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 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 AT LOS ANGELES
 
 STUDIES OF A BOOKLOVER
 
 Matthew Arnold
 
 STUDIES 
 
 OF A 
 
 BOOKLO VER 
 
 BY 
 
 THOMAS MARC PARROTT 
 
 Profeaor of English in Princeton 
 University 
 
 % 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 JAMES POTT & COMPANY 
 
 1904 

 
 Copyright, 1901 
 By The Booklovers Librakt 
 
 Copyright, 1903, 1904 
 By The Library Publishing Co. 
 
 Copyright, 1904 
 By James Pott & Co. 
 
 First Impression September, 1904 
 
 The Plimpton Press Norwood Mass. 
 
 ' t t . . c It t 1 . » ' c ' « » c 1 ■« « " c "' 
 
 It'. 1 '> i*c'' - 
 
 I ,' - ' < \ I ' ' '
 
 P£ f - 
 
 TO 
 
 JUNIUS SPENCER MORGAN 
 
 CLASSMATE COLLEAGUE AND FELLOW BOOKLOVER 
 
 THIS TOKEN 
 
 OF 
 
 OLD AND UNBROKEN FRIENDSHIP
 
 Preface 
 
 As a form of literary art the elaborate 
 preface is rapidly becoming extinct. 
 And in the case of so unpretentious a book as 
 this little collection of essays there can be 
 neither need nor wish of its momentary re- 
 vival. For these studies are merely frag- 
 < mentary records of a booklover's journeyings 
 3 through the pleasantest of lands — the land 
 of books. They have no theories of literature 
 to expound, no philosophy of life to express. 
 There is not, so far at least as I can see, any 
 one central or dominating idea upon which 
 as a connecting thread these detached essays 
 j$ are strung. They are simply random im- 
 ^ pressions of travel, and nothing more. 
 
 I have chosen to call them "studies," be- 
 cause, it seems to me, they bear the same rela- 
 tion to finished works that the hasty sketches 
 
 vii 
 
 "St 
 
 tn 
 
 DC 
 
 35 
 
 434390
 
 Preface 
 
 of a painter in some notebook or portfolio of 
 travel bear to his completed pictures. They 
 make no pretence to being complete and de- 
 finitive discussions of their themes. They 
 attempt only to seize certain aspects, to record 
 certain impressions, of stopping-places on the 
 journey. They may at least amuse the casual 
 reader; at best, perhaps, they may interest the 
 more thoughtful and lead him back once more 
 to the great originals. 
 
 To the editor of the Handbooks published 
 by the Booklovers Library I owe my thanks 
 for his kind permission to reprint the essay on 
 The Poetry of Matthew Arnold, which originally 
 appeared in the Handbook of the Greater 
 Victorian Poets. For its publication in the 
 present collection this essay has been carefully 
 revised and corrected. The essays on the 
 Personality of Johnson and on The Last 
 Minstrel first appeared in the Booklovers 
 Magazine, and I am indebted to its editor for 
 the courtesy which has permitted their in- 
 
 viii
 
 Preface 
 
 elusion in this volume. Of these the first 
 now appears in a much longer form, the second 
 is reprinted with only a few verbal changes. 
 Were I to thank by name all the friends 
 who have aided me by encouragement, ad- 
 vice, criticism, and correction during the 
 years in which these studies have been put 
 together, I should overrun the limits of a 
 preface. But if by chance any one of them 
 should see this page and recall those instances 
 of help which I so well remember, I would 
 ask him to feel the sincerity of my unspoken 
 thanks and to think of me as not all unmind- 
 ful, not all ungrateful, for past help and present 
 friendship. T M P 
 
 Silver Bay, 
 
 Lake George, 
 August, 1904. 
 
 IX
 
 Table of Contents 
 I 
 
 The Poetry of Matthew Arnold 1 
 
 II 
 
 Old Edinburgh and Her Poet- Laureate 56 
 
 III 
 
 The Autobiography of Milton 98 
 
 IV 
 
 The Personality of Dr. Johnson 132 
 
 V 
 
 "The Frugal Note of Gray'' 173 
 
 VI 
 
 The Charm of Goldsmith 207 
 
 VII 
 
 The Last Minstrel 238 
 
 VIII 
 
 The Vitality of Browning 262
 
 The 
 Poetry of Matthew Arnold 
 
 IT is by his poetry that the place of Matthew 
 Arnold in English literature will in the end 
 be determined. Such was not, it is true, the 
 opinion of his immediate contemporaries. 
 Whether they cheered him as a child of the 
 Sun God slaying with the shafts of Apollo 
 the giants of Philistia and the dragons of anti- 
 quated superstition, or whether they shrank 
 from him as a faithless and hopeless blas- 
 phemer of national traditions and the ancient 
 faith, the men of his own age thought rather 
 of his prose than of his poetry. One reason 
 for this no doubt lay in the predominating 
 quantity of his prose. His poems are con- 
 
 [1]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 tained in one not very bulky volume; his 
 essays and discourses, his lectures and criti- 
 cisms — religious, educational, social, and 
 literary — occupy some nine or ten. His 
 poetry was for the most part written before 
 he was forty years old; he remained a promi- 
 nent figure in the world of prose till his death 
 at something over sixty-five. 
 
 Moreover there was something in the 
 quality of Arnold's poetic work that tended to 
 prevent an instant popularity. Neither the 
 sentiment nor the splendor which made 
 Tennyson the darling of his age were his; he 
 did not have the quick, keen interest in life, 
 the broad human sympathies, wliich so rapidly 
 recommended Browning to the hearts of think- 
 ing, feeling, men and women on both sides of 
 the Atlantic, when once the spell of his strange 
 new style was broken. Arnold's first volume 
 of poems attracted hardly any attention; his 
 second he himself withdrew from the public 
 before fifty copies were sold. A nobly sym- 
 
 [2]
 
 The Poetry of Matthew Arnold 
 
 pathetic review by Swinburne of the New 
 Poems of 1867 marked the turn of the tide. 
 This was the first book of Arnold's poems 
 that met with an appreciative reception from 
 the general public; and with this book he laid 
 aside his singing robes. Except for the lofty 
 elegy on Dean Stanley and two or three grace- 
 ful and tender poems on the death of some 
 household pets, he wrote no line of poetry 
 again. 
 
 But to-day, when his theological polemics 
 are neglected alike by friend and foe, when 
 his social ideals are, for good or evil, very 
 rapidly left behind in the tremendous advance 
 of scientific materialism, when even his literary 
 judgments are assailed as partial and subjec- 
 tive, the beauty and the worth of his poetry 
 are dawning more brightly upon a world that 
 begins to wonder at its own blindness. A 
 hush has fallen upon English poetry in the 
 last decade. The clanging trumpet tones of 
 Browning ring no longer in our ears; the rich 
 
 [3]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 and tender harmonies of Tennyson no longer 
 overwhelm the other voices. Out of the past 
 there rises the cool, clear, flute-like note of 
 Arnold — not broad, not deep, but of a charm 
 for the lovers of purity and perfection in art 
 such as is hard to find elsewhere in English 
 poetry. 
 
 No good biography of Arnold exists, but 
 after all it does not matter much. The im- 
 portant facts of his life are known, and his 
 Letters, published in 1895, give us a presenta- 
 tion of his personality such as few biographies 
 afford. He was the oldest son of a father 
 scarcely less famous than himself. Dr. Thomas 
 Arnold, the scholar, historian, and preacher. 
 He received the orthodox classical English 
 education, at Winchester, at Rugby under his 
 father, and at Oxford. As an undergraduate 
 at the university he did not greatly distinguish 
 himself, although he won a prize for poetry 
 and took a fellowship at Oriel College. But 
 he drank deep of the fountains of classical 
 
 [4]
 
 The Poetry of Matthew Arnold 
 
 literature and poetry. In one sense of the 
 word, at least, he is the most classic of the 
 Victorian poets. In poetry, as in criticism, 
 he looked back to the Greeks as his models, 
 and his love of clearness, of order and restraint, 
 of firm outline and polished phrase, are largely 
 due to his long and loving study of the ancient 
 masters. 
 
 There were, however, other influences upon 
 his youth than that of the Greeks. Foremost 
 of these, perhaps, was the influence of Goethe. 
 No other English poet reveals in the same de- 
 gree as Arnold the deep impression left on 
 modern life and thought by the greatest of all 
 modern poets since Shakespeare. What ap- 
 pealed to him especially in Goethe was the 
 keen insight into the problems of life, the 
 serene and lofty spirit that rose above the tur- 
 moil of the world, the mingled strength and 
 sweetness of the poet's nature. In prose and 
 verse Arnold is never weary of paying homage 
 to his master. 
 
 [5]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 "He took the suffering human race. 
 He read each wound, each weakness clear; 
 And struck his finger on the place, 
 And said: Thou ailest here, and here! 
 He look'd on Europe's dying hour 
 Of fitful dream and feverish power; 
 His eye plunged down the weltering strife. 
 The turmoil of expiring life — 
 He said : The end is everywhere — 
 Art still has truth, take refuge there! 
 And he was happy, if to know 
 Causes of things, and far below 
 His feet to see the lurid flow 
 Of terror, and insane distress, 
 And headlong fate, be happiness." 
 
 Even more important, perhaps, in its in- 
 fluence on the young Arnold was the poetry 
 and personality of Wordsworth. Of all the 
 poets of the revolutionary period, Words- 
 worth has exercised the greatest power over 
 his successors in English literature. Indeed, 
 with the exception of Browning, the most 
 original and independent of them all, there is 
 hardly a poet, before the advent of the Pre- 
 
 . [6]
 
 The Poetry of Matthew Arnold 
 
 raphaelites, who does not show strong traces 
 of his masterful sway. But no other poet 
 was so reverent a disciple of Wordsworth as 
 Matthew Arnold. This was due not merely 
 to the instinctive worship which boyhood pays 
 to genius, though the long sojourns of the 
 Arnolds in the region where every flower, and 
 rock, and stream was sanctified by Words- 
 worth's song may have laid the foundations 
 of his discipleship. It was mainly because 
 Wordsworth had found the secret which Arnold 
 sought after in vain — the secret whose mys- 
 tery wrung from him at times his most lyrical 
 cry. One word appears again and again in 
 Arnold's verse — "calm." Throughout his 
 battle with the crushing influences of the world, 
 in all his doubts and agonies of spirit, Arnold 
 looked forward to this goal. It was nottriumph, 
 or knowledge, or love that Arnold prayed for, 
 but serene, unshaken repose, attained after 
 the storms of life by self-mastery of spirit. 
 And Wordsworth had not only attained this 
 
 in
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 calm, but seemed to have the power, in happy 
 moments, to guide his followers to the same 
 desired haven. 
 
 "He found us when the age had bound 
 Our souls in its benumbing round; 
 He spoke, and loosed our heart in tears. 
 He laid us as we lay at birth 
 On the cool flowery lap of earth, 
 Smiles broke from us and we had ease; 
 The hills were round us, and the breeze 
 Went o'er the sun-lit fields again; 
 Our foreheads felt the wind and rain. 
 Our youth return'd; for there was shed 
 On spirits that had long been dead, 
 Spirits dried up and closely furl'd. 
 The freshness of the early world." 
 
 No account of the forces that went to mold 
 the character of Matthew Arnold would be 
 complete which neglected the influence exerted 
 upon him by his father. In some respects 
 the two were far apart. Dr. Arnold, with all 
 his genuine goodness, was something of a 
 PhiHstine — so much so, that some mocking 
 
 [8]
 
 The Poetry of Matthew Arnold 
 
 critic characterized Matthew, the deadly enemy 
 of Philistia, as "David, the son of GoHath." 
 He was somewhat hard, somewhat narrow, 
 not only a sincere believer in orthodox Chris- 
 tianity, but one of its foremost champions 
 against the new spirit of doubt. At the first 
 glance it is the difference, rather than the like- 
 ness, between father and son that is apparent. 
 But one need not be a profound student of 
 Matthew Arnold to recognize the paternal 
 qualities in his work and character. From 
 his father came his sincerity, his moral earnest- 
 ness, his care for conduct — in short, all the 
 Hebraic elements of his nature. With all his 
 championship of Hellenism Matthew Arnold 
 was, one feels, rather a Jew than a Greek, more 
 at home with Saint Paul than with Socrates. 
 Something more than mere filial reverence in- 
 spires the noble memorial verses written by 
 his father's grave. There is spiritual sym- 
 pathy as well as profound admiration in the 
 lines which tell of the strength " zealous, benefi- 
 
 [9]
 
 Studies of a BooMover 
 
 cent, firm," that marked the elder Arnold's 
 hold on life. And it was in such servants, or 
 rather sons, of God as his father that the poet 
 recognized the predestined leaders of mankind 
 to whom he addressed the apostrophe which 
 closes Rugby Chapel. 
 
 "In the hour of need 
 Of your fainting, dispirited race. 
 Ye, like angels, appear. 
 Radiant with ardor divine! 
 Beacons of hope, ye appear! 
 Languor is not in your heart. 
 Weakness is not in your word. 
 Weariness not on your brow. 
 Ye alight in our van ! At your voice. 
 Panic, despair, flee away. 
 
 Ye fill up the gaps in our files. 
 Strengthen the wavering line, 
 Stablish, continue our march. 
 On, to the bound of the waste. 
 On, to the City of God." 
 
 Such were the influences under which the 
 young poet brought out in 1849 his first book 
 of verse. The Strayed Reveller and other Poems. 
 
 [10]
 
 The Poetry of Matthew Arnold 
 
 It fell, as has been said, still-born from the 
 press. The same fate, to be sure, has attended 
 many first volumes of verse, but few have de- 
 served it less. Browning and Tennyson are, 
 no doubt, greater poets than Arnold, but only 
 a prophet after the event would be able to 
 discern more of promise in the incoherent 
 beauties of Pauline, or in the somewhat 
 thoughtless rhymes and fancies of Poems, 
 Chiefly Lyrical, than in this little volume, 
 while in actual performance It fairly beats 
 them out of the field. Setting aside the title 
 poem, a series of pictures loosely strung to- 
 gether in the irregular rhymeless metre that 
 Arnold was so fond of, we have here the splen- 
 did sonnet to Shakespeare, the strong and finely 
 finished Mycerinus, the magic melodies of 
 The New Sirens, and the grave pathos of The 
 Sick King in Bokhara. And there are even 
 finer things in the book. 
 
 The Forsaken Merman, for example, is a 
 permanent addition to English literature. 
 
 [11]
 
 Studies of a BooMover 
 
 How good it is may, perhaps, be best ascer- 
 tained by a comparison with Tennyson's early 
 poems, the Merman and the Mermaid. It is 
 hard to praise with discretion the vivid clear- 
 ness of its pictures, the haunting music of its 
 changing rhythms, and, best and rarest of all, 
 the passionate cry of its wild, immortal, yet 
 strangely human pathos. One, at least, of 
 the shorter lyrics in this volume shows Arnold 
 for a brief space under the influence of Shelley, 
 and it is to be regretted that he did not yield 
 oftener to the spell. A Question is so purely 
 Shelleyan that it might almost be classed with 
 some of the minor songs of the master lyrist. 
 But after all Arnold at his best has a style of 
 his own which is more delightful than any 
 faint Shelleyan echoes. Of that style we need 
 not attempt a definition; an example will 
 serve our purpose better, and the lovely and 
 gracious words fairly tempt the pen to tran- 
 scribe them. 
 
 [12]
 
 The Poetry of Matthew Arnold 
 
 "Thin, thin the pleasant human noises grow. 
 
 And faint the city gleams; 
 Rare the lone pastoral huts — marvel not thou ! 
 The solemn peaks but to the stars are known, 
 But to the stars, and the cold lunar beams ; 
 Alone the sun arises, and alone 
 
 Spring the great streams." 
 
 Walter Bagehot once wrote an interesting 
 and suggestive essay on the pure, the ornate, 
 and the grotesque styles in English poetry. 
 Tennyson serves him well for the ornate, 
 some carefully chosen passages of Browning 
 furnish striking specimens of the grotesque, 
 and for examples of the pure style he goes 
 back to Wordsworth and to Milton. But he 
 need not have gone so far, for here, in the 
 first work of Arnold, w^e have, and not for 
 the last time, a specimen of the pure style 
 almost at its best. It is as classic as a statue 
 by Praxiteles. Not a word can be added, not 
 a word can be altered; the pictorial and musical 
 qualities blend in perfect harmony, and the 
 
 [13]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 grave music of the verse gives fit utterance to 
 the solemn beauty of the thought. 
 
 The last poem of the collection, though by 
 no means the most perfect, is perhaps the most 
 remarkable, and in many ways the most 
 characteristic in the book. Resignation is the 
 first poem where the distinctive Arnoldian 
 undertone of grave and thoughtful melancholy 
 vibrates throughout. Here, too, we have in 
 quintessence Arnold's whole poetic philoso- 
 phy: the immutability of nature and of her 
 laws, the restless longing of the heart of man, 
 the vanity of this longing and of all struggle 
 to realize it, the duty of renunciation and en- 
 durance, the aid which nature offers in the 
 effort to endure, and the final reward of re- 
 nunciation in the attainment of "quiet, and a 
 fearless mind." It is not a very cheerful phil- 
 osophy for a young man of twenty-seven, but 
 to Arnold, at all times of his life, the world was 
 not a cheerful, though far from an unlovely, 
 place. 
 
 [14]
 
 The Poetry of Matthew Arnold 
 
 " The mute turf we tread, 
 The solemn hills around us spread, 
 This stream which falls incessantly, 
 The strange-scrawl'd rocks, the lonely sky, 
 If I might lend their life a voice. 
 Seem to bear rather than rejoice." 
 
 The characteristic notes and beauties of this 
 volume appear again and again in Arnold's 
 later poems; Arnold developed, indeed, and 
 increased his powers, but he remained essen- 
 tially the same. There is no such change in 
 him as we find between the Browning of 
 Pauline and the Browning of The Ring and 
 the Book, or between the Tennyson of Lilian 
 or The Sea-Fairies and the Tennyson of Riz- 
 pah or Vastness. 
 
 Arnold's second volume, Empedocles on Etna 
 and other Poems, appeared in 1852, and was 
 hastily withdrawn from circulation by the 
 author. The reason for this appears to have 
 been that he could not bear to contemplate 
 the title-piece in print. "A situation," he 
 said, "in which a continuous state of mental 
 
 [15]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, 
 hope, or resistance, is in actual life painful, 
 not tragic, and its representation in poetry is 
 painful also." This is no doubt true, and, 
 moreover, it must be confessed that Emped- 
 ocles as a drama, even as a closet drama, is 
 quite impossible. But the poem may be re- 
 garded in another light than as a drama, and 
 all lovers of true poetry owe deep gratitude to 
 Robert Browning, who persuaded Arnold to 
 reprint in 1867 this long-suppressed work. It 
 contains in the long monologue of the hero 
 " the noblest exposition," to quote Swinburne's 
 words, " of the gospel of avrapKeia, the creed of 
 self-sufficience, which sees for man no clearer 
 or deeper duty than that of intellectual self- 
 reliance, self-dependence, self-respect." Even 
 those who reject this gospel of self-suflBcience 
 as inadequate may appreciate the dignity of 
 its ideas and the grave beauty of the words in 
 which they are presented. Of the lovely 
 group of songs put into the mouth of Callicles 
 
 [16]
 
 The Poetry of Matthew Arnold 
 
 there can be but one opinion — they are flaw- 
 less gems in the crown of Enghsh lyric poetry. 
 And their beauty is enhanced by the perfect 
 propriety of their setting. Arnold loved to 
 finish his longer poems with some specially 
 fine bit of verse, not always very closely con- 
 nected with the main subject. The classical 
 example, of course, is the superb finale of 
 Sohrah and Rustum; but even that great pas- 
 sage yields in dramatic propriety to the last 
 song of Callicles. After the bitterness of 
 human anguish, after the flame and smoke 
 of Etna, comes Apollo with his choir, comes 
 
 "The night in her silence. 
 The stars in their calm." 
 
 Tristram and Iseult, next to Empedocles the 
 longest poem of this volume, is by no means 
 the best. It is Arnold's first attempt at narra- 
 tive poetry, and though he was more success- 
 ful in narrative than in the drama, he can 
 hardly be called a master in the art of telling 
 a story in verse. There are many beautiful 
 
 [17]
 
 Studies of a Booliover 
 
 passages in this poem, chiefly lyrical or de- 
 scriptive, but it breaks down at the very climax. 
 Arnold had a strange deficiency of ear, though 
 at his best none of his contemporaries was 
 master of a finer music, and in tliis poem he 
 chose to embody the parting words of the ill- 
 starred lovers in a jingUng trochaic metre that 
 jars on every sense of the fitness of things. 
 
 Iseult. 
 " Tristram, ah, for love of Heaven, speak kindly ! 
 What, I hear these bitter words from thee ? 
 Sick with grief I am, and faint with travel — 
 Take my hand — dear Tristram, look on me! 
 
 Tristram. 
 I forgot, thou comest from thy voyage. — " 
 
 The truth is that Arnold, one of the least 
 passionate of Enghsh poets, simply could not 
 conceive such a situation as this, and his 
 attempt to portray what he had neither seen 
 nor felt was fore-doomed to failure. A pas- 
 sage in the third part of the poem probably 
 represents his own Nnew of such a love as that 
 of Tristram and Iseult. 
 
 [18]
 
 The Poetry of Matthew Arnold 
 
 "I swear, it angers me to see 
 How this fool passion gulls men potently; 
 Being, in truth, but a diseased unrest, 
 And an unnatural overheat at best." 
 
 That is a philosophic and, possibly, a correct 
 view; but it is hardly capable of poetic treat- 
 ment. To do Arnold justice he seems to have 
 realized his own deficiencies in this matter. 
 The passion of love, which plays so large a part 
 in the poetry of Browning and of Tennyson, 
 is almost entirely absent from his verse. Its 
 place is taken sometimes by tender affection, 
 oftener by hopeless longing. Never after his 
 failure in TriMram and Iseidt did he attempt 
 to handle a great and passionate love-story. 
 
 Two of the most noteworthy poems of this 
 volume are the Memorial Verses and the 
 Stanzas in Memory of the Author of Obermann. 
 Both belong, as their titles show, to the group 
 of elegiac poems which go so far to estabhsh 
 Arnold's rank as a poet. Something more 
 must be said of this group in the closing esti- 
 
 [19]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 mate of Arnold's work. It is enough for the 
 present to point out that these two poems, both 
 for conception and execution, for pohshed 
 beauty of word and grave dignity of thought, 
 stand very high in the group to which they 
 belong. 
 
 Two other poems in this volume deserve 
 more than a passing mention. A Summer 
 Night is, perhaps, the very highest poetic ex- 
 pression of the mingled despair and fortitude, 
 the disgust with the world and the rehef to be 
 found in the contemplation of nature, which 
 go to make up the essential undertone of most 
 of Arnold's verse. And the technical excel- 
 lences of the poem, as always happens when 
 Arnold is possessed by his theme, are the per- 
 fect reflection of the underlying thought. The 
 lovely moonlit night-piece with which the 
 poem opens, the contrast which it draws be- 
 tween the slave of life and the rebel, are equally 
 fine in thought and word; and it rises to a fit 
 climax of supreme lyrical utterance in the 
 
 [20]
 
 The Poetry of Matthew Arnold 
 
 noble apostrophe to the heavens which forms 
 its close. 
 
 The poem known under the various titles 
 of To Marguerite — In returning a volume of 
 Letters, Isolation, "and To Marguerite — Con- 
 tinued, is, I think, the loveliest of Arnold's 
 poems of love. And it is worth noting that 
 this poem deals, not with the rapture of posses- 
 sion, nor with the unutterable sadness of re- 
 membered kisses after death, but with the 
 sense of that predestined solitude of the soul 
 which even love is unable to overcome. The 
 theme is the same as that of Browning's Two 
 in the Campagna, and nothing can show more 
 clearly the difference between the character 
 and art of the two great poets than a com- 
 parison of the elder singer's strong and vibrat- 
 ing emotion, full of the sense of infinite passion 
 and the pain of finite hearts, with the melan- 
 choly acceptance by the younger of the solemn 
 laws under which "we mortal millions live 
 alone." From the point of view of pure poetry, 
 
 [21]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 at least, the comparison does not turn out to 
 Arnold's disadvantage; the closing phrase, in 
 which all the depth, and bitterness, and sad 
 estranging power of the sea are caught up in 
 three words, may challenge a place among the 
 greatest single lines of English poetry. 
 
 How any poet could have the heart to with- 
 draw such a volume from the public is inex- 
 plicable except on the theory that he retired 
 in order to make his entrance more effective 
 when next he appeared in the lists. The with- 
 drawal, at any rate, was short, for in the next 
 year, 1853, Arnold put forth another volume, 
 omitting, indeed, Empedocles and some other 
 poems, but reprinting a fair selection from his 
 earlier work, and adding several new poems of 
 great worth and beauty. 
 
 The longest and most pretentious of these 
 is Sohrab and Rustum. This is admittedly 
 the best of Arnold's narrative poems, and by 
 some critics it is ranked as the first of all his 
 works. This, however, is an opinion which 
 
 [22]
 
 The Poetry of Matthew Arnold 
 
 seems to be based on theory rather than on 
 fact. The epic is, perhaps, the highest form 
 of poetry, and undoubtedly this poem is 
 Arnold's nearest approach to epic height. 
 But in art a success, even along lower lines, 
 outweighs an ambitious but unattaining effort. 
 And that Sohrah and Rustum, in spite of its 
 manifold beauties, its stately verse, its noble 
 imagery, and well-conducted story, does not 
 quite attain will be clear, it seems to me, to 
 anyone who compares it with the true epic 
 tone in ancient or modern verse, with the 
 wrath and sorrow of Achilles, with the love 
 and vengeance of Kriemhild, with the passion 
 of battle and of loyalty that rings through the 
 last canto of Marmion. The situation is one 
 of the most pathetic in literature; but where 
 is the thrill of vital sympathy to make us feel 
 it ? Where is the divine creative power to put 
 life into the stately but shadowy figures of 
 father and son caught in the toils of Fate? 
 Sohrah and Rustum is a noble poem — one 
 
 [23]
 
 Studies of a BooMover 
 
 that we can read and re-read with increasing 
 appreciation. But what we feel is rather 
 admiration for the chaste and poHshed art of 
 the poet, than the hving presence of that 
 fierce and tragic power which, in the true epic, 
 grips and carries us whither it will. 
 
 At least two of the lyrics of this volume 
 
 would suffice to save a poet from complete 
 
 f orgetf ulness : Philomela, in which Arnold 
 
 catches the passion, as surely as Keats did the 
 
 magic, of the nightingale's song, and the 
 
 wonderful Requiescat. Of such a poem as this 
 
 j last it is useless to speak. If a reader cannot 
 
 1 see its flawless perfection ; if he cannot feel its 
 
 \ tender beauty and solemn pathos, culminating, 
 
 ^ as it does, in one inevitable and unforgetable 
 
 line, he is indeed to be pitied, but not to be 
 
 argued with. 
 
 The Church of Brou, on the other hand, 
 shares with Tristram the distinction of being 
 one of Arnold's few uneven, one might al- 
 most say unsatisfactory, poems. It was ap- 
 
 [24]
 
 The Poetry of Matthew Arnold 
 
 parently written some years before the pub- 
 lication of the volume, and its early date may 
 account for the triviality of its first and the in- 
 adequacy of its second part. But the close is 
 in Arnold's best vein. Here, as seldom in his 
 verse, the tender note of human affection 
 vibrates through the soft reposeful beauty of 
 the words. It is quite worth while to read 
 through the earlier parts for the shock of 
 pleased surprise that comes with the opening 
 invocation of the third, 
 
 "So rest, for ever rest, O princely Pair!" 
 
 And surprise gives way to a reverent thank- 
 fulness for such a precious gift of song, as we 
 approach the noble climax and listen with the 
 buried lovers to the passage of the angel's 
 wings, 
 
 " And on the lichen-crusted leads above 
 The rustle of the eternal rain of love." 
 
 The crowning glory of the whole volume is 
 The Scholar-Gipsy, but we may defer com- 
 
 [25]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 ment on this poem till we can consider it along 
 with its companion piece, Thyrsis. 
 
 Two years later, in 1855, Arnold published 
 a second series of selections from his earlier 
 poems, adding to them only one short song of 
 little value, and the long narrative of Balder 
 Dead. This poem has had the good fortune 
 to be praised by Mr. Henley, no mean judge 
 of poetry and somewhat sparing of his praise. 
 But one can hardly agree with him that Balder 
 Dead was " written in Arnold's most fortunate 
 hour." Whatever has been said in praise of 
 Sohrab and Riistum may be repeated of this 
 poem. But it has, if possible, even less of life 
 than its predecessor. All the world, runs the 
 old story, wept for Balder's death; but it is 
 hard to imagine that any human being was 
 ever moved to tears by Arnold's version of the 
 strange, sad tale. Its artificial beauties, " faultily 
 faultless, icily regular, splendidly null," leave 
 most of us as cold as the waste of snow that Her- 
 mod traversed on his way to Hela's realm. 
 
 [26]
 
 The Poetry of Matthew Arnold 
 
 The year 1858 saw the appearance of the 
 one work of Arnold's which must be pro- 
 nounced a hopeless failure. Merope is an at- 
 tempt to reproduce in English the old Greek 
 drama. Imitations are, as a rule, fore-doomed 
 to failure, and of all imitations that of the 
 Greek drama in modem English seems the 
 most hopeless. In the nineteenth century, at 
 any rate, there has been but one approach to 
 success in numberless attempts, Swinburne's 
 Atalanta in Calydon. It is not worth while 
 in this place to discuss the reason for such 
 failure; better to lay Merope aside and pass on 
 to Arnold's last book of verse. 
 
 This was the New Poems pubUshed in 1867, 
 the year in which Arnold laid down his profes- 
 sorship of poetry at Oxford. The book falls 
 naturally into three parts — the sonnets, the 
 lyrics rhymed and rhymeless, and the elegies. 
 Perhaps no single one of the sonnets quite 
 equals the great apostrophe to Shakespeare in 
 the first volume, but the group as a whole out- 
 
 [27]
 
 Studies of a BooMover 
 
 ranks its earlier fellows. Several of them are 
 particularly distinguished by the depth and 
 sincerity of the religious sentiment which 
 breathes through them — a sentiment which 
 shows a better, and essentially a truer, side of 
 Arnold than the reckless flippancy of many 
 of his controversial writings. 
 
 The lyrics of the collection are, with one 
 exception, hardly up to the earlier standard. 
 But that exception is so excellent that it alone 
 would save the volume; it is Dover Beach. 
 Here once more we have Arnold at his best, 
 thought, word, and rhythm blending in the 
 perfect song. It is hard to know what to 
 praise most in the poem, the glorious picture of 
 the moonlight and the floodtide, the " passionate 
 interpretation of nature" which catches in the 
 tremulous cadence of the waves the eternal 
 note of sadness, or the famous simile of the 
 ebbing sea of faith. And besides all these 
 there is one supreme touch in this lyric which 
 gives it a unique place among all Arnold's 
 
 [28]
 
 The Poetry of Matthew Arnold 
 
 poems — the human cry with which the last 
 
 stanza opens, 
 
 "Ah, love, let us be true 
 To one another ! " 
 
 Here for once the sad, proud consciousness 
 of isolation gives way to the sense of human 
 sympathy and comradeship in all disastrous 
 fight. For once we note in Arnold the pres- 
 ence of the idea which the great symbolic 
 painter of our day has embodied immortally 
 in "Love and Life." 
 
 It is after all, however, the elegies which 
 give to this volume its distinctive note. Of 
 these, Heine s Grave, in spite of the fine and 
 often quoted passage on the weary Titan, is 
 the least satisfactory. It is written in the 
 irregular rhymeless verse that had such a 
 dangerous fascination for Arnold. Rugby 
 Chapel is in the same metre, but here the poet 
 is really possessed by his theme, and the result 
 is a very noble tribute to the dead — notice- 
 able among all of Arnold's elegies for the ex- 
 
 [29]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 plicit testimony it bears to his belief in im- 
 mortality. The Stanzas from Carnac and A 
 Southern Night are memorials to his brother, 
 the latter a very beautiful lament, flooded, like 
 so many of Arnold's poems, with moonhght, 
 and murmurous with the sound of the sea. 
 Obermann Once More and the Sta7izas from 
 the Grande Chartreuse are naturally connected 
 by their theme, the lament for a dead faith. 
 Obermann is somewhat too long. The shadowy 
 personage who gives the poem its name dis- 
 courses through nine pages on the rise and 
 fall of religion, on present despair and on hope 
 for the future. The first part of his speech, 
 indeed, is already a classic; everyone knows 
 the famous stanzas that tell of the hard Pagan 
 world, the brooding East, the miraculous con- 
 quests, and slow, reluctant death of Chris- 
 tianity. But the remainder of the poem is 
 somewhat diffuse and contrasts unfavorably 
 with the terser, stronger close of the Obermann 
 poem of 1852. The Stanzas from the Grande 
 
 [30]
 
 The Poetry of Matthew Arnold 
 
 Chartreuse, however, are not open to the 
 charge of diffuseness. Indeed, it is hard to 
 see what charge the lover of pure and thought- 
 ful poetry could bring against them. We have 
 in them the highest expression in the elegiac 
 mood of the theme that Arnold treated with 
 supreme lyric power in Dover Beach. They are 
 a revelation of the poet's own divided mind. 
 
 " Wandering between two worlds, one dead, f 
 The other powerless to be born." % 
 
 But they are something more than that. The 
 poem, as a whole, is a typical, one might 
 almost say the typical, utterance of the Middle 
 Victorian era, a period when rationalistic 
 science seemed to be carrying all before it. 
 The calm assumption that the Christian faith 
 is only " a dead time's exploded dream" is by 
 no means peculiar to Arnold. It marks much 
 of the thought of his day. What is peculiar 
 to Arnold is his sincere regret for the vanished 
 past, his instinctive repugnance to the hardness 
 
 [31]
 
 Studies of a BooMover 
 
 and loudness of the new age, even though he 
 beUeves that the age is right. This attitude 
 is disclosed even more plainly in the remark- 
 able poem, Bacchanalia, which is also included 
 in this volume. 
 
 And now we come to Thyrsis, with its pre- 
 decessor. The Scholar-Gipsy. Here, it would 
 seem, if anywhere, we have the noblest work 
 of Arnold. Serene beauty of thought, tender 
 melancholy of mood, perfect fitness of expres- 
 sion, and harmonious rhythm, characterize 
 both these poems and characterize them 
 throughout. There are no languors, no de- 
 pressions, no passages of prose thrown into 
 metrical form. The famous simile with which 
 The Scholar-Gipsy closes is far from being 
 the "purple patch" it has irreverently been 
 styled. One cannot sew a purple patch upon 
 a robe of Tyrian dye; and, fine as the closing 
 stanzas are, they yield in excellence to some 
 of the earlier pictures of English life and 
 scenery. Two beauties we may note common 
 
 [32]
 
 The Poetry of Matthew Arnold 
 
 to both these poems : Arnold's loving memories 
 of his Alma Mater; and his deep and almost 
 sensuous delight in aspects of nature insep- 
 arably blended with those memories. Arnold 
 has apostrophized Oxford in a famous prose 
 passage, but all that he says there is packed 
 into one line of Thyrsis, 
 
 "That sweet city with her dreaming spires." 
 
 The loving sympathy with nature apparent 
 in almost every line of these poems it is im- 
 possible to praise too highly. The picture in 
 Thyrsis of a rain-drenched English garden 
 with its storm-vexed trees and fallen chestnut 
 flowers is a masterpiece of poetic word-paint- 
 ing. Hardly less delightful is the vision of 
 the moonlit ferry on the stripling Thames in 
 The Scholar-Gipsy, or the night-piece in 
 which the line of festal light in Christ-Church 
 hall shines through the driving snow-storm on 
 the Cumner hills. And for once in Arnold's 
 work the wonted opposition between the rest- 
 
 [33]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 less, turbulent soul of man and the sweet calm 
 of nature disappears. In these two poems 
 nature and man blend together in a perfect 
 harmony. 
 
 Poetry like this tempts one to linger over it. 
 There is much that might be said. It is hard 
 to pass without mention Arnold's striking 
 success in adapting the conventions of the 
 antique pastoral elegy to a lament for a modern 
 poet. Something, too, one would like to say 
 on the gleam of hope that lights the close of 
 Thyrsis, faint, indeed, when compared with 
 the sun-burst that exalts and glorifies the final 
 stanzas of Adonais, but not without a tender 
 beauty of its own. But all one can do is to 
 recommend these elegies to every lover of pure 
 poetry. They will serve as an unfailing test 
 of a reader's power to appreciate poetry for 
 its own sake. 
 
 Westminster Abbey, the elegy on Arnold's 
 school friend, Dean Stanley, is a noble poem, 
 but after Thyrsis it seems a little cold, a little 
 
 [34]
 
 The Poetry of Matthew Arnold 
 
 artijQcial. The group of poems on the house- 
 hold pets, Geist, Matthias, and Kaiser, de- 
 serves, at least, a passing mention. Here a 
 very different Arnold is revealed from the 
 Arnold of the poems or the essays. It is the 
 Arnold whom only his intimates knew — 
 gentle, affectionate, playful, and not without 
 a trace of kindly humor, the centre of a pleasant 
 company of cats and canaries, and children 
 and dachshunds. They are not without true 
 poetic merit, these little poems; but their chief 
 value lies in the revelation which they make of 
 a new and more genial side of the poet's mind 
 and life. 
 
 Some of the characteristic beauties and 
 defects of Arnold have been revealed by this 
 critical examination of his successive volumes. 
 But a brief summary may serve to gather up 
 the results so far attained and to fix them in 
 the reader's mind. 
 
 In the first place, it is easy to say what 
 Arnold was not. He was not a great narrative 
 
 [35]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 poet. No need, after all, to compare him 
 with the great masters of the epic — his own 
 contemporaries surpassed him again and again. 
 Matthew Arnold could no more have written 
 How They Brought the Good News from Ghent 
 to Aix or The Revenge than he could have writ- 
 ten the Iliad or Paradise Lost ; and this in spite 
 of his theory that " the eternal objects of poetry 
 are actions — human actions." But Arnold, 
 like his master, Wordsworth, achieves the 
 best results when he departs from theory and 
 surrenders himself to instinct and inspiration. 
 He was not himself a man of action, nor was 
 he capable of sympathizing with action, except 
 theoretically. He disliked and distrusted nearly 
 all the great actors in the social and pohtical 
 movements of his day. Small wonder, then, 
 that his narrative poems interest us by their 
 beauty of form, by their lyrical, descriptive, or 
 meditative passages — by anything in short, 
 rather than by the human actions which they 
 portray. 
 
 [36]
 
 The Poetry of Matthew Arnold 
 
 Again Arnold is not a dramatic poet. We 
 may waive the fact that he never wrote a great 
 play. No more did Browning or Tennyson. 
 But Arnold cannot lay claim even to the dra- 
 matic qualities which Browning and Tennyson 
 possessed. We have seen that he could not 
 tell a satisfactory story, but it is even plainer 
 that he could not create a character. As we 
 review Arnold's work we realize, with a little 
 touch of surprise, the almost entire absence 
 from it of men and women. The unreality 
 of Sohrab and of Rustum has been already 
 pointed out; the gods in Balder are even more 
 remote and lifeless; Obermann is a ghost, the 
 Scholar-Gipsy a myth, even the poet's nearest 
 friend becomes the conventional dead shepherd 
 of pastoral elegy. And the women! Mar- 
 guerite is a dainty lady who allows herself to 
 be kissed and abandoned, neither with ex- 
 treme concern; Fausta and Eugenia are mere 
 nomina umbrae. The truth is that Arnold is 
 one of the least objective of English poets. 
 
 [37] 
 
 424390
 
 Studies oj a BooJdover 
 
 Byron's lack of objectivity is a commonplace 
 of criticism; but Byron had, at least, the gift of 
 projecting his own great personality into the 
 figures of his poems. Harold, Manfred, and 
 Juan are, it may be, mere embodiments of 
 various aspects of their creator, but they share 
 something of his fiery life, and so long as the 
 personality of Byron thrills and fascinates, so 
 long will these characters endure — and that 
 will be as long as English poetry is read. But 
 is there any character of Arnold's poetry which 
 can be identified with Arnold ? 
 
 On the technical side of poetry there are few 
 faults to be found with Arnold's work, yet even 
 here the adversary may advance something 
 against him. He lacked almost entirely the 
 richness of color, the delight in lovely words 
 for their own sake and for the sake of their 
 associations, which makes so many lines of 
 Tennyson a wonder and a wild delight. He 
 lacked almost entirely the sense of that " natural 
 magic," to use his own fine phrase, by which 
 
 [38]
 
 The Poetry of Matthew Arnold 
 
 at times Shakespeare seems to transport us in 
 the twinkling of an eye to fairyland. Worst 
 of all, he often lacked a true ear for rhyme and 
 rhythm. This led him to perpetrate such 
 assonances as "ranging" and "hanging," as 
 " scorn " and " faun " ; at times to write, under 
 the delusion that it was metrical, such a pas- 
 sage as the following, which, printed as prose, 
 
 reads : 
 
 " Thou standest smiling down on me ! 
 Thy right arm, leaned up against the col- 
 umn there, props thy soft cheek; thy left 
 holds, hanging loosely, the deep cup, ivy- 
 cinctured, I held but now." 
 
 It would be an interesting and not unin- 
 structive exercise for the student of poetry to 
 attempt the scansion of these lines, or even 
 their arrangement in metrical form. Arnold 
 never outgrew this dulness and uncertainty of 
 ear. Some of his most prosaic and unrhyth- 
 mical passages occur in his last volume of 
 verse. 
 
 And now, having cleared the field, we may 
 
 [39]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 proceed to the more pleasing and gracious 
 task of defining what Arnold was, and of 
 pointing out his peculiar poetic characteristics. 
 He was, undoubtedly, a great didactic and 
 critical, a great elegiac and lyric poet. Didac- 
 tic, not in the old-fashioned sense of Pope and 
 Johnson, nor even in the often too obtrusive 
 fashion of Wordsworth. But he had a dis- 
 tinct philosophy of life, and this philosophy 
 interpenetrates and informs his poetry. It 
 does not harm it. Arnold, in poetry at least, 
 was not one of those preachers who are for- 
 ever dragging in the moral. He lived in the 
 world of ideas, as some poets, Mr. Kipling, for 
 example, live in the world of actions. The 
 desire to impart ideas roused him to a point 
 as near that of passionate poetic sympathy as 
 he ever approached. And, accordingly, some 
 of his very best poetry appears in these efforts 
 to communicate ideas which to him were vital 
 and salutary truths. We need only turn to the 
 later sonnets, to Resignation, A Summer Night, 
 
 [40]
 
 The Poetry of Matthew Arnold 
 
 and the Stanzas pom the Grande Chartreuse 
 to realize the truth of this statement. 
 
 Arnold is, perhaps, the greatest of our criti- 
 cal poets. He once defined poetry as being 
 essentially a criticism of life. If poetry were 
 this and this alone, Arnold would be the 
 greatest of English poets. Poetry, of course, 
 is infinitely more than this, even if we give 
 to the definition of criticism Arnold's wide 
 extension of meaning. But whether we take 
 criticism in this larger sense as a study of life 
 with the purpose of distinguishing between 
 the false and the true, or in the customary 
 narrower sense, as the effort to ascertain the 
 predominating ideas and salient character- 
 istics of a writer, Arnold's critical poetry 
 stands, I think, unrivaled. For a criticism 
 of life, for a criticism of literature, couched 
 in grave, yet lovely and harmonious verse, 
 such as abounds in the monologues of Em- 
 pedocles, in the memorial verses for Words- 
 
 [41]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 worth, and in the Obermann poems, we may 
 go far afield before we find his fitting mate. 
 
 Arnold's elegies alone would assign him a 
 place among the greater Victorian poets. One 
 critic, indeed, has gone so far as to call him 
 the greatest elegiac poet in English literature. 
 This seems a bold saying, for surely Arnold 
 has never reached such heights as Milton in 
 Lycidas, Shelley in Adonais, and Tennyson in 
 In Memoriam. But quantity counts for some- 
 thing also in determining a poet's work, pro- 
 vided always that it is quantity which does 
 not fall below a certain mark of excellence. 
 And no other English poet has given us so 
 many grave and tender elegies as the author 
 of Thyrsis, the Memorial Verses, A Southern 
 Night, Rugby Chapel, Heine's Grave, the 
 Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, and the 
 two poems in memory of the author of Ober- 
 mann. The mere roll-call of these titles is 
 enough to confirm those who know their 
 Arnold in the belief that he ranks among the 
 
 [42]
 
 The Poetry of Matthew Arnold 
 
 very first of the English poets of sorrow and 
 melancholy meditation. He was, indeed, well 
 fitted by nature to be an elegiac poet. A 
 famous phrase in Resignation speaks of the 
 poet's "sad lucidity of soul." This quality 
 was eminently characteristic of Arnold him- 
 self, and it distinguishes and elevates all his 
 elegies. Sad an elegy must be by its very 
 nature; but it must also be lucid. Wild and 
 wandering cries, however poignant and pathetic 
 they may be, are out of place in this form of 
 poetry. Unless a poet can so far master his 
 sorrow as to look through it and above it, he 
 will prove as incapable of embodying it in the 
 somewhat conventional forms of the elegy, as 
 he will prove incapable of filling these forms 
 with true and sympathetic poetry if his sorrow 
 be not genuine and deeply felt. From this point 
 of view, indeed, it might be maintained, and not 
 altogether without reason, that Thyrsis is the 
 most perfect elegy in English. And when to 
 this trait of sad lucidity we add the beauty of 
 
 [43]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 the diction, imbued, as it is, with a richness 
 of color very rare in Arnold's work, and the 
 melodious rhythm of the echoing lines, the 
 reasons for such a preference seem weighty 
 indeed. But the ranking of poets or poems 
 is a dangerous, and, indeed, uncritical per- 
 formance. It is enough to point out what a 
 poet has done without attempting to place 
 him above or below his fellows. And of the 
 beauty and poetic worth of Arnold's elegies 
 there can be no doubt in the mind of any 
 student of English poetry. 
 
 It is another matter with his lyrical poems. 
 Arnold is not, as a rule, reckoned one of the 
 great singers of our language. Yet I believe 
 the time will come when critics will not only 
 recognize in Arnold's lyrics the loveliest 
 flowers in his garden of verse, but will pro- 
 nounce any anthology of English lyrics in- 
 complete which does not contain more than 
 one or two of these priceless blossoms of pure 
 poetry. Listen for a moment to the lyrical 
 
 [44]
 
 The Poetry of Matthew Arnold 
 
 cry that rings through Requiescat, Dover 
 Beach, In Utrumque Paratus, the songs of 
 CalUcIes, and consider whether we have not 
 here a note as rare as it is beautiful. Tenny- 
 son alone, it seems to me, among Victorian 
 poets, can equal these effects, and even Tenny- 
 son lacks at times the purity, the simplicity, 
 and the directness which characterize the best 
 of Arnold's lyrics. Browning has many pas- 
 sages and some whole poems instinct with true 
 lyrical feeling, but as a rule Browning is not 
 subjective enough in mood or simple enough 
 in expression to be a great lyric poet. On the 
 other hand, Arnold's profound subjectivity, his 
 intense sensibility of his own moods, and his 
 power of rendering them in language so 
 free from taint or flaw that it seems the direct 
 utterance of the soul, were natural qualifica- 
 tions for a place among the master lyrists of 
 our language higher than has yet been awarded 
 to him — perhaps higher than he ever in 
 reality attained. 
 
 [45]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 One or two characteristics are yet to be 
 noticed. It is impossible to do justice to 
 Arnold without taking into account the uni- 
 form excellence of his work. How much is 
 there in some of our greatest poets, Words- 
 worth, for instance, and Browning, that might, 
 with no loss to their fame, be omitted alto- 
 gether from a consideration of their work? 
 But if we set aside the unfortunate Merope, 
 and one or two shorter poems, what is there 
 in Arnold that can be omitted without grave 
 loss ? One can understand a meaning be- 
 neath Arnold's laughing answer, when asked 
 to make a selection from his poems, " I would 
 like to choose them all." 
 
 Closely connected with this characteristic 
 is the uniform excellence of the single poems. 
 Sometimes, but rarely, we find purple patches 
 upon a mantle of hodden-gray; but, as a rule, 
 each poem maintains throughout an even ex- 
 cellence of style. And at its highest how pure 
 and noble is this style of Arnold's! He said 
 
 [46]
 
 The Poetry of Matthew Arnold 
 
 of Wordsworth's style that, at his best, Nature 
 seemed to take the pen and write for him. 
 No higher praise could be given to any poet, 
 and no truer praise to much of Arnold's own 
 poetry. Doubtless this instinct for chastely 
 finished work, which preserved him alike from 
 the too frequent redundancies of Tennyson, 
 and the too startling eccentricities of Brown- 
 ing, was due to the influence of his classical 
 studies; but there has been more than one 
 classically educated poet who has been notably 
 deficient in this instinct. 
 
 One specially characteristic feature of 
 Arnold's poetry is his treatment of nature. 
 Since Cowper's day, all great English poets 
 have been nature lovers. Even Browning, 
 whose stress lay upon the incidents in the 
 development of man's soul, illumines his 
 dramatic poetry with sudden pictures of the 
 external world that show him to have been a 
 penetrating observer and a passionate lover 
 of nature. The poetry of Tennyson, the great 
 
 [47]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 master of the idyllic school, is bathed in a 
 sensuous enjoyment of nature in all her as- 
 pects. In Arnold, too, there is this ever- 
 present love of nature, but with a difference. 
 He does not, like Browning, turn to nature 
 to illustrate the life of man, nor does he, like 
 Tennyson, steep his senses in nature for sheer 
 delight in her visible beauty. His relation 
 to the natural world is like that of Words- 
 worth, a moral relation. But here, again, we 
 must distinguish. Wordsworth sought in na- 
 ture the inspiration without which man's life 
 was stale, flat, unprofitable. To him the 
 universe was governed by laws, not only 
 mighty, but everlastingly righteous. The man 
 who could penetrate through the superficial 
 aspects of the visible world to grasp these laws, 
 and who, having grasped them, could shape 
 his own life in accordance with them, had 
 learned, in Wordsworth's judgment, the secret 
 of life. Arnold, on the other hand, draws a 
 sharp distinction between man and nature. 
 
 [48]
 
 The Poetry of Matthew Arnold 
 
 At times, even, as in the sonnet. In Harmony 
 with Nature, he contrasts the two as opposing 
 and almost hostile forces; 
 
 "Nature is cruel, man is sick of blood; 
 Nature is stubborn, man would fain adore." 
 
 This, to be sure, is an unusual view with 
 Arnold. But it is only an exaggeration of his 
 constantly maintained distinction between the 
 world of natural phenomena and the world of 
 man's life and thought. In one of his most 
 thoughtful poems. Morality, he represents 
 nature as admiring and applauding " the divine 
 strife," " the severe earnest air," of man. As a 
 rule, however, he conceives of nature as apart 
 from and indifferent to man : 
 
 " The world which was ere I was born. 
 The world which lasts when I am dead; 
 
 Which never was the friend of one. 
 Nor promised love it could not give, 
 But lit for all its generous sun, 
 And lived itself, and made us live." 
 
 Yet Arnold is not indifferent to nature be- 
 
 [49]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 cause nature is indifferent to him. On the 
 contrary he finds in the contemplation of na- 
 ture the attainment, temporary to be sure, but 
 still the attainment, of what with all his soul 
 he most desires — calm. And hence it comes 
 that he turns again and again to the more 
 tranquil and soothing aspects of the world 
 about him, to the peaceful beauty of the Eng- 
 lish country-side, to the quiet flow of a great 
 river towards its final home, and, most of all, to 
 
 "The night in her silence. 
 The stars in their calm." 
 
 It has been said that Arnold regarded na- 
 ture as a sedative, an anodyne. Such a state- 
 ment is one of the half-truths of criticism 
 which, while not without a basis of fact, are 
 responsible in the end for a wholly wrong im- 
 pression. It is true that Arnold turns with a 
 profound sense of relief from the weariness, 
 the fever, and the fret of human life to the 
 calm, untroubled world of nature. But he 
 by no means used nature as a drug to deaden 
 
 [50]
 
 The Poetry of Matthew Arnold 
 
 his senses. The contemplation of nature was 
 to him rather a bath that at once cleansed 
 him from the dust and stains of conflict, and 
 sent him out refreshed and strengthened to 
 face the world again. It is worth recalling 
 the fact that Arnold was a hard-working man. 
 By far the greater part of his poetry was com- 
 posed during the twenty years that he served 
 as an inspector of English schools, hurrying 
 from town to town, for long years without a 
 resting-place that he could call his home, con- 
 stantly engaged in the mind and soul destroy- 
 ing task of reading examination papers, and 
 fighting, like Paul at Ephesus, against the wild 
 beasts of British ignorance, obstinacy, and 
 Philistinism. It is no wonder that he turned 
 from such a battle to seek the consolations of 
 nature. The wonderful and laudable thing is 
 that he always went back to the battle again. 
 And this brings us to the last and noblest 
 characteristic of Arnold's poetry; its essentially 
 manly tone and temper. Arnold has not the 
 
 [51]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 strong and happy optimism of Browning nor 
 the emotional hopefulness of Tennyson. More 
 a child of his age than either of his great 
 contemporaries, he reflected, as neither of 
 them did, the prevailing spirit of his time. It 
 is for this that superficial critics call him a poet 
 of doubt and despair. Of doubt he is, in a 
 sense, a poet, inasmuch as he gives utterance 
 to the thought of his age, but never of despair. 
 The vigorous teachers of his youth — Goethe, 
 Wordsworth, his own father — forbade such 
 mental cowardice. And Arnold was at heart 
 a deeply religious nature, not a mystic, not an 
 enthusiast, but one whose religion was em- 
 braced in the word, conduct. If he laid aside 
 much of the armor of faith worn by his an- 
 cestors, it was only to fight more freely in the 
 lighter gear. 
 
 ' ' Hath man no second life ? — Pitch this one high ! 
 Sits there no judge in Heaven, our sin to see ? — 
 More strictly, then, the inward judge obey! 
 Was Christ a man like us? Ah! let us try 
 If we then, too, can be such men as he ! " 
 
 [52]
 
 The Poetry of Matthew Arnold 
 
 On the whole, and in spite of occasional 
 traces of weakness, the dominant note of 
 Arnold's poetry is one of steadfast, almost 
 stoical, endurance of present evils, not with- 
 out gleams of hope in a future deliverance, 
 
 "Still nursing the unconquerable hope. 
 Still clutching the inviolable shade." 
 
 Like Tennyson he trusted that somehow 
 good would be the final goal of ill. But unlike 
 Tennyson he was not content to rest in a 
 vague "somehow." The goal, he held, must 
 be attained by man's own conscious effort; and 
 to Arnold's mind the task, though attended by 
 disheartening difiiculties, was not impossible. 
 In lines which may be regarded as closing his 
 poetic career, he represents the typical figure 
 of an age of doubt and despair as prophesying 
 the coming of a new and better day: 
 
 "What though there still need effort, strife? 
 Though much be still unwon ? 
 Yet warm it mounts, the hour of life! 
 Death's frozen hour is done ! 
 
 [53]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 The world's great order dawns in sheen, 
 After long darkness rude, 
 Divinelier imaged, clearer seen. 
 With happier zeal pursued." 
 
 Arnold himself found salvation in a gospel 
 of morality touched by the emotion of poetry, 
 and he looked forward to a time when all the 
 world would listen to this gospel and find in it 
 
 "One common wave of thought and joy 
 Lifting mankind again." 
 
 That his creed seems heterodox to many, per- 
 haps to most, in our day as in his own, does 
 not alter the fact that he believed in it as a 
 means of escape from the deadening influences 
 of the world, and that so beheving he sorrowed 
 not as one that has no hope. It is not what he 
 believed, but the fact that he believed, which 
 constitutes the moral and spiritual value of 
 Arnold's work. 
 
 Enough has been said to justify Matthew 
 Arnold's claim to a place among the greater 
 Victorian poets — if hardly the equal of Tenny- 
 
 [54]
 
 The Poetry of Mattheiv Arnold 
 
 son or Browning, yet in the same class with 
 them. Indeed it seems by no means improb- 
 able that a poet of such grace and purity, of 
 such high artistic ideals and achievements, of 
 such moral dignity and manly fortitude, will 
 come to be recognized more and more clearly 
 with the years that make impartial judgment 
 possible as one of the great masters in the 
 broad and lovely realm of English poetry, 
 
 [55]
 
 Old Edinburgh 
 and Her Poet-Laureate 
 
 IN the early decades of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury the prosperity of Edinburgh was a 
 thing of the past and her total ruin seemed a 
 thing of the near future. The Union of the 
 Crowns in 1707 by abolishing the Parliament 
 of the northern kingdom had swept fashion 
 and trade from the wynds and closes of her 
 ancient capital into the whirlpool of London, 
 and in so doing had struck an apparently 
 mortal blow at the welfare of the good town. 
 Scotch poets and politicians alike were loud 
 in lament over the desolation which had fallen 
 upon her ancient glories. "There is the end 
 of an auld sang, " cried Lord Chancellor Sea- 
 field, when the act of Union was signed; and 
 ten years afterward Allan Ramsay apostro- 
 
 [56]
 
 Old Edinburgk and Her Poet- Laureate 
 
 phized the once fashionable but then deserted 
 quarter of the Canongate, 
 
 " London and death gar thee look droll. 
 And hing thy head." 
 
 For nearly half a century the cloud of pov- 
 erty and abandonment hung heavily over the 
 town. There was no commerce, and little 
 trade. The nobles and gentry who had been 
 wont to spend their holidays and guineas in 
 Edinburgh flourished in London or pined at 
 their country seats according as their poUtics 
 were Whig or Tory. The University was 
 housed in a group of shabby buildings where 
 a handful of students gathered to hear a set 
 of "useless, needless, headless and defective" 
 professors prelecting on pseudo-science and 
 mediaeval metaphysics. Alone of Scottish in- 
 stitutions there remained unbroken the fierce 
 and intolerant national church, which, no 
 longer finding a counterpoise in the power of 
 Parliament, exercised a rigorous and unchal- 
 lenged domination over the minds and man- 
 
 [57]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 ners of men. Its seizers and compurgators 
 arrested the godless who appeared upon the 
 streets "during sermons" on the Sabbath. 
 Its obedient magistrates closed the doors of 
 Allan Ramsey's little theatre and pried into 
 his bookshop in search of " villainous, profane, 
 and obscene books and plays." Not even 
 the privacies of family life were hidden from 
 the ever watchful eye of the kirk-session. 
 
 From the strict inquisition of the church 
 "non-professors" fled to the club for refuge, 
 and the very names of some of the more noted 
 clubs in Edinburgh were ominous of rebellion 
 against the rule of the saints. The Sulphur 
 Club, the Hell-Fire Club, and Pandemonium 
 rang with the lampoons on the clergy, the 
 loose stories, and the ribald songs that marked 
 the reaction in Scottish society against the 
 severity of church discipline. Between the 
 crushing tyranny of the kirk on the one hand, 
 and the reckless license of the ungodly on the 
 other, Edinburgh in the first half of the eigh- 
 
 [58]
 
 Old Edinburgh and Her Poet-Laureate 
 
 teenth century must have been as unpleasant 
 a place of residence as ever thirty thousand 
 souls were gathered in. 
 
 Between the years 1750 and 1760, however, 
 affairs began to mend. The country at large 
 was rapidly growing rich and prosperous. 
 Improved methods of agriculture had redeemed 
 many a barren heath and doubled the pro- 
 ductivity of arable land. Rents rose in the 
 most amazing fashion; and for the first time 
 in the history of Scotland began to be paid in 
 money instead of in kind. The laird who 
 had formerly received an over-supply of skinny 
 fowls, half-starved sheep, and wretched oats 
 and barley, now found himself in possession 
 of an income sufiicient to raise the ancestral 
 mortgage, educate his sons, and marry off 
 his daughters. In the West a thriving trade 
 with the American colonies had sprung up, 
 and Glasgow became a gate through which 
 a golden stream poured into the country. 
 Employment was found in England and her 
 
 [59]
 
 Studies of a BooJcIover 
 
 colonies for the canny Scot who served his 
 country and feathered his own nest with equal 
 diligence. And what he made abroad he 
 spent at home. Sons of peasants and crofters 
 returned full-handed to buy the estates on 
 which their ancestors had toiled, and to erect 
 beside the ruined keep of the old lord the 
 stately mansion house of the new proprietor. 
 With the reviving prosperity of the country 
 the fortunes of the capital began again to 
 flourish. From all over Scotland the gentry 
 and nobility flocked into Edinburgh to find 
 lodgings permanent or temporary in some 
 narrow flat in the tall " lands " of the old town. 
 The deserted Canongate became once more 
 the center of wealth and fashion. In the dec- 
 ade or so between 1759 and the opening of 
 the New Town of Edinburgh it was estimated 
 that two dukes, sixteen earls, two dowager 
 countesses, seven lords, seven chief-justices, 
 and thirteen baronets, not to speak of minor 
 gentry, made their homes in that now squalid 
 
 [60]
 
 Old Edinhurgh and Her Poet-Laureate 
 
 district. Once more the narrow streets of 
 the gray metropolis were brightened by the 
 gay dresses and pretty faces of high-born 
 ladies and rang far into the night with the songs 
 and laughter of noble beaux and macaronis. 
 
 Even the iron-bound kirk expanded under 
 the genial influence of the new prosperity. 
 A strong and gradually increasing party in 
 her councils sought to relax her rigorous dis- 
 cipline and to mingle something of humanity 
 and culture with the sincere but narrow piety 
 of former days. Loud was the lament of 
 evangelical elders, crying out with David 
 Deans, "My bowels — my bowels — I am 
 pained at the very heart," over what they 
 termed the "ulcers and the imposthumes and 
 the sores and the leprosies" of the kirk; but 
 the new tendency was irresistible, and in spite 
 of lament and protest the Church of Scotland 
 became, for the most part, what it has since 
 continued to be, one of the greatest civilizing 
 and humanizing agencies of the country. 
 
 [61]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 A similar change took place about the same 
 time in the world of learning and letters. 
 Robertson, the accomplished leader of the 
 liberal party in the church, was for thirty 
 years Principal of Edinburgh University, and 
 his administration was the most successful 
 that the old university had ever known. In 
 1770 the number of students was seven hun- 
 dred, more than double what it had been at 
 the time of the Union. The wretched build- 
 ings, more fit, as Robertson said, for alms- 
 houses than for a college, were in part swept 
 away, the corner stone of a new structure was 
 laid, and though the work was not completed 
 in Robertson's lifetime, it is to his initiative 
 that Edinburgh owes the stately edifice whose 
 dome to-day rises high over the steep incline 
 of the South Bridge. Of far greater impor- 
 tance, however, than the increased number 
 of students or the reconstruction of the build- 
 ings was the new spirit which Robertson and 
 his associates diffused throughout the univer- 
 
 [62]
 
 Old Edinburgh and Her Poet-Laureate 
 
 sity. The crabbed, pedantic temper of the 
 old days gave place to a polished, liberal, and 
 broadly human culture. The skepticism of 
 Hume was attacked and the authenticity of 
 Ossian defended without a trace of the bitter- 
 ness which had raged in the theological and 
 critical writings of the preceding generation. 
 From the portraits of these old professors 
 there beams a gentle humor and a kindly 
 optimism admirably in keeping with their well- 
 brushed small-clothes, their silk stockings, and 
 their powdered wigs. 
 
 No small part of this kindliness and culture 
 was due to the eminently social life of the so- 
 called " Literati " of those days, a body to which 
 many of the Edinburgh faculty belonged. Its 
 oldest and most famous member was, of course, 
 the great philosopher and historian, David 
 Hume; its profoundest and most original 
 thinker was Adam Smith. Hume lived in a 
 flat in the Canongate which he boasted of as 
 singularly free from vermin; Adam Smith 
 
 [63]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 spent the greater part of his life at the Httle 
 town of Kirkcaldy in Fife. But the country 
 scholar made frequent visits to his brother 
 wise man in the capital, and the suppers at 
 Hume's lodgings in James' Court were true 
 coena deorum. Hume was something of an 
 epicure; he prided himself on his recipe for 
 soupe a la reine, on his beef and cabbage, on 
 his mutton and old claret. There seems to 
 have been some point in the contemporary 
 sneer which spoke of Hume and his friends as 
 the "Eaterati," rather than the "Leeterati," 
 as, in broadest Scots, they called themselves. 
 Yet the great attraction of these suppers was 
 not the food and wine, however excellent, but 
 the company that Hume gathered around him. 
 There was John Home, author of the porten- 
 tous tragedy of "Douglas," firmly believed 
 by all good Scotchmen to outrank anything 
 of WuUie Shakespeare's. There was Adam 
 Ferguson, once the fighting chaplain of the 
 Black Watch, now Professor of Moral Phil- 
 
 [64]
 
 Old Edinburgh and Her Poet-Laureate 
 
 osophy at the university. Boswell would be 
 there with brand-new stories of the world of 
 London letters, and of the great Cham who 
 ruled that world. Law was represented by 
 Lord Kanes, cynical, learned, and industrious, 
 who wrote books faster than his rival, Lord 
 Monboddo, could read them. Even such 
 pillars of the church as Robertson, Blair, and 
 Carlyle of Inveresk, did not disdain to grace 
 the board of the most dangerous of skeptics. 
 Hume's personal character, simple, benevo- 
 lent, marked by an almost childlike blandness 
 of good humor, was of a sort to make even a 
 zealous churchman forget his essay on miracles ; 
 and Adam Smith's verdict that his friend ap- 
 proached " as nearly to the idea of a perfectly 
 wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature 
 of human frailty will permit," though it seemed 
 to the jealous orthodoxy of Boswell a " noxious 
 weed in the moral garden," merely echoed the 
 universal opinion of the philosopher's inti- 
 mates. 
 
 [65]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 All this new wine of the spirit was poured 
 into old bottles, so far at least as the dwell- 
 ing-place and habitation of the Edinburghians 
 went. For centuries the town which had 
 grown up along the steep and narrow ridge 
 rising from the Abbey of Holyrood to the 
 still more ancient Castle had retained almost 
 the same dimensions. On the north, the deep 
 valley with its loch, on the south, the swampy 
 grounds, seemed to forbid any lateral expansion. 
 But what the city lacked in breadth it made 
 up in height. Story upon story its lofty 
 houses soared up from the gray rock toward 
 the gray sky. Within them were huddled all 
 sorts and conditions of men, members of the 
 proletariat in the cellar, noblemen and judges 
 in the intermediate stories, with a family or 
 two of workmen in the garret. There were 
 no slums in the old town where the highest 
 and the lowest in the land inhabited the same 
 building. 
 
 Or perhaps it would be better to say that 
 [66]
 
 Old Edinburgh and Her Poet-Laureate 
 
 the city was one vast slum. For the manners 
 and customs of its inhabitants were dirty be- 
 yond description. There were no drains in 
 the houses, no sewers beneath the streets. At 
 ten o'clock each night the accumulated filth 
 of each flat was poured down from the windows 
 upon the pavement to the tune of a wild 
 chorus of "gardy loo" (gardez I'eau). Its 
 varied stenches, "the flowers of Edinburgh" 
 some wicked wit called them, arose to heaven; 
 and the belated foot-passenger picking his way 
 through the dimly lighted streets had a dangerous 
 and malodorous journey homewards. " I smell 
 you in the dark, " muttered Johnson as he 
 rolled along the High Street towards Boswell's 
 lodgings on the night of his arrival at Edin- 
 burgh. At seven o'clock each morning a 
 scanty train of scavengers appeared to clean 
 the streets; except on Sunday, when neither 
 necessity, charity, nor mercy were deemed to 
 demand their attendance. The common stairs 
 within the houses were at least as filthy as the 
 
 [67]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 streets without. The very churches were, as 
 Boswell testifies, shamefully dirty. When 
 Johnson saw the sign ""Clean your feet" at 
 the door of the Royal Infirmary, he remarked 
 to Boswell, not altogether without a chuckle 
 of true English superiority, "There is no 
 occasion for putting this at the doors of your 
 churches." 
 
 Within the tall "lands," built so close together 
 that the inhabitants of adjoining houses could 
 often shake hands across the deep but narrow 
 chasm that divided them, the inhabitants hved 
 in the most confined of quarters. Four, five, 
 or at most six rooms constituted the apart- 
 ments of the wealthiest families. Servants 
 slept outside the house or under the kitchen 
 table; cots were made up for the nurse and 
 children in the master's study, turned-up beds 
 with curtains drawn around them stood in 
 the drawing room. Naturally the entertain- 
 ing that could be done in such apartments 
 was of the smallest. My lady could receive 
 
 [68]
 
 Old Edinburgh and Her Foet-Laureate 
 
 a few friends over a cup of tea in her bedroom, 
 but when her lord wished to dine or wine his 
 friends recourse was had of mere necessity to 
 a tavern. 
 
 Taverns, in fact, played almost the same 
 part in the social life of Edinburgh during the 
 third quarter of the eighteenth century as 
 coffee-houses had done in London in Addison's 
 time. They were the common meeting-places 
 of a race of men to whom home meant little 
 more than a place to sleep. Doctors met their 
 patients, lawyers consulted with their clients, 
 over a mug of ale or a tass of brandy in the 
 httle rooms of a dark tavern half underground. 
 Here the city magistrates were accustomed to 
 meet, and here the ministers of the General 
 Assembly were entertained. Even trades- 
 people attended to their business as much 
 within the tavern as within the shop. As a 
 result, the greater part of the male population 
 of Edinburgh drank steadily from morn till 
 eve and far on into the night. At ten o'clock 
 
 [69]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 at night the drum of the city guard warned all 
 God-fearing men to leave the taverns and seek 
 their homes, in accordance with the provisions 
 of an ancient law which closed all places of 
 entertainment at that hour. But the law at 
 this time was laughed at by the very magis- 
 trates sworn to enforce it. Scott's picture of 
 Councillor Pleydell is but a faint sketch of the 
 accompUshed toper of the olden time. Even 
 to-day the capacity of a well-seasoned Scotch- 
 man for his native drink is something to appal 
 the untried foreigner; but if we may believe a 
 tithe of the stories collected by such a creditable 
 authority as Dean Ramsay, the Scotch of to- 
 day are but poor and degenerate scions of a 
 heroic race. 
 
 It was in the nature of things impossible 
 that the close and confined life of "land," flat, 
 and tavern should endure. Population grew 
 denser and wealth increased, while new ideas 
 of comfort sprang up that were impossible of 
 realization under the then prevaiUng circum- 
 
 [70]
 
 Old Edinburgh and Her Poet-Laureate 
 
 stances. One by one, and with a certain hesi- 
 tation, famihes crept out of their gloomy 
 wynds and narrow flats to find a home in the 
 "self-contained" houses built about 1760 in 
 George Square, a few minutes' walk to the 
 south of the Old Town. In the opposite 
 quarter the great North Bridge was built to 
 span the valley that still separates the Old 
 Town from the New. Plans were laid for 
 draining the Nor' Loch where the Princes 
 Street gardens now He; and httle by little 
 shops and dwelling houses began to push 
 westward along what is now the finest street 
 in the British Isles. As early as 1770 David 
 Hume, who might almost have been called the 
 presiding genius of the pleasant life of the Old 
 Town, removed to a house across the bridge 
 on the corner of a little unnamed lane which 
 some wag baptized in his honor St. David's 
 Street. In a couple of decades the movement was 
 accomphshed and the "lands" of the Canon- 
 gate and High Street, once more deserted by 
 
 [71]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 their noble and wealthy occupants, were turned 
 over to the tenancy of the lower classes. By 
 1783 the Lord President's old lodgings were 
 occupied by a " rouping wife " who sold old fur- 
 niture, a chairman left Lord Drummore's former 
 apartment because he was not sufficiently ac- 
 commodated, and troops of dirty children 
 swarmed and littered on the stairs along which 
 all the beauty and fashion of Edinburgh had 
 passed two short decades before. The glory 
 of the Old Town had departed, and the social 
 life of the New Town was a new life under 
 new conditions. But the old did not pass 
 away without its sacer vates. Just at the height 
 of the Old Town's prosperity in 1769, Robert 
 Fergusson returned from a fruitless expedi- 
 tion to the North to become the laureate of 
 the city where he had been born and where he 
 was so soon to die. 
 
 The researches of Fergusson's indefatigable 
 biographer, Dr. Grosart, have made it pos- 
 sible for us to form some notion of the poet's 
 
 [72]
 
 Old Edinburgh and Her Poet-Laureate 
 
 early life and training. He was born, it ap- 
 pears, in 1750, in a little old house in Cap-and- 
 Feather Close, a dirty alley opening off the 
 High Street. His father, a struggling clerk 
 and copyist, accomplished with some measure 
 of success the seemingly impossible task of 
 feeding, clothing, and educating four children 
 on his meagre salary of £20 a year. Robert's 
 health was from the beginning delicate; but he 
 managed, none the less, to secure a first-rate 
 education at the Edinburgh High School, the 
 Dundee Grammar School, and the University 
 of St. Andrews. Like so many poor young 
 Scotchmen, he was destined by his parents 
 for the ministry, for which calling a four years' 
 course at the university was a necessary prepa- 
 ration. The few anecdotes that remain of 
 Fergusson's college life, however, show him a 
 youth of anything but clerical tendencies. He 
 wrote verses in broad Scots satirizing his mas- 
 ters and his companions. He was degraded 
 from the post of precentor in the college chapel 
 
 [73]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 for an irreverent jest upon a bibulous fellow- 
 student, and he was at one time actually dis- 
 missed from the university, though, as he was 
 recalled within four days, the offence can 
 hardly have been a weighty one. On the other 
 hand, he read Virgil and Horace with diligence 
 and enjoyment, spent a good portion of his 
 frugal stipend upon handsome editions of 
 Shakespeare, Milton, and Pope, and sedulously 
 cultivated the friendship of Professor Wilkie, 
 the farmer philosopher, and author of the 
 ponderous " Epigoniad." In fact, his character 
 was well summed up by the college porter as 
 " a tricky callant, but a fine laddie for a' that." 
 A few months before his graduation his 
 father's sudden death put an end to whatever 
 thought he may have had of pursuing his 
 studies for the ministry, and after a vain at- 
 tempt to secure some position through the 
 favor of a prosperous uncle in Aberdeenshire, 
 he returned to seek his fortune in his native 
 town. 
 
 [74]
 
 Old Edinburgh and Her Poet-Laureate 
 
 Soon after his return, Fergusson secured a 
 position as a transcriber of legal papers in 
 the Commissary Clerk's office. The pay was 
 miserably low and he eked it out by copying, 
 in a fine, clear hand, wills, decrees of divorce, 
 and anything else that came in his way, at the 
 not exorbitant rate of a penny farthing a page. 
 To us, looking back upon those times, the post 
 seems, perhaps, one degree more wretched 
 than the gaugership of Burns. But dreary 
 as was the drudgery of endless transcription, 
 it brought him enough to support life in those 
 good old days of cheap living, and while per- 
 forming the duties of his office with scrupulous 
 punctuality, he found amusement in plenty in 
 the sights and sounds of his native town. He 
 formed an acquaintance with the actors of 
 the Uttle theater which had succeeded in estab- 
 lishing itself in Edinburgh, and a seat in the 
 Shakespeare box was reserved for him at every 
 performance. He was passionately fond of 
 music, particularly of his native Scotch airs. 
 
 [75]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 His love of company and good cheer soon in- 
 troduced him to the club life of the taverns. 
 He became a frequenter of Luckie Middle- 
 mist's, where gin was sold for five shillings a 
 gallon, of Robin Gibb's and Indian Peter's 
 in the precincts of the law courts. He knew 
 the shades of "Pandemonium," where the 
 salamanders, as the members called them- 
 selves, were wont to swill 
 
 " The comforts of a burning gill." 
 
 In due time his fame as a poet and his talent 
 as a singer introduced him to the famous Cape 
 Club, a body wliich hved in a perpetual high 
 jinks of the sort described by Scott in Guy 
 Mannering. Every member — and the mem- 
 bers embraced all sorts and conditions of men, 
 from Lancashire, the comic actor, and Ra^- 
 bum, the most famous of Scotch portrait 
 painters, to Gavin Wilson, the poeticizing shoe- 
 maker, and Deacon Brodie, the notorious 
 burglar — was dubbed a knight and received 
 
 [76]
 
 Old Edinburgh and Her Poet-Laureate 
 
 a nickname founded upon some adventure 
 which had befallen him. Fergusson received 
 the title of Sir Precentor, and took his, seat 
 among such worthy peers as Sir Hayloft, Sir 
 Beefsteaks, and Sir Old Wife. A song of Fer- 
 gusson's written for the Cape Club, and still 
 in manuscript among the Laing papers in the 
 Library of Edinburgh University, celebrates 
 the feasts of the Cape Knights upon Welsh 
 rabbit, Glasgow herring, caller tippeny and 
 porter, — cheap banquets, certainly, where " six- 
 pence would purchase a crown's worth of bliss," 
 — and inveighs with startling frankness against 
 the folly of the man who would abandon these 
 revels for the embraces of the strange woman. 
 It is, perhaps, deserving more than a pass- 
 ing notice that woman, strange or otherwise, 
 played little or no part in Fergusson's life. 
 He was distinctly a man's man, delighting in 
 the social life of the clubs with their songs and 
 frolics and general good fellowship. The 
 Amandas and Stellas of his English poems are 
 
 [77]
 
 Studies of a BooMover 
 
 evidently mere poetic conventions without 
 basis of reality. In his Scotch poems, where 
 alone his true character appears, a woman's 
 name is barely mentioned except with repro- 
 bation. In fact, Fergusson seems to have 
 been as resolute an abstainer from female in- 
 tercourse as his great successor. Bums, was 
 addicted to it in every shape, from an intrigue 
 with a serving girl to a platonic correspond- 
 ence with Clarinda. Stevenson has spoken 
 of Fergusson as "a poor, drunken, vicious 
 boy." Drunken he was, no doubt, too often, 
 and drunkenness, we are told in a characteris- 
 tic Scotch phrase, leads to vice, but in Fer- 
 gusson's case the second step was never taken. 
 It was not until some time after his return 
 to Edinburgh that Fergusson appeared in 
 print as a poet, and then his dehut was of the 
 most unpromising sort. The three poems that 
 formed his first contribution to the columns 
 of Ruddiman's Weekly were pastorals of the 
 dullest and most conventional type. Damon, 
 
 [78]
 
 Old Edinburgh and Her Poet-Laureate 
 
 Alexis, and Corydon recline on the slopes of 
 the Pentlands and warble responsively of 
 Aurora, Cynthia, and Sol, of the drooping olive 
 and the trembling zephyr. It is all very poor 
 stuff, of the pseudo-classic fashion, then prev- 
 alent in England, without a touch of the true 
 Scotch fire which glows through all his poems 
 in the vernacular. The succeeding poems of 
 this year were all English and all equally 
 worthless. Nothing can be more pitiful than 
 the sentimental Complaint on the Decay of 
 Friendship, except perhaps the mock heroics 
 of A Saturdaijs Expedition. But with the be- 
 ginning of the next year Fergusson found his 
 true vein. The Daft Days which appeared 
 in January, 1772, was written in a famous 
 vernacular stanza which had been handed 
 down from the courtly poets of the middle 
 ages by David Lindesay and Allan Ramsay. 
 The simpHcity, directness, and vividness of the 
 opening lines show at once that the poet has 
 emerged into the freedom of his mother tongue 
 
 [79]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 and Is no longer painfully attempting to culti- 
 vate the olives of the south on the heather- 
 clad hills of his northern land. The faultless 
 mastery of a somewhat difficult metre is in 
 admirable contrast to the stilted measures of 
 his English verse. The lilt of the stanza sets 
 the foot tapping like the music of the famous 
 reel it celebrates. 
 
 "Fiddlers! your pins in temper fix, 
 And roset well your fiddle sticks, 
 But banish vile Italian tricks 
 
 From out your quorum, 
 
 Nor fortes wi' pianos mix — 
 
 Gie 's Tullochgorum." 
 
 Fergusson's flowering time was brief, but 
 rich. From January, 1772, to December, 1773, 
 a series of poems both in English and Scots 
 appeared in Ruddiman's. The latter were for 
 the most part vivid pictures of Edinburgh life, 
 as Fergusson knew it, such as the King's 
 Birthday, Caller Oysters, and the Rising of the 
 Session. There were a few broadly realistic 
 sketches of the life and amusements of the 
 
 [80]
 
 Old Edinburgh and Her Poet- Laureate 
 
 lower classes, and, by way of contrast, a group of 
 half -humorous, half-sentimental nature poems, , 
 such as the Ode to the Bee, the Ode to the 
 Gowdspink (gold-finch), and On Seeing a Butter- 
 fly in the Street. Perhaps the most striking of 
 all is The Farmer s Ingle, a charmingly sym- 
 pathetic picture of a peasant's home, which, 
 in addition to its own merits, has the peculiar 
 glory of having inspired the best known and 
 best loved of Scottish poems, the Cotter's 
 Saturday Night. It is impossible to compare 
 the two without seeing whence the later and 
 greater poet drew his inspiration; and Bums 
 was honest enough to acknowledge his debt. 
 "Rhyme," he said in a letter to Dr. Moore, 
 "I had given up; but meeting with Fergus- 
 son's Scottish Poems, I strung anew my wildly- 
 sounding lyre with emulating vigor." 
 
 On the Edinburgh Literati Fergusson's poems 
 made little or no impression. These gentlemen 
 were indeed an Anglophile and rapidly angliciz- 
 ing set. In 1773 Dr. Johnson noted that the 
 
 [81]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 conversation of the Scotch grew every day less 
 displeasing to an English ear. "The great, 
 the learned, the ambitious, and the vain," he 
 remarks (and it is probable that few of the 
 Literati would escape inclusion under one of 
 these heads), " all cultivate the English phrases 
 and the English pronunciation." And if this 
 were so in daily intercourse, still more was it 
 the case in the written word. Hume was al- 
 most childishly eager to avoid a lapse into the 
 vernacular; and Dr. Beattie, author of the once 
 famous and now forgotten Minstrel, warned 
 his precocious son so solemnly against the use 
 of "Scottish words and other improprieties" 
 that after he grew up " he would never endure 
 to read what was written in any of the vulgar 
 dialects of Scotland." It is not uninstruc- 
 tive in this matter to note that Fergusson's 
 longest and most ambitious poem, Auld Reekie, 
 was dedicated to the future biographer of 
 Beattie, Sir William Forbes, and was treated 
 by that worthy and prosy gentleman with the 
 
 [82]
 
 Old Edinburgh and Her Poet-Laureate 
 
 silent scorn that an effusion so full of "Scot- 
 tish words and other improprieties" deserved. 
 But the common people, not yet anglicized 
 out of their national sentiment and their 
 mother tongue, hailed with delight the advent 
 of a new poet in the racy Doric of their an- 
 cestors. A chorus of applause greeted Fer- 
 gusson as the true successor of Allan Ramsay 
 in suiting his lines to the folk of the hills and 
 braes. The circulation of the paper in which 
 his poems appeared increased beyond expec- 
 tation, and the poems themselves were copied 
 and reprinted all over Scotland. Toward the 
 close of 1772 he felt justijfied in collecting his 
 scattered verses into a volume. The little 
 book contained barely a dozen of the Scotch 
 poems and was padded out with a mass of 
 inane English verse, but it met with a sur- 
 prising success. Fergusson cleared at least £50 
 by it, a sum twice as large as that which ac- 
 crued to Burns for his first volume of verse. 
 The publication of this volume and the en- 
 
 [83]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 suing golden harvest were the last bright spot 
 in the poet's short career. Early in 1774 his 
 constitution, at no time robust, showed evi- 
 dent signs of giving way under the double 
 strain of desk-work all day and high jinks half 
 the night. There is a silly story which Steven- 
 son seems to have believed of Fergusson's 
 having been frightened into madness by a lurid 
 discourse on Death and Hell pronounced to 
 him by a grim divine amid the appropriate 
 surroundings of a churchyard and a ruined 
 abbey. As a matter of fact the discourse in 
 question was delivered two years before Fer- 
 gusson's outbreak of insanity. But it is true, 
 and it is by no means surprising, when one 
 considers his early training and the circum- 
 stances of his life, that his madness, hke 
 Cowper's, took the form of religious mania. 
 He threw all his manuscripts into the fire, 
 abandoned his ofiice work, and refusing all 
 social invitations, sat poring for hours over 
 the Bible. A paraphrase of Job's tremendous 
 
 [84]
 
 Old Edinburgh and Her Poet-Laureate 
 
 curse which he composed about this time 
 shows, sadly enough, the nature of his scrip- 
 -tural studies. At one time, indeed, there 
 seemed hopes of his recovery; but an unfor- 
 tunate accident completed his ruin. Return- 
 ing late at night from a visit to a friend, he 
 stumbled on the stairs and fell violently to the 
 bottom. He was picked up senseless, and 
 when consciousness returned, his reason was 
 gone. He raved of the work he was destined 
 to accomplish as a minister of the gospel, and 
 grew so violent that it took three men to 
 hold him. It was impossible for him to re- 
 main in the poor lodging house his mother 
 kept, and he was accordingly in one of his 
 quiet and apparently lucid moments conveyed 
 in a sedan chair under the pretense of visiting 
 a friend to the Schelles (cells) where pauper 
 lunatics were confined. The yell which the 
 poor wretch set up on discovering where he 
 had been taken still rings in the ears of those 
 who know the story of his brief, unhappy life. 
 
 [85]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 Confinement in a public lunatic asylum was, 
 in those days, a species of permitted torture. 
 The happiest result that could be wished was 
 a speedy death, and this blessing was soon 
 accorded to Fergusson. His mother and sister 
 visited him the night before he died. He was 
 very weak and broken, but, for the moment, 
 quite sane. He begged his sister to come 
 often and sit with him and complained of the 
 cold he suffered in his fireless cell. WTien the 
 keeper called the women out at the closing 
 hour, the poor boy — he was only twenty-four 
 — burst into tears and cries. " Do not go yet, 
 mother," he wailed, " do not leave me, do not go 
 yet." He died alone and untended that night. 
 It would be, perhaps, too much to rank 
 Fergusson among the inheritors of unfulfilled 
 renown who rose to greet the risen Adonais. 
 Making every allowance for his brief life and 
 straitened circumstances, it is hardly possible 
 to find in his work the promise of great things 
 cut short by an untimely death. Much has 
 
 [86]
 
 Old Edinburgh and Her Poet-Laureate 
 
 been made of his relation to Burns, and Dr. 
 Grosart has pointed out how interpenetrating 
 was Fergusson's influence upon his great dis- 
 ciple. On the other hand, little has been said 
 of his indebtedness to Ramsay, from whom 
 he borrowed most of his metres and many of 
 his subjects. Fergusson stands, indeed, as a 
 connecting link between two greater poets, 
 renewing the fading tradition of the one and 
 preparing the way for the glorious appearance 
 of the other. Yet he is not without merits of 
 his own which raise him above the necessity 
 of being judged merely by the historic esti- 
 mate. He possessed a real mastery of his 
 craft, a true ear for the national metres and 
 rhymes, an amazing command of the rich 
 vernacular, a true feeling for nature, a sly and 
 pawky humor, and a notable gift of realistic 
 description. His gift for verse was, perhaps, 
 hardly so much a heaven-born genius as an 
 earthly talent, but it was a talent, genuine, 
 versatile, and well-employed. 
 
 [87]
 
 Studies of a BooMover 
 
 Fergusson was above all a national poet. 
 His muse did not, to quote his own picturesque 
 phrase, flee away beyond Parnassus and seek 
 for Helicon, "that heath'nish spring," but was 
 content with Highland whiskey. The Arno 
 and the Tiber — which to be sure he never 
 saw — were to him but " lifeless dowie pools " 
 compared with bonny Tweed, or Forth. At 
 times his nationalism shows itself in amus- 
 ing, half -humorous, half -chauvinistic, outbursts, 
 as when he falls foul of the professors of St. 
 Andrews for the "superb treat" they had 
 hastened to offer that slanderer of Scotland, 
 Samuel Johnson. The bill of fare which he 
 declares they were in duty bound to set before 
 the Doctor reads like the menu of some St. 
 Andrews club on a Burns anniversary: a hag- 
 gis, a singed sheep's head, sheep's trotters, 
 brose, blood puddings, a girdle farl (griddle 
 cake), and small ale in a wooden quegh. A 
 St. Andrews dinner to-day would, to be sure, 
 call for stronger drink than small ale. At 
 
 [88]
 
 Old Edinburgh and Her Poet-Laureate 
 
 times again he re-echoes in all seriousness the 
 complaints that Allan Ramsay had uttered 
 half a century before as to Scotland's ruin at 
 the hands of the "predominant partner," and 
 he has nothing but hard words for the laird 
 turned politician who seeks his fortune at the 
 English court. Fergusson's position as a 
 national poet is of course by no means unique. 
 Dunbar, Ramsay, Burns, and Scott are poets 
 of Scotland, in a broader sense than his most 
 devoted admirers will claim for Fergusson. 
 But no Scottish poet, whether greater or less 
 than he, has been so peculiarly the poet of 
 Edinburgh and Edinburgh life. Nor does the 
 fact that so many of his poems betray an in- 
 timate and loving familiarity with country 
 sights and sounds detract from his claim to be 
 regarded especially as a city poet. Stevenson 
 has told us in his prettiest phrases how pecul- 
 iarly Edinburgh is linked to the surrounding 
 country. "Into no city does the sight of the 
 country enter so far . . . you catch a glimpse 
 
 [89]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 of the far-away trees on your walk; and the 
 place is full of theater-tricks in the way of 
 scenery. You peep under an arch, you de- 
 scend steps that look as if they would lead you 
 in a cellar, you turn to a back-window of a 
 grimy tenement in a lane ; — and behold ! you 
 are face-to-face with distant and bright pros- 
 pects. You turn a corner, and there is the 
 sun going down into the Highland hills; you 
 look down an alley, and see ships tacking for 
 the Baltic." One lover, at least, of the old 
 town reckons among his dearest memories the 
 purple slopes of Arthur's Seat, most mountain- 
 like of little hills, looming grandly before him 
 every evening of a happy summer when he 
 turned a certain corner in the quiet villa-built 
 suburb where he tarried for a season. 
 
 But Fergusson's poems of nature, charming 
 as they are, would hardly have sufficed to 
 transmit his name to posterity. It is to his 
 poems of town life that the lover of the past 
 turns and turns again with undiminished 
 
 [90]
 
 Old Edinburgh and Her Poet-Laureate 
 
 pleasure, to the Daft Days, and the King's 
 Birthday, to Caller Oysters, the Rising of the 
 Session, the Election, and above all to Auld 
 Reekie. As he reads there rises before him a 
 panorama of the old town in the merry bustling 
 years which formed at once the climax and the 
 close of her peculiar prosperity. We can fol- 
 low the life of the town from the moment 
 
 when 
 
 "Morn with bonny purpie smiles 
 Kisses the air-cock of St. Giles " 
 
 to the wee sma' hours when the last buck 
 staggers homeward from his revels in the club. 
 The barefoot servant lasses cluster on the 
 turnpike stairs, chattering and complaining of 
 their mistresses' hard discipline. The shops 
 are opening and the "stair-head critics" 
 gather in the Luckenbooths to gossip over 
 neighbors and inquire too curiously into the 
 purposes and antecedents of every stranger 
 who goes by. Geordie Girdwood, the drunken, 
 sore-eyed, withered, little sexton of Greyfriars 
 
 [91]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 Churchyard is howking up gentle bones in 
 that dismal burying ground. Sandy Fife, the 
 bellman of St. Giles, sets the gill bells ringing, 
 and the burghers leave shop and office for the 
 traditional meridian. Lawyers gather round 
 the site of the ancient cross, pulled down some 
 twenty years before by the over-zealous magis- 
 trates upon whose heads Sir Walter was to de- 
 nounce a minstrel's curse. Or perhaps it is a 
 holiday, the King's Birthday, Hallow-fair, or 
 the day of the Leith races. On such a day 
 the shops are shut early, the clinking of the 
 "tinker billies" in the West Bow is hushed, 
 and the crowd pours out of doors to see and be 
 seen. Mons Meg roars a salute from the 
 castle at noon, and the city guard, " that black 
 banditti," muster for parade. The rabble of 
 the streets gather round and assault them with 
 dirty water and dead cats, the old soldiers 
 repel attacks with pungent Highland exple- 
 tives, with fire-locks and Lochaber axes. 
 Down on the sands near Leith the browster 
 
 [92]
 
 Old Edinburgh and Her Poet-Laureate 
 
 wives are selling bad ale and worse whiskey to 
 a noisy crowd, while the jockeys in red, yellow, 
 and tartan liveries gather for the races. As 
 night falls over the good town the fun and 
 noise redouble. The feeble gleam of Simon 
 Fraser's oil lamps is heightened by flaring 
 torches or horn lanterns in the hands of 
 liveried servants. Wily caddies run about the 
 streets and plunge into darksome alleys on 
 dubious errands. Sedan chairmen, predeces- 
 sors of our modern night-hawks, stand waiting 
 for a chance to pick up some drunken " birkie." 
 The noisy ten-hour drum calls the sober bur- 
 gher home from his club, but for the wilder 
 spirits the revel has just begun. From the tall 
 "lands" the nightly effusions splashdown upon 
 the pavement and the luckless passengers; and 
 the "flowers of Edinburgh" spread their per- 
 fume through the narrow ways. Here comes 
 a bruiser reeling home along the crown of the 
 causeway, pushing all he meets into the dirty 
 gutters. At his heels follow a pack of admir- 
 
 [93]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 ing macaronis applauding his exploits, but 
 ready to turn tail and run for it, if he is seized 
 by the city guard. And so the night goes on 
 till a pale gleam across the Forth proclaims 
 another day. If by chance that day happens 
 to be the Sabbath, what a sudden change ap- 
 pears in men and manners ! Save for the ring- 
 ing of a hundred church bells, among which 
 that of the Tron Kirk earns a bad pre-emi- 
 nence by its deafening clamor, all the noises of 
 the town are hushed. Through the unclean 
 streets the roisterous citizens of last night stalk 
 with faces of such portentous piety as if they 
 would make each neighbor think 
 
 " They thirst for goodness as for drink." 
 
 Then as now the whole population of the town 
 poured out on a pleasant Sunday afternoon to 
 snatch a breath of country air, and one might 
 catch a glimpse of pretty faces, half hidden 
 by the tantalizing "bon grace," making for 
 Comely Garden, or the park, to meet their joes. 
 
 [94]
 
 Old Edinburgh and Her Poet- Laureate 
 
 The "dandering cit" displays his Sunday 
 braws on Castle hill for " the fool cause of be- 
 ing seen." The poet himself seeks out the soli- 
 tudes of Arthur's Seat, or muses amid the ruins 
 of Holyrood over the vanished glories of Scot- 
 land. But we may be sure that, if he with- 
 drew from the crowd, it was only for a short 
 space, and evening found him back in Auld 
 Reekie seated at the table of the Cape Club. 
 
 There is no monument to Fergusson in his 
 native town except the tombstone with the 
 somewhat stilted inscription which the loving 
 heart of Robert Burns erected over his half- 
 forgotten grave. Few acts of Burns' life in 
 Edinburgh are so much to his credit as his 
 pilgrimage to the dreary little churchyard of 
 the Canongate. Like the impulsive, generous, 
 peasant poet he was, Burns threw himself on 
 his knees and with hot tears in his eyes kissed 
 the sacred earth that covered the mouldering 
 body of his predecessor and master. And the 
 homage of Burns has been supplemented by 
 
 [95]
 
 Studies of a BooMover 
 
 that of the latest poet of Auld Reekie. "I 
 may tell you," wrote Stevenson from his South 
 Sea exile, "I may tell you (because your poet 
 is not dead) something of how I feel. We are 
 three Robins who have touched the Scots lyre 
 this last century. Well, one is the world's. 
 He did it, he came off; he is forever; but I, 
 and the other, ah ! what bonds we have. Bom 
 in the same city; both sickly; both vicious; 
 both pestered — one nearly to madness and 
 one to the madhouse — with a damnatory 
 creed; both seeing the stars and the moon, and 
 wearing shoe-leather on the same ancient 
 stones, under the same pends; down the same 
 closes where our common ancestors clashed 
 in their armour rusty or bright. . . . He died 
 in his acute, painful youth and left the models 
 of the great things that were to come; and the 
 man who came after outlived his green-sick- 
 ness and faintly tried to parody his finished 
 work." 
 
 After all the true monument of a poet is not 
 
 [96]
 
 Old Edinburgh and Her Poet-Laureate 
 
 a sculptured bronze or marble, but a green and 
 tender memory in the hearts of men. And if 
 comparatively few to-day remember the " poor 
 white-faced boy who raved himself to death 
 in the Edinburgh mad-house," yet those few 
 include among their number all who know 
 the literature of the richest of English dialects 
 and all who love the most romantic of British 
 cities. Other poets have sung the praises of 
 Edinburgh, but to her laureateship no other poet 
 has so true a claim as Robert Fergusson. 
 
 [97]
 
 The 
 Autobiography of Milton 
 
 BEFORE the execution of Charles I 
 Milton had been known to some few 
 of his countrymen as a poet, to a larger circle 
 as a vigorous, daring, and somewhat scandalous 
 pamphleteer. On the Continent, with the 
 exception of the Italian friends who still re- 
 membered their beautiful, scholarly, and 
 accomplished guest of some twelve years be- 
 fore, it is probable that hardly a handful of 
 men were acquainted with his name. In 
 less than three years from the king's death, 
 however, things had so far changed that 
 Milton had become the most famous, or, per- 
 haps, it would be better to say the most no- 
 torious. Englishman alive, with the one ex- 
 ception of his great contemporary Cromwell. 
 
 [98]
 
 The Autobiography of Milton 
 
 And this change was due not to any resump- 
 tion of his long-neglected powers of poetry, 
 but solely to the position which he assumed 
 in those years as the defender with the pen of 
 that republic which the Puritans had estab- 
 lished with the sword. 
 
 Hardly was the king's blood dry before 
 Milton published the first of his republican 
 pamphlets: The Tenure of Kings and Magis- 
 trates: proving that it is Lawfull, and hath been 
 held so through all Ages, for any, who have 
 the Power, to call to account a Tyrant, or 
 wicked King, and after due conviction to de- 
 pose, and put him to death. The thorough- 
 going partisanship of this work was at once 
 recognized by the new rulers of England, who 
 promptly conferred upon Milton the Latin 
 Secretaryship to the Council of State, a posi- 
 tion which brought him into close connection 
 with the leaders of the army and the judges 
 of the late king. In this position Milton be- 
 came the acknowledged spokesman of the Com- 
 
 [99]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 monwealth. As such he was ordered to make 
 an attempt to check the reaction toward 
 monarchy which was showing itself in the en- 
 thusiastic reception of Eikon Basilike, — a 
 book purporting to proceed from the king 
 himself and to contain the prayers and pious 
 meditations of his last days, — by writing 
 something to destroy the credit of that work. 
 It was an ungracious task, but Milton per- 
 formed it. If he did not convince the people 
 — fifty editions of the Eikon were called for 
 within the year to one of Milton's Eikono- 
 clastes, the Image-breaker — he at least satis- 
 fied his friends in the Council. For Milton's 
 next task, once more at the request of that 
 body, was the defence of his country in 
 the court of European opinion against the 
 onslaught just delivered by Salmasius. 
 
 Salmasius, a French Protestant, attached 
 to the Dutch University of Leyden as Pro- 
 fessor Extraordinary, was by common consent 
 the most learned man alive. He had been 
 
 [100]
 
 The Autobiography of Milton 
 
 engaged by Charles II, then an exile at the 
 Hague, to issue a manifesto in defence of the 
 late king, and had performed his task in a 
 pamphlet of sonorous rhetorical Latin en- 
 titled Defensio Regia, in which he proclaimed 
 the divine right of kings, and assailed with 
 infinite objurgation the "perfidious, wicked, 
 and parricidal" act of the English who had 
 slain their heaven-sent ruler. It was in an- 
 swer to this work that Milton published in 
 the spring of 1651 his famous Pro Pofido 
 Anglicano Defensio. The long toil involved 
 in the preparation and composition of this 
 work cost Milton his eyesight. For years 
 his vision, overstrained by the arduous study 
 of his youth, had been failing, and when he 
 began his work on the Defence, he was warned 
 by his medical advisers that if he persisted 
 it would be irreparably lost. But he did not 
 hesitate for a moment. In such a case he 
 says: "I would not have listened to the voice 
 of yEsculapius himself in preference to the 
 
 [101]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 suggestions of the heavenly monitor within 
 my breast; my resolution was unshaken, 
 though the alternative was either the loss of 
 my sight or the desertion of my duty. , . . I 
 resolved, therefore, to make the short inter- 
 val of sight which was left me as beneficial 
 as possible to the common weal." About a 
 year after the appearance of the Defence the 
 prediction of the doctors was fulfilled and 
 Milton belonged to the fellowship of blind 
 Thamyris and blind Mseonides. Terrible as 
 the aflfliction of blindness must have been to 
 Milton he never regretted the sacrifice that he 
 had made, but consoled himself to the end 
 of his life by reflecting that he had lost his 
 eyes 
 
 "In liberty's defence, my noble task 
 Of which all Europe talks from side to side." 
 
 Milton did not flatter himself when he 
 represented all Europe as talking of his book. 
 The sensation which it caused was, indeed, 
 prodigious. An unknown Englishman had 
 
 [102]
 
 The AutobiographTj of Milton 
 
 confronted the greatest scholar of the age, ex- 
 posed his ignorance of history, ridiculed his 
 minute and pedantical learning, and, in con- 
 clusion, overwhelmed him with a flood of 
 personal abuse enriched with all the lively 
 billingsgate of classical latinity. "I had ex- 
 pected nothing of such quality from an Eng- 
 lishman," writes a Dutch scholar, rejoicing 
 in the overthrow of the hitherto invincible 
 Salmasius. Naturally, wherever the divine 
 right of kings to oppress their subjects was 
 maintained as an article of belief, Milton's 
 treatise was received with horror. It was 
 burnt by the public hangman at Paris and 
 Toulouse; the Diet of the Holy Roman Em- 
 pire ordered that all the books of Miltonius 
 should be sought out and confiscated. In 
 England, on the other hand, the book was 
 welcomed with an outburst of applause. All 
 the foreign envoys and ambassadors in London 
 congratulated Milton on his triumph over 
 the enemy of his country; the Council of State 
 
 [103]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 formally thanked him on behalf of the Com- 
 monwealth, and offered him a handsome sum 
 of money, a gift which, it is needless to say, 
 Milton at once refused. He was ready to 
 give his eyes for his country, but he would not 
 accept a money payment for the sacrifice. 
 Salmasius himself, on the receipt of Milton's 
 book, broke out into a storm of rage. He 
 threatened, says a writer of the time, straight- 
 way to send Milton, and the Parliament with 
 him, to perdition. But advancing age, domes- 
 tic trouble, and possibly also a dread of his 
 terrible antagonist, stayed his hand, and he 
 died in the rutumn of 1653 with his reply un- 
 finished. But in the meantime another cham- 
 pion, nameless indeed, but possessed of no 
 mean power of invective, had come to his aid. 
 This was Peter du Moulin, a clergyman who 
 had been expelled from his Yorkshire parish 
 by the Puritan reformers. Not daring to 
 publish his work in England he had sent it 
 over to Holland, where it was received by a 
 
 [104]
 
 The Autobiogra'phy of Milton 
 
 certain Moir, or Morus, who equipped it 
 with some abusive prefatory matter, saw it 
 through the press, and, in consequence, was 
 generally, in spite of his protestations, re- 
 garded as the real author. This book, Regii 
 Sanguinis Clamor ad Coelum adversus Parri- 
 cidas Anglicanos (The Cry of the King's 
 Blood to Heaven against the English Parri- 
 cides), is from beginning to end one wild tirade 
 against the principles and the leaders of 
 the English Commonwealth. Cromwell is 
 denounced as a hypocrite and said to be as 
 like Mahomet as an egg is like an egg; the 
 guilt of the Jews in the crucifixion of Christ 
 is asserted to be as nothing in comparison 
 with the wickedness of the English who had 
 slain their king; and France is besought to 
 take up arms to avenge his shameful murder. 
 But the choicest epithets of abuse are reserved 
 for Milton. The scurrile author taunts him 
 with his blindness, with his lean, shrivelled, 
 and bloodless form. He styles him a " hunger- 
 
 [105]
 
 Studies of a BooMover 
 
 starved little man of grammar willing to lend 
 his venal pen to the defence of Parricide." 
 Milton is a "bestial blackguard," "a fiendish 
 gallows-bird," "a hideous hangman." In 
 his youth he was expelled from Cambridge 
 for his profligacy and fled into Italy, where he 
 plunged into the most disgraceful \'ice. On 
 his return he wrote a book on divorce which 
 was httle less than a plea for license in crime; 
 when the murder of the king was being de- 
 bated, he sprang forward and shoved the 
 waverers to the evil side, and finally he had 
 filled the measure of his iniquities by insult- 
 ing the sacred memory of King Charles. His 
 book had been burnt by the hangman and he 
 himself deserved no better fate. 
 
 It was nearly two years before Milton 
 answered this book. During this time he was 
 slowly accustoming himself to the misery of 
 blindness; he had suffered the loss of his wife 
 and his only son, and he was waiting for the 
 threatened work of Salmasius. At last, how- 
 
 [106]
 
 The Autobiography of Milton 
 
 ever, in May, 1654, his answer appeared 
 under the title of Defensio Secunda. It was, 
 of course, written in Latin for European cir- 
 culation, and this fact, combined with the 
 baldness of the few translations that have 
 been made, serves to keep it out of the hands 
 of most English readers of to-day. Yet it is 
 in many respects one of the most valuable of 
 Milton's prose works. Its interest to us con- 
 sists by no means in the savage attack which 
 he directs against Morus, his supposed an- 
 tagonist; not even in the lofty tribute of praise, 
 at once hearty and independent, which he 
 bestows upon the leaders of his party, Fairfax, 
 Bradshaw, and Cromwell; but most of all 
 in the multitude of autobiographical details 
 which the little book contains. Milton, as 
 every one knows, had a well-grounded re- 
 spect for himself, and on this occasion he was 
 , quicker than ever to resent slanders against 
 his character. For these slanders were directed, 
 not against Milton the individual, but against 
 
 [107]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 Milton the Englishman, Milton the advo- 
 cate of his country in the court of Europe. 
 By a series of lies his enemy had sought to 
 render him infamous and so to bring dis- 
 credit upon the cause he represented. And 
 it is at once in defence of himself and of his 
 cause that Milton speaks, addressing him- 
 self to " the whole body of wise men, cities, and 
 nations on the Continent." There is, I 
 think, a pleasant human touch of wounded 
 vanity in the fact that he begins with an ac- 
 count of his personal appearance. " I am 
 not tall, I confess," he says, "yet rather of 
 middle height than short. Nor am I puny; 
 on the contrary, in my youth I was wont to 
 practise fencing daily, and when I wore my 
 sword, as I often did, I thought myself a 
 match for a far stronger man. To-day my 
 spirit and my strength is unchanged, and if 
 my eyes are otherwise, yet they are still clear 
 and bright. My complexion is so fresh that 
 I seem at least ten years younger than I am, 
 
 [108]
 
 The Autobiography of Miltori 
 
 nor is there a wrinkle on my skin. So much 
 I have been forced to say of my appearance; 
 would that I could as easily refute what this 
 inhuman adversary has said of my blindness." 
 Later on, after acknowledging the goodness 
 of God shown him even in his blindness, and 
 thanking his devoted friends for their ex- 
 traordinary kindness, Milton goes on to give 
 that sketch of his life from which all his bi- 
 ographers have drawn so largely. It may be 
 of interest to hear it in his own words. "I 
 was born in London," he says, " of an honour- 
 able family; my father was a most upright 
 man, my mother a woman of approved good- 
 ness, well known for her charities to the poor. 
 From a child my father destined me to the 
 study of the humanities, which indeed I pur- 
 sued so eagerly that from my twelfth year on 
 I seldom left my books for my bed before 
 midnight. And this was, in truth, the first 
 cause of my blindness. In addition to the 
 weakness of my eyes I suffered from frequent 
 
 [109]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 headaches, but none of these things hindered 
 my pursuit of learning. My father had me 
 taught not only in the school, but under vari- 
 ous masters at home, until I was so far 
 advanced in the study of languages and phil- 
 osophy that he sent me to Cambridge, one 
 of our two English universities. Here I 
 studied for seven years, shunning all vice (it 
 may be remembered that Milton's college 
 friends called him the Lady of Christ's) and 
 approved by all good men until I took the 
 degree of M. A. cum laude. And then I did 
 not run away to Italy, but of my own accord 
 withdrew to my home, to the deep regret of 
 my friends at college by whom I was not a 
 little esteemed." 
 
 "At my father's country house," he con- 
 tinues, "whither he had retired to spend his 
 old age, I passed my time solely in the perusal 
 of classic authors, yet I sometimes visited 
 the city to buy books or to learn something 
 new in mathematics or music, which were then 
 
 [110]
 
 The Autobiography of Milton 
 
 my chief delight. Having spent five years in 
 this manner I became desirous of visiting 
 foreign parts, especially Italy, and obtain- 
 ing my father's consent I set out, attended by 
 a single servant. On my departure the 
 famous Henry Wotton showed himself my 
 friend by writing a letter full of good wishes 
 and of advice most useful to a traveller." 
 This is the famous letter in which Sir Henry 
 praised the "Doric delicacy" of Comus and 
 advised Milton to go through Italy, " pensieri 
 stretti, viso sciolto" " with thoughts close and 
 face open." 
 
 After speaking of his noble and learned 
 acquaintances at Paris, Milton goes on to 
 tell of his travels in Italy. "I stayed two 
 months at Florence where I constantly attended 
 the Academies, which a laudable custom of 
 that city maintains for the promotion of 
 literature and social intercourse." Here he 
 pauses for a moment to recall the names of 
 the Florentine gentlemen who had welcomed 
 
 [111]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 him so kindly and praised his Latin poems so 
 enthusiastically on his first visit; "the day 
 will never come when I shall lose the pleasant 
 memory of these men." "From Florence I 
 went to Siena, and thence to Rome. I spent 
 two months in exploring the antiquities of 
 that famous city and was treated with the 
 greatest kindness by Lucas Holsten and other 
 men of learning and abihty. I went on to 
 Naples, and here, by the good offices of a hermit 
 who had been my companion on the journey, 
 I was introduced to Manso, Marquis of Villa, 
 a noble and venerable gentleman, to whom 
 Tasso, the famous poet, had dedicated his 
 book On Friendship. So long as I remained 
 in Naples this gentleman treated me as a dear 
 friend; he showed me about the city, took me 
 into the Viceroy's palace, and even visited me 
 several times at my lodgings. And when I 
 departed, he gravely excused himself for not 
 having shown me more attention, which, he 
 said, my lack of reserve in the matter of re- 
 
 [112]
 
 The Autobiography of Milton 
 
 ligion had rendered impossible in such a town 
 as Naples. I was preparing to visit Sicily 
 and Greece when the sad news of civil war 
 in England recalled me, for I thought it dis- 
 graceful to travel at ease abroad while my 
 fellow-citizens were fighting for liberty at 
 home. 
 
 "On my way back to Rome I was warned 
 that the English Jesuits were laying snares 
 for me in case I revisited that city, because 
 they thought I had spoken too boldly about 
 religion. For I had made it a rule never to 
 introduce the subject of religion in that coun- 
 try, but at the same time not to conceal my 
 own opinions, no matter what the conse- 
 quences, in case I were questioned as to my 
 faith. And so I returned to Rome, where 
 for two months' space, in the very city of the 
 Pope, I openly defended the true religion, as 
 I had done before, whenever it was attacked 
 in my presence. And by God's grace I re- 
 turned unharmed to Florence, where my 
 
 [113]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 friends received me as joyfully as if I had re- 
 turned to my fatherland." 
 
 After a brief account of his travels in 
 Northern Italy, Milton speaks of his visit to 
 Geneva on the way home, and the mention 
 of this city, from which his supposed calum- 
 niator, Morus, had departed under a cloud 
 of scandal, leads him to call God to witness 
 "that in all those cities where vice is so open 
 I Hved pure and untouched by crime or sliame, 
 perpetually reflecting that though I might 
 escape the eyes of men, I could not that of 
 God." It is an interesting coincidence that 
 Milton, on being asked at Geneva for his 
 autograph, wrote down from memory two 
 Unes of Comus, 
 
 "If virtue feeble were 
 Heaven itself would stoop to her," 
 
 and added below them, as an attestation of 
 his belief, " Caelum, non animum, Tnuto, dum 
 trans mare curro" : "I change my abode, but 
 not my opinions, when I cross the sea." 
 
 [114]
 
 The Autobiography of Milton 
 
 "On my return to England," he continues, 
 " I rented a house in London large enough for 
 myself and my books, and betook myself with 
 joy to my interrupted studies." This is the 
 time when Milton wrote his last long Latin 
 poem, the Epitaphium Damonis, in memory 
 of his lost friend, Diodati, and when he was 
 planning a great epic in his mother tongue 
 on the story of Arthur, in the hope, he says, 
 "that I might perhaps leave something so 
 written to after times as they should not 
 willingly let it die." 
 
 From this "quiet and still air of delightful 
 studies " Milton was soon called on to " em- 
 bark in a troubled sea of noises and hoarse 
 disputes." He enumerates in the Defence 
 the various pamphlets which he had written, 
 first in the controversy on church government 
 which was then raging, and next to promote 
 the cause of "that true liberty which is to be 
 sought within, and not without, the mind, not 
 in battle, but in the right conduct of life." To 
 
 [115]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 this end he wrote first his pamphlets on 
 divorce, "for that man makes a vain boast of 
 hberty in the polHng place or senate house 
 who at home endures a slavery most disgrace- 
 ful to a man, slavery to an inferior." Further, 
 he discussed briefly the education of children, 
 "than which nothing does more to train the 
 mind in virtue, that sole source of true internal 
 liberty." "Also I wrote the Areopagitica, on 
 the liberty of the press, to prevent the censor- 
 ship from remaining longer in the hands of a 
 few badly educated men who seldom allowed 
 aught to appear that was above the level of 
 the vulgar mind." 
 
 Finally Milton brings the story of his life 
 down to the date at which he was writing, by 
 speaking of the controversy in which he be- 
 came engaged after the execution of the king. 
 He denies that he urged on the regicides; his 
 first book on the subject did not appear till 
 after the king's death and was written " rather 
 to compose the minds of men than to de- 
 
 [116]
 
 The Autobiography of Milton 
 
 cide anything in the case of Charles, which 
 was not my business, but that of the magis- 
 trates, and was, moreover, settled already. 
 I did my work for church and state within my 
 own four walls: I received no reward for it 
 except that I was let alone. Other men got 
 money or office for nothing; but no one ever 
 saw me canvassing for an office, or using the 
 influence of friends to secure a favor; no one 
 ever saw me hanging about the doors of the 
 House with a beggar's face or spending my 
 time in the ante-chambers of committee- 
 rooms. I stayed at home and lived on my 
 own means. I was, indeed, at work on a 
 History of England when the Council of State 
 most unexpectedly demanded my assistance 
 in foreign affairs. At the request of the Coun- 
 cil I wrote the Eikonoklast in answer to the 
 Eikon. I did not insult the dead monarch, as 
 I am accused of doing, but I verily thought that 
 Queen Truth was more to be preferred than 
 King Charles. Finally, when Salmasius pub- 
 
 [117]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 lished his book, there was no long dispute as to 
 who should answer it. I was then present in 
 the Council, and all its members at once and 
 with one accord named me. So much, Morus, 
 I have written about myself to stop your 
 mouth and to expose your falsehoods." 
 
 I have translated freely, condensing and 
 omitting much from this the longest auto- 
 biographical passage in the works of Milton. 
 It is, however, only one of many. There is, 
 for instance, a long introduction to the second 
 book of The Reason of Church Government, in 
 which Milton speaks of the causes that have 
 induced him to lay aside the epic poem that 
 he was meditating and take part in the church 
 controversies of the time. Here he praises 
 the "ceaseless diligence and care" wliich his 
 father had lavished upon his education, and 
 mentions the fact that he himself had been 
 from a child destined to the service of the 
 church: "till coming to some maturity of 
 years and perceiving what tyranny had in- 
 
 [118]
 
 The Autobiography of Milton 
 
 vaded the church, that he who would take 
 orders must subscribe slave, and take an oath 
 withal, which, unless he took with a con- 
 science that would retch, he must either 
 straight perjure, or split his faith; I thought 
 it better to prefer a blameless silence before 
 the sacred office of speaking, bought and be- 
 gun with servitude and forswearing." Such 
 a passage as this goes far to explain that tor- 
 rent of wrath which Milton, " church-outed by 
 the prelates," pours upon the heads of the 
 corrupted clergy in Lycidas. 
 
 But this preface is, perhaps, even more re- 
 markable for its revelation of the conception 
 of the great poem which was already in 1641 
 dawning in Milton's mind. He had, it ap- 
 pears, renounced his first half-formed plan 
 of writing in Latin, "not caring once to be 
 named abroad, but content with these British 
 islands as my world." But there was still 
 much that remained to be decided, the choice 
 of a subject, for example, "what king or 
 
 [119]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 knight might be chosen in whom to lay the 
 pattern of a Christian hero." And there was 
 the question of the form which the poem 
 should take, " whether that epic whereof the 
 two poems of Homer are a model," or "those 
 dramatic constitutions wherein Sophocles and 
 Euripides reign." Above all there was the 
 long and arduous preparation necessary be- 
 fore the poem could even be begun, "indus- 
 trious and select reading, steady observation, 
 insight into all seemly and generous arts and 
 affairs," for the poem, when at last it should 
 appear, was to be a work " not to be raised 
 from the heat of youth, or the vapours of wine; 
 like that which flows at waste from the pen of 
 some vulgar amourist, or the trencher fury of 
 a rhyming parasite; nor to be obtained by 
 the invocation of dame Memory and her 
 siren daughters, but by devout prayer to that 
 eternal Spirit who can enrich with all utter- 
 ance and knowledge, and sends out his sera- 
 phim, with the hallowed fire of his altar, 
 
 [120 1
 
 The Autobiography of Milton 
 
 to touch and purify the lips of whom he 
 pleases." 
 
 An even more interesting autobiographical 
 passage occurs in the Apology for Smectymnuus, 
 published in 1642. This pamphlet was written 
 in answer to a savage attack upon Milton 
 composed by Bishop Hall, the leader of the 
 Episcopal party, and his son. In the address 
 to the reader prefixed to this attack it was 
 asserted that Milton had spent his youth 
 "loitering, bezzling, and harlotting," that he 
 had been " vomited out of the University into 
 a suburb sink of London," and that, wher- 
 ever he passed his mornings, he spent his 
 afternoons " at the playhouses or the bordelli." 
 No more absurd charge could have been in- 
 vented against Milton than that of idleness 
 and vice, and yet we can hardly regret the 
 recklessness of his adversaries, since it gave 
 the poet the opportunity for such a magnifi- 
 cent self-vindication. After thanking his op- 
 ponent for the "commodious lie" that he was 
 
 [121]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 expelled from Cambridge, inasmuch as it 
 gives him "apt occasion to acknowledge pub- 
 licly with all grateful mind that more than 
 ordinary favour and respect, which I found 
 above any of my equals at the hands of those 
 courteous and learned men, the fellows of 
 that college wherein I spent some years," 
 Milton goes on to speak of his present mode 
 of life, his studies, and his character. 
 
 " My morning haunts are where they should 
 be, at home," he says, " not sleeping nor con- 
 cocting the surfeits of an irregular feast, but 
 up and stirring, in winter often ere the sound 
 of any bell awake men to labor or to devotion; 
 in summer as oft with the bird that first rouses, 
 or not much tardier, to read good authors or 
 cause them to be read, till the attention be 
 weary, or memory have its full fraught: then 
 with useful and generous labours preserving 
 the body's health and hardiness to render 
 lightsome, clear, and not lumpish obedience 
 to the mind, to the cause of religion, and to 
 
 [122]
 
 The Autobiography of Milton 
 
 our country's liberty, when it shall require 
 firm hearts in sound bodies to stand and 
 cover their stations, rather than to see the 
 ruin of our protestation, and the inforcement 
 of a slavish life." It would seem from these 
 last words that Milton was already anticipat- 
 ing the civil war which broke out shortly after. 
 Masson, indeed, thinks that the passage shows 
 that Milton took part in the military exercises 
 of the London citizens. 
 
 Speaking of his studies Milton says that 
 his first delight was " the smooth elegiac poets." 
 Probably the reference is especially to Ovid, 
 whom we know that Milton, like Shakespeare 
 before liim, honored somewhat above his due. 
 Yet, he continues, "if I found those authors 
 anywhere speaking unworthy things of them- 
 selves, or unchaste of those names which be- 
 fore they had extolled, this effect it wrought 
 with me, from that time forward their art I 
 still applauded, but the men I deplored; and 
 above them all preferred the two famous re- 
 
 [123]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 nowners of Beatrice and Laura, who never 
 write but honor of them to whom they devote 
 their verse, displaying subUme and pure 
 thoughts without transgression. And it was 
 not long after when I was confirmed in this 
 opinion that he who would not be frustrate 
 of his hope to write well hereafter of laudable 
 things, ought himself to be a true poem; that 
 is, a composition and pattern of the best and 
 honourablest things." 
 
 "Next I betook me among those lofty 
 fables and romances " (Milton is thinking here, 
 perhaps, of his favorite " our sage and serious 
 poet, Spenser") "which recount in solemn 
 cantos the deeds of knighthood founded by our 
 victorious kings. There I read it in the oath 
 of every knight, that he should defend to the 
 expense of his best blood, or of his life, if it so 
 befell him, the honour and chastity of virgin 
 or matron; from whence even then I learned 
 what a noble virtue chastity sure must be, 
 to the defence of which so many worthies, 
 
 [ 124]
 
 The Autobiography of Milton 
 
 by such a dear adventure of themselves, had 
 sworn. . . . Only this my mind gave me, 
 that every free and gentle spirit, without that 
 oath, ought to be bom a knight, nor needed 
 to expect the gilt spur, nor the laying of a 
 sword upon his shoulder, to stir him up, both 
 by his counsel and his arms, to secure and 
 protect the weakness of any attempted chastity. 
 So that even these books, which to many 
 others have been the fuel of wantoness and 
 loose living . . . proved to me so many in- 
 citements to the love and steadfast observa- 
 tion of that virtue which abhors the society 
 of bordellos." 
 
 " Thus from the laureate fraternity of poets, 
 riper years and the ceaseless round of study 
 and reading led me to the shady spaces of 
 philosophy; but chiefly to the divine volumes 
 of Plato and his equal Xenophon; where if I 
 should tell ye what I learnt of chastity and 
 love, I mean that which is truly so, whose 
 charming cup is only virtue, which she bears 
 
 [125]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 in her hand to those who are worthy (the 
 rest are cheated with a thick, intoxicating 
 potion, which a certain sorceress, the abuser 
 of love's name, carries about); and how the 
 first and chiefest office of love begins and 
 ends in the soul, ... it might be worth your 
 listening, readers." And after a reference to 
 his training in the precepts of Christianity, 
 where he learnt that unchastity in a man, 
 "though not commonly thought so, must be 
 much more deflouring and dishonourable than 
 in a woman," Milton winds up this apologia 
 pro vita sua with a proud confidence of vic- 
 tory over his slanderer: "Thus large have I 
 purposely been, that if I have been justly 
 taxed with this crime, it may come upon me 
 after all this my confession with a ten-fold 
 shame." 
 
 I need not pursue my task further, I think, 
 of setting Milton to speak for himself and 
 show us in his own noble words what manner 
 of man he was. I have selected passages 
 
 [126]
 
 The AutobiograpJiij of Milton 
 
 from two of the least read of his prose works 
 in EngHsh, and from a Latin treatise which, 
 I fancy, is seldom read at all. But there is 
 hardly any work of Milton, that most intensely 
 self-conscious of authors, from which it would 
 not be possible to learn something about the 
 man behind the work. The divorce tracts, 
 for example, at once reveal to us his lofty ideal 
 of marriage, a subject on which he is the 
 most generally misunderstood of men, and 
 explain simply enough the catastrophe of his 
 own first attempt to realize this ideal. And 
 the Areopagitica, perhaps the noblest of all 
 his pamphlets, is on fire with that love of 
 freedom in thought, speech, and action, which 
 was the dominating principle of Milton's life. 
 And as for his poems, from the Sonnet on 
 being arrived to the age of twenty-three to the 
 Samson written in his blind old age when 
 " fallen on evil days and evil tongues," there is, 
 I believe, hardly one in which we may not 
 discover some exquisite touch of self-revela- 
 
 [127]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 tion. Milton could never, we may be sure, 
 have been a dramatist of the first order, if 
 for no other reason than that it was impos- 
 sible for him to conceal his own personality 
 behind the characters he created. 
 
 I have sometimes thought that it would be 
 a pleasant and not unprofitable task for a 
 student of literature to go through the letters, 
 essays, and poems of Milton in detail, to pick 
 out the autobiographical passages, and to 
 arrange them in such an order that the poet 
 might himself tell us the story of his inner 
 and his outer life from boyhood till old age. 
 Such an autobiography certainly would be 
 briefer than the enormous encyclopaedia of 
 Milton and his times by Professor Masson 
 which serves to-day for the standard life of 
 the poet. But, unless I am much mistaken, 
 the ordinary reader would learn more about 
 Milton's personality from such a compilation 
 than from the six huge volumes in which, if 
 the truth must be told, the poet too often dis- 
 
 [128]
 
 The Autobiography of Milton 
 
 appears amid a baffling crowd of contem- 
 poraries, more or less obscure, as the outline 
 of some splendid forest tree is often hidden 
 from the spectator by the lower growths that 
 cluster round it. 
 
 It is not only in Professor Masson's vast 
 work, however, that the personality of Milton 
 is obscured. On the contrary, I beUeve, 
 there is no English poet, of whose life we 
 know so much, whose true character, at the 
 same time, has been so generally misunder- 
 stood. In his own day the clouds of partisan 
 warfare hung thick around him; in our own 
 time he has too often been exalted into a re- 
 motely superhuman figure. Or if at times a 
 critic makes the effort to bring Milton back 
 to earth again and portray him as a man of 
 like passions with ourselves, the reaction 
 against the ordinary view is too likely to end 
 in an attempt to belittle the heroic figure. 
 Here, for example, is Professor Saintesbury's 
 rough sketch: "Milton's character was not 
 
 [129]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 an amiable one, nor even wholly estimable. 
 It is probable that he never in the course of 
 his whole life did anything that he considered 
 wrong, but unfortunately examples are not 
 far to seek of the facility with which desire 
 can be made to confound itself with de- 
 liberate approval. He was an exacting if not 
 tyrannical husband and father; he held in the 
 most exaggerated fashion the doctrine of the 
 superiority of man to woman; his egotism in 
 a man who had accomplished less would be 
 half ludicrous and half disgusting; his faculty 
 of appreciation beyond his own immediate 
 tastes and interests was small; his intolerance 
 surpassed that of an inquisitor." Such a cari- 
 cature may, perhaps, have its use as an oflFset 
 to the uncritical and boyish idealization of 
 Macaulay's famous essay; but it can hardly 
 be accepted as a realistic portrait of Milton. 
 
 The golden mean between such extremes 
 might perhaps be found by some such method 
 as I have suggested above. Certainly if we 
 
 [130]
 
 The Autobiography of Milton 
 
 would obtain a true portrait of Milton, "in 
 his habit as he lived," we might well spend 
 the time and care which others have devoted 
 to ransacking dusty archives or to evolving 
 an ideal figure from the depths of self-con- 
 sciousness, in the study and sympathetic in- 
 terpretation of those passages of his works 
 in which the poet reveals to us his aims and 
 hopes and beliefs and sympathies, in what 
 I have ventured to call the autobiography 
 of Milton. 
 
 [131]
 
 The 
 Personality of Dr. Johnson 
 
 IT is almost impossible for us, looking back 
 over the century and a quarter which 
 separates us from the death of Dr. Johnson, 
 to realize the position which for thirty years 
 he had held in the world of English letters. 
 And when at last by an effort of the historic 
 imagination we attain to some imperfect con- 
 ception of his place, we ask ourselves with 
 something like amazement to what this un- 
 disputed supremacy was due. Johnson was 
 the last literary autocrat of England, the 
 "great Cham of literature," as his contem- 
 porary, SmoUet, aptly called him. He filled 
 the throne which had been occupied before 
 him by Pope, by Dryden, and by Ben Jonson, 
 each of them, if not a greater man, assuredly 
 
 [132]
 
 The Personality of Dr. Johnson 
 
 a greater writer. Yet it may well be ques- 
 tioned whether any of them ever received 
 such undivided homage as was accorded dur- 
 ing the last years of his life to Samuel John- 
 son. It was not on account of the lack of 
 fellow-workers in the field of polite letters 
 that Johnson was so honored. His claim to 
 recognition rested upon his work as a moral 
 philosopher, a prose writer, and a poet. Now 
 in depth and originality of thought he was 
 surpassed by at least three of his contem- 
 poraries, Hume, Burke, and Adam Smith. 
 As a master of prose style Johnson is now, 
 perhaps, too generally undervalued, yet in the 
 weightier matters, such as invention, humor, 
 and power of characterization, his work is not 
 to be compared with that of such masters as 
 Fielding and Goldsmith. And as for poetry, 
 it is only by a certain efiFort of the will that the 
 modern reader trained in the romantic school 
 of Tennyson and Keats, and looking back 
 from them to Milton and Shakespeare, can 
 
 [133]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 admit the claim of Johnson's sonorous and 
 rhetorical couplets to be poetry at all. 
 
 The fact seems to be that Johnson's dicta- 
 torship was due to his personality rather than 
 to his productions, to his spoken rather than 
 to his written words. The greatest writers 
 have lost themselves in their work: Homer is 
 only a name; Shakespeare's true self is barely 
 discernible through his plays and poems. 
 Johnson, on the other hand, has left the im- 
 press of his strong, acute, yet sharply limited 
 personality on every line he wrote. In one 
 of his outbursts of dogmatic criticism Johnson 
 says, most unjustly, that no man could have 
 fancied that he read Lycidas with pleasure 
 had he not known the author. It would be 
 far less unjust, and probably a close approxi- 
 mation to the truth, to say that no man to-day 
 reads the Rambler or Rasselas except as he is at- 
 tracted to them by the fame of their author, and 
 with the hope, not always realized, of finding in 
 them the cause and justification of that fame. 
 
 [134]
 
 The Personality of Dr. Johnson 
 
 Naturally in our day, when the whole aspect 
 of the world has been changed by the economic 
 revolution, the discoveries of science, and the 
 triumph of democracy, the cause and justi- 
 fication of Johnson's fame is harder to dis- 
 cover in his books than it was in his own time. 
 And even in his own time, as has already been 
 suggested, it was probably rather to his com- 
 manding personality than to his works that 
 his supremacy was due. Fortunately for us 
 his personality still survives, imperishable and 
 wholly independent of his work. By some 
 happy fate, as if in compensation for the 
 hardships and miseries of his youth, he en- 
 countered in middle life the man who was 
 to make him immortal. No happier con- 
 junction of men could be imagined than that 
 of Samuel Johnson and James Boswell. 
 Johnson loved to talk, Boswell to Hsten; 
 Johnson was perhaps the most entertaining 
 and effective talker that ever lived, Boswell 
 was indisputably the best reporter of conver- 
 
 [135]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 sation; Johnson asserted his right, almost 
 tyrannically at times, to be the absolute lord 
 of every society into which he entered, Boswell 
 was willing either to efface himself, or to 
 obtrude himself just far enough to catch the 
 great man's eye and provoke one of those 
 outbursts which dehghted the hearers at that 
 time and have delighted thousands of readers 
 ever since. Johnson was pardonably proud, 
 and somewhat over quick to take offense, 
 though always eager to forgive; Boswell, on 
 the other hand, was almost humihatingly 
 wanting in self-respect, incapable of resent- 
 ment, and only too ready to be forgiven. 
 Finally, Johnson's ideas, beliefs, and principles 
 were as firm and immutable as bronze; Bos- 
 well's mind was wax to receive and marble 
 to retain; and thus the hero left upon his 
 worshiper an indelible imprint which has 
 transmitted his own true form and features 
 to all posterity. The two men were made 
 for each other, and if Boswell has achieved 
 
 [136]
 
 The Personality of Dr. Johnson 
 
 immortality in the company of Johnson, he 
 has obtained no more than his just reward. 
 It is quite time to have done with Macaulay's 
 silly paradox that it was only because he was 
 so great a fool that Boswell wrote so great a 
 book. Carlyle answered that paradox at the 
 time. " Falser hypothesis," he says, " never rose 
 in human soul." Unfortunately the popu- 
 larity of Macaulay's essay on Boswell's Life 
 of Johnson stands to Carlyle's work on the 
 same subject in inverse ratio to the real value 
 of their respective pictures of hero and bi- 
 ographer; and it is permissible, therefore, in 
 view of the gross injustice done to one who 
 was not only Johnson's biographer, but his 
 dear friend, to quote the too little known 
 words of Carlyle's verdict. " Boswell wrote a 
 good book," so the final judgment runs, "be- 
 cause he had a heart and an eye to discern wis- 
 dom, and an utterance to render it forth; be- 
 cause of his free insight, his lively talent, above 
 all, of his love and child-like open-minded- 
 
 [137]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 ness. . . . Neither James Boswell's good book, 
 nor any other good thing, in any time, nor in 
 any place, was, is, or can be performed by any 
 man in virtue of his badness, but always and 
 solely in spite thereof." 
 
 It must not be forgotten that the picture of 
 Johnson that Boswell gives us is a picture of 
 Johnson in his dechning years, his character 
 formed, his work, for the most part, done. 
 Johnson was already fifty-two when Boswell 
 met him, and although he had yet twenty- 
 three years of Hfe before him these were tran- 
 quil and idle years compared with the misery 
 and grinding toil of his earlier life. The 
 period of his acquaintance with Boswell was 
 one long Indian summer in which the storm- 
 beaten hero rested from his labors and en- 
 joyed, so far as the deep-rooted melancholy 
 of his nature would allow, the sunshine of 
 prosperity. The Johnson whom we all know 
 in the famous biography, the great dictator of 
 literature, the autocrat of the famous club, 
 
 [138]
 
 The Personality of Dr. Johnson 
 
 the revered philosopher whose grotesque antics 
 moved his friends to alternate awe and laughter, 
 the tender-hearted and rough-mannered man 
 who bullied the strong and bowed humbly 
 to the weak, was the product of a long life 
 amid an environment unknown to Boswell 
 except by report, and of an heredity which, 
 had he known, he could not have appreciated. 
 Boswell has furnished us with full materials 
 for an estimate of Johnson's character; but 
 before we can be in a position to estimate it 
 rightly, we must know something of the 
 process by which that character was evolved. 
 Samuel Johnson was born in the cathedral 
 town of Lichfield in 1709. His father, 
 Michael, was a book-seller, a bigoted Tory 
 and a man of learning, but superstitious, 
 utterly careless of money matters, and afflicted 
 with the constitutional melancholy which was 
 characteristic of his famous son. Johnson, it 
 must be owned, had good grounds for melan- 
 choly; he inherited the taint of scrofula and 
 
 [139]
 
 Studies of a BooMover 
 
 in early childhood almost wholly lost his 
 sight from this disease. In spite of his great 
 physical strength, he suffered throughout his 
 hfe from a variety of ailments, he was attacked 
 by paralysis in his old age, and finally fell a 
 victim to a terrible complication of gout, 
 dropsy, kidney trouble, and lung disease. 
 When we remember the vociferous lamenta- 
 tions with which Carlyle bewailed his attacks 
 of dyspepsia and insomnia, or the less noisy 
 but more terrible misanthropy with which 
 Swift revenged himself upon a world which, 
 at least, was innocent of his physical suffer- 
 ings, we find something truly noble in the un- 
 shaken fortitude with which Johnson faced 
 his miseries. Their one result upon his mind, 
 it would seem, was a somewhat scornful treat- 
 ment of the affected sorrows and sentimental 
 troubles with which his age was so plenteously 
 endowed. 
 
 The usual tales are told of Johnson's pre- 
 cocity. In spite of his deficient eyesight he 
 
 [ 140 ]
 
 The Personality of Dr. Johnson 
 
 read prodigiously. One of the most charac- 
 teristic of the anecdotes preserved by Boswell 
 tells how the boy climbed up a ladder in his 
 father's shop in search of some apples which 
 he fancied his brother had hidden behind a 
 huge folio on the upper shelf. The apples 
 were undiscoverable, but the book proved to 
 be a copy of Petrarch whose name Johnson 
 had come across somewhere in his voluminous 
 reading. Hunger was forgotten in the de- 
 light of a new discovery, and the boy sat upon 
 the ladder with the folio on his knees, reading 
 until he had finished a great part of the book. 
 The story is typical of much of Johnson's 
 life and, in particular, of his method of study, 
 accidental, spasmodic, intense and concen- 
 trated while the fit was on, sluggish and inter- 
 mittent when the moment passed. If he had 
 a subject to get up, he invariably neglected it. 
 When preparing his edition of Shakespeare, 
 he declined to avail himself of Garrick's un- 
 rivalled collection of early editions and con- 
 
 [141]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 temporary plays because he thought that Gar- 
 rick had not pressed him sufficiently to make 
 use of them. When he was composing the 
 Lives of the Poets, he snubbed Boswell for 
 busying himself to secure materials, and de- 
 clared that he didn't care to know about Pope. 
 On the other hand, he probably read more 
 miscellaneous printed matter than any man 
 of his century. With all his reading, how- 
 ever, he was the very opposite of the typical 
 book-worm. No creature is more universally 
 despised by normal boys than a young book- 
 worm, but Johnson even in his school-days 
 exercised an undisputed sway over his asso- 
 ciates. He did his friends' tasks for them, 
 he served as the standard by which every boy's 
 scholarship was tested, and he rode trium- 
 phantly to school in the morning mounted 
 upon a comrade's back, with two others sup- 
 porting him on either hand. 
 
 Johnson was sent up to Oxford on the 
 promise, never fulfilled, of pecuniary support 
 
 [142]
 
 The Personality of Dr. Johnson 
 
 from certain of his father's friends. The 
 anecdotes that are told of his college life are 
 extremely characteristic. On his entrance he 
 amazed his tutor by quoting Macrobius, he 
 stayed away from lectures to slide on the ice 
 in Christ Church meadows, he neglected the 
 required exercises in Latin verse, but latinized 
 a poem of Pope's in such a masterly fashion 
 as to attract the notice of the whole university. 
 His old master told Boswell that Johnson at 
 college was a "gay, frolicsome fellow, caressed 
 and loved by all about him"; but Johnson 
 himself told another story: "Oh, sir," he said, 
 "I was mad and violent. It was bitterness 
 which they mistook for frolic. I was miser- 
 ably poor and I thought to fight my way by 
 my literature and by my wit, so I disregarded 
 all power and all authority." He was gener- 
 ally seen "lounging at the college gate with a 
 circle of young students round him, whom 
 he was entertaining with his wit and keeping 
 from their studies, if not spiriting up to re- 
 
 [143]
 
 Studies of a BooMover 
 
 bellion against the college discipline." Yet 
 when one of these admiring friends put a pair 
 of shoes at his door to replace the broken pair 
 through which his feet were showing, Johnson 
 threw them away in a passion of resentment. 
 And this although he had already ceased to 
 attend a highly valued course of lectures be- 
 cause his shabby dress made him, as he 
 thought, an object of contempt to strangers. 
 Johnson loved learning much, but indepen- 
 dence more. The youth who threw away the 
 shoes was the father of the man who wrote 
 the famous letter to Lord Chesterfield "pro- 
 claiming to the listening world that Patronage 
 should be no more." 
 
 Johnson added but little to his mental 
 equipment at Oxford; indeed he said long 
 afterwards that he knew as much when he 
 went there at eighteen as he did when he was 
 fifty; but he acquired something better than 
 learning. From an early age he had been 
 something of a free-thinker and a careless 
 
 [144]
 
 The Personality of Dr. Johnson 
 
 talker about religion, probably more to show 
 his wit than for any other reason. But during 
 his short stay at Oxford — he was in residence 
 only a little more than a year — he read that 
 strangely powerful book, Law's Call to a Seri- 
 ous Life, and under its influence became 
 what he continued to his death, not only a 
 sincere believer, but a stalwart champion of re- 
 vealed religion. And this is the more remark- 
 able since, with hardly an exception, the emi- 
 nent men of his day, Bolingbroke, Pope, 
 Hume, and Voltaire, were either open infidels 
 or complacent and self-contented Deists. We 
 must not forget, of course, the Evangelical move- 
 ment under the fervent apostleship of Wesley 
 and Whitfield, but this movement was essen- 
 tially an appeal from the intellect to the emo- 
 tional faculties of men, and as such wholly 
 alien to the strong sense and self-restrained 
 nature of Johnson. His prayers were made 
 in his closet or written in his note-books, not 
 performed with unction upon the corners of the 
 
 [145]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 streets. The traditional forms of the Eng- 
 lish church gave full scope for his exercises of 
 devotion, and he was Tory enough to insist 
 upon the maintenance in all her privileges of 
 the national church; but beneath all forms he 
 recognized, as perhaps no other man did in 
 his day, the essential unity of religion. In 
 the true spirit of a sincere believer he was 
 accustomed to reproach himself bitterly for 
 his failure to live up to the principles of his 
 creed, but to us, looking back upon his blame- 
 less life and his thousand silent deeds of 
 charity, he seems the very embodiment of Saint 
 James's definition of religion. 
 
 Less is known of Johnson during the period 
 between his departure from Oxford and his 
 arrival in London than at any other time of 
 his life. His father's health and business 
 were failing together and he died in 1731 on 
 the verge of bankruptcy. Of his little inheri- 
 tance of £20, Johnson laid by eleven and 
 went out into the world to seek his living. He 
 
 [146]
 
 The Personality of Dr. Johnson 
 
 found it no easy task. He tried to turn his 
 education to account as a teacher in a Httle 
 school, but found it as disagreeable for him 
 to teach as it was for the boys to learn. He 
 earned a few guineas by writing and trans- 
 lating for a provincial bookseller. He fell in 
 love with and married a widow of nearly 
 twice his age, a fact which for some reason 
 has proved a source of inextinguishable mirth 
 to vulgar minds. It is impossible to be angry 
 with the born mimic, David Garrick, who in 
 after years used to convulse London drawing- 
 rooms by a caricature of the love-scenes be- 
 tween Johnson and the widow, which he had 
 witnessed with a school-boy's apish delight in 
 their ludicrous side; but it is not easy to for- 
 give Macaulay for abusing the woman whom 
 Johnson loved as "a tawdry painted grand- 
 mother who accepted his addresses with a 
 readiness that did her little honor." Not little, 
 but greatly to her honor was it that she had 
 eyes to pierce beneath the rough exterior of 
 
 [147]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 this poor, ugly, and miserable scholar, and to 
 see the strength and sincerity of his love; nor 
 less that she had the intelUgence to recognize 
 in him "the most sensible man she ever saw 
 in her life." 
 
 With the money that his wife brought him 
 Johnson once more tried his hand at teaching 
 and opened a school near Lichfield. But his 
 second attempt was no more successful than 
 his first. Not more than eight boys ever at- 
 tended the school, and after a hopeless struggle 
 of a year or two, Johnson abandoned it and 
 went up to London to seek his fortune with 
 two-pence ha'penny in his pocket and an un- 
 finished drama in his portmanteau. 
 
 London was at that time, to a degree which 
 it has never since been, the intellectual and 
 literary center of the English-speaking world. 
 Indeed, if we except the brilliant literary 
 coterie which a few years later gathered around 
 Hume in Edinburgh, London may be said 
 to have enjoyed throughout the middle of 
 
 [148]
 
 The Personality of Dr. Johnson 
 
 the eighteenth century a practical monopoly 
 of Englishmen of wit and letters. It offered 
 the only field in which a man of Johnson's 
 tastes and abilities might rise to fame and 
 fortune. Of these two, fame was in that day 
 far easier of attainment than fortune. Ma- 
 caulay has drawn a memorable picture of the 
 depressed state of letters at the time of John- 
 son's arrival in London, and of the miseries 
 suffered there by starving authors. As usual 
 with Macaulay the picture is overdrawn, but 
 there is no doubt that his main contention is 
 true. The golden age of patronage had 
 passed away, the age in which the writer ap- 
 pealed directly to a large and liberal reading 
 public had not yet arrived; and in the inter- 
 regnum, " struggling between two worlds, one 
 dead, one powerless to be born," Johnson and 
 his fellows had a long and bitter contest with 
 all the ills that then assailed the scholar's life, 
 
 " Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail." 
 But where weaker men succumbed, Johnson's 
 
 [ 149 ]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 courage, industry, and strong self-command 
 brought him nobly through the battle. 
 
 Johnson's emergence from the sea in which 
 so many of his fellows sank was, indeed, a 
 striking example of the survival of the fittest. 
 Of all the struggling men of letters in his day 
 no one was so well fitted to make his hands 
 keep his head. His native independence of 
 mind kept him from the snares of patronage 
 in which so brilliant a genius as his friend 
 Savage perished miserably; his proud self- 
 confidence prevented him from becoming the 
 abject slave of the book-sellers. His en- 
 counter with Osborne, one of the most promi- 
 nent publishers of the day, has become tradi- 
 tional. He is said to have knocked him 
 down with a folio Bible and to have put his 
 foot upon his neck in sign of triumph, but 
 Johnson told Boswell the story in a simpler 
 fashion: "Sir, he was impertinent to me, and 
 I beat him;" and he added later, "I have beat 
 many a fellow, but the rest had the wit to hold 
 
 [150]
 
 The Personalihj of Dr. Johnson 
 
 their tongues." Although by no means con- 
 temptuous of the good things of Hfe, he could 
 and often did live on as near nothing a day as 
 was humanly possible, and the want of a 
 dinner never lowered the quality or quantity 
 of his literary product. On the contrary, his 
 natural indolence seemed to need the spur of 
 sharp necessity. When free from care he was, 
 in the fine phrase of his day, "vastly idle"; 
 but he was at need capable of the most ex- 
 traordinary exertions. He wrote forty-eight 
 printed pages of the Lije of Savage at a 
 sitting; he began and finished his story of 
 Rasselas in a single week. And he was as 
 versatile as he was energetic. For the Gentle- 
 man s Magazine, with which he became con- 
 nected soon after his arrival in London, he 
 wrote verses in Latin, Greek, and English, 
 translations from French and Italian, essays, 
 biographical sketches, prefaces, and addresses 
 to the subscribers. Perhaps of all his labors 
 for the magazine that which attracted most 
 
 [151]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 attention was his version of the debates in 
 ParUament. The House of Commons at that 
 time and for years afterwards strictly pro- 
 hibited any account of its proceedings; but the 
 enterprising pubUsher of the Gentleman's 
 Magazine managed to bribe the doorkeepers 
 to admit men who reported to him the sub- 
 jects of discussion, the names of the speakers, 
 and a few scanty notes of their arguments. 
 Out of these materials Johnson composed, 
 under the title of Debates of the Senate of 
 Lilliput, a series of speeches which, in the 
 judgment of his contemporaries, surpassed the 
 eloquence of Demosthenes, and greatly in- 
 creased the sale of the magazine. 
 
 In spite of his poverty, however, as soon as 
 Johnson discovered that these speeches were 
 being received as the genuine orations de- 
 livered in Parliament, he ceased to compose 
 them, " for," said he, " I would not be accessory 
 to the propagation of falsehood." As this 
 fact bears witness to Johnson's tenderness of 
 
 [152]
 
 The Personality of Dr. Johnson 
 
 conscience, another incident is equally en- 
 lightening as to his political prejudices. 
 When praised for the impartiality with which 
 he had distributed reason and eloquence, he 
 answered: "That is not quite true. I saved 
 appearances tolerably well; but I took care 
 that the Whig dogs should not have the best 
 of it." 
 
 It was fortunate for Johnson in more ways 
 than one that at the crisis of his life he boldly 
 plunged into the world of London. Had he 
 remained in the provinces he would have 
 rotted in obscurity or collapsed under the de- 
 pressing influence of an environment to which 
 he was in no way adapted. On the other hand, 
 had circumstances permitted him to live like 
 Gray in the dignified seclusion of a college 
 fellowship, he would probably have done even 
 less work than Gray and in the end gone 
 melancholy mad. He had not the sHghtest 
 taste for country life, and ridiculed with 
 boisterous scorn the supposed delights of soli- 
 
 [153]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 tude. Possibly on account of his deficient 
 eyesight he had no appreciation whatever of 
 the beauties of nature; one prospect, he said, 
 resembles another very closely, and one blade 
 of grass is exactly like another. The demon 
 of melancholy, " a horrible hypochondria, with 
 perpetual irritation, fretfulness, and impa- 
 tience, with dejection, gloom, and despair 
 which made existence misery," was not to 
 be exorcised by solitary walks in country 
 fields. What Johnson needed was not only 
 work, but society, close contact with all sorts 
 and conditions of men, friendships, enmities, 
 whatever could draw him out of himself and 
 make him forget. All this he found in Lon- 
 don. No man of his time knew so well the 
 great city, and all the varieties of life contained 
 vrithin its walls. He slept with beggars, or 
 wandered houseless through the streets at 
 night with a brother poet; he slanged a 
 bargeman, laughed and jested with Garrick's 
 actresses, or talked "with profound respect, 
 
 [154]
 
 The Personality oj Dr. Johnson 
 
 but still in a firm, manly manner, with his 
 sonorous voice," to Majesty itself. "I look 
 upon a day as lost," he said, " in which I do not 
 make a new acquaintance." The fact that 
 he never lost a friend except by death shows 
 that he was as tenacious of old friendships as 
 he was eager to acquire new. He had, in fact, 
 a very genius for friendship, and the circle 
 that gathered round him in his later years 
 included not only poets, scholars, and men 
 of letters, but the most prominent painters, 
 actors, musicians, doctors, and statesmen in 
 England. 
 
 Johnson's attitude toward the great city 
 where he suffered so much and gained so 
 much is not to be judged from his poem, 
 London. The bitterness of that early satire is 
 due in part to the tone of the author from whom 
 it is imitated, in part, perhaps, to the temper of 
 Savage to whom it was addressed. But even 
 in this early work it may be noted that while 
 the abuse of the town is vivid and direct, — 
 
 [155]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 "Here malice, rapine, accident conspire, 
 And now a rabble rages, now a fire ; 
 Here falling houses thunder on your head, 
 And here a female atheist talks you dead, — " 
 
 the contrasting praises of the country are 
 absolutely commonplace and artificial, per- 
 haps the only insincere lines that Johnson ever 
 wrote. We can well imagine with what ridi- 
 cule he would in later years have chastised a 
 presumptuous friend who urged him to fulfil 
 the prophecy of Thales and, abandoning the 
 folhes of the town, " fly for refuge to the wilds 
 of Kent." London was no stony-hearted step- 
 mother to Johnson, but an Alma Mater dearer 
 even than his own mother university. He 
 preferred Fleet Street to the finest prospect in 
 the Highlands; declared that the full tide of 
 human existence was realized in all its magni- 
 tude at Charing Cross, and summed up the 
 feeling of thousands of lovers of the town be- 
 fore and since his day in the words, "When a 
 man is tired of London, he is tired of life." 
 
 [156]
 
 The Personality of Dr. Johnson 
 
 It would take too long to trace the evolution 
 of Johnson from the unknown correspondent 
 of the Gentleman's Magazine to the dicta- 
 torship of letters where Boswell found him; 
 but a few of the landmarks of his career may 
 be noted. His London in 1738 brought him 
 ten guineas and the praise of Pope. His Life 
 of Savage in 1744 attracted considerable atten- 
 tion, not only from the interest of its subject, 
 but from the vividness of its characterization 
 and the profound gravity of its morality. It 
 is written in Johnson's heaviest and most poly- 
 syllabic style; but it is worth reading even 
 today for its dexterous blending of moral criti- 
 cism and Christian charity. Indeed, it is at 
 times almost amusing to see how far John- 
 son's warm heart leads him to go in defence 
 of a friend, even when that friend was so 
 thorough-paced a blackguard as the unfor- 
 tunate Savage. 
 
 By 1747 Johnson had acquired sufficient 
 reputation to justify a syndicate of booksellers 
 
 [157]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 in contracting with him for the production of 
 an EngHsh Dictionary, at that time a great 
 desideratum in the language. On this work 
 he spent in all eight years, and its appearance 
 may be said to have laid the capstone on his 
 reputation. As a great lexicographer, — the 
 title by which he was so often known in the 
 eighteenth century, — Johnson was disquali- 
 fied first by his profound ignorance of all 
 other Germanic languages and even of the 
 earlier stages of his own tongue, and secondly 
 by his constitutional disinclination toward la- 
 borious and minute research. On the other 
 hand, his definitions were for the most part 
 excellent, although at times, when his partisan- 
 ship got the better of his judgment and he 
 defined excise as "a hateful tax levied upon 
 commodities and adjudged by wretches hired 
 by those to whom excise is paid, " or a pen- 
 sion as "pay given to a State hireling for 
 treason to his country," they were calculated 
 rather to make the cynic laugh and the judi- 
 
 [158]
 
 The Personality of Dr. Johnson 
 
 cious grieve. Sometimes, indeed, a flash of 
 Johnson's sturdy good humor and native wit 
 breaks through the cloud of definitions and 
 illustrations like a ray of sunshine, as where 
 he defines Grub Street as a place "much 
 inhabited by writers of small histories, dic- 
 tionaries, and temporary poems," or a lexi- 
 cographer as "a writer of dictionaries, a 
 harmless drudge." 
 
 Johnson received the respectable sum of 
 nearly $8,000 for his work, equivalent in 
 purchasing power to perhaps three times the 
 amount to-day. Out of this, however, he had 
 to pay all the expenses of preparing the book 
 for the press, and long before the work was 
 done he had spent all that he was to receive 
 for it. His procrastination delayed the book 
 several years beyond the date for which it was 
 originally announced and completely exhausted 
 the publishers' patience. "Thank God, I 
 have done with him," said Miller, the head of 
 the syndicate, when the last sheets came in. 
 
 [159]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 "1 am glad," said Johnson, when this was re- 
 ported to him, "that he thanks God for any- 
 thing." It is characteristic both of the man 
 and the times that within a year after the ap- 
 pearance of his great work Johnson was ar- 
 rested for debt and had to be bailed out by his 
 friend, Samuel Richardson. 
 
 The composition of the dictionary by no 
 means engrossed Johnson's attention during 
 the eight years that he was engaged upon it. 
 In 1748 he composed his best known poem, 
 The Vanity of Human Wishes, for which he 
 received the trifling sum of fifteen guineas. 
 In the following year, the tragedy of Irene, 
 which he had brought up to London with him 
 and which had so far gone the rounds of the 
 theatres in vain, was produced by his old 
 pupil, David Garrick, now the manager of 
 Drury Lane. 
 
 The production could hardly be called 
 successful. The play began amid cat-calls 
 and whistling, and when the catastrophe was 
 
 [160]
 
 The Personality of Dr. Johnson 
 
 reached and the unfortunate heroine with the 
 bowstring about her neck opened her Ups for 
 her dying speech, the audience broke into loud 
 howls of "Murder! Murder!" and drove her 
 silent from the stage. The friendly influence 
 of Garrick, however, succeeded in keeping the 
 stiff and lifeless play upon the stage for nine 
 nights, and Johnson received the handsome 
 profit of £300 or thereabouts, from what was, 
 as a matter of fact, the least valuable of all his 
 contributions to literature. The truth is that 
 with all his talents Johnson utterly lacked 
 dramatic power. His individuality was too 
 strongly developed for him to put himself in 
 another man's place. Goldsmith hit the nail 
 on the head when he remarked to Johnson: 
 "Why, sir, if you were to write a fable, you 
 would make all the little fishes talk like whales." 
 The author's great reputation induced some 
 friends to read and even to speak well of the 
 play; one. Pot, went so far as to say that it 
 was the finest tragedy of modern times; which 
 
 [161]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 gem of criticism being reported to Johnson 
 elicited the frank and crushing verdict, "If 
 Pot says so, Pot hes." 
 
 From 1750 to 1752 Johnson was occupied 
 with the composition of the Rambler, one of 
 the countless eighteenth century imitations of 
 the inimitable Spectator. The style shows 
 Johnson almost at his worst, and his occasional 
 attempts at pleasantry remind one painfully 
 of the gambols of a hippopotamus. But its 
 stately orthodoxy and its solemn moralizings 
 on Johnson's favorite theme, the vanity of 
 human wishes, exactly suited the taste of the 
 age, and it is not too much to say that his con- 
 temporary reputation as the greatest of Eng- 
 lish moralists dated from the appearance of 
 the Rambler. 
 
 The last number of this periodical had 
 already been written when Johnson lost his 
 wife. He was profoundly affected by her 
 death; "remember me in your prayers," he 
 wrote to an old friend in the first bitterness 
 
 [162]
 
 The Personality of Dr. Johnson 
 
 of his grief, "for vain is the help of man." 
 And his sorrow was no transient emotion; to 
 the end of his hfe he observed the day on 
 which his Tetty died as a day of mourning 
 and of solemn devotion to her memory. The 
 prayers written down in his diary on these 
 days wake, even at this distance of time, in 
 the most careless reader that sense of fellow- 
 ship in suffering which the old poet knew: 
 Sunt lacrimoB rerum, et mentem mortalia tan- 
 gunt. 
 
 Mrs. Johnson's death would have left her 
 husband alone in the world had he not already 
 begun to gather about him a household of 
 poor, distressed creatures — blind Miss Wil- 
 liams, old Mrs. Desmoulins and her daughter, 
 Polly Carmichael, Dr. Levet, whose brutal 
 manners put even Johnson to the blush, and 
 the negro servant, Frank, whose office of 
 valet must, from all we know of his master's 
 dress and personal appearance, have been an 
 absolute sinecure. Not one of these had any 
 
 [163]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 claim upon Johnson but that of wretchedness 
 and poverty, yet he turned over his house to 
 them, hstened humbly to their quarrels and 
 reproaches, and plunged himself into debt to 
 meet their wants. He even went out himself 
 to purchase fish and oysters for his favorite 
 cat, Hodge, lest if he should assign this task 
 to any of his dependents, the cat might be 
 disliked as a source of trouble and mistreated 
 in his absence. It was well said of the rough 
 old man that he had nothing of the bear about 
 him but his skin. 
 
 In 1756 Johnson began the famous edition 
 of Shakespeare over which he dawdled for the 
 next ten years. He received money from 
 hundreds of subscribers for the projected work, 
 spent it, and did nothing till stung to action 
 by a contemporary satire which roundly 
 charged him with dishonesty. It is rather the 
 fashion nowadays to sneer at Johnson's criti- 
 cisms of Shakespeare, but when the proper 
 allowance is made for Johnson's time and 
 
 [ 164]
 
 The Personality of Dr. Johnson 
 
 temper, it is hard to find a saner piece of criti- 
 cism in the EngUsh language than the preface 
 to this edition, or more sensible advice than 
 that which he gives there to the young student : 
 "Notes are often necessary, but they are 
 necessary evils. Let him that is yet unac- 
 quainted with the powers of Shakespeare, and 
 who desires to feel the highest pleasure that 
 the drama can give, read every play from the 
 first scene to the last, with utter negligence of 
 all his commentators. When his fancy is 
 once on the wing, let it not stop at correction 
 or explanation. When his attention is strongly 
 engaged, let it disdain alike to turn aside to 
 the name of Theobald and of Pope. Let him 
 read on through brightness and obscurity, 
 through integrity and corruption; let him pre- 
 serve his comprehension of the dialogue and 
 his interest in the fable. And when the pleas- 
 ures of novelty have ceased, let him attempt 
 exactness and read the commentators." 
 
 The Idler, a series of weekly essays, ap- 
 [165]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 peared in the Universal Chronicle for the years 
 1758-1760. We find in these essays the hnk 
 which joins the stiff and somewhat pompous 
 style of the Rambler to the more famihar and 
 pleasing tone of the Lives of the Poets. In 
 some of the papers, at least, we seem to hear 
 Johnson talking as he might have talked at the 
 club. The sketch of Dick Minim, the per- 
 fect type of a neo-classic critic, has several 
 humorous touches of self-portraiture; and 
 Johnson's open-mindedness is shown by his 
 admitting a paper by his friend Langton, con- 
 taining a kindly, but rather pointed, reproof 
 of his own growing preference of projects to 
 performances. 
 
 Jolmson's mother died in the beginning of 
 1759. As usual he was in distress for money 
 and had to borrow six guineas of a printer to 
 make up a sum which he sent down to her in 
 her illness. Unable to be with her in her last 
 moments, he wrote her perhaps the most 
 tender and touching letter which a son ever 
 
 [166]
 
 The Personality of Dr. Johnson 
 
 sent to his mother, and to provide for her 
 funeral expenses and pay the httle debts she 
 left behind, he broke the spell which idleness 
 was weaving around him and wrote in hot 
 haste his story of Rasselas. This work has 
 been absurdly criticised as a novel; as a matter 
 of fact it is nothing of the kind. Johnson's 
 Abyssinians make no pretence to reality; they 
 are ideal creatures in an imaginary country, 
 and the purpose of the book is neither to por- 
 tray manners nor to delineate character, but 
 to teach a moral lesson, and to denounce the 
 favorite dogma of the day, that this is the best 
 of all possible worlds. If there was one thing 
 of which Johnson was firmly persuaded, it 
 was that this dogma was a piece of cant, and 
 cant was the object of his most vigorous de- 
 nunciations. The note of the book is struck 
 in the words of Imlac, the wise counselor of 
 Rasselas: "Human life is everywhere a state 
 in which much is to be endured, and little to 
 be enjoyed." 
 
 [167]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 In 176-2 George III, who had newly come 
 to the throne, was graciously pleased to grant 
 Johnson a pension of £300 a year, one of the few 
 pubHc acts of His ^Majesty which were fortunate 
 enough then and afterwards to meet with almost 
 universal approbation. After some hesitation, 
 not unnatural in the author of that definition of 
 a pension aheady cited, Johnson accepted the 
 favor. In youth he had been an ardent Jacobite, 
 and it has even been conjectured, though prob- 
 ably without a shadow of truth, that he left Lon- 
 don in 1745 to join Prince Charhe's invasion 
 of England. But by 1762 the Jacobite cause 
 was merely the shadow of a name ; George III 
 was, at least, a true-bom EngUshman, and 
 Johnson's strong common sense naturally pre- 
 ferred so substantial a reahtv as three hundred 
 a year to the empty pleasure of cursing the 
 House of Hanover and drinking King James's 
 health. 
 
 On the receipt of his pension, Johnson 
 practically struck work. He had yet more 
 
 [168]
 
 The Personality of Dr. Johnson 
 
 than twenty years to live, but with the excep- 
 tion of the Lives of the Poets, a work which cost 
 him httle more time than was involved in the 
 actual labor of composition, it is doubtful 
 whether he devoted more than a few months 
 of this period to the practice of hterature. But 
 if he wrote httle he talked much. In the year 
 after the receipt of his pension he joined the 
 famous club which met for weekly suppers at 
 the Turk's Head Inn. In the same year he 
 first met BosweU. And here we may well 
 leave him; the rest of his acts and his words, 
 are they not written in the book of the prince 
 of biographers ? 
 
 The charm of BosweU' s book hes in its 
 lifelike presentation of Johnson's personahty; 
 from its pages the fascination which Johnson 
 exercised over his contemporaries rises afresh 
 to cast its spell over us. In what does the 
 secret of the charm consist ? Pari:ly, no doubt. 
 in the strong common sense of the man. We 
 are all more or less \*ictims to cant; in one 
 
 [169]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 form or another we all pay tribute to the or- 
 ganized hypocrisy of society. But none the 
 less we love the man who rises superior to the 
 conventions, exposes their hoUowness, and 
 laughs at the supposed necessity of their obh- 
 gations. Again, the quick wit and bluff 
 heartiness of Johnson are not without their 
 share in his attraction. His wit was not al- 
 ways of the most refined. His passages at 
 arms resemble cudgel play rather than a fen- 
 cing match. But after all the quarter-staff is 
 to us of the Enghsh-speaking race a kindlier 
 weapon than the rapier. And Jolmson was a 
 past master in the noble art of giving hard 
 knocks. " There is no arguing with Johnson," 
 said one victim, rubbing, we may imagine, 
 his broken head, "for if his pistol misses fire, 
 he knocks you down with the butt." And if 
 his bluffness was sometimes overpowering to 
 his contemporaries, it is a source of unfailing 
 amusement to a later generation. "He hugs 
 
 [170]
 
 The Personality of Dr. Johnson 
 
 you like a bear," said Burke, "and shakes 
 laughter out of you." 
 
 But if this were all, Johnson would be merely 
 a comic figure, a sort of literary Sancho Panza. 
 The secret of his charm lies deeper; there is a 
 trace in him of Don Quixote as well. Like 
 that noble and most pathetic figure, Johnson 
 was the champion of a failing order, of a cause 
 already lost, although he knew it not. In 
 literature, in politics, and in religion, Johnson 
 stood on the brink of a revolution, and strove 
 to save his world from plunging into what 
 seemed to him a bottomless abyss. So great 
 was his influence over the English world of his 
 day that he actually succeeded in delaying 
 the advent of that revolution. To avert it 
 was beyond human power, but there is some- 
 thing irresistibly appealing in the sight of a 
 brave man fighting a losing battle. 
 
 Finally, I think, the fascination of Johnson 
 is due to that delight which human nature 
 always experiences in discovering a treasure 
 
 [171]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 hidden beneath a repeUing exterior. There 
 is much about Johnson that is repellant — 
 not merely the scarred face, the uncouth man- 
 ners, and the slovenly dress, but the narrow- 
 ness, the dogmatism, the arrogance, passing 
 at times almost into brutality. But all this is 
 on the surface, the hard crust through which we 
 must break to reach the hidden ore. And the 
 ore is rich in the noblest qualities of manhood 
 — courage, courtesy, wisdom, and love. 
 
 [172]
 
 "The 
 Frugal Note of Gray" 
 
 THE fame of Gray is a unique phenome- 
 non in English Hterature; assuredly it 
 rests upon the narrowest of foundations. 
 During his lifetime he condescended to pub- 
 lish exactly a dozen poems, and the barrenness 
 of his productive powers may be measured 
 by the fact that when to these poems there 
 are added all that the diligence of successive 
 editors has been able to collect, school ex- 
 ercises, fragments in English and Latin, 
 trifling satiric skits, and rejected stanzas, the 
 whole occupies something less than two hun- 
 dred pages in the most elaborate edition of 
 his works. This is but a petty harvest for a 
 life of fifty years of unbroken leisure, and 
 yet it is no paradox to say that the security 
 
 [173]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 of Gray's fame is in inverse proportion to 
 the scantiness of his production. There is 
 no poem in our language — not Hamlet nor 
 Paradise Lost — which is surer of wide- 
 spread and enduring popularity than The 
 Elegy in a Country Churchyard. The time 
 may perhaps come when Shakespeare and 
 Milton will be as little understood or loved 
 as they were in Gray's youth. But so long 
 as the English language is spoken or read, 
 Gray's masterpiece will continue to fill the 
 place in the minds and hearts of men that it 
 took upon its first appearance and has held 
 since then for a century and a half. And this 
 for the simple reason that there is no one 
 poem in English, nor perhaps in any modern 
 language, which is at once so universal in its 
 appeal, so perfect and yet so simple in its 
 form. And the immortality of the Elegy en- 
 sures, we may well believe, a like happy fate 
 to the handful of lyrics which cluster round it. 
 The problem of Gray, if we may so call it, 
 [174]
 
 ''The Frugal Note of Graif 
 
 is to account for this discrepancy between the 
 quantity and the quaHty of his work. There 
 is, of course, no necessary connection between 
 these two. Yet, as a matter of fact, in Eng- 
 hsh Hterature, at least, the great poets have 
 as a rule been prolific poets as well. And 
 where the contrary has been the case the fact 
 is generally capable of a very simple explana- 
 tion; straitened circumstances, the pressure 
 of other interests and duties, or early death, 
 has limited or cut short the poet's work. But 
 none of these explanations are available in 
 the case of Gray. 
 
 Matthew Arnold in a famous essay has 
 attempted what may be called the objective 
 explanation. Gray, a born poet, he says, fell 
 unhappily upon an age of prose; he was iso- 
 lated in his century; the want of a genial at- 
 mosphere, the failure of sympathy in his 
 contemporaries, prevented him from develop- 
 ing and flowering as he would have done in 
 a happier time. " He iiever spoke out." This
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 little phrase, caught from a letter of a friend 
 of Gray's and meaning, in truth, nothing 
 more than that he had never told his friends 
 how near his end was, becomes in Arnold's 
 hands a magic formula by the frequent repeti- 
 tion of which he calls up a vision of Gray as 
 an unfortunate being, gifted with all the quali- 
 ties that go to make a poet, but blasted by 
 the east wind of a barren and prosaic age. 
 It need hardly be said that this vision is 
 wholly the product of the critic's imagination. 
 In the first place, prosaic as the mid-eighteenth 
 century was, it had the wit to recognize the 
 greatness of so rare and lofty a poet as Gray. 
 The Elegy went through four editions in 
 two months; the Pindaric Odes were received 
 with a chorus of wondering applause which 
 roused the bitter wrath of Samuel Johnson. 
 Gray was the only true poet of his century 
 who was honored by the offer of the laureate- 
 ship. And even had it been otherwise he was 
 not the man to be struck dumb by the in- 
 
 [176]
 
 '■'■The Frugal Note of Gray'''' 
 
 difference of the public, for he was himself 
 wholly indifferent to public praise or blame. 
 His first and last poems alike appeared anony- 
 mously. He consented to the publication of 
 the Pindaric Odes to please his friend, Wal- 
 pole, and only permitted Dodsley to print 
 the Elegy — and that without his name upon 
 the title-page — because he learned that the 
 manuscript had fallen into the hands of a 
 pirate printer who was already setting it in 
 type. He does not seem to have been espe- 
 cially elated by the popularity of the Elegy, 
 and he laughed good-naturedly at the charge 
 of obscurity which was at times brought 
 against his odes. It would be hard, I think, 
 to find another English poet who so serenely 
 and sincerely disregarded contemporary opinion 
 as Thomas Gray. 
 
 A later and less fanciful student of Gray's 
 fife and work, Professor Phelps, attributes 
 the poet's limited production to three causes, 
 his scholarly temper, his bad health, and liis 
 
 [177]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 dignified reserve. This, it seems to me, is 
 distinctly a more reasonable explanation, 
 since it seeks the cause not in the character 
 of the world surrounding the poet, but in the 
 man himself. And yet I am inclined to doubt 
 whether any of these causes, or all of them 
 combined, satisfactorily account for Gray's 
 sterility. The long disease of Pope's life did 
 not check his creative power, nor did the 
 dignified reserve of Tennyson's character 
 prevent his becoming one of the most produc- 
 tive of English poets. The later years of 
 Milton were marked by the presence of all of 
 these supposed causes of poetic barrenness, 
 yet these years gave birth to Paradise Lost, 
 Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. 
 The truth, I believe, lies somewhat deeper. 
 Professor Phelps, like Matthew Arnold, as- 
 sumes, perhaps too hastily, the presence in 
 Gray of rich productive powers which were 
 checked by certain temperamental and physi- 
 cal causes. But I am inclined to believe that 
 
 [178] 
 
 I
 
 ''The Frugal Note of Gray'' 
 
 Gray at once spoke the simple truth and told 
 the whole story when he said to Walpole: "If 
 I do not write much, it is because I cannot." 
 In other words he said little, because he had 
 but little power of speech. 
 
 In his ingenious analysis of the character 
 of Gray, Matthew Arnold has pointed out 
 accurately enough his qualities of learning, 
 penetration, seriousness, sentiment, and hu- 
 mor. But when the critic goes on to affirm 
 that these qualities constitute the equipment 
 and endowment for the office of poet, one de- 
 clines to follow him. It would not be difficult, 
 I fancy, to discover the presence of all these 
 qualities in the character of Gray's contem- 
 porary, Samuel Johnson. Yet, so far as I 
 know, no one has yet discovered in the auto- 
 crat of the Literary Club a great poet blighted 
 by an unfavorable environment or limited by 
 scholarly habits and ill health. 
 
 The truth is that these qualities are mere 
 accidents, by no means essential to the mak- 
 
 [179]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 ing of a poet. Shakespeare lacked learning, 
 Wordsworth critical penetration, Chaucer high 
 seriousness, Dryden sentiment, and Milton 
 humor. The true essentials of a poet, though 
 perhaps seldom found united and in their full 
 power in a single individual, are profound 
 reflection, vivid emotion, and far-reaching 
 sympathy, combined with an irresistible ten- 
 dency to expression and a mastery, inborn or 
 acquired, of metrical form. Gray was, no 
 doubt, a master of form. But he lacked al- 
 most entirely the born poet's creative im- 
 pulse. It was not only that he dallied over 
 his work — it took him three years to write 
 the Bard — or laid it aside for other things 
 as he laid aside the Elegy for seven years; but 
 as his letters and journals show, he had abun- 
 dance of sentiment, humor, and satire which 
 he seldom or never felt the desire to express 
 in verse. 
 
 Perhaps the most striking instance of this 
 poetic reticence of Gray appears in his feel- 
 
 [180]
 
 ''The Frugal Note of Gray'' 
 
 ing for nature. It has been well said that 
 Gray is the first English writer to exhibit that 
 love of nature, particularly in her wilder and 
 more sohtary moods, which dominates so 
 much of modern poetry. In his youth he 
 was profoundly affected by his first sight of 
 the Alps. He wrote to his friend West, for 
 example: "In our little journey up to the 
 Grande Chartreuse, I do not remember to 
 have gone ten paces without an exclamation 
 that there was no restraining. Not a precipice, 
 not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with 
 religion and poetry." This is wholly in the * 
 manner of Wordsworth, but the creative poetic 
 impulse moved Wordsworth to write Tinturn 
 Abbey, whereas the only record of Gray's 
 feelings, apart from incidental references in 
 letters, is found in a few Latin verses written 
 in the album of the Grande Chartreuse. We 
 must not be too severe upon Gray for his 
 choice of a dead language; Latin verse was 
 to him at that time, no doubt, an easier and 
 
 [181]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 more natural medium than English. But it 
 is none the less remarkable that this should 
 be his sole expression. Later in life he visited 
 the Scottish Highlands, and discovered the 
 English Lake Country, but by this time his 
 tendency toward expression had become atro- 
 phied by long disuse. The Journal in the 
 Lakes is delightful reading, but after all it is 
 prose not poetry; and even the Journal would 
 never have been written, had the friend for 
 whom it was composed been able to fulfil his 
 intention of accompanying Gray on the tour. 
 But even if Gray had been endowed with 
 the impulse to expression, the question re- 
 mains whether he did not lack other essential 
 qualities of the great poet. A capacity for 
 profound reflection Gray assuredly had not. 
 His learning is undisputed; but learning ac- 
 quired in Gray's fashion, merely to occupy the 
 tedious hours of a life without purpose, learn- 
 ing that is never employed or put to any prac- 
 tical use, is apt to hinder rather than to help 
 
 [182]
 
 ''The Frugal Note of Gray'' 
 
 the habit of reflection. The observations on 
 Aristotle, Froissart, and Shakespeare which 
 Arnold cites as evidence of Gray's power to 
 use his learning are excellent of their kind. 
 But they are critical dicta and nothing more. 
 And no one should have known better than 
 Matthew Arnold the difference between the 
 critical and the creative faculties. It is not by 
 framing critical dicta, however sincere, acute, 
 and well-turned they may be, that a scholar 
 fits himself for the office of a poet. On the 
 great problems of human life and destiny. 
 Gray, if we may trust the double testimony 
 of his letters and his poems, does not seem to 
 have thought at all. His religious belief was 
 sincere, but wholly conventional. He enter- 
 tained a deep distrust of the destructive skepti- 
 cism of Voltaire and Hume, but he cherished 
 an almost equally profound dislike of the 
 great contemporary champion of orthodoxy, 
 Dr. Johnson. The former shocked his re- 
 ligious, the latter his aesthetic sensibilities. 
 
 [183]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 He lived on the verge of the great revolutionary 
 movement which was to remodel the forms 
 of society, government, and intellectual life in 
 the Western world, without in the least realiz- 
 ing the impending deluge. He read the works 
 of Rousseau, the great forerunner of that 
 movement, "heavily, heavily," contrasting 
 them, no doubt to their disadvantage, with 
 the elegant romances of Crebillon and Mari- 
 vaux. And if we would have a striking instance 
 of the extent to which this absence of the capac- 
 ity for profound reflection impairs the poetry 
 of Gray, we have but to place his Hymn to 
 Adversity, with all its pomp of poetic phrase- 
 ology, beside that noblest of Wordsworth's 
 odes which "assigns to the guardianship of 
 duty or everlasting law the fragrance of the 
 flowers on earth and the splendor of the stars 
 in heaven." In form, and to a certain extent 
 in diction also, Wordsworth's Ode to Duty is 
 modelled upon Gray's Hymn. But what a 
 difference in the content of these poems! 
 
 [ 184]
 
 ''The Frugal Note of Gray'' 
 
 Duty was the guiding star of Wordsworth's 
 life; the reconciUation of the inevitable claims 
 of duty with the natural human desire for 
 happiness was the goal toward which his 
 ethical thinking was directed. To Gray, on 
 the other hand, Adversity was a mere ab- 
 straction, a literary lay figure on which to 
 hang a rich, embroidered robe of verse. It is 
 absurd to suppose that at the time when the 
 Hymn was written, or indeed at any time in 
 his quiet cloistered life. Gray had realized by 
 experience the true meaning of the word. 
 And as a natural result the thought of the 
 Hymn, when severed from its form, is a mere 
 series of commonplaces. 
 
 In dealing with Gray's capacity for emotion 
 we are, I believe, on somewhat more uncer- 
 tain ground. There is, indeed, little evidence 
 of this capacity in his poems. If these were 
 all that remained to testify of the character 
 of Gray, we might believe him, as comparative 
 strangers in his lifetime believed him, a man 
 
 [185]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 of cold, haughty, and fastidious temperament. 
 But the known facts of his Hfe contradict such 
 a judgment. We know of Gray's devotion 
 to his widowed mother, of his affection for his 
 aunts, — always excepting one "old Harridan, 
 the Spawn of Cerberus and the Dragon of 
 Wantley, " — of his tender love for West, the 
 friend of his youth, of his strong and long- 
 continued friendship with Walpole, Mason, 
 and Wharton, of the almost romantic warmth 
 of his feeling for Norton Nichols and Bon- 
 stetten, the young friends whose intimacy 
 lightened the gloom of his advancing years. 
 It is hardly too much to say that Gray had a 
 genius for friendship. Certainly those who 
 penetrated behind the veil of his reserve and 
 knew the man himself loved him as few Eng- 
 hsh poets have been loved. And yet, when 
 all is said, we must still believe that Gray's 
 emotional life was at least as calm as it was 
 deep. He had not the capacity for strong, 
 lively, and passionate feeling that marks the 
 
 [186]
 
 ''The Frugal Note of Gray"' 
 
 poet of the first order. It seems plain that 
 he never knew what it was to love a woman. 
 Certainly his sedate flirtation with Miss Speed 
 cannot be dignified with the name of love. 
 It seems equally plain that he never hated any 
 one with that fiery personal hatred that has 
 so often spurred a poet on to give utterance to 
 his feelings in words that still glow with the 
 intense heat in which they were first conceived. 
 Gray could neither love like Burns and Shelley, 
 nor hate like Pope and Byron. Even where 
 he felt deeply, as in his relations to his friends, 
 he seems to have laid the ban of a gentle and 
 dignified reserve upon any expression of his 
 feelings. His gentle and kindly letters seldom 
 or never betray the presence of any strong 
 emotion. Only once in his life did the mingled 
 passion of love and sorrow, of hopeless long- 
 ing for the days that are no more, impel him 
 irresistibly to utterance in verse. And the 
 one poem that issued from this rare mood 
 Gray carefully hid away among his papers 
 
 [187]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 where it was discovered only after his death. 
 In the Sonnet on the Death of West we hear 
 for the sole time in Gray's works the lyrical 
 cry that marks the presence in the poet of in- 
 tense and overmastering emotion: 
 
 "The fields to all their wonted tribute bear; 
 To warm their Httle loves the birds complain; 
 I fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear. 
 And weep the more because I weep in vain." 
 
 We may say of these lines what Gray's harshest 
 critic has said of a famous passage in the 
 Elegy: "Had Gray written often thus, it had 
 been vain to blame and useless to praise him." 
 But Gray did not write often thus. On the 
 contrary, as he advanced in Hfe he more and 
 more resolutely denied himself the utterance 
 of his feelings even in the privacy of conversa- 
 tion with his friends. Bonstetten complained 
 that although he himself poured out his heart 
 to the poet and made him the partner of his 
 hopes, his desires, and his enthusiasms. Gray 
 never returned the confidence. " His life was 
 
 [188]
 
 ''The Frugal Note of Gray"' 
 
 a sealed book to me; he never would talk of 
 himself, never allow me to speak to him of his 
 poetry. If I quoted lines of his to him, he 
 kept silence like an obstinate child." That 
 Gray fully returned the warmth of Bon- 
 stetten's affection we have abundant proof, 
 and the poet seems himself to have realized 
 and regretted the bar to the free communion 
 of soul which his long habit of reserve and re- 
 pression imposed upon him. "I know, and 
 have too often felt," he writes to his young 
 friend, " the disadvantages I lay myself under, 
 how much I hurt the little interest I have in 
 you, by this air of sadness . . . but sure you 
 will forgive though you cannot sympathize 
 with me." Gray's capacity for the expression 
 of his feelings in fact had by this time become 
 as impossible in social intercourse as it had 
 been long before in poetry. Gray was not an 
 old man when he died, but his period of pro- 
 duction had ceased with the completion of the 
 Bard fourteen years before his death. And as 
 
 [189]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 regards the expression of personal feeling, it is 
 not too much to say that his last utterance is 
 contained in the closing stanzas of the Elegy 
 written some seven years before the Bard. 
 Neither that poem nor its companion piece, 
 the Progress of Poesy, shows the slightest trace 
 of the quality of emotion, which is generally 
 considered essential to the true lyric. And 
 since it is upon these poems that the fame of 
 Gray as a lyric poet mainly depends, we seem 
 to arrive at the perhaps startling conclusion 
 that he was not in the true sense of the 
 word a lyric poet. And certainly, unless in 
 the category of the lyric a place can be found 
 for the expression of lofty thought in stately 
 language and harmonious rhythm, regardless 
 of the quality of emotion, Gray's claims as a 
 lyrist must be denied. 
 
 There is no need, I think, of elaborate 
 argument to show the limited extent of Gray's 
 sympathies. It has been generally admitted 
 that his life of the cloister shut him off from 
 
 [190]
 
 ''The Frugal Note of Gray 
 
 »» 
 
 all active interest in the affairs of men. It has 
 not, however, been so generally recognized 
 that this life was Gray's deliberate choice. At 
 the age of twenty-six Gray had finished his 
 education and had made the grand tour; he 
 was his own master, in possession of a small 
 but sufiicient income, free from any embarrass- 
 ment of family ties. The world was all be- 
 fore him where to choose, and he chose Cam- 
 bridge, that "silly, dirty place" where he had 
 spent four miserable years as an undergradu- 
 ate. The intellectual life of the university 
 was at its lowest ebb; over her ancient walls 
 brooded the spirit of Laziness, "our sovereign 
 lady and mistress, president of presidents and 
 head of heads," as Gray calls her in one of his 
 humorous and futile outbursts of revolt 
 against her power. Gray did not return to 
 Cambridge to study for any profession, nor 
 did he assume any share in the responsibilities 
 and duties of academic life. It was not, in- 
 deed, until a few years before his death that 
 
 [191]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 he had any official connection with the uni- 
 versity. He seems simply to have fled to 
 Cambridge as to a refuge from a world in 
 which he had few friends and no interests. 
 It cannot, I think, be maintained that Gray 
 gained anything by this flight from the worid. 
 Had he plunged like Johnson into the turmoil 
 of London life, he would have emerged, per- 
 haps a sadder, but certainly a wiser man. 
 Had he hved on at Stoke Pogis in the society 
 of his mother and his aunts, renewed his 
 friendship with Walpole. cultivated the ac- 
 quaintance of such neighbors as Lady Cob- 
 ham and Miss Speed, and continued to work 
 the vein of true poetry that had already dis- 
 closed itself in his mind, he would certainly 
 have been a happier man. As it was, Gray's 
 removal to Cambridge marks an abrupt check 
 in his poetic production: he laid aside the 
 half-completed Elegy, stammered out a few 
 lines expressive of his loathing for the aca- 
 demic atmosphere in the fragmentary Hymn 
 
 [19^]
 
 ^'The Frugal Note of Gray" 
 
 to Ignorance, and then relapsed into silence 
 for five years, when he emerged just long 
 enough to write the delightful ode on the 
 death of Walpole's cat. From the composi- 
 tion of poetry Gray turned to those studies 
 classical, archaeological, and aesthetic which 
 were henceforth to occupy so much of his life. 
 They were fruitless studies, so far at least as 
 any direct issue was concerned. Xo edition 
 of a Greek classic, no treatise on Gx)thic archi- 
 tecture, no history of English poetry, ever 
 came from Gray's pen. And in spite of the 
 various plans for works of this sort that he 
 formed and abandoned one after the other, 
 we may well beUeve that he devoted himself 
 to study not for the sake of producing anything, 
 but with the hope of dispelling the ennui that 
 hung so hea\'ily about his first years at Cam- 
 bridge, and, it may be, also of drugging his 
 mind against too painful reflections on what 
 might have been. 
 
 In time, however. Gray accommodated him- 
 [193]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 self fairly well to the unbroken monotony of 
 this life. He removed from Peterhouse, where 
 he had been disturbed by the rude pranks of 
 "buckish" undergraduates, to the more con- 
 genial society of his old college, Pembroke. 
 He adorned his rooms with old books, fresh 
 flowers, and Japanese vases. He amused his 
 leisure by thrumming on the harpsichord, 
 wandered through the quiet fields about Cam- 
 bridge, and noted with the eye and ear of a 
 born lover of nature the blossoming of the 
 first flowers and the song of the first return- 
 ing birds. He indulged himself in vacation 
 time with "Lilliputian journeys" about Eng- 
 land, visiting with special delight the noble 
 cathedrals whose Gothic architecture he was, 
 perhaps, the first man of his age to appreciate 
 at its true worth. And he wrote voluminously 
 to the few friends in whose correspondence he 
 found that social intercourse which the cir- 
 cumstances of his life and liis own reticence 
 of speech denied him at first hand. He even 
 
 [ 194]
 
 ''The Frugal Note of Gray'' 
 
 accepted a position as Professor of Modern 
 History and Letters in the university. He de- 
 livered no lectures, to be sure, but none of his 
 predecessors had done so since the chair was 
 founded, and although his conscience troubled 
 him at times for this compliance with aca- 
 demic etiquette, he never ventured to violate it. 
 From beginning to end he remained consistent 
 in his position as an onlooker rather than a 
 participant in university life. 
 
 Nor was Gray less the onlooker at the 
 world of public affairs. It is a mistake to 
 think of his age as dull. It witnessed the last 
 hopeless attempt to restore the Stuarts to their 
 old throne, it saw the last struggle in England 
 between representative institutions and the 
 monarchy. Abroad it saw the foundation 
 of the English empire in India, the final 
 triumph of England over her old rival for the 
 mastery of the New World, and the glorious 
 battle of Frederick the Great single handed 
 against the power of allied Europe. But for 
 
 [195]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 all these great events Gray had only the in- 
 terest of the placid citizen who finds in the 
 perusal of his daily paper a pleasant distraction 
 from the monotony of his life. "We talk of 
 war, famine, and pestilence," he writes, re- 
 ferring to himself and his Cambridge asso- 
 ciates, "with no more apprehension than of a 
 broken head, or of a coach overturned be- 
 tween York and Edinburgh." And Gray's 
 interest in personalities was little stronger than 
 his sympathy with great causes. He pitied 
 the "poor King of Prussia," admired Pitt, 
 and despised that " fizzling old owl," the Duke 
 of Newcastle; but had Pitt betrayed his coun- 
 try or Frederick taken poison, Gray, one be- 
 Heves, would none the less have sat down 
 calmly to his nice dinner and drunk his two 
 glasses of sweet wine before expressing his 
 feelings over such untoward events in a Avell- 
 turned phrase of a letter to Mason or Wharton. 
 Such, surely, is not the stuff of which great 
 poets are made. It would be absurd, of course, 
 
 [196]
 
 ''The Frugal Note of Gray 
 
 ?> 
 
 to expect in a retired scholar like Gray the all- 
 embracing human sympathy of Chaucer or of 
 Shakespeare; but it is hard to refrain from 
 comparing Gray's indifference with the love 
 of liberty, the hatred of tyranny, the passion 
 of patriotism which glowed in the hearts of 
 Milton, Wordsworth, and Tennyson, poets by 
 nature as little men of the world as Gray 
 himself. 
 
 Such seem to me to be the causes which 
 underlie and account for the scanty product 
 of Gray's muse. Under the happiest of cir- 
 cumstances he might, perhaps, have some- 
 what increased the quantity of his verse. 
 Under no imaginable circumstances, being 
 what he was, could he have altered its quality. 
 And what was he ? When one subtracts from 
 Gray those essentials to a great poet which 
 he seems undoubtedly to have lacked, what 
 remains ? Enough, at least, to constitute him 
 one of the finest artists in verse that glorify 
 our literature. His diction is impeccable. By 
 
 [197]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 long and toilsome labor he wrought the fabric 
 of his verse into something as near perfection 
 as is permitted to mortals. It is not too much, 
 I think, to say that in the rare and happy 
 union of simplicity and beauty Gray's Elegy 
 is unmatched in modern times. And his ear 
 for rhythm was as fine as his sense of language 
 was true. To match the lofty music of his 
 odes with their interwoven harmonies, their 
 pauses and prolongations, one must go back 
 to Milton, or come down to Coleridge and 
 Shelley. Finally Gray possessed what is per- 
 haps a rarer gift than feeling for language or 
 ear for rhythm, the constructive power. His 
 poems are not compositions in which an occa- 
 sional happy thought or striking image atones 
 for much that is commonplace or superfluous. 
 They are organic wholes. They spring up, 
 run their destined course, and come to their 
 proper close with something of that inevitable 
 character that attends the phenomena of na- 
 ture. Not a stanza, not a line, but has its 
 
 [198]
 
 '■'The Frugal Note of Gray 
 
 »» 
 
 function, its operant power, in the scheme of 
 the whole. And this is due to the fact that 
 Gray was not only a poet, but one of the 
 severest of critics. What other poet in our 
 history would have discarded from the Elegy, 
 for the sole reason that it formed too long a 
 parenthesis, such an exquisite quatrain as this: 
 
 " There scatter' d oft, the earliest of the year. 
 By hands unseen are showers of violets found ; 
 The redbreast loves to build and warble there. 
 And little footsteps lightly print the ground." 
 
 This artistic merit of Gray's work deserves, 
 moreover, special recognition in view of the 
 fact that the age in which he lived was wholly 
 dominated by what may be called the mechani- 
 cal theory of verse. Dryden, to borrow 
 Lowell's phrase, had "taught the trick of 
 cadences that made the manufacture of verses 
 more easy." Pope brought this handicraft 
 to its highest perfection; and Pope's successors 
 got the trick by heart. Regularity, uniformity, 
 precision, and balance became, as Arnold has 
 
 [199]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 pointed out, the dominant characteristics of 
 eighteenth century verse; and the prevaiUng 
 form of that verse, the heroic couplet as 
 written by Dry den and Pope, was exactly the 
 form wliich gave fullest expression to these 
 characteristics and denied expression to the 
 higher and truer qualities of poetry. Gray, 
 who began to write before the death of Pope 
 and who died before the reaction against 
 Pope's theory and practice was well under 
 way, was exposed to the full force of this 
 mechanical system. Yet he was practically 
 unaffected by it. Two of his poems, indeed. 
 The Hymn to Ignorance and the Alliance of 
 Education and Government, may fairly be said 
 to belong to the school of Pope. But both are 
 fragments, thrown aside, probably, because 
 Gray felt that his genius moved heavily in the 
 harness of this school. And both these frag- 
 ments can be subtracted from the scanty 
 total of Gray's work without at all impairing 
 the measure of his fame. Like the shepherd 
 
 [200]
 
 (( 
 
 The Frugal Note of Gray'' 
 
 boy who refused the armor of the king, Gray won 
 his victories by disregarding the accepted rules. 
 But Gray was something more than an 
 artist in verse. He was a true, if not a great 
 poet. He had what no other writer of his day, 
 with the one exception of the ill-fated Collins, 
 possessed, a real gift of song. In an age when 
 the would-be poet turned as a matter of course 
 to satire and didacticism, Gray shook out from 
 time to time a lyric note as pure and sweet as 
 that of a song bird. Such a note was not 
 always at his command. He indulged too 
 often in stately and sonorous rhetoric. The 
 admired opening of the Bard, for example, is 
 splendid declamation rather than song. But 
 what other poet of his day could have thrown 
 off such a couplet as that Gray made for 
 Nichols while walking with him in the spring 
 fields near Cambridge: 
 
 "There pipes the wood lark, and the song- 
 thrush there 
 Scatters his loose notes in the waste of air." 
 
 [201 ]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 Or what other poet could so have caught the 
 flute-hke note of the young Milton as Gray did 
 in the lines he puts into his great predecessor's 
 mouth in the Installation Ode: 
 
 "Ye brown o'er-arching groves, 
 
 That contemplation loves, 
 Where willowy Camus lingers with delight! 
 
 Oft at the blush of dawn 
 
 I trod your level lawn, 
 Oft woo'd the gleam of Cynthia silver-bright 
 In cloisters dim, far from the haunts of Folly, 
 With Freedom by my side, and soft-eyed 
 
 Melancholy." 
 
 Gray had, moreover, the true poet's quick 
 sensitiveness to the appeal of romantic land- 
 scape, literature, and tradition. Classical in 
 his expression, he became more and more, as he 
 advanced in life, romantic in his taste. Here, 
 too, he was at variance with the spirit of his 
 age. To style a scene, a sentiment, or a story 
 romantic was in the eyes of the censors of his 
 day to condemn it as wild, extravagant, or 
 improbable. But Gray set his Bard among 
 the savage mountains of Wales, paraphrased 
 
 [202]
 
 "The Frugal Note of Gray"' 
 
 stirring battle-pieces by the Celtic bards, and 
 introduced his astonished countrymen to the 
 grim mythology of Scandinavia. It is hard 
 to believe that we are listening to a writer of 
 the mid-eighteenth century when we read the 
 ringing lines that tell how the Fatal Sisters 
 plied their ghastly loom, or how Odin rode 
 down the yawning steep to wake the witch- 
 wife in her grave : 
 
 "Facing to the northern clime. 
 Thrice he traced the runic rhyme; 
 Thrice pronounced, in accents dread. 
 The thrilling verse that wakes the dead; 
 Till from out the hollow ground 
 Slowly breath'd a sullen sound." 
 
 Would not one say that we were listening to 
 the voice of Sir Walter? But the mere truth 
 is that Gray broke the way not only for Scott, 
 but for all who since his day have turned with 
 delight to the wild, enchanted fields of northern 
 myth and saga. 
 
 Finally, the truest poetic quality in Gray 
 is his gift of tender, quiet pathos. The gentle 
 
 [203]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 melancholy that overhung his life, deepening 
 at times into profound depression, and but 
 rarely lifting to let his native graceful humor 
 shine through the clouds, interpenetrates the 
 greater part of his verse and finds its supreme 
 expression in the Elegy. There is nothing 
 poignant, Httle that is personal, in Gray's 
 pathos. We know that the Elegy had its 
 origin in a mood of melancholy brooding due 
 to Gray's loss of a relative, and found its long- 
 deferred completion during a similar mood 
 due to a like cause. Yet it is singularly ab- 
 stract and general in tone. Not once in all 
 its calm and gentle progress do we catch the 
 cry of personal lament. That cry, as I have 
 pointed out, occurs once, and once only, in 
 Gray. There is nothing here of the stormy 
 wrath of Lycidas, of the lofty aspiration of 
 Adonais, of the alternations of hope and doubt 
 that pass like April cloud and sunshine over 
 In Memoriam. Yet who would wish the Elegy 
 other than it is ? What it lacks in thrill of in- 
 
 [204]
 
 ''The Frugal Note of Gray'' 
 
 dividual passion it gains in breath and univer- 
 sality of emotion. As the poet muses over 
 the unknown and nameless dead, it is not so 
 much the voice of Gray that we hear as "the 
 still, sad music of humanity." And this music, 
 like that which Wordsworth heard in later 
 days, is 
 
 "Not harsh, nor grating, though of ample 
 power 
 To chasten and subdue." 
 
 It is one of the fashions of contemporary 
 criticism to inquire somewhat curiously into 
 the mission and the message of a poet. I am 
 by no means sure that this quest is always suc- 
 cessful. Too often, I think, the critic reads 
 out of the poet only what he has first read into 
 him. Gray, we know, wrote to please him- 
 self, with httle care for his effect upon the 
 world. But the unconscious teacher is often 
 the best, and if for once we should indulge in 
 this modern fashion, might it not be true to 
 say that Gray's mission was to teach the 
 
 [205]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 dignity and beauty of poetry as an art, and that 
 his message was to touch an age singularly 
 hard and coarse with a sense of the pathos of 
 human destiny. And might one not go further 
 and find in Gray a special lesson for an age 
 so loud, so troubled, and so rebellious as our 
 own, the lesson of gentleness and resignation. 
 One stanza, excised from the Elegy by too 
 severe a hand, seems to me to sum up this 
 lesson in Gray's own perfect way: 
 
 "Hark! how the sacred calm, that broods 
 
 around. 
 Bids every fierce, tumultuous passion cease. 
 In still, small accents whisp'ring from the 
 
 ground 
 A grateful earnest of eternal peace." 
 
 [206]
 
 The 
 Charm of Goldsmith 
 
 TO be the best-beloved of English vsriters, 
 what a title is that for a man " — so 
 Thackeray opens his delightful lecture on 
 Oliver Goldsmith in the English Humourists. 
 And this title Goldsmith has borne almost with- 
 out a rival from the day of his death. While he 
 lived, men too generally underestimated him, 
 rascals cheated him, blackguards slandered 
 him; his very friends alternately ridiculed and 
 reproved him. Yet even then he was loved, 
 loved in spite of his follies and frailties, by all 
 who had themselves the heart to recognize the 
 warm, generous, human heart that beat be- 
 neath the ugly and ridiculous exterior of the 
 little Irish doctor. At the news of his death 
 Burke burst into tears, and Reynolds laid aside 
 
 [207]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 his brush and closed his studio — which he had 
 never done before even in times of deep do- 
 mestic affliction. But perhaps the most touch- 
 ing tribute to his memory was the outburst of 
 lament from the poor women who crowded the 
 staircase to his chambers; wretched outcasts, 
 waiting there to hear the last of the kind gentle- 
 man who had never insulted their misery and 
 who had often emptied his slender purse to re- 
 lieve their wants. 
 
 "Let not his frailties be remembered," 
 wrote Johnson of Goldsmith, some months 
 after his death. " He was a very great man." 
 Yet to-day it is not so much Goldsmith's great- 
 ness as his delightfulness that fills the mind of 
 the reader who turns once more the well-worn 
 pages of the Vicar of Wakefield, the Deserted 
 Village, or She Stoops to Conquer. And so 
 little can we obey the great moralist's injunc- 
 tion to forget poor Goldsmith's frailties that we 
 are perhaps almost too prone to dwell upon 
 them. Goldsmith's faults were never such as 
 
 [208]
 
 The Charm of Goldsmith 
 
 to startle or repel. In his lifetime they wronged 
 none but himself. And since his death it 
 would seem that they have atoned for the in- 
 jury they did by winning for him the hearts of 
 all who desire to feel between themselves and 
 the great men of the past the bond of a common 
 humanity. 
 
 Nowhere, I think, is this bond more readily 
 perceptible than in the case of Goldsmith. 
 As we read the story of his life, we feel that in 
 all but genius he is one of us. We first pity, 
 and then love him. 
 
 Goldsmith's life falls into three uneven parts : 
 the period of youth and merry idleness, the 
 period of obscure poverty and drudgery, and 
 the period, all too brief, of literary and social 
 distinction. He was born in 1728, in a "tum- 
 ble-down, fairy -haunted farm-house," near the 
 little Irish village of Pallas. His father, 
 Charles Goldsmith belonged to an English 
 family who had been long enough resident in 
 Ireland to acquire many of the characteristics 
 
 [209]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 of the native Irish, especially their gaiety, 
 sunny temper, credulity, and careless disregard 
 of the hard facts of life. He himself had made 
 an improvident marriage and at the time of 
 Oliver's birth was a country parson, eking out 
 his forty pounds a year by farming. Shortly 
 afterwards he was transferred to a parish worth 
 two hundred pounds per annum, in which he 
 regarded himself as so passing rich that he 
 " wound up " his brood of cliildren — Oliver 
 was one of ten — " to be mere machines of pity," 
 and "perfectly instructed them in the art of 
 giving away thousands before they were taught 
 the more necessary qualifications for earning a 
 farthing." These are Goldsmith's own words, 
 taken from one of the many autobiographical 
 passages in his works, and they show what, 
 perhaps, we might have guessed without them, 
 that the art of profuse expense and somewhat 
 thoughtless charity in which he was so great a 
 master was no mere individual characteristic but 
 an inherited and early-developed family trait. 
 
 [210]
 
 The Charm of Goldsmith 
 
 As a child Goldsmith is said to have been 
 stupid, sensitive, hot-tempered, and loving. 
 His growth was checked and his features deeply 
 scarred by an attack of small-pox. He passed 
 through several schools with no particular 
 credit, and at the age of seventeen was in- 
 duced, much against his will, to enter the Uni- 
 versity of Dubhn. 
 
 Goldsmith's reluctance was not due to a dis- 
 Uke of learning, but to his keen perception of 
 the humiUating terms upon which it was now 
 offered him. His father's income had been so 
 reduced by the effort to provide a dowry for 
 the eldest daughter of the family, who had 
 secretly married a gentleman above her in 
 rank and wealth, that he could not afford to 
 send Oliver to college, except as a sizar. 
 Now a sizar in those days was little better 
 than a menial. He swept courts, carried 
 dishes, dined on fragments, and acquired what 
 learning he could in the intervals. In Gold- 
 
 [211]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 smith's words, he was *' at once studying free- 
 dom and practising servitude." 
 
 At college Goldsmith passed four undistin- 
 guished years. It is plain that he was, and felt 
 himself, wholly out of place within the academic 
 walls. Once indeed by a burst of energy he 
 gained a petty prize worth thirty shillings, and 
 it is eminently characteristic of the man at all 
 times of his life that he promptly spent the 
 money in an entertainment with music and 
 dancing in his attic room. His tutor heard 
 the sound of revelry, burst open the door, 
 knocked Goldsmith down, and drove the 
 dancers headlong before him down the stairs. 
 Poor Goldsmith promptly ran away from col- 
 lege, starved for a time in the streets of Dublin, 
 and then set out to tramp across the country 
 with some vague idea of taking ship for Amer- 
 ica. He was rescued by his brother, who 
 brought him back to college and patched up 
 some sort of a truce with the redoutable 
 tutor. It is pleasant to learn that this hard- 
 
 [212]
 
 The Charm of Goldsmith 
 
 hitting personage finally came to a disgrace- 
 ful end. 
 
 A couple of anecdotes are preserved that 
 show us something of the better side of Gold- 
 smith at this time. He used, we are told, to 
 write street-ballads and sell them at five shil- 
 lings apiece to eke out his miserable allowance. 
 At night he would steal out to hear them sung 
 and peddled off in the Dubhn alleys. It was 
 under such circumstances that the future 
 author of the Deserted Village made his first 
 acquaintance with " sweet poetry " : 
 
 " Thou source of all my bliss and all my woe, 
 That found'st me poor at first, and keep'st 
 me so." 
 
 Yet poor as he was, Goldsmith was always 
 ready to give away all he had to wretches poorer 
 than himself. A friend who came to call on 
 him one morning had to haul liim by main 
 force out of the ticking of his mattress. Gold- 
 smith had given the blankets off his bed the 
 night before to a poor woman with five cliildren, 
 
 [213]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 whom he found crying at the college gates, and 
 to keep warm had burrowed so deeply into his 
 mattress that he could not get out again with- 
 out help. The story is ludicrous or pathetic, 
 as one chooses to look at it. Certainly, it 
 could not be told of any man of his day but 
 OUver Goldsmith. 
 
 After leaving college Goldsmith passed three 
 happy, idle years with his family. He ran er- 
 rands for his mother, made love to a pretty 
 cousin, played on the flute, and sang songs at the 
 village tavern. In vain did his relatives attempt 
 to get him started in life. They induced him to 
 apply for sacred orders, — imagination boggles 
 at Goldsmith in the pulpit,— but he was rejected 
 by the bishop on the ground, we are told, that 
 he apphed for ordination in a pair of most 
 unreverend scarlet breeches. They collected 
 thirty guineas and started him for America to 
 seek his fortune. He came back in six weeks 
 with nothing in his pocket, and with an amaz- 
 ing tale of the heartless sea-captain who had 
 
 [214]
 
 The Charm of Goldsmith 
 
 stripped him of his money and left him stranded 
 at Cork. The letter which he wrote on this 
 occasion to appease his mother's not unnatural 
 wrath is, I believe, the earliest specimen of his 
 composition now extant, and it is as delightful 
 as a chapter of the Vicar of Wakefield, and, 
 possibly, bears about the same relation to what 
 actually occurred as that prose idyl does to real 
 life. Once more he was launched, this time 
 with London as his goal; but he got no farther 
 than Dublin, when he fell into the hands of a 
 gambler who promptly eased him of the fifty 
 pounds which, we may suppose, were already 
 beginning to burn his pocket. With one last 
 despairing effort, his family raised a final purse, 
 shipped him off to Edinburgh to study medi- 
 cine, and washed their hands of him. He 
 never returned to Ireland, though many a time 
 his heart yearned for his old home, and he 
 never saw any of his kinsfolk again, except 
 once or twice when a brother, as poor, as rest- 
 less, and as simple as Oliver himself, sought 
 
 [215]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 him out in his London garret to obtain his aid 
 in making a fortune. 
 
 In Edinburgh, Goldsmith stayed two years, 
 making a pretence, at least, of study, telling 
 Irish stories in the students' clubs, and spending 
 a disproportionate share of his small allow- 
 ance on rich sky-blue satin and superfine claret- 
 colored clothes. From Edinburgh he set out 
 for Leyden, ostensibly to listen to the lectures 
 of the learned Albinus and the not less learned 
 Gaubius. But a year's intercourse with these 
 worthies sated his thirst for academic knowl- 
 edge; he borrowed a small sum from a fellow- 
 countryman, spent the greater part of it in the 
 purchase of rare tulip bulbs for an uncle in 
 Ireland, and set out on his travels with one 
 guinea in his pocket, one shirt to his back, and 
 his beloved flute in his hand, a happy, philo- 
 sophic vagabond. 
 
 The year of travel that ensued was probably 
 the most important event in Goldsmith's life. 
 It widened his horizon, stored his memory with 
 
 [216]
 
 The Charm of Goldsmith 
 
 scenes and images, and furnished materials for 
 some of his best work. He has left us a pic- 
 turesque account of it in the story of George 
 Primrose's wanderings, and although this can 
 hardly be taken as a scrupulously exact piece 
 of autobiography, we know from other sources 
 that it contains at least the main incidents of 
 Goldsmith's tour. He traveled on foot, earned 
 a night's rest and a breakfast by playing on his 
 flute, begged a dinner at the door of some con- 
 vent, earned a few shillings occasionally by 
 disputing at some university, and borrowed 
 from every one who would lend to him, until, 
 as he frankly confessed, there was hardly a 
 kingdom in Europe in which he was not a 
 debtor. He passed through Belgium, France, 
 and Switzerland, visited Italy and Germany, 
 and in the winter of 1756 returned to England, 
 "his whole stock of cash amounting to a few 
 half-pence." His wander jahre were over, and a 
 period of hard work and grinding poverty was 
 now to begin. 
 
 [217]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 Goldsmith was at this time, as he says in a 
 letter, "without friends, recommendations, 
 money, or impudence, and that in a country 
 where being born an Irishman was sufficient 
 to keep me unemployed. Many in such cir- 
 cumstances would have had recourse to the 
 friar's cord or the suicide's halter. But with 
 all my follies I had principle to resist the one, 
 and resolution to combat the other." 
 
 In truth. Goldsmith was no longer the merry, 
 lazy boy of earlier days; nor did he longer ex- 
 pect to live indefinitely upon the bounty of his 
 relatives. On the contrary, he now set in des- 
 perately, one might almost say heroically, to 
 earn a living for himself. But this was no 
 easy matter. He seems to have worked his 
 way up to London by joining a troupe of stroll- 
 ing players, but his first associates in the capital 
 were the beggars of Axe Lane. He found em- 
 ployment as a chemist's clerk, rose to be a fee- 
 less doctor in the slums, acted as press corrector 
 to the printer and novelist, Richardson, served 
 
 [218]
 
 The Charm of Goldsmith 
 
 for a time as usher at a boys' school, and finally 
 hired himself out as hack-writer to a pubhsher 
 named Griffiths. Of all his occupations, 
 school-teaching seems to have been the one he 
 hated most. "I have been an usher at a 
 boarding-school," says a character in the Vicar, 
 speaking no doubt the sentiments of Ohver 
 Goldsmith, "and may I die by an anodyne 
 necklace {i. e., a halter), but I had rather be an 
 under turnkey in Newgate. I was up early 
 and late; I was browbeat by the master, hated 
 for my ugly face by the mistress, worried by 
 the boys within, and never permitted to stir 
 out to meet civility abroad." 
 
 But Goldsmith's first experiences in the 
 literary profession can hardly have been pleas- 
 anter than school -teaching. He lodged and 
 boarded at the house of Griffiths, who com- 
 plained of his idleness because he did not write 
 every day, and all day, who altered his articles, 
 and refused him sufficient food. In despair 
 Goldsmith sought for an appointment as a 
 
 [219]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 doctor in the service of the East India Com- 
 pany, and to obtain the necessary outfit com- 
 posed his well-known Enquiry into the State of 
 Polite Learning in Europe. The title, by the 
 way, is a misnomer; the subject it indicates 
 was quite beyond Goldsmith's capacity, but, 
 on the other hand, the little book gives a very 
 vivid picture of the degraded condition of the 
 profession of literature in England, a subject 
 on which no man was perhaps better qualified 
 to speak. The East India scheme, however, 
 fell through, and as a last attempt to escape 
 from the slavery of hack-writing, he ap- 
 plied for a position as hospital mate, and 
 was rejected at the preliminary examination. 
 It was at this time that Goldsmith touched the 
 lowest point of misery; he pawned his clothes 
 to pay his landlady, pledged some books sent 
 him for review to secure a meal, was threatened 
 with the jail by the angry bookseller, and posi- 
 tively entreated as a favor that he might be 
 sent there. The quarrel was patched up, how- 
 
 [220]
 
 The Charm of Goldsmith 
 
 ever, and the success of his Enquiry which 
 appeared about this time tended somewhat to 
 improve his prospects in the dreary world of 
 which he had now become a citizen. 
 
 Goldsmith was at last fairly launched upon 
 the sea of letters. He found other and more 
 generous employers than Griffiths, published 
 a charming group of essays. The Bee, and a 
 most entertaining series of letters purporting 
 to be written by a Chinese philosopher in Eng- 
 land to his friends in the Middle Kingdom. 
 He wrote a life of Beau Nash, a child's history 
 of England, and contributed essays, reviews, 
 and biographical sketches to the magazines 
 of the day. Little by little as he rose in the 
 world he made the acquaintance of distin- 
 guished men of letters. Percy called at his 
 lodgings, in "a wretched, dirty room," at the 
 head of Break-neck Stairs. He entertained 
 Johnson at a dinner in the politer quarters in 
 Wine-office Court, to which he soon removed. 
 Percy, who escorted the great Cham thither, 
 
 [221]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 was surprised to find liim in a new suit, a new 
 wig nicely powdered, and everything about 
 him so perfectly dissimilar from his usual 
 habits and appearance that he was moved to 
 ask the cause. "Why, sir," said Johnson, "I 
 hear that Goldsmith, who is a very great sloven, 
 justifies his disregard of cleanliness and de- 
 cency by quoting my practice; and I am de- 
 sirous this night to show him a better example." 
 No record remains of the dinner and the good 
 things that were said over it, but from that 
 night on Johnson was one of Goldsmith's 
 closest friends. The great dictator of letters 
 took the struggling author to his heart, bar- 
 gained for him with the booksellers, bullied 
 theatrical managers to get his plays produced, 
 touched up his poems, and at his death wrote 
 an epitaph in his most magnificent Latin for 
 his monument in Westminster Abbey, scorn- 
 ing, as he said, to disgrace its walls by an Eng- 
 lish inscription. 
 
 In 1763 Goldsmith was enrolled as a charter 
 [222]
 
 The Charm of Goldsmith 
 
 member of the famous club over which John- 
 son ruled so long. At the close of the follow- 
 ing year he pubhshed his first signed work, 
 The Traveller, and it is from this time that his 
 contemporary reputation as a man of letters 
 may be said to date. When he joined the club 
 certain members were disposed to look down 
 upon him as a mere literary hack, unworthy 
 of the honor of their society, but on the appear- 
 ance of the Traveller, Johnson's pronuncia- 
 mento that the poem was superior to anything 
 since the death of Pope established his posi- 
 tion. It is characteristic of Goldsmith that 
 this poem, his first bold plea for fame, was 
 dedicated, not to his literary protector, nor to 
 some noble lord who might have rewarded him 
 with a handful of guineas, but to his brother 
 Henry, "a man who, despising fame and for- 
 tune, has retired early to happiness and ob- 
 scurity, with an income of forty pounds a year." 
 With the publication of the Traveller, Gold- 
 smith entered upon his last period, and from 
 
 [223]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 this time on he produced an uninterrupted 
 series of classics. Emboldened by the success 
 of the Traveller, the publishers ventured to 
 print a novel of Goldsmith's which had been 
 lying in their hands for at least three years. 
 This was none other' than the immortal Vicar 
 of Wakefield. All the world knows the story 
 of the way the book came into the pubhshers' 
 hands, of Goldsmith's arrest by an irate land- 
 lady, of Johnson's intervention, of the novel 
 "ready for the press," which Johnson took out 
 and sold for sixty pounds, and of the scolding 
 Goldsmith gave his landlady for having used 
 him so ill. A recent discovery has shown that 
 this must have happened soon after Goldsmith 
 had made Johnson's acquaintance, and, more- 
 over, that the book was by no means "ready 
 for the press." Probably, indeed, the long de- 
 lay in publication was due not only to the hesi- 
 tation of the publishers, but to Goldsmith's 
 tardiness in completing a work for which he had 
 already received, and spent, the money. Of 
 
 [224]
 
 The Charm of Goldsmith 
 
 one thing, at least, we may be sure: Gold- 
 smith, if left to himself, would never have sold 
 the Vicar to pay a landlady's bill. It was 
 work of another sort than this that he earned 
 his bread and butter by. And it may well be 
 that the hasty and unsatisfactory conclusion 
 of the novel is due, in part, to its having been 
 so unceremoniously taken out of his hands. 
 
 Of the book itself, little need be said. It is 
 one of the undisputed classics of the English 
 language, one of the few English classics whose 
 merit has been as fully and continuously recog- 
 nized upon the continent as in English-speak- 
 ing lands. Its defects are obvious. They 
 were obvious even to the author: "there are a 
 hundred faults in this thing," says Goldsmith 
 in the preface, "and a hundred things might 
 be said to prove them beauties. But it is need- 
 less." Quite needless. The book lives and 
 will live, not by its plot, or its characters, but by 
 what Henry James has called the " amenity " 
 of its author, "the frankness of his sweetness 
 
 [225]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 and the beautiful ease of his speech." " There 
 was," says the critic, "scarce a difficuUy, a 
 disappointraent, an humiHation, or a bitterness 
 of which he had not intimate and repeated 
 knowledge; and yet the heavy heart that went 
 through all this overflows in the little book as 
 optimism of the purest water — as good humor, 
 as good taste, and as drollery." 
 
 The Vicar was followed in 1768 by Gold- 
 smith's first play. The Good-natured Man. Al- 
 though it ran for ten nights and brought Gold- 
 smith a decent sum of money, the lively comedy 
 by no means obtained the success it deserved. 
 It ran counter to the prevailing taste of the 
 time for the sentimental and lachrymose 
 drama; elegant judges found its language "un- 
 commonly low"; in fact, it seems only to have 
 escaped being damned on the first night by the 
 comic humor of one of the actors. Goldsmith 
 was bitterly mortified. At a meeting of the 
 club, after the play, he managed, indeed, to 
 conceal his feelings, laughed, chatted, and sang 
 
 [226]
 
 The Charm of Goldsmith 
 
 his favorite song; but "all the time," he said, 
 "I was suffering horrid tortures, and when 
 all were gone but Johnson, I burst out a-crying, 
 
 and even swore by that I would never write 
 
 again." "All which. Doctor," said Johnson, 
 amazed at the frankness with which Goldsmith 
 a few weeks afterward related this scene in a 
 company of comparative strangers, " I thought 
 had been a secret between you and me; and I 
 am sure I would not have said anything about 
 it for the world." Of course he would not; 
 but a man may be allowed to laugh at his own 
 tears, though not at those of others; and we 
 love Goldsmith for his tears and laughter quite 
 as much as we honor Johnson for his goodness 
 and self-control. 
 
 Two years after the failure of his comedy 
 Goldsmith achieved an undisputed success by 
 the publication of the Deserted Village. Of 
 this poem less need be said, perhaps, than even 
 of the Vicar of Wakefield. Its place among 
 the classics of our language, ratified by the ap- 
 
 [227]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 plause and tears of generations of readers, is 
 absolutely secure. What signifies pointing 
 out, as certain critics of the baser sort have 
 done, that its economic theories are crude and 
 its pictures of rural life unreal? It is not the 
 business of a poem to teach political economy 
 or to correspond with minute accuracy to every- 
 day existence. Its business is to charm the 
 mind and touch the heart, and the Deserted 
 Village does both. It is not only the limpid 
 purity of its diction, the easy flow of its rhythm, 
 and the old-world grace of its portraits that 
 have made the poem immortal; but even more 
 its revelation of the poet, of his wistful affec- 
 tion for the friends of his youth, of his tender 
 sympathy for the misery he saw about him. 
 Gentleness, goodness, and humanity breathe 
 from every line. 
 
 Goldsmith completed his cycle of classics 
 by producing in 1773 one of the happiest conor 
 edies of our language. She Stoops to Coitquer. 
 Founded upon an incident of his own school 
 
 [228]
 
 The Charm of Goldsmith 
 
 days the story of the play is purely farcical; 
 but the wit of the dialogue and the humor of 
 the characters raise it to the highest plane of 
 comedy. It is one of the few plays of its cen- 
 tury that keep the stage to-day, and it is hard 
 to anticipate a time when the rollicking fun of 
 Tony Lumpkin and the mischievous grace of 
 Kate Hardcastle will lose their hold upon 
 spectators. 
 
 And yet it was with the greatest difficulty 
 that this most delightful of plays found its way 
 upon the boards. The manuscript lay for 
 months in the hands of a manager, while Gold- 
 smith was fretting his heart out with impatience 
 and struggling against a heavy burden of debt; 
 and it was at last only by the forceful interven- 
 tion of Johnson that the manager was induced 
 to accept it. He did so, however, with the full 
 conviction that it was foredoomed to failure; 
 he refused to adorn it with a new scene or a 
 new dress, and he communicated his doubts 
 to the actors who one by one threw up their 
 
 [229]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 parts. But when at last all obstacles were 
 overcome and the play appeared, its success 
 was instant and overwhelming. The club 
 attended the first night in a body to beat down 
 the anticipated opposition, but the enemies of 
 Goldsmith did not dare to show their heads. 
 As Horace Walpole writes: "All eyes were 
 upon Johnson, who sat in a front row in a side 
 box, and when he laughed everybody thought 
 himself warranted to roar." 
 
 The peals of laughter which greeted the ap- 
 pearance of She Stoops to Conquer, and pro- 
 claimed Goldsmith's final triumph over pre- 
 judice and false taste, marked also the cloee of 
 his career. He died about a year afterwards 
 of a fever brought on by overwork and trouble 
 of mind, leaving a few short poems and the 
 brilliant fragment. Retaliation, to be published 
 after his death. He was laid to rest in the 
 burial ground of the Temple Church; his books 
 and furniture were sold to pay his debts. 
 
 It must not be thought that, during this last 
 [230]
 
 The Charm of Goldsmith 
 
 period when Goldsmith was producing his best 
 work, he had risen above the necessity of writ- 
 ing for his daily bread. With the exception 
 of his two plays he hardly made enough by his 
 masterpieces to buy butter for his bread. The 
 Traveller brought him twenty guineas, the 
 • Vicar sixty pounds, the Deserted Village, we 
 are told, one hundred pounds. He would 
 indeed have been glad to devote himself wholly 
 to work of this sort, but no way ever opened 
 for him. His friends at one time applied for 
 a pension such as had been granted Johnson, 
 but it was promptly refused by the government, 
 probably because Goldsmith had declined to 
 hire out his pen in their service against the party 
 of his friend, Burke. The Lord Lieutenant 
 of Ireland once offered his patronage, but Gold- 
 smith begged him to transfer it to his brother 
 Henry. And so he struggled on, collecting 
 anthologies, compiling histories of Greece and 
 Rome, abridging his own compilations, turn- 
 ing out lives of Parnell and Bolingbroke, and 
 
 [231]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 finishing the very month before his death an 
 eight-volume work on Animated Nature. Hard 
 task-work, but not without intervals of inno- 
 cent amusement. When Goldsmith had writ- 
 ten himself to a standstill, he used to in- 
 dulge in one of the vacations which he called 
 "a Shoemaker's Holiday." Three or four 
 friends would meet for breakfast in his rooms, 
 stroll out along the city road and through the 
 fields to a country inn, where they dined at 
 ten-pence a head, play skittles in the afternoon, 
 and return, as evening fell, for supper in a Lon- 
 don coffee-house. The whole expense of the 
 excursion, we are told, never exceeded a crown, 
 and oftener was from three to four shillings, 
 "for which the party obtained good air and 
 exercise, good living, the example of simple 
 manners and good conversation." 
 
 In the face of such a simple record as this, 
 handed down to us by a contemporary who 
 had often been Goldsmith's fellow in a Shoe- 
 maker's Holiday, it is a little hard to believe 
 
 [ 232 ]
 
 The Charm of Goldsmith 
 
 the stories of the poet's vanity, profusion, sen- 
 suahty, and passion for gambhng which are 
 bandied about from one biographer to another. 
 Yet it is probable that these tales have a cer- 
 tain foundation of truth. Goldsmith had to 
 the last the heart of a child. He was child- 
 ishly eager to attract attention, to shine, to 
 please. He decked his little body in the most 
 gorgeous raiment and left a large tailor's bill 
 unpaid behind him. He entertained sumptu- 
 ously at his rooms, not to gratify his own ap- 
 petite, for he is described as drinking hot milk 
 at these banquets, but to give pleasure to his 
 friends. From one vice, at least, common 
 enough in his age. Goldsmith always seems to 
 have been free; he was not a drinking man. 
 It is not so easy to acquit him of the charge of 
 gambling. There is a good deal of contem- 
 porary testimony to show that he was fond of 
 play, and quite as much to show that he always 
 lost. He had a child's love of excitement, a 
 child's firm conviction that he would finally 
 
 [233]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 win, and a child's incapacity to match older 
 and craftier players. There is a most amusing 
 picture in his rhymed letter to Mrs. Bunbury 
 of the way in which she and her sister, the Jes- 
 samy Bride, lured him on with mocking ad- 
 vice to lose his shillings at loo. But there is 
 another story, not so well known as it might 
 be, which shows how little Goldsmith had of 
 the true gambler's absorbing passion. He 
 was playing whist one night with a party of 
 friends, for money of course, as every one 
 played at that time. At a critical moment of 
 the game, when the rubber depended upon a 
 single point. Goldsmith suddenly threw down 
 his hand and dashed out of the house into the 
 street. " Where the deuce have you been ? " 
 said one of the players on his return. "I'll 
 tell you," he replied. "As I was pondering 
 over my cards, my attention was attracted by 
 the voice of a woman in the street, who was 
 singing and sobbing at the same time; so I flew 
 down to relieve her distress, for I could not be 
 
 [234]
 
 The Charm of Goldsmith 
 
 quiet myself till I had quieted her." We can 
 hardly imagine Charles Fox, Lord March, or 
 any other of the famous gamblers of the day, 
 quitting the table to relieve the sorrows of a 
 poor street-singer. 
 
 Of envy, the basest vice, with which Gold- 
 smith has been charged, we may unhesitatingly 
 pronounce him free. He was vain, no doubt, 
 and his vanity was often hurt by the way in 
 which men whom he rightly believed to be in- 
 ferior to himself, Beattie, for example, and 
 Kelley, were pensioned and applauded, while 
 he was neglected. And with a child's lack of 
 self-control, he uttered his feelings when wiser 
 men would have been silent. Often, too, his 
 supposed outbursts of envy were whimsical 
 extravagances misunderstood by the solemn 
 fools to whom they were addressed. ^¥ho 
 can believe, for instance, that he was actually 
 envious when he said to Boswell, expatiating 
 on the greatness of their common friend : " Do 
 not talk of Johnson in such terms; it harrows 
 
 [235]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 up my very soul." The fact is that Goldsmith 
 was a simple man in a somewhat sophisticated 
 society, and its members mistook his occasional 
 petulance for malice, and his jests for bitter 
 earnest. Even Johnson seems in this point to 
 have misunderstood him. 
 
 But we may comfort ourselves with a re- 
 mark of Johnson's, made shortly after Gold- 
 smith's death, when a roomful of people at 
 Sir Joshua's were depreciating their dead 
 friend's work. The loyal old man rose to his 
 feet, looked the chatterers in the face, and ex- 
 claimed, "If nobody was suffered to abuse 
 poor Goldy but those who could write as well, 
 he would have few censors!" And to sum up 
 the whole matter. Goldsmith wrote so well be- 
 cause he was at bottom so good. If he had the 
 faults of a child, he had as well a child's vir- 
 tues. He loved children because, as has been 
 said, he was always at heart a child. He 
 was unsuspicious, generous, and confiding; 
 tender-hearted and easily moved to pity. If 
 
 [236]
 
 The Charm of Goldsmith 
 
 he ever took offence, as he was often warranted 
 in doing, he was always ready to forgive. 
 Above all he had that simple faith in goodness, 
 human and divine, which our Lord himself 
 recognized as not the least of virtues when he 
 set a little child in the midst of the wrangling 
 disciples. And it is this childlikeness, if I may 
 use the word, appearing as it does both in his 
 life and in his work, that constitutes for all 
 who know him the peculiar charm of Oliver 
 Goldsmith. 
 
 [237]
 
 The Last Minstrel 
 
 SCOTT was in his time the most popular 
 of all the great poets of the Romantic 
 movement, and he remains to-day the best 
 loved of their number. Whatever may be the 
 received opinion as to the merit of his verse 
 when compared with that of his contempo- 
 raries, it is impossible to feel for the cold auster- 
 ity of Wordsworth, the passionate egoism of 
 Byron, or even the sensitive ideality of Shelley, 
 anything like that sentiment of warm personal 
 affection which we cherish for the kindly, gen- 
 erous, and broadly human personality of Scott. 
 In part, no doubt, this sentiment is due to the 
 unbounded reverence of boyhood for the won- 
 der-working poet who unbarred the gates and 
 led the way into the enchanted garden of ro- 
 mance. Nine out of every ten readers of Eng- 
 lish verse may, I fancy, repeat with all sincerity 
 
 [238]
 
 The Last Minstrel 
 
 and truth the closing words of Lang's letter to 
 Sir Walter: "From you first, as we followed 
 the deer with King James, or rode with Wil- 
 liam of Deloraine on his midnight errand, did 
 we learn what Poetry means and all the happi- 
 ness that is in the gift of song. This and more 
 than may be told you gave us, that are not for- 
 getful, not ungrateful, though our praise be 
 unequal to our gratitude." 
 
 But there is something more in our feeling 
 for Scott and his work than a mere lingering 
 of the ingenuous and uncritical admiration of 
 boyhood. There comes a time, indeed, in 
 most lives when Scott's poems are thrown 
 aside for the work of other poets, graver or 
 more sensuous, subtler or more passionate. 
 At such a period, too, his novels suffer under 
 the onslaughts of the newly awakened critical 
 sense; one is apt to pronounce them stilted in 
 diction, clumsy in machinery, and generally 
 wanting in technic. But this period passes, 
 like other literary maladies, and we come back 
 
 [239]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 to Scott with a renewed delight in that brave 
 spirit of adventure which bewitched our youth, 
 and with a truer appreciation of the lyric 
 beauty, the power of sustained narrative, the 
 vigorous and varied gift of character portrayal 
 which combine with his epic simplicity and 
 his romantic charm to insure him a permanent 
 place, not in his native language only, but 
 among the great names of the literature of the 
 world. 
 
 It is probable that Scott's popularity rests 
 to-day, with the generality of readers, rather 
 upon his novels than his verse. This is due 
 in part to the almost unchallenged pre-emi- 
 nence which fiction since Scott's day has ob- 
 tained over other forms of literature, and to 
 the present almost unbroken preoccupation of 
 the general reader with novels, and novels 
 only. And it is due in part also to the undis- 
 puted fact that many of the best characteristics 
 of Scott — his shrewd and sunny humor, his 
 genial sympathy with all sorts of men, and 
 
 [ 240 ]
 
 The Last Minstrel 
 
 his firm grasp on the realities of hfe — are 
 revealed more clearly in his novels than in his 
 poetry. Yet it is no less true that the neglect 
 which his verse suffered during the greater 
 part of the last century was undeserved. His 
 fame was eclipsed by the successive ascensions 
 of Byron, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Brown- 
 ing. Each of these poets became famous, 
 and rightly famous, for qualities and effects 
 not to be found in Scott, and as a consequence 
 Scott's verse was underrated because it lacked 
 these qualities and effects. A saner and more 
 sympathetic criticism estimates a poet by what 
 he is and does, not by what he could not be 
 and never dreamed of doing. Toward the close 
 of the Victorian era poetry tended more and 
 more to become a thing of the study, and the 
 appreciation of poetry to become less popular 
 in the true sense of the word, and more narrowly 
 limited to a small, refined, and art-loving class, 
 in whose eyes the open-air, impetuous, and 
 often careless verse of Scott was an unpardon- 
 
 [241]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 able crime against the canons of true art. The 
 world-wide vogue of Kipling's verses in the last 
 decade, however, would seem to indicate that 
 a strong reaction against the later Victorian 
 standards has already set in, and it is by no 
 means improbable that as the critics come to 
 realize that the last word of poetry was not 
 spoken by Tennyson, Rossetti, or Swinburne, 
 they may also come to recognize more gen- 
 erally the widely diverse merits of the great 
 predecessor of these poets. 
 
 The truth is that Scott, although his poetic 
 activity falls almost wholly within the nine- 
 teenth century, was absolutely unmoved by 
 the great currents of feeling which swayed 
 that age. His attitude toward the principles 
 that precipitated the gigantic convulsion of 
 the Revolution in France and brought about 
 the bloodless, but no less important, reform 
 of the English constitution was from first to 
 last that of the fighting Tory. In his fiery 
 youth he headed a band of gentlemen who 
 
 [242]
 
 The Last Minstrel 
 
 cracked the heads of Irish Jacobins in the 
 pit of the Edinburgh theater; in his decrepit 
 old age he sprang from his carriage to arrest 
 a radical rowdy at the Selkirk hustings. His 
 political ideas were summed up in the old 
 Cavalier motto: "Fear God; honor the king." 
 His attitude toward George IV, over which 
 Thackeray makes merry, was not that of a 
 servile courtier to his sovereign, but that of a 
 Highland bard toward the chief of his clan. 
 Scott was the last English poet to whom the 
 sentiment of loyalty in its old accepted mean- 
 ing was something more than an idle phrase. 
 He was in fact the last minstrel, and his muse 
 
 the Lady of the Mere 
 
 Sole-sitting by the shores of old romance." 
 
 Scott represents the culmination of the eight- 
 eenth century's interest in the romantic and 
 medieval past. In him the tendencies that had 
 budded in Horace Walpole and Bishop Percy 
 and ' ' Ossian ' ' McPherson broke out into full and 
 
 [243]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 perfect flower. Our knowledge of the Middle 
 Ages is to-day in many respects more accurate 
 and well-rounded ; our poets and novelists would 
 shudder at such light-hearted anachronisms 
 as those in which Scott leaps over the centuries 
 to make his wizard clansman contemporary 
 with Queen Mary's moss-troopers, or to send 
 a Danish viking campaigning like a Crusader 
 "on Carmel's cliffs and Jordan's strand." 
 And yet with all our increase of knowledge 
 and painstaking accuracy of expression it is 
 doubtful whether any poet since Scott's day 
 has ever penned a passage so instinct with 
 medievalism as the well-known description of 
 Branksome at the opening of the Lay or the 
 scarcely less famous Mass in Melrose Abbey 
 at its close. Here as nowhere else in modern 
 English literature the romantic past is seized 
 and realized in two of its most dominating fea- 
 tures, warfare and religious devotion. 
 
 Of a third great element in medievalism, 
 romantic love, Scott is said to have had a 
 
 [244]
 
 The Last Minstrel 
 
 fainter perception ; and it is clear that the pas- 
 sion of love plays but a small part in his verse. 
 And yet I doubt whether any later poet has 
 reproduced more accurately the attitude of the 
 medieval minstrel toward love both in its 
 lighter and graver aspects as Scott in one 
 of the least regarded of his poems, The Bridal 
 of Triermain. It would be an interesting 
 study to compare the Arthur of that poem, the 
 chivalric, adventurous, and amorous king of the 
 old romances, with the spirituaHzed and alle- 
 gorized Arthur of the Idylls of the King. Ten- 
 nyson's may be the nobler conception, but there 
 can be no doubt that Scott's is the more truly 
 medieval ; and the perfect close of Sir Roland's 
 love-quest stands in admirable contrast to 
 the hopeless muddle of medieval and modern 
 with which Tennyson winds up his charming 
 idyll on the love-quest of Sir Gareth. " Scott's 
 feeHng for romance," says one of the shrewdest 
 of his later critics, and the depth of his sym- 
 pathy with all that was heroic and much that 
 
 [245]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 was merely ancient, enabled him to assume 
 almost the attitude of the wandering minstrel"; 
 and in addition to the passage just noted a 
 hundred others might be quoted to verify the 
 truth of this assertion. 
 
 Scott's feeling for romance and sympathy 
 with the heroic past came to him in the most 
 natural way, through heredity and early en- 
 vironment. He was, to be sure, the son of a 
 sedate and practical Edinburgh lawyer, but 
 he was also the descendant of a famous hard- 
 riding, hard-fighting clan, the sixth in right 
 line from Walter of Harden, the hero of many 
 a Border ballad, and his wife, the Flower of 
 Yarrow — no bad genealogy, as Scott himself 
 remarked with conscious pride, for a Border 
 minstrel. He was born in what is still the 
 most romantic of British towns, and his early 
 years were spent with his grandparents in a 
 farmhouse overlooking the Tweed, where he 
 was brought up in an atmosphere of Jacobite 
 tales and Border legends — an atmosphere 
 
 [246]
 
 The Last Minstrel 
 
 wonderfully reproduced for us in the auto- 
 biographic lines prefixed to the third canto 
 of Marmion. The first poem that he learned 
 by heart was the ballad of Hardyknut, the first 
 book that he read aloud was Pope's Iliad. 
 Wliile still a boy he read both Ossian and 
 Spenser, and committed to memory long pas- 
 sages of the Faerie Queene. To a residence 
 during his twelfth year in Kelso, "the most 
 beautiful village in Scotland," Scott himself 
 traced the awakening of his feeling for the 
 beauties of nature, a feeling inextricably in- 
 tertwined in him with a sense of the historic 
 or legendary past of which these beauties were 
 the frame. Scott was no pure nature-wor- 
 shiper like Wordsworth; a landscape meant 
 little or nothing to him unless it were asso- 
 ciated with romantic memories. As he put 
 it, very frankly, he would rather wander over 
 the field of Bannockburn than survey the scene 
 from the battlements of Stirling. 
 
 One of the most important incidents in 
 [247]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 Scott's early life was his acquaintance with 
 Percy's ballad collection, Reliques of Ancient 
 English Poetry. It was not that the book 
 opened a new field to the boy, for he had been 
 familiar since infancy with ballads and legends; 
 but it showed him that the collection, anno- 
 tation, and imitation of these old songs was a 
 pursuit worthy of a scholar and a gentleman. 
 To Scott's first reading of the Reliques under 
 a huge plantanus tree in the Kelso garden, 
 oblivious of the flight of time and the pangs 
 of hunger, may be traced his own great col- 
 lection, the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border; 
 and the Minstrelsy laid the foundation for 
 perhaps the greater portion of his later work. 
 
 Scott's schooling was limited and irregular. 
 He declined to learn Greek, and provoked 
 the wrath of his teacher by composing an argu- 
 ment to prove the superiority of Ariosto to 
 Homer. He neglected the Latin classics to 
 fasten eagerly upon the monkish chroniclers 
 of the Middle Ages, and very properly preferred 
 
 [248]
 
 The Last Minstrel 
 
 the Stabat Mater and the Dies Irce to the neo- 
 classic poems of the Renaissance. Outside 
 of school hours he taught himself French and 
 Italian, for the specific purpose of mastering 
 the romantic treasures of those languages. 
 He attended but few classes at the university, 
 and although he studied hard and passed with 
 credit his examinations for entrance to the 
 Scottish bar, his heart was never in his pro- 
 fession. And yet his profession was of the 
 greatest service to him, for it sent him wan- 
 dering all over Scotland in pursuit of witnesses 
 and testimony. He utihzed these excursions 
 to store his mind with images of romantic 
 scenery and ruined castles and abbeys, with 
 snatches of old songs and ballads, with anec- 
 dotes and legends of Highland chieftains and 
 Border cattle- thieves. Before long he set 
 himself diligently to collect the half-forgotten 
 ballads of the Border-side, and his annual 
 raids into Liddesdale not only secured him 
 the treasures which he went to seek, but 
 
 [249]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 familiarized him with a mode of life which 
 had changed but little since the old moss-troop- 
 ing days. In after years Scott was accustomed 
 to lament the idleness and irregular studies of 
 his youth; but it is certain that no formal train- 
 ing could have fitted him half so well for the 
 work he was to do, and all true Scott lovers 
 will readily agree with Ruskin's charming 
 paradox that the poet enjoyed "the blessing 
 of a totally neglected education." 
 
 Scott's first contribution to literature was 
 under the auspices of the new romantic school 
 of Germany. He translated Burger's ghostly 
 ballads, Lenore and The Wild Huntsman, 
 and Goethe's chivalric drama Goetz von 
 Berlichingen. Proceeding to original composi- 
 tion he fell in with " Monk " Lewis, the recog- 
 nized leader of the romantic movement in the 
 highest circles of English society, and con- 
 tributed to his Tales of Wonder a group of 
 ballads, among them Glenfinlas, The Eve of 
 St. John, and The Fire-King. Here we find 
 
 [250]
 
 The Last Minstrel 
 
 the first true evidences of Scott's genius. The 
 vigorous diction, Hvely rhythm, and picturesque 
 imagery of these poems stand out in striking 
 contrast to the tinsel and clap-trap of Lewis's 
 own productions. And the strong sense of 
 locahty, the poetic use of proper names, and 
 the mastery of supernatural effects which they 
 exhibit were all true promises of greater things 
 to come. 
 
 The Minstrelsy, Scott's next work, did not 
 appear until three years later. The author's 
 original intention had been to publish a neat 
 little book, such as might sell for four or five 
 shillings. But the work grew on his hands. 
 In addition to his own stores of legend and 
 ballad, Scott drew on the resources of such 
 scholars as Ellis and Ritson, such countryside 
 collectors and composers as Leyden and Hogg. 
 The result was a three-volume collection, 
 which is simply the best ballad-book in the 
 world. Scott never hesitated to take liberties 
 with his originals; he combined, altered, and 
 
 [251]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 inserted passages at will. He did all this, how- 
 ever, not to tickle the palate of a too fastidious 
 public in Bishop Percy's fashion, but to bring 
 the corrupt and imperfect versions up to his 
 own standard of taste; and his taste in ballad 
 literature was nothing short of the highest. 
 He treated the ballads, in fact, not like a mod- 
 ern editor, but like an old minstrel; and as the 
 last and greatest of the minstrels he brought 
 many of them into their final and most perfect 
 form. 
 
 And the prose of the book, the introduction, 
 the essay on fairies, the voluminous historical 
 and legendary notes, is only a little less delight- 
 ful than the ballads. It contained the ma- 
 terial for a hundred romances, and was the 
 storehouse whence Scott drew uncounted 
 names, scenes, and incidents for his later work. 
 Years afterwards, when Scottish society was 
 rent asunder over the authorship of the Waver- 
 ley novels, Christopher North ridiculed the 
 folly of those who went far afield to discover 
 
 [252]
 
 The Last Minstrel 
 
 the writer. " What are they all thinking of ? " 
 said he; "have they forgotten the prose of the 
 Minstrelsy? " 
 
 Scott began the composition of his first long 
 poem, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, in the 
 same year that saw the publication of his Border 
 Ballads. He derived a hint for the subject 
 from the young and beautiful wife of the noble- 
 man who afterwards became Duke of Buc- 
 cleuch, the famous title of the chief of the Scott 
 clan. Scott has immortalized her as the Duch- 
 ess of the introduction to the Lay, where he 
 himself appears under the thin disguise of the 
 aged minstrel. It would be impossible to find 
 in modern times a situation more charmingly 
 medieval. A young countess commands the 
 minstrel of her house to sing, and even sets 
 him a subject; the minstrel obeys, and weaves 
 into his song the happiest of compliments to 
 his gracious lady and the most delicate con- 
 fession of his devotion and gratitude. And 
 the song itself is such as a minstrel of the Middle 
 
 [ 253 ]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 ages might have sung, a metrical romance of 
 chivalry. Like most of the old romances it 
 is deficient in construction and overcharged with 
 episode; but the episodes are too deUghtful to 
 wish away, and in poems of this sort elaborate 
 plot-construction is perhaps the last thing that 
 matters. 
 
 The Lay, to quote Lockhart's fine phrase, 
 is "a vivid panorama of that old Border life 
 of war and tumult and all earnest passions." 
 Love, war, rehgion, and magic are woven to- 
 gether into one imperishable fabric of romance, 
 while at the same time the poet never wholly 
 loses touch with the reahties of life. William 
 of Deloraine, Wat Tinlinn, the representatives 
 of the English yeomanr}^ are veritable crea- 
 tures of flesh and blood, and more than suffice 
 to save the poem from drifting off into the 
 dreamy land of Otherwhere, in which, for 
 example, the scene of Coleridge's contem- 
 porary romance of Christabel is laid. 
 
 Marmion, the greatest of Scott's poems, 
 [254]
 
 The Last Minstrel 
 
 appeared some three years after the Lay. It 
 was composed for the most part in the saddle, 
 during long rides over the braes or along the 
 sands in the intervals of drilling with a volun- 
 teer regiment of cavalry. England was then 
 in the full tide of her struggle against the gi- 
 gantic power of Napoleon, and Scott, it is 
 needless to say, threw himself into the struggle 
 with all his heart. From it he caught more 
 than a mere taste of 
 
 "That stern joy which warriors feel 
 In foemen worthy of their steel." 
 
 The poem itself breathes full of the mighty 
 passion of the time. Alone of Scott's tales in 
 verse it may with some fairness lay claim to 
 the proud epithet of epic. Had the poet been 
 fortunate enough at this period to light upon 
 the theme that he took up later in the decay of 
 his powers, the wars of Bruce, and had he de- 
 veloped that theme with the care which he 
 acknowledges to have bestowed in unrivaled 
 
 [255]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 measure upon Marmion, we should perhaps 
 have had what it now seems impossible that 
 we shall ever see, a modern national epic poem. 
 Even as it is, Marmion is many degrees above 
 the Lay which precedes and The Lady of the 
 Lake which follows it, in all that pertains to 
 unity, dignity, and tragic force. The plot, 
 though somewhat complicated, is a true plot 
 and not a mere succession of incidents — it 
 moves forward step by step ; the fortunes of the 
 principal figures are relieved against a well- 
 planned background of history, and in the 
 superb climax of the poem the fates of hero, 
 heroine, and villain are involved in the over- 
 whelming national catastrophe of Flodden. 
 Words are too weak to praise the battlepiece 
 with which the poem ends. It stands, along 
 with the battles of the Iliad and the slaughter 
 of the Nibelungs in Atli's Hall, as one of 
 the three great poetic expressions of the fight- 
 ing spirit in man, ancient, medieval, and 
 modern. 
 
 [256]
 
 The Last Minstrel 
 
 The Lady of the Lake is the most popular of 
 Scott's poems, a fact due in large part, at least, 
 to its happy choice of subjects. It is not too 
 much to say that in this poem Scott opened to 
 English readers a world entirely new, for the 
 effusions of the pseudo-Ossian some fifty years 
 before had been far too vague and intangible 
 to give any conception of the life behind the 
 Highland hills. Alien in blood and language 
 as Scott was, he recognized in the dominating 
 principle of this life, loyalty to the chief, one of 
 the strongest of his own convictions; and, 
 guided by this clue, he reconstructed and por- 
 trayed the customs and national characteristics 
 of the Highlanders in a fashion that has been 
 and will be the delight of generations. It was 
 an astonishing tour de force, but, after all, it 
 was little more. There is a faint flavor of arti- 
 ficiality about the poem ; it is as if Scott's grasp 
 on real life weakened when he deserted the nar- 
 row limits of his own peculiar land between 
 Edinburgh and the Border. In story and in 
 
 [257]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 style The Lady of the Lake is the simplest, most 
 polished, and most evenly sustained of all his 
 poems; but if it never sinks so low, it never 
 rises within striking distance of the loftiest 
 flights of the Lay and Marmion, and some of 
 its best passages are weakened by our sense that 
 the same thing has been done and better done 
 before. The Battle of Beal' an Duine is a 
 long way behind Flodden. And yet when we 
 hear that a Scotch ofiicer in the Peninsular 
 War read this battlepiece to his company 
 lying exposed to the fire of the French guns, and 
 that the men listened in breathless attention, 
 only interrrupting with a joyous hurrah as the 
 shot struck the bank above their heads, we 
 feel the utter futility of criticism. In poetry, 
 as in sport or war, blood will tell, and the blood 
 of generations of fighting men was warm in 
 Scott's veins. 
 
 Space forbids any detailed consideration of 
 the later poems. Yet, with the exception of 
 the two dealing with contemporary events, and 
 
 [258]
 
 The Last Minstrel 
 
 possibly the careless and ill-conceived romance 
 Harold the Dauntless, they by no means de- 
 serve to be dismissed without a word. Some- 
 thing has already been said of The Bridal of 
 Triermain. The Lord of the Isles contains at 
 least one scene equal to the finest passages of 
 the Lay, and many that are httle below the level 
 of The Lady of the Lake. Rokeby, of all Scott's 
 poems, seems to me the most undeservedly neg- 
 lected. Less fortunate in the choice of a sub- 
 ject than in any other of his romances, Scott 
 has here laid his main stress upon character- 
 ization, and the chief figures in Rokeby are 
 drawn with an attention to detail, and set off 
 against each other in such effective contrast, as 
 prepares us for the best work of his novels. 
 Matilda, drawn from Scott's remembrance of 
 his first love, is the most real of all the heroines 
 of his poems; Redmond is by long odds the 
 strongest of his heroes ; and Bertram, the cen- 
 tral figure of the whole romance, is the most 
 superb portrait in Scott's collection of heroic 
 
 [259]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 villains. But the crowning glory of Roheby is 
 the lovely garland of lyrics which is so deftly in- 
 terwoven with the action of the tale. Long 
 after we have forgotten the descriptions and 
 incidents of the poem, the gay lilt of the " Cav- 
 alier Song" and the tender cadences of "O, 
 Brignall's banks," and "A weary lot is thine, 
 fair maid," linger in our ears. The last-named 
 song, indeed, seems to me the very quintessence 
 of Scott's lyric gift. 
 
 It is hard to part from Scott. There is so 
 much over which one would gladly pause: 
 the mingled grace and strength of his elegiac 
 moods, the frank simplicity of his occasional 
 outbursts of self-revelation, the loving and 
 minute detail of his bits of landscape-painting. 
 But the purpose of this essay has been to ex- 
 plain and illustrate but one aspect of Scott's 
 poetry, and to portray Scott himself as the last 
 of the minstrels, the restorer to English liter- 
 ature of the well-nigh forgotten medieval forms 
 of the ballad and the metrical romance, the in- 
 
 [260]
 
 The Last Minstrel 
 
 spired awakener of an undying interest in the 
 legendary and chivalric past, the golden link 
 that binds us to the middle ages. And this 
 purpose it may be hoped has been, in some 
 measure, already accomplished. 
 
 [261]
 
 The 
 Vitality of Browning 
 
 IT was the fashion some time ago to speak 
 with a certain easy contempt of the late-won 
 popularity of Browning's verse, to make small 
 jokes about the labors of the Browning Society, 
 and to prophesy that the popularity and the 
 Society alike were a mere fad which would 
 hardly outlive the poet himself. Browning has 
 been dead some fifteen years; the Browning 
 Society soon followed him to the grave; the 
 fad, if fad it were, of assuming a peculiar posi- 
 tion in the world of culture by exclusive and 
 esoteric devotion to his poems, has also passed 
 away. And yet Browning remains as popular 
 as ever. Perhaps more so. Not only is his 
 rank as one of the greater Victorian poets 
 tacitly admitted, — a fact which was by no 
 
 [262]
 
 The Vitality of Browning 
 
 means appcarent when Mr. Stedman's well- 
 known review of the poetry of that age ap- 
 peared in 1887 — but he is constantly quoted 
 or alluded to in such a way as to show that this 
 rank is not an empty honor conferred upon the 
 illustrious dead, but rather the recognition of 
 his permeating influence upon the present time. 
 And there are other proofs of Browning's hold 
 upon the public. Editions of his works are 
 rapidly multiplying. His earlier poems, in 
 particular, as they pass out of copyright, are 
 being reproduced in cheap and attractive forms; 
 and since the appearance of Mrs. Browning's 
 Letters in the closing years of the last century 
 there has been a steady succession of books 
 about the poet, which has culminated this pres- 
 ent year in Professor Dowden's thoughtful and 
 illuminating "biography of the poet's mind," 
 perhaps the most valuable contribution to our 
 knowledge of the man and his work that has 
 yet been made. Decidedly Browning is not 
 dead yet. 
 
 [ 263 ]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 "No need that sort of king should ever die," 
 says one of the characters in Pippa Passes, 
 and so may we say of Browning. The quaUty 
 most characteristic of the man, from his im- 
 petuous and eager youth to his magnificent old 
 age, was energy, activity, vitality of body and 
 mind. 
 
 There was discernible in him, indeed, a cer- 
 tain restless activity. He could not sit long 
 over a book; he would not spend his time in 
 the slow labor of the file that brings forth at 
 last the perfect line. He needed to the very 
 end of his life some outlet for his superabun- 
 dant physical energies. And so he rode for 
 hours, walked for miles, swam far out into the 
 sea, bathed in mountain brooks, modeled in 
 clay; — any occupation was welcome that gave 
 his powers play. And his mind was as active 
 as his body. If he did not read long, he read 
 swiftly and widely, and assimilated instantly 
 what once he read. If he did not meditate 
 profoundly, he thought vehemently, springing 
 
 [264]
 
 The Vitality of Browning 
 
 with lightning bounds over the processes of 
 reason to the goal of truth. He was insatiable 
 in his thirst for acquisition and enjoyment. 
 He tasted all the pleasures of travel, society, 
 art, and music. He drank deep of the cup of 
 love. But he was not content with mere en- 
 joyment. Whatever he touched he sought to 
 master and understand. Like his own Fra 
 Lippo, the world meant intensely to him, and 
 to find its meaning was his meat and drink. 
 There is no poet in our literature who shows 
 in so abundant measure the presence of this 
 element of intellectual curiosity. 
 
 And the same vitality that characterized the 
 man marks his work as well. There are many 
 faults in Browning, faults of omission and 
 commission, rough places, ugly spots, offences 
 to eye and ear. But there is one fault with 
 which his severest critic cannot charge him. 
 He is never dull. The wine he pours is not 
 always sweet, but it is never flat or vapid. 
 It has always a certain keen smack and pun- 
 
 [265]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 gent aroma which assures us that the poet's 
 spirit is still there. 
 
 Browning's parents were quiet bourgeois 
 people, but each of them furnished something 
 of the matter which, touched by the spark of 
 genius, broke out into flower in the poet. His 
 father, denied the artistic and the classical 
 education for which he had longed in youth, 
 was a clerk in the Bank of England, a self- 
 taught scholar, a prodigious reader, and an 
 indefatigable book hunter. " His brain," said 
 his son in after years, "was a storehouse of 
 literary and philosophical antiquities." He 
 was fond of poetry and art, and himself wrote 
 verses, and drew, cleverly enough, portraits and 
 caricatures. He possessed robust health and 
 a fund of simple, unworldly affection for wife, 
 children, and friends. The poet's mother, 
 slight, delicate, and high-strung, was, in Car- 
 lyle's phrase, " the true type of a Scottish gen- 
 tlewoman." Her son's affection for her was 
 deep and lasting. Through all the years of his 
 
 [266]
 
 The Vitality of Browning 
 
 life as a young bachelor in his parents' house 
 he never went to bed without going into her 
 room to kiss her good-night, and at her death, 
 which happened while he was away at Flor- 
 ence, his wife wrote: "Robert has loved his 
 mother as such passionate natures only can 
 love, and I never saw a man so bowed down 
 in such extremity of sorrow — never." Both 
 husband and wife were devout Christians of the 
 simple, old-fashioned type, members of an 
 Independent congregation in a London suburb, 
 evangelical, rather than sacerdotal or ascetic. 
 Browning's education was peculiar. He left 
 school in his fourteenth year, and never went to 
 college, unless a brief attendance on a Greek 
 class in London University may be reckoned 
 such. But his home training was excellent. 
 He cultivated the body, learnt to ride, box, 
 dance, and fence; devoted much time to music; 
 and under his father's guidance read omniv- 
 orously, English, French, Latin, and Greek. 
 There is little reason to share, I think, his 
 
 [267]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 oflBcial biographer's regret that Browning 
 missed the conventional EngUsh course of 
 instruction. 
 
 Like most poets Browning was a precocious 
 boy. He read Pope's Homer with keen de- 
 hght at the age of eight, plunged headlong into 
 Byron at ten, and in his twelfth year produced 
 a volume of verses of the true Byronic stamp, 
 in which we are told, "he yearned for wastes 
 of ocean and illimitable sands, for dark eyes 
 and burning caresses, for despair that nothing 
 would quench but the silent grave, and, in 
 particular, for hollow, mocking laughter." It 
 is needless to say that no publisher shared the 
 proud parents' opinion of this early work, and 
 it is characteristic of Browning that, as soon as 
 he came to years of discretion, he destroyed the 
 manuscript. 
 
 While Browning was still a boy, however, he 
 came under a nobler and more permanent in- 
 fluence than that of Byron. A pretty story is 
 told of his discovery in a suburban bookstall 
 
 [268]
 
 The Vitality of Browning 
 
 of a copy of " Mr. Shelley's Atheistical Poem," 
 Queen Mob; of his mother's sympathy with her 
 boy's new interest, of her presentation of an 
 armful of volumes by Mr. Shelley and his 
 friend Mr. Keats; and of the boy's rapturous 
 communion through a summer night, while 
 nightingales sang in the garden, with the souls 
 of poets dead and gone. To the end of his life 
 Browning never forgot that night; he often 
 spoke of it as "his first joy, his first free hap- 
 piness in outlook." And well might he re- 
 member it, for the soul of the poet was born in 
 him that night. 
 
 And it was not long before he definitely 
 decided to devote his life to poetry. With the 
 full consent of his father, who seems to have 
 entertained the same well-founded confidence 
 in his son's genius that Milton's father did. 
 Browning declined to enter business or prepare 
 for a profession, and set himself to study life, 
 and to cultivate his powers for his future work. 
 His first actual production, it must be owned, 
 
 [269]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 was somewhat disappointing. Pauline, a long, 
 monodramatic poem, intended to serve as the 
 introduction to a series of similar epics, "nar- 
 ratives of the lives of typical souls," was written 
 before Browning was twenty-one, and ap- 
 peared anonymously in 1833. It attracted 
 almost no attention, and in spite of certain 
 passages of a wild, vague beauty, contained 
 little of true promise. For its very beauties 
 were but faint echoes from Shelley. The por- 
 trait of the nameless hero is shadowy and ob- 
 scure; that of the lady of the poem is, perhaps, 
 even less perceptible. Browning himself real- 
 ized his lack of "good draughtsmanship and 
 right handling," and in later years acknowl- 
 edged and retained the piece among his collected 
 works with extreme reluctance. 
 
 It is another matter with Browning's next 
 work. Paracelsus, published In 1835, is a 
 creation which any poet might be proud to 
 own. Coming from the hand of a youth of 
 twenty-three, it amazes us, not so much by its 
 
 [270]
 
 The Vitality of Browning 
 
 eloquence and beauty as by its strength of 
 thought, its grasp on hfe, its revealed mastery 
 of poetic conception and execution. The por- 
 trait of Paracelsus, the first in Browning's long 
 gallery of heroes who strove and failed and 
 wrested victory out of defeat, is lifelike and 
 convincing. Such and no otherwise we must 
 believe the real man to have been. And the 
 central theme of the poem reveals with an 
 intense simplicity seldom matched thereafter in 
 Browning's work what was to be the cardinal 
 point of his philosophy of life, — the necessity 
 of human striving, undismayed by weakness, 
 ignorance, and failure, sustained and cheered 
 by love and sympathy, upward toward the 
 ideal of humanity, which is none other than 
 God himself. 
 
 It is a long step backward from Paracelsus 
 to Sordello, which closes the first period of 
 Browning's work. In fact it appeared at one 
 time as if the publication of this unlucky poem 
 had forever closed the gates against Browning's 
 
 [271]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 favor with the English public. The stories 
 that are told of its reception by Carlyle, who 
 declared that his wife had read it through with- 
 out being able to discover whether Sordello 
 were the name of a man, a city, or a book; by 
 Tennyson, who declared that he had under- 
 stood but two lines, the first and last, and that 
 both these were lies; and by Douglas Jerrold, 
 who saw in his utter inability to make sense of 
 the poem a symptom of incipient idiocy, and 
 was only rescued from despair by his wife's 
 frank assertion that it was the poet and not 
 the reader who was mad; — these stories but 
 faintly illustrate the dumb amazement with 
 which the public in general received the book. 
 And even to-day a not wholly dissimilar effect 
 is produced upon the reader who approaches 
 the poem for the first time, equipped though 
 he may be with the whole armory of guides, 
 hand-books, and commentaries which have 
 gathered round this portentous work of Brown- 
 ing's youth. The truth is that Sordello, though 
 
 [272]
 
 The Vitality of Browning 
 
 by no means so obscure or illegible as tra- 
 dition gives out, is a work of extreme difficulty. 
 The style is condensed, abrupt, and allusive to 
 a degree, — " Greek written in shorthand," 
 some one has called it. The main theme, 
 "incidents in the development of a soul," on 
 which Browning meant to lay stress, is too 
 often buried from sight in a multitude of de- 
 tails gathered from his historical studies and 
 his recent Itahan travels. Only an utter lack 
 of the critical instinct could have persuaded 
 Browning into the beUef he is said to have 
 entertained that this unwieldly narrative would 
 be inteUigible, even in its main outhnes, to the 
 average reader. But Browning had at all times 
 of his hfe far more of the creative impulse than 
 of the critical instinct. 
 
 Browning's second period of work overlaps 
 his first, and coincides with the introduction to 
 society and the world of letters which the suc- 
 cess of Paracelsus, hmited as this success was, 
 had won for him. He was at this time a 
 
 [ 273 ]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 tall, dark, handsome youth, something of a 
 dandy in dress, vivacious and friendly in man- 
 ner. He was eager to wring from the world 
 all that it had to offer one fresh from so se- 
 cluded a boyhood, and gladly cultivated the 
 friendships with poets, actors and men of letters 
 whom this new-found world revealed to him. 
 It was at the suggestion of one of these new 
 friends, the great actor, Macready, that 
 Browning in 1836 laid aside his half-finished 
 Sordello and began the first of his series of 
 plays. 
 
 Luckily one need spend little time nowa- 
 days in threshing over the straw of that once 
 hotly debated question whether or not Brown- 
 ing was a dramatist. If by the word drama- 
 tist we mean what the word has meant from 
 the time of ^schylus to the time of Ibsen, a 
 writer of plays for the stage, Browning has 
 small claim to the title. It is quite true that 
 several of his plays were actually performed 
 and that none of these positively failed. As 
 
 [274]
 
 The Vitality of Browning 
 
 to the exact measure of success attained by 
 Sirafjord, A Blot in the 'Scutcheon, or Co- 
 lomhe's Birthday, we may, I think, remain 
 wholly and calmly indifferent. Indeed, it may 
 well be a matter of congratulation to us that 
 their success was not more decided, and that 
 Browning escaped a permanent entanglement 
 with so effete and moribund an institution as 
 the Victorian theater. His failure as a prac- 
 tical playwright, for failure in view of all the 
 circumstances it must be called, threw him 
 back upon his own proper field, that drama 
 "whose stage," to quote the admirable phrase 
 of a French critic, "is the soul itself and whose 
 actors are the passions." 
 
 The dramatic quality in Browning consists, 
 to put it briefly, in his objectivity, in his power 
 to conceive other characters than his own, in 
 his ability to make these characters reveal 
 themselves by thought and word and action. 
 And this second period of Browning's work, 
 in sharp distinction to his first, is pre-eminently 
 
 [275]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 objective. Exclusive of Sordello, a poem be- 
 gun and in part completed before Browning 
 began his work for the stage, this period em- 
 braces his productions from 1837 to 1846. It in- 
 cludes Strafford, and the seven plays and two 
 clusters of dramatic lyrics and romances which 
 go to make up the series of Bells and Pome- 
 granates. In all these it is hard to find a 
 single direct and personal utterance of the 
 poet such as occurs so often in his earliest 
 work. It is as if Browning had felt the inade- 
 quacy of the material on which he had hitherto 
 built up his theory of life, and now flung him- 
 self upon the world to gather new facts, create 
 new characters, invent new tests, and thus 
 equip himself by experimental knowledge of 
 human life for the pronunciation of a riper and 
 juster judgment. And what a wealth of new 
 material the poet brought back from this raid 
 upon objective existence. To this period be- 
 long Pippa and her songs, the superb and 
 sensual Ottima, the gracious charm of Co- 
 
 [276]
 
 Tlie Vitality of Broivning 
 
 lombe, the innocent guiltiness of Mildred and 
 Mertoun, the noble faith of Luria. 
 
 Apart from the creation of character in his 
 dramas Browning discovered in this period the 
 peculiar form of verse in which his most char- 
 acteristic work hereafter was to be framed, 
 the dramatic monologue; and his first employ- 
 ment of this form, My Last Duchess, shows how 
 instantly he realized its possibilities. Humor, 
 a quality hitherto unknown in Browning, shows 
 itself in such work as The Pied Piper, Si- 
 brandus Schafnaburgensis, and The Flight of 
 the Duchess. Passion, too, makes its appear- 
 ance, the passion of friendship in Time's Re- 
 venges, of hatred in the Soliloquy of the Spanish 
 Cloister, of love in Cristina and In a Gondola. 
 
 As one glances back over the period as a 
 whole, one gets somehow the impression of a 
 genial young giant broken loose upon the world 
 and venting his glorious strength, not in 
 destruction, but in reproduction, in imitation, 
 in caricature, even, of the multiform types of 
 
 [277]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 humanity that he encountered there. And as 
 a whole this period of vigorous objective work, 
 so packed with vivid portraiture, so ahve with 
 human passion, represents an immeasurable 
 advance upon the incoherent beauties of Pau- 
 line, the confused entanglement of Sordello, 
 or even the eloquent philosophy of Paracelsus. 
 Yet all this work, fresh, strong, and vital as it 
 appears to us, was thrown away upon a public 
 deaf and blind. The Bells and Pomegranates, 
 published though they were in cheap yellow- 
 paper-covered booklets, found few readers 
 and almost no purchasers. One. only of the 
 numbers achieved the grace of a second edition, 
 A Blot in the 'Scutcheon; and this distinction 
 was due, one fears, not to any popular appre- 
 ciation of its merits, but in part to the com- 
 parative success it had obtained upon the stage, 
 and in part to the notoriety of the bitter quarrel 
 between playwright and actor which accom- 
 panied its production. 
 
 Browning had, however, already gained one 
 [ 278 ]
 
 The Vitality of Browning 
 
 reader whose praise in after years was to out- 
 weigh for liim the phiudits of a Hstening world. 
 EHzabeth Barrett, a far more popular poet in 
 the early forties than Browning, was at the 
 time of their first acquaintance a hopeless in- 
 valid, hopeless at least in her own opinion and 
 in that of those who knew her best. But her 
 spirit triumphed serenely over her bodily suffer- 
 ings. Invahd as she was, her life was very 
 full. She read, wrote, translated, received a few 
 intimates in the little room where she spent day 
 after day upon her sofa, and kept in close touch 
 with all the movements of the time. Brown- 
 ing, " the author of Paracelsus and king of the 
 mystics," as she called him, she had long 
 known in his works, and she had conceived the 
 highest opinion of his present worth and his 
 promise for the future. The noble compli- 
 ment which she paid in her Poems of 1844 to 
 his Bells and Pomegranates brought her a 
 letter from him full of thanks and enthusiastic 
 praise of her work. Her reply opened the way 
 
 [279]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 to an animated and intimate correspondence, 
 and after some months Browning received per- 
 mission to visit her. On a former occasion 
 she had, indeed, dechned to receive him. 
 "There is nothing to see in me," she said, 
 " nothing to hear in me. I am a weed fit for 
 the ground and darkness." But Browning 
 saw in her a flower that needed only the sun- 
 Hght of love to breakout into full bloom, and this 
 love he brought with him. It is characteristic 
 of the impetuous vigor of the man that his first 
 visit to the woman whom he thought, as he 
 confessed afterwards, to be suffering from some 
 incurable disease, was promptly followed by a 
 letter containing an offer of marriage. Miss 
 Barrett w^as greatly shocked, and forbade fur- 
 ther advance upon penalty of forfeiting her 
 friendship. With a lover's craft Browning 
 bowed to her decision, obtained the return of 
 the offending letter, and straightway burned it, — 
 to the deep grief in after days of his wife, who had 
 treasured up every other word he ever wrote her. 
 
 [280]
 
 The Vitality of Browimig 
 
 Their intercourse began again, and before 
 long the poetess, longing with all the strength 
 of her passionate woman's heart for love, found 
 herself unable to put away the cup of life 
 which her poet-lover quietly but with steadfast 
 devotion held to her hps. The story of their 
 courtship has recently been given to the world 
 by the publication of the letters that passed be- 
 tween them in these months. A great hue and 
 cry was raised at the time over the publication 
 of these letters, as if in some way the sanctities 
 of private life had thereby been profaned. But 
 as a matter of fact, there is little or nothing in 
 them except the prose version of what Mrs. 
 Browning herself, with her husband's consent 
 and at his desire, had long since given to the 
 world in the Sonnets from the Portuguese. 
 These sonnets are in every detail autobiograph- 
 ical, and quite apart from their extraordinary 
 worth as pure poetry, they are a contribution 
 to the psychology of love such as has seldom 
 been equaled. They form a perfect sequence 
 
 [281]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 from his first proffer of love and her refusal 
 through a trembling symphony of doubts and 
 fears and hopes to the harmonious closing 
 chords of her final surrender and avowal: 
 
 "I love thee with a love I seemed to lose 
 With my lost saints — I love thee with the breath. 
 Smiles, tears, of all this life — and if God choose, 
 I shall but love thee better after death." 
 
 One obstacle alone stood in the way of their 
 happiness. Mr. Barrett was apparently the 
 perfect type of that hard-hearted father who, 
 fortunately for the world, is so much commoner 
 in fiction than in real life. He was by no means 
 an unkind parent, but his theory of paternal 
 government seems to have been that he should 
 oblige his children in small things and they 
 should obey him in all things. All thought of 
 marriage, in particular, on the part of any of his 
 daughters he resisted with an almost insane 
 violence of speech and gesture. He had no 
 special dislike to Browning, " the pomegranate 
 man," as he called him; but when it was 
 
 [282]
 
 The Vitality of Browning 
 
 hinted to him that his invahd daughter, now 
 visibly gaining in health and strength, might 
 some day be looking for a husband, he replied 
 that she ought to be thinking of another world. 
 Miss Barrett confessed herself physically un- 
 able to endure the outbreak that would inevi- 
 tably follow the announcement of her purpose; 
 and at her desire the marriage was secret. 
 Within a week afterwards she left her home 
 never to return. Her father considered her 
 action as little short of an unnatural crime; he 
 never saw her again, left her letters unopened, 
 and went to his grave unforgiving. 
 
 Apart from the passing shadow which her 
 father's harshness threw upon them, the mar- 
 ried happiness of the Brownings was unbroken. 
 They lived for the most part in Florence, mak- 
 ing occasional excursions to Rome and Paris, 
 and visiting England at intervals in the summer. 
 They saw little of society in the ordinary sense 
 of the word; but Story, Hawthorne, George 
 Sand, Mazzini, Landor, Rossetti, Carlyle, 
 
 [283]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 and Tennyson were among their acquaintances 
 and friends. Mrs. Browning continued to 
 improve in health and strength till it seemed 
 that little short of a miracle had been wrought 
 upon her. All credit for the miracle she 
 at least gave her husband. "He has done 
 everything for me," she wrote a friend; 
 "he loved me for reasons which had helped 
 to weary me of myself, drew me back to 
 life and hope when I had done with both. 
 . . . The intellect is so little in comparison 
 with all the rest, the womanly tenderness, the 
 inexhaustible goodness, the high and noble 
 aspiration of every hour." Browning on his 
 part regarded her as the inspiration of his life. 
 "By gift of her," he says, "God best taught 
 song." She is his "angel," his "moon of 
 poets," his 
 
 "Lyric love, half angel and half bird. 
 And all a wonder and a wild desire." 
 
 It is her face that he expects to see at the last 
 breaking through the clouds of death; it is she 
 
 [284]
 
 The Vitality of Browning 
 
 who in the next world will see and make him 
 see "new depths of the divine." 
 
 Their married life was perhaps too happy to 
 last long upon this earth. Mrs. Browning's 
 eager and sensitive temperament at last wore 
 through its tenement of clay. In 1861, sixteen 
 years after their marriage, she died suddenly 
 in her husband's arms, "smilingly, happily, 
 with a face like a girl's." "There was no 
 lingering nor acute pain nor consciousness of 
 separation," he wrote a friend, " but God took 
 her to himself as you would lift a sleeping 
 child out of a dark, uneasy bed into your arms 
 and the light." 
 
 The influence of these happy years of inti- 
 mate association with a spirit at once so lofty 
 and so tender as his wife's is unmistakable 
 upon the poet's work. Browning's third 
 period begins with the twin-poems of Christ- 
 mas Eve and Easter Day, published some four 
 years after his marriage, and closes in 1868 
 Mdth the late completion of the work which he 
 
 [285]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 had meditated and perhaps roughly sketched 
 out before his wife's death, The Ring and 
 the Book. In a sense this period is a con- 
 tinuation of the second. It is, in the main, a 
 period of objective work, of character creation. 
 And as such it contains Browning's finest work. 
 Nothing that he did before or after can com- 
 pare with the figures of Fra Lippo and Andrea 
 del Sarto, with Bishop Blougram and Mr. 
 Sludge, with the immortal three of The Ring 
 and the Book, Guido, Pompilia, and Giuseppe 
 Caponsacchi. But the period is by no means 
 one of pure objectivity. The poet interprets 
 as well as creates. He creates, indeed, often 
 for the sake of interpretation. The figures of 
 Caliban, for example, and of the dying apostle 
 whom Jesus loved, were drawn not for any 
 mere aesthetic delight in realizing a poetic 
 concept, though this, too, no doubt, enters into 
 the work, but primarily to serve as mouth- 
 pieces of Browning's ideas on religion, what 
 religion must be when it looks up to an all- 
 
 [286]
 
 The Vitality of Browriing 
 
 powerful but loveless God, what religion may 
 be when it centres in a God of love. How 
 immensely Browning's interest in religion in- 
 creased in this period may readily be ascer- 
 tained by comparing the unfinished Saul of 
 the Bells and Pomegranates with the superb 
 conclusion added ten years later in Alen and 
 Women. 
 
 And when one speaks of religion in connec- 
 tion with Browning one means neither more 
 nor less than Christianity. To discuss the ex- 
 act degree of Browning's orthodoxy, to exam- 
 ine whether at all times he accepted implicitly 
 each separate dogma of revealed religion, is 
 of course impossible in such a sketch as this. 
 It is sufficient for us to know that at this 
 central period of his life, this period of his 
 greatest and most enduring creative work, he 
 held fast to the central doctrine of Christianity, 
 the revelation of God's love for man in the God- 
 man, Christ. This doctrine is the theme of 
 poem after poem, of Saul, of Karshish, of A 
 
 [287]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 Death in the Desert; rejected, Browning seems 
 to teach, it leaves human hfe as sadly insoluble 
 a puzzle as it was to Cleon; accepted it trans- 
 figures human life with the glory which hung 
 about the death-bed of St. John. And if it be 
 objected that such poems are dramatic in 
 nature, that the words of David or Karshish 
 do not express the beliefs of Browning, the 
 simple answer is that no one but a believer in 
 this doctrine would, or could, have treated it 
 so often with such intense interest and with 
 such evident sympathy. And if further an- 
 swer were needed, the first poem of this period, 
 Christmas Eve, proclaims Browning's personal 
 belief in the divinity of Christ in the frankest 
 fashion, and rejects absolutely the modern 
 notion that the "secret of Jesus" consists in 
 the "sweet reasonableness" of his moral 
 teachings. It is only a biased, and, to my 
 mind, a wilfully blinded criticism which can 
 see in the speaker of this poem any other than 
 the poet himself. 
 
 [288]
 
 The Vitality of Broioning 
 
 Indeed, this reappearance of the personal, 
 subjective note might well be called the ele- 
 ment which distinguishes the work of Brown- 
 ing's third period from that which immediately 
 preceded it. It is not on the topic of religion 
 alone that he speaks out. On art, and its 
 significance in human life, on love, and its 
 power in the releasing of the soul, his utterance 
 is quite as direct. Such personal speech as 
 appears in Old Pictures in Florence, and One 
 Word More; such slightly veiled expression of 
 his thought as appears in Aht Vogler, and 
 Evelyn Hope, would have been impossible to 
 his mood of a few years earlier. 
 
 It is hardly to be doubted, I think, that it 
 was the influence of his wife, whose own genius 
 was distinctly lyrical and subjective, that led 
 to this freer expression of his own " hopes and 
 fears, beliefs and disbelieving." Early in 
 their correspondence Miss Barrett had urged 
 Browning to speak out in his own person ; and 
 he had replied that whereas he had hitherto 
 
 [289]
 
 Studies of a BooMover 
 
 only made men and women utter themselves 
 on his behalf, he would now try to declare di- 
 rectly what was in him; "only," he added, "I 
 don't think I shall let you hear, after all, the 
 savage things about Popes and imaginative 
 religions that I must say." That these savage 
 things were never said, may well be another 
 tribute to Mrs. Browning's influence. 
 
 Browning had nearly thirty years of life 
 before him when his wife died, and after the 
 first convulsive agony of grief he set himself to 
 live them resolutely and well. For a time, 
 indeed, it was a mere chance whether he should 
 go away to some quiet retreat and be seen no 
 more. But Browning's vitality was too red- 
 blooded for any such cloistered seclusion, and 
 two years after his wife's death he deliberately 
 entered society again, pronouncing the retired 
 life he had led since her death morbid and 
 unworthy. From this time on as long as his 
 bodily strength permitted, Browning was, in 
 the best sense, a man of the world. He ac- 
 
 [290]
 
 The Vitality of Browning 
 
 cepted every suitable invitation, he was seen 
 at every public function. He appeared at first 
 nights in the theater, never missed a Patti or 
 Joachim concert, a private view or annual ex- 
 hibition. The magnificent success of The 
 Ring and the Book finally established his fame 
 as a poet, and he became a lion of the salons in 
 London and Paris. Frankly enough he lived 
 and liked life's way. But though in the world 
 he was not of it. Amid a materialistic, pleas- 
 ure-loving, and skeptical society, he remained 
 always the same earnest thinker and bold 
 speaker, a champion of the ideal, an apologist 
 for the eternal verities. He seemed to his 
 friends to have the secret of perennial youth, 
 for he went unwearied through the arduous 
 London seasons, and in holidays on the Breton 
 coast or among the Alps swam, rode, and 
 walked with all the zest and vigor of a youth. 
 Something of this joyous energy of youth sur- 
 viving in old age shows itself in his latest 
 poems. To the last there remains the same 
 
 [291]
 
 Studies of a BooMover 
 
 keen interest in life, the same desire to gather 
 objective facts and interpret them. The same 
 quick sensitiveness to beauty that marks Pau- 
 line appears in the Parleyings, and the pas- 
 sionate love-poems scattered through Ferish- 
 tah's Fancies and Asolando were written by a 
 white-haired man of almost eighty. 
 
 Browning by no means neglected his proper 
 calHng during this busy period of his life in 
 society. He wrote vigorously and without in- 
 terruption. Indeed, one may venture the asser- 
 tion that he wrote too much. Nine volumes in 
 eight years, which was his record between 1871 
 and 1878, must be a strain upon the strongest 
 powers. One has the feeling in looking over 
 the work of these years that Browning had 
 perfected his method, wrote easily and swiftly, 
 and cared little what he wrote so long as he 
 was occupied. If this were so, it is not sur- 
 prising that the quality of his work suffered as 
 the quantity increased. There is an excess of 
 intellectual subtlety, of psychological analysis, 
 
 [292]
 
 TJie Vitality of Browning 
 
 a deficiency of his former directness of speech and 
 positive creative power. He neglected almost 
 entirely his old form of the short dramatic 
 monologue, and wrote long argumentative or 
 narrative poems such as Fifine at the Fair or 
 Red Cotton Night-cap Country. One may read 
 these poems with interest, but hardly with real 
 pleasure, and the temptation to return to them 
 is assuredly not very strong. It is fortunate 
 for Browning's fame that he passed out of this 
 period toward the close of the seventies, and 
 entered upon a St. Martin's summer of pro- 
 duction which includes some of his most de- 
 lightful work. It may be that the shock 
 inflicted upon him in 1877 by the sudden death 
 of a dear friend led to his abandoning the 
 practise of intellectual casuistry. In the dark 
 hours that followed he probed the inmost re- 
 cesses of his soul to obtain a truthful answer 
 to the question whether this earthly life were 
 all that man could hope for. And having 
 obtained his answer, he ceased to play with the 
 
 [ 293 ]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 false, and again devoted himself to the study 
 of the true. It may be, too, that the decline 
 of his bodily powers, imperceptible, indeed, even 
 to himself, but no less real, indisposed him to 
 the effort of long and sustained composition. 
 The fact remains that the quantity of verse 
 pubhshed by Browning during the last ten 
 years of his life is less than half of what he 
 wrote in the preceding decade. And this 
 verse consists for the most part of brief dra- 
 matic narratives marked by a strong and im- 
 pressive realism, of lyrics instinct with strange 
 and poignant charm, and, in one volume, at 
 least, of parables in which Browning drapes 
 his philosophy of life with the cloak of Oriental 
 wisdom in the mouth of the dervish-teacher, 
 Ferishtah. 
 
 The last months of Browning's life were 
 spent in Italy, at Asolo, the httle hill-town he 
 had fallen in love with fifty years before, and 
 in his son's Venetian palace. Old as he was 
 he still preserved his habit of vigorous action, 
 
 [ 294 ]
 
 The Vitality of Browning 
 
 and his enjoyment of the charm of Italian hfe 
 and scenery. He walked among the moun- 
 tains or along the Lido, explored the obscurest 
 calli of Venice, and feasted his eyes on the 
 gorgeous pageants of Italian sunrise and sun- 
 set. "Every morning at six I see the sun 
 rise," he wrote not long before his death. 
 "My bedroom window commands a perfect 
 view: the still gray lagune, the few sea-gulls 
 flying, the islet of St. Giorgio in deep shadow, 
 and the clouds in a long purple rack, behind 
 which a sort of spirit of rose burns up till 
 presently all the rims are on fire with gold, 
 and last of all the orb sends before it a long 
 column of its own essence apparently: so my 
 day begins." 
 
 But even while he enjoyed the present 
 and looked forward with happy anticipation 
 to future work, his strength was waning. 
 A bronchial attack revealed some hitherto 
 unsuspected weakness of the heart's action, 
 and on December 12, 1889, the very day 
 
 [295]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 on which his last volume of verse was pub- 
 lished, Browning passed quietly and painlessly 
 out of life. He was honored with a magnifi- 
 cent public funeral in Venice, and his body was 
 conveyed to England to its final resting-place 
 in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey, 
 close by the tomb of Chaucer, and near the 
 spot where his friend and noble rival in the 
 race for fame, Alfred Tennyson, was laid away 
 some three years later. The solemn splendor 
 of his burial was a fitting tribute from the 
 nation that had so long denied and so late 
 accepted his claims as a poet and teacher. 
 
 It is as a poet, I think, rather than as a 
 teacher, that Browning will live. Or, perhaps, 
 one should rather say that he will live as a 
 teacher because he was, first of all, a poet. 
 Part of his work, a large part, perhaps, is 
 destined to the oblivion of the collected edition 
 and the upper shelf — no unusual fate for 
 poets who have written so much as he. What 
 will live is that portion in which, forgetting for 
 
 [296]
 
 The Vitality of Browning 
 
 the time his desire to teach, he has set himself 
 to create character and to express emotion. 
 It is as certain as any Hterary prophecy can 
 be that Fra Lippo and Abt Vogler will be read 
 long years after La Sasiaz and the Parleyings 
 are forgotten. 
 
 The elements which give to Browning's 
 poetry this assured vitality may, I think, be 
 briefly summed up under three heads. There 
 is, first, his extraordinary grasp upon reality. 
 Browning is not a poet of dreams and vague 
 desires and empty aspirations. He deals by 
 preference with the common aspects of earth 
 and the common passions of mankind. He 
 has nothing of Shelley's "desire of the moth 
 for the star " ; on the contrary he shares to the 
 full the great movement toward realism in 
 literature which succeeded the romantic period 
 of the early nineteenth century. From this 
 reaUsm springs not only his power of vivid 
 description, but his humor, and his fondness 
 for the grotesque. He saw things as they were 
 
 [297]
 
 Studies of a Booklover 
 
 and loved them so. And it is this quahty, I 
 think, which gives his work body and fulness. 
 Closely connected with this quality is another 
 which we may call his humanity, his wide sym- 
 pathy with all forms of human life: 
 
 "Man's thoughts, and loves, and hates, 
 Earth is my vineyard, these grew there." 
 
 It is by virtue of this sympathy that he was 
 able to enter into souls so different from his 
 own and from one another as Guido, Giuseppe, 
 Cleon, and Johannes Agricola. And having 
 entered into them and understood them, he 
 was able to reveal them to the world. Brown- 
 ing's greatest gift to literature consists in the 
 men and women that he has created. No 
 English poet since Shakespeare has possessed 
 this creative power to Browning's degree, and 
 it is just this power which constitutes his essen- 
 tial claim to the title of poet, or maker, and 
 which gives his work its warmth and color. 
 
 Finally, Browning's vitality is assured by his 
 buoyant and undaunted optimism. In its strug- 
 
 [298]
 
 The Vitality of Browning 
 
 glc upward against the powers of evil mankind 
 cannot afford to reject the aid of so strong and 
 fearless a fighter as Browning proved himself. 
 A poet who can hope in the Paris morgue is an 
 ally not to be despised. It makes little differ- 
 ence in the last result whether this optimism 
 was a matter of temperament or based upon 
 rational principles. As a matter of fact both 
 temperament and reason combined in Brown- 
 ing's optimism. His vigorous and happy na- 
 ture forbade him to succumb to the evil that he 
 saw and plainly recognized around him. His 
 keen and powerful intellect compelled him to 
 find assurance for his instinctive hope of victory. 
 And he found this assurance in the existence, 
 amid all the world's evil and misery, of love. 
 
 "There is no good in life but love, but love! 
 What else looks good is some shade flung from 
 
 love. 
 Love gilds it, gives it worth," 
 
 says the hero of In a Balcony, echoing a thought 
 that recurs repeatedly in BroAvning's work. 
 
 [299]
 
 Studies of a BooJdover 
 
 And since love is the best thing that the mind 
 can apprehend in the world, it follows that 
 God — and Browning was as sure of God as 
 he was of the world — must be a God of love. 
 And from the idea of a God of love springs the 
 faith in immortality without which human hfe 
 becomes a miserable mystery. And the faith 
 in immortality once accepted transforms hu- 
 man life into a period of probation in which 
 pain and sorrow and evil itself may be cheer- 
 fully accepted as necessary instruments in the 
 shaping of the soul for its proper life hereafter. 
 The belief in immortality was not so much a 
 religious dogma as a habit of mind with 
 Browning; it seemed impossible for him to 
 view the world except, as it were, sub specie 
 oelernitatis. This belief inspired much of his 
 loftiest and strongest verse; and the opti- 
 mism which sprang from this belief gives his 
 work as a whole its strengthening and elevating 
 power. 
 
 The epilogue to Asolando contains the por- 
 [300]
 
 The Vitality of Browning 
 
 trait that Browning drew of himself as he 
 looked back over the crowded years of his long 
 life. Reading the proof of this last poem one 
 night shortly before his death, he hesitated and 
 said to the friends who were sitting by him: 
 " It almost looks like bragging to say this, and 
 as if I ought to cancel it; but it's the simple 
 truth; and as it's true, it shall stand." It 
 might well stand as his epitaph, and it will 
 serve fitly as a conclusion to this essay. Brown- 
 ing's work, as I have tried to show, shares 
 something of the poet's vitality. And Brown- 
 ing was, and knew himself to be, 
 
 " One who never turned his back but marched 
 breast forward. 
 Never doubted clouds would break. 
 Never dreamed, though right were worsted, 
 
 wrong would triumph, 
 Held we fall to rise, are baflBed to fight better, 
 Sleep to wake." 
 
 [301]
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
 
 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below 
 
 OCT 2 9 1943 
 JAM a i 
 JUN 1 3 195S 
 
 JAN 3 1961 
 
 Form L-fi 
 S5m-2, '43(5205) 
 
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 UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA 
 
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 LOS AxNGELES 
 TJRRAPY
 
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