressed, like nature, fit for her own ends, 
 
 Essaying nothing she cannot perform." 
 
 I have quoted enough to show how fully 
 Emerson caught, in his first experience, the 
 spirit of the woods: not morbidly, like Shelley, 
 nor with the air of calling all the world to see 
 how solitary he was, which seems to me so much 
 to impair the genuineness of Thoreau's experience 
 in the barn-door backwoods in which he acted 
 the recluse. Thoreau was a modern realist with 
 a morose and uncompanionable genius always 
 in attendance; his was a pinchbeck royalty with 
 a lunch -basket from his father's farm hardly 
 hidden behind his throne. He saw minutely, as 
 all short-sighted people do ; Emerson, in his single 
 interview with a true and uncontaminated nature, 
 saw all the relations between her and not merely 
 one individuality, narrow or large, but all 
 humanity. The ancient Greek in him found the 
 algebraic formula of existence, the absolute ideal 
 of man and the law of his relation to nature. 
 He saw "hypnum and hydnum," but put them 
 down as details in a foreground. What filled 
 his canvas was manhood. He measured and 
 specialised nature with reference to a completed 
 and ideal type in which nature was fulfilled, and 
 he bowed to the backwoodsman.
 
 THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP 291 
 
 " Your rank is all reversed. Let men of cloth 
 Bow to the stalwart churls in overalls : 
 They are the doctors of the wilderness, 
 And we the low-prized laymen." 
 
 If the experience was unique, it was sufficient, 
 and other summers had been only repetitions; 
 his epic of the wilderness may be made more 
 picturesque by another telling, but not more com 
 plete. What he did in this poem is unique as 
 was the occasion. He reduced man to his most 
 simple condition before nature in her most 
 primitive state and drew them as a whole, as the 
 great painters did their outdoor figure-subjects 
 humanity always the keynote of the picture. 
 When he has told nature's message, he gives by 
 implication something beyond the interpretation 
 of it as rendered in thought, the recognition of 
 what it does with humanity. Taking man in the 
 simple and complete type, to which he does full 
 honour, as he reverences nature; beyond this 
 and that there stands always the higher and 
 ultimate universal nature of which man is a part, 
 but the crowning part, the aspiring and suffer 
 ing humanity. There is no conflict; only, when 
 all has been said for the backwoods and the 
 backwoodsman, he points to another humanity 
 and nature beyond. 
 
 " And presently the sky is changed; world! 
 What pictures and what harmonies are thine ! 
 The clouds are rich and dark, the air serene, 
 So like the soul of me, what if 'twere me ? 
 A melancholy better than all mirth.
 
 292 THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP 
 
 Comes the sweet sadness at the retrospect, 
 Or at the foresight of obscurer years? 
 
 And, that no day of life may lack romance, 
 The spiritual stars rise nightly, shedding down 
 A private beam into each several heart. 
 
 Suns haste to set, that so remoter lights 
 Beckon the wanderer to his vaster home." 
 
 In the midst of this hymn to nature, it was 
 one of the supreme achievements of the me 
 chanical mind of man which furnished the text 
 for his loudest paean. Some of the members of 
 the company, in their wanderings outside our 
 realm, had met a traveller with the news of the 
 laying of the first transatlantic cable, and came 
 back to camp with the great news. 
 
 " One held a printed journal, waving high, 
 Caught from a late-arriving traveller, 
 Big with great news, and shouted the report 
 For which the world had waited, now firm fact, 
 Of the wire-cable laid beneath the sea, 
 And landed on our coast, and pulsating 
 With ductile fire. Loud, exulting cries 
 From boat to boat, and to the echoes round, 
 Greet the glad miracle." 
 
 Emerson is, we say, cold. Perhaps in the day 
 when only bacchanals heat the public ear he may 
 be so. There is no passion which the public now 
 generally recognise as such, except the personal; 
 but in that serener sphere where Plato breathed, 
 the nature of Emerson is too much at home to 
 be yet widely understood in its passion. How 
 Greek is this passionate outburst at the new 
 revolt of the human mind against its limitations,
 
 THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP 293 
 
 this clapping of hands at the Promethean un 
 loosing! And Promethean passion was his: it 
 quickened his blood with every human footstep 
 upward, it kindled the light of his calm eyes 
 anew with every indignity offered humanity ; not 
 only the slavery of the black and the barbarian 
 made his anger burn, but the slavery of civilisa 
 tion and self-imposed wrong made his soul heavy. 
 And people have the idea of comparing him 
 with the burly Carlyle! As well Apollo with a 
 jotun! "Deficient in form and polish?" Well, 
 the ages had not yet furnished the material to 
 cut this diamond to its faceted formality; there 
 is neither the form of Sophocles nor the fluency 
 of Plato, but it was further from Homer to 
 Plato than from Chaucer to Emerson. Then see 
 the Greek again in his instinctive impersonation 
 of the forces of nature "Chronos and Tellus 
 who were before Jove": 
 
 " A spasm throbbing through the pedestals 
 Of Alp and Andes, isle and continent, 
 Urging astonished Chaos with a thrill 
 To be a brain, or serve the brain of man. 
 The lightning has run masterless too long ; 
 He must to school and learn his verb and noun, 
 And teach his nimbleness to earn his wage, 
 Spelling with guided tongue man's messages 
 Shot through the weltering pit of the salt sea." 
 
 But our paradise was no Eden. The world 
 that played bo-peep with us across the moun 
 tains came for us when the play-spell was over; 
 this summer dream, unique in the record of 
 poesy, melted like a cloud-castle into its original
 
 294 THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP 
 
 elements, and Emerson was one of the first to 
 turn back to the sterner use of time. 
 
 " The holidays were fruitful, but must end ; 
 One August evening had a cooler breath; 
 Into each mind intruding duties crept ; 
 Under the cinders burned the fires of home ; 
 Nay, letters found us in our paradise : 
 So in the gladness of the new event 
 We struck our camp and left the happy hills." 
 
 The lake became for a time a place of pilgrim 
 age. To visit the Philosophers' Camp was one of 
 the items of an Adirondack trip. 
 
 " We planned 
 
 That we should build, hard by, a spacious lodge, 
 And how we should come hither with our sons 
 Hereafter." 
 
 And the permanent meeting-place was fixed at 
 Ampersand Pond, to which in time the traditior 
 of the Philosophers' Camp was attached, and 
 where, as long as the club existed, the annual 
 meetings were held. 
 
 Twenty-five years elapsed before I returned to 
 Follansbee Water. The genius loci, dryad or 
 hamadryad, had there been one, would have 
 found it as hard to recognise me as I found it 
 hard to find Camp Maple. I had the same guide, 
 Steve Martin, a grey-headed man, the worse for 
 a life of hardship, which, I find, does not always 
 harden; but we found with great difficulty the 
 landing and the choked-up spring. A half-re 
 forested clearing spread round the spot where 
 our "ten scholars" used to lie, and a tangle.d
 
 THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP 295 
 
 thicket of raspberry bushes, lady's-willow, birch 
 saplings, and tall grass, made walking almost 
 impossible. We found a huge rock that had 
 been a landmark, but this and the spring alone 
 were to be distinguished. The careless sports 
 men had cut all the hard wood away, and let the 
 fires in, and the whole forest round had been 
 burned, and was succeeded by thickets of under 
 growth. The great maples and the tall white 
 pines had gone from the entire vicinity, and a 
 vulgar new forest was on its way; the trees that 
 used to line the lake-shore had fallen into the 
 lake, their roots being burned away; and not the 
 slightest feature remained of the grove where 
 wit and wisdom held tournament a generation 
 before. All was ashes and ruin. I 
 
 " felt like one who treads alone 
 Some banquet-hall deserted." 
 
 Nor was the lake less changed in outward ap 
 pearance. Every fit camping-ground on the shore 
 had been occupied in succession, and the camp- 
 fires allowed to spread into the forest until the 
 whole shore had been denuded of its fringe of 
 hoary trees. The "procession of the pines" had 
 gone by for ever; only here and there a dead 
 trunk was standing, among them that up which 
 Lowell's guide climbed to the osprey's nest to get 
 an egg for Agassiz. Speculating manufacturers 
 had built a dam across the Kaquette and flooded 
 all the bottom-land, killing the trees over a large 
 tract; wretched dolts had put pike into the
 
 296 THE PHILOSOPHERS' CAMP 
 
 Raquette waters, and the trout had become 
 exterminated in every stream to which the 
 ravenous fish had access. 
 
 It was well that the charm once broken, the 
 desecration begun, it should be complete. The 
 memories sacred to the few survivors can never 
 be quickened by this ruin, and to the rest of 
 the world it does not matter. Emerson has 
 embalmed it; that is enough. In some Eastern 
 countries it is the custom to break the bowl 
 from which an honoured guest has drunk ; nature 
 has done this service to Follansbee Water. 
 
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