LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 CALIFORNIA 
 
 SAN DIEGO i

 
 PRINCIPLE IN ART 
 
 ETC.
 
 PRINCIPLE IN ART 
 
 ETC. 
 
 BY 
 
 COVENTRY PATMORE 
 
 N EW EDITION 
 
 LONDON 
 
 GEORGE BELL AND SONS, YORK STREET 
 COVENT GARDEN
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THE large majority of these Essays were printed 
 in the St. James's Gazette during the editorship 
 of Mr. Greenwood. The Essay on "Architec- 
 tural Styles " contains a summary of principles 
 which were stated, some thirty years ago, in 
 various articles, chiefly in the Edinburgh Review. 
 In the original issue the author had noted 
 that "thoughts had sometimes been repeated, 
 almost in the same words." In the rearrange- 
 ment here adopted no attempt has been made 
 to obviate this repetition, which may be even 
 more conspicuous than in the original order ; 
 but, "as these thoughts are mostly unfamiliar
 
 vi PREFACE 
 
 and significant, readers will be none the worse 
 for encountering them twice, or even thrice." 
 
 Shortly before his death, Mr. Patmore had 
 suggested a rearrangement for a new issue, 
 which has been adopted and completed for this 
 edition. A few corrections and omissions have 
 also been made, the greater number of which 
 were either marked or sanctioned by the author 
 himself. The alterations not actually his own 
 are few and of small importance. 
 
 Some obvious mistakes in matters of fact, 
 and some errors of punctuation, have been 
 corrected; here and there a word has been 
 transposed where the original order was im- 
 perfect ; and one or two passages which seemed 
 to have been written for an immediate purpose 
 rather than for more permanent effect have been 
 omitted.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 ESSAY PAGE 
 
 I. PRINCIPLE IN ART . . . . i 
 
 II. CHEERFULNESS IN LIFE AND ART . . 6 
 
 III. THE POINT OF REST IN ART ... 12 
 
 IV. BAD MORALITY is BAD ART . . . 18 
 V. EMOTIONAL ART 24 
 
 VI. PEACE IN LIFE AND ART . . .31 
 
 VII. PATHOS 37 
 
 VIII. POETICAL INTEGRITY .... 44 
 
 IX. THE POETRY OF NEGATION ... 50 
 
 X. DISTINCTION 55 
 
 XI. KEATS . . . . . . -75 
 
 XII. WHAT SHELLEY WAS .... 82 
 
 XIII. BLAKE 92 
 
 XIV. ROSSETTI AS A POET . . . .98 
 
 XV. ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 106
 
 viii CONTENTS 
 
 ESSAY PAGE 
 
 XVI. EMERSON 113 
 
 XVII. CRABBE AND SHELLEY . . . . . 122 
 XVIII. A MODERN CLASSIC, WILLIAM 
 
 BARNES 129 
 
 XIX. MRS. MEYNELL 146 
 
 XX. MADAME DE HAUTEFORT . . . 159 
 
 XXI. A SPANISH NOVELETTE . . . 192 
 
 XXII. ON OBSCURE BOOKS . . . .199 
 
 XXIII. SHALL SMITH HAVE A STATUE? . . 205 
 
 XXIV. IDEAL AND MATERIAL GREATNESS IN 
 
 ARCHITECTURE 210 
 
 XXV. " OLD ENGLISH " ARCHITECTURE, 
 
 ANCIENT AND MODERN . . . 218 
 
 XXVI. ARCHITECTURAL STYLES . . . 224
 
 I 
 
 PRINCIPLE IN ART 
 
 IT is not true, though it has so often been asserted, 
 that criticism is of no use or of little use to art. 
 This notion prevails so widely only because 
 among us at least criticism has not been criti- 
 cism. To criticise is to judge ; to judge requires 
 judicial qualification ; and this is quite a different 
 thing from a natural sensitiveness to beauty, how- 
 ever much that sensitiveness may have become 
 heightened by converse with refined and beautiful 
 objects of nature and works of art. " Criticism," 
 which has been the outcome only of such sensitive- 
 ness and such converse, may be, and often is, 
 delightful reading, and is naturally far more popular 
 than criticism which is truly judicial. The pseudo- 
 criticism, of which we have had such floods during 
 the past half-century, delights by sympathy with, 
 and perhaps expansion of, our own sensations ; 
 B
 
 2 PRINCIPLE IN ART 
 
 true criticism appeals to the intellect, and rebukes 
 the reader as often as it does the artist for his 
 ignorance and his mistakes. Such criticism may 
 not be able to produce good art ; but bad art 
 collapses at the contact of its breath, as the steam 
 in the cylinder of an engine collapses on each 
 admission of the spray of cold water ; and thus, 
 although good criticism cannot produce art, it 
 removes endless hindrances to its production, and 
 tends to provide art with its chief motive-power, a 
 public prepared to acknowledge it. The enuncia- 
 tion of a single principle has sometimes, almost 
 at a blow, revolutionised not only the technical 
 practice of an art, but the popular taste with regard 
 to it. Strawberry Hill Gothic vanished like a 
 nightmare when Pugin for the first time authori- 
 tatively asserted and proved that architectural 
 decoration could never properly be an addition to 
 constructive features, but only a fashioning of 
 them. The truth was manifest at once to amateur 
 as well as to architect ; and this one principle 
 proves to have contained a power even of popular 
 culture far greater than all the splendid " sympa- 
 thetic " criticism which followed during the next 
 fifty years. And it has done nothing but good, 
 whereas the latter kind of writing, together with 
 much good, has done much harm. Pugin's insight 
 did not enable him to discover the almost equally
 
 PRINCIPLE IN ART 3 
 
 clear and simple principle which governs the 
 special form of decoration that properly charac- 
 terises each of the great styles of architecture. 
 Therefore, while his law of constructional decora- 
 tion compelled all succeeding " critics " to keep 
 within its bounds, they were still free to give the 
 rein to mere fancy as to the nature of the decora- 
 tion itself; and this has been becoming worse 
 and worse in proportion as critics and architects 
 of genius, but of no principle, have departed from 
 the dry tradition of decorative form which pre- 
 vailed in Pugin's day, and which finds its ortho- 
 dox expression in Parker's Glossary and the 
 elementary works of Bloxam and Rickman. 
 Sensitiveness or natural " taste," apart from 
 principle, is, in art, what love is apart from truth 
 in morals. The stronger it is, the further it is 
 likely to go wrong. Nothing can be more 
 tenderly " felt " than a school of painting which 
 is now much in favour ; but, for want of know- 
 ledge and masculine principle, it has come to 
 delight in representing ugliness and corruption 
 in place of health and beauty. Venus or Hebe 
 becomes, in its hands, nothing but a Dame aux 
 Camillas in the last stage of moral and physical 
 deterioration. A few infallible and, when once 
 uttered, self-evident principles would at once put 
 a stop to this sort of representation among
 
 4 PRINCIPLE IN ART 
 
 artists ; and the public would soon learn to be 
 repelled by what now most attracts them, being 
 thenceforward guided by a critical conscience, 
 which is the condition of "good taste." 
 
 There is little that is conclusive or fruitful in 
 any of the criticism of the present day. The very 
 name that it has chosen, "Esthetics," contains 
 an implied admission of its lack of virility or 
 principle. We do not think of Lessing's Lao- 
 coon, which is one of the finest pieces of critical 
 writing in the world, as belonging to "^Esthetics"; 
 and, like it, the critical sayings of Goethe and Cole- 
 ridge seem to appertain to a science deserving a 
 nobler name a science in which truth stands 
 first and feeling second, and of which the con- 
 clusions are demonstrable and irreversible. A 
 critic of the present day, in attempting to describe 
 the difference between the usual construction of 
 a passage by Fletcher and that of one by Shake- 
 speare, would beat helplessly about the bush, telling 
 us many things about the different sorts of feelings 
 awakened by the one and by the other, and 
 concluding, and desiring to conclude, nothing. 
 Coleridge in a single sentence defines the differ- 
 ence, and establishes Shakespeare's immeasurable 
 superiority with the clearness and finality of a 
 mathematical statement ; and the delight of the 
 reader of Shakespeare is for ever heightened
 
 PRINCIPLE IN ART 5 
 
 because it is less than before a zeal without know- 
 ledge. 
 
 There already exists, in the writings and say- 
 ings of Aristotle, Hegel, Lessing, Goethe, and 
 others, the greater part of the materials necessary 
 for the formation of a body of Institutes of Art 
 which would supersede and extinguish nearly all 
 the desultory chatter which now passes for criti- 
 cism, and which would go far to form a true and 
 abiding popular taste one which could render 
 some reason for its likings and dislikings. The 
 man, however, who could put such materials to- 
 gether and add such as are wanting does not 
 live ; or at any rate he is not known. Hegel 
 might have done it, had his artistic perception 
 been as fine and strong as his intellect ; which 
 would then have expressed its conclusions with- 
 out the mist of obscurity in which, for nearly all 
 readers, they are at present shrouded. In the 
 meantime it would be well if the professed critic 
 would remember that criticism is not the ex- 
 pression, however picturesque and glowing, of the 
 faith that is in him, but the rendering of sound 
 and intelligible reasons for that faith.
 
 II 
 
 CHEERFULNESS IN LIFE AND ART 
 
 " REJOICE always : and again I say, Rejoice," says 
 one of the highest authorities ; and a poet who is 
 scarcely less infallible in psychological science 
 writes 
 
 A cheerful heart is what the Muses love. 
 
 Dante shows Melancholy dismally punished in 
 Purgatory ; though his own interior gaiety of 
 which a word by and by is so interior, and its 
 outward aspect often so grim, that he is vulgarly 
 considered to have himself been a sinner in this 
 sort. Good art is nothing but a representation of 
 life ; and that the good are gay is a commonplace, 
 and one which, strange to say, is as generally dis- 
 believed as it is, when rightly understood, undeni- 
 ably true. The good and brave heart is always 
 gay in this sense : that, although it may be afflicted 
 and oppressed by its own misfortunes and those of 
 others, it refuses in the darkest moment to con-
 
 CHEERFULNESS IN LIFE AND ART 7 
 
 sent to despondency ; and thus a habit of mind is 
 formed which can discern in most of its own afflic- 
 tions some cause for grave rejoicing, and can thence 
 infer at least a probability of such cause in cases 
 where it cannot be discerned. Regarding thus 
 cheerfully and hopefully its own sorrows, it is not 
 over-troubled by those of others, however tender 
 and helpful its sympathies may be. It is impos- 
 sible to weep much for that in others which we 
 should smile at in ourselves ; and when we see a 
 soul writhing like a worm under what seems to us 
 a small misfortune, our pity for its misery is much 
 mitigated by contempt for its cowardice. 
 
 A couple of generations ago most people would 
 have opened their eyes wide at any one who should 
 have thought remarks like these worth making. 
 Such truth formed part of the universal tradition 
 of civilisation and moral culture. But a wilful 
 melancholy, and, the twin sign of corruption, a 
 levity which acutely fears and sympathises with 
 pains which are literally only skin-deep, have been 
 increasing upon us of late in a most portentous 
 way. The much-vaunted growth of " humanity " 
 has been due to a softening rather of the brain 
 than of the heart. Huge moral ill, the fact of 
 national degradation, the prospect of national dis- 
 aster, arouses less pain in the sympathetic hearts 
 of humanitarians than the yelp of a poodle which
 
 8 CHEERFULNESS IN LIFE AND ART 
 
 has had its ear pinched. Men and times do not 
 talk about the virtues they possess. Which is 
 more inhuman : to punish with rack and wheel the 
 treason which voluntarily sacrifices or jeopardises 
 the welfare of millions, or to condone or ignore it 
 for the sake of momentary ease ? The England 
 in which melancholy and levity are becoming pre- 
 valent habits is merry England no more. " The 
 nation thou hast multiplied, but not increased the 
 joy." And we are not the only nation which 
 deserves this lamentation of the prophet. The 
 growths of melancholy and levity have been still 
 more marked in France. In America, some tra- 
 veller has remarked, " there is comfort everywhere, 
 but no joy." America is accordingly the only 
 country which has no art. 
 
 It is, as I have said, a vulgar error to consider 
 Dante a melancholy poet. In the whole range of 
 art, joy is nowhere expressed so often and with 
 such piercing sweetness as in the Paradise; and 
 it flashes occasionally through the dun atmos- 
 phere of the other parts of the poem. The 
 Inferno is pervaded by the vigorous joy of the 
 poet at beholding thoroughly bad people getting 
 their deserts ; and the penances of purgatory 
 are contemplated by him with the grave pleasure 
 which is often felt by the saner sort of persons, 
 even in this world, under the sufferings they
 
 CHEERFULNESS IN LIFE AND ART 9 
 
 acknowledge to be the appropriate punishment 
 of and purification from the sins they have fallen 
 into. Shakespeare is the most cheerful of poets. 
 We read his deepest tragedies without contract- 
 ing even a momentary stain of melancholy, how- 
 ever many tears they may have drawn from us. 
 Calderon flies among horrors and disasters on 
 the wings of a bird of Paradise, without any re- 
 sulting incongruity ; and like things may be said 
 of the greatest painters and musicians, until quite 
 recent times. But since about the beginning of 
 this century how many of our geniuses have mingled 
 their songs with tears and sighs over " insoluble 
 problems " and " mysteries of life " which have no 
 existence for a man who is in his right senses and 
 who minds his own business ; while the " scrannel 
 pipes" of the smaller wits have been playing to 
 the sorry Yankee tune of " There's nothing new, 
 and there's nothing true, and it doesn't signify." 
 Music has taken to imitate the wailing of lost 
 spirits or the liveliness of the casino ; and the 
 highest ambition of several of our best painters 
 seems to have been to evoke a pathos from eternal 
 gloom. 
 
 This is false art, and represents a false life, or 
 rather that which is not life at all ; for life is not 
 only joyful, it is joy itself. Life, unhindered by 
 the internal obstruction of vice or the outward
 
 io CHEERFULNESS IN LIFE AND ART 
 
 obscurations of pain, sorrow, and anxiety, is pure 
 and simple joy ; as we have most of us experienced 
 during the few hours of our lives in which, the 
 conscience being free, all bodily and external evils 
 have been removed or are at least quiescent. And, 
 though these glimpses of perfect sunshine are short 
 and far between, the joy of life will not be wholly 
 obscured to us by any external evil, provided the 
 breast is clear of remorse, envy, discontent, or 
 any other habitually cherished sin. The oppor- 
 tunities and hindrances of joyful life are pretty 
 fairly distributed among all classes and persons. 
 God is just, and His mercy is over all His works. 
 If gardens and parks are denied to the inhabitant 
 of a city lane, his eye is so sharpened by its fasts 
 that it can drink in its full share of the sweetness 
 of nature from a flowering geranium or a pot of 
 crocuses on his window-sill. There are really 
 very few persons who have not enough to eat. 
 Marriage is open almost equally to all, except, 
 perhaps, the less wealthy members of the upper 
 orders. None are without opportunities of joy and 
 abundant reasons for gratitude : and the hindrances 
 of joy are, if justly considered, only opportunities 
 of acquiring new capacities for delight. In pro- 
 portion as life becomes high and pure it becomes 
 gay. The profound spiritualities of the Greek and 
 Indian myths laugh for joy ; and there are, perhaps,
 
 CHEERFULNESS IN LIFE AND ART n 
 
 no passages of Scripture more fondly dwelt upon 
 in the Roman Breviary than those which paint 
 the gladness of the Uncreated Wisdom : " When 
 he balanced the foundations of the earth, I was 
 with him, forming all things : and was delighted 
 every day, playing before him at all times, playing 
 in the world : and my delight is to be with the 
 children of men."
 
 Ill 
 
 THE POINT OF REST IN ART 
 
 COLERIDGE, who had little technical knowledge 
 of any art but that in which, when he was him- 
 self, he supremely excelled poetry had never- 
 theless a deeper insight into the fundamental 
 principles of art than any modern writer, with the 
 sole exception of Goethe. And this is one of his 
 many fruitful sayings : " All harmony is founded 
 on a relation to rest on relative rest. Take a 
 metallic plate and strew sand on it, sound an 
 harmonic chord over the sand, and the grains will 
 whirl about in circles and other geometrical 
 figures, all, as it were, depending on some point 
 of sand relatively at rest. Sound a discord, and 
 every grain will whisk about without any order at 
 all, in no figures, and with no point of rest." 
 
 Without pretending to be able to trace this 
 principle of rest to more than a very limited 
 distance, and in a very few examples, I think it
 
 THE POINT OF REST IN ART 13 
 
 is worth notice in a time when art generally is 
 characterised by a want of that repose which 
 until recently has especially " marked the manners 
 of the great." Look through the National Gallery, 
 and few pictures will be found which would 
 not add a grace of peace to the house they 
 were hung in, no matter how wild the subject or 
 passionate the motive. Step into an Academy 
 Exhibition, and there will scarcely be discovered 
 a dozen canvases in a thousand which, however 
 skilful and in many respects admirable they may 
 be, would not constitute points of unrest, if they 
 were in daily and hourly sight. It is the same 
 with nearly all modern poetry, sculpture, and 
 architecture ; and if it is not true of music, it is 
 because music absolutely cannot exist without 
 some reference to a point or points of rest, in key- 
 note, fundamental strain, or reiterated refrain. 
 
 It might at first be supposed that, in a picture, 
 this point should be that on which the eye should 
 repose in order to bring the remainder into focal 
 proportion ; and this is true with regard to those 
 painters who paint on the theory that the eye is 
 fixed, and not roving in its regard. But this 
 theory has never been that of the greatest times 
 of art. Crome's, Constable's, and Gainsborough's 
 landscapes do not fade off from a certain point 
 on which the eye is supposed to be fixed ; yet
 
 I 4 THE POINT OF REST IN ART 
 
 there will usually be found some point, generally 
 quite insignificant in matter, on which, indeed, the 
 eye does not necessarily fix itself, but to which it 
 involuntarily returns for repose. 
 
 The most noteworthy remark to be made about 
 this point of rest is, that it is in itself not the most 
 but the least interesting point in the whole work. 
 It is the punctum indifferens to which all that is 
 interesting is more or less unconsciously referred. 
 In an elaborate landscape it may be as it is in 
 one of Constable's the sawn-off end of a branch 
 of a tree : or a piece of its root, as it is in one of 
 Michael Angelo's pieces in the Sistine Chapel. 
 In the Dresden " Madonna " of Raphael it is the 
 heel of the Infant. No one who has not given 
 some thought to the subject can have any idea of 
 the value of these apparently insignificant points 
 in the pictures in which they occur, unless he 
 tries the experiment of doing away with them. 
 Cover them from sight and, to a moderately 
 sensitive and cultivated eye, the whole life of the 
 picture will be found to have been lowered. 
 
 In proportion to the extent and variety of points 
 of interest in a painting or a poem the necessity 
 for this point of rest seems to increase. In a 
 lyric or idyll, or a painting with very few details, 
 there is little need for it. It is accordingly in the 
 most elaborate plays of Shakespeare that we find
 
 THE POINT OF REST IN ART 15 
 
 this device in its fullest value ; and it is from two 
 or three of these that I shall draw my main 
 illustrations of a little-noticed but very important 
 principle of art. In King Lear it is by the 
 character of Kent, in Romeo and Juliet by 
 Friar Laurence, in Hamlet by Horatio, in Othello 
 by Cassio, and in the Merchant of Venice by 
 Bassanio, that the point of rest is supplied ; 
 and this point being also in each case a 
 point of vital comparison by which we measure 
 and feel the relationships of all the other char- 
 acters, it becomes an element of far higher value 
 than when it is simply an, as it were, accidental 
 point of repose, like the lopped branch in Con- 
 stable's landscape. Each of these five characters 
 stands out of the stream of the main interest, and 
 is additionally unimpressive in itself by reason of 
 its absolute conformity to reason and moral order, 
 from which every other character in the play 
 departs more or less. Thus Horatio is the exact 
 punctum indifferens between the opposite excesses 
 of the characters of Hamlet and Laertes over- 
 reasoning inaction and unreasoning action 
 between which extremes the whole interest of the 
 play vibrates. The unobtrusive character of Kent 
 is, as it were, the eye of the tragic storm which 
 rages round it ; and the departure, in various 
 directions, of every character more or less from
 
 16 THE POINT OF REST IN ART 
 
 moderation, rectitude, or sanity, is the more clearly 
 understood or felt from our more or less conscious 
 reference to him. So with the central and com- 
 paratively* unimpressive characters in many other 
 plays characters unimpressive on account of 
 their facing the exciting and trying circumstances 
 of the drama with the regard of pure reason, 
 justice, and virtue. Each of these characters is a 
 peaceful focus radiating the calm of moral solu- 
 tion throughout all the difficulties and disasters of 
 surrounding fate : a vital centre, which, like that 
 of a great wheel, has little motion in itself, but 
 which at once transmits and controls the fierce 
 revolution of the circumference. 
 
 It is obvious, as I have indicated, that a point 
 of rest and comparison is necessary only when the 
 objects and interests are many and more or less 
 conflicting ; but the principle is sometimes at play 
 in forms and works in which we should scarcely 
 have expected to find it. An armlet, or even a 
 finger-ring, gives every portion of the nude figure 
 an increase of animation, unity, and repose. The 
 artistic justification of the unmeaning "burthen" 
 of many an old ballad may probably be found, 
 at least in part, in the same principle ; as may 
 also be that of the trick as old as poetry of 
 occasionally repeating a line or phrase without 
 any apparent purpose in the repetition.
 
 THE POINT OF REST IN ART 17 
 
 Of course the " point of rest " will not create 
 harmony where as in most modern works its 
 elements are absent ; but, where harmony exists, 
 it will be strangely brought out and accentuated 
 by this in itself often trifling, and sometimes, 
 perhaps, even accidental accessory. The only 
 point in the human body which is wholly without 
 beauty, significance, or purpose in itself, which is 
 merely the scar of its severance from the mother, 
 is the eye of its entire loveliness, the point to 
 which everything is referred for the key of its 
 harmony.
 
 IV 
 
 BAD MORALITY IS BAD ART 
 
 BAD morality is not a necessary condition of good 
 art ; on the contrary, bad morality is necessarily 
 bad art, for art is human, but immorality inhuman. 
 The "art" of the present generation is in great 
 part more immoral than any that has preceded it 
 in England. Modern English readers tolerate 
 any amount of corruption, provided only the terms 
 in which it is suggested be not " coarse " ; and 
 novels and poems are read, understood, and 
 talked about by young ladies which Rochester 
 would have blushed to be found reading, and 
 which Swift would have called indecent. The 
 delicate indecency of so much modern art is partly 
 due to deficiency of virility, which, in proportion 
 to its strength, is naturally modest. Indecency is 
 an endeavour to irritate sensations and appetites 
 in the absence of natural passion ; and that which 
 passes with so many for power and ardour is
 
 BAD MORALITY IS BAD ART 19 
 
 really impotence and coldness. On the other 
 hand, the ban which these emasculate times have 
 set upon plain-speaking would alone be well-nigh 
 fatal to great art, even were there no other 
 hindrances to it. The loss by the poet of the 
 privilege of plain speaking is equivalent to the 
 loss of the string which Hermes added to Apollo's 
 lute. A whole octave has been withdrawn from 
 the means of expression. Take a single example. 
 Perhaps two or three of lago's speeches are 
 " coarser " than anything else in English poetry 
 there is nothing more so in the Bible itself; but 
 the splendour, purity, and solidity of the most 
 splendid, pure, and solid of all dramas that were 
 ever written, depend in very large measure on the 
 way in which these qualities are heightened by 
 those very passages. 
 
 For a good many years past the worth of the 
 philosopher and poet has been measured by the 
 width of his departure from the fundamental truth 
 of humanity. But the orthodox truth of humanity 
 is a perennially young and beautiful maiden, 
 whose clothes, however, are liable to get out of 
 fashion, and to bring upon her the appellation of 
 " old frump " from those who are over-anxious to 
 keep up with the Zeitgeist. The worthiest occu- 
 pation of the true poet and philosopher in these 
 days is to provide her with such new clothes as
 
 20 BAD MORALITY IS BAD ART 
 
 shall make her timely acceptable ; and happy is 
 he who shall be found to have contributed even a 
 ribbon or two towards the renovation of her 
 wardrobe, which has of late years fallen so 
 lamentably into decay. 
 
 The poet, as a rule, should avoid religion 
 altogether as a direct subject. Law, the recti- 
 tude of humanity, should be his only subject, as, 
 from time immemorial, it has been the subject of 
 true art, though many a true artist has done the 
 Muse's will and knew it not. As all the music of 
 verse arises, not from infraction, but inflection of 
 the law of the set metre ; so the greatest poets 
 have been those the modulus of whose verse has 
 been most variously and delicately inflected, in 
 correspondence with feelings and passions which 
 are the inflections of moral law in their theme. 
 Masculine law is always, however obscurely, the 
 theme of the true poet ; the feeling, with the cor- 
 respondent rhythm, is its feminine inflection, with- 
 out which the law has no sensitive or poetic life. 
 Art is thus constituted because it is the constitu- 
 tion of life, all the grace and sweetness of which 
 arise from inflection of law, not from infraction of 
 it, as bad men and bad poets fancy. 
 
 Law puts a strain upon feeling and feeling re- 
 sponds with a strain upon law, but only such a strain 
 as that with which the hand draws the music from
 
 BAD MORALITY IS BAD ART 2 i 
 
 the strings of the lyre. Furthermore, Aristotle says 
 that the quality of poetic language is a continual 
 slight novelty. It must needs be so, if poetry 
 would perfectly express poetic feeling, which has 
 also a continual slight novelty, being never alike 
 in any two persons, or on any two occasions. 
 In the highest poetry, like that of Milton, these 
 three modes of inflection, metrical, linguistical, 
 and moral, all chime together in praise of the 
 true order of human life, or moral law. Where 
 this is not recognised there is no good art. What 
 are inflections when there is nothing to inflect ? 
 You may get the wail of the ALolian harp, but not 
 music. 
 
 Are those great poets wrong, then the great 
 dramatic poets, especially whose works abound 
 with representations of infraction of law and its 
 consequent disasters ? No. But there are two 
 kinds of inflection and infraction of law : first, of 
 the inner law, which is inflected when a man 
 feels disposed to covet his neighbour's wife and 
 does not, and infracted when he does ; secondly, 
 of the outer and vaster law of God's universal 
 justice, which cannot be infracted, but only in- 
 flected, even by sin and disaster ; the law by 
 which the man shall find it good that he has not 
 followed his natural inclinations, and that by 
 which the man who has so done shall be
 
 22 BAD MORALITY IS BAD ART 
 
 effectually convinced that the game was not worth 
 the candle. It must be confessed that a large 
 portion of the writings of the very best poets of 
 the past and passing generation has been not art 
 at all, since the one real theme of art has been 
 absent. But it was not thus that ^schylus, 
 Dante, Calderon, and Shakespeare understood 
 "art." 
 
 The old commonplace that "Art is essentially 
 religious " is so far true as that the true order of 
 human life is the command, and in part the 
 revelation, of God ; but all direct allusion to Him 
 may be as completely omitted as it is from the 
 teaching of the Board School, and yet the art 
 may remain "essentially religious." But the 
 mere intention of the artist is not enough to make 
 it so. When Homer and Milton invoked the 
 Muse they meant a reality. They asked for 
 supernatural "grace" whereby they might inter- 
 pret life and nature. 
 
 " By grace divine, not otherwise, O Nature, 
 are we thine," says Wordsworth. This gift, with- 
 out which none can be a poet, is essentially the 
 same thing as that which makes the Saint. Only 
 art is a superficies and life a solid ; and the 
 degree of grace which is enough to make a super- 
 ficies divinely good and beautiful, may leave the 
 solid unaffected. As' we all know, a man may be
 
 BAD MORALITY IS BAD ART 23 
 
 a very good poet, and very little indeed of a Saint. 
 Therefore, I trust that I shall not offend the 
 shade of Shelley, and such of his living successors 
 as feel Shelley's abhorrence of " men who pray," 
 if I say that, notwithstanding their heretical 
 notions of what art should be, there are passages 
 in the works of some of them which distinctly 
 prove that, while writing thus, they were " under 
 the influence of divine grace," of that supernatural 
 spirit without which Nature is not really natural. 
 It is to such passages, and such only, that they 
 owe their claim to be called poets, not to those in 
 which they have ignored or outraged law. 
 
 In the very greatest poets, the standard of 
 human law has been absolute sanctity. The key- 
 note of this their theme is usually sounded by 
 them with the utmost reserve and delicacy, especi- 
 ally by Shakespeare, but it is there ; and every 
 poet the natural faculties of the poet being pre- 
 supposed will be great in proportion to the 
 strictness with which, in his moral ideal, he follows 
 the counsels of perfection.
 
 V 
 EMOTIONAL ART 
 
 ONE of the most accomplished writers of the day, 
 a Cambridge lecturer upon poetry, and himself no 
 mean proficient in the art, speaks of poetry as 
 "an art which appeals to the emotions and the 
 emotions only." To what a pass have psychology 
 and criticism come ! Poetry, the supreme and 
 peculiar vocation of man, an art in which no 
 woman has attained even the second degree of 
 excellence, to be stigmatised, and that without 
 any intention of affront, as essentially and abso- 
 lutely feminine ! Poetry, in common with, but 
 above all the arts, is the mind of man, the rational 
 soul, using the female or sensitive soul, as its 
 accidental or complementary means of expres- 
 sion ; persuasive music assisting commanding 
 truth to convince not God's chosen, to whom 
 truth is its own evidence and its own music but 
 the Gentiles, to whom pure truth is bitter as
 
 EMOTIONAL ART 25 
 
 hyssop, until, on the lips of the poet, they find it to 
 be sweeter than honey. " The sweetness of the lips 
 increaseth learning." But what is the sweetness 
 of the lips without learning ? An alluring harlot, 
 and Mr. Gosse's conception of the Muse ! And, 
 alas, not his only, but mainly that of the time, 
 as far as it has any clear conceptions about art at 
 all. Music, painting, poetry, all aspire to be 
 praised as harlots, makers of appeals " to the 
 emotions and the emotions only." Art, indeed, 
 works most frequently and most fruitfully through 
 such appeals ; but so far is such appeal from 
 being its essence, that art, universally acknow- 
 ledged to be of the very highest kind, sometimes 
 almost entirely dispenses with " emotion," and 
 trusts for its effect to an almost purely intellectual 
 expression of form or order in other words, of 
 truth ; for truth and order are one, and the music 
 of Handel, the poetry of ^Eschylus, and the 
 architecture of the Parthenon are appeals to a 
 sublime good sense which takes scarcely any 
 account of " the emotions." 
 
 But far be it from me to undervalue the 
 emotions, by a due expression of which the " poet 
 sage" becomes indeed the apostle of the Gentiles: 
 and by giving to which, in his life and work, their 
 due place, he becomes in soul and act what man 
 was made to be, namely, the image of God, who
 
 26 EMOTIONAL ART 
 
 is described in the Orphic hymn as " a beautiful 
 youth and a divine nymph." In proportion as a 
 man, above all a poet, has in his constitution the 
 " divine nymph," the " sensitive soul," so is the 
 " beautiful youth," the " rational mind," great in 
 its influential force ; provided that the masculine 
 character holds itself always supreme over the 
 feminine, which is really only sweet in so far as it is 
 in subordination and obedience. I may go further, 
 and say that no art can appeal " to the emotions 
 only" with the faintest hope of even the base 
 success it aspires to. The pathos of such art 
 (and pathos is its great point) is wholly due to a 
 more or less vivid expression of a vague remorse 
 at its divorce from truth and order. The Dame 
 aux Camelias sighs in all Verdi's music over her 
 lost virtue, which, however, she shows no anxiety 
 to recover, and the characteristic expression of 
 the most recent and popular school of poetry and 
 painting is a ray of the same sickly and in the 
 most part hypocritical homage to virtue. With- 
 out some such homage, even the dying and super- 
 sensitive body of " emotional " art loses the very 
 faintest pretensions to the name of art, and 
 becomes the confessed carrion of Offenbach's 
 operas and the music hall. Atheism in art, as 
 well as in life, has only to be pressed to its last 
 consequences in order to become ridiculous, no
 
 EMOTIONAL ART 27 
 
 less than disastrous ; and the " ideal," in the 
 absence of an idea or intellectual reality, be- 
 comes the " realism " of the brothel and the 
 shambles. 
 
 The advocate of art for " the emotions and the 
 emotions only," cannot be brought to understand 
 that the alternative is not " didactic " art, which 
 is as much a contradiction in terms as his own 
 notion of art is. Of great and beautiful things 
 beauty and greatness are the only proofs and ex- 
 pressions ; and the ideas of the greatest artists 
 are the morality of a sphere too pure and high for 
 " didactic " teaching. The teaching of art is the 
 suggestion far more convincing than assertion 
 of an ethical science, the germs of which are to 
 the mass of mankind incommunicable ; and the 
 broad daylight of this teaching can be diffused 
 only by those who live in and absorb the direct 
 splendour of an unknown, and, to the generality, 
 an unknowable sun. The mere ignoring of 
 morality, which is what the more respectable of 
 modern artists profess, will not lift them into the 
 region of such teachers ; much less will the denial 
 of morality do so, as some modern artists seem 
 to think. The Decalogue is not art, but it is the 
 guide-post which points direct to where the source 
 of art springs ; and it is now, as in the day when 
 Numa and Moses made their laws : he is profane
 
 28 EMOTIONAL ART 
 
 who presents to the gods the fruit of an unpruned 
 vine ; that is, sensitive worship before the sensi- 
 tive soul has been sanctified by habitual confession 
 of and obedience to the rational ; and still worse 
 than he who offers the Muses the " false fire " of 
 his gross senses is he who heats the flesh-pots of 
 Egypt with flames from the altar, and renders 
 emotions, which were intended to make the mortal 
 immortal, themselves the means and the subjects 
 of corruption. Of all kinds of corruption, says 
 St. Francis of Sales, the most malodorous is rotten 
 lilies. 
 
 By very far the largest proportion of " the 
 emotions," namely, corporeal pleasures and pains, 
 have no place at all in true art, unless, indeed, 
 they may be occasionally and sparingly used as 
 discords in the great harmony of the drama. Joy, 
 and pathos of its privation, are the " pain " and 
 " pleasure " of art, poetic " melancholy " and 
 " indignation " being the sigh of joy indefinitely 
 delayed, and wroth at the obstruction of its good 
 by evil. These form the main region of the lyric 
 poet. But, as joy and pathos are higher than 
 pleasure and pain, being concerned with the 
 possession or privation of a real good, so in peace 
 which is as much above joy as joy is above 
 pleasure, and which can scarcely be called 
 emotion, since it rests, as it were, in final good,
 
 EMOTIONAL ART 29 
 
 the primum mobile, which is without motion 
 we find ourselves in the region of " great " art. 
 Pleasure is an itch of the cold and corrupt flesh, 
 and must end with corruption ; joy is the life of 
 the natural and innocent breast, prophesying 
 peace, but too full of desire to obtain it yet ; 
 peace is the indwelling of God and the habitual 
 possession of all our desires, and it is too grave 
 and quiet even for a smile. 
 
 This character of peace in art and life has 
 sometimes affected entire states of civilisation, 
 hovering like an angel even in atmospheres pro- 
 foundly tainted with impurities, and giving an 
 involuntary greatness to the lives and works of 
 men to whom its source was invisible ; breathing 
 through the veils of Eleusis the beauty of the 
 glorified body into the marbles of Phidias, and 
 guiding the brush of Titian and Raphael, and 
 even the chisel of Cellini, by the hand of a spirit 
 whose dwelling was the inmost sanctuary of the 
 Temple. 
 
 What then, it will be answered, shall be said of 
 that poetry, some of it the most exquisite in the 
 world, which seeks only to evoke an echo, in the 
 reader's bosom, of human love ? This : That 
 love if it be worthy of the name is the highest 
 of virtues, as well as the sweetest of emotions. 
 Nay, that it is the sweetest of emotions because
 
 30 EMOTIONAL ART 
 
 it is the highest of virtues, ordering the whole 
 being of man " strongly and sweetly " ; being in 
 the brain confession of good ; in the heart, love 
 for, and desire to sacrifice everything for the good 
 of, its object ; in the senses, peace, purity, and 
 ardour.
 
 VI 
 PEACE IN LIFE AND ART 
 
 IF we compare ancient with modern art, and the 
 minds and manners of our far ancestors with the 
 minds and manners of the present time, it can 
 hardly fail to strike us that the predominant 
 presence of peace in the former and its absence 
 in the latter constitute the most characteristic 
 difference. Peace, as it was held to be the last 
 effect and reward of a faithful life, was regarded 
 as the ideal expression of life in painting, sculpture, 
 poetry, and architecture ; and accordingly the tran- 
 quil sphere of all the greatest of great art is 
 scarcely troubled by a tear or a smile. This 
 peace is no negative quality. It does not consist 
 in the mere absence of disturbance by pain or 
 pleasure. It is the peace of which St. Thomas 
 says " perfect joy and peace are identical," and is 
 the atmosphere of a region in which smiles and 
 tears are alike impertinences. In such art the
 
 32 PEACE IN LIFE AND ART 
 
 expression of pain and pleasure is never an end, 
 as it almost always is with us moderns, but a 
 means of glorifying that peace which is capable of 
 supporting either without perturbation. " Peace," 
 says again the great writer above quoted, " is the 
 tranquillity of order, and has its seat in the will." 
 A word about this living order, which all great 
 art aspires to express. Each soul is created to 
 become a beauty and felicity which is in a measure 
 unique, and every one who has attained to a life 
 upon his own lines desires to become more and 
 more truly and manifestly this singular excellence 
 and happiness for which he alone was born. 
 This is his " ruling love," his individuality, the 
 centre towards which his thoughts and actions 
 gravitate, and about which his whole being 
 revolves ; while this individual being again travels 
 about that greater centre which gives a common 
 unity and generosity to all individualities. This 
 double order has its exact analogue in that of the 
 motions of the heavenly bodies, and is that by 
 which alone the motions of souls are made 
 heavenly. For the proof of this doctrine no one 
 need go further than his conscience if he has 
 one. If he has not, since there is no peace for 
 the like of him, the discussion of its nature need 
 not occupy his attention. 
 
 This peace, which is the common character of
 
 PEACE IN LIFE AND ART 33 
 
 all true art and of all true life, involves, in its 
 fullest perfection, at once the complete subdual 
 and the glorification of the senses, and the "order- 
 ing of all things strongly and sweetly from end to 
 end." 
 
 " Forth from the glittering spirit's peace 
 
 And gaiety ineffable 
 Stream to the heart delight and ease, 
 
 As from an overflowing well ; 
 And, orderly deriving thence 
 
 Its pleasure perfect and allow'd, 
 
 Bright with the spirit shines the sense, 
 
 As with the sun a fleecy cloud." 
 
 It is sufficient, however, for the honour of art 
 and life that peace should be dominant in the 
 mind and will. Lessing observes that the dignity 
 and repose of Greek tragedy is in no way disturbed 
 by cries of grief and pain, too violent for modern 
 art, because the tragedian makes it clear that 
 these perturbations are only in the outer man, the 
 stability of the interior being therefore illustrated 
 rather than clouded by such demonstrations. In 
 the Shakspearian tragedy the seat of this supreme 
 expression is removed, for the most part, from the 
 personality of the characters engaged, to the mind 
 of the reader, reflecting that of the poet, who 
 evolves peace from the conflict of interests and 
 passions to which the predominance and victory 
 D
 
 34 PEACE IN LIFE AND ART 
 
 of a single moral idea gives unity. That idea is 
 never embodied in any single conspicuous char- 
 acter, though it is usually allowed an unobtrusive 
 expression in some subordinate personality, in 
 order to afford a clue to the " theme " of the 
 whole harmony. Such theme-suggesting char- 
 acters are, for example, the Friar in Romeo and 
 Juliet, and Kent in King Lear, who represent and 
 embody the law from which all the other characters 
 depart more or less, with proportionate disaster to 
 themselves. 
 
 Delights and pleasures demand, no less than 
 grief and pain, to be subordinated to peace, in 
 order to become worthy of life and art. The 
 cynicism and the corrupt melancholy of much of 
 our modern life and art are the inevitable results 
 of the desires being set upon delights and pleas- 
 ures in which there is not peace. 
 
 The peace, which is " identical with perfect joy " 
 in life and its expression in art, is also identical 
 with purity, which is so far from being, as is com- 
 monly supposed, a negative quality, that it is the 
 unimpeded ardour of ordered life in all its degrees, 
 and is as necessary to the full delight of the senses 
 as it is to the highest felicity of the spirit. Hence 
 the greatest art, in which all things are " ordered 
 sweetly " by essential peace, and in which pleasure 
 is only the inevitable accident, is exceedingly bold.
 
 PEACE IN LIFE AND ART 35 
 
 Its thoughts are naked and not ashamed ; and 
 Botticelli, in his celestial "Venus " in the National 
 Gallery, expresses, without raising a disorderly 
 fancy, things which Titian, in his leering Venus 
 of the stews, at Florence, is too " chaste " to hint. 
 
 There are, probably, few persons who are so un- 
 happy as not to have experienced a few moments 
 in life during which they have drawn breath in 
 a region in which pleasure and pain are disr 
 cerned to be, in themselves, neither good nor evil, 
 and even so much like each other that there is not 
 much to choose between them. Those who have 
 known such moments, and who preserve the 
 memory of them as the standard of life, at least 
 in desire, have alone the key to the comprehen- 
 sion of great art, or the possibility of approaching 
 to it in execution. Such knowledge so respected 
 is the initial condition of that only true " style " 
 which is the unique aspect of the individual soul 
 to the absolute beauty and joy ; of that living 
 " repose, which marks the manners of the great " 
 in art, and which bears upon the stately move- 
 ment of its eternal stream the passions, pains, and 
 pleasures of life like eddies which show the motion 
 that is too great to be perturbed by them. 
 
 For the time, at least, this quality, as I have 
 said, has almost disappeared from art. It lingered 
 in the best poetry, painting, and music of the last
 
 36 PEACE IN LIFE AND ART 
 
 century and of the beginning of this. It was the 
 ideal to which Goethe, Coleridge, Keats, and 
 Wordsworth aspired, and in a few pieces attained. 
 The gravity of Handel is sweet with it, and the 
 sweetness of Mozart grave. Gainsborough, Crome, 
 and Hogarth were more or less moved by it ; and 
 we still judge art such of us as have any power 
 of judgment by the standard of this glory, though 
 we have lost the secret of its creation.
 
 VII 
 PATHOS 
 
 NEITHER Aristotle nor Hegel, the two great 
 expositors of the relation of the emotions to art, 
 has discussed the nature of that which is under- 
 stood by moderns as "pathos." Aristotle has 
 described in his Rhetoric, with the greatest 
 acuteness and sensibility, the conditions and 
 modes of exciting pity. But pity includes much 
 that is excluded by pathos ; and it may be useful 
 to endeavour to ascertain what the limitations of 
 the latter are, and what are its conditions in 
 relation more particularly to art, in which it plays 
 so important a part. 
 
 Pity, then, differs from pathos in this : the latter 
 is simply emotional, and reaches no higher than 
 the sensitive nature ; though the sensitive nature, 
 being dependent for its power and delicacy very 
 much upon the cultivation of will and intellect, 
 may be indefinitely developed by these active
 
 38 PATHOS 
 
 factors of the soul. Pity is helpful and is not 
 deadened or repelled by circumstances which dis- 
 gust the simply sensitive nature ; and its ardour so 
 far consumes such obstacles to merely emotional 
 sympathy, that the person who truly pities finds 
 the field of pathos extended far beyond the 
 ordinary limits of the dainty passion which gives 
 tears to the eyes of the selfish as well as the self- 
 sacrificing. In an ideally perfect nature, indeed, 
 pity and pathos, which is the feeling of pity, would 
 be coextensive ; and the latter would demand for 
 its condition the existence of the former, with some 
 ground of actual reality to work beneficially upon. 
 On the other hand, entire selfishness would destroy 
 even the faintest capacity for discerning pathos in 
 art or circumstance. In the great mass of men 
 and women there is sufficient virtue of pity pity 
 that would act if it had the opportunity to extend 
 in them the feeling of pity, that is pathos, to a far 
 larger [range of circumstances than their active 
 virtue would be competent to encounter, even if 
 it had the chance. 
 
 Suffering is of itself enough to stir pity ; for 
 absolute wickedness, with the torment of which 
 all wholesome minds would be quite content, 
 cannot be certainly predicated of any individual 
 sufferer ; but pathos, whether in a drawing-room 
 tale of delicate distress or in a tragedy of ^Eschylus
 
 PATHOS 39 
 
 or Shakespeare, requires that some obvious good- 
 ness, or beauty, or innocence, or heroism should 
 be the subject of suffering, and that the circum- 
 stance or narration of it should have certain 
 conditions of repose, contrast, and form. The 
 range of pathos is immense, extending from the 
 immolation of an Isaac or an Iphigenia to the 
 death of a kitten that purrs and licks the hand 
 about to drown it. Next to the fact of goodness, 
 beauty, innocence, or heroism in the sufferer, 
 contrast is the chief factor in artistic pathos. 
 The celestial sadness of Desdemona's death is 
 immensely heightened by the black shadow of 
 lago ; and the singer of Fair Rosamund's sorrows 
 knew the value of contrast when he sang 
 
 Hard was the heart that gave the blow, 
 Soft were those lips that bled. 
 
 Every one knows how irresistible are a pretty 
 woman's tears. 
 
 Nought is there under heav'n's wide hollowness 
 That moves more dear compassion of mind 
 Than beauty brought to unworthy wretchedness. 
 
 It is partly the contrast of beauty, which is the 
 natural appanage of happiness, that renders her
 
 40 PATHOS 
 
 tears so pathetic ; but it is still more the way in 
 which she is given to smiling through them. The 
 author of the Rhetoric shows his usual incompar- 
 able subtilty of observation when he notes that 
 a little good coming upon or in the midst of 
 extremity of evil is a source of the sharpest 
 pathos ; and when the shaft of a passionate female 
 sorrow is feathered with beauty and pointed with 
 a smile there is no heart that can refuse her her 
 will. In absolute and uncontrolled suffering there 
 is no pathos. Nothing in the Inferno has this 
 quality except the passage of Paolo and Francesca, 
 still embracing, through the fiery drift. It is the 
 embrace that makes the pathos, " tempering 
 extremities with extreme sweet," or at least with 
 the memory of it. Our present sorrows generally 
 owe their grace of pathos to their "crown," which 
 is " remembering happier things." No one weeps 
 in sympathy with the " base self-pitying tears " of 
 Thersites, or with those of any whose grief is 
 without some contrasting dignity of curb. Even 
 a little child does not move us by its sorrow, when 
 expressed by tears and cries, a tenth part so much 
 as by the quivering lip of attempted self-control. 
 A great and present evil, coupled with a distant 
 and uncertain hope, is also a source of pathos ; 
 if indeed it be not the same with that which 
 Aristotle describes as arising from the sequence
 
 PATHOS 41 
 
 of exceeding ill and a little good. There is pathos 
 in a departing pleasure, however small. It is the 
 fact of sunset, not its colours which are the same 
 as those of sunrise that constitutes its sadness ; 
 and in mere darkness there may be fear and 
 distress, but not pathos. There are few things so 
 pathetic in literature as the story of the supper 
 which Amelia, in Fielding's novel, had prepared 
 for her husband, and to which he did not come, 
 and that of Colonel Newcome becoming a Charter- 
 house pensioner. In each of these cases the pathos 
 arises wholly from the contrast of noble reticence 
 with a sorrow which has no direct expression. 
 The same necessity for contrast renders reconcilia- 
 tions far more pathetic than quarrels, and the 
 march to battle of an army to the sound of cheer- 
 ful military music more able to draw tears than 
 the spectacle of the battle itself. 
 
 The soul of pathos, like that of wit, is brevity. 
 Very few writers are sufficiently aware of this. 
 Humour is cumulative and diffusive, as Shakespeare, 
 Rabelais, and Dickens well knew ; but how many 
 a good piece of pathos has been spoiled by the 
 historian of Little Nell by an attempt to make 
 too much of it ! A drop of citric acid will give 
 
 poignancy to a feast ; but a draught of it ! 
 
 Hence it is doubtful whether an English eye 
 ever shed a tear over the Vita Nuova, whatever
 
 42 PATHOS 
 
 an Italian may have done. Next to the patient 
 endurance of heroism, the bewilderment of weak- 
 ness is the most fruitful source of pathos. Hence 
 the exquisitely touching points in A Pair of Blue 
 Eyes, Two on a Tower, The Trumpet- Major, and 
 other of Hardy's novels. 
 
 Pathos is the luxury of grief ; and when it ceases 
 to be other than a keen-edged pleasure it ceases to 
 be pathos. Hence Tennyson's question in " Love 
 and Duty," " Shall sharpest pathos blight us ? " 
 involves a misunderstanding of the word ; although 
 his understanding of the thing is well proved by 
 such lyrics as "Tears, idle tears," and "O well 
 for the fisherman's boy." Pleasure and beauty 
 which may be said to be pleasure visible are 
 without their highest perfection if they are with- 
 out a touch of pathos. This touch, indeed, accrues 
 naturally to profound pleasure and to great beauty 
 by the mere fact of the incongruity of their earthly 
 surroundings and the sense of isolation, peril, and 
 impermanence caused thereby. It is a doctrine 
 of that inexhaustible and (except by Dante) almost 
 unworked mine of poetry, Catholic theology, that 
 the felicity of the angels and glorified saints and 
 of God Himself would not be perfect without the 
 edge of pathos, which it receives from the fall and 
 reconciliation of man. Hence, on Holy Saturday 
 the Church exclaims, " O felix culpa ! " and hence
 
 PATHOS 43 
 
 " there is more joy in heaven over one sinner that 
 repenteth than over ninety and nine righteous who 
 need no repentance." Sin, says St. Augustine, is 
 the necessary shadow of heaven ; and pardon, says 
 some other, is the highest light of its beatitude.
 
 VIII 
 POETICAL INTEGRITY 
 
 THE assertion that the value of the words of a 
 poet does and ought to depend very much upon 
 his personal character may seem, at the first glance, 
 a violent paradox ; but it is demonstrably true. 
 A wise or tender phrase in the mouth of a Byron 
 or a Moore will be despised, where a common- 
 place of morality or affection in that of a Words- 
 worth or a Burns is respected. If the author of 
 Don Juan had said that for him " the meanest 
 flower that blows could give thoughts that do often 
 lie too deep for tears," as he would have said had 
 it occurred to him to do so, no one would have 
 believed him ; it would have passed for a mere 
 " poetical licence," and would have been excused 
 as such and forgotten. Byron and Wordsworth 
 have both declared in words of similar force and 
 beauty that the sights and sounds of nature 
 "haunted them like a passion." But the declara-
 
 POETICAL INTEGRITY 45 
 
 tion is not consistent with what we know of 
 Byron, and it is consistent with what we know 
 of Wordsworth ; and in the one case it creates a 
 like frame of mind in the reader, while in the 
 other it passes like a melodious wind, leaving no 
 impression. Now this mighty element of char- 
 acter resides, not in the poet's active life, by 
 which he is and ought to be socially judged, but 
 in the spiritual consistency and integrity of his 
 mind and heart, as it is to be inferred from the 
 cumulative testimony of his words, which are, 
 after all, the safest witnesses of what the man truly 
 is. A man's actions although we are bound 
 socially to judge him thereby may belie him : 
 his words never. Out of his mouth shall the in- 
 terior man be judged ; for the interior man is what 
 he heartily desires to be, however miserably he 
 may fail to bring his external life into correspond- 
 ence with his desire ; and the words of the man 
 will infallibly declare what he thus inwardly is, 
 especially when, as in the case of the poet, the 
 powers of language are so developed as to become 
 the very glass of the soul, reflecting its purity and 
 integrity, or its stains and insincerities, with a 
 fidelity of which the writer himself is but imper- 
 fectly conscious. 
 
 To a soundly trained mind there is no surer sign 
 of shallowness and of interior corruption than that
 
 46 POETICAL INTEGRITY 
 
 habitual predominance of form over formative 
 energy, of splendour of language and imagery over 
 human significance, which has so remarkably dis- 
 tinguished a great deal of the most widely praised 
 poetry of the past eighty years. Much of this 
 poetry has about as much relation to actual or 
 imaginative reality as the transformation scene of 
 a pantomime ; and much more called " descrip- 
 tive" has so low a degree of significance and 
 betrays so inhuman an absorption in the merest 
 superficies of nature, that when the writer pretends 
 to deal with those facts and phenomena of humanity 
 which, directly or indirectly, are the main region 
 of every true poet's song, he has to overcome our 
 sense that he is an habitual trifler before he can 
 gain credit for sincerity, even when he is giving 
 utterance to what may really be a passing strain 
 of true poetic thought and feeling. A poet who 
 is thus constantly occupied with the superficies of 
 nature may probably attain to an accuracy and 
 splendour of analytical description which has its 
 value in its way, and which may, in certain transi- 
 tory conditions of popular taste, raise him to the 
 highest pinnacle of favour. But such poetry will 
 be judged, in the end, by its human significance ; 
 and the writer of it will have the fatal verdict of 
 " heartless " recorded against him a verdict 
 which even in the time of his favour is implicitly
 
 POETICAL INTEGRITY 47 
 
 pronounced by the indifference with which his pro- 
 fessions of human principle and feeling are received 
 even by his admirers. 
 
 The slightest touch of genuine humanity is of 
 more actual and poetic value than all that is not 
 human which the sun shines on. The interest of 
 what is called "descriptive" or "representative" 
 in real poetry and all real art is always human, or, 
 in other words, " imaginative." A description by 
 Wordsworth, Coleridge or Burns, a landscape by 
 Crome, Gainsborough or Constable, is not merely 
 nature, but nature reflected in and giving expres- 
 sion to a state of mind. The state of mind is 
 the true subject, the natural phenomena the terms 
 in which it is uttered ; and there has never been 
 a greater critical fallacy than that contained in 
 Mr. Ruskin's strictures on the " pathetic fallacy." 
 Nature has no beauty or pathos (using the term 
 in its widest sense) but that with which the mind 
 invests it. Without the imaginative eye it is like 
 a flower in the dark, which is only beautiful as 
 having in it a power of reflecting the colours of 
 the light. The true light of nature is the human 
 eye ; and if the light of the human eye is dark- 
 ness, as it is in those who see nothing but surfaces, 
 how great is that darkness ! 
 
 The saying of Wordsworth concerning the Poet, 
 that
 
 48 POETICAL INTEGRITY 
 
 You must love him ere to you 
 
 He will seem worthy of your love, 
 which at first reading sounds very much like 
 nonsense, is absolutely true. He must have won 
 your credit and confidence in his words, by proofs 
 of habitual veracity and sincerity, before you can 
 so receive the words which come from his heart 
 that they will move your own. If, in the utter- 
 ance of what he offers to you as the cry or the 
 deep longing of passion, you catch him busily 
 noticing trifles for which very likely he gets 
 praise " accurate observation of nature " you 
 will put him down as one who knows nothing of 
 the passion he is pretending to express. If you 
 detect him in the endeavour to say " fine things " 
 in order to win your admiration for himself, instead 
 of rendering his whole utterance a single true thing, 
 which shall win your sympathy with the thought 
 or feeling by which he declares himself to be domi- 
 nated, the result will be the same ; as also it will 
 be if you discover that the beauty of his words is 
 obtained rather by the labour of polish than by the 
 inward labour and true finish of passion. When, 
 on the other hand, some familiarity with the poet's 
 work has assured you that, though his speech may 
 be unequal and sometimes inadequate, it is never 
 false ; that he has always something to say, even 
 when he fails in saying it : then you will not only
 
 POETICAL INTEGRITY 49 
 
 believe in and be moved by what he says well ; 
 but when the form is sometimes imperfect you will 
 be carried over such passages, as over thin ice, 
 by the formative power of passion or feeling which 
 quickens the whole ; although you would reject 
 such passages with disgust were they found in the 
 writing of a man in whose thoughts you know that 
 the manner stands first and the matter second.
 
 IX 
 THE POETRY OF NEGATION 
 
 POETRY is essentially catholic and affirmative, 
 dealing only with the permanent facts of nature 
 and humanity, and interested in the events and 
 controversies of its own time only so far as they 
 evolve manifestly abiding fruits. But the abiding 
 fruits of such events and controversies are very 
 rarely manifest until the turmoil in which they are 
 produced has long since subsided ; and therefore 
 poets, in all times before our own, have either 
 allowed the present to drift unheeded by, or have 
 so handled its phenomena as to make them wholly 
 subsidiary to and illustrative of matters of well- 
 ascertained stability. The many occasional poems 
 of past times, of which temporary incidents have 
 been the subjects, in no way contradict this asser- 
 tion in the main ; and the casual example of a 
 poet like Dryden affords only the confirming 
 exception. Dryden was fond of protesting, especi-
 
 THE POETRY OF NEGATION 51 
 
 ally when he was a Catholic ; and there is no 
 doubt but that this habit added greatly to his 
 popularity in his lifetime, as it does to the favour 
 in which some of the most distinguished of our 
 modern poets are now held ; but all those points 
 which probably constituted the high lights of 
 Dryden's poetry to his contemporaries have suffered 
 in course of time a change like that which has 
 come over the whites of many of Sir Joshua 
 Reynolds's pictures ; and it is much to be feared 
 that a similar fate awaits a large proportion 
 of what has been written by several of the 
 best poets of the generation now passing away. 
 Most of our recent poets, even while condemning 
 political revolution, have shared in the Ideas or 
 feelings which are at the bottom of revolutions, a 
 hope which the facts of nature do not justify, and 
 a disbelief in what those facts do justify namely, 
 the ineradicable character of moral evil with its 
 circumstantial consequences. The heart of the 
 modern poet is, as a rule, always vibrating between 
 the extremes of despondent grumbling at the pre- 
 sent conditions and hasty and unreasonable aspira- 
 tions for the improvement of his kind ; his tragedies 
 and hymns of rejoicing are alike void of the dignity 
 and repose which arise from a sound confession of 
 the facts of humanity and a cheerful resignation to 
 its imperfections ; and he whose true function is
 
 52 THE POETRY OF NEGATION 
 
 to stand aside as the tranquil seer too often now 
 becomes the excited agent in matters which con- 
 cern him least of all men, because of all men he is 
 the least fitted to meddle with them. It is hard 
 to say which is more wonderful the clearness of 
 the true poet's vision for things when he is con- 
 tented with looking at them as they are, or his 
 blindness when he fancies he can mend them. 
 Famous statesmen have marvellously drivelled in 
 verse, but not more marvellously than famous poets 
 have drivelled in what pertains to statesmanship. 
 It is scarcely without a feeling of amazement that 
 a man of ordinary good sense contrasts the power 
 of poetic vision in writers like Victor Hugo and 
 Carlyle with the childishness of their judgments 
 when they propose antidotes for evils which they 
 so clearly see, but for which they do not see that 
 there are no antidotes, but only palliatives. Look- 
 ing for what they fancy may be, when their 
 vocation is to proclaim with clearness that which 
 is, one poet will shriek to us (for untruths cannot 
 be sung) that all will be well when King Log is 
 down and King Stork reigns in his stead ; another 
 that Niagara may yet be dammed if country 
 gentlemen will hire drill-sergeants to put their 
 gardeners and farm-labourers through the goose- 
 step ; another says the world will be saved if a few 
 gentlemen and ladies, with nothing better to do,
 
 THE POETRY OF NEGATION 53 
 
 will take to playing at being their own domestics ; 
 a fourth, in order to save morals, proposes their 
 abolition ; a fifth proclaims that all will have good 
 wages when there remains no one to pay them ; 
 a sixth discovers in the science of the future a 
 sedative for human passions instead of a wider 
 platform for their display ; and so on. Others, 
 who have no patent medicines on hand, impotently 
 grumble or rage at evils in which, if they looked 
 steadily, they might discern the good of justice, or 
 that of trial, or both (as great poets in past times 
 always have done) ; and, instead of truly singing, 
 they sob hysterical sympathy with such sufferings 
 in others as, if they were their own, they either 
 would bear or know that they ought to bear with 
 equanimity. 
 
 The statesman, the social reformer, the political 
 economist, the natural philosopher, the alms-giver, 
 the hospital visitor, the preacher, even the cynical 
 humorist, has each his function, and each is 
 rightly more or less negative ; but the function of 
 the poet is clearly distinguished from all of these, 
 and is higher though less obtrusive than any. It 
 is simply affirmative of things which it greatly 
 concerns men to know, but which they have either 
 not discovered or have allowed to lapse into the 
 death of commonplace. He alone has the power 
 of revealing by his insight and magic words the
 
 54 THE POETRY OF NEGATION 
 
 undreamt-of mines of felicity which exist poten- 
 tially for all in social relationships and affections. 
 The inexhaustible glories of nature are a blank for 
 many who are yet able to behold them reflected in 
 his perceptions. His convincing song can persuade 
 many to believe in, if they do not attain to taste 
 as he, if indeed he be a poet, must have tasted 
 the sweet and wholesome kernel which the rough 
 shell of unmerited suffering conceals for those who 
 are patient. And he can so contemplate the one 
 real evil in the world as to give body and life and 
 intelligibility to that last and sharpest cry of faith, 
 " O felix culpa ! " 
 
 The temptations which our time offers to the 
 poet in order to induce him to forsake his own 
 line are very great, and poets are human. The 
 conceited present craves to have singers of its own, 
 who will praise it, or at least abuse it ; and it pays 
 them well for pandering to its self-consciousness, 
 lavishing its best honours upon them as leaders of 
 the " Liberal movement," and scoffing at those, as 
 " behind their time," who stand apart and watch 
 and help those abiding developments of humanity 
 which advance "with the slow process of the 
 suns."
 
 X 
 
 "DISTINCTION" 1 
 
 I HAVE been taken to task at great length and 
 with great severity by the Spectator for having 
 identified the " elect " with the " select " ; and 
 the Guardian has charged me, in terms not less 
 profuse and energetic, with entertaining " flunkey " 
 notions, not only of this life, but of the next. 
 The Spectator, furthermore, denounces me as a 
 person of singularly "savage" and "scornful" 
 disposition. Now, as these are moral rather than 
 literary censures, and as any one may, if he likes, 
 consider that he is under obligation to defend 
 his character publicly when it has been publicly 
 impugned, I desire to say a few words in explana- 
 
 1 When this Essay appeared in the Fortnightly Review 
 it was taken so much au grand sdrieux by the news- 
 papers, especially the Spectator, that I resolved never 
 thenceforward to attempt to deal in " chaff" or fun, with- 
 out clearly intimating my intention at the outset.
 
 56 " DISTINCTION " 
 
 tion of expressions and sentiments which 1 think 
 that my judges have misinterpreted. 
 
 I confess frankly to a general preference for 
 persons of " distinction," and even to believing 
 that they are likely to have a better time of it 
 hereafter than the undistinguished, but I humbly 
 and sincerely protest to my monitors that I do 
 not, as they assume, identify " distinction " with 
 wealth, culture, and modern Conservative politics, 
 though I do hold that in the absence of 
 culture, " distinction " rarely becomes apparent, 
 just as, in the absence of polish, the tints and 
 veins of a fine wood or marble, though they may 
 be there, are little evident. In this world, at 
 least, " de non apparentibus et de non existenti- 
 bus eadem est ratio." 
 
 If we could see the soul of every man as, 
 indeed, we can, more or less, in his face, which 
 is never much like the face of any other we 
 should see that every one is in some degree "dis- 
 tinguished." He is born " unique," and does not 
 make himself so; though, by fidelity to himself 
 and by walking steadily and persistently on his 
 own line, his distinction can be indefinitely in- 
 creased, as it can be indefinitely diminished by 
 the contrary process until he may end in extinc- 
 tion ; for, interiorly, man lives by contrast and 
 harmonious opposition to others, and the com-
 
 " DISTINCTION " 57 
 
 munion of men upon earth as of Saints in heaven 
 abhors identity more than Nature does a vacuum. 
 Nothing so shocks and repels the living soul as a 
 row of exactly similar things, whether it consists 
 of modern houses or of modern people, and 
 nothing so delights and edifies as "distinction." 
 
 It was said of a celebrated female Saint that 
 she did nothing but what was done by everybody 
 else, but that she did all things as no one else 
 did them. In manners and art, as in life, it 
 signifies far less what is done or said than how it 
 is done and said ; for the unique personality, the 
 only truly interesting and excellent thing, the 
 " distinction," comes out in the latter only. 
 
 I am old enough, and have been lucky enough 
 no doubt, through favour rather than through 
 the manifestation of any distinction of my own 
 to have been occasionally present at small private 
 gatherings of eminent statesmen and literary men, 
 in times when such eminence usually savoured of 
 distinction ; and I confess that I have had few 
 experiences which so helped me to understand 
 how pleasant a thing life might become under 
 supernaturally favourable circumstances. 
 
 My friendly monitors of the Guardian and 
 Spectator may, perhaps, discover further con- 
 firmation, in these words, of their impression that 
 I am at once a "flunkey" and a "savage"; and
 
 58 " DISTINCTION " 
 
 my confession may recall to their minds that 
 other savage to whom the missionary sought in 
 vain to convey any idea of Heaven until he com- 
 pared it with a perpetual feast of buffalo-beef well 
 masticated by a squaw. Well, difference, though 
 it may not amount to distinction, is better than 
 dull uniformity ; and I will go on my own way 
 without nourishing ill-will towards my critics, 
 and, I hope, without provoking it in them. There 
 is so little distinction now, that I will not quarrel 
 with anybody for not understanding me when I 
 praise it. In English letters, for example, now 
 that Matthew Arnold and William Barnes are 
 gone, and Dr. Newman and Lord Tennyson are 
 silent, distinction has nearly vanished. 
 
 The verse of Mr. William Morris, always mas- 
 terly, is sometimes really distinguished, as in the 
 prelude and some of the lyrics of Love is Enough. 
 The distinction, too, of Mr. Swinburne's writing is 
 occasionally unquestionable ; but he allows him- 
 self to be troubled about many things, and would, 
 I fancy, write more poetically, if less forcibly, were 
 his patriotism not so feverish, and his horror of 
 the errors and wickedness of Popery more abstract, 
 disinterested, and impersonal. He is wanting, I 
 venture to think, in what Catholic moralists call 
 " holy indifference." Distinction is also manifest 
 in the prose of Mr. George Meredith when the
 
 " DISTINCTION " 59 
 
 cleverness is not too overwhelming to allow us to 
 think of anything else ; but, when the nose of 
 epigram after epigram has no sooner reached the 
 visual nerve than the tail has whisked away from 
 it, so that we have had no time to take in the 
 body, our wonder and bedazement make it some- 
 times impossible for us to distinguish the distinc- 
 tion, if it be there. Mr. Pater, Mr. Symonds, and 
 Mr. Henley are not without claim to rank with the 
 "quality," though their distinction is a trifle too 
 intentional. Mrs. Meynell, alone, is, both in 
 prose and verse, almost always thoroughly distin- 
 guished. 
 
 Democracy hates distinction, though it has a 
 humble and pathetic regard for eminence and 
 rank ; and eminence and rank, by the way, never 
 paid a more charming and delicate compliment to 
 Democracy than when Lord Rosebery affirmed 
 that the test of true literature, and its only justi- 
 fiable Imprimatur, is " the thumb-mark of the 
 artisan." 
 
 The ten or so superior and inexhaustibly fertile 
 periodical writers who (with three or four fairly 
 good novelists) now represent English literature, 
 and are the arbiters and, for the most part, the 
 monopolists of fame, share the dislike of their 
 clientele to " distinction," suppressing it, when it 
 ventures to appear, with a " conspiracy of silence "
 
 60 " DISTINCTION " 
 
 more effective than the guillotine, while they exalt 
 the merit which they delight to honour by voices 
 more overwhelming than the plebiscite. Witness 
 the fate of William Barnes, who, though far from 
 being the deepest or most powerful, was by far 
 the most uniformly " distinguished " poet of our 
 time. Mr. G. S. Venables said, perhaps, no more 
 than the truth when he declared, as he did in 
 my hearing, that there had been no poet of such 
 peculiar perfection since Horace. Mr. F. T. Pal- 
 grave has also done him generous and courageous 
 justice. But what effect have these voices had 
 against the solid silence of non-recognition by our 
 actual arbiters of fame ? He is never named in 
 the authentic schedules of modern English poets. 
 I do not suppose that any one nearer to a Countess 
 than his friend Mrs. Norton ever asked him to 
 dinner, and there was not so much as an enthus- 
 iastic Dean to decree (upon his own respectable 
 responsibility) the national honour of burial in 
 Westminster Abbey to the poor classic. On the 
 other hand, the approving voices of our literary 
 and democratic Council of Ten or so are as tre- 
 mendously effective as their silence. No such 
 power of rewarding humble excellence ever before 
 existed in the world. Mrs. Lynn Lynton, of her 
 own knowledge, writes thus : " Of a work, lately 
 published, one man alone wrote sixteen reviews.
 
 "DISTINCTION" 61 
 
 The author was his friend, and in sixteen ' vehicles ' 
 he carried the flag of his friend's triumph." To 
 compare good things with bad, this beneficent 
 ventriloquism reminds one of Milton's description 
 of the devil, in the persons of the priests of Baal, 
 as " a liar in four hundred mouths." 
 
 I hope that I may further exonerate myself from 
 the charge of a proclivity to "plush" this, if I 
 remember rightly, was the word used by the 
 Guardian and also from that of a "savage" dis- 
 respect for modern enlightenment, as authenticated 
 by "the thumb-mark of the artisan," when I go 
 on to say that, to my mind, there can be no " dis- 
 tinction," in life, art, or manners, worth speaking 
 of, which is not the outcome of singular courage, 
 integrity, and generosity, and, I need scarcely add, 
 of intellectual vigour, which is usually the com- 
 panion of those qualities habitually exercised. An 
 accomplished distinction, as the sight of it gives 
 the greatest delight to those who have it or are 
 on the way to the attainment of it, so it is the 
 greatest of terrors to the vulgar, whether of the 
 gutter or in gilded chambers. Their assertion of 
 their sordid selves it rebukes with a silence or a 
 .look of benevolent wonder, which they can never 
 forgive, and which they always take for indications 
 of intolerable pride, though it is nothing other 
 than the fitting and inevitable demeanour, under
 
 62 " DISTINCTION ' 
 
 the circumstances, of the "good man, in whose 
 eyes,'' King David says, "a vile person is de- 
 spised " ; or that recommended by St. Augustine, 
 who tells us that, if a man does not love the living 
 truth of things, you should " let him be as dirt " 
 to you ; or by a still higher Authority, who directs 
 you to treat such an one as a " sinner and a pub- 
 lican," or, in modern phrase, a "cad." Naturally, 
 the average democrat who has not yet learned 
 to love the living truth of things resents "dis- 
 tinction," and pathetically turns to Lord Rosebery 
 and other such highly certificated judges of what 
 is really excellent for consolation and reassurance ; 
 and naturally the leaders of democracy, in the 
 House of Commons or in the newspapers and 
 magazines, are as jealous of distinction as the 
 Roman democrats were of the man who presumed 
 to roof his house with a pediment which, perhaps, 
 reminded them too disagreeably of a Temple. 
 
 The finest use of intercourse, whether personal 
 or through books, with the minds of others is not 
 so much to acquire their thoughts, feelings, and 
 characters as to corroborate our own, by compel- 
 ling these to " take aspect," and to derive fresh 
 consciousness, form, and power to our proper and 
 peculiar selves. Such intercourse not only brings 
 latent " distinction " into life, but it increases it 
 more and more ; a beautiful and beloved opposi-
 
 " DISTINCTION " 63 
 
 tion acting as the scientific toy called the " electric 
 doubler," by which the opposite forces in the two 
 juxtaposed discs may be accumulated almost with- 
 out limit, and splendid coruscations of contrasting 
 life evoked, where there apparently was mere inert- 
 ness before. The best use of the supremely useful 
 intercourse of man and woman is not the begetting 
 of children, but the increase of contrasted personal 
 consciousness. 
 
 All attraction and life are due to magnetic 
 opposition, and a great individuality, appearing in 
 any company, acts as a thunder -cloud, which 
 brightens the circumjacent air by alluring to or 
 repelling from itself all the dusty and inert par- 
 ticles which float so thickly in the air of ordinary- 
 companies. The Catholic Church, whose forte, I 
 think, is psychological insight, is peculiarly sen- 
 sible in this, that, instead of encouraging uniform- 
 ity of thought and feeling, as all other Churches 
 do, she does her best, in the direction of souls, to 
 develop as wide a distinction as is consistent with 
 formal assent to her singularly few articles of 
 obligatory faith. She requires consent to the 
 letter of the doctrine, but welcomes as many and 
 seemingly conflicting ways of viewing it as there 
 are idiosyncrasies of character in men, recom- 
 mending each not to force his inclination, but to 
 seek such good in the doctrine as best suits him.
 
 64 " DISTINCTION " 
 
 Thus does she encourage the immense diversity 
 with which the final vision of Truth shall be re- 
 flected in prismatic glories from the " Communion 
 of the Saints." 
 
 In the world, as I have said, distinction can 
 scarcely be manifested without a certain amount 
 of culture, especially that part of culture which 
 consists in simplicity, modesty, and veracity. 
 But culture in the democracy is usually deficient 
 in these characteristics, and is also wanting in 
 that purity of manner and phraseology without 
 which delicate distinctions of nature are, more or 
 less, indecipherable. Plain speaking sometimes 
 very unpleasantly plain speaking may be con- 
 sistent with distinction ; but until Sir William 
 Harcourt, Mr. Labouchere, and Mr. Gladstone, 
 for example, learn to leave off calling Tory spades 
 sanguinary shovels, their eminent personalities 
 must lack one fundamental condition of true self- 
 manifestation. Persons who habitually express 
 themselves so loosely must rest content, in this 
 world, with something short of true distinction, 
 though when they shall have attained to the Com- 
 munion of Saints it may become unexpectedly 
 conspicuous in them. So in art. In poetry, for 
 instance, good and simple manners and language 
 are not distinction, but distinction nowhere appears 
 without them. The ordinary laws of language
 
 " DISTINCTION " 65 
 
 must be observed, or those small inflections of 
 customary phrase, that " continual slight novelty," 
 which is, as Aristotle, I think, says, the essential 
 character of poetic language, and which is so 
 because it is the true and natural expression of 
 individuality, will be wanting. Even the genius 
 and ardour of Dr. Furnivall must fail to disinter 
 the soft pearl of distinction from the heaped pot- 
 sherds and broken brickbats of a violent and 
 self-imposed originality of diction, however great 
 the natural and acquired faculties of the poet may 
 be ; yes, even though such faculties be far greater 
 than those of others who may have added to their 
 generally inferior abilities the art of " expressing 
 themselves" Self must, however, be eliminated 
 from a man's consciousness before the " how," 
 which is the first essential in art, can make itself 
 heard above the voice of the comparatively insig- 
 cant "what." To many persons this setting of the 
 manner before the matter must appear almost im- 
 moral. Shall the virtues of eagerness and earnest- 
 ness in pursuit of one's own true good and that of 
 mankind be put after such a trifle as the mode of 
 professing them? The truth, however, is that 
 such eagerness and earnestness are not virtues but 
 rather proofs that virtue is not yet attained, just as 
 the desire for praise is a proof that praise is not 
 fully deserved. Repose " marks the manners of 
 
 F
 
 66 " DISTINCTION " 
 
 the great," for it is the expression of a degree of 
 attainment which makes all further attainment 
 that is desired easy, sure, and unexciting, and of 
 a modesty which refuses to regard self as the 
 "hub of the universe," without which it cannot 
 revolve, or indeed as in any way necessary to its 
 existence and well-being, however much it may 
 concern a man's own well-being that he should 
 take his share, to the best of his abilities, in doing 
 the good which will otherwise be done without 
 him. The worst hindrance to distinction in 
 nearly all the poetry of our generation is the 
 warm interest and responsibility which the poets 
 have felt in the improvement of mankind ; as if 
 
 " Whether a man serve God or his own whim, 
 Much matters, in the end, to any one but him ! " 
 
 But, to recur again from Art to Life, the virtu- 
 ous Democrat is always a little Atlas who goes 
 stumbling along with his eye-balls bursting from 
 his head under his self-assumed burthen. An- 
 other obstacle to his distinction is his abhorrence 
 of irrationality of all sorts. He dreams of no 
 beauty or excellence beyond the colossal ration- 
 ality of a Washington or a Franklin ; whereas 
 distinction has its root in the irrational. The 
 more lofty, living, and spiritual the intellect and 
 character become, the more is the need perceived
 
 " DISTINCTION " 67 
 
 for the sap of life which can be sucked only from 
 the inscrutable and, to the wholly rational mind, 
 repulsive ultimates of nature and instinct. The 
 ideal nation of rational Democrats, so far from 
 exemplifying the glory of distinctions, would find 
 its similitude in a great library consisting entirely 
 of duplicates, digests, and popular epitomes of the 
 works of John Stuart Mill. 
 
 I confess, therefore, to a joyful satisfaction in 
 my conviction that a real Democracy, such as 
 ours, in which the voice of every untaught ninny 
 or petty knave is as potential as that of the wisest 
 and most cultivated, is so contrary to nature and 
 order that it is necessarily self-destructive. In 
 America there are already signs of the rise of an 
 aristocracy which promises to be more exclusive, 
 and may, in the end, make itself more pre- 
 dominant than any of the aristocracies of Europe ; 
 and our own Democracy, being entirely without 
 bridle, can scarcely fail to come to an early and 
 probably a violent end. There are, however, 
 uses for all things, and those who love justice 
 enough not to care much should disaster to them- 
 selves be involved in its execution will look, not 
 without complacency, on the formal and final ruin 
 of superiorities which have not had sufficient care 
 for their honour and their rights to induce them 
 to make even a sincere parliamentary stand for
 
 68 "DISTINCTION" 
 
 their maintenance. " Superiorities," when they 
 have reached this stage of decay, are only fit 
 to nourish the fields of future civilisation, as 
 ancient civilisations, gone to rot, have so richly 
 nourished ours ; and when Democracy shall have 
 done its temporary work of reducing them to 
 available " mixen," Democracy, too, will dis- 
 appear, and after how many " dark ages " of 
 mere anarchy and war and petty fluctuating 
 tyrannies, who can tell ? there will come another 
 period of ordered life and another harvest of "dis- 
 tinguished " men. 
 
 In the meantime "genius" and "distinction" 
 will become more and more identified with loud- 
 ness ; floods of vehement verbiage, without any 
 sincere conviction, or indications of the character 
 capable of arriving at one ; inhuman humani- 
 tarianism ; profanity, the poisoner of the roots of 
 life ; tolerance and even open profession and 
 adoption of ideas which Rochester and Little 
 would have been ashamed even remotely to 
 suggest ; praise of any view of morals, provided it 
 be an unprecedented one ; faith in any foolish 
 doctrine that sufficiently disclaims authority. 
 
 That such a writer as Walt Whitman should 
 have attained to be thought a distinguished poet 
 by many persons generally believed to have them- 
 selves claims to distinction, surely more than
 
 " DISTINCTION " 69 
 
 justifies my forecast of what is coming. That 
 amazing consummation is already come. 
 
 Being well satisfied that the world can get on 
 in this, its destined course, without my help, I 
 should not have broken my customary habit in 
 order to trouble it and myself with the expression 
 of my views of " distinction " and its condition, 
 culture, had it not been for the moral obligation, 
 under which, as I have said, any one may, if he 
 likes, consider himself, to write an Apologia pro 
 moribus sut's, when these have been publicly 
 attacked. I do not trouble the public often, and 
 have never done so about myself. I take silent 
 and real comfort in the fatalism which teaches me 
 to believe that if, in spite of my best endeavours, I 
 cannot write poetry, it is because poetry is not 
 the thing which is wanted from me, and that, 
 when wanted, it will come from somebody else. 
 But to be stigmatised as a " flunkey " and a 
 " savage," by writers eminent for gentleness and 
 orthodox manners, is a different thing. Flunkey- 
 ism and savagery, though, as times go, they 
 should be considered as vices condoned by 
 custom, yet are vices ; and for this and no other 
 reason have I thought it right to explain the 
 views, feelings, and expressions upon the miscon- 
 ception of which these charges have been founded. 
 
 But I have also to complain that there has
 
 70 " DISTINCTION " 
 
 been a certain amount of carelessness on the part 
 of my accusers. I do think that when the 
 Guardian charges me with the sin of having said 
 nothing in the Angel in the House about the 
 " Poor," the writer should have remembered the 
 one famous line I have ever succeeded in writing, 
 namely, that in which Mrs. Vaughan is repre- 
 sented as conveying 
 
 " A gift of wine to Widow Neale." 
 
 I put it in on purpose to show that my thoughts 
 were not wholly occupied with cultivated people, 
 though I knew quite well when I did so that it 
 must evoke from the Olympians as a candid 
 friend, who has access to the sacred Hill, assures 
 me has been the case thunders of inextinguish- 
 able laughter. Again, I am surprised and grieved 
 that a journal, which so well represents and pro- 
 tects an Establishment in which primitive graces 
 and doctrines have of late been revived in so 
 gratifying a manner, should have accused me of 
 carrying my flunkey notions into a future state, 
 with no other proof alleged than my affirmation 
 of the doctrine of the Intercession of Saints, when 
 I say that sinners, through them, approach 
 
 Divinity 
 
 " With a reward and grace 
 
 Unguess'd by the unwash'd boor who hails Him to his 
 face. "
 
 " DISTINCTION " 71 
 
 Was it just to assume that by the " unwash'd 
 boor " I meant only the artisan who had not put 
 aside for the Sunday the materials with which he 
 is accustomed to affix his Imprimatur to sound 
 literature ? 
 
 Again, I must say that the writer in the 
 Spectator whose hand is not easily to be mis- 
 taken for any but that of the kindest and most 
 conscientious of editors should not have de- 
 nounced me as a person of eminently savage 
 disposition, when he must, I think, have remem- 
 bered that the very last time I saw him I pro- 
 tested to him how completely my feelings were in 
 unison with the mild amenity of Dr. Newman, 
 adding, by way of confirmation, from a poem of 
 my own 
 
 "O, that I were so gentle and so sweet, 
 So I might deal fair Sion's foolish foes 
 Such blows ! " 
 
 He also neglects, I think, to put a fair interpreta- 
 tion upon what he calls my " hatred " and 
 " scorn " of the People. Sir Thomas Browne, 
 in a time when the People were much less dis- 
 agreeable than they are become in this the day of 
 their predominance, declared that they constituted 
 the only entity which he could say with truth that 
 he sincerely hated. Now Sir Thomas Browne
 
 72 " DISTINCTION " 
 
 was, as we know from his own assurance, among 
 the sweetest-tempered and least savage of men 
 as, indeed, I believe that I myself am. Neither 
 Sir Thomas nor I ever meant the least unkindness 
 or affront to any individual. I have examined 
 my conscience carefully, and I find myself in a 
 state of universal charity. I condemn no one to 
 perdition ; I am willing to believe that, were we 
 admitted to the secret recesses of their souls, we 
 might discover some apprehension of the living 
 truth of things in Mr. Gladstone, some conscience 
 in Lord Rosebery of the limits which should be 
 put to party complaisance, some candour in the 
 editor of Truth; and I am so far from " hating " 
 these or any, in a wicked sense, that, though I 
 cannot love them with the " love of complacency " 
 as I believe the schoolmen call it, in distinction 
 to the " love of benevolence " I love them so 
 much with the latter kind of love that I desire 
 heartily the very best that could happen for 
 them, which would be that, for a moment, they 
 should see themselves as they truly are. I 
 cannot help adding though I think the tu 
 quoque rather vulgar that, when this really ex- 
 cellent politician and critic said that I con- 
 founded the select with the elect, he himself 
 was more or less confounding the elect with the 
 electors.
 
 "DISTINCTION" 73 
 
 Finally, had I really been a " flunkey " I 
 cannot get the sting of that word out of me 
 had I departed from my Darby and Joan notions 
 to please the dainty with descriptions of abnormal 
 forms of affection ; had I sought to conciliate the 
 philosophic by insisting that no son can reasonably 
 regard the chastity of his mother as other than an 
 open question ; had I endeavoured to allure 
 laughter by such easy combinations of profanity 
 and patois as have won for so many a reputation 
 for being vastly humorous ; had I, in compliment 
 to abstainers from what is strong, diluted my 
 modicum of spirit with ten times its bulk of the 
 pure element ; had I paid even proper attention 
 to the arbiters of fame, how much " earthlier 
 happy " might I now have been ! As it is, 
 whether my thoughts are " pinnacled dim in the 
 intense inane" of the Unknown Eros, or I 
 proffer, in the Angel in the House, "a gift of 
 wine to Widow Neale," the Council of Ten or so 
 are alike unsympathetic ; in my declining years I 
 have scarcely a Countess on whom I can rely for 
 a dinner ; when I die there will be no discerning 
 Dean to bury me, upon his own responsibility, in 
 Westminster Abbey ; and on my obscure tomb- 
 stone some virtuous and thoughtful democrat may 
 very likely scribble, "Here lies the last of the 
 Savages and Flunkeys," notwithstanding all I
 
 74 "DISTINCTION" 
 
 have now said to prove that I am an unpretentious 
 and sweet-tempered old gentleman, who is harm- 
 lessly and respectably preparing for a future state, 
 in which he trusts that there will be neither toma- 
 hawk nor " plush."
 
 XI 
 
 KEATS 
 
 MR. SIDNEY COLVIN'S book upon Keats is, in the 
 main, a welcome exception to what has become, 
 of late, the rule in this class of work. It is re- 
 markably just, and every good reader will feel it 
 to be the more warmly appreciative because it 
 is scarcely ever extravagantly so. The bulk of 
 Keats's poetry, including " Endymion," is esti- 
 mated at its true worth, which, as Keats the 
 severest judge of his own work knew and con- 
 fessed, was not much ; and the little volume 
 (justly styled by Mr. Colvin " immortal ") which 
 was published in 1820, and which does not con- 
 sist of more than about 3000 lines, is declared 
 to contain nearly the whole of the poet's effective 
 writing. And even in this little volume which 
 includes "Lamia," "Isabella," "The Eve of St. 
 Agnes," the five " Odes," and " Hyperion " Mr. 
 Colvin acutely detects and boldly points out many
 
 76 KEATS 
 
 serious defects. From the comparatively worthless 
 waste of the rest of Keats's writing, Mr. Colvin 
 picks out with accurate discernment the few pieces 
 and passages of real excellence ; and he does 
 criticism good service in directing attention to the 
 especial value of the fragment called " The Eve of 
 St. Mark," and of that which is probably the very 
 finest lyric in the English language, " La Belle 
 Dame sans Merci." 
 
 As long as Mr. Colvin limits himself to the 
 positive beauties and defects of Keats's poetry he 
 is nearly always right ; it is only in his summing 
 up and in his estimate of the comparative worth 
 of his subject that a less enthusiastic critic must 
 part company with him. " I think it probable 
 that by power, as well as by temperament and 
 aim, he was the most Shakespearian spirit that 
 has lived since Shakespeare." Is not the truth 
 rather that, among real poets, Keats was the 
 most un-Shakespearian poet that ever lived ? True 
 poets may be divided into two distinct classes, 
 though there is a border-line at which they occa- 
 sionally become confused. In the first class, which 
 contains all the greatest poets, with Shakespeare at 
 their head, intellect predominates ; governing and 
 thereby strengthening passion, and evolving beauty 
 and sweetness as accidents though inevitable 
 accidents of its operation. The vision of such
 
 KEATS 77 
 
 poets may almost be described in the words of 
 St. Thomas Aquinas, in speaking of the Beatific 
 Vision. " The vision," he writes, " is a virtue, 
 the beatitude an accident." Such poets are truly 
 spoken of as masculine. In the other class in 
 which Keats stands as high as any other, if not 
 higher the " beatitude," the beauty and sweet- 
 ness, is the essential, the truth and power of 
 intellect and passion the accident. These poets 
 are, without any figure of speech, justly described 
 as feminine (not necessarily effeminate) ; and they 
 are separated from the first class by a distance as 
 great as that which separates a truly manly man 
 from a truly womanly woman. The trite saying 
 that the spirit of the great poet has always a 
 feminine element is perfectly true notwithstanding. 
 " The man is not without the woman ; " though 
 " the man is not for the woman, but the woman 
 for the man." The difference lies in that which 
 has the lead and mastery. In Keats the man 
 had not the mastery. For him a thing of beauty 
 was not only a joy for ever, but was the supreme 
 and only good he knew or cared to know ; and 
 the consequence is that his best poems are things 
 of exquisite and most sensitively felt beauty, and 
 nothing else. But it is a fact of primary signifi- 
 cance, both in morals and in art (a fact which is 
 sadly lost sight of just now), that the highest
 
 78 KEATS 
 
 beauty and joy are not attainable when they occupy 
 the first place as motives, but only when they are 
 more or less the accidents of the exercise of the 
 manly virtue of the vision of truth. There are at 
 fitting seasons a serene splendour and a sunny 
 sweetness about that which is truly masculine, 
 whether in character or in art, which women and 
 womanly artists never attain an inner radiance 
 of original loveliness and joy which comes, and 
 can only come, of the purity of motive which 
 regards external beauty and delight as accidental. 
 In his individual criticisms of Keats's poems 
 Mr. Colvin fully recognises their defect of masculine 
 character. In speaking of " Isabella " he says : 
 "Its personages appeal to us, not so much humanly 
 and in themselves, as by the circumstances, scenery, 
 and atmosphere amidst which we see them move. 
 Herein lies the strength, and also the weakness, of 
 modern romance : its strength, inasmuch as the 
 charm of the mediaeval colour and mystery is 
 unfailing for those who feel it at all ; its weakness, 
 inasmuch as under the influence of that charm 
 both writer and reader are too apt to forget the 
 need for human and moral truth ; and without these 
 no great literature can exist." Again : " In Keats's 
 conceptions of his youthful heroes there is at all 
 times a touch, not the wholesomest, of effeminacy 
 and physical softness, and the influence of passion
 
 KEATS 79 
 
 he is apt to make fever and unman them quite ; 
 as, indeed, a helpless and enslaved submission of 
 all the faculties to love proved, when it came to 
 the trial, to be the weakness of his own nature." 
 And again : " In matters of poetic feeling and 
 fancy Keats and Hunt had not a little in common. 
 Both alike were given to ' luxuriating ' somewhat 
 effusively and fondly over the ' deliciousness ' of 
 whatever they liked in art, books, and nature." 
 In these and other equally just and unquestionable 
 criticisms of Keats's character and works, surely 
 Mr. Colvin sufficiently refutes his own assertion 
 that this writer was "by temperament" "the 
 most Shakespearian " of r poets since Shakespeare. 
 And whether he was also such (as Mr. Colvin 
 further asserts him to have been) " by power," 
 let the poet's work declare. In his own lovely 
 line which he faithfully kept to in " Lamia," "Isa- 
 bella," " The Eve of St. Agnes," and the " Odes" 
 he is unsurpassed and perhaps unequalled. 
 When he is true to that line we do not feel the 
 want of anything better, though we may know 
 that there is something better : as, in the presence 
 of a beautiful woman, we do not sigh because she 
 is not a General Gordon or a Sir Thomas More. 
 But let Keats try to assume the man as he does 
 in his latest work, his attempts at dramatic com- 
 position or at satirical humour, in the " Cap and
 
 8o KEATS 
 
 Bells " and all his life and power seem to shrivel 
 and die, like- the beauty of Lamia in the presence 
 of Apollonius. Some of his readers may object 
 the semblance of Miltonic strength in certain 
 passages of the fragment " Hyperion " ; but Keats 
 himself knew and admitted that it was only a 
 semblance and an echo, and therefore wisely 
 abandoned the attempt, having satisfied himself 
 with having shown the world that there was no 
 object of merely external nature, from " roses 
 amorous of the moon " to 
 
 The solid roar 
 
 Of thunderous waterfalls and torrents hoarse, 
 Pouring a constant bulk, uncertain where, 
 
 which he had not nerves to feel and words so to 
 utter that others should feel as he did. 
 
 In making this distinction between poetry of a 
 masculine and that of a feminine order, it must be 
 understood that no sort of disrespect is intended 
 to the latter in saying a good word for that " once 
 important sex " of poetry which the bewitching 
 allurements of Keats and Shelley and their followers 
 have caused, for a season, to be comparatively 
 despised. The femininity of such poets as these 
 is a glorious and immortal gift, such as no mortal 
 lady has ever attained or ever will attain. It has 
 been proved to us how well a mortal lady may be- 
 come able to read the classics ; but, humbled as
 
 KEATS 8 1 
 
 some of us may feel by her having headed the 
 Tripos, it is still some compensation for those of our 
 sex to remember that we alone can write "classics," 
 even of the feminine order. Nor let it be thought 
 that we have been insisting upon a modern and 
 fanciful distinction in thus dividing great men into 
 two classes, in one of which the masculine and in 
 the other the feminine predominates. It is a fact 
 the observation whereof is as old as the mythology 
 which attributed the parentage of heroes in whom 
 the intellectual powers prevailed to the union of 
 gods with women, while those who distinguished 
 themselves by more external and showy faculties 
 were said to have been born of the commerce of 
 goddesses with men.
 
 XII 
 WHAT SHELLEY WAS 1 
 
 PROFESSOR DOWDEN has had access to a very 
 large quantity of hitherto unpublished correspond- 
 ence and other matter, some of which throws 
 much new light upon Shelley's singular charac- 
 ter ; and, but for one most important point 
 his sudden separation from Harriet Westbrook, 
 for which no substantial reason is given the 
 Professor's eleven hundred closely printed pages 
 contain all and more than all that any reasonable 
 person can want to know about the subject. Pro- 
 fessor Dowden's arrangement of this mass of 
 material is so lucid that interest seldom flags ; and 
 the whole work reads like a first-class sensational 
 novel, of which the only faults are that the 
 characters are unnatural and the incidents improb- 
 able. A beautiful youth of almost superhuman 
 
 1 This was published before the appearance of Mr. 
 Matthew Arnold's Essay on Professor Dowden's book.
 
 WHAT SHELLEY WAS 83 
 
 genius, sensitiveness, and self-abnegation, is the 
 hero. He is given early to blaspheming whatever 
 society has hitherto respected, and to cursing the 
 King and his father an old gentleman whose 
 chief foible seems to have been attachment to the 
 Church of England. His charity is so angelical 
 that he remains on the best of terms with one man 
 who has tried to seduce his wife, and with another 
 a beautiful young lord with a club-foot, whom 
 he finds wallowing in a society given to vices which 
 cannot be named, and who is also a supreme poet 
 notwithstanding the fact that this lord has had 
 a child by one of the ladies of his (the hero's) 
 wife's family and treats her with the most unmerited 
 contempt and cruelty. He adores three really 
 respectable and attractive young ladies by name 
 Harriet Westbrook, Elizabeth Kitchener, and 
 Emilia Viviani with a passion which eternity 
 cannot exhaust, and praises them in music like 
 that of the spheres (witness " Epipsychidion ") ; 
 and, anon, Harriet is " a frantic idiot," Elizabeth 
 a " brown demon," and Emilia a " centaur." " It 
 was," says his biographer, " one of the infirmities 
 of Shelley's character that, from thinking the best 
 of a friend or acquaintance, he could of a sudden 
 and with insufficient cause, pass over to the other 
 side and think the worst." It is, perhaps, fortunate 
 that Providence should afflict supreme sanctities
 
 84 WHAT SHELLEY WAS 
 
 and geniuses with such " infirmities " ; otherwise 
 we might take them for something more than mere 
 saints and poets. The hero, as became absolute 
 charity, gave every one credit at least, when it 
 suited his mood and convenience for being as 
 charitable as himself: witness his soliciting 
 Harriet Westbrook for money after he had run 
 away with his fresh " wife," her rival. He was 
 addicted even from his babyhood to the oddest 
 and most " charming " eccentricities. " When 
 Bysshe," then quite a child, " one day set a fagot- 
 stack on fire, the excuse was a charming one : he 
 did so that he might have ' a little hell of his 
 own.' " At Eton " in a paroxysm of rage he seized 
 the nearest weapon, a fork, and stuck it into the 
 hand of his tormentor." On another occasion, 
 when his tutor found him apparently setting fire 
 to himself and the house, and asked him " What 
 on earth are you doing, Shelley ? " he replied, 
 "Please, sir, I'm raising the devil." The pet 
 virtue of the hero was tolerance. " Here I swear," 
 he writes to Mr. Hogg, " and as I break my oaths, 
 may Infinity, Eternity blast me here I swear that 
 never will I forgive intolerance ! It is the only 
 point on which I allow myself to encourage revenge 
 . . . not one that leaves the wretch at rest, but 
 lasting, long revenge." His resolutions to be 
 himself tolerant often broke down, and he could not
 
 WHAT SHELLEY WAS 85 
 
 abide "men who pray" and such - like ; but what 
 could be expected from such a hero in such a 
 world ! He had all the naivete as well as the 
 self-reliance of true greatness. He had no sooner 
 become an undergraduate at Oxford than he 
 printed a pamphlet on " The Necessity of 
 Atheism," and sent copies to the Vice-Chancellor, 
 the heads of houses, and all the bishops, with " a 
 pretty letter in his own handwriting " to each. He 
 was summoned before the University authorities, 
 who " pleaded, implored, and threatened ; on the 
 other side, the unabashed and beardless boy 
 maintaining his right to think and to declare his 
 thoughts to others." Much evil as he believed of 
 such vermin, he does not seem to have dreamed 
 of the intolerance of which they were capable. 
 Hogg the dear and lifelong friend who tried to 
 seduce his wife writes : " He rushed in ; he was 
 terribly agitated. ' I am expelled,' he said, as 
 soon as he had recovered himself a little ; ' I am 
 expelled ! ' . . . He sat on the sofa, repeating with 
 convulsive vehemence the words ' Expelled ! 
 expelled ! ' " Professor Dowden thinks " it was 
 natural and perhaps expedient that measures should 
 have been taken to vindicate the authority of the 
 heads of the institution ; . . . but good feeling " 
 would not have punished so severely what " was 
 more an offence of the intellect than of the heart
 
 86 WHAT SHELLEY WAS 
 
 and will " : for what was it " to fling out a boy's 
 defiance against the first article of the Creed," 
 compared with the drinking and disorderly life of 
 some other undergraduates who were yet allowed 
 to remain in the University? The conduct of the 
 authorities was the less excusable that we have 
 Mr. Hogg's authority for the fact that at this time 
 " the purity and sanctity of his life were most 
 conspicuous," and that " in no individual, perhaps, 
 was the moral sense ever more completely de- 
 veloped than in Shelley." Of course, in face of 
 such an authority as Mr. Hogg, the assertion of 
 Thornton Hunt that " he was aware of facts which 
 gave him to understand that Shelley while at 
 college, in tampering with venal passions, had 
 seriously injured his health ; and that this was 
 followed by a reaction ' marked by horror,' " is not 
 to be listened to, and is therefore relegated to a 
 footnote. Professor Dowden rightly thinks that 
 Shelley might have been all the better had he left 
 the University at the usual time, and with his mind 
 weighted with more discipline and knowledge. 
 " His voyage," says his biographer, " must needs 
 have been fleet and far, and the craft, with fore 
 and flying sails set, must often have run upon her 
 side and drunk the water ; all the more reason, 
 therefore, for laying in some ballast below before 
 she raced into the gale." Everyone knows how
 
 WHAT SHELLEY WAS 87 
 
 the craft raced into the gale, with Miss Westbrook 
 on board, as soon as the Oxford hawser was cut. 
 Shelley might have done much worse. She was a 
 good and attractive person. He began by liking 
 her. " There are some hopes," he says, " of this 
 dear little girl ; she would be a divine little scion 
 of infidelity if I could get hold of her." She seems 
 to have been sincerely devoted to him and he 
 afterwards to her, until circumstances unknown or 
 undivulged made his home insupportable to her, 
 and she became the " frantic idiot " who, though 
 she would give Shelley money when she had it, 
 was apparently not sufficiently " tolerant " upon 
 other points such as that of his proposition that 
 she should enjoy the scenery of Switzerland in 
 his company and that of her supplanter ; and it 
 certainly showed some narrowness of mind to cast 
 herself, upon his final desertion of her, into the 
 Serpentine, when she might have shared, or at 
 least witnessed, the " eternal rapture " and " divine 
 aspirations" which her husband was enjoying in 
 the arms of another woman. Poor little " idiot" 
 as she was, she constitutes almost the only point 
 in all this bewildering "romance of reality" upon 
 which the mind can rest with any peace or 
 pleasure. 
 
 What Shelley was at first he remained to the 
 last : a beautiful, effeminate, arrogant boy con-
 
 88 WHAT SHELLEY WAS 
 
 stitutionally indifferent to money, generous by 
 impulse, self-indulgent by habit, ignorant to the end 
 of all that it most behoves a responsible being to 
 know, and so conceited that his ignorance was 
 incurable ; showing at every turn the most infallible 
 sign of a feeble intellect, a belief in human per- 
 fectibility ; and rushing at once to the conclusion, 
 when he or others met with suffering, that some 
 one, not the sufferer, was doing grievous wrong. If 
 to do what is right in one's own eyes is the whole 
 of virtue, and to suffer for so doing is to be a 
 martyr, . then Shelley was the saint and martyr 
 which a large number of chiefly young persons 
 consider him to have been as a man ; and if to 
 have the faculty of saying everything in the most 
 brilliant language and imagery, without having 
 anything particular to say beyond sublime com- 
 monplaces and ethereal fallacies about love and 
 liberty, is to be a " supreme " poet, then Shelley 
 undoubtedly was such. But, as a man, Shelley 
 was almost wholly devoid of the instincts of the 
 "political animal," which Aristotle defines a man 
 to be. If he could not see the reasons for any 
 social institution or custom, he could not feel any 
 and forthwith set himself to convince the world 
 that they were the invention of priests and tyrants. 
 He was equally deficient in what is commonly 
 understood by natural affection. The ties of
 
 WHAT SHELLEY WAS 89 
 
 relationship were no ties to him : for he could only 
 see them as accidents. " I, like the God of the 
 Jews," writes Shelley, " set up myself as no re- 
 specter of persons ; and relationship is regarded 
 by me as bearing that relation to reason which a 
 band of straw does to fire." As these deficiencies 
 were the cause of all the abnormal phenomena of 
 his life, so they are at the root of, or rather are, 
 the imperfections of his poetry, which is all 
 splendour and sentiment and sensitiveness, and 
 little or no true wisdom or true love. The very 
 texture of his verse suffers from these causes. In 
 his best poems it is firm, fluent, various, and 
 melodious ; but the more serious and subtle music 
 of life which he had not in his heart he could not 
 put into his rhythms ; which no one who knows 
 what rhythm is will venture to compare with the 
 best of Tennyson's or Wordsworth's, far less with 
 the best of our really " supreme " poets. A very 
 great deal of his poetry is much like the soap- 
 bubbles he was so fond of blowing its superficies 
 beauty, its substance wind ; or like many a young 
 lady who looks and moves and modulates her 
 speech like a goddess, and chatters like an ape. 
 
 After Shelley, the chief male figure in this 
 romance which would be altogether incredible 
 were it not real is that of the guide, philosopher, 
 and friend of the poet's youth, Godwin. Pecksniff
 
 90 WHAT SHELLEY WAS 
 
 is genteel comedy compared with the grim farce 
 of this repulsive lover of wisdom as embodied in 
 himself. Like the German poet who was entrusted 
 by one friend to be the bearer of a sausage to 
 another, and, bit by bit, ate it all on his way, 
 Godwin "sincerely abhorred all that was sordid 
 and mean ; but he liked sausage " ; and the way 
 he combined the necessity for nibbling at Shelley's 
 future fortune by making incessant claims, which 
 the latter could satisfy only by repeated and 
 ruinous post-obits, with the other necessity for 
 keeping up the insulted and injured dignity of a 
 man whom Shelley had wronged past pardon, is 
 funny beyond description. His writing to tell 
 Shelley that he had insulted him by giving him a 
 heavy sum of money in the form of a cheque made 
 payable to his (Godwin's) own name, thereby 
 making the gift liable to be construed as such by 
 the banker, and threatening solemnly not to receive 
 the gift at all, unless the name was changed to 
 " Hume " or any other the poet might select, is a 
 touch which Shakespeare might have coveted for 
 Ancient Pistol. 
 
 It appears that there still exists a good deal of 
 writing by and concerning Shelley which it has 
 not been deemed expedient to publish. A footnote, 
 for instance, assures us that " a poetical epistle to 
 Graham referring to his father in odious terms " is
 
 WHAT SHELLEY WAS 91 
 
 still " in existence" ; and various other unprinted 
 letters and poems are alluded to. But it is 
 scarcely to be supposed that any future Life of 
 Shelley will supersede Professor Dowden's 
 unless, indeed, it should be an abridgment, more 
 suitable in bulk and perhaps in tone than the 
 present publication is, for the use of those who, 
 undazzled, or possibly repelled, by the glamour of 
 Shelley's personality and revolutionary convictions, 
 admire the meteoric splendour of his genius and 
 allow it its not unimportant place in the permanent 
 literature of England.
 
 XIII 
 BLAKE 
 
 BLAKE'S poetry, with the exception of four or five 
 lovely lyrics and here and there in the other pieces 
 a startling gleam of unquestionable genius, is mere 
 drivel. A sensible person can easily distinguish 
 between that which he cannot understand and that 
 in which there is nothing to be understood. Mr. 
 W. Rossetti, who is an enthusiast for " the much- 
 maligned Paris Commune" and for Blake's poetry, 
 says of some of the latter, where it is nearly at its 
 worst, " We feel its potent and arcane influence, 
 but cannot dismember this into articulated mean- 
 ings." This sentence, if put into less exalted 
 English, expresses tolerably well the aspect of 
 mind with which we regard much of the writing of 
 the Prophets and of the great ancient and modern 
 mystics. Some light of their meaning forces itself 
 through the, in most cases, purposely obscure cloud 
 of their words and imagery ; but when, by chance,
 
 BLAKE 93 
 
 a glimpse of the disc itself is caught, it is surpris- 
 ingly strong, bright, and intelligible. Such writers 
 are spoken of with irreverence by those only that 
 would have given their verdict in favour of the 
 famous Irishman who, being confronted with one 
 witness swearing to having seen him take a hand- 
 kerchief from another gentleman's pocket, brought 
 four who testified with equal solemnity to not hav- 
 ing seen him do any such thing. The obvious 
 rule in regard to such writers is, "When you can- 
 not understand a man's ignorance, think yourself 
 ignorant of his understanding." Again, if a man's 
 sayings are wholly unintelligible to us, he may 
 claim the benefit of a small possibility of a doubt 
 that his meanings may be too great and necessarily 
 "arcane " for our powers of reception. But when 
 a writer's works consist of a few passages of great 
 beauty and such simplicity that a child may under- 
 stand them like Blake's " Chimney- Sweep," 
 " Tiger," " Piping down the valleys wild," " Why 
 was Cupid a boy?" and " Auguries of Innocence " 
 and a great deal more that is mere ill-expressed 
 but perfectly intelligible platitude and common- 
 place mixed with petty spite, and a far larger 
 quantity still which to the ear of the natural under- 
 standing is mere gibberish, he has no right to 
 claim, as Blake does, that the latter shall be 
 regarded as plenarily inspired, or, indeed, as being
 
 94 BLAKE 
 
 anything better than the delirious rubbish it ob- 
 viously is. 
 
 Mr. W. Rossetti, though he goes a great way 
 further in his admiration of Blake than reason can 
 be shown for, does the cause of reason a good 
 service in declaring his opinion that the poet was 
 probably mad. " When," says he, " I find a man 
 pouring forth conceptions and images for which he 
 professes himself not responsible and which are 
 in themselves in the highest degree remote, nebu- 
 lous, and intangible, and putting some of these, 
 moreover, into words wherein congruent sequence 
 and significance of expression or analogy are not 
 to be traced, then I cannot resist a strong pre- 
 sumption that that man was in some true sense of 
 the word mad." As Pope " could not take his tea 
 without a stratagem," so Blake could not " mix his 
 colours with diluted glue " without declaring that 
 "the process was revealed to him by St. Joseph"; 
 and it was the ghost of his brother who taught 
 him the new, though, had we not been told other- 
 wise, the not supernaturally wonderful device of 
 saving the expense of ordinary typography by 
 etching the words of his verses on the copper plate 
 which bore their illustrations. Blake was morally 
 as well as intellectually mad ; proposing on one 
 occasion, for example, that his wife should allow 
 him to introduce a second partner to his bed, and
 
 BLAKE 95 
 
 doing so with a bond fide unconsciousness of any- 
 thing amiss in such a suggestion as perfect as that 
 with which Shelley urged his wife to come and 
 share the delights of a tour in Switzerland with 
 him and his mistress Mary Godwin. 
 
 That " great wits to madness nearly are allied," 
 is not true ; but it is not only true but psychologic- 
 ally explicable that small " geniuses " often are so. 
 Most children are geniuses before the dawn of 
 moral and intellectual responsibilities ; and there 
 are some who remain, not children, but moral and 
 intellectual manikins, all their lives. It must be 
 confessed that conscience makes, not only cowards, 
 but more or less dullards, of us all. The child, 
 
 that 
 
 Mighty prophet, seer blest, 
 
 On whom those truths do rest 
 
 Which we are toiling all our lives to find, 
 
 owes his power of vision to his not being able to 
 see the flaming sword of conscience which turns 
 every way, and hinders all men but a very few 
 from getting a glimpse through the closed gates of 
 Paradise. Yet it is better to be a purblind man 
 with a conscience than a seeing manikin with none. 
 It is better still, and best of all, when the man of 
 developed intellect and fully accepted responsi- 
 bilities retains a cherished memory of and an 
 innocent sympathy with the knowledge that came
 
 96 BLAKE 
 
 to him in childhood and early youth, and uses his 
 trained powers of expression in order to make the 
 world partakers of those thoughts and feelings 
 which had no tongue when they first arose in him, 
 and leave no memory in the mass of men until the 
 man of true and sane genius touches chords of 
 recollection that would otherwise have slept in them 
 for ever. One of the few really good things ever 
 said by Hazlitt is that " men of genius spend their 
 lives in teaching the world what they themselves 
 learned before they were twenty." 
 
 For the time, however, the manikin type of 
 genius is all the fashion, especially with a class of 
 critics who have it in their power to give notoriety 
 if they cannot give fame. Craziness alone passes 
 at present for a strong presumption of genius, 
 and where genius is really found in company there- 
 with it is at once pronounced "supreme." This 
 is partly because most people can see that craziness 
 has something abnormal about it, and are ready, 
 therefore, to identify it with genius, of which most 
 persons know only that it also is " abnormal " ; 
 and partly because the manikin mind is always 
 red republican, and ardent in its hatred of kings, 
 priests, "conventions," the "monopoly" of property 
 and of women, and all other hindrances put in the 
 way of virtue, liberty, and happiness by the wicked 
 " civilizee."
 
 BLAKE 97 
 
 Blake, as an artist, is a more important figure 
 than Blake the poet ; and naturally so, for the 
 smallest good poem involves a consecutiveness 
 and complexity of thought which are required in 
 paintings only of a character which Blake rarely 
 attempted. Yet, even as a painter his reputation 
 has until lately been much exaggerated. That 
 exhibition of his collected drawings and paintings 
 was a great blow to the fame which had grown up 
 from a haphazard acquaintance by his admirers 
 with a few sketches or an illustrated poem. Here 
 and there there was a gleam of such pure and 
 simple genius as is often revealed in the speech of 
 a finely-natured child amid its ordinary chatter ; 
 here and there the expression of a tender or dis- 
 tempered dream which was not like anything else 
 in the spectator's experience ; now and then an 
 outline that had a look of Michael Angelo, with 
 sometimes hints which might have formed the 
 themes of great works, and which justified the 
 saying of Fuseli that " Blake is damned good to 
 steal from " ; but the effect of the whole collection 
 was dejecting and unimpressive, and did little 
 towards confirming its creator's opinion that Titian, 
 Reynolds, and Gainsborough were bad artists, and 
 Blake, Barry, and Fuseli good ones.
 
 THE claims of Rossetti as a painter and a poet 
 have obtained a full and generous recognition ; 
 and he has acquired a standing in either art 
 which will in all probability abide, though it is 
 far too soon to attempt any estimate of his 
 position in the permanent ranks of artists and 
 writers. His thoughtfulness, and the clearness 
 and intensity of his perceptions, do not require to 
 be insisted upon, nor the almost unexampled way 
 in which he has merged and often, it must be 
 admitted, confounded the functions of painter 
 and poet. This he has done to the detriment of 
 his perfection in either art, in neither of which 
 can he be truly said to have attained the character 
 of mastery which may be found, more or less, in 
 almost all other workers of equal genius with 
 himself, and sometimes in those whose natural 
 qualifications have been inferior to his. Little
 
 ROSSETTI AS A POET 99 
 
 of his drawing and none of his painting can be 
 enjoyed without the drawback of some sense of 
 manifest technical failure ; and nearly all his 
 poetry which is more or less difficult by reason 
 of the quick succession of out-of-the-way thoughts 
 and images, needing the closest attention for their 
 appreciation is rendered unnecessarily so by 
 language which rarely has the fluency of perfec- 
 tion. In the two or three instances in which his 
 verse becomes fluent and more or less masterly 
 notably in the "Burden of Nineveh" and "Jenny" 
 it ceases to be characteristic or subtle. The 
 " Burden of Nineveh " might have been written 
 by Southey, or any other writer of forcible words 
 and thoughts in somewhat commonplace rhythm. 
 This fact, that fluency fails him as soon as he gets 
 upon his own proper ground, renders it extremely 
 difficult to discern and to describe exactly what 
 that ground is. Style, which is the true expres- 
 sion of the poet's individuality the mark by 
 which we discover, not what, but how, he thinks 
 and feels is almost suffocated, in Rossetti's most 
 characteristic work, by voluntary oddities of 
 manner and by a manifest difficulty in so moving 
 in the bonds of verse as to convert them into 
 graces. If subtle thoughts and vivid imagery 
 were all that went to make a poet, Rossetti would 
 stand very high. But these qualities must have
 
 TOO ROSSETTI AS A POET 
 
 the running commentary and musical accompani- 
 ment of free feeling, which only a correspondingly 
 subtle and vivid versification can express, before 
 they can be allowed to constitute a claim to the 
 highest poetical rank. Rossetti as a versifier was 
 not less technically defective than Rossetti as a 
 painter ; his best poems and his best paintings are 
 the outcome, not only of very high aims which 
 are as common as blackberries but of very high 
 aims deeply and characteristically felt ; and his 
 superiority to many far more technically perfect 
 artists results from the fact that his characteristic 
 feeling is strong enough to make itself powerfully, 
 however indistinctly, perceived through the mist 
 and obstructions of his mannerism and defective 
 verse. 
 
 Like all men of strong artistic individuality 
 combined with serious artistic faults, Rossetti has 
 had a great influence upon the literature of his 
 day such an influence as comparatively faultless 
 writers never exert, at least in their time. Many 
 young versifiers and painters fancy they are 
 reproducing Rossetti's intensity when they are 
 only imitating the most prevailing fault of his art, 
 its tensity. His brother, William Rossetti, in 
 his modest and judicious introduction to these 
 volumes, tells how he and Gabriel used to amuse 
 themselves in making bouts-rimes. William says
 
 ROSSETTI AS A POET 101 
 
 of his brother's literary toys of this sort : " Some 
 have a faux air of intensity of meaning, as well 
 as of expression ; but their real core of significance 
 is small." It cannot be denied that a careful 
 scrutiny of much of Rossetti's published work is 
 open to this criticism. It is tense without being 
 intense. This fault is his great attraction to his 
 imitators, whose every sensation is represented as 
 a pang, delicious or otherwise, and whose mental 
 sky is a canopy of iron destiny compared with 
 which the melancholy of Byron, which likewise 
 had so many copyists, was no more than a 
 pleasant shade. 
 
 In endeavouring to do justice to Rossetti it 
 must be remembered that, though born and bred 
 in England, he was an Italian by blood and 
 sympathy. His acquaintance with Englishmen 
 and English books was by no means wide. Love, 
 the constant theme of his art, is in some of his 
 most important poems, not the English love whose 
 stream is steady affection and only its occasional 
 eddies passion, and which, when disappointed, 
 does not cease to be love though it becomes 
 sorrow : but the Italian ardour, in perennial crisis, 
 which stabs its rival and hates its object, if she 
 refuses its satisfaction, as ardently as it worships 
 her so long as there is hope. The limitations, 
 also, which characterise Rossetti's poetry belong
 
 102 ROSSETTI AS A POET 
 
 to Italian poetry itself. There is little breadth in 
 it, but much acuteness. It is therefore quite unfair 
 to try an essentially Italian poet, like Rossetti, by 
 comparing his works with the classical poetry of 
 a nation which, for combined breadth and height, 
 far surpasses the poetry of all other languages 
 present and past, with the doubtful exception of 
 the Greek. The English language itself is not 
 made for Italian thought and passion. It has 
 about four times as many vowel sounds as Italian 
 and a corresponding consonantal power ; that is 
 to say, it differs from the Italian about as much 
 as an organ differs from a flute. Rossetti uses 
 little besides the flute-notes of our English organ ; 
 and, if he had made himself complete master of 
 those notes, it would have been the most that 
 could have been expected of him. In appear- 
 ance and manners Rossetti was thoroughly Italian. 
 In his youth especially he had the sweet and 
 easy courtesy peculiar to his nation. His brother 
 says, " There was a certain British bluffness 
 streaking the finely poised Italian suppleness and 
 facility." This describes, better than perhaps Mr. 
 William Rossetti intended, a characteristic which 
 occasionally, but fortunately not often, appears in 
 his poetry, which is most pleasing when it is least 
 " streaked " with British bluffness : as it is, for 
 example, in " Jenny."
 
 ROSSETTI AS A POET 103 
 
 Rossetti's power is chiefly shown in his long 
 ballads, such as " Sister Helen," "The Bride's Pre- 
 lude," " Rose Mary," and " The King's Tragedy." 
 Had these been found in Percy's " Relics," they 
 would have constituted the chief ornaments of 
 that collection. As it is, it is impossible not to 
 feel that they are more or less anachronisms, both 
 in spirit and in form. The repetition of a refrain 
 through the fifty stanzas or so of " Sister Helen," 
 the most forcible of all these lyrical narratives, 
 has no sufficient justification for its interruption 
 of the fiercely flowing history. A refrain which 
 extends to more than three or four stanzas 
 requires and originally assumed a musical accom- 
 paniment. The constant high-pressure of passion 
 in these ballads is also an anachronism : and to 
 the cultured modern reader this character is 
 calculated to defeat the poet's purpose, giving 
 him an impression of cold instead of warmth, as 
 if the fire had a salamander instead of a heart in 
 its centre. A kindred fault, which Rossetti has 
 in common with some of the most famous poets 
 of the century, is that of conferring upon all his 
 images an acute and independent clearness which 
 is never found in the natural and truly poetical 
 expression of feeling. It is true, and great poets 
 (especially Shakespeare) have noted it, that in 
 extreme crises of passion there will sometimes be
 
 104 ROSSETTI AS A POET 
 
 a moment of calm in which the minutiae of some 
 most trifling object or circumstance will, as it 
 were, photograph themselves upon the mind. But 
 this praeternatural calm is only the "eye of the 
 storm " ; and to scatter broadcast, over a long 
 poem, imagery with the sharpest outlines is to 
 prove, not only that it has not been written from 
 true passion, but that the poet has not even 
 observed the phenomena of true passion. Such 
 independent force and clearness of imagery can 
 be justified only in poems of the very lowest type 
 of artistic construction, such as Schiller's " Song of 
 the Bell " and " Childe Harold," which scarcely 
 profess to have more unity than is to be found in 
 a scrap-book. A fine poem may or may not be 
 full of " fine things " ; but, if it does abound in 
 them, their independent value should appear only 
 when they are separated from their context. In 
 Rossetti, as in several other modern poets of great 
 reputation, we are constantly being pulled up, in 
 the professedly fiery course of a tale of passion, 
 to observe the moss on a rock or the note of a 
 chaffinch. High finish has nothing to do with 
 this quality of extreme definiteness in detail ; 
 indeed, it is more often exercised by the perfect 
 poet in blurring outlines than in giving them 
 acuteness. It must be admitted, however, that 
 Rossetti had an unusual temptation to this kind
 
 ROSSETTI AS A POET 105 
 
 of excess in his extraordinary faculty for seeing 
 objects in such a fierce light of imagination as 
 very few poets have been able to throw upon 
 external things. He can be forgiven for spoiling 
 a tender lyric by a stanza such as this, which 
 seems scratched with an adamantine pen upon a 
 slab of agate 
 
 But the sea stands spread 
 As one wall with the flat skies, 
 Where the lean black craft, like flies, 
 
 Seem wellnigh stagnated, 
 
 Soon to drop off dead. 
 
 Though the foregoing strictures apply to a large 
 portion of Rossetti's work, there is a really precious 
 residuum which they do not touch. There are 
 several pieces such as "Love's Nocturn," "The 
 Portrait," " A Little While," and many sonnets 
 which are full of natural feeling expressed with 
 simple and subtle art ; and in much of his work 
 there is a rich and obscure glow of insight into 
 depths too profound and too sacred for clear 
 speech, even if they could be spoken : a sort of 
 insight not at all uncommon in the great art 
 of past times, but exceedingly rare in the art of 
 our own.
 
 XV 
 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 
 
 C LOUGH worshipped Truth with more than the 
 passion of a lover, and his writings are, for the 
 most part, the tragic records of a life-long devo- 
 tion to a mistress who steadily refused his em- 
 braces ; but as it is greatly better to have loved 
 without attaining than to have attained without 
 loving, so Clough's ardent and unrewarded stumb- 
 lings in the dark towards his adored though unseen 
 divinity are greatly more attractive and edifying 
 to those who have shared, successfully or not, the 
 same passion, than is that complacent fruition of 
 her smiles which she often accords to those who 
 are contented to be no more than her speaking 
 acquaintances. Regarded from a purely intel- 
 lectual point of view, Clough's utterances on 
 religion, duty, etc., are little better than the 
 commonplaces which in these days pass through 
 the mind and more or less affect the feelings of
 
 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 107 
 
 almost every intelligent and educated youth before 
 he is twenty years of age ; but there are common- 
 places which cease to be such, and become in- 
 definitely interesting, in proportion as they are 
 animated by moral ardour and passion. Speech 
 may work good by warming as well as by 
 enlightening ; and if dough's writings teach no 
 new truth, they may inflame the love of truth, 
 which is perhaps as great a service. Though he 
 professes that he can nowhere see light where 
 light is most necessary and longed for, his mind 
 is utterly opposed to the negative type ; and he 
 accurately exemplifies the class of believer whom 
 Richard Hooker endeavours to comfort, in his 
 great sermon on " the perpetuity of faith in the 
 elect," by the reminder that a longing to believe 
 is implicit faith, and that we cannot sorrow for the 
 lack of that which we interiorly hold to be non- 
 existent. A question that must suggest itself to 
 most readers is, What is the use and justification 
 of these endless and tautological lamentations 
 over the fact as Clough conceived it to be 
 that, for such as him at least, " Christ is not 
 risen " ? The reply is, that the responsibility of 
 the publication of so much that is profoundly 
 passionate, but far from profoundly intellectual, 
 scepticism was not his. With the exception of 
 some not very significant critical essays, his prose
 
 jog ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 
 
 consists of letters, which were of course not meant 
 for the public ; and the greater part of his poetry 
 remained to the day of Clough's death in his desk, 
 and would probably never have left it, with his 
 consent, unless to be put in the fire. 
 
 Those who recognise in the " Bothie " Clough's 
 almost solitary claim to literary eminence must 
 somewhat wonder at the considerable figure he 
 stands for in the estimation of the present 
 generation. The fact is that dough, like James 
 Spedding, was personally far more impressive 
 than his works ; and the singularly strong effect 
 produced among his friends by the extreme 
 simplicity and shy kindliness of his life and 
 manners, and the at once repellent and alluring 
 severity of his truthfulness, gave his character a 
 consequence beyond that of his writings with all 
 who knew him though ever so slightly ; and the 
 halo of this sanctity hangs, through the report of 
 his friends, about all that he has done, and renders 
 cold criticism of it almost impossible. No one 
 who knew Clough can so separate his personality 
 from his writings as to be able to criticise them 
 fairly as literature ; no one who has not known 
 him can understand their value as the outcome of 
 character. 
 
 The impressionable and feminine element, which 
 is manifest in all genius, but which in truly effective
 
 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 109 
 
 genius is always subordinate to power of intellect, 
 had in Clough's mind the preponderance. The 
 masculine power of intellect consists scarcely so 
 much in the ability to see truth, as in the tenacity 
 of spirit which cleaves to and assimilates the truth 
 when it is found, and which steadfastly refuses to 
 be blown about by every wind of doctrine and 
 feeling. The reiterated theme of Clough's poetry 
 is that the only way of forgetting certain problems 
 now, and of securing their solution hereafter, is to 
 do faithfully our nearest duty. This is no new 
 teaching : it is that of every religion and all 
 philosophy. But Clough had no power of trust- 
 ing patiently to the promise, " Do my command- 
 ments and you shall know of the doctrine." This 
 was the ruin of what might otherwise have been a 
 fine poetic faculty. A " Problem " will not sing 
 even in the process of solution, much less while it 
 is only a hopeless and irritating " Pons." 
 
 Clough was curiously attracted by Emerson, of 
 whom he spoke as the only great contemporary 
 American. Now Emerson, at his very best, never 
 approached greatness. He was at highest only 
 a brilliant metaphysical epigrammatist. But a 
 religion without a dogma, and with only one com- 
 mandment, " Thou shalt neither think nor do 
 anything that is customary," had great attractions 
 for Clough, to whom it never seems to have
 
 no ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 
 
 occurred that the vast mass of mankind, for whose 
 moral and religious welfare he felt so keenly, has 
 not and never can have a religion of speechless 
 aspirations and incommunicable feelings, and that 
 to teach men to despise custom is to cut the 
 immense majority of them adrift from all moral 
 restraint. The promise that we shall all be priests 
 and kings seems scarcely to be for this world. At 
 all events we are as far from its fulfilment now as 
 we were two thousand years ago ; and we shall 
 not be brought nearer to it by any such outpour- 
 ings of sarcastic discontent as go to the making 
 of poems like the tedious Mephistophelian drama 
 called " Dipsychus," which Clough had the good 
 sense not to publish, though it is included with 
 many others of equally doubtful value in post- 
 humous editions of his works. This class of his 
 poems possesses, indeed, a lively interest for a 
 great many people of our own time, who are in the 
 painful state of moral and religious ferment which 
 these verses represent ; but it is a mere accident 
 of the time that there is any considerable audience 
 for such utterances, and it is probable that in a 
 generation or two most men will feel surprise that 
 there could ever have been a public who found 
 poetry in this sort of matter. 
 
 The " Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich " is the only 
 considerable poem of dough's in which he seems,
 
 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH in 
 
 for a time, to have got out of his slough of intro- 
 spection and doubt and to have breathed the 
 healthy air of nature and common humanity. In 
 spite of many artistic shortcomings, this poem is 
 so healthy, human, and original, that it can scarcely 
 fail to survive when a good deal of far more 
 fashionable verse shall have disappeared from 
 men's memories. The one infallible note of a 
 true poet the power of expressing himself in 
 rhythmical movements of subtilty and sweetness 
 which baffle analysis is also distinctly manifest 
 in passages of the " Bothie," passages the music 
 of which was, we fancy, lingering in the ear of 
 Tennyson when he wrote certain parts of " Maud." 
 The originality of this idyll is beyond question. It 
 is not in the least like any other poem, and an 
 occasionally ostentatious touch of the manner of 
 " Herman and Dorothea " seems to render this 
 originality all the more conspicuous in the main. 
 Another note of poetical power, scarcely less 
 questionable than is that of sweetness and subtilty 
 of rhythm, is the warm and pure breath of woman- 
 hood which is exhaled from the love-passages of 
 this poem. Clough seems to have felt, in the 
 presence of a simple and amiable woman, a 
 mystery of life which acted for a time as the 
 rebuke and speechless solution of all doubts and 
 intellectual distresses. These passages in the
 
 Ii2 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 
 
 " Bothie," and, in a less degree, some others in 
 the " Amours de Voyage," stand, in the disturbed 
 course of Clough's ordinary verse, like the deep, 
 pure, and sky-reflecting pools which occasionally 
 appear in the course of a restless mountain river.
 
 XVI 
 EMERSON 
 
 THE life and writings of Emerson owe their chief 
 claim on our attention to the fact that they repre- 
 sent with singular force a line of thought and belief 
 if belief it can be called which an immense 
 number of the young, intelligent, and sincere of 
 the past and present generation have been en- 
 deavouring to follow, though as yet without any re- 
 markable or even satisfactory results. "Every man 
 is potentially a man of genius," is the one dogma 
 of Emerson's religion though it is nowhere put 
 thus plainly by him ; and its one commandment 
 is " Be a man of genius." Absolute nonconformity 
 with everything, we are taught, is the first condi- 
 tion of personal and social well-being ; and we are 
 enjoined to look upon our individual insight as 
 our one infallible guide, though it may bid us go 
 one way to-day and the opposite to-morrow. At 
 the time when Emerson was debating with him- 
 I
 
 Ii 4 EMERSON 
 
 self as to whether he should throw up his office 
 as Unitarian preacher, he seems to have had some 
 searchings of heart as to the validity of the new 
 doctrine. " How," he writes, in his Journal, " shall 
 the droning world get on if all its beaux esprits 
 recalcitrate upon its approved forms and accepted 
 constitutions and quit them in order to be single- 
 minded ? The double-refiners would produce at 
 the other end the double-damned." This is per- 
 haps the wisest thing ever said by Emerson ; but 
 he nevertheless chose his part definitively with the 
 "double-refiners." "I hate preaching," he writes 
 in a subsequent page of his Journal. " Preaching 
 is a pledge, and I wish to say what I feel and 
 think to-day, with the proviso that to-morrow per- 
 haps I shall contradict it all." In the free use of 
 his proviso he accordingly, for the remainder of 
 his life, followed and taught others to follow what 
 he called " intuition," even though it should not 
 wait for " to-morrow " to contradict itself. For 
 example, in the last page but one of the essay 
 on " Character " we are instructed to reject the 
 doctrine of the divinity of Christ because "the 
 mind requires a victory to the senses, a force of 
 character which will convert judge, jury, soldier, 
 and king ; " and on the following page we are told 
 that, "when that love which is all - suffering, all- 
 abstaining, all-aspiring . . . comes into our streets
 
 EMERSON 115 
 
 and houses, only the pure and aspiring can know 
 its face." 
 
 Emerson's life, journals, and letters considerably 
 modify the impression which his published essays 
 and lectures are calculated to leave namely, that 
 he was a mere stringer-together of lively thoughts, 
 images, and poetical epigrams. He seems to have 
 made the best of his own humanity, and to have 
 always done the right according to his judgment, 
 though the doing of it sometimes involved serious 
 pecuniary inconvenience, and, as in the case of his 
 opposition to the fugitive slave law, violent popular 
 disapprobation. He was kindly and moral in his 
 family and social relationships, and was conscien- 
 tious even to a fault in avoiding those venial sins 
 of language to which the most of us are perhaps 
 too indifferent. His American admirers some- 
 times spoke of him as an " angel." At any rate, 
 he was a sort of sylph. He noted of his com- 
 patriots generally that " they have no passions, 
 only appetites." He seems to have had neither 
 passion nor appetite ; and there was an utter 
 absence of " nonsense " about him which made it 
 almost impossible to be intimate with him. Mar- 
 garet Fuller, his closest friend, and even his wife, 
 whom he loved in his own serene way, seem to 
 have chafed under the impossibility of getting 
 within the adamantine sphere of self-consciousness
 
 ii6 EMERSON 
 
 which surrounded him. Not only could he not 
 forget himself, but he could not forget his grammar ; 
 and when he talked he seemed rather to be " com- 
 posing" his thoughts than thinking them. His 
 friend and admirer, Mr. Henry James the elder, 
 complains that for this reason his conversation 
 was without charm. " For nothing ever came but 
 epigrams, sometimes clever, sometimes not." His 
 manners and discourse were, however, invariably 
 kind and amiable. He never seems to have 
 uttered a personal sarcasm, and only once in his 
 life to have been seriously angry. This was on 
 occasion of the famous fugitive slave law, which 
 he indignantly declared would be disobeyed, if 
 need be, by himself and every honest man. 
 
 Dr. W. H. Furness writes of Emerson: "We 
 were babies and schoolfellows together. I don't 
 think he ever engaged in boys' plays. ... I can 
 as little remember when he was not literary in his 
 pursuits as when I first made his acquaintance." 
 Indeed, "orating" was in Emerson's blood. Nearly 
 all his known ancestors and relatives seem to have 
 been " ministers " of some denomination or other. 
 His school-days though he never became a 
 scholar in any department of learning began 
 before he was three years old. His father com- 
 plains of the baby of two years and odd months 
 " Ralph does not read very well yet " ; and during
 
 EMERSON 117 
 
 all the rest of his youth Dr. Furness says that he 
 grew up under " the pressure of I know not how 
 many literary atmospheres." Add to this the fact 
 that his father and mother and his aunt who 
 was the chief guide of his nonage were persons 
 who seemed to think that love could be manifested 
 only by severe duty, and rarely showed him any 
 signs of the weaknesses of "affection," and we 
 have as bad a bringing-up for a moral, philo- 
 sophical, and religious teacher as could well have 
 been devised. " The natural first, and afterwards 
 the spiritual." Where innocent joy and personal 
 affection have not been main factors of early 
 experience the whole life wants the key to Chris- 
 tianity ; and in such a case a rejection of all faith 
 except that in "genius," "over-soul," "a some- 
 what which makes for righteousness," or some 
 other such impotent abstraction is, in our day, 
 almost inevitable in amind of constitutional sincerity 
 like Emerson's, especially when such sincerity is 
 unaccompanied, as it was in him, by a warm and 
 passionate nature and its intellectual correlative, a 
 vigorous conscience. Emerson, though a good 
 man that is, one who lived up to his lights 
 had little or no conscience. He admired good, 
 but did not love it ; he denounced evil, but did not 
 hate it, and did not even maintain that it was hate- 
 ful, but only held that it was greatly inexpedient.
 
 ii8 EMERSON 
 
 Though Emerson could not see that a religion 
 of which there is nothing left but an " over-soul " 
 is much the same thing as a man of whom there 
 is nothing left but his hat, the religious bodies to 
 which he was for many years more or less attached 
 were less devoid of humour, and the joke of a faith 
 without a dogma became, in time, too much for 
 their seriousness. Consequently they agreed ami- 
 cably to part, and Emerson pursued his course ; 
 that which had hitherto been called " preaching " 
 becoming thenceforward lecturing and " orating." 
 
 There can be no greater misfortune for a sincere 
 and truthful mind like Emerson's than to have to 
 get a living by "orating." This was his position, 
 however ; and there can be no doubt that his 
 mind and his writings were the worse for this 
 necessity. His philosophy afforded him only a 
 very narrow range of subject. In all his essays 
 and lectures he is but ringing the changes upon 
 three or four ideas which are really common- 
 place, though his sprightly wit and imagination 
 give them freshness ; and it is impossible to read 
 any single essay, much more several in succession, 
 without feeling that the licence of tautology is used 
 to its extremest limits. In a few essays for 
 example, "The Poet," "Character," and "Love" 
 the writer's heart is so much in the matter that these 
 endless variations of one idea have the effect of
 
 EMERSON 119 
 
 music which delights us to the end with the reitera- 
 tion of an exceedingly simple theme ; but in many 
 other pieces it is impossible not to detect that 
 weariness of the task of having to coin dollars out 
 of transcendental sentiments to which Emerson's 
 letters and journals often bear witness. But, 
 whether he were delighted with or weary of his 
 labour, there is no progress in his thought, which 
 resembles the spinning of a cockchafer on a pin 
 rather than the flight of a bird on its way from one 
 continent to another. 
 
 Emerson's was a sweet and uniformly sunny 
 spirit ; but the sunshine was that of the long Polar 
 day, which enlightens but does not fructify. It 
 never even melted the icy barrier which separated 
 his soul from others ; and men and women were 
 nothing to him, because he never got near enough 
 to understand them. Hence his journals and 
 ietters about his visits to Europe, and especially 
 to England, are curiously superficial in observa- 
 tion. He made many acute and witty remarks, 
 such as, " Every Englishman is a House of Com- 
 mons, and expects that you will not end your 
 speech without proposing a measure ; " but, on 
 the whole, he quite misunderstood the better class 
 of our countrymen, of whom, in his second visit to 
 England, he had the opportunity of seeing a good 
 deal. Although there was much constitutional
 
 120 EMERSON 
 
 reserve, there was no real reticence in him. His 
 ethereal, unimpassioned ideas had, indeed, nothing 
 in them that, for him, commanded reticence ; and 
 he concluded that the best sort of Englishmen 
 were without any motives that " transcend " sense, 
 because he did not feel, as all such Englishmen 
 do, that though that which transcends sense may 
 be infinitely dearer than all else, and even because 
 it is so dear, it is better not to talk of things which 
 can scarcely be spoken of without inadequacy and 
 even an approach to nonsense. Many an English- 
 man would turn aside with a jest from any attempt 
 to lead him into "transcendental" talk, not because 
 he was less, but because he was more, " serious " 
 than his interlocutor ; and also because the very 
 recognition of certain kinds of knowledge involves 
 the recognition of obligations, to confess directly 
 or indirectly the fulfilment or neglect whereof 
 implies either self-praise or self-blame, which, in 
 ordinary circumstances, are alike indecent. In 
 fact, Emerson was totally deficient in the religious 
 sense, which is very strong in the hearts of a vast 
 number of Englishmen, who own to no fixed creed 
 but who would be revolted by the profound and 
 unconscious irreverence with which Emerson was 
 in the habit of speaking and writing of the most 
 sacred things and names. The name of " Jesus " 
 frequently occurs in such sentences as this : " Nor
 
 EMERSON 121 
 
 Jesus, nor Pericles, nor Caesar, nor Angelo, nor 
 Washington," etc. 
 
 If we put aside Emerson's unconscious malprac- 
 tices in this sort, the attitude of his mind with 
 regard to the serious beliefs of the world were too 
 childish for resentment or exposure. It is as if 
 one should be angry with the young lady who should 
 simper, " Oh, my religion is the religion of the 
 Sermon on the Mount ! " in answer to an attempt 
 to talk with her about Bossuet or Hooker.
 
 XVII 
 CRABBE AND SHELLEY 
 
 THE firmament of fame is full of variable stars, and 
 they are nowhere thicker than in that great con- 
 stellation of poets which marks the end of the last 
 and the commencement of this century. Among 
 the names of Byron, Moore, Rogers, Southey, 
 Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Burns, 
 Campbell, Crabbe, Cowper, and Scott, there are 
 only two whose lustre has remained perfectly 
 steady and seems likely to remain so. Two or 
 three, blazing forth at once as luminaries of the 
 first magnitude, have gradually and persistently 
 waned whether or not ever to recover any 
 part of their lost splendour is very doubtful. 
 The light of one or two others has fluctuated 
 violently, and continues to do so, with a manifest 
 diminution, however, in their total sum of light; one 
 or two others have suffered a distinct degradation 
 from first into second or third class lustres, and at
 
 CRABBE AND SHELLEY 123 
 
 present show no sign of further alteration. Two at 
 least have grown astonishingly in conspicuousness, 
 and now glow like the Dog-star and Aldebai'an 
 though there are not wanting sky-critics who declare 
 that they discern conditions of coming change and 
 retrogression ; and one at least has almost dis- 
 appeared from the heaven of public recognition, 
 not, however, without prognostications from some 
 of an assured reassertion of a moderate if not pre- 
 dominating position. 
 
 To quit figures of speech, Coleridge and Burns 
 though poets of very different calibre are the only 
 two of the thirteen above mentioned whose reputa- 
 tions have been altogether unaffected by the violent 
 changes of literary fashion which have taken place 
 in the course of the century. Each of these two 
 poets has written a good deal which the world will 
 willingly let die ; but Coleridge in his great way, 
 and Burns in his comparatively small way, have 
 done a certain moderate amount of work so 
 thoroughly and manifestly well that no sane critic 
 has ever called it into question or ever will. By 
 the leaders of poetic fashion Moore and Rogers 
 have come to be accounted as almost nowhere as 
 poets. Southey and Cowper now depend mainly 
 for their fame upon a few small pieces, which in 
 their own day were not regarded as of much account 
 in comparison with such works as The Task and
 
 124 CRABBE AND SHELLEY 
 
 The Curse of Kehama; Campbell now lives only, 
 but vigorously, in a few lyrics. Who but Mr. 
 Ruskin is there that would not laugh now to hear 
 the name of Scott coupled with those of Keats and 
 Shelley ? Byron, who once outblazed all others, is 
 now considered, by many judges not altogether to 
 be disregarded, less as a great fixed star than as a 
 meteor formed from earthly fumes condensed and 
 for a time incandescent in the upper air. Words- 
 worth's fame, though all agree that it is assured, 
 has suffered and is likely still to suffer some fluc- 
 tuations ; and, when poetry is talked about in circles 
 of modern experts, no one ever hears of Crabbe, 
 though here and there one comes upon some literary 
 oddity who maintains that he has as good a claim 
 as Shelley to a place in the heavens of abiding fame. 
 As this, to most modern ears astounding, paradox 
 is certainly maintained, in private at least, by 
 several persons whose opinion the most advanced 
 critic would not think of despising, it may be worth 
 while to see what can be said for it. 
 
 Things, it is said, are best known by comparison 
 with their opposites ; and, if so, surely Crabbe 
 must be best illustrated by Shelley and Shelley by 
 Crabbe. Shelley was an atheist and profoundly 
 immoral ; but his irreligion was radiant with pious 
 imagination, and his immorality delicately and 
 strictly conscientious. Crabbe was a most sincere
 
 CRABBE AND SHELLEY 125 
 
 Christian in faith and life ; but his religion and 
 morality were intolerant, narrow, and scrupulous, 
 and sadly wanting in all the modern graces. 
 Shelley had no natural feeling or affection and the 
 greatest sensitiveness ; Crabbe had the tenderest 
 and strongest affections, but his nerves and aesthetic 
 constitution were of the coarsest. Shelley's taste 
 often stood him in the stead of morality. He 
 would have starved rather than write begging letters 
 to Thurlow, Burke, and other magnates, as Crabbe 
 did when he wanted to better his condition as an 
 apothecary's apprentice. Crabbe's integrity pro- 
 duced some of the best effects of taste, and made 
 him at once an equal in manners with the dukes 
 and statesmen with whom he associated as soon 
 as he had been taken from his beggary by Burke. 
 Through years and years of poverty and almost 
 hopeless trial Crabbe was a devoted and faithful 
 lover, and afterwards as devoted and faithful a 
 husband to his " Myra," whom he adored in verses 
 that justified some one's description of his style as 
 " Pope in worsted stockings. " Shelley breathes 
 eternal vows in music of the spheres, to woman 
 after woman, whom he will abandon and speak or 
 write of with hatred and contempt as soon as their 
 persons have ceased to please him. Crabbe knew 
 nothing of the " ideal," but loved all actualities, 
 especially unpleasant ones, upon which he would
 
 126 CRABBE AND SHELLEY 
 
 turn the electric light of his peculiar powers of 
 perception till the sludge and dead dogs of a tidal 
 river shone. Jeffrey described the true position of 
 Crabbe among poets better than any one else has 
 done when he wrote, " He has represented his 
 villagers and humble burghers as altogether as 
 dissipated and more dishonest and discontented 
 than the profligates of higher life. . . . He may 
 be considered as the satirist of low life an occu- 
 pation sufficiently arduous, and in a great degree 
 new and original in our language." In this his 
 proper vocation Crabbe is so far from being a 
 " Pope in worsted stockings," that his lines ofter 
 resemble the strokes of Dryden's sledge-hamme? 
 rather than the stings of his successor's cane. But, 
 when uninspired by the intensely disagreeable or 
 vicious, Crabbe's " diction " is to modern ears, for 
 the most part, intolerable. In his cooler moments 
 he poured forth thousands of such couplets as 
 
 It seems to us that our Reformers knew 
 Th' important work they undertook to do. 
 
 And to such vile newspaper prose he not only 
 added the ghastly adornment of verse, but also 
 frequently enlivened it with the " poetic licences " 
 and Parnassian " lingo " of the Pope period. 
 What a contrast with Shelley ! He erred quite as 
 much as Crabbe did from the imaginative reality
 
 CRABBE AND SHELLEY 127 
 
 which is the true ideal ; but it was all in the 
 opposite way. If Crabbe's eye, in its love for the 
 actual and concrete, dwelt too habitually upon the 
 hardness and ugliness of the earth on which he 
 trod, Shelley's thoughts and perceptions were for 
 the most part 
 
 Pinnacled dim in the intense inane 
 
 of a fancy which had no foundation in earth or 
 heaven. His poetry has, however, the immortal 
 reality of music ; and his songs are songs, though 
 they may be often called " songs without words," 
 the words meaning so little though they sound so 
 sweet. 
 
 This " parallel " as lines starting and continued 
 in opposite directions have got to be called might 
 be carried much further with advantage to the 
 student of poetry ; and the comparison might be 
 still more profitable if the best poems of Coleridge 
 were examined as illustrations of the true poetic 
 reality from which Crabbe and Shelley diverge 
 equally, but in contrary ways. Crabbe mistakes 
 actuality for reality ; Shelley's imagination is 
 unreal. Coleridge, when he is himself, whether 
 he is in the region of actuality, as in " Genevieve," 
 or in that of imagination, as in " Christabel," is 
 always both real and ideal in the only true poetic 
 sense, in which reality and ideality are truly one.
 
 128 CRABBE AND SHELLEY 
 
 In each of these poems, as in every work of true 
 art, there is a living idea which expresses itself in 
 every part, while the complete work remains its 
 briefest possible expression, so that it is as absurd 
 to ask What is its idea? as it would be to ask 
 what is the idea of a man or of an oak. This idea 
 cannot be a simple negation ; and simple evil 
 which is so often Crabbe's theme is simple nega- 
 tion. On the other hand, good, in order to be the 
 ground of the ideal in art, must be intelligible 
 that is to say, imaginatively credible, though it may 
 want the conditions of present actuality. But is 
 there any such ideal as this in Shelley ?
 
 XVIII 
 
 A MODERN CLASSIC, WILLIAM 
 BARNES 
 
 A CLASSICAL work may be roughly defined as a 
 work of a past generation about which every man 
 of liberal education may be expected to know 
 something. To satisfy this description it is not 
 at all necessary that the work should be of 
 intrinsically classical merit. A speech, a sermon, 
 or a pamphlet, has sometimes attained a classical 
 position by the mere accident of its having been 
 the origin or turning-point of a political or religious 
 movement. Some writers of very ordinary quality 
 refuse to be forgotten because the current of con- 
 temporary fashion set so strongly in their favour 
 as to become a fact of literary history. Others 
 have become classics by force of quantity rather 
 than of quality ; and the right of these to their 
 position is sometimes better than that of either of 
 the above-named sorts, because quantity is a real 
 K
 
 I 3 o A MODERN CLASSIC 
 
 element of merit, when the quality is good though 
 it may not be excellent, as a large mass of aqua- 
 marine may be of more real value than a very 
 small emerald. Several writers, the main portion 
 of whose writings is of poor account, have become 
 immortal by one work among many, or by a 
 fragment of some work ; some by a single song. 
 Those writers who have left nothing but work of 
 classical quality may almost be counted upon the 
 fingers, a good part of the writings of some of the 
 very greatest authors claiming not to be forgotten 
 only for their authors' sake. Without affirming, 
 with Lord Bacon, that the stream of time bears 
 up light and worthless things, and submerges the 
 weightiest a sentence in which it is difficult to 
 discover the writer's proverbial wisdom there can 
 be little doubt that it has submerged some things 
 of truly classical pretensions, even since the inven- 
 tion of printing provided an immensely increased 
 security against the literal extinction of a book 
 before there has been time to decide upon its 
 merits. In times past, however, though readers 
 were far fewer in number, they seem to have been 
 so much higher in average quality than the readers 
 of our own day, that scarcely any works of real 
 power escaped a sufficient amount of contemporary 
 recognition to insure them some hearing during 
 that space of time which is ordinarily required for
 
 WILLIAM BARNES 131 
 
 testing a work's fitness for fame. Time has not 
 utterly submerged nearly so much writing of the 
 first quality by its mere lapse as has been dragged 
 to the bottom by too vast a weight of circumjacent 
 worthlessness. Fifty good lines will sometimes 
 float five thousand bad or medium ones, yet they 
 may be sunk by twenty or fifty thousand such. 
 Suckling's will survive a hundred more recent fames 
 upon the strength of his poem, On a Wedding; but 
 Drayton, whose minor poems contain passages 
 not less exquisite, is fading in the dark shadow 
 cast by his " greater " works. Another fact worth 
 noting is that time, while it steadily sustains the 
 fame of certain writers, detaches it from their best 
 productions. The comparatively unknown " minor 
 poems " of Spenser, for example are, quantity for 
 quantity, of higher significance than the Faery 
 Queen, as Milton well discerned, for he has 
 borrowed little or nothing from the latter, but 
 has abundantly appropriated the beauties of the 
 former, to which he is even indebted for what 
 many readers believe to be some of his own most 
 exquisite and characteristic rhythms, especially 
 those of Lycidas. 
 
 Again, a fame sufficiently enduring to be justly 
 called such, is sometimes subject to severe fluctua- 
 tions. Pope and Byron are examples. These 
 writers have had their claims to be ranked as
 
 132 A MODERN CLASSIC 
 
 great poets supported and attacked with party 
 violence, one side refusing to recognise them as 
 really poets at all, the other, partly provoked by 
 such injustice, claiming for them the highest peak 
 of Parnassus. This conflict, which is still raging, 
 and will probably do so for a long time, might be 
 greatly pacified by reasonable compromise, founded 
 on the truth above asserted that the real value 
 of a large aquamarine may be more than that of 
 a small emerald. Except in one famous passage 
 in the Dunciad, Pope, much of whose writing is 
 faultless in manner, never rose to perfect greatness 
 of style, to such style as entitles a man to fame, 
 and secures it for him, though he may have 
 written no more than fifty lines at such a pitch. 
 Byron never sustained himself even for twenty 
 verses in such a region. Yet it seems absurd to 
 say that, on the whole, Herrick or George Herbert, 
 for example, have a better title to a classical 
 position than Byron or Pope, though the best 
 writing of the two former is as much more 
 exquisite in quality than that of the two latter, 
 except in the single passage above named, as 
 the beauty of a violet or a peach -blossom is 
 than that of a peony or a dahlia. The light 
 of the smallest fixed star is more intense than 
 that of the most lustrous planet ; but in the 
 sky of fame Jupiter and Venus will always make
 
 WILLIAM BARNES 133 
 
 a more conspicuous figure than any two of the 
 Pleiades. 
 
 Without venturing upon such confident flights 
 of criticism as those of Mr. Frederic Harrison, 
 who dismisses most of Shakespeare's writing 
 as rubbish, it may be safely said that the in- 
 equality of many writers of the highest classical 
 position and genius is one of the most extra- 
 ordinary of the phenomena of mind. The 
 greatest writers, when the spirit forsakes them, 
 often write not only as badly as but worse 
 than commonly sensible people. Milton's Speech 
 on the Liberty of unlicensed Printing contrasts 
 strangely with the truculent, vituperative, and un- 
 reasoning mass of his other prose writings. In 
 some half a dozen short poems, Coleridge's 
 fountain of inspiration rises, pure and dazzling, 
 to a height no other poet of the present century 
 has attained, while the rest of his verse is a marsh 
 of comparative dulness. Cowley's cold conglo- 
 merate of grit is only rarely fused by the poet's 
 fire, but it was no common fire that could, even 
 occasionally, fuse and be fed by such material ; 
 and, as long as there are any readers who do not 
 seek the Muses only for a-musement, the question, 
 too hastily asked a hundred years ago, "Who now 
 reads Cowley ? " will not be answered as the 
 querist expected it to be.
 
 134 A MODERN CLASSIC 
 
 At this time of day, and with the example of 
 the French " Classics " before us, it need not be 
 urged that sustained finish is not the first claim to 
 classical rank ; yet sustained finish, in passages at 
 least, is one of the invariable notes of such claim ; 
 for absolute and unlaboured finish is the natural 
 accompaniment of those full floods of poetic 
 passion which come upon all true poets, at least 
 in moments. In such happy flood-tides the best 
 words will take their best order in the best metres 
 without any sensible effort ; but in most poets 
 these outpourings are rare indeed, though a con- 
 scientious worker will sometimes conceal their 
 rarity by spending so much time and labour upon 
 the comparatively uninspired context of passages 
 inspired that his whole work will be upon the same 
 level of verbal beauty, and the delighted peruser 
 will find nothing to remind him that easy reading's 
 
 sometimes d d hard writing. There have 
 
 been few poets who have worked with such con- 
 scientiousness, and the reward of such work is far 
 off, for " the crowd, incapable of perfectness," are 
 more moved to admiration by the alternation and 
 contrast of good with bad than by that of different 
 kinds of excellence. This disqualification for 
 immediate recognition is equally shared by 
 another and still rarer order of poet he who is 
 the ideal " classic," he in whose every verse poetic
 
 WILLIAM BARNES 135 
 
 feeling breathes in words of unlaboured perfec- 
 tion. 
 
 I should hesitate to declare my belief that 
 William Barnes, the " Dorset Poet," belongs to 
 this rare order did I not know that my belief is 
 shared by judges of authority better established 
 than mine, one of whom a well-known and grave 
 and cautious speaker and writer went so far as 
 to say in my hearing, " There has been no such 
 art since Horace." This saying, of course, implies 
 no sort of comparison of the poetry of Barnes with 
 that of Horace. It simply means that, in both 
 alike, thoughts and feelings are expressed and 
 incidents related and represented with the most 
 dainty perfection ; neither does it imply that 
 Barnes is nearly so great a poet as many another 
 whose average display of art has been incompar- 
 ably less. Burns, for example, who, like Barnes, is 
 a poet of the first water but not of the first magni- 
 tude, is perhaps better at his best than the Dorset 
 poet, though greatly inferior to him in evenness of 
 quality ; and permanent fame is right in her usual 
 practice of judging a poet by his best, even when 
 there is not much of it, and in rarely admitting 
 quantity as a main factor of her calculation. That 
 which is of the greatest value in every true artist is 
 his style, and that may be conveyed almost as 
 effectively in fifty pages as in five hundred.
 
 136 A MODERN CLASSIC 
 
 The absolute pre-eminence of style above all 
 other artistic qualities seems not to have been 
 sufficiently perceived or at least insisted upon by 
 critics, and a few words on that subject are there- 
 fore proper in a notice of a writer whose individu- 
 ality, though it may not be so forcible, is more 
 clearly and delicately pronounced than it is in any 
 other poet of our day. That the proper study of 
 mankind is man, expresses a truth which Pope had 
 scarcely tenderness and subtlety enough of intellect 
 to feel in its fulness. Some one has better 
 expressed the same thought in the words, " Every 
 soul is a celestial Venus to every other soul." As 
 the human face, the image of the soul, is incom- 
 parably the most beautiful object that can be seen 
 by the eyes, the soul itself is the supreme interest 
 and attraction of the intellectual vision ; and the 
 variety of this interest and attraction is limited only 
 by the number of those who, in action, manners, 
 or art, are endowed with the faculty of expressing 
 themselves and their inherent distinction, which, 
 could it be fully displayed, would be found to be 
 absolutely unique in each person. In that shadow 
 of the soul, the face, some glimpse of this funda- 
 mental uniqueness is always apparent, no vice or 
 power of custom being enough altogether to quench 
 it. In manners, though singularity is common 
 enough, it is very rarely the clear and expressive
 
 WILLIAM BARNES 137 
 
 outcome of the individual life. When it is so it 
 constitutes " distinction," as it is well called. In 
 art, in which singularity is also common, this 
 living uniqueness is exceedingly rare indeed, and 
 it is what is, rightly again, called "genius," that 
 is, the manifestation of the inward man himself. 
 It has been said that he alone who has no style 
 has true style. It would be better to say that he 
 who has no manner has the first condition of style. 
 As theologians affirm that all a man can of himself 
 do towards obtaining positive sanctity is a negative 
 avoidance of the hindrances of sin, so style, the 
 sanctity of art, can only appear in the artist whose 
 ways are purged, in the hour at least of effective 
 production, from all mannerism, eccentricities, and 
 selfish obfuscation by the external life. These 
 evils are so strong and the individuality of nearly 
 all men so weak, that there is about as much 
 chance of any particular child turning out to be 
 capable of style in art as there is of his being able 
 to fight the battles of Napoleon or to lead the life 
 of St. Francis. There have been whole nations 
 of which the American is most notable which 
 have never attained to the production of a single 
 work of art marked by true style. 
 
 Now a man's true character or individuality 
 lies, not in his intellect but in his love, not in what he 
 thinks, but in what he is. The " light that lighteth
 
 138 A MODERN CLASSIC 
 
 every man " is, in every man, the same in kind, 
 though not in degree ; he is essentially differen- 
 tiated from other men by his love. Old writers 
 bore this in mind when they used the words 
 " spirit " and " genius " ; what they called spirit 
 we now call wit or talent. " L'esprit est le Dieu 
 des instans, le ge*nie est le Dieu des ages," says 
 Fr. Lebrun. So far are these from being the same 
 that a man may, like Herrick or Blake, be little 
 better than a blank in intellect, yet be full of 
 the dainty perfume of his peculiar love, whilst a 
 colossus of wit and understanding may be as empty 
 as a tulip of the odour of that sanctity ; for a sort 
 of sanctity it really is, always containing as it does 
 some manifest relic of that infantine innocence 
 which nearly all men have trodden under foot, or 
 laughed to death, or otherwise lost touch of, before 
 they were out of their teens. This peculiar faculty, 
 or rather virtue, which alone confers true style 
 upon the poet, is as often as not, nay, more often 
 than not, the grace of those whom even ordinarily 
 clever men look down upon, and justly from their 
 point of view, as " little ones." Little ones they 
 mostly are, but their angels behold the face of 
 their Father, and the words of the least of them is 
 a song of individual love which was never heard 
 before and never will be heard again. 
 
 To this primary claim to an abiding place among
 
 WILLIAM BARNES 139 
 
 such minor classics as Herbert, Suckling, Herrick, 
 Burns, and Blake, William Barnes adds that of a 
 sustained perfection of art with which none of them 
 can compare. His language has the continual 
 slight novelty which Aristotle inculcates as proper to 
 true poetic expression, and something much higher 
 than the curiosa felicitas, which has been absurdly 
 rendered " curious felicity," but which means the 
 " careful luck " of him who tries many words, and 
 has the wit to know when memory, or the neces- 
 sity of metre or rhyme, has supplied him unex- 
 pectedly with those which are perhaps even better 
 than he knew how to desire. The words of Barnes 
 are not the carefully made clothes, but the body 
 of his thoughts and feelings. Another still rarer 
 praise of his work is that he never stops in it till 
 he has said all that should be said, and never 
 exceeds that measure by a syllable ; and about 
 this art there is not the slightest apparent con- 
 sciousness either of its abundant fulness or its 
 delicate reticence. He seems, in fact, never to 
 have written except under the sense of a subject 
 that makes its own form, and of feelings which 
 form their own words that is to say, he is always 
 classic both in form and substance. 
 
 Perfect, however, as are the Poems in the Dorset 
 Dialect, it would be absurd to call Barnes a poet 
 of the first magnitude or even the second. Every
 
 140 A MODERN CLASSIC 
 
 one of the minor classics I have named surpasses 
 him in some point of wit, sweetness, subtlety, or 
 force, as he surpasses them in the lovely innocence 
 which breathes from his songs of nature and 
 natural affection. He has written no one poem 
 that time is likely to stamp as of value at all 
 equivalent, for instance, to Genevieve or the Ode 
 on a Grecian Urn; and such a lyric as Spenser's 
 Epithalamiori) compared with the best song of 
 Barnes, is as Hera to a wood-nymph. 
 
 Barnes's reputation has the great advantage 
 since he could bear the delay of fame without dis- 
 couragement of not having been forced. Poor, 
 contented, unambitious, without anything remark- 
 able in his person or conversation or romantic 
 in his circumstances, hidden all his lifetime in a 
 sequestered country parsonage, and having no 
 means, direct or indirect, of affecting the personal 
 hopes or fears of his literary contemporaries, he 
 has been left alone in his humble glory, which was 
 to recite to delighted audiences of farmers and 
 ploughmen and their wives and sweethearts a series 
 of lyrics, idylls, and eclogues, which, being the 
 faultless expression of elementary feelings and per- 
 ceptions, are good for all but those in whom such 
 feelings and perceptions are extinct. 
 
 The very best of Barnes's poems are almost as 
 bare of " ornament " and as dependent for effect
 
 WILLIAM BARNES HI 
 
 on their perfection, as a whole, as a tragedy of 
 yEschylus. There is not the slightest touch of 
 " poetry " in the language itself of the rustics who 
 are the dramatis persona of the eclogues, yet 
 poetry has not much to show which is more ex- 
 quisite in its way than these unconscious and art- 
 less confabulations of carters and milkmaids as 
 reflected in the consciousness and arranged by the 
 art of the poet. 
 
 I will conclude my statement of the claim of 
 Barnes to be regarded as an English classic by a 
 few words on the likelihood, as it seems to me, of 
 his being one of the last of his sort. Everything 
 in the present state and apparent prospects of 
 civilisation is discouraging to the production of 
 classical work. Boys and girls may lisp in 
 numbers because the numbers come, but no true 
 artist in words can do his arduous though joyful 
 work except in the assured hope of having, sooner 
 or later, an audience ; and as time goes on this 
 must seem to him a less and less likely reward and 
 complement of his labour. Barnes's best poems 
 have been before the public for more than forty 
 years ; yet what proportion of those who will read 
 this notice have ever held a volume of them in their 
 hands ? A hundred or two hundred years ago his 
 general acknowledgment by educated readers 
 would have been immediate. The Religio Medici
 
 142 . A MODERN CLASSIC 
 
 was reprinted eight times in England and trans- 
 lated into most languages of Europe during the 
 lifetime of Sir Thomas Browne, its literary excel- 
 lence constituting its only attraction, for all "parties" 
 were offended by it. The reading public of England 
 was then less than one-tenth of its present number, 
 making a sale of eight editions thus equivalent to 
 one of eighty editions now. The book having been 
 recognised at the time for what it is, a true classic, 
 has continued to form part of the course of reading 
 expected in cultivated persons. But had it been 
 published in our own day, would it have sold 
 eighty copies ? We read of $, 20, or even 60 
 in old times having been given by booksellers to 
 persons of wholly untried fame for the copyrights 
 of works which time has nevertheless stamped 
 as great classics. It seems scarcely credible, but 
 there can be no reasonable doubt of it. Is it 
 that the present indifference and even repugnance 
 to new excellence of the highest order is accounted 
 for by our having more of the old than we know 
 what to do with ? Scarcely ; for a man of forty, 
 without being at all a man of unlimited leisure, 
 may very well have perused all that remains of the 
 world's literature that is above or up to the mark 
 of Sir Thomas Browne or William Barnes. The 
 few shelves which would hold all the true classics 
 extant might receive as many more of the like as
 
 WILLIAM BARNES 143 
 
 there is any chance that the next two or three 
 centuries will produce, without burthening the 
 select and leisurely scholar with a sense of how 
 much he had to read. Is it not rather that the 
 power to appreciate either the matter or form of 
 genuine art in writing is dying out, even among 
 those who by their education ought to be the zeal- 
 ous upholders and guardians of a high and pure 
 standard ? Lawlessness, self-assertion, oddity in- 
 stead of individuality, and inorganic polish where 
 there should be the breathing completeness of art, 
 are no longer the delight only of the " groundlings." 
 They are also the lure of leaders of literary fashion, 
 of those whose approval used to be the almost 
 certain forerunner of fame, and that foretaste of it 
 without which the soul of man of genius sickens 
 within him and refuses to exercise its functions. 
 There appears to be little hope that this is only a 
 transitory declension. It is not a reaction but a 
 decay ; and the recuperative force, if there be any 
 in the future, shows no signal of its approach. 
 The peace and joy which are the harvest of a quiet 
 mind, and the conditions when they are not the 
 inspirations, as they were in Barnes of true art 
 no longer exist. In America, where it has been 
 well said there is everywhere comfort but no joy, 
 and where popularity, as a clever American lady 
 assured me, lasts a year, and fame ten, we prob-
 
 144 A MODERN CLASSIC 
 
 ably have the mirror of our own very near future ; 
 and the decline from this present easy-going state 
 of things to the commencement of a series of dark 
 ages, of which no one shall be able to discern the 
 limit, may perhaps be more rapid than most of us 
 imagine. Unpalatable and unacceptable as the 
 suggestion may be, it cannot be denied by persons 
 who are able and willing to look facts in the face 
 that there are already strong indications of a 
 relapse into a long-protracted period of social and 
 political disorganisation, so complete that there 
 shall be no means of leisure or even living for a 
 learned class, nor any audience for what it has to 
 impart. Such recrudescences of civilisation have 
 occurred, and they may occur again, though the 
 prospect may be as incredible to most Europeans 
 at the present moment as it must have been to the 
 lieges of the Eternal City at the height and sudden 
 turning-point of its popular glory and seemingly 
 consolidated order. By Americans the idea would 
 of course be scouted. But American culture and 
 civilisation are identical with those of Europe, only 
 they are in many respects the worse and in very 
 few the better for transplantation. Religion, though 
 widespread, is of a vulgarer and less efficient type 
 than among us ; art is absolutely non-existent ; and 
 the vanity which so loudly claims the paternity of 
 the future is the very worst of prognostics for the
 
 WILLIAM BARNES 145 
 
 fulfilment of that expectation. America is begin- 
 ning where others have ended, in a widely spread 
 and widely indulged desire for riches and luxury. 
 It is said that the disappearance of some of the 
 finest and most carefully cultivated sorts of fruit 
 trees is owing to the fact that the grafts, from 
 which alone they can be reproduced, will live and 
 give other grafts only during the natural lifetime 
 of the original tree. History seems to indicate 
 that a similar law applies to the grafts of culture 
 and civilisation, and that they cannot long survive 
 the failure of the sap in the old trunk.
 
 XIX 
 MRS. MEYNELL 
 
 AT rare intervals the world is startled by the 
 phenomenon of a woman whose qualities of mind 
 and heart seem to demand a revision of its con- 
 ception of womanhood and an enlargement of those 
 limitations which it delights in regarding as essen- 
 tials of her very nature, and as necessary to her 
 beauty and attractiveness as woman. She belongs 
 to a species quite distinct from that of the typical 
 sweet companion of man's life, the woman who is 
 so sweet and so companionable, even because, as 
 Thomas Aquinas affirms, " she is scarcely a 
 reasonable creature." A Lady Jane Grey, a Mrs. 
 Hutchinson, a Rachel Lady Russell, or a Madame 
 de Hautefort is, however, not less but more 
 womanly for owing her exceptional character to 
 the possession of qualities which are usually the 
 prerogative of the ideal man ; a fact which corro- 
 borates a theory, not unknown to philosophy and
 
 MRS. MEYNELL H7 
 
 theology, that sex in the soul lies in aspect rather 
 than in substance. " Spirits, at will," says Milton, 
 " can either sex assume, or both" ; and women of 
 the grander type, who prefer their womanhood to 
 the assertion of their right to a masculine attitude 
 towards the world, have always had the world in 
 worship at the feet of their greater and sweeter 
 femininity. 
 
 " Originally, " says Plato, " there were three 
 sexes." The Church teaches the same thing. 
 God is the great prototype and source of sex : the 
 Father being the original masculine intellect, the 
 Word its feminine reflection, consciousness, or 
 ' glory," while the Holy Spirit is defined to be 
 " the embrace," or synthesis, " of the Father and 
 the Word," the Creator Spiritus, that aspect 
 (Persona) of God (who is " one in substance ") 
 which is the immediate source of all life, love, joy, 
 and power. In man, the express image of God, 
 genius is that divine third, quickening, and creative 
 sex, which contains and is the two others, and 
 which is so rare, owing to the loss of balance in 
 man's nature, that Plato speaks of it as no longer 
 existing. 
 
 In the realms of art and letters genius is, in its 
 initial stage, perceptive reason, the rare power ot 
 seeing self-evident things ; and its modes of ex- 
 pression correspond with its character. A strong
 
 148 MRS. MEYNELL 
 
 and predominatingly masculine mind has often 
 much to say, but a very imperfect ability to say it ; 
 the predominatingly '^feminine mind can say any- 
 thing, but has nothing to say ; but with the double- 
 sexed insight of genius, realities and expressions 
 are wedded from their first conception, and, even 
 in their least imposing developments, are living 
 powers, and of more practical importance than the 
 results of the highest efforts of mind when either 
 of its factors greatly predominates over the other. 
 I am about to direct the reader's attention 
 to one of the very rarest products of nature and 
 grace a woman of genius, one who, I am bound 
 to confess, has falsified the assertion which I 
 made some time ago, that no female writer of our 
 time had attained to true " distinction." In the 
 year 1875, Miss Alice Thompson (now Mrs. 
 Meynell), the sister of Miss Thompson (Lady 
 Butler), the painter of the famous " Roll Call," 
 published a volume of poems, which were as near 
 to being poetry as any woman of our time, with 
 the exception of Miss Christina Rossetti, has 
 succeeded in writing. But though this volume, in 
 the opinion of some critics Ruskin, D. G. Ros- 
 setti, Aubrey de Vere, and myself among others 
 far surpassed the work of far more famous " poet- 
 esses," it was not poetry in the sense which causes 
 all real poets, however subordinate in their kind, to
 
 MRS. MEYNELL 149 
 
 rank as immortals. There is sufficient intellect 
 and imagination in Mrs. Meynell's Poems to have 
 supplied a hundred of that splendid insect, Herrick; 
 enough passion and pure human affection for a 
 dozen poets like Crashaw or William Barnes ; they 
 breathe, in every line, the purest spirit of woman- 
 hood, yet they have not sufficient force of that 
 ultimate womanhood, the expressional body, to give 
 her the right to be counted among classical poets. 
 No woman ever has been such a poet : probably 
 no woman ever will be, for (strange paradox !) 
 though, like my present subject, she may have 
 enough and to spare of the virile intellect, and be 
 also exquisitely womanly, she has not womanhood 
 enough. 
 
 The feminine factor in the mind of the great 
 poet is, indeed, a greater thing than woman it is 
 goddess. Keats and Shelley, in their best works, 
 were wholly feminine ; they were merely exponents 
 of sensitive beauty ; but into this they had such an 
 insight, and with it such a power of self-identi- 
 fication, as no woman has ever approached. Mrs. 
 Meynell's verses are full of delicate and original 
 thought, for the most part faultlessly expressed. 
 Witness this sonnet, called " Renouncement," 
 which has deservedly found a place in most of our 
 many modern anthologies :
 
 ISO MRS. MEYNELL 
 
 " I must not think of thee ; and tired yet strong 
 I shun the thought that lurks in all delight 
 The thought of thee and in the blue heaven's height, 
 And in the sweetest passage of a song. 
 Oh, just beyond the fairest thoughts that throng 
 This breast, the thought of thee waits, hidden yet bright ; 
 But it must never, never come in sight ; 
 I must stop short of thee the whole day long. 
 But when sleep comes to close each difficult day, 
 When night gives pause to the long watch I keep, 
 And all my bonds I needs must loose apart, 
 Must doff my will as raiment laid away, 
 With the first dream that comes with the first sleep 
 I run, I run, I am gather'd to thy heart." 
 
 This, like all Mrs. Meynell's verse, is true, 
 beautiful, tender, and, negatively, almost fault- 
 less ; but it does not attain the classical standard. 
 Compared with that which is classical in the 
 writings of second or even third-rate poets, like 
 Herrick, Crashaw, and William Barnes, it is " as 
 moonlight unto sunlight." Our admiration is, 
 indeed, strongly awakened by it, but we think of 
 and admire the poetess still more than her poetry. 
 It does not strain to rival man's work, as Mrs. 
 Browning's does, nor to put forth the great, 
 impersonal claims of great poetry, nor claim to 
 have mastered the arduous technique whereby every 
 phrase becomes a manifold mystery of significance 
 and music. Mrs. Meynell's thoughts and feelings
 
 MRS. MEYNELL 151 
 
 seem to be half-suffocated by their own sweetness 
 and pathos, so that, though they can speak with 
 admirable delicacy, tenderness, and that rarest 
 of graces unsuperfluousness, they cannot sing. 
 With extraordinary power of self-judgment, she 
 discovered this fact while she was as yet a mere 
 girl, and, disdaining to do anything which she 
 could not do, not only well, but best, and notwith- 
 standing the encouragement to persevere in poetry 
 which she received from a large and high class of 
 critics, she gave up the attempt, and has hardly 
 since written a line. 
 
 But, in a very small volume of very short essays, 
 which she has just published, this lady has shown 
 an amount of perceptive reason and ability to dis- 
 cern self-evident things as yet undiscerned, a 
 reticence, fulness, and effectiveness of expression, 
 which place her in the very front rank of living 
 writers in prose. The greater part of this little 
 volume is classical work, embodying, as it does, new 
 thought of general and permanent significance in 
 perfect language, and bearing, in every sentence, 
 the hall-mark of genius, namely, the marriage of 
 masculine force of insight with feminine grace and 
 tact of expression. Of the " sweetness and wit," 
 which are said, by Donne, I think, to be woman's 
 highest attainment, there is in these little essays 
 abundance, but they are only the living drapery of
 
 152 MRS. MEYNELL 
 
 thought which has the virile qualities of simplicity, 
 continuity, and positiveness. The essays of 
 Emerson, of which those of Mrs. Meynell will 
 sometimes remind the reader, are not to be com- 
 pared with the best of hers in these greater merits ; 
 moreover, the "transcendentalism" of the American 
 writer afforded a far easier field than that chosen 
 by the English lady. It is very easy to speak 
 splendidly and profusely about things which trans- 
 cend speech ; but to write beautifully, profitably 
 and originally about truths which come home to 
 everybody, and which everybody can test by com- 
 mon sense ; to avoid with sedulous reverence the 
 things which are beyond the focus of the human 
 eye, and to direct attention effectively to those 
 which are well within it, though they have hitherto 
 been undiscerned through lack of attention or the 
 astounding imperfection of common vision for the 
 reality of common things, is a very different attain- 
 ment. Gaiety of manner with gravity of matter, 
 truth perceived clearly and expressed with ease and 
 joy, constitute the very highest and rarest of prose 
 writing. Emerson had no gravity and no true 
 sequence of thought, for he lived or attempted to 
 live in a sphere in which the laws of gravitation 
 do not operate, and which, being without limitation, 
 is without unity. In the writing of Mrs. Meynell 
 we have brightness and epigram enough, but they
 
 MRS. MEYNELL 153 
 
 are but the photosphere of weighty, intelligible and 
 simple human interest ; and they never tempt her, as 
 the possession of such wit almost inevitably tempts 
 the male writer, to any display of scorn and contempt. 
 She has always pity and palliatory explanation for 
 the folly or falsehood which she exposes so trench- 
 antly. Perhaps the unkindest hit in her book is that 
 in which she laughs at the New- Worldling, thus : 
 
 " The difficulty of dealing, in the course of any critical 
 duty, with decivilised man lies in this : when you accuse 
 him of vulgarity sparing him, no doubt, the word he 
 defends himself against the charge of barbarism. Espe- 
 cially from new soil transatlantic, colonial he faces 
 you, bronzed, with a half conviction of savagery, partly 
 persuaded of his own youthfulness of race. He writes 
 and recites poems about ranches and canyons ; they are 
 designed to betray the recklessness of his nature, and to 
 reveal the good that lurks in the lawless ways of a young 
 society. He is there to explain himself, voluble with a 
 glossary for his own artless slang. But his colonialism is 
 only provincialism very articulate. The new air does 
 but make old decadences seem more stale ; the young 
 soil does but set into fresh conditions the ready-made, the 
 uncostly, the refuse feeling of a race decivilising. 
 American fancy played long this pattering part of youth. 
 The New Englander hastened to assure you with so self- 
 denying a face he did not wear war-paint and feathers, 
 that it became doubly difficult to communicate to him 
 that you had suspected him of nothing wilder than a 
 second-hand dress-coat. "
 
 154 MRS. MEYNELL 
 
 In this last phrase, as in all Mrs. Meynell's wit, 
 the razor-edge cuts so keenly because of the weight 
 at its back. In one little sentence she shatters a 
 world of pretension which, without deceiving any- 
 one, has puzzled most of us in the attempt to 
 define and dissipate it ; and henceforward we shall 
 never be without an answer to the worn-out and 
 vulgarised civilisee when he at once boasts of and 
 apologises for being a fine young savage. 
 
 " Decivilised man," continues our authoress, "is not 
 peculiar to new soil. The English town, too, knows 
 him in all his dailiness. In England, too, he has a 
 literature, an art, a music, all his own, derived from 
 many and various things of price. Trash, in the fulness 
 of its insimplicity and cheapness, is impossible without a 
 beautiful past. Its chief characteristic which is futility, 
 not failure could not be achieved but by the long abuse, 
 the rotatory reproduction, the quotidian disgrace, of the 
 utterances of art, especially the utterance by words. 
 Gaiety, vigour, vitality, the organic quality, purity, 
 simplicity, precision all these are among the antecedents 
 of trash. . . . The decivilised have every grace as the 
 antecedent of their vulgarities, every distinction as the 
 precedent of their mediocrities. No ballad-concert song, 
 feign it sigh, frolic, or laugh, but has the excuse that the 
 feint was suggested, was made easy, by some once living 
 sweetness. Nor are the decivilised to blame as having 
 in their own persons possessed civilisation and marred it- 
 They did not possess it ; they were born into some 
 tendency to derogation, into an inclination for things
 
 MRS. MEYNELL 155 
 
 mentally inexpensive. And the tendency can hardly do 
 other than continue. Nothing can look duller than the 
 future of this secondhand and multiplying world." 
 
 Where, in the whole field of modern literature, 
 can we find a more significant, original, and con- 
 vincing piece of writing than this ? 
 
 In the way of art -criticism very few have 
 equalled Mrs. Meynell's little essay on Velasquez, 
 whom she calls " the first Impressionist." In this 
 essay she, for the first time, and with the extreme 
 brevity and fulness of genius, explains and justifies 
 Impressionism, and abolishes the pretensions of 
 almost all modern " Impressionists " to their self- 
 assumed title. The best of this lady's essays, 
 which seldom run to greater length than about 
 five or six pages, are so perfect that to give 
 extracts as samples is like chipping off corners 
 of " specimen " rubies or emeralds for the like 
 purpose. Their value is not in arithmetical, but 
 in geometrical, proportion to their bulk. Since, 
 however, there is no room for the whole ruby, take 
 this chip from the " Point of Honour." 
 
 " Not without significance is the Spanish nationality 
 of Velasquez. In Spain was the point put upon honour ; 
 and Velasquez was the first Impressionist. As an Im- 
 pressionist he claimed, implicitly if not explicitly, a 
 whole series of delicate trusts in his trustworthiness. . . . 
 He kept the chastity of art when other masters were
 
 156 MRS. MEYNELL 
 
 content with its honesty, and when others saved artistic 
 conscience he safeguarded the point of honour. Con- 
 temporary masters more or less proved their position, 
 and convinced the world by something of demonstration ; 
 the first Impressionist simply asked that his word should 
 be accepted. To those who will not take his word he 
 offers no bond. To those who will he grants the dis- 
 tinction of a share in his responsibility. Somewhat 
 unrefined, in comparison with his lofty and simple claim 
 to be believed on a suggestion, is the commoner painter's 
 production of his credentials, his appeal to the sanction 
 of ordinary experience, his self-defence against the 
 suspicion of making irresponsible mysteries in art. 
 ' You can see for yourself,' the lesser man seems to say 
 to the world ; ' thus things are, and I render them in 
 such manner that your intelligence may be satisfied.' 
 This is an appeal to average experience, at the best to 
 cumulative experience, and with the average or the sum, 
 art cannot deal without derogation. The Spaniard 
 seems to say, ' Thus things are in my pictorial sight. 
 Trust me : I apprehend them so. ' We are not excluded 
 from his councils, but we are asked to attribute a certain 
 authority to him, master of the craft as he is, master of 
 that art of seeing pictorially which is the beginning and 
 not far from the end not far short of the whole of 
 the art of painting. So little, indeed, are we shut out 
 from the mysteries of a great Impressionist's impression, 
 that Velasquez requires us to be in some degree his 
 colleagues. Thus may each of us to whom he appeals 
 take praise from the praised. He leaves my educated 
 eyes to do a little of the work. He respects my re-
 
 MRS. MEYNELL 157 
 
 sponsibility no less though he respects it less explicitly 
 than I do his. . . . Because Impressionism is so free, 
 therefore is it so doubly bound. To undertake this art 
 for the sake of its privileges, without confessing its 
 obligations, or at least without confessing them up to 
 the point of honour, is to take a vulgar freedom ; to see 
 immunities precisely where there are duties. A very 
 mob of men have taken Impressionism upon themselves 
 in this our later day. It is against all probabilities that 
 more than a few among these have within them the 
 point of honour. . . . May the gods guard us from the 
 further popularising of Impressionism ; for the point of 
 honour is the simple secret of the few." 
 
 In no other authoress of this century can 
 anything be positively inferred, concerning the 
 character of the writer, from her works ; but there 
 breathes from almost every paragraph and stanza 
 of these two little volumes the indefinable but 
 unmistakable perfume of a sweet, noble and 
 singular personality. Mrs. Meynell's style is like 
 the subtle and convincing commentary of a beauti- 
 ful voice. 
 
 The range of subject in this score of miniature 
 essays is very large, and an extraordinary degree 
 of finished culture in various directions is displayed, 
 with an entire absence of pretension or even 
 consciousness. " The Rhythm of Life," " A Re- 
 membrance," "The Sun," "The Flower," "By 
 the Railway Side," " Composure," " Domus An-
 
 158 MRS. MEYNELL 
 
 gusta," " Rejection," " Innocence and Experience," 
 " Decivilised," " The Point of Honour," bear no 
 resemblance one to the other, except in their 
 equal charm of fulness, brevity, original insight, 
 experience, graceful learning, and unique beauty 
 of style. The authoress never falls below the 
 high standard she has attained in the two essays 
 I have now quoted, except in cases in which she 
 has chosen matter unworthy of her powers. The 
 merits of Lowell and Oliver Wendell Holmes, and 
 the vulgarity of Dickens and the caricaturists of 
 fifty years ago, may afford very good subjects for 
 ordinary critics, but diamond -dust and a razor- 
 edge, though it may have the weight of a hatchet 
 behind it, are quite unadapted for the working up 
 of blocks of teak or sandstone. There is a sort 
 of sanctity about such delicate genius as Mrs. 
 Meynell's which makes one shrink to see the robe 
 of her Muse brush against anything common. 
 Let her respect her own graceful powers and 
 personality, as every man of true delicacy and 
 insight must respect them, and she will become 
 one of the fairest and steadiest lights of English 
 literature, though she may remain unconspicuous 
 to " the crowd, incapable of perfectness."
 
 XX 
 MADAME DE HAUTEFORT 1 
 
 THERE is nothing comparable for moral force 
 to the charm of truly noble manners. The mind 
 is, in comparison, only slightly and transiently 
 impressed by heroic actions, for these are felt to 
 be but uncertain signs of a heroic soul ; nothing 
 less than a series of them, more sustained and 
 varied than circumstances are ever found to de- 
 mand, could assure us, with the infallible certainty 
 required for the highest power of example, that 
 they were the faithful reflex of the ordinary spirit 
 of the actor. The spectacle of patient suffering, 
 though not so striking, is morally more im- 
 pressive ; for we know that 
 
 "Action is transitory a step, a blow, 
 The motion of a muscle this way or that 
 'Tis done ; and, in the after vacancy, 
 We wonder at ourselves like men betray'd ; 
 Suffering is permanent, obscure, and dark, 
 And has the nature of infinity." 
 
 1 I have drawn the materials of this essay mainly from 
 the Life of Madame de Hautefort, by Victor Cousin.
 
 160 MADAME DE HAUTEFORT 
 
 The mind, however, has a very natural repug- 
 nance to the sustained contemplation of this 
 species of example, and is much more willingly 
 persuaded by a spectacle precisely the reverse 
 namely, that of goodness actually upon the earth 
 triumphant, and bearing in its ordinary de- 
 meanour, under whatever circumstances, the lovely 
 stamp of obedience to that highest and most 
 rarely - fulfilled commandment, "Rejoice ever- 
 more." Unlike action or suffering, such obedience 
 is not so much the way to heaven, as a picture, 
 say rather a part, of heaven itself; and truly 
 beautiful manners will be found upon inspection 
 to involve a continual and visible compliance with 
 that apostolical injunction. A right obedience of 
 this kind must be the crown and completion of 
 all lower kinds of obedience. It is not com- 
 patible with the bitter humiliations of the habit of 
 any actual sin ; it excludes selfishness, since the 
 condition of joy, as distinguished from pleasure, 
 is generosity, and a soul in the practice of going 
 forth from itself; it is no sensual partiality for the 
 " bright side " of things, no unholy repugnance to 
 the consideration of sorrow ; but a habit of lifting 
 life to a height at which all sides of it become 
 bright, and all moral difficulties intelligible : in 
 action it is a salubrity about which doctors will 
 not disagree ; in the countenance it is a loveliness
 
 MADAME DE HAUTEFORT 161 
 
 about which connoisseurs will not dispute ; in the 
 demeanour it is a lofty gentleness, which, without 
 pride, patronises all the world, and which, with- 
 out omitting the minutest temporal obligations or 
 amenities, does everything with an air of im- 
 mortality. When Providence sets its inheritors 
 upon a hill where they cannot be hid, acknow- 
 ledging, as it were, their deserts by conferring 
 upon them conspicuous fortune and corporeal 
 advantages, and proving them by various and 
 splendid opportunities, the result is an example 
 to which, as I have said, there is nothing else to 
 be compared in the way of moral agency ; a 
 spectacle so clear in the demonstration of human 
 majesty and loveliness, that the honouring of it 
 with love and imitation is the only point of 
 worship upon which persons of all countries, 
 faiths, customs, and morals, are in perfectly 
 catholic agreement. For the benefit of a single 
 such example it were scarcely possible that the 
 world could pay too dearly. Monarchy and 
 aristocracy have nothing to fear from the argu- 
 ments of their opponents so long as demo- 
 cracies have failed to produce a Sidney or a 
 Bayard, a Rachel Lady Russell or a Madame 
 de Hautefort. 
 
 It is far from my intention to imply that the 
 loveliest blossoms of humanity appear, like the 
 M
 
 162 MADAME DE HAUTEFORT 
 
 flowers of the aloe, at centenary intervals, and 
 then only in king's gardens. We are not allowed 
 to doubt but that the poor and suffering most 
 often are what " the rich should be, right-minded" ; 
 and that they therefore, more frequently than the 
 rich, have the foundation of right manners. 
 Nevertheless, spiritual loveliness when found in 
 conspicuous places, and " clothed upon " with 
 extraordinary personal and intellectual gifts, while 
 it is more impressive than humble worth in the 
 sight even of the best, as being exposed to subtler 
 temptations to deny itself, is made visible to 
 many who would refuse to acknowledge the 
 same lustre were it shining in a dark place, and 
 is more imposing to all, not only because all are 
 naturally delighted with the extraordinary occur- 
 rence of harmony between the apparently hostile 
 realms of grace and nature, fortune and desert, 
 but also because such harmony explains, exalts, 
 and really completes its seemingly -opposed ele- 
 ments, and grace, expressing itself with thorough 
 culture and knowledge of the world, becomes 
 natural, and nature, instructed in its true per- 
 fection, gracious. Moreover, fine manners are 
 always more or less an art, and this art is one 
 which the poor and socially obscure have no 
 means of bringing to perfection ; their lives may 
 be purified in the furnace of affliction, and worked
 
 MADAME DE HAUTEFORT 163 
 
 by the blows of circumstance into the finest 
 temper ; faith and resignation may give evenness, 
 and love a certain lustre to their demeanour ; 
 but the last touch, which is that which polishes 
 the mirror, and tells more in the eyes of the 
 world than all the rest, is the work of art. And, 
 let it be acknowledged, none of the fine arts is so 
 fine as that of manners, and, of all, it is probably 
 the only one which is cultivated in the next 
 world as well as in this. The contagion of 
 fine manners is irresistible, and wherever the 
 possessor of them moves, he leaves behind him 
 lovers and imitators who indefinitely, if not 
 infinitely, propagate his likeness. Unlike the 
 lower arts of poetry, music, architecture, and 
 painting, which may be regarded as secondary 
 and derivative from this primary art of good 
 manners, which imitates nothing but God 
 unlike these arts, in which men have always been 
 the most excellent professors, that of fine manners 
 has been carried to its highest perfection by 
 women. Than some of these, in whom station, 
 beauty, wit, and holiness, have been united, it 
 seems scarcely possible that the angels themselves 
 should shine with a more bright and amiable 
 lustre. 
 
 Women, not to speak of their beauty, their 
 docile and self-adaptive natures, and that inherent
 
 164 MADAME DE HAUTEFORT 
 
 aptitude for goodness which makes devotion their 
 chief intemperance, enjoy, in their privilege of 
 subordination to men, a vast advantage for the 
 development of the noblest manners. Obedience 
 is the proper perfection of humanity ; fine manners 
 are the expression of that perfection ; and that 
 obedience and consequent perfection are likely 
 to be frequent and complete in proportion as the 
 object to which submission is directly due is near 
 and comprehensible. Remote and incomprehen- 
 sible Deity is the " head of the man " ; and his 
 obedience to that vast and invisible authority 
 though of a loftier nature, is necessarily incom- 
 plete in its character and indistinct in its ex- 
 pression when compared with the submission of 
 the woman to the image of the same authority in 
 himself. While the one obeys from faith, the 
 other does so from sight ; and the sensible " beauty 
 of holiness " is therefore almost exclusively the 
 prerogative of the woman. The light of her duty 
 strikes directly upon that to which it is relative, 
 and is reflected back in loveliness upon herself; 
 while his appears to be lost in the space it has to 
 traverse to its object. Here is a great spiritual 
 distinction of sex, which those who reject the 
 doctrine of subordination confound and destroy ; 
 pulling down the majesty of man by abolishing 
 his principal responsibility, and turning the
 
 MADAME DE HAUTEFORT 165 
 
 peculiar strength and glory of the woman into 
 weakness and disgrace. 
 
 There was one place and time singular in the 
 history of the world for the development of the 
 woman's character to the extreme limit of her 
 capacities in various directions. The court of 
 France in the reign of Louis XIII., the regency 
 of Anne of Austria, and the early part of the 
 reign of Louis XIV., produced a company of 
 ladies, in whose presence all the remaining tract 
 of history looks dim. The wars of the League 
 had left the great nobles of France in the enjoy- 
 ment of an amount of personal freedom, import- 
 ance, and dignity, greater than was ever, before 
 or since, the lot of any aristocracy. Chivalrous 
 traditions ; the custom of appeal to arms for the 
 settlement of personal quarrels, a custom which 
 is said to have cost the country some nine hundred 
 of its best gentlemen in about nine years ; the 
 worship of womanhood carried to a pharisaical 
 strictness of observance, were conditions which, 
 though socially disastrous in various ways, exalted 
 the individual -valeur of men to the most im- 
 posing height, and rendered a corresponding 
 exaltation imperative upon the women, in order 
 to secure that personal predominance which it is 
 their instinct to seek. The political state of 
 France was one which afforded the members of
 
 166 MADAME DE HAUTEFORT 
 
 its court extraordinary occasions for the display 
 of character. That state was one of a vast transi- 
 tion. Feudal privileges had to be either moder- 
 ated, defined, and constitutionalised, or else 
 destroyed. The revolution which was about to 
 operate in England and to end in liberty, was 
 working in France with a manifestly opposite 
 destiny. Richelieu and Mazarin were slowly and 
 surely bringing about an absolute despotism as 
 the only solution of the political difficulties of the 
 State consistent with its greatness, and, probably, 
 even with its unity. The opposition of the nobles 
 to the diminution of their power was carried on 
 with far greater boldness and grandeur of personal 
 effect, inasmuch as it was done without directly 
 affronting the monarchical authority in the persons 
 of its weak representatives, Louis XIII. and Anne 
 of Austria. The two great ministers were the 
 objects against which the whole wrath of the 
 nobility was directed. Hence the war against 
 encroaching monarchy was in great part waged 
 in the court itself; and the king and the queen- 
 regent were themselves found from time to time in 
 the ranks of the indignant aristocracy. Here, then, 
 was a wonderful field for individual effect ; and 
 that field was open to women no less, or even 
 more, than to men ; for the struggle, indeed, on 
 the part of the latter was, upon the whole, a selfish
 
 MADAME DE HAUTEFORT 167 
 
 and ignoble one ; no national idea inspired it ; 
 every one was for himself and his house ; and the 
 women were perfectly able to sympathise and 
 assist in quarrels of this personal and intelligible 
 interest. Richelieu and Mazarin were moreover 
 exactly the kind of enemies to excite the peculiar 
 hostility, and prove the peculiar talents, of women. 
 In their modes of thought and action, these 
 ministers were too much like women not to be 
 naturally obnoxious to their hatred. In these 
 days, too, rose Port -Royal, with its female re- 
 formers, saints, and theologians, offering an asylum 
 to weary and repentant worldliness and passion, 
 or a fresh field for vanity which had exhausted 
 its ordinary irritants. On every side lay great 
 temptations and great opportunities ; and the 
 women of the period seem to have been endowed 
 with singular qualifications for the illustration of 
 both. Of this constellation of splendid person- 
 alities, Marie de Hautefort was the crowning 
 glory. 
 
 She was born in 1 6 1 6, and was soon after left 
 an orphan and committed to the charge of her 
 grandmother, Madame de la Flotte Hauterive. 
 Her early years were passed in the country ; but 
 there was much talk of the court and its pleasures 
 at her grandmother's house ; and the beautiful and 
 intellectual girl, at eleven years of age then
 
 168 MADAME DE HAUTEFORT 
 
 almost a woman in figure, and then and always 
 too innocent to have any element of asceticism in 
 her sincere piety, offered fervent prayers to Heaven 
 to be allowed to go to court .' Madame de la 
 Flotte had affairs which brought her to Paris ; 
 Marie went with her, and made such an impres- 
 sion, that the queen-mother, Mary de Medicis, at 
 once placed her among her maids -of -honour. 
 Though she was but twelve years of age, her 
 manners were distinguished by that " tres grand 
 air, tempere par une retenue presque severe," which 
 to the last continued to be the quality of her 
 chaste and noble loveliness. Her beauty of person 
 must have been of the very loftiest kind, if we may 
 judge from the effect which she immediately pro- 
 duced in the most brilliant and fastidious court in 
 the world. She had the name of Aurora given 
 to her, as descriptive of her fresh and innocent 
 splendour. When she was fourteen the king fell 
 in love with her. He took her away from the 
 queen -mother, and placed her with the queen- 
 consort, who at first was naturally somewhat shy 
 of a maid-of-honour who was manifestly a rival. 
 But Anne soon discovered in Mademoiselle de 
 Hautefort a mind from which she had nothing to 
 dread. As for the affections of the king, Anne 
 enjoyed too little of them at any time to care 
 much for the platonic alliance which she saw
 
 MADAME DE HAUTEFORT 169 
 
 plainly was the worst she had to fear ; she soon 
 found also that her misfortunes and neglect con- 
 stituted a much more powerful claim to the noble 
 girl's attachment than the power and prestige of 
 the greatest monarch in the world. Thus the 
 favourite of the king enjoyed the singular distinction 
 of being at the same time scarcely less the favourite 
 of his wife. The first public mark of attention 
 from the king to the maid -of -honour was on 
 occasion of a sermon at which the queen and the 
 court were present. The maids-of-honour, accord- 
 ing to custom, were seated on the ground. The 
 king sent the velvet, on which he was kneeling, 
 for Mademoiselle de Hautefort to sit upon. She 
 blushed with confusion, obeyed a sign from the 
 queen to take it, but placed it by her side. Such 
 a mixture of modesty and tact was not unappreciated 
 in the court of France. On another occasion an 
 incident occurred which will serve to explain how 
 the position of Mademoiselle de Hautefort was 
 one against which not the slightest exception could 
 be taken, a little allowance being made for the liberal 
 manners of the seventeenth century. The king 
 entered the apartment of the queen as she and her 
 maid-of-honour were discussing a note, containing 
 something that it was not desired that the king 
 should see. He pressed very much to obtain it, 
 and Mademoiselle de Hautefort found it impossible
 
 170 MADAME DE HAUTEFORT 
 
 to keep the queen's secret except by placing the 
 paper in her bosom. This at once terminated the 
 dispute ; although the queen in jest held the hands 
 of the beautiful girl, and dared the king to take 
 the letter from its sanctuary. Though the religion 
 of Louis, and his reverence for this noble lady, 
 prevented him from affronting her with his passion, 
 his extreme jealousy was a source of continual 
 annoyance to her ; and many a time the pride of 
 the good and gay young beauty resented the 
 assiduities and pretensions of an amitid which had 
 no right to such exclusiveness, and no foundation 
 for such suspicions ; for, with several of the noblest 
 gentlemen of France at her feet, Mademoiselle de 
 Hautefort's heart was untouched. After these 
 misunderstandings with his " friend," Louis would 
 sit and sulk in a corner for hours ; and there was 
 no gaiety at the court until a good understanding 
 was restored. At this time the affections of the 
 maid-of-honour were chiefly set upon her mistress, 
 for whose sake alone she seems to have endured 
 attentions which, to say the least, incommoded 
 her. Madame de Motteville, in her Memoirs, 
 assures us that Mademoiselle de Hautefort treated 
 Louis at all times "as badly as it was permitted 
 to treat a king." His neglect and hatred of his 
 wife, founded upon the atrocious suspicions which 
 Richelieu, for political purposes, succeeded in
 
 MADAME DE HAUTEFORT 171 
 
 bringing upon her, deprived him of the respect of 
 one whose generous nature revolted against all 
 appearance of injustice. Towards Richelieu him- 
 self, as the chief author of the queen's misfortunes, 
 she entertained feelings of contempt and dislike 
 which she made no effort to conceal, although the 
 mighty minister loaded her with compliments and 
 attentions, calculating that her presence at the 
 court was not fitted to increase the favour of 
 Anne with Louis. Finding, however, that all his 
 endeavours to change her from an enemy into a 
 friend were vain, and that she was doing more 
 service to the queen by pleading her cause than 
 disservice by her personal attractions, Richelieu 
 determined upon getting rid of her influence. He 
 persuaded the king that she ridiculed his manners 
 and his passion in his absence ; and, instead of 
 appeasing his scruples of conscience, as heretofore, he 
 represented his affection as dangerous and contrary 
 to religion. These means proving only partially 
 effective, Richelieu called into play a rival beauty, 
 Louise Angelique de la Fayette, who, with scarcely 
 inferior virtues and personal attractions, had a 
 nature more sympathetic with that of Louis. The 
 king found in this lady a compassionate, patient, 
 and friendly listener to the sorrows and complaints 
 which he delighted in talking about to women ; 
 and their relationship soon ripened into the high
 
 172 MADAME DE HAUTEFORT 
 
 and tender friendship which was ordinarily the 
 limit of the king's " amours " ; for, with all his 
 weaknesses, his religion was sincere and his 
 refinement remarkable ; and the woman whom he 
 could have suspected of a willingness to sacrifice 
 her dignity to his affection would never have 
 possessed it. In this instance, however, the king 
 in a moment of passion forgot his better knowledge 
 and Mademoiselle de la Fayette's honour so far as 
 to propose that she should take up her residence 
 at Versailles, and be " toute k lui." His punish- 
 ment was heavy, but just. The noble young lady, 
 between whom and himself there had for two 
 years subsisted a most deep and happy friendship, 
 determined, after many regrets and a strong 
 struggle with her heart, to have no further com- 
 munication with him but through the grating of a 
 nunnery. Upon these terms, however, the king 
 continued for many months to see her at the 
 convent of St. Mary of the Visitation. Like 
 Mademoiselle de Hautefort, Mademoiselle de la 
 Fayette was constant in her favourable repre- 
 sentations of the queen to her consort ; and it 
 was after one of these singular visits, that the 
 king, prevented by a storm from returning to St. 
 Maur, stopped a night at the Louvre, where was 
 the queen, who nine months after gave birth to 
 Louis XIV. During this period, Mademoiselle de
 
 MADAME DE HAUTEFORT 173 
 
 Hautefort remained in the service of Anne, who 
 was almost entirely abandoned by Louis, and 
 solaced herself with maintaining, chiefly by means 
 of Madame de Chevreuse, a correspondence with 
 her royal relatives of Spain, then at war with 
 France. The fact of this correspondence was 
 treasonous ; and the nature of it, whatever it may 
 have been, was such that the queen had the 
 greatest terror of its transpiring. At one moment 
 her fate depended upon the correspondence of her 
 replies to the examination imposed upon her by 
 Richelieu with the statements of her confidant 
 and aid La Porte, who was then in the Bastille. 
 Mademoiselle de Hautefort, as heroic as she was 
 beautiful and tender, disguised herself en grisette, 
 left the Louvre at dawn, went in a fiacre alone to 
 the Bastille, waited ever so long exposed to the 
 coarse pleasantries of the corps de garde at the 
 gate, obtained a solitary interview with the 
 Chevalier de Jars, who had just received his 
 pardon on the very scaffold for his part in the 
 queen's affairs, prevailed upon him to risk his 
 head again by making himself the means of 
 conveying a letter to La Porte, returned as she 
 came, had the good fortune to reach her apart- 
 ment unrecognised ; and was then for the first 
 time overcome with the terrible risks to which she 
 had exposed herself, and, what she prized far
 
 174 MADAME DE HAUTEFORT 
 
 more, her unblemished reputation. In the political 
 intrigues of the queen and Madame de Chevreuse 
 she had no interest. Richelieu and the king were 
 unjust ; Anne suffered, and required service and 
 consolation ; and that was all the noble maiden 
 knew or cared to know. 
 
 The prospect of the queen's becoming a mother, 
 as soon as it was known, made a great improve- 
 ment in her position with the king, who was thus 
 again thrown into the society of Mademoiselle de 
 Hautefort. His passion, for a time suspended by 
 his affection for Mademoiselle de la Fayette, 
 revived, and maintained for two years more its 
 chaste and stormy life. The proud maiden re- 
 fused to acquire any advantage to her not very 
 splendid fortune ; and the only honour she con- 
 sented to receive was one from the hands of the 
 queen namely, the office of dame d'atours, which 
 entitled her to be called Madame. Richelieu's 
 jealousies reawakened with the passion of the 
 king ; there was no second Louise de la Fayette 
 at hand ; and the minister took advantage of the 
 part which, as he had the means of proving, 
 Mademoiselle de Hautefort had taken in aiding 
 the queen in her forbidden correspondence with 
 Madame de Chevreuse and other active enemies 
 of the cardinal, to demand the dismissal of the 
 favourite from the court. Louis resisted. Riche-
 
 MADAME DE HAUTEFORT 175 
 
 lieu had recourse to his last and always successful 
 trick : he gave the king to understand that he 
 must choose between his minister and his mistress. 
 Even this argument, however, only prevailed 
 upon Louis to consent to her being exiled for a 
 period of fourteen days. She refused to believe 
 the direction to absent herself, on receiving it 
 through Richelieu, and obtained an audience of 
 the king, demanding of what crime she was 
 accused. Louis replied that the order was wrung 
 from him against his will ; that it was but for 
 temporary reasons of state, and that it gave him 
 the greatest grief. This was not enough to satisfy 
 the dignity and self-respect of the lady, who told 
 him that in bidding him adieu for fourteen days 
 she bade him adieu for ever. Mademoiselle de 
 Chemerault, another of the queen's ladies, was 
 dismissed at the same time ; but only in order 
 that she might continue to act as Richelieu's spy 
 upon the words and actions of the noble creature 
 who fancied her her sincere friend. Mademoiselle 
 de Hautefort thought that the queen had not 
 treated Mademoiselle de Chemerault with suffi- 
 cient generosity in the gifts she made her on her 
 dismissal ; and, utterly careless of her own in- 
 terests, she addressed to Anne the noblest letter of 
 remonstrance which it has ever been our happiness 
 to read. Louis died without beholding her again ;
 
 176 MADAME DE HAUTEFORT 
 
 and, indeed, his. fickle nature had been diverted 
 from his sorrow for her loss by a new favourite, 
 Cinq Mars. Anne was no sooner a widow than 
 she begged Madame de Hautefort to return. 
 She was now twenty-seven, and at the height of 
 her beauty. She became the chief ornament of 
 the famous Maison Rambouillet at that time the 
 place of reunion for the most refined and exclusive 
 society the world has seen. Here, surrounded by 
 the atmosphere of literary dilettantism, which 
 turned all her contemporaries more or less into 
 blue- stockings, and which in its less dignified 
 development at the assemblies of Mademoiselle 
 de ScudeVy afterwards provoked the ridicule of 
 Moliere, Madame de Hautefort's delicacy and 
 tact preserved her from the airs of the prfaieuse. 
 The few letters of her writing which remain are 
 "toujours spirituelles, mais tres ne'glige'es"; and a 
 contemporary writer says, " Pour les vers, c'est sa 
 passion : et, quoiqu'elle n'en fasse point, elle les 
 recite comme si elle les faisait" As she was free 
 from the prevailing intellectual dilettantism, she 
 was equally a stranger to the more tempting, and, 
 at that time, all but universal dilettantism of the 
 affections. The consequence was, that the pas- 
 sions she inspired were deep, sincere, and really 
 chivalrous. The mock chivalry of La Roche- 
 foucauld became genuine towards her. On the
 
 MADAME DE HAUTEFORT 177 
 
 eve of a battle he gave her brother a letter, con- 
 taining a declaration of his love, to be given to 
 her if he died ; if not, to be returned. " C'e"tait 
 Ik," says M. Cousin, " comme on faisait la cour a 
 Mile, de Hautefort." Her nobler charms for a 
 while eclipsed the attractions of Madame de Che- 
 vreuse in the eyes of Charles of Lorraine. On 
 one occasion he took prisoner a French gentle- 
 man whom he discovered to be slightly acquainted 
 with her. " I give you your liberty," he said ; 
 " and require nothing for your ransom but the 
 honour of hearing that you have kissed, upon my 
 part, the hem of the robe of Madame de Haute- 
 fort." And many another, in whom love had 
 hitherto been vice, found it the well-head of virtue 
 when inspired by her. A noble young soldier, 
 the Marquis de Gevres, had the inexpressible 
 honour and happiness of touching the heart of 
 this lady ; but her royal admirer prevented their 
 marriage, which was in course of arrangement ; 
 and, just as De Gevres was restored to his hopes 
 by the king's death, and was about to receive the 
 staff of Marshal of France for his brilliant ser- 
 vices, he was killed at the siege of Thionville. 
 Madame de Hautefort's magnificent reserve upon 
 all points touching her own interests and feelings 
 permitted to none of the aristocratic memoir- 
 writers of the time the means of informing 
 N
 
 1 78 MADAME DE HAUTEFORT 
 
 posterity how far she was affected by these inci- 
 dents. 
 
 Madame de Hautefort, on her return to the 
 court of Anne of Austria, after the death of 
 Richelieu and Louis XIII., had every reason to 
 calculate upon reaping the reward of her faithful 
 services, as far as such services can be rewarded 
 temporally, in the unimpeded favour of the queen, 
 who was now a queen indeed. But this change 
 from the position of the powerless and oppressed 
 consort to the absolute regent was not really 
 favourable to Madame de Hautefort. She cared 
 very little for politics, and very much for her per- 
 sonal friends ; and she was not prepared to look 
 coldly upon all her old alliances, formed at first 
 in the service and interest of the queen, merely 
 because Anne, with a sense of responsibility which 
 made the sacrifice a virtue in her, chose to aban- 
 don her former connexions, and to take up with 
 the partisans of Richelieu and the monarchy. 
 The loyalty of Madame de Hautefort was of too 
 high and heavenly a character for that. Her 
 position at court, which she by no means under- 
 valued, might still, however, have been maintained, 
 had it not been for the peculiar favour to which 
 Mazarin now rose, and the scandal created by his 
 nightly conferences with the queen. It was more 
 than the pride and delicacy of the dame cTatours
 
 MADAME DE HAUTEFORT 179 
 
 could bear. Moreover, she was de-vote full twenty 
 years before the usual age, for she was now only 
 twenty -seven, and in all the splendour of her 
 beauty ; and affairs of state, which were made the 
 excuse for these conferences, were trifles in her 
 eyes when compared with a wilful indifference to 
 even the "appearance of evil." She regarded 
 silence under these circumstances as a crime ; and, 
 far from her being intimidated by the dangers of 
 interference and expostulation, those dangers acted 
 as provocatives to a virtue of which the only draw- 
 back was a heroic intemperance, and a slight 
 defect of suavity when, but only when, it had to 
 do with the failings of kings and queens. In 
 fact, Madame de Hautefort treated Anne, in her 
 turn, "as ill as it was permitted to treat a queen"; 
 that is to say, she displayed a marked disapproval 
 of her conduct, and made no concealment of 
 her dislike of Mazarin, which was unmitigated, 
 although he, like Richelieu, did his very best to 
 be well with her. Failing, he, like his predecessor, 
 determined to get rid of her uncongenial influ- 
 ence ; and the very means which Richelieu had 
 used with Louis XIII., Mazarin employed with 
 his royal mistress. He represented Madame de 
 Hautefort as being in the habit of publicly express- 
 ing her views of the queen's conduct ; and Anne, 
 already irritated by the private representations of
 
 l8o MADAME DE HAUTEFORT 
 
 her dame d'atours, was completely estranged from 
 her in heart by the calumnies and exaggerations 
 of the minister. But to dismiss her from the 
 court was not a step to be taken in haste. 
 Madame de Hautefort was the idol of two very 
 considerable parties, the Importants and the 
 Saints ; and in the court itself she was without an 
 enemy beside Mazarin and the mistress whom 
 she persisted in serving too well. The little king, 
 Louis XIV., was devotedly attached to her, and 
 used to call her his wife ; and several of the chief 
 nobles of the country were suitors for her hand ; 
 in particular, Gassion, the general-in-chief of the 
 French cavalry, the Duke de Liancour, and the 
 Duke Charles de Schomberg, who were among 
 the most valuable servants of the monarchy, were 
 devoted to this lady with a passion which would 
 not have forgiven any injury to her. The Duke 
 de Schomberg seemed to be favoured by Madame 
 de Hautefort ; and it was highly to Mazarin's 
 interest that an alliance should take place which 
 would make her the wife of a man who hated par- 
 tisanship, and would at least secure her neutrality 
 towards the chief minister whom he served. The 
 duke is thus painted by a contemporary: " II avail 
 les premieres charges de la cour ; il ne voyait 
 que les princes au-dessus de lui. II etait fait k 
 peu pres comme on depeint les htfros de romans :
 
 MADAME DE HAUTEFORT t Si 
 
 il etait noir ; mais sa mine haute, guerriere, et 
 majestueuse, inspirait du respect a ses amis et de 
 la crainte a ses ennemis ; il e*tait magnifique, 
 liberal, et avait fait des defenses extraordin- 
 aires dans les emplois qu'il avait eu en com- 
 mandant les armees de France. Sa mine e"tait 
 tellement pleine de majeste", qu'un jour, etant 
 chez une dame et etant dans la ruelle avec un 
 habit fort brillant d'or et d'argent, une nour- 
 rice de cette dame entrant dans la chambre en 
 fut si surprise qu'elle s'approcha d'une demoiselle 
 et lui demanda quel roi e"tait Ik aupres de sa 
 maitresse ? " A man, in externals at least, not 
 unworthy of our heroine. But her true and stately 
 soul did nothing in haste. She subjected her 
 suitor's passion to the test of a long and dubious 
 courtship ; and felt herself bound not to abandon 
 the court, as she probably might have to do for 
 Languedoc, which was his government, until all 
 had been done to retrieve the queen from her 
 position with Mazarin ; who was thus at length 
 compelled to obtain by open rupture what he had 
 hoped to effect quietly, and as if in the interest of 
 his proud and beautiful enemy. The party of the 
 Importants was scattered by a sort of coup cPetat; 
 several even of the ladies about the queen's person 
 were dismissed or warned ; and Madame de 
 Hautefort, of all Mazarin's political enemies, was
 
 l8a MADAME DE HAUTEFORT 
 
 the only one of any consequence who escaped 
 defeat and humiliation on this occasion. She 
 was far above suspicion of having had any part in 
 the conspiracy which threw so many others into 
 Mazarin's power ; the candour and openness of 
 her enmity puzzled and awed the prince of in- 
 triguers, and enabled her to dispute his influence 
 with the queen, long after all the Importants, 
 including the infinitely clever Madame de Chev- 
 reuse, were for the time put to silence. Madame 
 de Hautefort was, moreover, to the party of the 
 Saints what Madame de Chevreuse was to the 
 Importants ; and her opposition to Mazarin was 
 made formidable by being supported with the 
 whole influence of the religieuses of the convents 
 of the Filles-de-Sainte-Marie, the Carmelites, and 
 the Val-de-Grace. But the warfare thus carried 
 on afforded no cause for open accusation ; and it 
 was upon the always somewhat rash generosity of 
 Madame de Hautefort in interceding for those 
 whom she considered to have been unjustly treated, 
 that her fall from court favour was made to depend. 
 She irritated the queen greatly by representations 
 in favour of Beaufort, in whose guilt she did not 
 believe ; and on one occasion was so emphatic in 
 recommending the claims of some old servant to 
 Anne's consideration, that the queen told her 
 plainly that she was weary of her reprimands, and
 
 MADAME DE HAUTEFORT 183 
 
 altogether dissatisfied with her conduct ; and the 
 next morning the dame (Patortrs received a com- 
 mand to quit the court. For a time she was in 
 despair at having, as it appeared, irrevocably 
 offended her to whose service her entire life had 
 been devoted. Like Louise Angelique de la 
 Fayette, she withdrew to the convent of Filles-de- 
 Sainte-Marie, with the intention of becoming one 
 of the religieuses; but, happily for the world, her 
 lovely light was destined not to be so hidden 
 under a bushel. Her adorers showed the sincerity 
 of their vows by hastening to renew them now 
 that she was in disgrace. The Duke de Schom- 
 berg's solicitations were listened to ; and Madame 
 de Hautefort, after a crowning act of nobility 
 which we have not space to relate, but which 
 involved a momentary giving up of her lover for 
 the supposed interests of his family, became the 
 Duchess de Schomberg at the age of thirty, in the 
 year 1646. For ten years she was the tenderest 
 and happiest of wives, and afterwards the holiest 
 of widows. Her personal beauty increased with 
 years, as perfectly noble beauty always does. As 
 she had been the ornament of the Maison Ram- 
 bouillet without affectation of literature, she now 
 became that of Port-Royal without mixing herself 
 with the Jansenist quarrel. It was in vain that 
 Louis XIV. endeavoured to persuade her back to
 
 184 MADAME DE HAUTEFORT 
 
 the court, " afin," as he said, "d'y retablir la 
 dignite et la grandeur qu'on commence a ne plus 
 y voir." She led a life of active and unpretentious 
 piety until 1691, which was the date of her transla- 
 tion from a life of grace to one of glory. 
 
 Where else shall we find another like her ? 
 Rachel Lady Russell, her contemporary, was 
 nearer to her than any other we remember ; an 
 additional example in confirmation of the remark 
 that nature is fond of bringing forth extraordinary 
 persons in pairs ; but Lady Russell seems to have 
 had neither that magnificent physique, nor those 
 splendid opportunities, which confer such a grand 
 and full perfection on the picture of Madame de 
 Hautefort. Do what we will with our understand- 
 ings and moral principles, we can never make 
 puritans of our tastes ; and however the mind may 
 cry peccavi for its preference, of two beautiful 
 natures it always will prefer that which goes the 
 most gloriously clad. Neither will the feelings 
 accept potentialities for actualities. Lady Russell, 
 in Madame de Hautefort's circumstances, almost 
 certainly would have been no less noble ; nay, it 
 is more than likely that she would have avoided 
 Madame de Hautefort s one mistake, which seems 
 to have been an unnecessarily plain-spoken way 
 towards those who happened to have the power of 
 resenting it with overwhelming effect. As it was,
 
 MADAME DE HAUTEFORT 185 
 
 however, Lady Russell's opportunities were limited; 
 and so France is left to boast the production of 
 the most imposingly noble woman with whom 
 history has made us acquainted. 
 
 We are aware that many of our readers will 
 altogether dispute the principles by which we are 
 induced to attribute such an eminence to a woman 
 who was nothing more than a woman, holding the 
 old orthodox rank of the " weaker vessel," and as 
 such claiming peculiar honour ; who was too much 
 attached to her friends ever to soar quite out of 
 the region of personalities ; whose virtues were 
 never startling, being all strung like pearls upon 
 the silken thread of propriety ; who was not with- 
 out that amiable vanity which enhances our 
 admiration by seeming not ungrateful for it ; 
 who, in fine, though virtuous and heroic when 
 occasion required, was at all times and on all 
 occasions nothing so much as womanly. Many 
 others have been as virtuous, as beautiful, and as 
 heroic ; but none else has in an equal degree 
 glorified these perfections by such an attractive 
 radiance of womanhood, that mysterious influ- 
 ence, which we can describe only by negatives 
 and contradictions ; that charming subordination, 
 which affects us less as the necessity of a weaker 
 being than as the complaisance of a nature which 
 would rather persuade than command ; that flatter-
 
 186 MADAME DE HAUTEFORT 
 
 ing inferiority, which allows us the leadership in 
 wisdom, and is content that we should preach, so 
 that it maintains the monopoly of the good ex- 
 ample ; that ever-present and ever- intangible 
 charm, whose best praise is that it is the reverse 
 of manhood. Marie de Hautefort has taught us 
 what a woman may be, and what a man may 
 aspire to deserve. 
 
 We gladly take the opportunity of repeating, in 
 connexion with her life, what M. Guizot says, in 
 concluding his beautiful essay on Lady Russell, 
 called " L' Amour dans le Manage " : 
 
 " I have felt profound pleasure in relating the 
 history of this lady, so pure in her passion, always 
 great, and always humble in her greatness, faithful 
 and devoted with equal ardour to her feelings and 
 her duties in grief and joy, in triumph and advers- 
 ity. Our times are attacked with a deplorable 
 malady ; men believe only in the passion which is 
 attended with moral derangement : infinite love, 
 perfect devotion, all ardent, exalted, and soul- 
 mastering sentiments, appear to them impossible 
 within the bounds of moral laws and social con- 
 ventions ; all order seems to them a paralysing 
 yoke, all submission a debasing servitude ; no flame 
 is anything if it is not a devouring conflagration. 
 This disease is all the graver because it is not the 
 crisis of a fever, nor the explosion of an exuberant
 
 MADAME DE HAUTEFORT 187 
 
 force. It springs from perverse doctrines, from 
 the rejection of law, faith, and superhuman exist- 
 ence, from the idolatry of man, who takes himself 
 for God. And with this disease there is joined 
 another no less lamentable : man not only adores 
 nothing but himself; but even himself he adores 
 only in the multitude where all men are confounded. 
 He hates and envies everything that rises above 
 the vulgar level ; all superiority, all individual 
 grandeur, seems to him an iniquity and an injury 
 towards that chaos of undistinguished and ephem- 
 eral beings whom he calls humanity. When he 
 perceives, in the higher walks of society, some 
 great scandal, some odious instance of vice and 
 crime, he rejoices, and ardently turns it to the 
 worst account against social superiorities, making 
 it to be believed that such things are the natural 
 consequences of high birth, great fortune, aristo- 
 cratic condition. When we have been assailed by 
 these base doctrines, and the shameful passions 
 which give birth to, or are born from, them ; when 
 we have felt the hatefulness of them and measured 
 the peril, it is a very lively delight to meet with one 
 of those noble examples which are their splendid 
 confutation. In proportion as I respect humanity 
 in its totality, I admire and love those glorified 
 images of humanity, which personify and set on 
 high, under visible features and with a proper
 
 i88 MADAME DE HAUTEFORT 
 
 name, whatever it has of most noble and most pure. 
 Lady Russell gives the soul this beautiful and 
 virtuous joy. Oest tine grande dame chrtiienne" 
 If Lady Russell and Madame de Hautefort 
 are splendid and unanswerable replies to vulgar 
 depreciations of aristocracy, they offer no less 
 forcible and illustrious denials of the calumnies 
 on womanhood which with our generation pass for 
 praise. Of all the monstrous births of modern 
 philosophy, surely none is so monstrous, so marked 
 with moral ignorance and deterioration, as the doc- 
 trine of the equality of man and woman, in the 
 form in which it is at present widely preached. 
 No woman, who has read the foregoing pages, 
 will suspect me of desiring to derogate from her 
 honour ; and, indeed, my indignation is, not so 
 much because the doctrine in point diminishes the 
 honour of man, as because it sullies by misrepre- 
 senting that of his gentle ally. Surely she has 
 points of superiority enough, without disputing the 
 sole points which we and nature deny to her 
 namely, wisdom for the legislative, and force for 
 the executive, in life. Well aware that we really 
 abuse what we overrate, we yet deliberately admit 
 an excellency of nature in woman which puts to 
 the blush the best results of grace in man. Her 
 superiority to man in that wherein he most excels 
 the beasts, religion ; his physical inferiority to her
 
 MADAME DE HAUTEFORT 189 
 
 in almost everything but that in which the beasts 
 excel him, strength ; the only virtue in which she 
 does not share being that in which they do, phy- 
 sical courage ; her far greater readiness to rejoice 
 with them that do rejoice, and weep with them 
 that weep ; her infinite versatility, which caused an 
 old writer to say : " Sing of the nature of woman, 
 and then the song shall be surely full of varieties, 
 old crotchets, and most sweet closes, it shall 
 be humour grave, fantastic, loving, melancholy, 
 sprightly, one in all and all in one " ; her beauty, 
 which is love visible, which purifies our passions 
 in exciting them, and makes our desires glow like 
 sunny clouds in the sky of a pure conscience ; her 
 voice, which is audible benevolence ; her manner, 
 a miracle of lovely tact, and candour subtly-paced 
 as guile ; these and other praises, which would 
 exhaust us long before we exhausted them, are 
 surely enough to countervalue that poor predomin- 
 ance of power with which the brain and muscles 
 of man are indefeasibly endowed, and which force 
 kingship upon him in the very teeth of his false 
 philosophy. The happiness and dignity of man 
 and woman require, not a confusion, but a com- 
 plete distinction, of their relations ; and the title of 
 the " weaker vessel," being, on the best authority, 
 the woman's peculiar title to honour, is not to be 
 forgotten and ignored, but to be contemplated and
 
 190 MADAME DE HAUTEFORT 
 
 loved. Only thus can their absolutely infinite 
 capability of being mutually exalted come into 
 effect. They are like the two plates of the philo- 
 sophical instrument called the electrical doubler, 
 which by mutual opposition under proper cir- 
 cumstances indefinitely intensify their contrasted 
 conditions her softness, delicacy, tenderness, com- 
 pliance, fear, and confidence, opposed to whatever 
 strength, courage, gravity, firmness, dignity, and 
 originality there may have been in him before, 
 render a certain exaltation of these virtues, for her 
 sake, easy ; every such exaltation upon his part 
 induces in her a more passionate submission, 
 whereby her peculiar qualities are correspondingly 
 developed ; and every such increment of loving 
 and intelligent self-devotion calls upon him, in 
 turn, for the delightful exercise of a higher degree 
 of manhood, in order that he may deserve it. 
 How hopeful would be that reform which should 
 begin where life begins, in the relation of the 
 sexes ! How hopeless all reforms which attempt 
 to clear the social current anywhere but at its 
 source ! There are certain moral processes which 
 seem to be antecedent to religion. St. Paul tells 
 us that the man who does not provide for those of 
 his own household has not only denied the faith, 
 but "z's worse than an infidel" ; and religion does 
 not so much teach as assume a knowledge of the
 
 MADAME DE HAUTEFORT 191 
 
 primary facts of nature, which those, who in our 
 day are worse than infidels, represent as doctrines, 
 in order that it may be possible to deny them. 
 The family titles are those by which God reveals 
 His relation to us and ours to Him ; and to mis- 
 interpret them is to obscure revelation in its very 
 terms. The human affections are the living figures 
 by which we are to be taught to comprehend and 
 feel those which are divine. The performance of 
 natural duties, and the possession of natural know- 
 ledge, constitute and indicate that " honest and 
 good heart," which we are told is not the fruit of 
 the seed of faith, but the ground in which it must 
 be sown, in order to come to perfection. Now the 
 relation of man and woman, besides being the first 
 and strongest of human ties, is the source from 
 which they all spring ; and a miscomprehension 
 of the nature of the primary relation necessarily 
 involves error in the understanding of those which 
 are derivative.
 
 XXI 
 
 A SPANISH NOVELETTE 
 
 MR. GOSSE is doing useful work in editing a 
 series of translations of remarkable foreign novels, 
 most of which are little known to English readers. 
 To persons the most of us whose knowledge of 
 Spanish books is confined to Don Quixote^ Pepita 
 Jimenez will come as a complete and delightful sur- 
 prise ; and yet not only is it, as Mr. Gosse says, "the 
 typical Spanish novel of our days," but it is typical 
 of a great and altogether unique national literature. 
 Though Juan Valera's personality differs from the 
 priestly character of Calderon as far as may well 
 be, since he is said to have made himself " con- 
 spicuous by his bonnes fortunes^ his wild freaks at 
 the gaming-table, his crazy escapades, his feats 
 of horsemanship, and his powers as a toreador," 
 the very same distinguishing vein which makes 
 such plays as Calderon's Life is a Dream, and 
 The Wonder-working Magician the astonishment
 
 A SPANISH NOVELETTE 193 
 
 and delight of every reader who comes upon them 
 for the first time an astonishment and delight 
 almost like that of the acquisition of a new sense 
 this very same vein sparkles through and 
 vivifies the modern novel Pepita Jimenez. Alike 
 in Calderon and in this work of Juan Valera we 
 find that complete synthesis of gravity of matter and 
 gaiety of manner which is the glittering crown of 
 art, and which out of Spanish literature is to be 
 found only in Shakespeare, and even in him in a 
 far less obvious degree. It is only in Spanish 
 literature, with the one exception of Dante, that 
 religion and art are discovered to be not neces- 
 sarily hostile powers ; and it is in Spanish litera- 
 ture only, and without any exception, that gaiety 
 of life is made to appear as being not only com- 
 patible with, but the very flower of that root which 
 in the best works of other literatures hides itself 
 in the earth, and only sends its concealed sap 
 through stem and leaf of human duty and desire. 
 The reason of this great and admirable singularity 
 seems mainly to have been the singular aspect of 
 most of the best Spanish minds towards religion. 
 With them, religion has been, as it was meant to 
 be, a human passion ; they have regarded dogma 
 as the form of realisable, and, by them, realised 
 experience, and the natural instincts of humanity 
 as the outlines of the lineaments of the Divinity 
 O
 
 194 A SPANISH NOVELETTE 
 
 " very God and very man." Witness the writings 
 of their greatest Saints and theologians, in which 
 dogma is, as it were, fused in, and becomes, psycho- 
 logy, instead of remaining, as it has done with us, 
 a rock, indeed, of refuge to many, but a rock of 
 stumbling and offence to many more, and of these 
 especially such as have been endowed with the 
 artistic temperament. 
 
 Pepita Jimenez is essentially a " religious novel" ; 
 none the less so because it represents the failure 
 of a good young aspirant to the priesthood to 
 attain a degree of sanctity to which he was not 
 called, and depicts the working in his aspirations 
 of a pride so subtle as to be very venial, though, 
 in some degree, disastrous. Mr. Gosse seems to 
 me to mistake the motif of the novel entirely in 
 regarding it as representing the necessary failure of 
 a " divine ardour brought face to face with an 
 earthly love." It represents nothing but the 
 exceedingly common mistake of young and ardent 
 minds in measuring their present capacity by their 
 desires, and striving to take their station on the 
 top of an alp, when they are only fit for the ascent 
 of a very moderate hill. One of the many points 
 in which Catholic philosophy shows itself superior 
 to the philosophy of Protestant religionists in the 
 knowledge of the human mind is its distinct recog- 
 nition of the fact that there are as many degrees of
 
 A SPANISH NOVELETTE 195 
 
 human capacity for holiness as for any other kind 
 of eminence, and that for most men a very mod- 
 erate degree of spirituality is the utmost for which 
 they are entitled to hope. An ardent Protestant, 
 misinterpreting the words, " Be ye perfect as I am 
 perfect," is apt to think that he is nothing if not a 
 Saint, whereas Juan Valera knew that to be a Saint, 
 as to be a poet, is to be about one in twenty 
 millions, and he has made a very amusing as well 
 as a very useful book out of the vain strivings of 
 his hero for 
 
 " Heroic good, target for which the young 
 Dream in their dreams that every bow is strung ; " 
 
 and the course of experience by which he is 
 brought to conclude 
 
 " That less than highest is good, and may be high." 
 
 That disgusting abortion, the English "religious 
 novel," would have made the enthusiastic young 
 deacon relapse into despair and profligacy, instead 
 of letting him marry the pretty girl who had 
 turned him from his supposed " vocation," and 
 who thereafter caused him to live an exemplary, 
 conscientious, and religious life as a country 
 gentleman, and farmer of his own land. 
 
 There is plenty of " analysis " in the English 
 religious novel, but no psychology ; and analysis 
 which has not psychological knowledge for its
 
 196 A SPANISH NOVELETTE 
 
 material is merely the anatomy of a corpse, and 
 fails as completely in illustrating and extending 
 knowledge of life as the anatomy of the body has 
 confessedly failed, from the time of Galen and 
 Hippocrates, in explaining the vivifying powers of 
 nature. Psychology comes naturally to the typical 
 Spanish mind, for the reasons given above. It 
 deals with the personal relationships of the soul 
 with the personalities which are above the soul, 
 from which the soul exists, and of which the soul 
 is the express mirror ; but of these personal 
 relationships, which every religion confesses, the 
 modern mind, out of Spain, knows comparatively 
 little, though, thanks to the works of St. John of 
 the Cross (two editions of which have lately ap- 
 peared in England), and of certain other works, 
 magnificent as literature as well as for burning 
 psychological insight, the study of true psychology, 
 vulgarly called "mysticism" and "transcendental- 
 ism " (what good thing is not " mystic " and 
 " transcendental " to the modern " scientist " and 
 his pupils ?), shows signs of revival in Europe 
 generally. 
 
 A most important consequence of the human 
 character of Spanish faith, a character manifest 
 alike in the religious philosophy of the times of 
 Calderon and of those of Juan Valera, is the utter 
 absence of the deadly Manicheism, which is the
 
 A SPANISH NOVELETTE 197 
 
 source of modern " nicety " in that portion of 
 literature and art which does not profess, like 
 French, and, in great part, American literature 
 and art, to have abandoned all faith and real 
 decency. Calderon, in works which glitter with 
 an incomparable purity, is more plain - spoken, 
 when need be, than Shakespeare, and constantly 
 exalts the splendour of that purity in his main 
 theme by a by-play of inferior characters which is 
 as gay and " coarse " as anything in Othello or 
 Romeo and Juliet; and though Juan Valera in 
 this novel conforms in the main to the daintiness 
 of the fashion, there is a freedom in his story from 
 the cant of Manichean purity which will certainly 
 limit the number of his readers among ourselves, 
 and probably give some scandal to the most 
 " serious " among those the immense majority 
 of our countrymen and women who do not really 
 believe that God made all things pure, and that 
 impurity is nothing but the abuse of that which is 
 pure, and that such abuse is impure in proportion 
 to the purity perverted. 
 
 In consequence of the characteristics I have 
 endeavoured to indicate, this novel, though ex- 
 pressly " religious " in its main theme and most of 
 its details, is as "natural," concrete, and whole- 
 somely human and humanly interesting as one of 
 Sir Walter Scott's. There is in it no sense of
 
 198 A SPANISH NOVELETTE 
 
 dislocation or incompatibility between the natural 
 and the spiritual. From the dainty, naive, inno- 
 cently coquettish, and passionate Pepita, who is 
 enraged by her lover's pretensions to a piety 
 which, though she is devoted to her beautifully 
 adorned " Infant Jesus," she cannot understand, 
 and in which she sees only an obstacle to the 
 fulfilment of her love for him, to the saintly 
 ecclesiastic, who, almost from the first, sees the 
 incapacity of his pupil, Don Luis, for the celibate 
 heights to which he aspires, but who understands 
 life in all its grades too well to look upon his 
 strivings and his "fall," as Don Luis at first 
 esteems it, with other than a good-humoured 
 smile, all is upon one easy ascending plane and 
 has an intelligible unity. Valera has taken no 
 less care with and interest in the subordinate 
 characters than the principals in the story. They 
 are all true and vivid and unique in their several 
 ways, and we have the most complete picture of a 
 very foreign world without the slightest drawback 
 of strangeness or want of verisimilitude.
 
 XXII 
 ON OBSCURE BOOKS 
 
 THE next best thing to understanding an obscure 
 matter, and the first and most necessary step to- 
 wards understanding it, is to know that you do 
 not understand it, waiving for a time and in your 
 own respect the popular and pleasant assumption 
 that everything in which there is anything to be 
 understood can be understood by everybody and 
 at once. The threadbare saying, "If you do not 
 understand a man's ignorance, you should think 
 yourself ignorant of his understanding," should 
 be cherished by every reader who does not read 
 merely to pass the time. Active, intelligent, and 
 modest minds are able, in most cases, to discover 
 at a glance whether the obscurity of a book is due 
 to the author's ignorance or their own ; but, un- 
 happily, such minds are rare ; and the consequence 
 is that most of the great books of the world rest 
 unread upon the dusty bookshelves of our big
 
 200 ON OBSCURE BOOKS 
 
 libraries. " What is the use of reading books 
 which, perhaps, we could not understand, if we 
 tried ever so much ? And what a bore it would 
 be to learn to understand them if we could," is 
 the remark that will naturally occur. But the 
 fact is that the obscure works of great writers are 
 never wholly obscure, unless they are purely 
 technical and scientific ; and that the little which 
 may easily be understood in them is generally 
 sweeter and brighter than all the sweetness and 
 light of many a perfectly intelligible and widely 
 popular author. 
 
 Nor is the reading the less pleasant to any one 
 who seeks more in reading than the merest amuse- 
 ment, because the way is somewhat rough, and 
 there may be great boulders or even craggy hills 
 which he must avoid and go round instead of 
 over. The way often sparkles with gems of for- 
 gotten novelty, and it is the most agreeable of 
 surprises to find how many problems which agitate 
 the contemporary heart have been settled once 
 and for ever, hundreds or thousands of years ago. 
 You may not understand one-tenth of a treatise 
 by Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, 
 Swedenborg, or Hegel ; but what you do com- 
 prehend remains engraved in your memory like a 
 precious intaglio, and you find that you have been 
 learning things and not listening to gossip about
 
 ON OBSCURE BOOKS 201 
 
 things. Then there is the pleasure always great 
 to an active mind of being active. You have to 
 ask yourself at every step whether you have rightly 
 understood ; and, whether you concur or not, the 
 novelty of style excites your intelligence, instead 
 of laying it to sleep, as the smooth conventional 
 language of the day often does, so that you think 
 you understand when you do not, or when, per- 
 haps, there has been nothing to understand. Again, 
 the often hopeless obscurities of some passages 
 throw the clearer parts into such splendid clear- 
 ness ! How delightful to find in Plato, among a 
 good deal from which the light has, perhaps, for 
 ever departed, a political passage, long, clear, 
 forcible, and as d propos as if it had been written 
 yesterday by a supernaturally vigorous correspond- 
 ent of the Times. Nor is the reading of the 
 authors of great exploded systems of philosophy 
 to be neglected. Though erroneous as well as 
 obscure, the errors of great original thinkers are 
 commonly related in a more living manner to 
 truth than the commonplaces and pretentious 
 rtckaujfit of the present day ; and, in the course 
 of proving what may now seem, or may really be, 
 an absurd proposition, they often scatter about 
 them many sparks of living truth, any one of 
 which might suffice for the theme about which a 
 ninteenth- century writer might talk profoundly
 
 202 ON OBSCURE BOOKS 
 
 through sixteen pages of a first-class periodical. 
 Even from a far less elevated point of view than 
 that of the true student, the reading of such books 
 is in its results profitable and delightful. If you 
 want to shine as a diner-out, the best way is to 
 know something which others do not know, and 
 not to know many things which everybody knows. 
 This takes much less reading, and is doubly 
 effective, inasmuch as it makes you a really good, 
 that is, an interested listener, as well as a talker. 
 Your neighbour at the board can tell you what 
 the Times or the Contemporary Review, which 
 you have not read, says about the matter, and 
 you ean supplement the information by something 
 on the subject from Hobbes or Hooker ; and each 
 converses with the pleasant sense of being superior 
 to the other, and able to instruct him. 
 
 But to return to the point of view of the student, 
 there is no more agreeable result of reading such 
 books as we are treating of than that of gradually 
 discovering that great Doctors of the Church, 
 schoolmen, mystics, and others were not such 
 idiots as we fancied we were bound to believe 
 them to have been, and as, indeed, such elegant 
 extracts as are all that is known of them by most 
 enlightened persons may seem to prove them to 
 have been. Such passages may appear to be not 
 obscure, but very clear nonsense, and may seem
 
 ON OBSCURE BOOKS 203 
 
 to imply, if we know no more, that these writers 
 could not possibly write sensibly on anything. 
 But the result of a direct and considerate ac- 
 quaintance with their books themselves may be 
 the discovery of quite simple explanations of such 
 seemingly hopeless anomalies ; for example, the 
 strange traditional practice which prevailed among 
 the schoolmen, and prevails in some theological 
 schools even in the present day, of confirming a 
 thesis by some brief and quite inconclusive argu- 
 ment or authority, and then going on with the 
 real proof in the body of the chapter or article, 
 is the clue to the existence of many most amusing 
 demonstrations of the imbecility of men who have 
 won immortal names for their learning and sa- 
 gacity. But perhaps the greatest of all the 
 advantages of this sort of reading is the advantage 
 of keeping company with the intellectually great, 
 apart from any specific and tangible acquisition 
 of knowledge. Great authors are always greater 
 than their books. The best part of the best play 
 of Shakespeare is Shakespeare himself, the vast, 
 wholesome, serene, and unique individuality which 
 stands above and breathes through tragedy and 
 comedy alike. Fortunately, the most ordinary 
 education implies contact with several of these 
 primary spheres of benign influence ; but there 
 are many others, totally different in character,
 
 204 ON OBSCURE BOOKS 
 
 which might be approached with the same kind 
 of benefit by the general student, but scarcely ever 
 are. Of course, the principal excuse for this is 
 that many or most such works as we are con- 
 templating are in some language which the 
 ordinary reader though he may have been at 
 a public school and University cannot comfort- 
 ably read. But this excuse is insufficient. The 
 best writers, even the best poets, bear translation 
 best ; and unless a man can read Greek comfort- 
 ably, which is really an exceedingly rare accom- 
 plishment, or can peruse Latin freely, which is 
 not at all a common acquirement even among 
 the most expensively educated, he will get much 
 more of the author's thought by handling fairly 
 good translations than by consulting originals, of 
 which the inherent obscurity may be quite sufficient 
 for his patience.
 
 XXIII 
 SHALL SMITH HAVE A STATUE? 
 
 THE modern practice of sending the hat round for 
 money to set up in the Abbey or elsewhere a 
 statue, or at least a bust, of Smith, during or 
 immediately after his lifetime, in grateful remem- 
 brance of the service or pleasure he may have 
 done us, can rarely be indulged without danger of 
 making him and ourselves ridiculous in the eyes of 
 our children or even in our own, should we 
 survive for a few years the amiable folly of having 
 raised an abiding memorial of our possibly transient 
 enthusiasm. There could have been no doubt of 
 the propriety of setting up a statue to the Duke of 
 Wellington after Waterloo, however much there 
 may reasonably have been about the propriety of 
 the statue itself which the ladies of England 
 dedicated to the hero. But even in the case of 
 such obvious and measurable merits as those of 
 warriors it is best not to be in a hurry. Historical
 
 206 SHALL SMITH HAVE A STATUE ? 
 
 criticism has discovered that the credit of great 
 battles and even campaigns has not always been 
 rightly due to the commanders-in-chief. Again, 
 improvements like those of the steam jet, by which 
 it became at once possible to raise the rate of 
 railway travelling from under ten to over fifty miles 
 an hour, the penny post, and the electric telegraph, 
 are certainly matters for permanent memorials, 
 provided that they are raised to the right men. 
 But improvements and inventions of this magnitude 
 scarcely ever are, in the first instance, attributed 
 to the right men, who are generally more or less 
 obscure and unrewarded geniuses. It is the 
 practical man, who has the quickness to see the 
 money value of a great invention and the means of 
 removing the last external hindrance to its popular 
 use, that gets the statue, and the money too. Few 
 would envy him the latter; but it is cruel to him 
 no less than to ourselves to be in such haste to 
 decorate him with a laurel crown, which the touch 
 of time may change into a fool's cap. Again, 
 unless statues are due to good intentions ardently 
 prosecuted without reference to results, we ought 
 to be very careful how we impose immortality upon 
 great philanthropists and humanitarians. It would 
 not have been for the abiding happiness and 
 honour of the two eminent prelates and the able 
 editor who lately constituted themselves high
 
 SHALL SMITH HAVE A STATUE ? 207 
 
 commissioners of public morality, to have had 
 their images set up in Hyde Park back to back, 
 like the figure of Hecate Triformis, and so to have 
 been forbidden eternally to blush unseen, as no 
 doubt they now desire to do. It would be prudent, 
 also, to wait a while before conferring diplomas of 
 immortality upon the heroes of legislation. The 
 fame of repealers of navigation laws and founders 
 of household franchise should be considered as in 
 a state of pupilage for at least fifty years ; and 
 they should not be allowed to sport bronze thighs 
 and the toga virilis before the public buildings or 
 in the squares of the metropolis, ere the paper 
 on which their Bills are printed is well dry. It 
 should be remembered that, in our haste, we may 
 be placing an awful and easy vengeance in the 
 hands of posterity ; which might choose, not 
 to pull down such monuments, but to let them 
 stand. 
 
 But of all modes of premature insistence upon 
 the verdict of fame, the one which is most to be 
 avoided, if we would avoid making ourselves un- 
 necessarily absurd, is that of decreeing immortality 
 during or soon after their lifetime to literary men 
 and artists. If, indeed, there existed academies 
 of art and literature, which should consist of all the 
 best men of their kind, all actuated by the most 
 disinterested appreciation of merit not their own
 
 208 SHALL SMITH HAVE A STATUE ? 
 
 in their own profession, then we might have some 
 approximation but only an approximation to a 
 safe tribunal ; and if Smith and his friends were 
 such boobies as to want the cake of fame before it 
 was baked, Smith might be " busted up " in the 
 Abbey, or obtain a parliamentary guarantee of 
 being puff-worthy, in his own day or immediately 
 after, with little more to be said against it than 
 that it was a want of decorum, all the more dis- 
 gusting on account of the dignity of the occasion 
 and the absence of any call for hurry. But, as no 
 such academy could exist, or, if it existed, could 
 make its decrees prevail with those who are the 
 decreers of statues, how does the matter stand ? 
 A man who has done his best, perhaps, to give us 
 harmless amusement, and whose only crime is that 
 of having succeeded too well in adapting himself 
 to the poor capacities and passing moods of his 
 present audience, is now in such danger as he 
 never was in at any former time of rinding himself 
 rewarded with ten thousand per annum here and 
 an eternity of contempt hereafter. 
 
 If persons of culture and natural taste have 
 often to confess that the muse of a painter, a poet, or 
 a novelist whose muse was the seemingly faultless 
 mistress of his affections five-and-twenty years ago 
 now stands before him as a false Duessa, what 
 should we think of the right to raise monuments
 
 SHALL SMITH HAVE A STATUE? 209 
 
 claimed by that public which is as changeable in its 
 tastes as it is liberal in paying for their indulgence? 
 Yet it is this public that is venturing more and 
 more audaciously to anticipate the verdict of time. 
 True, it often uses a Minister or a committee of 
 experts as its agent, councillor, and representative ; 
 but it is none the safer for that. If the agents 
 themselves know better, they know the value of 
 their own popularity too well to say so ; or they 
 may have a secret grudge against Smith, and so 
 cry " Ay " with all their hearts when the people 
 ask, " Shall Smith have a statue ? "
 
 XXIV 
 
 IDEAL AND MATERIAL GREATNESS 
 IN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 ST. THOMAS AQUINAS writes, " Great riches are 
 not required for the habit of magnificence ; it is 
 enough that a man should dispose of such as he 
 possesses greatly, according to time and place. :; 
 As in life, so in art, and especially in architecture, 
 greatness of style is quite independent of wealth 
 of material ; indeed, wealth of material is con- 
 stantly found by true artists to be a fatal hindrance 
 to grandeur of effect. Hence great poets and 
 painters are usually very shy of what commonly 
 pass for great subjects that is, subjects full of 
 obvious interest and splendour ; and, if they treat 
 such subjects at all, they begin by denuding them 
 as far as possible of all that makes them attractive 
 to the novice in art, until they come to a simple 
 greatness which was hitherto a secret. 
 
 Now I wish to point out what I conceive to be
 
 GREATNESS IN ARCHITECTURE 211 
 
 a principal condition of great effect with small 
 means and in small or comparatively small build- 
 ings. It is magnificence in the expenditure of 
 such material as the architect possesses, and 
 especially of stone, brick, and timber. It is 
 commonly supposed, even by architects, that a 
 solidity of wall and roof sufficient to put far out 
 of sight any idea of insecurity or decay, if properly 
 shown forth and expressed by chamfer, moulding, 
 cornice, shafted recess, and the many other 
 " decorations " which are principally methods of 
 showing the thickness of wall and weight of roof, 
 is all that noble building calls for ; and that the 
 frequent nay, general practice of ancient archi- 
 tecture in going much further than this was simply 
 waste of material caused by want of mechanical 
 knowledge. But those who know most of ancient 
 architecture know best that there was no want of 
 mechanical knowledge displayed in it, but quite 
 the reverse. Not only is mechanical knowledge, 
 equal to if not beyond our own, proved by such 
 buildings as York and Salisbury Cathedrals, but 
 the house and cottage builder of the sixteenth and 
 seventeenth centuries seems to have known all 
 the details of his business fully as well as the 
 most ingenious economist of material that ever 
 " scamped " a modern tenement of the same order. 
 He was fully aware that the strength of a joist or
 
 212 IDEAL AND MATERIAL GREATNESS 
 
 rafter lay rather in its depth than in its breadth, 
 and that, for a time at least, a few boards two 
 inches thick and ten inches deep, set edgeways, 
 would suffice to carry the roof, which nevertheless 
 it pleased him better to lay upon a succession of 
 beams ten inches square. It is the reality, and 
 the modest ostentation of the reality, of such 
 superfluous substantiality that constitutes the secret 
 of effect in many an old house that strikes us as 
 " architectural " though it may be almost wholly 
 without architectural ornament ; and, in the very 
 few instances in which modern buildings have 
 been raised in the same fashion, the beholder at 
 once feels that their generous regard for the far 
 future is of almost as poetical a character as the 
 aged retrospect of a similar house of the time of 
 Henry VII or Elizabeth. A man now hires a bit 
 of ground for eighty or ninety years ; and, if he 
 has something to spare for spending on beauty, 
 he says to himself : " I will build me a house 
 that will last my time, and what money I have 
 over I will spend in decorating it. Why should 
 I waste my means in raising wall and roof which 
 will last five times as long as I or mine shall 
 want them ? " The answer is : Because that 
 very " waste " is the truest and most striking 
 ornament ; and though your and your family's 
 usufruct of a house thus magnanimously built may
 
 IN ARCHITECTURE 213 
 
 be but a fifth of its natural age, there lies in that 
 very fact an "ornament" of the most noble and 
 touching kind, which will be obvious at all seasons 
 to yourself and every beholder, though the 
 consciousness of its cause may be dormant ; 
 whereas the meanness of your own plan will be 
 only the more apparent with every penny you 
 spend in making it meretricious. 
 
 I have said that a modest ostentation of extreme 
 substantiality is also an element of architectural 
 effect in the kind of building contemplated. This, 
 indeed, is the properly architectural or artistic 
 element. A house will look respectable, and 
 something more than respectable, which has only 
 the reality of being built somewhat better than 
 well. But consciousness is the life of art, and 
 there must be a quiet rejoicing in strength, solidity, 
 and permanence, to give these characters that 
 power over the imagination which a work of art 
 must have. A labourer's cottage or the smallest 
 village church which has this character is an 
 artistic and rightly architectural work ; and the 
 nobleman's mansion or the cathedral which wants 
 it is not. Here comes in that true " decoration " 
 which scarcely the humblest house of the sixteenth 
 or early part of the seventeenth century was alto- 
 gether without. In out-of-the-way villages and 
 roadside inns of that period, you will find your
 
 214 IDEAL AND MATERIAL GREATNESS 
 
 attention directed to the thickness and weight of 
 the roof-timbers by a carved or moulded cornice, 
 that measures and expatiates upon the depth 
 and substance of the rafters terminating there ; 
 or one or more of the brackets supporting the 
 joists of the overhanging bedroom floor will 
 have a touch of carving, to declare with what 
 ease and pleasure the burthen is borne upon their 
 sturdy shoulders ; or the lintel of the door will 
 show and boast of the thickness of the wall by a 
 moulded chamfer. A single touch of such decora- 
 tion glorifies the whole, and puts the living spirit 
 of art into the body of an honest building, however 
 humble it may be. 
 
 So far is size from being needful to greatness in 
 architecture, that one of the very grandest pieces 
 of domestic building I ever saw is a little village 
 inn of extremely early date in a Sussex village 
 which scarcely anybody has ever heard of, though 
 it stands but two miles from Berwick Station on 
 the Sodth Coast Railway. This village is Ald- 
 friston. It has in its little market-place an 
 extremely ancient stone cross, far gone in decay, 
 having never been touched by restorer. The 
 whole village has an air of antiquity such as 
 breathes from no other English village I have 
 ever seen ; but older than anything, except the 
 cross, is its hostelry no bigger than a well-to-do
 
 IN ARCHITECTURE 215 
 
 bailiff's cottage, showing no Elizabethan "variety" 
 in its ground -plan, and the front to the street 
 having but three windows above and one on either 
 side of the doorway. When I came upon it quite 
 unprepared for seeing anything particular in the 
 village, this house fairly took my breath away by 
 its exemplification of the way in which ideal and 
 material greatness differ. It was like coming, in 
 a newspaper article, upon three or four lines of 
 great and unknown poetry. Yet it was nothing 
 but a cottage built mightily, and with a mighty 
 consciousness of being so built. It seems never 
 to have been touched, except here and there by 
 the house-painter, since the date at which it was 
 raised, which was probably in the fifteenth 
 century, the carved foliage in the spandrels of 
 the small arched doorway indicating that period. 
 An architect learned in mouldings might perhaps 
 fix the date to within twenty-five years, from those 
 of the cornice. The bedroom storey projects con- 
 siderably over the ground-floor, and is borne by 
 great oak brackets, the faces of which are adorned 
 with painted carvings of figures in mitres, one 
 being St. Hubert, as is shown by the stag at his 
 feet. The spaces between these brackets are 
 ceiled with a great plaster " cavetto," which, 
 together with the brackets, springs from a wide 
 timber cornice above the door and windows of the
 
 216 IDEAL AND MATERIAL GREATNESS 
 
 ground-floor. In the hollow of this cornice are 
 four or five grotesque faces, the painting of which, 
 though fresh, seems, like the painting of all the 
 other decorations, to be nothing but the original 
 colouring faithfully transmitted. The three win- 
 dows of the upper floor are bays, and are carried 
 by great spread brackets, carved and painted 
 with most curiously quaint and simple representa- 
 tions of St. George and the Dragon and symbols 
 of his tradition, the tails of two dragons in the 
 central bracket running in their extremities into 
 the outlines 01 a pointed and foliated arch. The 
 roof is covered in with slabs of ragged stone, 
 thick enough for a London pavement. The 
 dimensions of the timbers of the roof are proved 
 inferentially by the fact that the roof-tree has not 
 sagged an inch under some four hundred years 
 of this burthen; and their mass and power are ex- 
 pressed artistically by their termination in a cornice 
 of immense depth, and consisting of a greater 
 number of moulded " members " than I remember 
 to have seen in any other feature of the kind. 
 The walls are plastered in their plain spaces, 
 but indicate their construction of solid oak 
 which, by the way, is far more durable than 
 either brick or any ordinary stone by the chance 
 appearance in one place of a strange animal 
 which runs up the face of the wall and is obvi-
 
 IN ARCHITECTURE 217 
 
 ously carved out of a beam otherwise hid by the 
 plaster. 
 
 There is nothing heavy in the total effect of 
 this extraordinary piece of cottage architecture ; 
 for there is artistic animation everywhere, and the 
 expression of its strength is that of living power 
 and not mere passive sufficiency. 
 
 To build such a cottage now might cost about 
 three times as much as it does to build a common 
 country inn of the same dimensions. It would 
 not, of course, suit a London citizen so well as a 
 Chiselhurst villa of like size and cost ; but it 
 would be a fit abode for a duke in difficulties.
 
 XXV 
 
 "OLD ENGLISH" ARCHITECTURE, 
 ANCIENT AND MODERN 
 
 THE style of architecture in which the great 
 majority of country houses, and very many town 
 houses, from the cottage to the mansion, have been 
 built during the past fifteen years, is a very great 
 improvement upon the nameless mode for which 
 no better title could be invented than the " factory 
 style" which prevailed in house architecture 
 during great part of last century and the first half 
 of this. And it is a yet greater improvement upon 
 the falsification of that simple though sordid way 
 of building, by attempting to change its misery 
 into magnificence by "compo " mockeries of stone 
 construction and a style of ornament created to 
 express the thickness of the wall or the weight of 
 roof of a Renaissance palace. Most persons are 
 contented with describing the improved mode as 
 Old English, fancying that it is a real return to
 
 " OLD ENGLISH " ARCHITECTURE 219 
 
 the way in which houses were built in the reign ol 
 Elizabeth or James or thereabouts. But there is 
 a notable distinction between ancient and modern 
 " Old English." It is this : the "variety" in form 
 which is of the essence of the last was but the 
 accident of the first. Whitehall and the Parthenon 
 are not more simply symmetrical in their masses 
 than are many of the finest specimens of Early 
 English domestic architecture ; and the " variety " 
 which we moderns suppose we are copying is, in 
 nearly all cases, the result either of change of plan 
 in the process of building, or of subsequent addi- 
 tions by which the original symmetry was sacrificed. 
 That the sacrifice was often without loss, and often 
 even a gain as such a sacrifice could never be 
 in the case of a Greek or Renaissance building 
 is owing to the fact that domesticity is the central 
 thought and expression of the one kind of archi- 
 tecture and public ostentation of the other. Accord- 
 ingly, the keynote of an Early English house is its 
 stack of chimneys, upon which it was considered 
 impossible to lavish too much ornament. From 
 the cottage of the Sussex labourer to the great 
 nobleman's mansion such as that most exquisite 
 of all existing specimens of Tudor building, 
 " Compton in the Hole " the chimneys are the 
 things which first attract the eye and delight it 
 longest ; whereas the Greek, Roman, or Renais-
 
 220 "OLD ENGLISH" ARCHITECTURE, 
 
 sance house is heartily ashamed of its smoke, and 
 has never yet succeeded thoroughly in dealing 
 with its disgrace. Symmetry, then, in the old 
 country house was looked upon as good ; but con- 
 venience and comfort, and the expression of con- 
 venience and comfort, as better. Now, in a house 
 well and deliberately planned for the convenience 
 of any household, large or small, the ground-plan 
 and elevation will be naturally simple and sym- 
 metrical; simplicity, too, iseconomical, and economy 
 a part of domesticity. Accordingly, the great 
 Tudor mansions and palaces of England, the 
 builders of which could have best afforded to pay for 
 the supposed charm of " variety," are, for the most 
 part, the simplest in plan and elevation ; while it is 
 in the ill-planned and often-added-to village inn or 
 rectory that the vagaries of " variety," so alluring to 
 the modern mind, are almost exclusively found. 
 
 In Old English architecture this variety is a very 
 real though accidental beauty. It has the double 
 charm of intensifying the primary expression of 
 domesticity by the very sense of the sacrifice 
 which has been made to it, and of giving the 
 building, however small, a touch of historical char- 
 acter. But what if these beauties of the old 
 architecture are sought to be obtained in the 
 modern by sacrifices of convenience, economy, 
 and domesticity, and by a deliberate planning of
 
 ANCIENT AND MODERN 221 
 
 structural " after- thoughts," or subsequent neces- 
 sities, from the beginning ! What if a house, full 
 of small and uncomfortable rooms connected, or 
 rather isolated, by mazes of dark staircases, land- 
 ings, and passages, has been manifestly built at 
 one blow, and at twice the cost at which a simple 
 and symmetrical and scarcely less nay, to the 
 initiated, more beautiful house of the same period 
 of architecture might have been built, without the 
 sacrifice of any modern convenience ? Surely, if 
 the devil were an architect his "favourite sin" 
 would be this kind of " cottage of gentility." 
 
 The " variety " of a real Old English house not 
 only is nearly always the outcome of some con- 
 venience or necessity discovered or arising after 
 the first building of it, but is nearly always obvi- 
 ously so. Some little difference of style not too 
 great to break harmony, will indicate a difference 
 of date ; or it will be shown by some infraction 
 of the lines of the original building. The library 
 or parlour which cuts off a return of the label 
 of the pantry window is manifestly an addition. 
 But it would be too ridiculous to copy such proofs 
 of accident and alteration into a nineteenth-century 
 rectory, villa, or mansion ; and the consequence 
 is, that to an understanding eye its variety is often 
 in appearance, as it is in reality, mere imbecility 
 aping the movements of reason.
 
 222 "OLD ENGLISH' ARCHITECTURE, 
 
 There is no real anachronism in the revival of 
 the ordinary details of Old English house architec- 
 ture, though there is sometimes in that of the 
 material. The " half-timbered " wall belongs only 
 to times and places in which bricks and tiles are 
 not to be had, and in which abundance of the 
 best oak timber is. But hooded gables, deep 
 cornices, bracketed bays, weather-tiled walls, the 
 projection of upper over lower storeys, and almost 
 all the other charming features of the mode, have 
 sound reasons of use which hold as good now as 
 they did in the year 1 600 ; and in these reasons 
 alone consists their architectural charm. The 
 characteristic Old English chimney the most 
 ornamental feature of the style has its full justi- 
 fication in use ; the loading of the top with pro- 
 jecting layer after layer of bricks, laid even or 
 notch-wise, forming that security against hurricane 
 so often sought, in the " factory " style, by the 
 one or more long iron rods which agreeably 
 break the sky-line of many modern mansions. 
 Even the scalloped tile, which so often replaces 
 the square in old weather-tiled walls, has its utili- 
 tarian purpose a saving of material ; the greatest 
 breadth of the scallop being superposed upon the 
 juncture of the tiles below, so as to protect it from 
 wet. The projection, in a long low house of the 
 modest rectory or farmhouse type, of the bedroom
 
 ANCIENT AND MODERN 223 
 
 storey over the basement is the feature farthest of 
 all from being merely ornamental. In such a 
 house more space was usually wanted for bed- 
 rooms than for living-rooms and offices, and a 
 very moderate projection of the upper storey 
 supplies this additional space.
 
 XXVI 
 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 
 
 I 
 
 EVERY one has a perfectly definite impression of 
 what is meant by an architectural style ; and 
 would recognise a building as Egyptian, Greek, 
 Ecclesiastical, Gothic, Norman, or Moresque, not 
 merely by the characteristic details of each of 
 these manners, but still more by a perfectly dis- 
 tinct character attained in each manner by the 
 combination of those details a character which 
 is totally different from any effect that could 
 result from any such random though more or less 
 constant collocation of details as is to be found, 
 for example, in the bastard " Italian Gothic." 
 This, though it was made popular by Mr. Ruskin, 
 has about as much relation to a true style as a 
 curiosity-shop has to a well-ordered living-room. 
 It is a remarkable fact, and one especially worth 
 dwelling upon in this context, that Italy, the
 
 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 225 
 
 country of the arts, never had an architecture, and 
 could never even adopt one from its neighbours 
 without degrading or abolishing its character as 
 a style. The so-called "Romanesque" was an 
 incongruous hybrid until it was developed into the 
 " Norman " by the northern nations of Europe ; 
 and though the pointed arch made its appearance 
 in Italy very early, no Italian architect ever seems 
 to have had any perception of its artistic capacity, 
 even when he adopted in his buildings the con- 
 structive system to which that feature belonged. 
 Italy had great architects, but no great archi- 
 tecture. Buildings like St. Mark's, the Doge's 
 Palace, the Duomo of Florence, etc., owe their 
 influence upon the imagination to the personality 
 of the architect, which has known how to impress 
 itself on a combination of in themselves unmean- 
 ing or incongruous forms, rather than to that 
 imaginative integrity of style which makes every 
 Old English parish church look as if the Spirit had 
 builded its own house. Every great architect 
 like every great poet, painter, or musician has 
 his own style, whether he works on the lines of 
 a great integral style like the Northern Pointed, or 
 in a mongrel mode like that of the Romanesque, 
 or in no accepted manner at all. Sir Christopher 
 Wren could not build a common brick house 
 without imposing his own character upon it. 
 Q
 
 226 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 
 
 But this personal character or style, which always 
 marks the work of the great artist, is usually 
 almost beyond the power of analysis ; and, were 
 it otherwise, would scarcely be worth the trouble 
 of analysis, which would only serve the purpose 
 of encouraging imitations of that which owes its 
 value to its unique individuality. 
 
 The five styles above named i.e. the Egyptian, 
 the Greek, the Pointed Gothic, the Norman, and 
 the Moresque are so much distinguished trom 
 all other modes of building by the integrity with 
 which a single idea is carried out in every detail, 
 that in comparison with them there is no other 
 manner which deserves to be called a style. And 
 it is hard to conjecture the possibility of the 
 development in the future of any sixth style which 
 shall deserve to rank with them ; for these five 
 seem to have exhausted the five possible modes 
 in which weight or mass of material apparently 
 the foundations of all architectural expression 
 can be treated. Two of these styles, the Norman 
 and the Moresque, though equal to the others in 
 artistic integrity, are immeasurably inferior to 
 them in significance ; the first three having dealt 
 with and exhausted the only modes in which the 
 primary fact of weight of material in stone con- 
 struction can be subordinated to religious expres- 
 sion, and the field itself of religious expression in
 
 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 227 
 
 architecture having been in like manner cleared 
 by these styles : for when the Material, the 
 Rational, and the Spiritual have once found utter- 
 ance in stone as they have done in the temple- 
 architectures of Egypt, Greece, and Northern 
 Europe what fourth religious aspect remains to 
 inspire a new art ? 
 
 It is proposed in this paper to consider the 
 several expressional themes of the five great 
 architectures, and to give a brief exposition of 
 the way in which they are worked out. It should 
 be premised, however, that as it does not require 
 a knowledge of how an effect is produced in order 
 to feel that effect, so it is not pretended that any 
 very distinct consciousness of the adaptation of 
 means to expressional ends must have existed in 
 the minds of the inventors of the great styles of 
 architecture. All artistic production involves a 
 large element of lucky accident, of which the true 
 artist alone knows how to avail himself; and, jt 
 is often from a lucky accident in a happy season 
 that a great work or a great art will take its 
 origin, as the dropping of a grain of sand into 
 a saturated solution of certain salts will form the 
 centre and cause of its sudden crystallisation. As 
 sound philosophy is only sound sense spread out, 
 so true criticism of great work is only right per- 
 ception spread out ; and the use of criticism of
 
 228 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 
 
 such work is not so much to teach men to enjoy 
 it, as to enable them to pronounce a prompt and 
 assured and demonstrable condemnation of bad or 
 inferior work when false or exaggerated claims are 
 put forth in its favour. 
 
 The three primary architectures seem to have 
 owed their origin to three accidents. The 
 immense and wholly unreasonable massiveness 
 which characterises the Egyptian style is prob- 
 ably due to its having emerged from caverns. It 
 carried 'into the air its memory of having had the 
 rocky earth for its roof and walls, and of the time 
 when its close-packed squadrons of granite shafts 
 were a necessity which it cost nothing to provide. 
 The Parthenon, again, is a manifest glorification 
 in stone of the forms of the wooden hut ; and the 
 pointed arch, with all its immense consequences, 
 arose from the constructional accident of cross- 
 vaulting. 
 
 Weight, then, which is the most general and 
 characteristic attribute of matter, was taken by 
 the Egyptian, Greek, and Gothic architects as the 
 ground of.their several ideas whether consciously 
 or not, is no concern of ours. The Egyptian 
 architect, as will be shown, subordinated every 
 detail, from the mass of the pyramid which may 
 be regarded as the form taken by weight in the 
 abstract down to almost every particular of
 
 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 229 
 
 decoration, to the creation of an effect of com- 
 pulsory submission to an irresistible and for-ever- 
 enduring material power. The mightiest bulk of 
 Alp or Apennine is a bubble compared with an 
 Egyptian temple, which is the awful life of 
 ponderosity and crushing earthliness ; and there is 
 no need to pause in order to point out how aptly 
 this expression suited the "political and religious 
 character of the people out of whom Israel fled. 
 
 In the architecture of Greece, weight repre- 
 sentative of material force was still the theme ; 
 but it was material force which had met with its 
 match, the force of mind ; and the ponderous 
 entablature, every detail of which expresses 
 weight, is lifted and borne beautifully in air by 
 a series of members every one of which conveys 
 the impression of an opposite ascendant force 
 recognising but not suffering in the least degree 
 from its burthen, beneath which the animated 
 shaft is seen to fling away a part of its supporting 
 power just at the point where most weight is 
 borne, and the Caryatides of the Pandrosium 
 can afford to stand with one knee bent easily 
 forward. Here, then, again was a great and new 
 , phase of the human mind envisaging the universe, 
 expressed by simple reference to weight of material 
 in its temples. , . 
 
 The third great phase that in which an ascetic
 
 230 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 
 
 spirituality, refusing all willing alliance with earth- 
 liness, recognises it only as a thing to be defied 
 and to be made the measure of the spirit's pre- 
 dominance obtained its artistic expression by 
 employing material weight as the symbol of its 
 opponent ; which it neither suffers from nor enters 
 into alliance with, but vanquishes, converts, and 
 glorifies in ascending streams of life. 
 
 The Moresque style also owes its singular 
 integrity of effect to a peculiar mode of regarding 
 the idea of gravitation : if that can be called a 
 mode of regarding it which consists in a most 
 ingenious and fanciful ignoring of it, either as an 
 oppressor, an ally, or a vanquished foe. The 
 honeycombed domes of the Alhambra and the 
 Mosque of Cordova hang apparently suspended 
 in air upon " pendentives," like sunny clouds in 
 station ; and the astonishing art by which innumer- 
 able details are made to concur in this effect would 
 justify this style in ranking with the three fore- 
 going, had this effect any symbolic meaning for 
 the human race and its religions ; but it has no 
 meaning for men who have their feet upon the 
 earth, and is only adapted for the palaces and 
 temples of a race of sylphs or gnomes. 
 
 Lastly, the Norman style, though no less con- 
 sistent an exponent of one idea than are the other 
 temple styles, is founded upon no reference to
 
 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 231 t 
 
 superincumbent weight, but depends almost wholly' 
 upon its boast of the mass and eternal stability of 
 the wall. It well conveys the solemn expression 
 of a calm eternity of time ; but for religious 
 purposes it will not bear the least comparison with 
 the flamelike Gothic, expressing at once the peace 
 and ardour of the " eternal moment." 
 
 In the following pages a short analysis will be 
 given of the somewhat obscure means by which 
 the obvious expressions of these five great archi- 
 tectures are obtained. 
 
 11 
 
 The symbolisation of material life and power by 
 an elaborately artistic treatment of the mere fact 
 of weight, which is the most universal and con- 
 spicuous attribute of matter, is the object of 
 every general form and of almost every, so-called 
 decorative, detail of Egyptian architecture ; the 
 few exceptions, such as the occasional intrusion of 
 the lotus and palm into the capitals of the columns, 
 being due to an obscure but probably intimately 
 related symbolism of a different kind. 
 
 The pyramid is the simplest artistic form by 
 which mere weight can be expressed. It is nothing 
 more nor less than a mound or mountain shaped
 
 232 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 
 
 so as to give it an artistic consciousness. The 
 form of the Egyptian Temple is nothing but the 
 expression of this elementary form of weight with 
 emphasis upon emphasis, until there results such 
 an accumulation and concentration of the idea of 
 weight that the whole building seems as if it would 
 crush the earth on which it stands. This effect 
 is mainly produced by a multiplication of the 
 pyramidal form in the masses of the building ; by 
 its truncation at various heights, which introduces 
 the powerful element of suggestion ; by numerous 
 inferior members which emphasise the expression 
 by contrast ; and by such a multiplication and 
 formation of shaft and capital as to convey the 
 idea of an overwhelming burthen above them. 
 The great double-towered Propylon of the typical 
 Egyptian Temple, is, in its entire mass, a truncated 
 pyramid ; and, as simply such, is a much more 
 forcible expression of pyramidal form than the 
 pyramid itself. This expression is doubled by the 
 division of the upper part of the mass into two low 
 towers. Immense cavetto cornices crown these 
 towers, and intensify their effect by the strongest 
 contrast. Their pyramidal outline is emphasised 
 to the eye by the great roll-mouldings which follow 
 the angles of the masonry from summit to base. 
 Finally, the plane of the great doorway by which 
 the two masses of the Propylon are joined leaves
 
 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 233 
 
 that of the pyramidal mass and becomes nearly 
 perpendicular, while the sides of the doorway 
 become actually perpendicular constituting a 
 cumulative contrast which seems to double the 
 already manifold emphasis of the main bulk of 
 the building. The comparatively low mass of 
 the body of the temple behind the Propylon 
 is still the truncated pyramid crowned with the 
 contrasting cornice ; but the truncation occurs so 
 near the ground, and so far from what would 
 be the apex were the converging lines of wall 
 continued upwards, that the pyramidal form 
 would scarcely have been suggested, were it not 
 for its plainer manifestation in the Propylon ; but, 
 with this aid, the eye at once catches the idea of 
 the decapitated pyramid throughout. Through 
 openings in these strongly inclined walls appeared 
 the vertical colonnades ; and such niches or aper- 
 tures as were practised in these walls had the 
 contrast of perpendicular jambs. In front of the 
 vast ponderosity of the Egyptian Temple rose the 
 final and most effective contrast to the whole the 
 " fingers of the sun " : the pair of tall and slender 
 monoliths, which only tapered sufficiently to give 
 them the reality and the appearance of security. 
 In the interior of the building the idea of weight 
 had to be conveyed in a different manner namely, 
 by the bulk, number, and form of the columns.
 
 234 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 
 
 Every detail of shaft and capital with the two or 
 three exceptions already spoken of was calculated 
 to express actual sufferance from the burthen borne 
 by them. The shafts bulge towards the base, and 
 the capitals likewise swell as they approach their 
 juncture with the shafts ; shaft and capital being 
 usually clothed with vertical convex mouldings : 
 the exact reverse of the Doric shaft, which, as will 
 be shown, had exactly the opposite idea to convey. 
 Unlike the repose and sufficiency of the Doric 
 column, the Egyptian expresses violent and yet 
 insufficient energy, which seems to rush towards 
 and to be partially driven back by the entablature. 
 The immense thickness of wall, wherever it was 
 shown, was emphasised by sculpture in very low 
 relief. These are only the main elements of an 
 effect which, and the means of producing which, 
 will be more forcibly felt by a corresponding 
 analysis of Greek architecture culminating in the 
 Doric of the Parthenon. 
 
 This temple has a double basement, the first of 
 which is on a "dead level" ; from this rises the 
 second basement, in which the true life of the 
 building commences. In 1837 Mr. Pennethorne 
 announced the important discovery that the lines 
 of this basement, together with those of the entab- 
 lature, are not horizontal lines, but parabolic 
 curves; and Mr. Penrose, in 1852, in a work
 
 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 235 
 
 published by the Society of Dilettanti, gave the 
 actual measurements of these curves ; which are 
 found to prevail not only in the horizontal but in 
 all the vertical lines and faces, in the inclined lines 
 of the pediment, and in the axes of the shafts. 
 These curves are so subtle the rise being only an 
 inch or two in as many hundred feet that they 
 are rather felt than seen ; but that they are felt, 
 even by the comparatively gross modern eye, is 
 clear enough from the different way in which it is 
 affected by the Parthenon itself and by any imita- 
 tion of it by modern builders. It is probable that 
 these curves were in some instances meant to 
 correct optical illusions, by which straight lines 
 would look hollow, etc. ; but a far greater motive 
 for their introduction was an effect of animation in 
 the whole and in every part and of unity through 
 the predominance of general curves, which a 
 cultivated eye can discern very easily, but which is 
 probably beyond our present powers of analysis. 
 Above the basement the Doric Temple externally 
 and the Greek Temple's architectural beauty is 
 all outside consists of two parts, of opposite and 
 exactly balanced significance. The first consists 
 of a colonnade of shafts, each of which rises at 
 once from the stylobate, without the footing or 
 " base " found in subsequent styles. The shaft 
 diminishes somewhat rapidly, until it impinges
 
 236 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 
 
 upon and ends in the capital ; which is an 
 hyperbolic " ovolo," spreading widely under the 
 "abacus'' or tile, which constitutes the neutral 
 point, or point of rest, between the column and the 
 entablature. The outlines of the shaft (always 
 fluted in early Greek architecture) converge from 
 the base towards the capital not in straight lines, 
 but in decided parabolic curves, of which the 
 departure from straight lines is greatest at about 
 two-thirds of the height of the shaft. This curve 
 of the shaft is called the entasis ; and upon it 
 depends mainly the expressional life of the shaft. 
 It will be remembered that there is a similar 
 swelling in the Egyptian shaft : but this is where 
 it approaches the base. Its position in the Greek 
 shaft expresses an ascendant energy of force, which 
 is manifested most strongly as it approaches the 
 capital. In the one case yielding under weight is 
 expressed, in the other superabundant po\ver. 
 This animated expression is multiplied by every 
 multiplication of the outline provided by the flut- 
 ings, which in the Greek shaft are concave, 
 expressing concentration of force towards the 
 centre ; whereas, in the Egyptian the flutings are 
 convex, expressing further a tendency to bulge and 
 burst under their burthen. A little under the 
 capital, and just where the Greek shaft is thinnest, 
 one or more deep channels are incised in its
 
 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 237 
 
 substance, showing that power can be triumphantly 
 cast away just where power is most needed. The 
 Egyptian shaft, at the same point, is usually bound 
 with a heavy thonglike moulding, as if to prevent 
 it from being crushed. The ovolo, which consti- 
 tutes the Doric capital, provides and expresses the 
 distribution of the power of the shaft to meet the 
 superincumbent entablature; and the "quirk" or 
 sudden diminution of its breadth immediately 
 under the abacus is a repetition of the device of 
 the incised channels for proving the existence of 
 superabundant power. At the point where the 
 Greek entablature is met with easy grace by the 
 noble spread of the hyperbolic ovolo, the Egyptian 
 capital, as a rule, diminishes and seems to dash 
 itself with violence towards the point of conflict. 
 
 As every feature of the column thus expresses 
 cheerful and abundant energy, every detail of the 
 entablature is a mode of expressing the weight 
 which is thus met and carried with such graceful 
 power. The Doric entablature is made up ot 
 three parts architrave, frieze, and cornice each 
 expressing in a different manner the idea of weight. 
 The architrave is a massive layer of stone with its 
 face unbroken by any sort of " decoration " ; it 
 projects beyond the neck of the shaft, so that a line 
 dropped from it would about touch the outer 
 circumference of the shaft at its base. In this
 
 238 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 
 
 member, then, weight is expressed by a simple 
 mass directly imposed upon the centres of support. 
 The frieze is a similar layer of masonry having its 
 face broken up by triglyphs members resembling, 
 and no doubt originating in, the terminations of 
 beams of timber. These triglyphs are slightly 
 projecting quadrilateral masses of stone, consider- 
 ably higher than they are broad, and cut into deep 
 vertical channels. They would express little 
 besides the memory of the old timber construction, 
 were it not for the gutta which hang below them, 
 separated from them by a fillet. These guttas, by 
 multiplying the vertical lines of the triglyphs, 
 confer upon them the appearance of pendants, the 
 force of the earthward tendency being increased 
 by the fillets, whose momentary interruption of 
 that tendency seems to increase it. To increase 
 what Franz Kugler calls the " triglyphic character," 
 little pendants sometimes occur at the top of the 
 chamfered sides of the triglyphs. No one can 
 realise the whole force of this extremely simple 
 means of expression except by trying what the 
 Doric entablature would be without it. There is, 
 or was, a church in the Waterloo Road, massively 
 built and preserving pretty well all the features 
 of the Doric Temple, except the triglyphs and 
 guttae. Their omission makes the whole building 
 light-headed. There seems to be no meaning in
 
 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 239 
 
 the vast current of upward force in the fluted 
 shafts, if that is all they have to carry. Any one 
 can satisfy himself of this point by simply covering 
 the frieze, in a print of a Doric Temple, by a slip 
 of white paper. Of course this all -important 
 triglyphic character, though only expressed in the 
 frieze, is felt to apply to the entire mass of the 
 entablature, of which the weight is thus made 
 visible. 
 
 As the architrave expresses simple weight, and 
 the frieze weight depending, so the cornice is weight 
 impending. The great projection of this massive 
 member beyond the face of the frieze and architrave 
 contains in itself the ground of that expression ; 
 but it is carefully heightened by the deep under- 
 cutting of the corona, which throws the mass 
 forward and separates it by a dark shadow from 
 the top of the frieze ; and it is still further 
 heightened by a repetition of the rows of guttae 
 which, however, in this instance seem to be sliding 
 off the inclined faces of the mutules (inclined slabs 
 set in the undercutting of the corona) ; so that the 
 same device that gives dependent weight in the 
 frieze, expresses weight impendent in the cornice. 
 
 These are only a few of the more obvious 
 means whereby the lovely equilibrium of the Doric 
 style is created. There are many other details, 
 impossible to notice here ; but every one bears
 
 240 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 
 
 the central thought constantly in view, and adds 
 to the most perfect though not perhaps the 
 highest architectural beauty the world has ever 
 seen. The other so-called "orders" are only 
 modifications or corruptions of the same idea. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Before proceeding to show how the idea of 
 Greek architecture, symbolised in a system ot 
 construction and decoration which emphasised to 
 the eye in every detail an exact adequacy of 
 endeavour to effect, was modified or corrupted in 
 the so-called " Ionic," " Corinthian," and other 
 " orders," a few words should be said about the 
 very peculiar and little understood treatment of 
 the wall by the Doric architects. As a contrast 
 to the active conflict of apparently ascending 
 power in the columns with the gravitating power, 
 rendered, as it were, visible in the entablature, the 
 treatment of the walls of the naos, pronaos, and 
 posticum that is, of the body of the temple and 
 of the porches created by the prolongation of the 
 side walls is emphatically passive and neutral, 
 and just the reverse of the treatment of the wall 
 by the Egyptians, who made it the base of a 
 truncated pyramid, a mass of conscious ponder-
 
 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 241 
 
 osity, which " lean'd down on earth with all its 
 weight." The vertical junctures of the stones of 
 the walls of the Greek Temple were rendered 
 invisible by the polishing of their adjacent faces ; 
 but the horizontal faces were rough-worked, so that 
 the wall-face presented a series of straight lines 
 parallel to the base. These lines were only strong 
 enough to be plainly seen, through the gaps in 
 that torrent of ascending power, the fluted colon- 
 nade ; increasing that force by their contrast, but 
 themselves expressing nothing but the fact that 
 the wall was a wall, built in ordinary courses of 
 masonry. Had the perpendicular junctures of the 
 masonry been visible, the contrast to the shafts 
 which either were monoliths or had the junctures 
 of the frustra so polished that they looked like 
 monoliths would have been lost. The ante, or 
 ends of the walls, are treated in a way which is 
 particularly noteworthy. In the Roman corrup- 
 tions of Greek architecture these antas were con- 
 fused with and often treated as flattened and 
 applied shafts. The fact of passive resistance of 
 the wall, in contrast to the active resistance of 
 the colonnade, is carefully but very unobtrusively 
 expressed in these wall-terminations in the purest 
 Doric. Where the strongly ascending force of 
 the shaft sacrifices power in order to prove its 
 abundance, the antas are increased in breadth and 
 R
 
 242 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 
 
 strength by successive cappings, or by mouldings 
 so undercut as to express a rolling over or suffer- 
 ance from superimposed weight ; there was no 
 entasis or visible swell in the antse until they 
 were used by later architects who had lost the 
 sense of what entasis meant ; these wall-termina- 
 tions were further strengthened by a base, which 
 no Doric shaft ever had. The base and capping 
 were, more or less, continued along the top and 
 bottom of the whole wall, the doors and other 
 apertures of which usually diminished in width 
 towards the top, suggesting but still in a passive 
 and unobtrusive way the simple reality of weight 
 and pressure in the wall, and affording a further 
 and most important contrast to the living " empor- 
 streben," as the German critics call it, of the line 
 of shafts. Thus Mr. Ruskin is wrong in saying 
 that " in the Greek Temple the wall is as nothing ; 
 the entire interest is in the detached columns 
 and the frieze (entablature ?) they bear." The 
 wall is the expression of the passive life that be- 
 comes active when it is concentrated in the colon- 
 nade, and has so much more work to do. 
 
 In the " Ionic Order" exactly the same idea of 
 the symbolisation of the balance of material and 
 intellectual forces is carried out with the same 
 integrity as in the Doric, though with less simpli- 
 city and obviousness. The idea of elasticity as
 
 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 243 
 
 noticed by Franz Kugler in his Handbuch der 
 Kunstgeschichte for the first time is added to 
 that of simple upward met by simple downward 
 force. It occurs especially in the base and the 
 volutes of the column, as these members are found 
 modified and perfected by the Attic architects. 
 By tracing the growth of the Attic base, much 
 light will be thrown upon the Greek architectural 
 idea. A base is a support for the shaft. The 
 Doric had no base, because the notion of any 
 weight to be supported was not allowed to be 
 expressed anywhere but in the entablature ; the 
 Ionic differing from the Doric mainly in this 
 that the visible conflict between weight and sup- 
 porting power, which in the Doric was wholly 
 concentrated upon the abacus, or tile, where the 
 column met the entablature, was in the Ionic so 
 distributed that almost every member was at once 
 agent and reagent, expressing an adequate power 
 of supporting what was above it, but also requiring 
 support from that which was below. A great 
 square stone or plinth is the simplest form of base ; 
 but this would have looked poor and inorganic 
 underneath the elaborately fluted and voluted 
 column. The square stone cut into a circle with 
 its edges rounded is the next simplest form ; but it 
 was left for the Romans to use this base, for they 
 had not the sensitive eye that discerned the fatal
 
 244 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 
 
 effect of swelling or sufferance from weight which 
 this cushion-like form conveys. The first Ionic 
 base had a scotza, or hollow receding moulding, 
 under the round torus. This contradicted the 
 above impression ; but it did it violently and 
 awkwardly. Finally, the Attic base was formed 
 of a large torus below, a smaller one above, and 
 the scotia, or receding moulding, between them ; 
 so that the base which, on the whole, was a 
 spreading and supporting member was neverthe- 
 less narrowest where it would have been thickest 
 had it suffered, like a cushion, from the weight it 
 carried. The fluting of the Ionic order, while it 
 expressed ascendant force like the Doric, had a 
 flat space or fillet instead of a sharp edge between 
 each concavity, and each line of fluting had semi- 
 circular terminations. The effect of this was to 
 endow the shaft itself with a substantive expression 
 of weight, which had no existence in the Doric 
 shaft, that flew, like a sheaf of arrows, from the 
 earth to strike against the ovolo of the capital. 
 The Ionic capital, like the Ionic base, had its 
 elastic character perfectly developed by Attic 
 architects. In the original Ionic the ears of the 
 volutes simply hang on either side of the ovolo 
 like horns ; but in Attic specimens they appear to 
 be formed by the pressure of the entablature upon 
 a series of elastic curves. The Ionic abacus
 
 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 245 
 
 differs from the Doric in expressing, in common 
 with all the other members of the Ionic column, 
 an active supporting power ; whereas the Doric 
 tile is simply negative, the " point of rest " be- 
 tween the opposing forces of the column and 
 entablature. The architrave, the first member of 
 the Ionic entablature, instead of expressing weight 
 by simple mass, as the Doric architrave does, 
 consists of two or three layers of masonry, the 
 upper projecting over the other, and giving to the 
 entire entablature the expression of impending 
 weight, which in the Doric is limited to the 
 corona. In the frieze there are no gutta? or 
 triglyphs, because the pendent effect which these 
 give to the Doric frieze would be inconsistent 
 with the continuation of the idea of support as 
 well as weight throughout all the members of the 
 Ionic order. In the pure Doric there is absolutely 
 no such thing as ornament ; though Kugler, not- 
 withstanding that he is of all critics the one who 
 has come nearest to the perception of the true 
 sense of Greek architecture, asserts that the head 
 and foot members of the antae are merely orna- 
 mental. How far this is from being the case has 
 been now shown. The so-called " egg and arrow " 
 and other figures into which Greek mouldings 
 were cut have nothing to do with ornament. 
 They are simply the means of emphasising the
 
 246 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 
 
 forms of the mouldings and rendering them visible 
 at distances at which otherwise they would not be 
 distinguished. But in the Ionic we have real 
 architectural ornament, and lines of roses or bands 
 of foliage are inserted at points where it is desir- 
 able to express in the absence of more severe 
 means of expression the freedom and cheerful- 
 ness with which a superincumbent weight is 
 carried. 
 
 The " Corinthian " is only a highly decorated 
 Ionic, and the Greeks of the good age seem to 
 have thought it fittest for secular or semi-secular 
 purposes. It attained somewhat of the character 
 of an " Order " only in the hands of the Romans, 
 who had little taste for or understanding of pure 
 Greek art, but had sufficient intelligence to see 
 how to apply ornament for the most part in the 
 right places. When they tried to improve upon 
 the Doric of the Parthenon, they did it in a very 
 characteristic way. They simplified it by doing 
 away with the fluting of the shaft and setting it 
 upon a base of the single torus or roll-moulding, 
 so that it looked like a big sausage set on end 
 upon a small curly one ; and instead of the channel 
 cut in the neck of the shaft which must have 
 been a hopeless puzzle to them they bound the 
 shaft at the same point with a projecting mould- 
 ing : as the Egyptians did rightly, because they
 
 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 247 
 
 wanted to express an idea the exact opposite of 
 the Greek one. Meretricious ornament and mock 
 simplicity went hand in hand, and all pretensions 
 to integrity of style had to be abandoned when 
 the arch and the entablature had to be reconciled. 
 As builders the Romans perhaps surpassed all 
 others before or since ; and as architects also 
 they were as great as they could be, in the absence 
 of the Greek devotion to the unity produced by one 
 all-pervading symbolic thought. 
 
 IV 
 
 The pointed Gothic, though it took its rise 
 more than fifteen hundred years after the decay 
 of Attic architecture, and after the intervention 
 of several other styles, of which the " Norman " 
 constitutes one of the five great and only pure 
 styles which the world has seen, is nevertheless 
 in closer artistic relationship with the Attic style 
 than the Norman is, and should be therefore 
 treated earliest. The immense effort which was 
 made to develop a great style from the dome the 
 natural outcome of the circular arch introduced 
 by the Romans never came to anything but the 
 production of here and there an edifice which, 
 like the Pantheon and St. Sophia, were miracles
 
 248 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 
 
 of technical skill, until the idea was taken up 
 by the fanciful Moresque architects. Again, the 
 Norman, though a great integral style, as will be 
 shown, is not based upon any relation to weight 
 of material ; which is at once the great fact of 
 building, and as such is made by the Egyptian, 
 Greek, and Gothic architects to express the 
 material, intellectual, and sphiuial character of 
 worship in ways that exhaust this primary source 
 of architectural symbolism. 
 
 Weight simple and irresistible in the Egyptian, 
 adequately supported in the Greek is, in the 
 pointed Gothic, not abolished as in the Moresque, 
 but totally vanquished and borne above, as by 
 a superior spiritual power. Two happy accidents 
 gave rise to this architectural development. As 
 the Egyptian architecture was an artistic trans- 
 figuration of the necessities of an original cavern 
 architecture, and as the Doric Temple in a similar 
 way transmuted to undreamt-of significance the 
 forms of the timber hut, so the Gothic architecture 
 found in the Basilica the main forms of which 
 were transmitted through the Norman cathedral 
 the accidental key to what probably will for ever 
 remain the supreme glory of the art of temple- 
 building. The Basilica itself contained nothing 
 but the discovery of the most convenient way of 
 roofing -in and lighting a great oblong hall. It
 
 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 249 
 
 consisted of nave and aisles ; the walls of the nave 
 rising within and above those of the aisles, to 
 form the clerestory, which gave the centre of the 
 edifice externally the appearance of unsheathing 
 itself from and soaring above the rest. The means 
 of emphasising and multiplying this effect indefi- 
 nitely as the pyramidal effect was multiplied and 
 emphasised in the Egyptian Temple- were pro- 
 vided by another fortunate accident, the develop- 
 ment of the pointed arch from the mechanical 
 necessities of cross -vaulting. No sooner did a 
 row of pointed arches make its appearance in the 
 clerestory vaulting than the power of Gothic ex- 
 pression, latent in the main body of the building, 
 became obvious. The tower, with its spire, was 
 the first and simplest sequence. It was to the 
 clerestory what this was to the main body of the 
 building. In the course of a few years every 
 detail of construction and decoration became sub- 
 ordinated to the heavenward flight which the main 
 masses of the building had thus taken. 
 
 This fact is a threadbare commonplace of archi- 
 tectural criticism, and one which is obvious to the 
 eye of the dullest beholder of the interior or ex- 
 terior of every Gothic cathedral ; but the number 
 and subtlety of the means by which the effect is 
 gained are beyond all reckoning and analysis ; and 
 the object of this chapter is to point out only a few
 
 250 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 
 
 of them which are not to be found in architectural 
 manuals, and to show how this all-prevailing stream 
 of ardent aspiration was moderated and governed 
 so as to acquire the expression of peace as well 
 as ardour, as befitted the beauty of the Christian 
 temple. Mr. Freeman comes nearer than any 
 other eminent architectural critic to a clear dis- 
 cernment of Gothic character when he says : 
 " Where there is no strife there is no victory ; the 
 vertical line cannot be called predominant unless 
 the horizontal exist in a visible condition of sub- 
 jection and inferiority." But the horizontal line 
 exists in Gothic architecture as much more than a 
 foil to vertical character ; it checks and keeps it 
 within bounds, and exhibits it as an expression of 
 the infinite bounded and peacefully bounded by 
 the finite which is the true character of the life 
 and worship symbolised. Hence the square- 
 headed tower is as fine a finish to the Gothic 
 cathedral as the spire is, if not finer. Compare the 
 tower of York with the spire of Freyburg in Breis- 
 gau the finest spire in the world, rising as it does 
 as a spire from the ground and it will be found 
 that the cessation of the great, steady heavenward 
 current in York, gradually prepared for as it is by 
 the treatment of the face of the tower, and culmi- 
 nating in the compromise of open battlements, each 
 of which frames the pointed arch, creates a more
 
 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 251 
 
 solemn and heart -expanding sense of infinite 
 aspiration than the apparently greater flight of 
 endeavour in the famous spire, which soars indeed 
 twice the height of the tower, but, as it were, 
 evaporates as it soars. The minds of the Gothic 
 architects seem to have been much divided as to 
 which was better : the checked and contained ex- 
 pression of the tower, in which an undiminished 
 force of ascension was suggested, or the exhausting 
 flight of the spire. The tower of Salisbury, for 
 example, was not originally intended to carry the 
 spire, which was added long after the cathedral 
 was completed. They often obtained both features, 
 giving a spire to only one of the west-end towers. 
 There is, perhaps, no more satisfactory treatment 
 of the west front than this, as may be seen in 
 Strasburg Cathedral. Like many other fine effects, 
 this most probably arose from accident the acci- 
 dent of its not being convenient at the time to add 
 the second spire ; but that the incompleteness 
 was fully recognised as a perfection is proved by 
 the many instances of its having been, if not 
 devised, allowed to remain. 
 
 There are three ways of treating the spire. It 
 may commence at the earth, as that of Freyburg 
 does, without the intervention of a tower ; or it 
 may rise from a tower the head of which is con- 
 siderably larger than the base of the spire ; or
 
 252 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 
 
 the base of the spire may coincide with the top of 
 the tower, in which case it is called a "broach 
 spire." The second is the finest and by far the 
 most frequent arrangement, as it combines the 
 effects of spire and tower without confusing them ; 
 a part of the force of the tower being contained 
 and checked, and a part being allowed to take its 
 self-exhausting flight. It is to be observed, how- 
 ever, that even when the spire is most prominent 
 as in Lichfield, where there are three of them 
 it is, when compared with the whole building, only 
 as it were an accidental escape and waste of the 
 vast current of vertical force expressed by the 
 entire mass of the building. Perhaps the most 
 expressive treatment of the tower is in the in- 
 numerable examples in which only a very small 
 proportion of its vertical force is permitted to 
 escape in four or more pinnacles, one of which is 
 often larger than the others. Spires and pinnacles 
 are in most cases covered with lines of " crockets ": 
 figures in which ascending power is usually ex- 
 pressed by the upward growth of a leaf ; which 
 is emphasised by some check, made apparent to 
 the eye by a strong bulge, like that of a current 
 flowing over a stone. Wherever the idea of weight 
 or side-thrust would occur naturally to the eye 
 as in buttresses, lower angles of gables, etc. 
 there is an especial outburst of flaming finial or
 
 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 2 53 
 
 pinnacle, or other mode of contradicting and re- 
 versing the idea, which the Greek architect would 
 have been contented with accepting and beauti- 
 fying. 
 
 Let us now enter the church, which is, within 
 as well as without, a great geyser of ascending 
 life ; which may indeed lose itself in the dimness 
 of the vaulted roof, as the spire loses itself in air, 
 but never shows weariness of its flight or a memory 
 of the earth from which it started. As in Egyp- 
 tian and Greek architecture, so in the Gothic, we 
 must look to the column for the strongest expres- 
 sion of the characterising idea. The Egyptian 
 column suffered and seemed half-crushed under 
 the weight it bore ; the Greek rose to its burthen 
 with the glad assurance of being fully adequate 
 to its task. The Gothic is conscious of no task 
 at all ; but flies, without the least diminution of 
 its substance, and without swelling either under 
 sufferance or gathering of strength by entasis at 
 any particular point, to the commencement of the 
 arch ; where it divides itself, sending up the 
 streams of its clustered shafts, some into the lines 
 of the arch and others to the top of the clerestory 
 wall ; while others again follow the lines of the 
 vaulting, there to meet like fingers joined in 
 prayer, but still having no thought of the weight 
 of the roof they really help to carry.
 
 254 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 
 
 Mr. Ruskin complains of Gothic capitals as 
 he might also have done of Gothic bases that 
 they are unnecessary and ridiculous because they 
 have no bearing power. If they had, they would 
 cease to be Gothic, and the whole character of 
 the wonderful art would be ruined. Capitals are 
 sometimes entirely omitted, as in the shafted 
 piers of Cologne ; but when this is the case the 
 point at which the arch springs becomes doubtful 
 to the eye, and there is something exhausting in the 
 wholly uninterrupted flight of the vertical lines. 
 The capitals, like the horizontal annulet which 
 often binds at intervals the clustered column, have 
 no other purpose but to correct these effects 
 of unrelieved continuity ; and the mouldings 
 of capitals, when they exist, not only have no 
 and express no " bearing-power," but very care- 
 fully express the contrary by various devices of 
 undercutting, etc. It is the same with the base, 
 when it is not altogether dispensed with. The 
 most common form of Gothic base is a curious 
 caricature of the Attic base, the form of which had 
 been transmitted unimpaired to the Gothic archi- 
 tect through the Romanesque and Norman. It 
 was perched upon and overhung a stilted plinth, 
 which was itself a reversal of the expression of 
 elementary support in the original flat plinth ; and 
 the curves of this base were so diminished in one
 
 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 255 
 
 part and exaggerated in another that all reference 
 to supporting power seemed to be derisively 
 abolished. The "ogee" is a moulding which 
 strongly expresses carrying power. A favourite 
 Gothic base was two reversed ogees, the lower 
 projecting far over the edge of the plinth, which, 
 in classic architecture, always afforded a wide- 
 spreading field for the base. And so on. 
 
 It would take a bulky volume to trace the 
 wonderful integrity with which the three modes 
 of envisaging the idea of weight are carried out in 
 the three great architectures ; but enough has been 
 said to give the clue by which a fairly cultivated 
 and perceptive student may follow up the subject 
 for himself. 
 
 Before proceeding to consider the Norman and 
 Moresque styles, a word should be said about that 
 portion of Gothic decoration which does not di- 
 rectly help the main effect of aspiration namely, 
 cusped and foliated tracery, diaper-work, the foliage 
 of spandrels, etc. etc. Kugler says : " This filling- 
 in appears as a peculiar sort of architecture of 
 independent signification." He does not, however, 
 give the interpretation which he sees to be required. 
 Yet there is an interpretation which needs only to
 
 256 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 
 
 be put in words to be obvious to every eye which 
 has made itself familiar with these objects. In 
 exact proportion to the recognised perfection of 
 these details, as it was attained in the middle or 
 " decorated " period of pointed architecture, they 
 become expressions of an idea almost identical with 
 that which has been traced in the mode by which 
 contented suspension or delay of the infinitely 
 aspiring character in the main lines of the building 
 is conveyed. As the inexhaustible torrent of 
 upward life is checked peacefully, but with no 
 denial of infinite potential aspiration, in the square- 
 headed tower, so the same reconcilation of life with 
 law without the least detriment to either that 
 reconcilation which is the consummation of Chris- 
 tianity is expressed even more completely in the 
 more essentially decorative details of pointed archi- 
 tecture. It is in the treatment of foliage that this 
 character can be most easily traced, and this can 
 be done best by comparing it with other modes of 
 treatment. By the Greek architect this and other 
 natural objects, when wanted for ornament, were 
 what is called " conventionalised " ; honeysuckles, 
 roses, and waves of the sea were represented by 
 certain formal figures which suited the lines of the 
 architecture, and were not so much like nature as 
 to attract attention from those all-important lines 
 to themselves. In the Italian Gothic, again, such
 
 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 257 
 
 natural objects are represented as nearly as possible 
 like nature, but with such slight modifications and 
 arrangements as were necessary to give them the 
 consciousness of art. This is the sort of imitation 
 which Mr. Ruskin recommends, and into which the 
 northern Gothic fell in the decay of the art. But 
 in fourteenth-century Gothic that is to say, in the 
 Gothic which was as much superior to that of the 
 thirteenth and fifteenth centuries as the art of 
 Athens was superior to that of Psestum or Rome 
 nature was neither imitated nor conventionalised. 
 The special aim of the fourteenth-century orna- 
 mentation is to show a vigorous life playing with 
 perfect freedom in severely geometrical forms 
 with freedom so perfect that it is difficult to say, 
 whether the life shapes the law or the law the life. 
 This highly and essentially symbolic character is 
 the most marked expression of Gothic tracery. In 
 its decay it took the form of licence and weakness 
 in the French " flamboyant," and of hardness and 
 rigidity in the English " perpendicular " ; the life 
 prevailing to its own destruction in the one, the 
 lifeless law preponderating in the other. Gothic 
 foliage, again, always feels the law ; though, so far 
 from suffering thereby, it is, in its place, far more 
 beautiful than nature. The leafage not only follows 
 geometrical outlines, but swells under its limitation 
 into rich protuberances. The yearning for and 
 s
 
 258 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 
 
 potentiality of infinite ascension, peacefully accept- 
 ing its temporal limitations, and the freedom of life 
 perfected by law, are the artistic motives of every 
 detail as well as of the main masses of pure Gothic. 
 The Romano-Byzantine style attained in its final 
 development, the " Norman," to the unity of idea 
 which is the criterion of a true style. The arch up 
 to this time had been treated partly as a thing of 
 beauty in itself and partly as the constructive 
 theme ; in the Norman it took its place, expres- 
 sionally, as subordinate to the wall, the mass of 
 which it carries and distributes between the piers. 
 The wall itself is the artistic theme of Norman 
 architecture, and all decorative and some construc- 
 tional features are devoted to making a boast of its 
 mass and thickness. Weight the theme in the 
 three highly contrasted modes of the Egyptian, 
 Greek, and Pointed architectures plays no part 
 in the Norman expression. The arch, being 
 recognised by the eye for what it is, an infinitely 
 powerful supporter, can express no proportion to 
 finite superincumbent weight ; and it is treated as 
 a mere head to the gap in the wall between nave 
 and aisle. The expressional intention of the 
 Norman architects in this matter is curiously and 
 decisively proved by the fact that their favourite 
 arch-mouldings were the billet and chevron i.e. 
 lines of notches and angles which completely broke
 
 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 259 
 
 up all idea of arch-character as referable to support- 
 ing power or to weight distributed on to the piers, 
 and transferred the interest of the eye to the 
 material substance of the wall out of which these 
 figures were cut. The piers between these arches 
 were huge masses of wall, either quadrangular or 
 turned into great cylinders, without entasis or any 
 other sign of having to bear anything ; and such 
 decoration as they had was devised so as to 
 deny emphatically any reference to superimposed 
 burthen. The figure of the weight-carrying shaft 
 set in the angles of these piers was their principal 
 decoration ; but they were Lilliputian mockeries of 
 the Attic shaft, or were twisted singly or doubly, 
 and in various other ways ridiculed, as it were, the 
 idea that shaft -power was demanded in the huge 
 masses of masonry to which they were attached. 
 The only thing that these little shafts whether in 
 notch of pier or in recess of porch, blind arcade, 
 or window ever carried or appeared to carry was 
 a single line of the often innumerable mouldings, 
 the purpose of which was simply to display the 
 immense thickness of the wall, which was the true 
 and only theme of this style. This system of 
 emphasising the wall by negativing the shaft-power 
 was occasionally carried into the almost grotesque 
 excess of representing the shaft as broken in the 
 middle ! The favourite treatment of the Norman 
 S 2
 
 260 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 
 
 wall was to boast of its thickness exactly as the 
 Doric shaft boasted of its supporting power that 
 is, by throwing away some portion of it. The face 
 of the wall was recessed in panels, which were 
 often filled with blind arcades. Modern builders 
 often recess walls in this way in order to save 
 material, leaving the wall thickest where it has 
 most work to do ; but the Norman and Lombard 
 architects had no such economy in view. The 
 windows and other apertures in the wall showed, 
 by their shafted and moulded chamfers, a reality 
 of thickness so great that the panelling and blank 
 arcading were seen to be no sacrifice, though they 
 were a delicate and effective suggestion of one. 
 This arcaded panelling is not only on one plane of 
 the wall-surface. The recessed plane is again re- 
 cessed in the same way, and yet again, arcade 
 within arcade ; and finally, in the higher portions of 
 the wall, open galleries are worked in its thickness. 
 In apertures the constructive rule which requires 
 that the bevel or chamfer should slant inwards, to 
 give the better light, is sacrificed to the opportunity 
 of showing the mass of the wall ; and the chamfer 
 is external, and is so treated in its decoration as to 
 increase in every possible way the appearance of 
 thickness. The treatment of the doorway, which is 
 the point from which the expressional idea may be 
 best enforced upon every beholder, is very peculiar.
 
 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 261 
 
 When there is no advanced porch, a deep arch is 
 practised through a great part of the wall, and the 
 thickness is emphasised by an elaborate perspec- 
 tive of shafts and mouldings. Within this deeply 
 recessed arch the actual doorway is often worked 
 as a horizontal-headed aperture in a plane face of 
 wall without chamfer ; the remaining thickness of 
 the wall, not shown by the recessed arch, being 
 thus left to be measured by the imagination, which 
 has already been excited by the display of thick- 
 ness within thickness of decorated archway. The 
 Norman architects, in order still further to increase 
 this effect, had sometimes recourse to a device that 
 can scarcely be justified by strict architectural 
 principles, which should never falsify construction 
 in order to heighten expression. A face of wall 
 was advanced in front of the main wall of the 
 building, in order to obtain a much greater depth 
 of masonry for showing off the multitudinously 
 moulded entrance-arch. This projection did not 
 form a real advanced porch, having its proper 
 ecclesiastical purposes, but was nothing but a boast 
 and display of mass in the masonry which really 
 had no existence, the advanced face of wall con- 
 cealing the fact that there was only mass enough 
 behind it to allow of this misleading display. It 
 may be said that the Gothic spire is constructed 
 simply for display. It is quite true ; but it is
 
 262 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 
 
 avowedly so constructed, and there was no con- 
 cealment about it. 
 
 Mr. Ruskin, by the way, strangely affirms that 
 " the direct symbolisation of a sentiment is a weak 
 motive with all men " ; inferring thence that there 
 was no intention of aspiration in the Pointed archi- 
 tecture which he cares so little for. But surely 
 the reverse is the case ; and such symbolisation, 
 in one way or other, constitutes a great part of the 
 life of all men. The Gothic spire, which was the 
 most costly, as well as the most useless feature of 
 the Gothic cathedral, is a final answer to such 
 doctrine, which strikes indeed at the life of all 
 artistic work. If it did not " symbolise a senti- 
 ment," what was done by it ? 
 
 The round arch, which was the accident of the 
 Norman architecture, being treated therein as a 
 mere cavernous gap in masses of, in themselves, 
 all-sufficient masonry, was, as it has been already 
 said, adopted by the Byzantine architects as the 
 principal theme of their art ; but this arch could 
 be made nothing of, as the main source of expres- 
 sion, until it developed the dome ; and the dome, 
 as it proved, could not be made much of, until the 
 Moresque builders took it in hand. It had the 
 fatal defect, when on a large scale, of lateral 
 thrust, which could be met only by a construction 
 having the double defect of positive and negative
 
 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 263 
 
 falsehood. The domes of St. Sophia and St. 
 Vitale, which the eye naturally presumes to be 
 of one mass or substance with the substructure, 
 are really formed, for lightness, of Rhodian bricks, 
 pumice-stone, and coils of empty jars ; and yet the 
 lateral thrust is so great that it has to be opposed 
 by a vast buttress-system, which is carefully con- 
 cealed, because it would contradict, if exposed, the 
 inevitable effect of extreme lightness in the dome. 
 The Renaissance architects found themselves 
 equally at a loss, as we know, in dealing with this 
 feature. Both in St. Peter's and in St. Paul's there 
 is not one but two entirely separate domes. And 
 when all is done the Byzantine and Renaissance 
 domes are nothing to the eye but hollow shells, 
 with no special artistic expression. 
 
 The Moresque architects hit upon the astonishing 
 fancy of giving the dome substance, and thereby 
 reconciling it with the constructive masses which 
 supported and abutted upon it, and at the same 
 time annihilating the idea of weight. This last 
 idea already lurked in the Byzantine domes of St. 
 Sophia, which seem to be carried wholly by " pen- 
 dentives," and not at all by the piers to which 
 these are attached. But it only lurked therein ; 
 for the eye necessarily inferred the immense lateral 
 weight which piers and walls received. Now the 
 honeycombed domes of the Moresque architecture
 
 264 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 
 
 are multiplied masses of pendentive forms hanging 
 actually in air, and making it impossible for the 
 eye to entertain any idea of lateral thrust in the 
 whole or any part ; and every detail of column, 
 wall, and arch corroborates this fanciful negation 
 of weight so perfectly that, for unity of effect, the 
 Attic architecture remains the only rival of the 
 Moresque, though there is this infinite difference 
 between them : that, whereas the first appeals to 
 the imagination and symbolises the Greek ideal of 
 mental and moral equilibrium in forms of true 
 construction, the latter only excites the fancy by a 
 fairy tale. The whole carrying and resisting power 
 of the arch is flung away by conferring upon it 
 outlines which have no such power (the real 
 carrying arch being hidden in the wall far outside 
 the visible arch) : the arches in colonnades, etc., 
 seldom rest on, but simply abut against, the 
 columns, which usually carry broad perpendicular 
 beams, these being crossed above the arch-head 
 by similar horizontal beams ; so that there is only 
 a small rectangular space of wall over each arch, 
 and the idea of the weight of this being carried 
 by the arch is contradicted by a network of bars 
 carrying the lines of the wall into the upright 
 beams. When a single arch is set in a wall, it is 
 similarly framed in fretwork, the lines of which 
 carry the eye off the arch without being pro-
 
 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 265 
 
 nounced enough to convey the idea that the force 
 of the wall is thus conducted laterally to some 
 support outside the arch. 
 
 It is impossible, in the space which can here be 
 given to the matter, to notice one in a score of the 
 details combining to produce the effect wherewith 
 every one is familiar. The purpose of these 
 pages will have been answered if the vivifying 
 thought of each of the five architectures, which 
 alone are integral styles and not mixtures of styles, 
 has been stated clearly, and such hints of the means 
 by which such thought is conveyed have been 
 given as will enable those who care to go further 
 into the subject to do the rest of the analysis by 
 themselves. 
 
 THE END 
 
 Printed by R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, Edinburgh.