j 1 , IMPRESSIONS OF feMP THEOPHRASTUS ESSAYS AND POEMS By GEORGE |LIOX Author of "ADAM BEDE," " DANIEL DERONDA," <* ^ "FELIX HOLT," ROMOLA," "SILAS MARKER," "MILL ON THE FLOSS," etc., etc. Jt Jt # A. L. BURT, PUBLISHER, 52-58 DUANE STREET, NEW YORK *.**** IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH CONTENTS. PAGE I. LOOKING INWARD, 7 II. LOOKING BACKWARD, ....... 18 III. How WE ENCOURAGE RESEARCH, . . . . .81 IV. A MAN SURPRISED AT His ORIGINALITY, . . .44 V. A Too DEFERENTIAL MAN, 62 VI. ONLY TEMPER, 69 VII. A POLITICAL MOLECULE, ....... 66 VIII. THE WATCH-DOG OF KNOWLEDGE, 70 IX. A HALF-BREED, . . . . . . . .77 X. DEBASING- THE MORAL CURRENCY, . . . . .84 XI. THE WASP CREDITED WITH THE HONEYCOMB, . . .90 XII. "So YOUNG," .101 XIII. How WE COME TO GIVE OURSELVES FALSE TESTIMO- NIALS, AND BELIEVE IN THEM, ..... 106 XIV. THE Too READY WRITER, 114 XV. DISEASES OF SMALL AUTHORSHIP, .... XVI. MORAL SWINDLERS, ....... XVII. SHADOWS OF THE COMING RACE, .... XVIII. THE MODERN HEP I HEP ! HBP ! LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. THEOPHKASTUS SUCH. Griff House (where George Eliot passed her girlhood daya).Frontis. PAGE Farm Offices, Griff (surroundings of Geo. Eliot's girlhood home) 139 Theophrastus Such. LOOKING INWARD. IT is my habit to give an account to myself of the charac- ters I meet with : can I give any true account of my own? I am a bachelor, without domestic distractions of any sort, and have all my life been an attentive companion to myself, flat- tering my nature agreeably on plausible occasions, reviling it rather bitterly when it mortified me, and in general remem- bering its doings and sufferings with a tenacity which is too apt to raise surprise if not disgust at the careless inaccuracy of my acquaintances, who impute to me opinions I never held, express their desire to convert me to my favorite ideas, forget whether I have ever been to the East, and are capable of being three several times astonished at my never having told them before of my accident in the Alps, causing me the ner- vous shock which has ever since notably diminished my di- gestive powers. Surely I ought to know myself better than these indifferent outsiders can know me; nay, better even than my intimate friends, to whom I have never breathed those items of my inward experience which have chiefly shaped my life. Yet I have often been forced into the reflection that even the acquaintances who are as forgetful of my biography and tenets as they would be if I were a dead philosopher are probably aware of certain points in me which may not be in- cluded in my most active suspicion. We sing an exquisite passage out of tune ?nd innocently repeat it for the greater pleasure of our hearers. Who can be aware of what his for- 8 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. eign accent is in the ears of a native? And how can a man be conscious of that dull perception which causes him to mistake altogether what will make him agreeable to a particular wom- an, and to persevere eagerly in a behavior which she is pri- vately recording against him? I have had some confidences from my female friends as to their opinion of other men whom I have observed trying to make themselves amiable, and it has occurred to me that, though I can hardly be so blundering as Lippus and the rest of those mistaken candidates for favor whom I have seen ruining their chance by a too elaborate personal canvass, I must still come under the com- mon fatality of mankind and share the liability to be absurd without knowing that I am absurd. It is in the nature of foolish reasoning to seem good to the foolish reasoner. Hence with all possible study of myself, with all possible effort to escape from the pitiable illusion which makes men laugh, shriek, or curl the lip at Folly's likeness, in total unconscious- ness that it resembles themselves, I am obliged to recognize that while there are secrets in me unguessed by others, these others have certain items of knowledge about the extent of my powers and the figure I make with them, which in turn are secrets uuguessed by me. When I was a lad I danced a horn- pipe with arduous scrupulosity, and while suffering pangs of pallid shyness was yet proud of my superiority as a dancing pupil, imagining for myself a high place in the estimation of beholders ; but I can now picture the amusement they had in the incongruity of my solemn face and ridiculous legs. What sort of hornpipe am I dancing now? Thus if I laugh at you, O fellow-men ! if I trace with curi- ous interest your labyrinthine self-delusions, note the incon- sistencies in your zealous adhesions, and smile at your helpless endeavors in a rashly chosen part, it is not that I feel myself aloof from you : the more intimately I seem to discern your weaknesses, the stronger to me is the proof that I share them. How otherwise could I get the discernment? for even what we are averse to, what we vow not to entertain, must have shaped or shadowed itself within us as a possibility before we can think of exorcising it. No man can know his brother simply as a spectator. Dear blunderers, I am one of you. I LOOKING INWARD. wince at the fact, but I am not ignorant of it, that I too am laughable on unsuspected occasions ; nay, in the very tempest and whirlwind of my anger, I include myself under iny own indignation. If the human race has a bad reputation, I per- ceive that I cannot escape being compromised. And thus while I carry in myself the key to other men's experience, it is only by observing others that I can so far correct my self- ignorance as to arrive at the certainty that I am liable to commit myself unawares and to manifest some incompetency which I know no more of than the blind man knows of his im- age in the glass. Is it then possible to describe one's self at once faithfully and fully ? In all autobiography there is, nay, ought to be, an incompleteness which may have the effect of falsity. We are each of us bound to reticence by the piety we owe to those who have been nearest to us and have had a mingled influence over our lives; by the fellow-feeling which should restrain us from turning our volunteered and picked confessions into an act of accusation against others, who have no chance of vindi- cating themselves ; and most of all by that reverence for the higher efforts of our common nature which commands us to bury its lowest fatalities, its invincible remnants of the brute, its most agonizing struggles with temptation, in unbroken silence. But the incompleteness which comes of self-igno- rance may be compensated by self-betrayal. A man who is affected to tears in dwelling on the generosity of his own sen- timents makes me aware of several things not included under those terms. Who has sinned more against those three dute- ous reticences than Jean Jacques? Yet half our impressions of his character come not from what he means to convey, but from what he unconsciously enables us to discern. This naive veracity of self-presentation is attainable by the slenderest talent on the most trivial occasions. The least lucid and impressive of orators may be perfectly successful in showing us the weak points of his grammar. Hence I too may be so far like Jean Jacques as to communicate more than I am aware of. I am not indeed writing an autobiography, or pretending to give an unreserved description of myself, but only offering some slight confessions in an apologetic light, to 10 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. indicate that if in rny absence you dealt as freely with my un- conscious weaknesses as I have dealt with the unconscious weaknesses of others, I should not feel myself warranted by common-sense in regarding your freedom of observation as an exceptional case of evil-speaking; or as malignant interpreta- tion of a character which really offers no handle to just ob- jection ; or even as an unfair use for your amusement of dis- advantages which, since they are mine, should be regarded with more than ordinary tenderness. Let me at least try to feel myself in the ranks with my fellow-men. It is true that I would rather not hear either your well-founded ridicule or your judicious strictures. Though not averse to finding fault with myself, and conscious of deserving lashes, I like to keep the scourge in my own discriminating hand. I never felt my- self sufficiently meritorious to like being hated as a proof of my superiority, or so thirsty for improvement as to desire that all my acquaintances should give me their candid opinion of me. I really do not want to learn from my enemies : I prefer having none to learn from. Instead of being glad when men use me despitefully, I wish they Avould behave better and find a more amiable occupation for their intervals of business. In brief, after a close intimacy with myself for a longer period than I choose to mention, I find within me a permanent long- ing for approbation, sympathy, and love. Yet I am a bachelor, and the person I love best has never loved me, or known that I loved her. Though continually in society, and caring about the joys and sorrows of my neigh- bors, I feel myself, so far as my personal lot is concerned, uncared for and alone. " Your own fault, my dear fellow ! " said Minutius Felix, one day that I had incautiously men- tioned this uninteresting fact. And he was right in senses other than he intended. Why should I expect to be admired, and have my company doted on? I have done no services to my country beyond those of every peaceable orderly citizen ; and as to intellectual contribution, my only published work was a failure, so that I am spoken of to inquiring beholders as " the author of a book you have probably not seen. " (The work was a humorous romance, unique in its kind, and I am told is much tasted in a Cherokee translation, where the jokes LOOKING INWARD. 11 are rendered with all the serious eloquence characteristic of the Red races.) This sort of distinction, as a writer nobody is likely to have read, can hardly counteract an indistinctness in my articulation, which the best-intentioned loudness will not remedy. Then, in some quarters my awkward feet are against me, the length of my upper lip, and an inveterate way I have of walking with my head foremost and my chin project- ing. One can become only too well aware of such things by looking in the glass, or in that other mirror held up to nature in the frank opinions of street-boys, or of our Free People travelling by excursion train ; and no doubt they account for the half-suppressed smile which I have observed on some fair faces when I have first been presented before them. This di- rect perceptive judgment is not to be argued against. But I am tempted to remonstrate when the physical points I have mentioned are apparently taken to warrant unfavorable infer- ences concerning my mental quickness. With all the increas- ing uncertainty which modern progress has thrown over the relations of mind and body, it seems tolerably clear that wit cannot be seated in the upper lip, and that the balance of the haunches in walking has nothing to do with the subtle dis- crimination of ideas. Yet strangers evidently do not expect me to make a clever observation, and my good things are as unnoticed as if they were anonymous pictures. I have in- deed had the mixed satisfaction of finding that when they were appropriated by some one else they were found remark- able and even brilliant. It is to be borne in mind that I am not rich, have neither stud nor cellar, and no very high con- nections such as give to a look of imbecility a certain prestige of inheritance through a titled line ; just as " the Austrian lip " confers a grandeur of historical associations on a kind of fea- ture which might make us reject an advertising footman. I have now and then done harm to a good cause by speaking for it in public", and have discovered too late that my attitude on the occasion would more suitably have been that of negative beneficence. Is it really to the advantage of an opinion that I should be known to hold it? And as to the force of my ar- guments, that is a secondary consideration with audiences who have given a new scope to the ex pede Herculem principle, and 12 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. from awkward feet infer awkward fallacies. Once, when zeal lifted me on my legs, I distinctly heard an enlightened artisan remark, " Here's a rum cut! " and doubtless he reasoned in the same way as the elegant Glycera when she politely puts on an air of listening to me, but elevates her eyebrows and chills her glance in sign of predetermined neutrality: both have their reasons for judging the quality of my speech be- forehand. This sort of reception to a man of affectionate disposition, who has also the innocent vanity of desiring to be agreeable, has naturally a depressing if not embittering tendency ; and in early life I began to seek for some consoling point of view, some warrantable method of softening the hard peas I had to walk on, some comfortable fanaticism which might supply the needed self-satisfaction. At one time I dwelt much on the idea of compensation ; trying to believe that I was all the wiser for my bruised vanity, that I had the higher place in the true spiritual scale, and even that a day might come when some visible triumph would place me in the French heaven of having the laughers on my side. But I presently perceived that this was a very odious sort of self -cajolery. Was it in the least true that I was wiser than several of my friends who made an excellent figure, and were perhaps praised a little beyond their merit? Is the ugly unready man in the corner, outside the current of conversation, really likely to have a fairer view of things than the agreeable talker, whose success strikes the unsuccessful as a repulsive example of for- wardness and conceit? And as to compensation in future years, would the fact that I myself got it reconcile me to an order of things in which I could see a multitude with as bad a share as mine, who, instead of getting their corresponding compensation, were getting beyond the reach of it in old age? What could be more contemptible than the mood of mind which makes a man measure the justice of divine or human law by the agreeableness of his own shadow and the ample satisfaction of his own desires? I dropped a form of consolation which seemed to be encour- aging me in the persuasion that my discontent was the chief evil in the world, and my benefit the soul of good in that evil. LOOKING INWARD. May there not be at least a partial release from the impris- oning verdict that a man's philosophy is the formula of his personality? In certain branches of science we can ascertain our personal equation, the measure of difference between our own judgments and an average standard: may there not be some corresponding correction of our personal partialities in moral theorizing? If a squint or other ocular defect disturbs my vision, I can get instructed in the fact, be made aware that my condition is abnormal, and either through spectacles or diligent imagination I can learn the average appearance of things: is there no remedy or corrective for that inward squint which consists in a dissatisfied egoism or other want of mental balance? In my conscience I saw that the bias of per- sonal discontent was just as misleading and odious as the bias of self-satisfaction. Whether we look through the rose-colored glass or the indigo, we are equally far from the hues which the healthy human eye beholds in heaven above and earth below. I began to dread ways of consoling which were really a flattering of native illusions, a feeding-up into monstros- ity of an inward growth already disproportionate ; to get an especial scorn for that scorn of mankind which is a transmuted disappointment of preposterous claims ; to watch with peculiar alarm lest what I called my philosophic estimate of the human lot in general should be a mere prose lyric expressing my own pain and consequent bad temper. The standing-ground worth striving after seemed to be some Delectable Mountain, whence I could see things in proportions as little as possible determined by that self-partiality which certainly plays a necessary part in our bodily sustenance, but has a starving effect on the mind. Thus I finally gave up any attempt to make out that I pre- ferred cutting a bad figure, and that I liked to be despised, because in this way I was getting more virtuous than my suc- cessful rivals; and I have long looked with suspicion on all views which are recommended as peculiarly consolatory to wounded vanity or other personal disappointment. The con- solations of egoism are simply a change of attitude or a resort to a new kind of diet which soothes and fattens it. Fed in this way it is apt to become a monstrous spiritual pride, or a 14 ~THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. chuckling satisfaction that the final balance will not be against us, but against those who now eclipse us. Examining the world in order to find consolation is very much like looking carefully over the pages of a great book in order to find our own name, if not in the text, at least in a laudatory note : whether we find what we want or not, our preoccupation has hindered us from a true knowledge of the contents. But an attention fixed on the main theme or various matter of the book would deliver us from the slavish subjection to our own self-importance. And I had the mighty volume of the world before me. Nay, I had the struggling action of a myriad lives around me, each single life as dear to itself as mine to me. Was there no escape here from this stupidity of a mur- muring self -occupation ? Clearly enough, if anything hindered my thought from rising to the force of passionately interested contemplation, or my poor pent-up pond of sensitiveness from widening into a beneficent river of sympathy, it was my own dulness; and though I could not make myself the reverse of shallow all at once, I had at least learned where I had better turn my attention. Something came of this alteration in my point of view, though I admit that the result is of no striking kind. It is unnecessary for me to utter modest denials, since none have assured me that I have a vast intellectual scope, or what is more surprising, considering I have done so little that I might, if I chose, surpass any distinguished man whom they wish to depreciate. I have not attained any lofty peak of magnanimity, nor would I trust beforehand in my capability of meeting a severe demand for moral heroism. But that I have at least succeeded in establishing a habit of mind which keeps watch against my self-partiality and promotes a fair consideration of what touches the feelings or the fortunes of my neighbors seems to be proved by the ready confidence with which men and women appeal to my interest in their ex- perience. It is gratifying to one who would above all things avoid the insanity of fancying himself a more momentous or touching object than he really is to find that nobody expects from him the least sign of such mental aberration, and that he is evidently held capable of listening to all kinds of per- LOOKING INWARD 15 sonal outpouring without the least disposition to become com- municative in the same way. This confirmation of the hope that my bearing is not that of the self-flattering lunatic is given me in ample measure. My acquaintances tell me unre- servedly of their triumphs and their piques ; explain their pur- poses at length, and reassure me with cheerfulness as to their chances of success ; insist on their theories and accept me as a dummy with whom they rehearse their side of future dis- cussions; unwind their coiled-up griefs in relation to their husbands, or recite to me examples of feminine incomprehen- sibleness as typified in their wive" , mention frequently the fair applause which their merits have wrung from some per- sons, and the attacks to which certain oblique motives have stimulated others. At the time when I was less free from superstition about my own power of charming, I occasionally, in the glow of sympathy which embraced me and .my confid- ing friend on the subject of his satisfaction or resentment, was urged to hint at a corresponding experience in my own case ; but the signs of a rapidly lowering pulse and spreading nervous depression in my previously vivacious interlocutor warned me that I was acting on that dangerous misreading, "Do as you are done by." Recalling the true version of the golden rule, I could not wish that others should lower my spirits as I was lowering my friend's. After several times obtaining the same result from a like experiment in which all the circumstances were varied except my own personality, I took it as an established inference that these fitful signs of a lingering belief in my own importance were generally felt to be abnormal, and were something short of that sanity which I aimed to secure. Clearness on this point is not without its gratifications, as I have said. While my desire to explain myself in private ears has been quelled, the habit of getting interested in the experience of others has been continually gathering strength, and I am really at the point of finding that this world would be worth living in without any lot of one's own. Is it not possible for me to enjoy the scenery of the earth without saying to myself, I have a cabbage-garden in it? But this sounds like the lunacy of fancying one's self everybody else and being unable to play one's own part de- 16 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. cently another form of the disloyal attempt to be independ- ent of the common lot, and to live without a sharing of pain. Perhaps I have made self -betrayals enough already to show that I have not arrived at that non-human independence. My conversational reticences about myself turn into garrulousness on paper as the sea-lion plunges and swims the more ener- getically because his limbs are of a sort to make him sham- bling on land. The act of writing, in spite of past experience, brings with it the vague, delightful illusion of an audience nearer to my idiom than the Cherokees, and more numerous than the visionary One for whom many authors have declared themselves willing to go through the pleasing punishment of publication. My illusion is of a more liberal kind, and I im- agine a far-off, hazy, multitudinous assemblage, as in a pic- ture of Paradise, making an approving chorus to the sentences and paragraphs of which I myself particularly enjoy the writ- ing. The haze is a necessary condition. If any physiognomy becomes distinct in the foreground, it is fatal. The counte- nance is sure to be one bent on discountenancing my innocent intentions: it is pale-eyed, incapable of being am used -when I am amused or indignant at what makes me indignant j it stares at my presumption, pities my ignorance, or is mani- festly preparing to expose the various instances in which I un- consciously disgrace myself. I shudder at this too corporeal auditor, and turn toward another point of the compass where the haze is unbroken. Why should I not indulge this remain- ing illusion, since I do not take my approving choral paradise as a warrant for setting the press to work again and making some thousand sheets of superior paper unsalable? I leave my manuscripts to a judgment outside my imagination, but I will not ask to hear it, or request my friend to pronounce, be- fore I have been buried decently, what he really thinks of my parts, and to state candidly whether my papers would be most usefully applied in lighting the cheerful domestic fire. It is too probable that he will be exasperated at the trouble I have given him of reading them ; but the consequent clearness and vivacity with which he could demonstrate to me that the fault of my manuscripts, as of my one published work, is simply flatness, and not that surpassing subtilty which is the prefer- LOOKING INWARD. IT able groun of popular neglect this verdict, however instruct- ively expressed, is a portion of earthly discipline of which I will not beseech my friend to be the instrument. Other per- sons, I am aware, have not the same cowardly shrinking from a candid opinion of their performances, and are even impor- tunately eager for it; but I have convinced myself in numer- ous cases that such exposers of their own back to the smiter were of too hopeful a disposition to believe in the scourge, and really trusted in a pleasant anointing, an outpouring of balm without any previous wounds. I am of a less trusting dispo- sition, and will only ask my friend to use his judgment in in- suring me against posthumous mistake. Thus I make myself a charter to write, and keep the pleas- ing, inspiring illusion of being listened to, though I may some- times write about myself. What I have already said on this too familiar theme has been meant only as a preface, to show that in noting the weaknesses of my acquaintances I am con- scious of my fellowship with them. That a gratified sense of superiority is at the root of barbarous laughter may be at least half the truth. But there is a loving laughter in which the only recognized superiority is that of the ideal self, the God within, holding the mirror and the scourge for our own petti- ness as well as our neighbors'. 2 n. LOOKING BACKWAED. MOST of us who have had decent parents would shrink from wishing that our father and mother had been somebody else whom we never knew; yet it is held no impiety, rather a graceful mark of instruction, for a man to wail that he was not the son of another age and another nation, of which also he knows nothing except through the easy process of an im- perfect imagination and a flattering fancy. But the period thus looked back on with a purely admiring regret, as perfect enough to suit a superior mind, is always a long way off; the desirable contemporaries are hardly nearer than Leonardo da Vinci, most likely they are the fellow-citi- zens of Pericles, or, best of all, of the JEolic lyrists whose sparse remains suggest a comfortable contrast with our re- dundance. No impassioned personage wishes he had been born in the age of Pitt, that his ardent youth might have eaten the dearest bread, dressed itself with the longest coat- tails and the shortest waist, or heard the loudest grumbling at the heaviest war-taxes ; and it would be really something original in polished verse if one of our young writers de- clared he would gladly be turned eighty-five that he might have known the joy and pride of being an Englishman when there were fewer reforms and plenty of highwaymen, fewer discoveries and more faces pitted with the small-pox, when laws were made to keep up the price of corn, and the trouble- some Irish were more miserable. Three-quarters of a century ago is not a distance that lends much enchantment to the view. We are familiar with the average men of that period, and are still consciously encumbered with its bad contrivances and mistaken acts. The lords and gentlemen painted by young Lawrence talked and wrote their nonsense in a tongue we thor- LOOKING BACKWARD. 19 oughly understand ; hence their times are not much flattered, not much glorified by the yearnings of that modern sect of Flagellants who make a ritual of lashing not themselves, but all their neighbors. To me, however, that paternal time, the time of my father's youth, never seemed prosaic, for it came to my imagination first through his memories, which made a wondrous perspective to my little daily world of dis- covery. And for my part I can call no age absolutely unpo- etic : how should it be so, since there are always children to whom the acorns and the swallow's eggs are a wonder, always those human passions and fatalities through which Garrick as Hamlet in bobwig and knee-breeches moved his audience more than some have since done in velvet tunic and plume? But every age since the golden may be made more or less prosaic by minds that attend only to its vulgar and sordid elements, of which there was always an abundance even in Greece and Italy, the favorite realms of the retrospective optimists. To be quite fair toward the ages, a little ugliness as well as beauty must be allowed to each of them, a little implicit poetry even to those which echoed loudest with servile, pom- pous, and trivial prose. Such impartiality is not in vogue at present. If we ac- knowledge our obligation to the ancients, it is hardly to be done without some flouting of our contemporaries, who with all their faults must be allowed the merit of keeping the world habitable for the refined eulogists of the blameless past. One wonders whether the remarkable originators who first had the notion of digging wells, or of churning for butter, and who were certainly very useful to their own time as well as ours, were left quite free from invidious comparison with predeces- sors who let the water and the milk alone, or whether some rhetorical nomad, as he stretched himself on the grass with a good appetite for contemporary butter, became loud on the virtue of ancestors who were uncorrupted by the produce of the cow ; nay, whether in a high flight of imaginative self-sac- rifice (after swallowing the butter) he even wished himself earlier born and already eaten for the sustenance of a genera- tion more nai've than his own. I have often had the fool's hectic of wishing about the un- 20 THEOPHRASTU8 SUCH. alterable, but with me that useless exercise has turned chiefly on the conception of a different self, and not, as it usually does in literature, on the advantage of having been born in a different age, and more especially in one where life is imag- ined to have been altogether majestic and graceful. With my present abilities, external proportions, and generally small provision for ecstatic enjoyment, where is the ground for con- fidence that I should have had a preferable career in such an epoch of society? An age in which every department has its awkward-squad seems in my mind's eye to suit me better. I might have wandered by the Strymon under Philip and Al- exander without throwing any new light on method or organ- izing the sum of human knowledge; on the other hand, I might have objected to Aristotle as too much of a systematize!-, and have preferred the freedom of a little self-contradiction as offering more chances of truth. I gather, too, from the un- deniable testimony of his disciple Theophrastus that there were bores, ill-bred persons, and detractors even in Athens, of species remarkably corresponding to the English, and not yet made endurable by being classic; and, altogether, with my present fastidious nostril, I feel that I am the better off for possessing Athenian life solely as an inodorous fragment of antiquity. As to Sappho' s Mitylene, while I am convinced that the Lesbian capital held some plain men of middle stature and slow conversational powers, the addition of myself to their number, though clad in the majestic folds of the hima- tion and without cravat, would hardly have made a sensation among the accomplished fair ones who were so precise in ad- justing their own drapery about their delicate ankles. Whereas by being another sort of person in the present age I might have given it some needful theoretic clew. Or I might have poured forth poetic strains which would have anticipated the- ory and seemed a voice from "the prophetic soul Of the wide world dreaming of things to come." Or I might have been one of those benignant lovely souls who, -yithout astonishing the public and posterity, make a happy difference in the lives close around them, and in this way lift LOOKING BACKWARD. 21 the average of earthly joy. la some form or other I might have been so filled from the store of universal existence that I should have been freed from that empty wishing which is like a child's cry to be inside a golden cloud, its imagination being too ignorant to figure the lining of dimness and damp. On the whole, though there is some rash boasting about en- lightenment, and an occasional insistence on an originality which is that of the present year's corn-crop, we seem too much disposed to indulge, and to call by complimentary names, a greater charity for other portions of the human race than for our contemporaries. All reverence and gratitude for the worthy Dead on whose labors we have entered, all care for the future generations whose lot we are preparing ; but some affection and fairness for those who are doing the actual work of the world, some attempt to regard them with the same freedom from ill-temper, whether on private or public grounds, as we may hope will be felt by those who will call us ancient! Otherwise, the looking before and after, which is our grand human privilege, is in danger of turning to a sort of other-worldliness, breeding a more illogical indifference or bitterness than was ever bred by the ascetic's contemplation of heaven. Except on the ground of a primitive golden age and continuous degeneracy, I see no rational footing for scorn- ing the whole present population of the globe, unless I scorn every previous generation from whom they have inherited their diseases of mind and body, and by consequence scorn my own scorn, which is equally an inheritance of mixed ideas and feelings concocted for me in the boiling caldron of this uni- versally contemptible life, and so on scorning to infinity. This may represent some actual states of mind, for it is a nar- row prejudice of mathematicians to suppose that ways of think- ing are to be driven out of the field by being reduced to an absurdity. The Absurd is taken as an excellent juicy thistle by many constitutions. Eeflections of this sort have gradually determined me not to grumble at the age in which I happen to have been born a natural tendency certainly older than Hesiod. Many an- cient beautiful things are lost, many ugly modern things have arisen } but invert the proposition and it is equally true. I 22 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. at least am a modern with some interest in advocating toler- ance, and notwithstanding an inborn beguilement which carries my affection and regret continually into an imagined past, I am aware that I must lose all sense of moral proportion unless I keep alive a stronger attachment to what is near, and a power of admiring what I best know and understand. Hence this question of wishing to be rid of one' s contemporaries asso- ciates itself with my filial feeling, and calls up the thought that I might as justifiably wish that I had had other parents than those whose loving tones are my earliest memory, and whose last parting first taught me the meaning of death. I feel bound to quell such a wish as blasphemy. Besides there are other reasons why I am contented that my father was a country parson, born much about the same time as Scott and Wordsworth; notwithstanding certain qualms I have felt at the fact that the property on which I am living was saved out of tithe before the period of com- mutation, and without the provisional transfiguration into a modus. It has sometimes occurred to me when I have been taking a slice of excellent ham that, from a too tenable point of view, I was breakfasting on a small squealing black pig which, more than half a century ago, was the unwilling representative of spiritual advantages not otherwise acknowledged by the grudging farmer or dairyman who parted with him. One en- ters on a fearful labyrinth in tracing compound interest back- ward, and such complications of thought have reduced the flavor of the ham ; but since I have nevertheless eaten it, the chief effect has been to moderate the severity of my radicalism (which was not part of my paternal inheritance) and to raise the assuaging reflection that if 'the pig and the parishioner had been intelligent enough to anticipate my historical point of view, they would have seen themselves and the rector .in a light that would have made tithe voluntary. Notwithstand- ing such drawbacks I am rather fond of the mental furniture I got by having a father who was well acquainted with all ranks of his neighbors, and am thankful that he was not one of those aristocratic clergymen who could not have sat down to a meal with any family in the parish except my lord's still more that he was not an earl or a marquis. A chief misfor- LOOKING BACKWARD. 23 tune of high birth is that it usually shuts a man out from the large sympathetic knowledge of human experience which comes from contact with various classes on their own level, and in my father's time that entail of social ignorance had not been disturbed as we see it now. To look always from over- head at the crowd of one's fellow-men must be in many ways incapacitating, even with the best will and intelligence. The serious blunders it must lead to in the effort to manage them for their good one may see clearly by the mistaken ways peo- ple take of nattering and enticing others whose associations are unlike their own. Hence I have always thought that the most fortunate Britons are those whose experience has given them a practical share in many aspects of the national lot, who have lived long among the mixed commonalty, roughing it with them under difficulties, knowing how their food tastes to them, and getting acquainted with their notions and mo- tives not by inference from traditional types in literature or from philosophical theories, but from daily fellowship and ob- servation. Of course such experience is apt to get antiquated, and my father might find himself much at a loss amongst a mixed rural population of the present day ; but he knew very well what could be wisely expected from the miners, the weavers, the field-laborers, and the farmers of his own time yes, and from the aristocracy, for he had been brought up in close contact with them and had been companion to a young nobleman who was deaf and dumb. " A clergyman, lad, " he used to say to me, " should feel in himself a bit of every class " ; and this theory had a felicitous agreement with his inclination and practice, which certainly answered in making him beloved by his parishioners. They grumbled at their ob- ligations toward him; but what then? It was natural to grumble at any demand for payment, tithe included, but also natural for a rector to desire his tithe and look well after the levying. A Christian pastor who did not mind about his money was not an ideal prevalent among the rural minds of fat central England, and might have seemed to introduce a dangerous laxity of supposition about Christian laymen who happened to be creditors. My father was none the less be- loved because he was understood to be of a saving disposition, 24 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. and how could he save without getting his tithe? The sight of him was not unwelcome at any door, and he was remark- able among the clergy of his district for having no lasting feud with rich or poor in his parish. I profited by his popularity, and for months after my mother's death, when I was a little fellow of nine, I was taken care of first at one homestead and then at another; a variety which I enjoyed much more than my stay at the Hall, where there was a tutor. Afterward for several years I was my father's constant companion in his outdoor business, riding by his side on my little pony and listening to the lengthy dialogues he held with Darby or Joan, the one on the road or in the fields, the other outside or inside her door. In my earliest remembrance of him his hair was already gray, for I was his youngest as well as his only sur- viving child ; and it seemed to me that advanced age was ap- propriate to a father, as indeed in all respects I considered him a parent so much to my honor that the mention of my re- lationship to him was likely to secure me regard among those to whom I was otherwise a stranger my father's stories from his life including so many names of distant persons that my imagination placed no limit to his acquaintanceship. He was a pithy talker, and his sermons bore marks of his own compo- sition. It is true, they must have been already old when I began to listen to them, and they were no more than a year's supply, so that they recurred as regularly as the Collects. But though this system has been much ridiculed, I am pre- pared to defend it as equally sound with that of a liturgy ; and even if my researches had shown me that some of my father's yearly sermons had been copied out from the Avorks of elder divines, this would only have been another proof of his good judgment. One may prefer fresh eggs though laid by a fowl of the meanest understanding, but why fresh sermons? Nor can I be sorry, though myself given to meditative if not active innovation, that my father was a Tory who had not exactly a dislike to innovators and dissenters, but a slight opinion of them as persons of ill-founded self-confidence; whence my young ears gathered many details concerning those who might perhaps have called themselves the more advanced thinkers in our nearest market-town, tending to convince me LOOKING BACKWARD. 25 that their characters were quite as mixed as those of the thinkers behind them. This circumstance of my rearing has at least delivered me from certain mistakes of classification which I observe in many of my superiors, who have apparent- ly no affectionate memories of a goodness mingled with what they now regard as outworn prejudices. Indeed, my philo- sophical notions, such as they are, continually carry me back to the time when the fitful gleams of a spring day used to show me my own shadow as that of a small boy on a small pony, riding by the side of a larger cob-mounted shadow over the breezy uplands which we used to dignify with the name of hills, or along by-roads with broad grassy borders and hedgerows reckless of utility, on our way to outlying ham- lets, whose groups of inhabitants were as distinctive to my imagination as if they had belonged to different regions of the globe. From these we sometimes rode onward to the adjoin- ing parish, where also my father officiated, for he was a plu- ralist, but I hasten to add on the smallest scale ; for his one extra living was a poor vicarage, with hardly fifty parishioners, and its church would have made a very shabby barn, the gray worm-eaten wood of its pews and pulpit, with their doors only half hanging on the hinges, being exactly the color of a lean mouse which I once observed as an interesting member of the scant congregation, and conjectured to be the identical church mouse I had heard referred to as an example of extreme pov- erty ; for I was a precocious boy, and often reasoned after the fashion of my elders, arguing that " Jack and Jill " were real personages in our parish, and that if I could identify " Jack " I should find on him the marks of a broken crown. Sometimes when I am in a crowded London drawing-room (for I am a town-bird now, acquainted with smoky eaves, and tasting Nature in the parks) quick flights of memory take me back among my father's parishioners while I am still con- scious of elbowing men who wear the same evening uniform as myself; and I presently begin to wonder what varieties of history lie hidden under this monotony of aspect. Some of them, perhaps, belong to families with many quarterings ; but how many " quarterings " of diverse contact with their fellow- countrymen enter into their qualifications to be parliamentary 26 THEOPHBASTU8 SUCH. leaders, professors of social science, or journalistic guides of the popular mind? Not that I feel myself a person made competent by experience ; on the contrary, I argue that since an observation of different ranks has still left me practically a poor creature, what must be the condition of those who ob- ject even to read about the life of other British classes than their own? But of my elbowing neighbors with their crush hats, I usually imagine that the most distinguished among them have probably had a far more instructive journey into manhood than mine. Here, perhaps, is a thought- worn physiognomy, seeming at the present moment to be classed as a mere species of white cravat and swallow-tail, which may once, like Faraday's, have shown itself in curiously dubious embryonic form leaning against a cottage lintel in small cor- duroys, and hungrily eating a bit of brown bread and bacon ; there is a pair of eyes, now too much wearied by the gas-light of public assemblies, that once perhaps learned to read their native England through the same alphabet as mine not within the boundaries of an ancestral park, never even being driven through the country town five miles off, but among the mid- land villages and markets, along by the tree-studded hedge- rows, and where the heavy barges seem in the distance to float mysteriously among the rushes and the feathered grass. Our vision, both real and ideal, has since then been filled with far other scenes: among eternal snows and stupendous sun- scorched monuments of departed empires ; within the scent of the long orange-groves; and where the temple of Neptune looks out over the siren-haunted sea. But my eyes at least have kept their early affectionate joy in our native landscape, which is one deep root of our national life and language. And I often smile at my consciousness that certain con- servative prepossessions have mingled themselves for me with the influence of our midland scenery, from the tops of the elms down to the buttercups and the little wayside vetches. Naturally enough. That part of my father's prime to which he oftenest referred had fallen on the days when the great wave of political enthusiasm and belief in a speedy regenera- tion of all things had ebbed, and the supposed millennial ini- tiative of France was turning into a Napoleonic empire, the LOOKING BACKWARD. 27 sway of an Attila with a mouth speaking proud things in a jargon half revolutionary, half Koman. Men were beginning to shrink timidly from the memory of their own words and from the recognition of the fellowships they had formed ten years before; and even reforming Englishmen for the most part were willing to wait for the perfection of society, if only they could keep their throats perfect and help to drive away the chief enemy of mankind from our coasts. To my father's mind the noisy teachers of revolutionary doctrine were, to speak mildly, a variable mixture of the fool and the scoundrel ; the welfare of the nation lay in a strong Government which could maintain order ; and I was accustomed to hear him utter the word " Government " in a tone that charged it with awe, and made it part of my effective religion, in contrast with the word " rebel, " which seemed to carry the stamp of evil in its syllables, and, lit by the fact that Satan was the first rebel, made an argument dispensing with more detailed inquiry. I gathered that our national troubles in the first two decades of this century were not at all due to the mistakes of our ad- ministrators ; and that England, with its fine Church and Con- stitution, would have been exceedingly well off if every British subject had been thankful for what was provided, and had minded his own business if, for example, numerous Catholics of that period had been aware how very modest they ought to be considering they were Irish. The times, I heard, had often been bad ; but I was constantly hearing of " bad times " as a name for actual evenings and mornings when the god- fathers who gave them that name appeared to be remarkably comfortable. Altogether, my father's England seemed to me lovable, laudable, full of good men, and having good rulers, from Mr. Pitt on to the Duke of Wellington, until he was for emancipating the Catholics; and it was so far from prosaic to me that I looked into it for a more exciting romance than such as I could find in my own adventures, which consisted mainly in fancied crises calling for the resolute wielding of domestic swords and firearms against unapparent robbers, rioters, and invaders who, it seemed, in my father's prime had more chance of being real. The morris-dancers had not then dwindled to a ragged and almost vanished rout (owing 28 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. the traditional name probably to the historic fancy of our superannuated groom) ; also the good old king was alive and well, which made all the more difference because I had no no- tion what he was and did only understanding in general that if he had been still on the throne he would have hindered everything that wise persons thought undesirable. Certainly that elder England with its frankly salable bor- oughs, so cheap compared with the seats obtained under the reformed method, and its boroughs kindly presented by noble- men desirous to encourage gratitude ; its prisons with a mis- cellaneous company of felons and maniacs and without any supply of water ; its bloated, idle charities ; its non-resident, jovial clergy ; its militia-balloting ; and, above all, its blank ignorance of what we, its posterity, should be thinking of it, has great differences from the England of to-day. Yet we discern a strong family likeness. Is there any country which shows at once as much stability and as much susceptibility to change as ours? Our national life is like that scenery which I early learned to love, not subject to great convulsions, but easily showing more or less delicate (sometimes melan- choly) effects from minor changes. Hence our midland plains have never lost their familiar expression and conservative spirit for me; yet at every other mile, since I first looked on them, some sign of world-wide change, some new direction of human labor has wrought itself into what one may call the speech of the landscape in contrast with those grander and vaster regions of the earth which keep an indifferent aspect in the presence of men's toil and devices. What does it signify that a lilliputian train passes over a viaduct amidst the abysses of the Apennines, or that a caravan laden with a na- tion's offerings creeps across the unresting sameness of the desert, or that a petty cloud of steam sweeps for an instant over the face of an Egyptian colossus immovably submitting to its slow burial beneath the sand? But our woodlands and pastures, our hedge-parted corn-fields and meadows, our bits of high common where we used to plant the windmills, our quiet little rivers here and there fit to turn a mill-wheel, our villages along the old coach-roads, are all easily alterable lineaments that seem to make the face of our Motherland sym- LOOKING BACKWARD. 29 pathetic with the laborious lives of her children. She does not take their ploughs and wagons contemptuously, but rather makes every hovel and every sheep-fold, every railed bridge or fallen tree-trunk, an agreeably noticeable incident; not a mere speck in the midst of unmeasured vastness, but a piece of our social history in pictorial writing. Our rural tracts where no Babel-chimney scales the heavens are without mighty objects to fill the soul with the sense of an outer world unconquerably aloof from our efforts. The wastes are playgrounds (and let us try to keep them such for the children's children who will inherit no other sort of demesne) ; the grasses and reeds nod to each other over the river, but we have cut a canal close by ; the very heights laugh with corn in August or lift the plough-team against the sky in September. Then comes a crowd of burly navvies with pick- axes and barrows, and while hardly a wrinkle is made in the fading mother's face or a new curve of health in the blooming girl's, the hills are cut through or the breaches between them spanned, we choose our level and the white steam-pennon flies along it. But because our land shows this readiness to be changed, all signs of permanence upon it raise a tender attachment in- stead of awe : some of us, at least, love the scanty relics of our forests, and are thankful if a bush is left of the old hedgerow. A crumbling bit of wall where the delicate ivy-leaved toad- flax hangs its light branches, or a bit of gray thatch with patches of dark moss on its shoulder and a troop of grass- stems on its ridge, is a thing to visit. And then the tiled roof of cottage and homestead, of the long cow-shed where genera- tions of the milky mothers have stood patiently, of the broad- shouldered barns where the old-fashioned flail once made resonant music, while the watch-dog barked at the timidly venturesome fowls making pecking raids on the outflying grain the roofs that have looked out from among the elms and walnut-trees, or beside the yearly group of hay and corn stacks, or below the square stone steeple, gathering their gray or ochre-tinted lichens and their olive-green mosses under all ministries, let us praise the sober harmonies they give to our landscape, helping to unite us pleasantly with the elder gen- 30 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. erations who tilled the soil for us before we were born, and paid heavier and heavier taxes,' with much grumbling, but without that deepest root of corruption the self-indulgent de- spair which cuts down and consumes and never plants. But I check myself. Perhaps this England of my affections is half visionary a dream in which things are connected ac- cording to my well-fed, lazy mood, and not at all by the mul- titudinous links of graver, sadder fact, such as belong every- where to the story of human labor. Well, well, the illusions that began for us when we were less acquainted with evil have not lost their value when we discern them to be illusions. They feed the ideal Better, and in loving them still, we strengthen the precious habit of loving something not visibly, tangibly existent, but a spiritual product of our visible, tangi- ble selves. I cherish my childish loves the memory of that warm little nest where my affections were fledged. Since then I have learned to care for foreign countries, for literatures foreign and ancient, for the life of Continental towns dozing round old cathedrals, for the life of London, half sleepless with eager thought and strife, with indigestion or with hunger ; and now my consciousness is chiefly of the busy, anxious metropolitan sort. My system responds sensitively to the London weather- signs, political, social, literary; and my bachelor's hearth is embedded where by much craning of head and neck I can catch sight of a sycamore in the Square garden : I belong to the " Nation of London." Why? There have been many volun- tary exiles in the world, and probably in the very first exodus of the patriarchal Aryans for I am determined not to fetch my examples from races whose talk is of uncles and no fathers some of those who sallied forth went for the sake of a loved companionship, when they would willingly have kept sight of the familiar plains, and of the hills to which they had first lifted up their eyes. m. HOW WE ENCOURAGE RESEARCH. THE serene and beneficent goddess Truth, like other deities whose disposition has been too hastily inferred from that of the men who have invoked them, can hardly be well pleased with much of the worship paid to her even in this milder age, when the stake and the rack have ceased to form part of her ritual. Some cruelties still pass for service done in her honor : no thumb-screw is used, no iron boot, no scorching of flesh ; but plenty of controversial bruising, laceration, and even life- long maiming. Less than formerly ; but so long as this sort of truth-worship has the sanction of a public that can often understand nothing in a controversy except personal sarcasm or slanderous ridicule, it is likely to continue. The sufferings of its victims are often as little regarded as those of the sacri- ficial pig offered in old time, with what we now regard as a sad miscalculation of effects. One such victim is my old acquaintance Merman. Twenty years ago Merman was a young man of promise, a convey- ancer with a practice which had certainly budded, but, unlike Aaron's rod, seemed not destined to proceed further in that marvellous activity. Meanwhile he occupied himself in mis- cellaneous periodical writing and in a multifarious study of moral and physical science. What chiefly attracted him in all subjects were the vexed questions which have the advan- tage of not admitting the decisive proof or disproof that ren- ders many ingenious arguments superannuated. Not that Merman had a wrangling disposition : he put all his doubts, queries, and paradoxes deferentially, contended without un- pleasant heat and only with a sonorous eagerness against the personality of Homer, expressed himself civilly though firmly on the origin of language, and had tact enough to drop at the 32 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. right moment such subjects as the ultimate reduction of all the so-called elementary substances, his own total scepticism concerning Manetho's chronology, or even the relation between the magnetic condition of the earth and the outbreak of revo- lutionary tendencies. Such flexibility was naturally much helped by his amiable feeling toward woman, whose nervous system, he was convinced, would not bear the continuous strain of difficult topics ; and also by his willingness to contribute a song whenever the same desultory charmer proposed music. Indeed his tastes were domestic enough to beguile him into marriage when his resources were still very moderate and partly uncertain. His friends wished that so ingenious and agreeable a fellow might have more prosperity than they ven- tured to hope for him, their chief regret on his account being that he did not concentrate his talent and leave off forming opinions on at least half a dozen of the subjects over which he scattered his attention, especially now that he had married a "nice little woman" (the generic name for acquaintances' wives when they are not markedly disagreeable). He could not, they observed, want all his various knowledge and Lapu- tan ideas for his periodical writing which brought him most of his bread, and he would do well to use his talents in get- ting a specialty that would fit him for a post. Perhaps these well-disposed persons were a little rash in presuming that fit- ness for a post would be the surest ground for getting it ; and on the whole, in now looking back on their wishes for Mer- man, their chief satisfaction must be that those wishes did not contribute to the actual result. For in an evil hour Merman did concentrate himself. He had for many years taken into his interest the comparative history of the ancient civilizations, but it had not preoccupied him so as to narrow his generous attention to everything else. One sleepless night, however (his wife has more than once narrated to me the details of an event memorable to her as the beginning of sorrows), after spending some hours over the epoch-making work of Grampus, a new idea seized him with regard to the possible connection of certain symbolic monuments common to widely scattered races. Merman started up in bed. The night was cold, and the sudden with- HOW WE ENCOURAGE RESEARCH. 33 drawal of warmth made his wife first dream of a snowball, and then cry, "What is the matter, Proteus?" " A great matter, Julia. That fellow Grampus, whose book is cried up as a revelation, is all wrong about the Magicodum- bras and the Zuzumotzis, and I have got hold of the right clew." "Good gracious! does it matter so much? Don't drag the clothes, dear." " It signifies thic;, Julia, that if I am right I shall set the world right ; I shall regenerate history ; I shall win the mind of Europe to a new view of social origins ; I shall bruise the head of many superstitious. " " Oh no, dear, don't go too far into things. Lie down again. You have been dreaming. What are the Madicojum- bras and Zuzitotzums? I never heard you talk of them before. What use can it be troubling yourself about such things? " " That is the way, Julia that is the way wives alienate their husbands, and make any hearth pleasanter to him than his own ! " "What do you mean, Proteus? " " Why, if a woman will not try to understand her husband's ideas, or at least to believe that they are of more value than she can understand if she is to join anybody who happens to be against him, and suppose he is a fool because others con- tradict him there is an end of our happiness. That is all I have to say." " Oh no, Proteus, dear. I do believe what you say is right. That is my only guide. I am sure I never have any opinions in any other way : I mean about subjects. Of course there are many little things that would tease you, that you like me to judge of for myself. I know I said once that I did not want you to sing ' Oh ruddier than the cherry, ' because it was not in your voice. But I cannot remember ever differing from you about subjects. I never in my life thought any one clev- erer than you." Julia Merman was really a " nice little woman, " not one of the stately Dians sometimes spoken of in those terms. Her black silhouette had a very infantine aspect, but she had dis- 3 34 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. cernment and wisdom enough to act on the strong hint of that memorable conversation, never again giving her husband the slightest ground for suspecting that she thought treasonably of his ideas in relation to the Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis, or in the least relaxed her faith in his infallibility because Europe was not also convinced of it. It was well for her that she did not increase her troubles in this way ; but to do her justice, what she was chiefly anxious about was to avoid in- creasing her husband's troubles. Not that these were great in the beginning. In the first development and writing out of his scheme, Merman had a more intense kind of intellectual pleasure than he had ever known before. His face became more radiant, his general view of human prospects more cheerful. Foreseeing that truth as presented by himself would win the recognition of his contemporaries, he excused with much liberality their rather rough treatment of other theorists whose basis was less perfect. His own periodical criticisms had never before been so amiable: he was sorry for that unlucky majority whom the spirit of the age, or some other prompting more definite and local, compelled to write without any particular ideas. The possession of an original theory which has not yet been as- sailed must certainly sweeten the temper of a man who is not beforehand ill-natured. And Merman was the reverse of ill- natured. But the hour of publication came ; and to half a dozen per- sons, described as the learned world of two hemispheres, it became known that Grampus was attacked. This might have been a small matter; for who or what on earth that is good for anything is not assailed by ignorance, stupidity, or malice and sometimes even by just objection? But on examination it appeared that the attack might possibly be held damaging, unless the ignorance of the author were well exposed and his' pretended facts shown to be chimeras of that remarkably hide- ous kind begotten by imperfect learning on the more feminine element of original incapacity. Grampus himself did not im- mediately cut open the volume which Merman had been care- ful to send him, not without a very lively and shifting con- ception of the possible effects which the explosive gift might HOW WE ENCOURAGE RESEARCH. 35 produce on the too eminent scholar effects that must cer- tainly have set in on the third day from the despatch of the parcel. But in point of fact Grampus knew nothing of the book until his friend Lord Narwhal sent him an American newspaper containing a spirited article by the well-known Professor Sperm N. Whale which was rather equivocal in its bearing, the passages quoted from Merman being of rather a telling sort, and the paragraphs which seemed to blow de- fiance being unaccountably feeble, coming from so distin- guished a Cetacean. Then, by another post, arrived letters from Butzkopf and Dugong, both men whose signatures were familiar to the Teutonic world in the Seltenerscheinende Monat-schrift or Hayrick for the insertion of Split Hairs, ask- ing their Master whether he meant to take up the combat, because, in the contrary case, both were ready. Thus America and Germany were roused, though England was still drowsy, and it seemed time now for Grampus to find Merman's book under the heap and cut it open. For his own part he was perfectly at ease about his system ; but this is a world in which the truth requires defence, and specious false- hood must be met with exposure. Grampus having once looked through the book, no longer wanted any urging to write the most crushing of replies. This, and nothing less than this, was due from him to the cause of sound inquiry ; and the punishment would cost him little pains. In three weeks from that time the palpitating Merman saw his book announced in the programme of the leading Review. No need for Grampus to put his signature. Who else had his vast yet microscopic knowledge, who else his power of epithet? This article in which Merman was pilloried and as good as muti- lated for he was shown to have neither ear nor nose for the subtleties of philological and archaeological study was much read and more talked of, not because of any interest in the system of Grampus, or any precise conception of the danger at- tending lax views of the Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis, but because the sharp epigrams with which the victim was lacer- ated, and the soaring fountains of acrid mud which were shot upward and poured over the fresh wounds, were found amus- ing in recital. A favorite passage was one in which a certain 36 THEOPHRASTU8 SUCH. kind of sciolist was described as a creature of the Walrus kind, having a phantasmal resemblance to higher animals when seen by ignorant minds in the twilight, dabbling or hobbling in first one element and then the other, without parts or organs suited to either, in fact one of Nature's impostors who could not be said to have any artful pretences, since a congenital in- competence to all precision of aim and movement made their every action a pretence just as a being born in doeskin gloves would necessarily pass a judgment on surfaces, but we all know what his judgment would be worth. In drawing-room circles, and for the immediate hour, this ingenious comparison was as damaging as the showing up of Merman's mistakes and the mere smattering of linguistic and historical knowledge which he had presumed to be a sufficient basis for theorizing ; but the more learned cited his blunders aside to each other and laughed the laugh of the initiated. In fact. Merman's was a remarkable case of sudden notoriety. In London drums and clubs he was spoken of abundantly as one who had written ridiculously about the Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis: the leaders of conversation, whether Christians, Jews, infidels, or of any other confession except the confession of ignorance, pronouncing him shallow and indiscreet if not presumptuous and absurd. He was heard of at Warsaw, and even Paris took knowledge of him. M. Cachalot had not read either Grampus or Merman, but he heard of their dispute in time to insert a paragraph upon it in his brilliant work, L'orient au point de vue actuel, in which he was dispassionate enough to speak of Grampus as possessing a coup d'ceil presque frangais in matters of historical interpretation, and of Merman as nevertheless an objector qui merite d 1 etre connu. M. Porpesse, also, availing himself of M. Cachalot's knowledge, reproduced it in an article with certain additions, which it is only fair to distinguish as his own, implying that the vigorous English of Grampus was not always as correct as a Frenchman could de- sire, while Merman's objections were more sophistical than solid. Presently, indeed, there appeared an able extrait of Grampus's article in the valuable Rapporteur scientifique et historique, and Merman's mistakes were thus brought under the notice of certain Frenchmen who are among the masters HOW WE ENCOURAGE RESEARCH. 37 of those who know on oriental subjects. In a word, Merman, though not extensively read, was extensively read about. Meanwhile, how did he like it? Perhaps nobody, except his wife, for a moment reflected on that. An amused society considered that he was severely punished, but did not take the trouble to imagine his sensations ; indeed this would have been a difficulty for persons less sensitive and excitable than Mer- man himself. Perhaps that popular comparison of the Wal- rus had truth enough to bite and blister on thorough applica- tion, even if exultant ignorance had not applauded it. But it is well known that the walrus, though not in the least a ma- lignant animal, if allowed to display its remarkably plain person and blundering performances at ease in any element it chooses, becomes desperately savage and musters alarming auxiliaries when attacked or hurt. In this characteristic, at least, Merman resembled the walrus. And now he concen- trated himself with a vengeance. That his counter-theory was fundamentally the right one he had a genuine conviction, whatever collateral mistakes he might have committed; and his bread would not cease to be bitter to him until he had con- vinced his contemporaries that Grampus had used his minute learning as a dust-cloud to hide sophistical evasions that, in fact, minute learning was an obstacle to clear-sighted judg- ment, more especially with regard to the Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis, and that the best preparation in this matter was a wide survey of history, and a diversified observation of men. Still, Merman was resolved to muster all the learning within his reach, and he wandered day and night through many wil- dernesses of German print, he tried compendious methods of learning oriental tongues, and, so to speak, getting at the mar- row of languages independently of the bones, for the chance of finding details to corroborate his own views, or possibly even to detect Grampus in some oversight or textual tampering. All other work was neglected : rare clients were sent away and amazed editors found this maniac indifferent to his chance of getting book-parcels from them. It was many months before Merman had satisfied himself that he was strong enough to face round upon his adversary. But at last he had pre- pared sixty condensed pages of eager argument which seemed 38 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. to him worthy to rank with the best models of controversial writing. He had acknowledged his mistakes, but he had re- stated his theory so as to show that it was left intact in spite of them; and he had even found cases in which Ziphius, Microps, Scrag Whale the explorer, and other Cetaceans of unanswerable authority, were decidedly at issue with Gram- pus. Especially a passage cited by this last from that greatest of fossils Megalosaurus was demonstrated by Merman to be capable of three different interpretations, all preferable to that chosen by Grampus, who took the words in their most literal sense; for, 1, the incomparable Saurian, alike unequalled in close observation and far-glancing comprehensiveness, might have meant those words ironically ; 2, motzis was probably a false reading foxpotzis, in which case its bearing was reversed; and 3, it is known that in the age of the Saurians there were conceptions about the motzis which entirely remove it from the category of things comprehensible in an age when Saurians run ridiculously small : all which views were godfathered by names quite fit to be ranked with that of Grampus. In fine, Merman wound up his rejoinder by sincerely thanking the eminent adversary without whose fierce assault he might not have undertaken a revision in the course of which he had met with unexpected and striking confirmations of his own funda- mental views. Evidently Merman's anger was at white heat. The rejoinder being complete, all that remained was to find a suitable medium for its publication. This was not so easy. Distinguished mediums would not lend themselves to contradic- tions of Grampus, or if they would, Merman's article was too long and too abstruse, while he would not consent to leave anything out of an article which had no superfluities ; for all this happened years ago when the world was at a different stage. At last, however, he got his rejoinder printed, and not on hard terms, since the medium, in every sense modest, did not ask him to pay for its insertion. But if Merman expected to call out Grampus again, he was mistaken. Everybody felt it too absurd that Merman should undertake to correct Grampus in matters of erudition, and an eminent man has something else to do than to refute a petty objector twice over. What was essential had been done : the HOW WE ENCOURAGE RESEARCH. 39 public had been enabled to form a true judgment of Merman's incapacity, the Magieodumbras and Zuzumotzis were but subsidiary elements in Grampus's system, and Merman might now be dealt with by younger members of the master's school. But he had at least the satisfaction of finding that he had raised a discussion which would not be let die. The followers of Grampus took it up with an ardor and industry of research worthy of their exemplar. Butzkopf made it the subject of an elaborate Einleitung to his important work, Die Bedeutung des JEgyptischen Labyrinthes; and Dugong, in a remarkable address which he delivered to a learned society in Central Europe, introduced Merman's theory with so much power of sarcasm that it became a theme of more or less derisive allu- sion to men of many tongues. Merman with his Magieodum- bras and Zuzumotzis was on the way to become a proverb, being used illustratively by many able journalists who took those names of questionable things to be Merman's own in- vention, " than which, " said one of the graver guides, " we can recall few more melancholy examples of speculative aber- ration." Naturally the subject passed into popular literature, and figured very commonly in advertised programmes. The fluent Loligo, the formidable Shark, and a younger member of his remarkable family known as S. Catulus, made a special reputation by their numerous articles, eloquent, lively, or abusive, all on the same theme, under titles ingeniously varied, alliterative, sonorous, or boldly fanciful; such as "Moments with Mr. Merman," "Mr. Merman and the Magicodumbras," " Greenland Grampus and Proteus Merman, " " Grampian Heights and their Climbers, or the New Excelsior." They tossed him on short sentences ; they swathed him in paragraphs of winding imagery ; they found him at once a mere plagiarist and a theorizer of unexampled perversity, ridiculously wrong about potzis and ignorant of Pali ; they hinted, indeed, at cer- tain things which to their knowledge he had silently brooded over in his boyhood, and seemed tolerably well assured that this preposterous attempt to gainsay an incomparable Cetacean of world-wide fame had its origin in a peculiar mixture of bit- terness and eccentricity which, rightly estimated and seen in its definite proportions, would furnish the best key to his ar- 40 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. gumentation. All alike were sorry for Merman's lack of sound learning, but how could their readers be sorry? Sound learn- ing would not have been amusing; and as it was, Merman was made to furnish these readers with amusement at no expense of trouble on their part. Even burlesque writers looked into his book to see where it could be made use of, and those who did not know him were desirous of meeting him at dinner as one likely to feed their comic vein. On the other hand, he made a serious figure in sermons under the name of " Some " or " Others " who had attempted presumptuously to scale eminences too high and arduous for human ability, and had given an example of ignominious fail- ure edifying to the humble Christian. All this might be very advantageous for able persons whose superfluous fund of expression needed a paying investment, but the effect on Merman himself was unhappily not so transient as the busy writing and speaking of which he had become the occasion. His certainty that he was right naturally got stronger in proportion as the spirit of resistance was stimu- lated. The scorn and unfairness with which he felt himself to have been treated by those really competent to appreciate his ideas had galled him and ^made a chronic sore ; and the exultant chorus of the incompetent seemed a pouring of vine- gar on his wound. His brain became a registry of the foolish and ignorant objections made against him, and of continually amplified answers to these objections. Unable to get his answers printed, he had recourse to that more primitive mode of publication, oral transmission or button-holding, now gen- erally regarded as a troublesome survival, and the once pleas- ant, flexible Merman was on the way to be shunned as a bore. His interest in new acquaintances turned chiefly on the pos- sibility that they would care about the Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis; that they would listen to his complaints and ex- posures of unfairness, and not only accept copies of what he had written on the subject, but send him appreciative letters in acknowledgment. Repeated disappointment of such hopes tended to embitter him, and not the less because after a while the fashion of mentioning him died out, allusions to his theory were less understood, and people could only pretend to re- HOW WE ENCOURAGE RESEARCH. 41 member it. And all the while Merman was perfectly sure that his very opponents who had knowledge enough to be capable judges were aware that his book, whatever errors of statement they might detect in it, had served as a sort of di- vining rod, pointing out hidden sources of historical interpre- tation; nay, his jealous examination discerned in a new work by Grampus himself a certain shifting of ground which so poor Merman declared was the sign of an intention gradually to appropriate the views of the man he had attempted to brand as an ignorant impostor. And Julia? And the housekeeping? the rent, food, and clothing, which controversy can hardly supply unless it be of the kind that serves as a recommendation to certain posts. Controversial pamphlets have been known to earn large plums ; but nothing of the sort could be expected from unpractical heresies about the Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis. Painfully the contrary. Merman's reputation as a sober thinker, a safe writer, a sound lawyer, was irretrievably injured : the distrac- tions of controversy had caused him to neglect useful editorial connections, and indeed his dwindling care for miscellaneous subjects made his contributions too dull to be desirable. Even if he could now have given a new turn to his concentration, and applied his talents so as to be ready to show himself an exceptionally qualified lawyer, he would only have been like an architect in competition, too late with his superior plans : he would not have had an opportunity of showing his qualifica- tion. He was thrown out of the course. The small capital which had filled up deficiencies of income was almost ex- hausted, and Julia, in the effort to make supplies equal to wants, had to use much ingenuity in diminishing the wants. The brave and affectionate woman whose small outline, so un- impressive against an illuminated background, held within it a good share of feminine heroism, did her best to keep up the charm of home and soothe her husband's excitement; parting with the best jewel among her wedding presents in order to pay rent, without ever hinting to her husband that this sad result had come of his undertaking to convince people who only laughed at him. She was a resigned little creature, and reflected that some husbands took to drinking and others to 42 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. forgery: hers had only taken to the Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis, and was not unkind only a little more indifferent to her and the two children than she had ever expected he would be, his mind being eaten up with "subjects," and con- stantly a little angry, not with her, but with everybody else, especially those whc were celebrated. This was the sad truth. Merman felt himself ill used by the world, and thought very much worse of the world in con- sequence. The gall of his adversaries' ink had been sucked into his system and ran in his blood. He was still in the prime of life, but his mind was aged by that eager monotonous construction which comes of feverish excitement on a single topic and uses up the intellectual strength. Merman had never been a rich man, but he was now con- spicuously poor, and in need of the friends who had power or interest which he believed they could exert on his behalf. Their omitting or declining to give this help could not seem, to him so clearly as to them an inevitable consequence of his having become impracticable, or at least of his passing for a man whose views were not likely to be safe and sober. Each friend in turn offended him, though unwillingly, and was suspected of wishing to shake him off. It was not altogether so; but poor Merman's society had undeniably ceased to be attractive, and it was difficult to help him. At last the pressure of want urged him to try for a post far beneath his earlier prospects, and he gained it. He holds it still, for he has no vices, and his domestic life has kept up a sweetening current of motive around and within him. Nevertheless, the bitter flavor ming- ling itself with all topics, the premature weariness and wither- ing, are irrevocably there. It is as if he had gone through a disease which alters what we call the constitution. He has long ceased to talk eagerly of the ideas which possess him, or to attempt making proselytes. The dial has moved onward, and he himself sees many of his former guesses in a new light. On the other hand, he has seen what he foreboded, that the main idea which was at the root of his too rash theorizing has been adopted by Grampus and received with general respect, no reference being heard to the ridiculous figure this important conception made when ushered in by the incompetent " Others." HOW WE ENCOURAGE RESEARCH. 43 Now and then, on rare occasions, when a sympathetic tete- a-tete has restored some of his old expansiveness, he will tell a companion in a railway carriage, or other place of meeting favorable to autobiographical confidences, what has been the course of things in his particular case, as an example of the justice to be expected of the world. The companion usually allows for the bitterness of a disappointed man, and is se- cretly disinclined to believe that Grampus was to blame. IV. A MAN SURPRISED AT HIS ORIGINALITY. AMONG the many acute sayings of La Rochefoucauld, there is hardly one more acute than this : " La plus grande ambition n'en a pas la moindre apparence lorsqu'elle se rencontre dans une impossibility absolue d'arriver ou elle aspire." Some of us might do well to use this hint in our treatment of ac- quaintances and friends from whom we are expecting grati- tude because we are so very kind in thinking of them, inviting them, and even listening to what they say considering how insignificant they must feel themselves to be. We are often fallaciously confident in supposing that our friend's state of mind is appropriate to our moderate estimate of his importance : almost as if we imagined the humble mollusk (so useful as an illustration) to have a sense of his own exceeding softness and low place in the scale of being. Your mollusk, on the con- trary, is inwardly objecting to every other grade of solid rather than to himself. Accustomed to observe what we think an unwarrantable conceit exhibiting itself in ridiculous preten- sions and forwardness to play the lion's part, in obvious self- complacency and loud peremptoriness, we are not on the alert to detect the egoistic claims of a more exorbitant kind often hidden under an apparent neutrality or an acquiescence in being put out of the question. Thoughts of this kind occurred to me yesterday when I saw the name of Lentulus in the obituary. The majority of his acquaintances, I imagine, have always thought of him as a man justly unpretending and ac nobody's rival; but some of them have perhaps been struck with surprise at his reserve in praising the works of his contemporaries, and have now and then felt themselves in need of a key to his remarks on men of celebrity in various departments. He was a man of fair A MAN SURPRISED AT HIS ORIGINALITY. 45 position, deriving his income from a business in which he did nothing, at leisure to frequent clubs and at ease in giving din- ners ; well-looking, polite, and generally acceptable in society as a part of what we may call its bread-crumb the neutral basis needful for the plums and spice. Why, then, did he speak of the modern Maro or the modern Flaccus with a pecu- liarity in his tone of assent to other people's praise which might almost have led you to suppose that the eminent poet had borrowed money of him and showed an indisposition to repay? He had no criticism to offer, no sign of objection more specific than a slight cough, a scarcely perceptible pause before assenting, and an air of self-control in his utterance as if certain considerations had determined him not to inform against the so-called poet, who to his knowledge was a mere versifier. If you had questioned him closely, he would per- haps have confessed that he did think something better might be done in the way of Eclogues and Georgics, or of Odes and Epodes, and that to his mind poetry was something very different from what had hitherto been known under that name. For my own part, being of a superstitious nature, given read- ily to imagine alarming causes, I immediately, on first getting these mystic hints from Lentulus, concluded that he held a number of entirely original poems, or at the very least a revo- lutionary treatise on poetics, in that melancholy manuscript state to which works excelling all that is ever printed are nec- essarily condemned; and I was long timid in speaking of the poets when he was present. For what might not Lentulus have done, or be profoundly aware of, that would make my ignorant impressions ridiculous? One cannot well be sure of the negative in such a case, except through certain positives that bear witness to it; and those witnesses are not always to be got hold of. But time wearing on, I perceived that the attitude of Lentulus toward the philosophers was essentially the same as his attitude toward the poets; nay, there was something so much more decided in his mode of closing his mouth after brief speech on the former, there was such an air of rapt consciousness in his private hints as to his conviction that all thinking hitherto had been an elaborate mistake, and 46 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. as to his own power of conceiving a sound basis for a lasting superstructure, that I began to believe less in the poetical stores, and to infer that the line of Lentulus lay rather in the rational criticism of our beliefs and in systematic construc- tion. In this case I did not figure to myself the existence of formidable manuscripts ready for the press ; for great thinkers are known to carry their theories growing within their minds long before committing them to paper, and the ideas which made a new passion for them when their locks were jet or auburn, remained perilously unwritten, an inwardly develop- ing condition of their successive selves, until the locks are gray or scanty. I only meditated improvingly on the way in which a man of exceptional faculties, and even carrying within him some of that fierce refiner's fire which is to purge away the dross of human error, may move about in society totally unrecognized, regarded as a person whose opinion is superfluous, and only rising into a power in emergencies of threatened blackballing. Imagine a Descartes or a Locke being recognized for nothing more than a good fellow and a perfect gentleman what a painful view does such a pic- ture suggest of impenetrable dulness in the society around them! I would at all times rather be reduced to a cheaper estimate of a particular person, if by that means I can get a more cheer- ful view of my fellow-men generally ; and I confess that in a certain curiosity which led me to cultivate Lentulus' s acquaint- ance, my hope leaned to the discovery that he was a less re- markable man than he had seemed to imply. It would have been a grief to discover that he was bitter or malicious, but by finding him to be neither a mighty poet, nor a revolutionary poetical critic, nor an epoch-making philosopher, my admira- tion for the poets and thinkers whom he rated so low would recover all its buoyancy, and I should not be left to trust to that very suspicious sort of merit which constitutes an excep- tion in the history of mankind, and recommends itself as the total abolitionist of all previous claims on our confidence. You are not greatly surprised at the infirm logic of the coach- man who would persuade you to engage him by insisting that any other would be sure to rob you in the matter of hay and A MAN SURPRISED AT HIS ORIGINALITY. 47 corn, thus demanding a difficult belief in him as the solt ex- ception from the frailties of his calling j but it is rather aston- ishing that the wholesale decriers of mankind and its per- formances should be even more unwary in their reasoning than the coachman, since each of them not merely confides in your regarding himself as an exception, but overlooks the almost certain fact that you are wondering whether he inwardly excepts you. Now, conscious of entertaining some common opinions which seemed to fall under the mildly intimated but sweeping ban of Lentulus, my self-complacency was a little concerned. Hence I deliberately attempted to draw out Lentulus in private dialogue, for it is the reverse of injury to a man to offer him that hearing which he seems to have found nowhere else. And for whatever purposes silence may be equal to gold, it cannot be safely taken as an indication of specific ideas. I sought to know why Lentulus was more than indifferent to the poets, and what was that new poetry which he had either written or, as to its principles, distinctly conceived. But I presently found that he knew very little of any particular poet, and had a general notion of poetry as the use of artificial language to express unreal sentiments: he instanced "The Giaour," "Lalla Eookh," "The Pleasures of Hope," and " Ruin seize thee, ruthless King " ; adding, " and plenty more." On my observing that he probably preferred a larger, simpler style, he emphatically assented. "Have you not," said I, "written something of that order?" "No; but I often com- pose as I go along. I see how things might be written as fine as Ossian, only with true ideas. The world has no notion what poetry will be." It was impossible to disprove this, and I am always glad to believe that the poverty of our imagination is no measure of the world's resources. Our posterity will no doubt get fuel in ways that we are unable to devise for them. But what this conversation persuaded me of was, that the birth with which the mind of Lentulus was pregnant could not be poetry, though I did not question that he composed as he went along, and that the exercise was accompanied with a great sense of power. This is a frequent experience in dreams, and much of our wak- 48 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. ing experience is but a dream in the daylight. Nay, for what I saw, the compositions might be fairly classed as Ossianic. But I was satisfied that Lentulus could not dis- turb my grateful admiration for the poets of all ages by eclipsing them, or by putting them under a new electric light of criticism. Still, he had himself thrown the chief emphasis of his pro- test and his consciousness of corrective illumination on the philosophic thinking of our race ; and his tone in assuring me that everything which had been done in that way was wrong that Plato, Eobert Owen, and Dr. Tuffie who wrote in the "Regulator," were all equally mistaken gave my supersti- tious nature a thrill of anxiety. After what had passed about the poets, it did not seem likely that Lentulus had all systems by heart; but who could say he had not seized that thread which may somewhere hang out loosely from the web of things and be the clew of unravelment? We need not go far to learn that a prophet is not made by erudition. Lentulus at least had not the bias of a school ; and if it turned out that he was in agreement with any celebrated thinker, ancient or modern, the agreement would have the value of an undesigned coinci- dence not due to forgotten reading. It was therefore with re- newed curiosity that I engaged him on this large subject the universal erroneousness of thinking up to the period when Lentulus began that process. And here I found him more copious than on the theme of poetry. He admitted that he did contemplate writing down his thoughts, but his difficulty was their abundance. Apparently he was like the woodcut- ter entering the thick forest and saying, " Where shall I be- gin? " The same obstacle appeared in a minor degree to cling about his verbal exposition, and accounted perhaps for his rather helter-skelter choice of remarks bearing on the number of unaddressed letters sent to the post-office; on what logic really is, as tending to support the buoyancy of human me- diums and mahogany tables ; on the probability of all miracles under all religions when explained by hidden laws, and my unreasonableness in supposing that their prqfuse occurrence at half a guinea an hour in recent times was anything more than a coincidence ; on the haphazard way in which marriages are A MAN SURPRISED AT HIS ORIGINALITY. 49 determined showing the baselessness of social and moral schemes ; and on his expectation that he should offend the sci- entific world when he told them what he thought of electricity as an agent. No man's appearance could be graver or more gentlemanlike than that of Lentulus as we walked along the Mall while he delivered these observations, understood by himself to have a regenerative bearing on human society. His wristbands and black gloves, his hat and nicely clipped hair, his laudable moderation in beard, and his evident discrimination in choos- ing his tailor, all seemed to excuse the prevalent estimate of him as a man untainted with heterodoxy, and likely to be so unencumbered with opinions that he would always be useful as an assenting and admiring listener. Men of science seeing him at their lectures doubtless flattered themselves that he came to learn from them ; the philosophic ornaments of our time, expounding some of their luminous ideas in the social circle, took the meditative gaze of Lentulus for one of surprise not unmixed with a just reverence at such close reasoning toward so novel a conclusion ; and those who are called men of the world considered him a good fellow who might be asked to vote for a friend of their own and would have no trouble- some notions to make him unaccommodating. You perceive how very much they were all mistaken, except in qualifying him as a good fellow. This Lentulus certainly was, in the sense of being free from envy, hatred, and malice ; and such freedom was all the more remarkable an indication of native benignity, because of his gaseous, inimitably expansive conceit. Yes, conceit ; for that his enormous and contentedly ignorant confidence in his own rambling thoughts was usually clad in a decent silence, is no reason why it should be less strictly called by the name directly implying a complacent self-estimate unwarranted by performance. Nay, the total privacy in which he enjoyed his consciousness of inspiration was the very condition of its undisturbed placid nourishment and gigantic growth. Your audibly arrogant man exposes himself to tests : in attempting to make an impression on others ne may possibly (not always) be made to feel his own lack of definiteness ; and the demand 4 50 THEOPHRASTCS SUCH. for definiteness is to all of us a needful check on vague depre- ciation of what others do, and vague ecstatic trust in our own superior ability. But Lentulus was at once so unreceptive, and so little gifted with the power of displaying his miscel- laneous deficiency of information, that there was really noth- ing to hinder his astonishment at the spontaneous crop of ideas which his mind secretly yielded. If it occurred to him that there were more meanings than one for the word " mo- tive," since it sometimes meant the end aimed at and some- times the feeling that prompted the aiming, and that the word "cause" was also of changeable import, he was naturally struck with the truth of his own perception, and was con- vinced that if this vein were well followed out much might be made of it. Men were evidently in the wrong about cause and effect, else why was society in the confused state we behold? And as to motive, Lentulus felt that when he came to write down his views he should look deeply into this kind of subject and show up thereby the anomalies of our social institutions ; meanwhile the various aspects of " motive " and " cause " flitted about among the motley crowd of ideas which he regarded as original, and pregnant with reformative efficacy. For his un- affected good-will made him regard all his insight as only valuable because it tended toward reform. The respectable man had got into his illusory maze of dis- coveries by letting go that clew of conformity in his thinking which he had kept fast hold of in his tailoring and manners. He regarded heterodoxy as a power in itself, and took his in- acquaintance with doctrines for a creative dissidence. But his epitaph needs not to be a melancholy one. His benevolent disposition was more effective for good than his silent pre- sumption for harm. He might have been mischievoiis but for the lack of words : instead of being astonished at his inspira- tions in private, he might have clad his addled originalities, disjointed commonplaces, blind denials, and balloon-like con- clusions, in that mighty sort of language which would have made a new Koran for a knot of followers. I mean no disre- spect to the ancient Koran, but one would not desire the roc to lay more eggs and give us a whole wing-flapping brood to soar and make twilight. A MAN SURPRISED AT HIS ORIGINALITY. 61 Peace be with Lentulus, for he has left us in peace. Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact from calling on us to look through a heap of millet-seed in order to be sure that there is no pearl in it. V. A TOO DEFERENTIAL MAN. A LITTLE unpremeditated insincerity must be indulged under the stress of social intercourse. The talk even of an honest man must often represent merely his wish to be inoffensive or agreeable rather than his genuine opinion or feeling on the matter in hand. His thought, if uttered, might be wounding; or he has not the ability to utter it with exactness and snatches at a loose paraphrase ; or he has really no genuine thought on the question and is driven to fill up the vacancy by borrowing the remarks in vogue. These are the winds and currents we have all to steer amongst, and they are often too strong for our truthfulness or our wit. Let us not bear too hardly on each other for this common incidental frailty, or think that we rise superior to it by dropping all considerateness and deference. But there are studious, deliberate forms of insincerity which it is fair to be impatient with : Hinze's, for example. From his name you might suppose him to be German : in fact, his family is Alsatian, but has been settled in England for more than one generation. He is the superlatively deferential man, and walks about with murmured wonder at the wisdom and discernment of everybody who talks to him. He cultivates the low-toned tete-a-tete, keeping his hat carefully in his hand and often stroking it, while he smiles with downcast eyes, as if to relieve his feelings under the pressure of the remarkable conversation which it is his honor to enjoy at the present mo- ment. I confess to some rage on hearing him yesterday talk- ing to Felicia, who is certainly a clever woman, and, without any unusual desire to show her cleverness, occasionally says something of her own or makes an allusion which is not quite common. Still, it must happen to her as to every one else tq A TOO DEFERENTIAL MAN. 53 speak of many subjects on which the best things were said loug ago, and in conversation with a person who has been newly introduced those well-worn themes naturally recur as a further development of salutations and preliminary media of understanding, such as pipes, chocolate, or mastic-chewing, which serve to confirm the impression that our new acquaint- ance is on a civilized footing and has enough regard for formu- las to save us from shocking outbursts of individualism, to which we are always exposed with the tamest bear or baboon. Considered purely as a matter of information, it cannot any longer be important for us to learn that a British subject in- cluded in the last census holds Shakespeare to be supreme in the presentation of character ; still, it is as admissible for any one to make this statement about himself as to rub his hands and tell you that the air is brisk, if only he will let it fall as a matter of course, with a parenthetic lightness, and not an- nounce his adhesion to a commonplace with an emphatic in- sistence, as if it were a proof of singular insight. We mortals should chiefly like to talk to each other out of good will and fellowship, not for the sake of hearing revelations or being stimulated by witticisms ; and I have usually found that it is the rather dull person who appears to be disgusted with his contemporaries because they are not always strikingly original, and to satisfy whom the party at a country house should have included the prophet Isaiah, Plato, Francis Bacon, and Vol- taire. It is always your heaviest bore who is astonished at the tamenesa of modern celebrities : naturally ; for a little of his company has reduced them to a state of flaccid fatigue. It is right and meet that there should be an abundant utter- ance of good sound commonplaces. Part of an agreeable talker's charm is that he lets them fall continually with no more than their due emphasis. Giving a pleasant voice to what we are all well assured of, makes a sort of wholesome air for more special and dubious remark to move in. Hence it seemed to me far from unbecoming in Felicia that in her first dialogue with Hinze, previously quite a stranger to her, her observations were those of an ordinarily refined and well-educated woman on standard subjects, and might have been printed in a manual of polite topics and creditable opin- 54 THEOPHRATSUS SUCH. ions. She had no desire to astonish a man of whom she had heard nothing particular. It was all the more exasperating to see and hear Hinze's reception of her well-bred conformi- ties. Felicia's acquaintances know her as the suitable wife of a distinguished man, a sensible, vivacious, kindly disposed woman, helping her husband with graceful apologies writ- ten and spoken, and making her receptions agreeable to all comers. But you would have imagined that Hinze had been prepared by general report to regard this introduction to her as an opportunity comparable to an audience of the Delphic Sibyl. When she had delivered herself on the changes in Italian travel, on the difficulty of reading Ariosto in these busy times, on the want of equilibrium in French political affairs, and on the pre-eminence of German music, he would know what to think. Felicia was evidently embarrassed by his reverent wonder, and, in dread lest she should seem to be playing the oracle, became somewhat confused, stumbling on her answers rather than choosing them. But this made no difference to Hinze's rapt attention and subdued eagerness of inquiry. He continued to put large questions, bending his head slightly that his eyes might be a little lifted in awaiting her reply. " What, may I ask, is your opinion as to the state of Art in England?" "Oh," said Felicia, with a light deprecatory laugh, "I think it suffers from two diseases bad taste in the patrons and want of inspiration in the artists." " That is true indeed, " said Hinze, in an undertone of deep conviction. " You have put your finger with strict accuracy on the causes of decline. To a cultivated taste like yours this must be particularly painful." " I did not say there was actual decline, " said Felicia, with a touch of brusquerie. " I don't set myself up as the great personage whom nothing can please." " That would be too severe a misfortune for others, " says my complimentary ape. " You approve, perhaps, of Rose- mary's ' Babes in the Wood,' as something fresh and naive in sculpture?" "I think it enchanting." A TOO DEFERENTIAL MAN. 55 " Does he know that? Or will you permit me to tell him? " "Heaven forbid! It would be an impertinence in me to praise a work of his to pronounce on its quality; and that I happen to like it can be of no consequence to him." Here was an occasion for Hiuze to smile down on his hat and stroke it Felicia's ignorance that her praise was inesti- mable being peculiarly noteworthy to an observer of mankind. Presently he was quite sure that her favorite author was Shakespeare, and wished to know what she thought of Ham- let's madness. When she had quoted Wilhelin Meister on this point, and had afterward testified that " Lear " was beyond adequate presentation, that " Julius Caesar " was an effective acting play, and that a poet may know a good deal about human nature while knowing little of geography, Hinze ap- peared so impressed with the plentitude of these revelations that he recapitulated them, weaving them together with threads of compliment " As you very justly observed " ; and " It is most true, as you say " ; and " It were well if others noted what you have remarked." Some listeners incautious in their epithets would have called Hinze an "ass." For my part I would never insult that in- telligent and unpretending animal who no doubt brays with perfect simplicity and substantial meaning to those acquainted with his idiom, and if he feigns more submission than he feels, has weighty reasons for doing so I would never, I say, insult that historic and ill -appreciated animal, the ass, by giving his name to a man whose continuous pretence is so shallow in its motive, so unexcused by any sharp appetite as this of Hinze's. But perhaps you would say that his adulatory manner was originally adopted under strong promptings of self-interest, and that his absurdly over-acted deference to persons from whom he expects no patronage is the unreflecting persistence of habit just as those who live with the deaf will shout to every- body else. And you might indeed imagine that in talking to Tulpian, who has considerable interest at his disposal, Hinze had a de- sired appointment in his mind. Tulpian is appealed to on innumerable subjects, and if he is unwilling to express him- self on any one of them, says so with instructive copiousness : ~>6 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. he is much listened to, and his utterances are registered and reported with more or less exactitude. But I think he has no other listener who comports himself as Hinze does who, figuratively speaking, carries about a small spoon ready to pick up any dusty crumb of opinion that the eloquent man may have let drop. Tulpian, with reverence be it said, has some rather absurd notions, such as a mind of large discourse often finds room for : they slip about among his higher conceptions and multitudinous acquirements like disreputable characters at a national celebration in some vast cathedral, where to the ardent soul all is glorified by rainbow light and grand associa- tions : any vulgar detective knows them for what they are. But Hinze is especially fervid in his desire to hear Tulpian dilate on his crotchets, and is rather troublesome to bystanders in asking them whether they have read the various fugitive writings in which these crotchets have been published. If an expert is explaining some matter on which you desire to know the evidence, Hinze teases you with Tulpian' s guesses, and asks the expert what he thinks of them. In general, Hinze delights in the citation of opinions, and would hardly remark that the sun shone without an air of re-* spectful appeal or fervid adhesion. The " Iliad, " one sees, would impress him little if it were not for what Mr. Fugleman has lately said about it; and if you mention an image or sen- timent in Chaucer he seems not to heed the bearing of your reference, but immediately tells you that Mr. Hautboy, too, regards Chaucer as a poet of the first order, and he is de- lighted to find that two such judges as you and Hautboy are at one. What is the reason of all this subdued eostasy, moving about, hat in hand, with well-dressed hair and attitudes of unim- peachable correctness? Some persons conscious of sagacity decide at once that Hinze knows what he is about in flattering Tulpian, and has a carefully appraised end to serve though they may not see it. They are misled by the common mistake of supposing that men's behavior, whether habitual or occa- sional, is chiefly determined by a distinctly conceived motive, a definite object to be gained or a definite evil to be avoided. The truth is, that, the primitive wants of nature once toler- A TOO DEFERENTIAL MAN. 57 ably satisfied, the majority of mankind, even in a civilized life full of solicitations, are with difficulty aroused to the distinct conception of an object toward which they will direct their actions with careful adaptation, and it is yet rarer to find one who can persist in the systematic pursuit of such an end. Few lives are shaped, few characters formed, by the contem- plation of definite consequences seen from a distance and made the goal of continuous effort or the beacon of a constantly avoided danger : such control by foresight, such vivid pictur- ing and practical logic are the distinction of exceptionally strong natures ; but society is chiefly made up of human be- ings whose daily acts are all performed either in unreflecting obedience to custom and routine or from immediate promptings of thought or feeling to execute an immediate purpose. They pay their poor-rates, give their vote in affairs political or parochial, wear a certain amount of starch, hinder boys from tormenting the helpless, and spend money on tedious observ- ances called pleasures, without mentally adjusting these prac- tices to their own well-understood interest or to the general, ultimate welfare of the human race ; and when they fall into ungraceful compliment, excessive smiling, or other luckless efforts of complaisant behavior, these are but the tricks or habits gradually formed under the successive promptings of a wish to be agreeable, stimulated day by day without any wid- ening resources for gratifying the wish. It does not in the least follow that they are seeking by studied hypocrisy to get something for themselves. And so with Hinze's deferen- tial bearing, complimentary parentheses, and worshipful tones, which seem to some like the overacting of a part in a comedy. He expects no appointment or other appreciable gain through Tulpian's favor; he has no doubleness toward Felicia; there is no sneering or backbiting obverse to his ecstatic admiration. He is very well off in the world, and cherishes no unsatisfied ambition that could feed design and direct flattery. As you perceive, he has had the education and other advantages of a gentleman without being conscious of marked result, such as a decided preference for any particular ideas or functions : his mind is furnished as hotels are, with everything for occasional and transient use. But one cannot be an Englishman arid 58 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. gentleman in general : it is in the nature of things that one must have an individuality, though it may be of an often- repeated type. As Hinze in growing to maturity had grown into a particular form and expression of person, so he neces- sarily gathered a manner and frame of speech which made him additionally recognizable. His nature is not tuned to the pitch of a genuine direct admiration, only to an attitudiniz- ing deference which does not fatigue itself with the formation of real judgments. All human achievement must be wrought down to this spoon-meat this mixture of other persons' washy opinions and his own flux of reverence for what is third-hand, before Hinze can find a relish for it. He has no more leading characteristic than the desire to stand well with those who are justly distinguished ; he has no base admirations, and you may know by his entire presenta- tion of himself, from the management of his hat to the angle at which he keeps his right foot, that he aspires to correct- ness. Desiring to behave becomingly and also to make a fig- ure in dialogue, he is only like the bad artist whose picture is a failure. We may pity these ill-gifted strivers, but not pre- tend that their works are pleasant to behold. A man is bound to know something of his own weight and muscular dexterity, and the puny athlete is called foolish before he is seen to be thrown. Hinze has not the stuff in him to be at once agree- ably conversational and sincere, and he has got himself up to be at all events agreeably conversational. Notwithstanding this deliberateness of intention in his talk he is unconscious of falsity, for he has not enough of deep and lasting impression to find a contrast or diversity between his words and his thoughts. He is not fairly to be called a hypocrite, but I have already confessed to the more exasperation at his make- believe reverence, because it has no deep hunger to excuse it. VI. ONLY TEMPER. WHAT is temper? Its primary meaning, the proportion and mode in which qualities are mingled, is much neglected iu popular speech, yet even here the word often carries a refer- ence to an habitual state or general tendency of the organism in distinction from what are held to be specific virtues and vices. As people confess to bad memory without expecting to sink in mental reputation, so we hear a man declared to have a bad temper and yet glorified as the possessor of every high quality. When he errs or in any way commits himself, his temper is accused, not his character, and it is understood that but for a brutal bearish mood he is kindness itself. If he kicks small animals, swears violently at a servant who mis- takes orders, or is grossly rude to his wife, it is remarked apologetically that these things mean nothing they are all temper. Certainly there is a limit to this form of apology, and the forgery of a bill, or the ordering of goods without any pros- pect of paying for them, has never been set down to an unfor- tunate habit of sulkiness or of irascibility. But on the whole there is a peculiar exercise of indulgence toward the manifes- tations of bad temper which tends to encourage them, so that we are in danger of having among us a number of virtuous persons who conduct themselves detestably, just as we have hysterical patients who, with sound organs, are apparently laboring under many sorts of organic disease. Let it be ad- mitted, however, that a man may be " a good fellow " and yet have a bad temper, so bad that we recognize his merits with reluctance, and are inclined to resent his occasionally amiable behavior as an unfair demand on our admiration. Touchwood is that kind of good fellow. He is by turns 60 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. insolent, quarrelsome, repulsively haughty to innocent people who approach him with respect, neglectful of his friends, angry in face of legitimate demands, procrastinating in the fulfilment of such demands, prompted to rude words and harsh looks by a moody disgust with his fellow-men in general and yet, as everybody will assure you, the soul of honor, a stead- fast friend, a defender of the oppressed, an affectionate-hearted creature. Pity that, after a certain experience of his moods, his intimacy becomes insupportable! A man who uses his balmorals to tread on your toes with much frequency and an unmistakable emphasis may prove a fast friend in adversity, but meanwhile your adversity has not arrived and your toes are tender. The daily sneer or growl at your remarks is not to be made amends for by a possible eulogy or defence of your undertaking against depreciators who may not present them- selves, and on an occasion which may never arise. I cannot submit to a .chronic state of blue and green bruise as a form of insurance against an accident. Touchwood's bad temper is of the contradicting pugnacious sort. He is the honorable gentleman in opposition, whatever proposal or proposition may be broached, and when others join him he secretly damns their superfluous agreement, quickly discovering that his way of stating the case is not ex- actly theirs. An invitation or any sign of expectation throws him into an attitude of refusal. Ask his concurrence in a benevolent measure : he will not decline to give it, because he has a real sympathy with good aims ; but he complies resent- fully, though where he is let alone he will do much more than any one would have thought of asking for. No man would shrink with greater sensitiveness from the imputation of not paying his debts, yet when a bill is sent in with any prompti- tude he is inclined to make the tradesman wait for the money he is in such a hurry to get. One sees that this antagonistic temper must be much relieved by finding a particular object, and that its worst moments must be those where the mood is that of vague resistance, there being nothing specific to oppose. Touchwood is never so little engaging as when he comes down to breakfast with a cloud on his brow, after parting from you the night before with an affectionate effusiveness at the end of ONLY TEMPER. 61 a confidential conversation which has assured you of mutual understanding. Impossible that you can have committed any offence. If mice have disturbed him, that is not your fault ; but, nevertheless, your cheerful greeting had better not convey any reference to the weather, else it will be met by a sneer which, taking you unawares, may give you a crushing sense that you make a poor figure with your cheerfulness, which was not asked for. Some daring person perhaps introduces another topic, and uses the delicate flattery of appealing to Touchwood for his opinion, the topic being included in his favorite studies. An indistinct muttering, with a look at the carving-knife in reply, teaches that daring person how ill he has chosen a market for his deference. If Touchwood's be- havior affects you very closely you had better break your leg in the course of the day: his bad temper will then vanish at once; he will take a painful journey on your behalf; he will sit up with you night after night ; he will do all the work of your department so as to save you from any loss in conse- quence of your accident ; he will be even uniformly tender to you till you are well on your legs again, when he will some fine morning insult you without provocation, and make you wish that his generous goodness to you had not closed your lips against retort. It is not always necessary that a friend should break his leg, for Touchwood to feel compunction and endeavor to make amends for his bearishness or insolence. He becomes spon- taneously conscious that he has misbehaved, and he is not only ashamed of himself, but has the better prompting to try and heal any wound he has inflicted. Unhappily the habit of being offensive " without meaning it " leads usually to a way of making amends which the injured person cannot but regard as a being amiable without meaning it. The kindness, the complimentary indications or assurances, are apt to appear in the light of a penance adjusted to the foregoing lapses, and by the very contrast they offer call up a keener memory of the wrong they atone for. They are not a spontaneous prompt- ing of good- will, but an elaborate compensation. And, in fact, Dion's atoning friendliness has a ring of artificiality. Be- cause he formerly disguised his good feeling toward you he 62 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. now expresses more than he quite feels. It is in vain. Hav- ing made you extremely uncomfortable last week he has abso- lutely diminished his power of making you happy to-day : he struggles against this result by excessive effort, but he has taught you to observe his ntfulness rather than to be warmed by his episodic show of regard. I suspect that many persons who have an uncertain, incal- culable temper flatter themselves that it enhances their fas- cination ; but perhaps they are under the prior mistake of exaggerating the charm which they suppose to be thus strength- ened j in any case they will do well not to trust in the attrac- tions of caprice and moodiness for a long continuance or for close intercourse. A pretty woman may fan the flame of dis- tant adorers by harassing them, but if she lets one of them make her his wife, the point of view from which he will look at her poutings and tossings and mysterious inability to be pleased will be seriously altered. And if slavery to a pretty woman, which seems among the least conditional forms of ab- ject service, will not bear too great a strain from her bad tem- per even though her beauty remain the same, it is clear that a man whose claims lie in his high character or high perform- ances had need impress us very constantly with his peculiar value and indispensableness, if he is to test our patience by an uncertainty of temper which leaves us absolutely without grounds for guessing how he will receive our persons or hum- bly advanced opinions, or what line he will take on any but the most momentous occasions. For it is among the repulsive effects of this bad temper, which is supposed to be compatible with shining virtues, that it is apt to determine a man' s sudden adhesion to an opinion, whether on a personal or impersonal matter, without leaving him time to consider his grounds. The adhesion is sudden and momentary, but it either forms a precedent for his line of thought and action, or it is presently seen to have been incon- sistent with his true mind. This determination of partisan- ship by temper has its worst effects in the career of the public man, who is always in danger of getting so enthralled by his own words that he looks into facts and questions not to get rectifying knowledge, but to get evidence that will justify his ONLY TEMPER. 63 actual attitude which was assumed under an impulse depend- ent on something else thau knowledge. There has been plenty of insistence on the evil of swearing by the words of a master, and having the judgment uniformly controlled by a " He said it " ; but a much worse woe to befall a man is to have every judgment controlled by an " I said it " to make a divinity of his own short-sightedness or passion-led aberration and ex- plain the world in its honor. There is hardly a more pitiable degradation than this for a man of high gifts. Hence I can- not join with those who wish that Touchwood, being young enough to enter on public life, should get elected for Parlia- ment and use his excellent abilities to serve his country in that conspicuous manner. For hitherto, in the less moment- ous incidents of private life, his capricious temper has only produced the minor evil of inconsistency, and he is even greatly at ease in contradicting himself, provided he can contradict you, and disappoint any smiling expectation you may have shown that the impressions you are uttering are likely to meet with his sympathy, considering that the day before he himself gave you the example which your mind is following. He is at least free from those fetters of self -justification which are the curse of parliamentary speaking, and what I rather desire for him is that he should produce the great book which he is generally pronounced capable of writing, and put his best self imperturbably on record for the advantage of society ; because I should then have steady ground for bearing with his diurnal incalculableness, and could fix my gratitude as by a strong staple to that unvarying monumental service. Unhap- pily, Touchwood's great powers have been only so far mani- fested as to be believed in, not demonstrated. Everybody rates them highly, and thinks that whatever he chose to do would be done in a first-rate manner. Is it his love of dis- appointing complacent expectancy which has gone so far as to keep up this lamentable negation, and made him resolve not to write the comprehensive work which he would have written if nobody had expected it of him? One can see that if Touchwood were to become a public man and take to frequent speaking on platforms or from his seat in the House, it would hardly be possible for him to maintain 64 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. much integrity of opinion, or to avoid courses of partisanship which a healthy public sentiment would stamp with discredit. Say that he were endowed with the purest honesty, it would inevitably be dragged captive by this mysterious, Protean bad temper. There would be the fatal public necessity of justify- ing oratorical Temper which had got on its legs in its bitter mood and made insulting imputations, or of keeping up some decent show of consistency with opinions .vented out of Tem- per's contradictoriness. And words would have to be followed up by acts of adhesion. Certainly if a bad-tempered man can be admirably virtuous, he must be so under extreme difficulties. I doubt the possi- bility that a high order of character can coexist with a temper like Touchwood' s. For it is of the nature of such temper to interrupt the formation of healthy mental habits, which de- pend on a growing harmony between perception, conviction, and impulse. There may be good feelings, good deeds for a human nature may pack endless varieties and blessed inconsistencies in its windings but it is essential to what is worthy to be called high character, that it may be safely calculated on, and that its qualities shall have taken the form of principles or laws habitually, if not perfectly, obeyed. If a man frequently passes unjust judgments, takes up false attitudes, intermits his acts of kindness with rude behavior or cruel words, and falls into the consequent vulgar error of sup- posing that he can make amends by labored agreeableness, I cannot consider such courses any the less ugly because they are ascribed to " temper." Especially I object to the assump- tion that his having a fundamentally good disposition is either an apology or a compensation for his bad behavior. If his temper yesterday made him lash the horses, upset the curricle and cause a breakage of my rib, I feel it no compensation that to-day he vows he will drive me anywhere in the gentlest manner any day as long as he lives. Yesterday was what it was, my rib is paining me, it is not a main object of my life to be driven by Touchwood and I have no confidence in his lifelong gentleness. The utmost form of placability I am capa- ble of is to try and remember his better deeds already per- ONLY TEMPER. 66 formed, and, mindful of my own offences, to bear him no mal- ice. But I cannot accept his amends. If the bad-tempered man wants to apologize he had need to do it on a large public scale, make some beneficent discovery, produce some stimulating work of genius, invent some power- ful process prove himself such a good to contemporary mul- titudes and future generations, as to make the discomfort he causes his friends and acquaintances a vanishing quantity, a trifle even in their own estimate. 5 VIL A POLITICAL MOLECULE. THE most arrant denier must admit that a man often furthers larger ends than he is conscious of, and that while he is trans- acting his particular affairs with the narrow pertinacity of a respectable ant, he subserves an economy larger than any pur- pose of his own. Society is happily not dependent for the growth of fellowship on the small minority already endowed with comprehensive sympathy: any molecule of the body politic working toward his own interest in an orderly way gets his understanding more or less penetrated with the fact that his interest is included in that of a large number. I have watched several political molecules being educated in this way by the nature of things into a faint feeling of fraternity. But at this moment I am thinking of Spike, an elector who voted on the side of Progress though he was not inwardly attached to it under that name. For abstractions are deities having many specific names, local habitations, and forms of activity, and so get a multitude of devout servants who care no more for them under their highest titles than the celebrated person who, putting with forcible brevity a view of human motives now much insisted on, asked what Posterity had done for him that he should care for Posterity? To many minds even among the ancients (thought by some to have been invariably poetical) the goddess of wisdom was doubtless worshipped simply as the patroness of spinning and weaving. Now spin- ning and weaving from a manufacturing, wholesale point of view, was the chief form under which Spike from early years had unconsciously been a devotee of Progress. He was a political molecule of the most gentlemanlike ap- pearance, not less than six feet high, and showing the utmost nicety in the care of his person and equipment. His umbrella A POLITICAL MOLECULE. 67 was especially remarkable for its neatness, though perhaps he swung it unduly in walking. His complexion was fresh, his eyes small, bright, and twinkling. He was seen to great ad- vantage in a hat and greatcoat garments frequently fatal to the impressiveness of shorter figures ; but when he was uncov- ered in the drawing-room, it was impossible not to observe that his head shelved off too rapidly from the eyebrows toward the crown, and that his length of limb seemed to have used up his mind so as to cause an air of abstraction from con- versational topics. He appeared, indeed, to be preoccupied with a sense of his exquisite cleanliness, clapped his hands together and rubbed them frequently, straightened his back, and even opened his mouth and closed it again with a sligM snap, apparently for no other purpose than the confirmation to himself of his own powers in that line. These are innocent exercises, but they are not such as give weight to a man's per- sonality. Sometimes Spike's mind, emerging from its pre- occupation, burst forth in a remark delivered with smiling zest ; as, that he did like to see gravel walks well rolled, or that a lady should always wear the best jewelry, or that a bride was a most interesting object; but finding these ideas received rather coldly, he would relapse into abstraction, draw up his back, wrinkle his brows longitudinally, and seem to regard society, even including gravel walks, jewelry, and brides, as essentially a poor affair. Indeed his habit of mind was desponding, and he took melancholy views as to the possible extent of human pleasure and the value of existence. Especially after he had made his fortune in the cotton manu- facture, and had thus attained the chief object of his ambition the object which had engaged his talent for order and per- severing application. For his easy leisure caused him much ennui. He was abstemious, and had none of those tempta- tions to sensual excess which fill up a man's time first with indulgence and then with the process of getting well from its effects. He had not, indeed, exhausted the sources of knowl- edge, but here again his notions of human pleasure were nar- rowed by his want of appetite ; for though he seemed rather surprised at the consideration that Alfred the Great was a Catholic, or that apart from the Ten Commandments any con- 68 THEOPHRA8TUS SUCH. ception of moral conduct had occurred to mankind, he was not stimulated to further inquiries on these remote matters. Yet he aspired to what he regarded as intellectual society, will- ingly entertained beneficed clergymen, and bought the books he heard spoken of, arranging them carefully on the shelves of what he called his library, and occasionally sitting alone in the same room with them. But some minds seem well glazed by nature against the admission Of knowledge, and Spike's was one of them. It was not, however, entirely so with re- gard to politics. He had a strong opinion about the Reform Bill, and saw clearly that the large trading towns ought to send members. Portraits of the Reform heroes hung framed and glazed in his library : he prided himself on being a Lib- eral. In this last particular, as well as in not giving bene- factions and not making loans without interest, he showed un- questionable firmness.* On the Repeal of the Corn Laws, again, he was thoroughly convinced. His mind was expansive toward foreign markets, and his imagination could see that the people from whom he took corn might be able to take the cotton goods which they had hitherto dispensed with. On his conduct in these political concerns, his wife, otherwise in- fluential as a woman who belonged to a family with a title in it, and who had condescended in marrying him, could gain no hold : she had to blush a little at what was called her hus- band's " radicalism " an epithet which was a very unfair im- peachment of Spike, who never went to the root of anything. But he understood his own trading affairs, and in this way became a genuine, constant political element. If he had been born a little later he could have been accepted as an eligible member of Parliament, and if he had belonged to a high family he might have done for a member of the Government. Perhaps his indifference to " views " would have passed for administrative judiciousness, and he would have been so gen- erally silent that he must often have been silent in the right place. But this is empty speculation : there is no warrant for saying what Spike would have been and known so as to have made a calculable political element, if he had not been edu- cated by having to manage his trade. A small mind trained to useful occupation for the satisfying of private need be- A POLITICAL MOLECULE. 69 oomes a representative of genuine class needs. Spike objected to certain items of legislation because they hampered his own trade, but his neighbors' trade was hampered by the same causes ; and though he would have been simply selfish in a question of light or water between himself and a fellow-towns^ man, his need for a change in legislation, being shared by all his neighbors in trade, ceased to be simply selfish, and raised him to a sense of common injury and common benefit. True, if the law could have been changed for the benefit of his par- ticular business, leaving the cotton trade in general in a sorry condition while he prospered, Spike might not have thought that result intolerably unjust; but the nature of things did not allow of such a result being contemplated as possible; it allowed of an enlarged market for Spike only through the en- largement of his neighbors' market, and the Possible is always the ultimate master of our efforts and desires. Spike was obliged to contemplate a general benefit, and thus became public-spirited in spite of himself. Or rather, the nature of things transmuted his active egoism into a demand for a pub- lic benefit. Certainly if Spike had been born a marquis he could not have had the same chance of being useful as a political ele- ment. But he might have had the same appearance, have been equally null in conversation, sceptical as to the reality of pleasure, and destitute of historical knowledge; perhaps even dimly disliking Jesuitism as a quality in Catholic minds, or regarding Bacon as the inventor of physical science. The depth of middle-aged gentlemen's ignorance will never be known, for want of public examinations in this branch. VIII. THE WATCH-DOG OF KNOWLEDGE. MOKDAX is an admirable man, ardent in intellectual work, public-spirited, affectionate, and able to find the right words in conveying ingenious ideas or elevated feeling. Pity that to all these graces he cannot add what would give them the utmost finish the occasional admission that he has been in the wrong, the ocasional frank welcome of a new idea as some- thing not before present to his mind ! But no : Mordax's self- respect seems to be of that fiery quality which demands that none but the monarchs of thought shall have an advantage over him, and in the presence of contradiction or the threat of having his notions corrected, he becomes astonishingly un- scrupulous and cruel for so kindly and conscientious a man. " You are fond of attributing those fine qualities to Mordax, " said Acer, the other day, " but I have not much belief in vir- tues that are always requiring to be asserted in spite of ap- pearances against them. True fairness and good will show themselves precisely where his are conspicuously absent. I mean, in recognizing claims which the rest of the world are not likely to stand up for. It does not need much love of truth and justice in me to say that Aldebaran is a bright star, or Isaac Newton the greatest of discoverers ; nor much kindli- ness in me to want my notes to be heard above the rest in a chorus of hallelujahs to one already crowned. It is my way to apply tests. Does the man who has the ear of the public use his advantage tenderly toward poor fellows who may be hindered of their due if he treats their pretensions with scorn? That is my test of his justice and benevolence. " My answer was, that his system of moral tests might be as delusive as what ignorant people take to be tests of intellect and learning. If the scholar or savant cannot answer THE WATCH-DOG OF KNOWLEDGE. 71 haphazard questions on the shortest notice, their belief in his capacity is shaken. But the better informed have given up the Johnsonian theory of inind as a pair of legs able to walk east or west according to choice. Intellect is no longer taken to be a ready-made dose of ability to attain eminence (or mediocrity) in all departments ; it is even admitted that ap- plication in one line of study or practice has often a laming effect in other directions, and that an intellectual quality or special facility which is a furtherance ill one medium of effort is a drag in another. We have convinced ourselves by this time that a man may be a sage in celestial physics and a poor crea- ture in the purchase of seed-corn, or even in theorizing about the affections ; that he may be a mere fumbler in physiology and yet show a keen insight into human motives; that he may seem the " poor Poll " of the company in conversation and yet write with some humorous vigor. It is not true that a man's intellectual power is like the strength of a timber beam, to be measured by its weakest point. Why should we any more apply that fallacious standard of what is called consistency to a man's moral nature, and argue against the existence of fine impulses or hr-.bits of feeling in relation to his actions generally, because those better move- ments are absent in a class of cases which act peculiarly on an irritable form of his egoism? The mistake might be corrected by our taking notice that the ungenerous words or acts which seem to us the most utterly incompatible with good disposi- tions in the offender, are those which offend ourselves. All other persons are able to draw a milder conclusion. Laniger, who has a temper but no talent for repartee, having been run down in a fierce way by Mordax, is inwardly persuaded that the highly lauded man is a wolf at heart : he is much tried by perceiving that his own friends seem to think no worse of the reckless assailant than they did before ; and Corvus, who has lately been, flattered by some kindness from Mordax, is un- mindful enough of Laniger 's feeling to dwell on this instance of good-nature with admiring gratitude. There is a fable that when the badger had been stung all over by bees, a bear con- soled him by a rhapsodic account of how he himself had just breakfasted on their honey. The badger replied, peevishly, 72 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. " The stings are in my flesh, and the sweetness is on your muzzle." The bear, it is said, was surprised at the badger's want of altruism. But this difference of sensibility between Laniger and his friends only mirrors in a faint way the difference between his own point of view and that of the man who has injured him. If those neutral, perhaps even affectionate persons, form no lively conception of what Laniger suffers, how should Mordax have any such sympathetic imagination to check him in what he persuades himself is a scourging administered by the quali- fied man to the unqualified? Depend upon it, his conscience, though active enough in some relations, has never given him a twinge because of his polemical rudeness and even brutality. He would go from the room where he has been tiring himself through the watches of the night in lifting and turning a sick friend, and straightway write a reply or rejoinder in which he mercilessly pilloried a Laniger who had supposed that he could tell the world something else or more than had been sanctioned by the eminent Mordax and what was worse, had sometimes really done so. Does this nullify the genuineness of motive which made him tender to his suffering friend? Not at all. It only proves that his arrogant egoism, set on fire, sends up smoke and flame where just before there had been the dews of fellowship and pity. He is angry and equips himself accordingly with a penknife to give the offender a comprachico countenance, a mirror to show him the effect, and a pair of nailed boots to give him his dismissal. All this to teach him who the Eomans really were, and to purge inquiry of incompetent intrusion, so rendering an important service to mankind. When a man is in a rage and wants to hurt another in con- sequence, he can always regard himself as the civil arm of a spiritual power, and all the more easily because there is real need to assert the righteous efficacy of indignation. I for my part feel with the Lanigers, and should object all the more to their or my being lacerated and dressed with salt, if the ad- ministrator of such torture alleged as a motive his care for Truth and posterity, and got himself pictured with a halo in consequence. In transactions between fellow-men it is well THE WATCH DOG OF -KNOWLEDGE. 73 to consider a little, in the first place, what is fair and kind toward the person immediately concerned, before we spit and roast him on behalf of the next century but one. Wide- reaching motives, blessed and glorious as they are, and of the highest sacramental virtue, have their dangers, like all else that touches the mixed life of the earth. They are archangels with awful brow and flaming sword, summoning and encourag- ing us to do the right and the divinely heroic, and we feel a beneficent tremor in their presence; but to learn what it is they thus summon us to do, we have to consider the mortals we are elbowing, who are of our own stature and our own ap- petites. I cannot feel sure how my voting will affect the con- dition of Central Asia in the coming ages, but I have good reason to believe that the future populations there will be none the worse off because I abstain from conjectural vilifica- tion of my opponents during the present parliamentary session, and I am very sure that I shall be less injurious to my con- temporaries. On the whole, and in the vast majority of in- stances, the action by which we can do the best for future ages is of the sort which has a certain beneficence and grace for contemporaries. A sour father may reform prisons, but considered in his sourness he does harm. The deed of Judas has been attributed to far-reaching views, and the wish to hasten his Master's declaration of himself as the Messiah. Perhaps I will not maintain the contrary Judas represented his motive in this way, and felt justified in his traitorous kiss; but my belief that he deserved, metaphorically speaking, to be where Dante saw him, at the bottom of the Malebolge, would not be the less strong because he was not convinced that his action was detestable. I refuse to accept a man who has the stomach for such treachery, as a hero impatient for the re- demption of mankind and for the beginning of a reign when the kisses shall be those of peace and righteousness. All this is by the way, to show that my apology for Mordax was not founded on his persuasion of superiority in his own motives, but on the compatibility of unfair, equivocal, and even cruel actions with a nature which, apart from special temptations, is kindly and generous ; and also to enforce the need of checks from a fellow-feeling with those whom our 74 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. acts immediately (not distantly) concern. Will any one be so hardy as to maintain that an otherwise worthy man cannot be vain and arrogant? I think most of us have some interest in arguing the contrary. And it is of the nature of vanity and arrogance, if unchecked, to become cruel and self-justifying. There are fierce beasts within : chain them, chain them, and let them learn to cower before the creature with wider reason. This is what one wishes for Mordax that his heart and brain should restrain the outleap of roar and talons. As to his unwillingness to admit that an idea which he has not discovered is novel to him, one is surprised that quick in- tellect and shrewd observation do not early gather reasons for being ashamed of a mental trick which makes one among the comic parts of that various actor Conceited Ignorance. I have a sort of valet and factotum, an excellent, respect- able servant, whose spelling is so unvitiated by non-phonetic superfluities that he writes night as nit. One day, looking over his accounts, I said to him jocosely, "You are in the latest fashion with your spelling, Pummel : most people spell ' night ' with a gh between the i and the t, but the greatest scholars now spell it as you do. " " So I suppose, sir, " says Pummel; "I've see it with a gh, but I've noways give into that myself." You would never catch Pummel in an interjection of surprise. I have sometimes laid traps for his astonishment, but he has escaped them all, either by a respectful neutrality, as of one who would not appear to notice that his master had been tak- ing too much wine, or else by that strong persuasion of his all-knowingness which makes it simply impossible for him to feel himself newly informed. If I tell him that the world is spinning round and along like a top, and that he is spinning with it, he says, "Yes, I've heard a deal of that in my time, sir," and lifts the horizontal lines of his brow a little higher, balancing his head from side to side as if it were too painfully full. Whether I tell him that they cook puppies in China, that there are ducks with fur coats in Australia, or that in some parts of the world it is the pink of politeness to put your tongue out on introduction to a respectable stranger, Pummel replies, "So I suppose, sir," with an air of resignation to THE WA.TCH DOG OP KNOWLEDGE. 75 hearing my poor version of well-known things, such as elders use in listening to lively boys lately presented with an anec- dote book. His utmost concession is, that what you state is what he would have replied if you had given him carte blanche instead of your needless instruction, and in this sense his fa- vorite answer is, "I should say." "Pummel," I observed, a little irritated at not getting my coffee, " if you were to carry your kettle and spirits of wine up a mountain of a morning, your water would boil there sooner." " I should say, sir.-" " Or, there are boiling springs in Iceland. Better go to Iceland. " " That' s what I' ve been thinking, sir." I have taken to asking him hard questions, and as I ex- pected, he never admits his own inability to answer them without representing it as common to the human race. " What is the cause of the tides, Pummel?" "Well, sir, nobody rightly knows. Many gives their opinion, but if I was to give mine, it 'ud be different." But while he is never surprised himself, he is constantly imagining situations of surprise for others. His own con- sciousness is that of one so thoroughly soaked in knowledge that further absorption is impossible, but his neighbors ap- pear to him to be in the state of thirsty sponges which it is a charity to besprinkle. His great interest in thinking of for- eigners is that they must be surprised at what they see in England, and especially at the beef. He is often occupied with the surprise Adam must have felt at the sight of the assembled animals " for he was not like us, sir, used from a b'y to Wombwell's shows." He is fond of discoursing to the lad who acts as shoeblack and general subaltern, and I have overheard him saying to that small upstart, with some sever- ity, " Now don't you pretend to know, because the more you pretend the more I see your ignirance " a lucidity on his part which has confirmed my impression that the thoroughly self- satisfied person is the only one fully to appreciate the charm of humility in others. Your diffident self-suspecting mortal is not very angry that others should feel more comfortable about themselves, pro- vided they are not otherwise offensive : he is rather like the 76 THEOPHRASTU8 SUCH. chilly person, glad to sit next a warmer neighbor ; or the timid, glad to have a courageous fellow-traveller. It cheers him to observe the store of small comforts that his fellow-crea- tures may find in their self-complacency, just as one is pleased to see poor old souls soothed by the tobacco and snuff for which one has neither nose nor stomach one's self. But your arrogant man will not tolerate a presumption which he sees to be ill-founded. The service he regards so- ciety as most in need of is to put down the conceit which is so particularly rife around him that he is inclined to believe it the growing characteristic of the present age. In the schools of Magna Grsecia, or in the sixth century of our era, or even under Kublai Khan, he finds a comparative freedom from that presumption by which his contemporaries are stirring his able gall. The way people will now flaunt notions which are not his without appearing to mind that they are not his, strikes him as especially disgusting. Jt might seem surprising to us that one strongly convinced of his own value should prefer to exalt an age in which he did not flourish, if it were not for the reflection that the present age is the only one in which anybody has appeared to undervalue him. IX. A HALF-BREED. AN early deep-seated love to which we become faithless has its unfailing Nemesis, if only in that division of soul which narrows all newer joys by the intrusion of regret and the es- tablished presentiment of change. I refer not merely to the love of a person, but to the love of ideas, practical beliefs, and social habits. And faithlessness here means not a gradual conversion dependent on enlarged knowledge, but a yielding to seductive circumstance ; not a conviction that the original choice was a mistake, but a subjection to incidents that flatter a growing desire. In this sort of love it is the forsaker who has the melancholy lot ; for an abandoned belief may be more effectively vengeful than Dido. The child of a wandering tribe caught young and trained to polite life, if he feels an hereditary yearning can run away to the old wilds and get his nature into tune. But there is no such recovery possible to the man who remembers what he once believed without being convinced that he was in error, who feels within him unsatis- fied stirrings toward old beloved habits and intimacies from which he has far receded without conscious justification or unwavering sense of superior attractiveness in the new. This involuntary renegade has his character hopelessly jangled and out of tune. He is like an organ with its stops in the lawless condition of obtruding themselves without method, so that hearers are amazed by the most unexpected transitions the trumpet breaking in on the flute, and the oboe confounding both. Hence the lot of Mixtus affects me pathetically, notwith- standing that he spends his growing wealth with liberality and manifest enjoyment. To most observers he appears to be simply one of the fortunate and also sharp commercial men 78 THEOPHRA8TUS SUCH. who began with meaning to be rich and have become what they meant to be : a man never taken to be well-born, but sur- prisingly better informed than the well-born usually are, and distinguished among ordinary commercial magnates by a per- sonal kindness which prompts him not only to help the-suffer- ing in a material way through his wealth, but also by direct ministration of his own; yet with all this, diffusing, as it were, the odor of a man delightedly conscious of his wealth as an equivalent for the other social distinctions of rank and intellect which he can thus admire without envying. Hardly one among those superficial observers can suspect that he aims or has ever aimed at being a writer ; still less can they imagine that his mind is often moved by strong currents of regret and of the most unworldly sympathies from the memories of a youthful time when his chosen associates were men and wom- en whose only distinction was a religious, a philanthropic, or an intellectual enthusiasm, when the lady on whose words his attention most hung was a writer of minor religious literature, when he was a visitor and exhorter of the poor in the alleys of a great provincial town, and when he attended the lectures given specially to young men by Mr. Apollos, the eloquent Congregational preacher, who had studied in Germany and had liberal advanced views then far beyond the ordinary teach- ing of his sect. At that time Mixtus thought himself a young man of socially reforming ideas, of religious principles and religious yearnings. It was within his prospects also to be rich, bu the looked forward to a use of his riches chiefty for reforming and religious purposes. His opinions were of a strongly democratic stamp, except that even then, belonging to the class of employers, he was opposed to all demands in the employed that would restrict the expansiveness of trade. He was the most democratic in relation to the unreasonable privileges of the aristocracy and landed interest ; and he had also a religious sense of brotherhood with the poor. Alto- gether, he was a sincerely benevolent young man, interested in ideas, and renouncing personal ease for the sake of study, religious communion, and good works. If you had known him then you would have expected him to marry a highly serious and perhaps literary woman, sharing his benevolent A HALF-BREED. 79 and religious habits, and likely to encourage his studies a woman who along with himself would play a distinguished part in one of the most enlightened religious circles of a great provincial capital. How is it that Mixtus finds himself in a London mansion, and in society totally unlike that which made the ideal of his younger years? And whom did he marry? Why, he married Scii.tilla, who fascinated him as she had fascinated others, by her prettiness, her liveliness, and her music. It is a common enough case that of a man being suddenly captivated by a woman nearly the opposite of his ideal ; or if not wholly captivated, at least effectively captured by a combination of circumstances along with an unwarily manifested inclination which might otherwise have been transient. Mixtus was captivated and then captured on the worldly side of his disposition, which had been always grow- ing and flourishing side by side with his philanthropic and re- ligious tastes. He had ability in business, and he had early meant to be rich; also, he was getting rich, and*the taste for such success was naturally growing with the pleasure of re- warded exertion. It was during a business sojourn in London that he met Scintilla, who, though without fortune, associated with families of Greek merchants living in a style of splen- dor, and with artists patronized by such wealthy entertainers. Mixtus on this occasion became familiar with a world in which wealth seemed the key to a more brilliant sort of dominance than that of a religious patron in the provincial circles of X. Would it not be possible to unite the two kinds of sway? A man bent on the most useful ends might, with a fortune large enough, make morality magnificent, and recommend religious principle by showing it in combination with the best kind of house and the most liberal of tables ; also with a wife whose graces, wit, and accomplishments gave a finish sometimes lacking even to establishments got up with that unhesitating worldliness to which high cost is a sufficient reason. Enough. Mixtus married Scintilla. Now this lively lady knew noth- ing of Nonconformists, except that they were unfashionable : she did not distinguish one conventicle from another, and Mr. Apollos with his enlightened interpretations seemed to her 80 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. as heavy a bore, if not quite so ridiculous, as Mr. Johns could have been with his solemn twang at the Baptist chapel in the lowest suburbs, or as a local preacher among the Methodists. In general, people who appeared seriously to believe in any sort of doctrine, whether religious, social, or philosophical, seemed rather absurd to Scintilla. Ten to one these theoretic people pronounced oddly, had some reason or other for saying that the most agreeable things were wrong, wore objectionable clothes, and wanted you to subscribe to something. They were probably ignorant of art and music, did not understand badinage, and, in fact, could talk of nothing amusing. In Scintilla's eyes the majority of persons were ridiculous and de- plorably wanting in that keen perception of what was good taste, with which she herself was blessed by nature and edu- cation ; but the people understood to be religious or otherwise theoretic, were the most ridiculous of all, without being pro- portionately amusing and invitable. Did Mixtus not discover this view of Scintilla's before their marriage? Or did he allow her to remain in ignorance of habits and opinions which had made half the occupation of his youth? When a man is inclined to marry a particular woman, and had made any committal of himself, this woman's opinions, however different from his own, are readily regarded as part of her pretty ways, especially if they are merely negative ; as, for example, that she does not insist on the Trinity or on the rightfulness or expediency of church rates, but simply regards her lover's troubling himself in disputation on these heads as stuff and nonsense. The man feels his own superior strength, and is sure that marriage will make no difference to him on the subjects about which he is in earnest. And to laugh at men's affairs is a woman's privilege, tending to enliven the domestic hearth. If Scintilla had no liking for the best sort of nonconformity, she was without any troublesome bias tow- ard Episcopacy, Anglicanism, and early sacraments, and was quite contented not to go to church. As to Scintilla's acquaintance with her lover's tastes on these subjects, she was equally convinced on her side that a husband's queer ways while he was a bachelor would be easily A HALF-BREED. 81 laughed out of him when he had married an adroit woman. Mixtus, she felt, was an excellent creature, quite likable, who was getting rich ; and Scintilla meant to have all the advan- tages of a rich man's wife. She was not in the least a wicked woman ; she was simply a pretty animal of the ape kind, with an aptitude for certain accomplishments which education had made the most of. But we have seen what has been the result to poor Mixtus. He has become richer even than he dreamed of being, has a little palace in London, and entertains with splendor the half-aristocratic, professional, and artistic society which he is proud to think select. This society regards him as a clever fellow in his particular branch, seeing that he has become a considerable capitalist, and as a man desirable to have on the list of one's acquaintances. But from every other point of view Mixtus finds himself personally submerged: what he happens to think is not felt by his esteemed guests to be of any consequence, and what he used to think with the ardor of conviction he now hardly ever expresses. He is transplanted, and the sap within him has long been diverted into other than the old lines of vigorous growth. How could he speak to the artist Crespi or to Sir Hong Kong Bantam about the enlarged doctrine of Mr. Apollos? How could he mention to them his former efforts toward evangelizing the inhabitants of the X. alleys? And his references to his historical and geographical studies toward a survey of possible markets for English prod- ucts are received with an air of ironical suspicion by many of his political friends, who take his pretension to give advice concerning the Amazon, the Euphrates, and the Niger as equivalent to the currier's wide views on the applicability of leather. He can only make a figure through his genial hospi- tality. It is in vain that he buys the best pictures and statues of the best artists. Nobody will call him a judge in art. If his pictures and statues are well chosen it is generally thought that Scintilla told him what to buy ; and yet Scintilla in other connections is spoken of as having only a superficial and often questionable taste. Mixtus, it is decided, is a good fellow, not ignorant no, really having a good deal of knowledge as well as sense, but not easy to classify otherwise than as a rich 82 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. man. He has consequently become a little uncertain as to his own point of view, and in his most unreserved moments of friendly intercourse, even when speaking to listeners whom he thinks likely to sympathize with the earlier part of his career, he presents himself in all his various aspects and feels himself in turn what he has been, what he is, and what others take him to be (for this last status is what we must all more or less accept). He will recover with some glow of enthusiasm the vision of his old associates, the particular limit he was once accustomed to trace of freedom in religious speculation, and his old ideal of a worthy life; but he will presently pass to the argument that money is the only means by which you can get what is best worth having in the world, and will arrive at the exclamation " Give me money ! " with the tone and gesture of a man who both feels and knows. Then if one of his audi- ence, not having money, remarks that a man may have made up his mind to do without money because he prefers something else, Mixtus is with him immediately, cordially concurring in the supreme value of mind and genius, which indeed make his own chief delight, in that he is able to entertain the admirable possessors of these attributes at his own table, though not himself reckoned among them. Yet, he will proceed to ob- serve, there was a time when he sacrificed his sleep to study, and even now amid the press of business he from time to time thinks of taking up the manuscripts which he hopes some day to complete, and is always increasing his collection of valuable works bearing on his favorite topics. And it is true that he has read much in certain directions, and can remember what he has read ; he knows .the history and theories of coloniza- tion and the social condition of countries that do not at present consume a sufficiently large share of our products and manu- factures. He continues his early habit of regarding the spread of Christianity as a great result of our commercial intercourse with black, brown, and yellow populations ; but this is an idea not spoken of in the sort of fashionable society that Scintilla collects round her husband's table, and Mixtus now philosophi- cally reflects that the cause must come before the effect, and that the thing to be directly striven for is the commercial in- tercourse, not excluding a little war if that also should prove A HALF BREED. 83 needful as a pioneer of Christianity. He has long been wont to feel bashful about his former religion ; as if it were an old attachment having consequences which he did not abandon but kept in decent privacy, his avowed objects and actual position being incompatible with their public acknowledgment. There is the same kind of fluctuation in his aspect toward social questions and duties. He has not lost the kindness that used to make him a benefactor and succorer of the needy, and he is still liberal in helping forward the clever and industrious ; but in his active superintendence of commercial undertakings he has contracted more and more of the bitterness which capi- talists and employers often feel to be a reasonable mood toward obstructive proletaries. Hence many who have occasionally met him when trade questions were being discussed, conclude him to be indistinguishable from the ordinary run of moneyed and money-getting men. Indeed, hardly any of his acquaint- ances know what Mixtus really is, considered as a whole nor does Mixtus himself know it. X. DEBASING THE MORAL CURRENCY. " IL ne f aut pas mettre un ridicule ou il n'y en a point : c'est se giiter le gout, c'est corrompre son jugement et celui des autres. Mais le ridicule qui est quelque part, il faut 1'y voir, Pen tirer avec grace et d'une maniere qui plaise et qui instruise." I am fond of quoting this passage from La Bruyere, because the subject is one where I like to show a Frenchman on my side, to save my sentiments from being set down to my pecul- iar dulness and deficient sense of the ludicrous, and also that they may profit by that enhancement of ideas when presented in a foreign tongue, that glamour of unfamiliarity conferring a dignity on the foreign names of very common things, of which even a philosopher like Dugald Stewart confesses the influ- ence. I remember hearing a fervid woman attempt to recite in English the narrative of a begging Frenchman who described the violent death of his father in the July days. The narra- tive had impressed her, through the mists of her flushed anx- iety to understand it, as something quite grandly pathetic; but finding the facts turn out meagre, and her audience cold, she broke off, saying, " It sounded so much finer in French j'ai vu le sang de mon pere, and so on I wish I could re- peat it in French." . This was a pardonable illusion in an old- fashioned lady who had not received the polyglot education of the present day ; but I observe that even now much nonsense and bad taste win admiring acceptance solely by virtue of the French language, and one may fairly desire that what seems a just discrimination should profit by the fashionable prejudice in favor of La Bruyere's idiom. But I wish he had added that the habit of dragging the ludicrous into topics where the chief interest is of a different or even opposite kind is a sign not of DEBASING THE MORAL CURRENCY. 86 endowment, but of deficiency. The art of spoiling is within reach of the dullest faculty : the coarsest clown with a ham- mer in his hand might chip the nose off every statue and bust in the Vatican, and stand grinning at the effect of his work. Because wit is an exquisite product of high powers, we are not therefore forced to admit the sadly confused inference of the monotoous jester that he is establishing his superiority over every less facetious person, and over every topic on which he is ignorant or insensible, by being uneasy until he has dis- torted it in the small cracked mirror which he carries about with him as a joking apparatus. Some high authority is needed to give many worthy and timid persons the freedom of muscular repose under the growing demand on them to laugh when they have no other reason than the peril of being taken for dullards ; still more to inspire them with the courage to say that they object to the theatrical spoiling for themselves and their children of all affecting themes, all the grander deeds and aims of men, by burlesque associations adapted to the taste of rich fishmongers in the stalls and their assistants in the gal- lery. The English people in the present generation are falsely reputed to know Shakespeare (as, by some innocent persons, the Florentine mule-drivers are believed to have known the Divina Commedia, not, perhaps, excluding all the subtle dis- courses in the Purgatorio and Paradisd) ; but there seems a clear prospect that in the coming generation he will be known to them through burlesques, and that his plays will find a new life as pantomimes. A bottle-nosed Lear will come on with a monstrous corpulence from which he will frantically dance himself free" during the midnight storm; Eosalind and Celia will join in a grotesque ballet with shepherds and shepherd- esses ; Ophelia in fleshings and a voluminous brevity of grena- dine will dance through the mad scene, finishing with the famous " attitude of the scissors " in the arms of Laertes ; and all the speeches in "Hamlet" will be so ingeniously parodied that the originals will be reduced to a mere memoria technica of the improver's puns premonitory signs of a hideous mil- lennium, in which the lion will have to lie down with the las- civious monkeys whom (if we may trust Pliny) his soul natu- rally abhors. 86 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. I have been amazed to find that some artists whose own works have the ideal stamp, are quite insensible to the damag. ing tendency of the burlesquing spirit which ranges to and fro and up and down on the earth, seeing no reason (except a pre- carious censorship) why it should not appropriate every sacred, heroic, and pathetic theme which serves to make up the treas- ure of human admiration, hope, and love. One would have thought that their own half-despairing efforts to invest in worthy outward shape the vague inward impressions of sub- limity, and the consciousness of an implicit ideal in the com- monest scenes, might have made them susceptible of some disgust or alarm at a species of burlesque which is likely to ren- der their compositions no better than a dissolving view, where every noble form is seen melting into its preposterous carica- ture. It used to be imagined of the unhappy mediaeval Jews that they parodied Calvary by crucifying dogs : if they had been guilty they would at least have had the excuse of the hatred and rage begotten by persecution. Are we on the way to a parody which shall have no other excuse than the reckless search after fodder for degraded appetites after the pay to be earned by pasturing Circe's herd where they may defile every monument of that growing life which should have kept them human? The world seems to me well supplied with what is genuinely ridiculous : wit and humor may play as harmlessly or benefi- cently round the changing facets of egoism, absurdity, and vice, as the sunshine over the rippling sea or the dewy mead- ows. Why should we make our delicious sense of the ludi- crous, with its invigorating shocks of laughter and its irrepres- sible smiles which are the outglow of an inward radiation as gentle and cheering as the warmth of morning, flourish like a brigand on the robbery of our mental wealth? or let it take its exercise as a madman might, if allowed a free nightly promenade, by drawing the populace with bonfires which leave some venerable structure a blackened ruin or send a scorching smoke across the portraits of the past, at which we once looked with a loving recognition of fellowship, and disfigure them into butts of mockery? nay, worse use it to degrade the healthy appetites and affections of our nature as they are seen to be DEBASING THE MORAL CURRENCY. 87 degraded in insane patients whose system, all out of joint, finds matter for screaming laughter in mere topsy-turvy, makes every passion preposterous or obscene, and turns the hard-won order of life into a second chaos hideous enough to make one wail that the first was ever thrilled with light? This is what I call debasing the moral currency : lowering the value of every inspiring fact and tradition so that it will command less and less of the spiritual products, the generous motives which sustain the charm and elevation of our social existence the something besides bread by which man saves his soul alive. The bread-winner of the family may demand more and more coppery shillings, or assignats, or greenbacks for his day's work, and so get the needful quantum of food; but let that moral currency be emptied of its value let a greedy buffoonery debase all historic beauty, majesty, and pathos, and the more you heap up the desecrated symbols the greater will be the lack of the ennobling emotions which sub- due the tyranny of suffering, and make am'bition one with social virtue. And yet it seems, parents will put into the hands of their children ridiculous parodies (perhaps with more ridiculous " illustrations " ) of the poems which stirred their own tender- ness or filial piety, and carry them to make their first acquain- tance with great men, great works, or solemn crises through the medium of some miscellaneous burlesque which, with its idiotic puns and farcical attitudes, will remain among their primary associations, and reduce them throughout their time of studious preparation for life to the moral imbecility of an in- ward giggle at what might have stimulated their high emula- tion or fed the fountains of compassion, trust, and constancy. One Avonders where these parents have deposited that stock of morally educating stimuli which is to be independent of poetic tradition, and to subsist in spite of the finest images being de- graded and the finest words of genius being poisoned as with some befooling drug. Will fine wit, will exquisite humor prosper the more through this turning of all things indiscriminately into food for a glut- tonous laughter, an idle craving without sense of flavors? On the contrary. That delightful power which La Bruyere points 88 THEOPHRASTUS SUCtf. to le ridicule qui est quelque part, il faut 1'y voir, 1'en tirer avec grace et d'une maniere qui plaise et qui instruise" de- pends on a discrimination only compatible with the varied sen- sibilities which give sympathetic insight, and with the justice of perception which is another name for grave knowledge. Such a result is uo more to be expected from faculties on the strain to find some small hook by which they may attach the lowest incongruity to the most momentous subject, than it is to be expected of a sharper, watching for gulls in a great po- litical assemblage, that he will notice the blundering logic of partisan speakers, or season his observation with the salt of historical parallels. But after all our psychological teaching, and in the midst of our zeal for education, we are still, most of us, at the stage of believing that mental powers and habits have somehow, not perhaps in the general statement, but in any particular case, a kind of spiritual glaze against conditions which we are continually applying to them. We soak our chil- dren in habits of contempt and exultant gibing, and yet are confident that as Clarissa one day said to me " We can al- ways teach them to be reverent in the right place, you know." And doubtless if she were to take her boys to see a burlesque Socrates, with swollen legs, dying in tke utterance of cockney puns, and were to hang up a sketch of this comic scene among their bedroom prints, she would think this preparation not at all to the prejudice of their emotions on hearing their tutor read that narrative of the Apology which has been consecrated by the reverent gratitude of ages. This is the impoverish- ment that threatens our posterity : a new Famine, a meagre fiend with lewd grin and clumsy hoof, is breathing a moral mildew over the harvest of our human sentiments. These are the most delicate elements of our too easily perishable civiliza- tion. And here again I like to quote a French testimony. Sainte Beuve, referring to a time of insurrectionary disturbance, says : " Rien de plus prompt a baisser que la civilisation dans des crises comme celle-ci ; on perd en trois semaines le resultat de plusieurs siecles. La civilisation, la vie est une chose ap- prise et inventee qu'on le sache bien -, ' Inventas aut qui vitam excoluere per artes. ' Les hommes apres quelques anne"es de paix oublient trop cette verite : ils arrivent a croire que la DEBASING THE MORAL CURRENCY. 89 culture est chose inne"e, qu'elle est la meme chose que la na- ture. La sauvagerie est toujours la a deux pas, et, des qu'on lache pied, elle recommence." We have been severely enough taught (if we were willing to learn) that our civilization, considered as a splendid material fabric, is helplessly in peril without the spiritual police of sentiments or ideal feelings. And it is this invisible police which we had need, as a com- munity, strive to maintain in efficient force. How if a dan- gerous " Swing " were sometimes disguised in a versatile enter- tainer devoted to the amusement of mixed audiences? And I confess that sometimes when I see a certain style of young lady, who checks our tender admiration with rouge and henna and all the blazonry of an extravagant expenditure, with slang and bold brusquerle intended to signify her emancipated view of things, and with cynical mockery which she mistakes for penetration, I am sorely tempted to hiss out " Petroleuse!" It is a small matter to have our palaces set aflame compared with the misery of having our sense of a noble womanhood, which is the inspiration of a purifying shame, the promise of life-penetrating affection, stained and blotted out by images of repulsiveness. These things come not of higher education, but of dull ignorance fostered into pertness by the greedy vulgarity which reverses Peter' s visionary lesson and learns to call all things common and unclean. It comes of debasing the' moral currency. The Tirynthians, according to an ancient story reported by Athenseus, becoming conscious that their, trick of laughter at everything and nothing was making them unfit for the con- duct of serious affairs, appealed to the Delphic oracle for some means of cure. The god prescribed a peculiar form of sacrifice which would be effective if they could carry it through with- out laughing. They did their best ; but the flimsy joke of a boy upset their unaccustomed gravity, and in this way the oracle taught them that even the gods could not prescribe a quick cure for a long vitiatio'n, or give power and dignity to a. people who in a crisis of the public well-being were at the mercy of a poor jest. XT. THE WASP CREDITED WITH THE HONEYCOMB. No man, I imagine, would object more strongly than Eu- phorion to communistic principles in relation to material prop- erty, but with regard to property in ideas he entertains such principles willingly, and is disposed to treat the distinction between Mine and Thine in original authorship as egoistic, narrowing, and low. I have known him, indeed, insist at some expense of erudition on the prior right of an ancient, a mediaeval, or an eighteenth century writer to be credited with a view or statement lately advanced with some show of origi- nality; and this championship seems to imply a nicety of conscience toward the dead. He is evidently unwilling that his neighbors should get more credit than is due to them, and in this way he appears to recognize a certain proprietorship even in spiritual production. But perhaps it is no real incon- sistency that, with regard to many instances of modern origi- nation, it is his habit to talk with a Gallic largeness and refer to the universe : he expatiates on the diffusive nature of intel- lectual products, free and all-embracing as the liberal air ; on the infinitesimal smallness of individual origination compared with the massive inheritance of thought on which every new generation enters ; on that growing preparation for every epoch through which certain ideas or modes of view are said to be in the air, and, still more metaphorically speaking, to be inevita- bly absorbed, so that every one may be excused for not know- ing how he got them. Above all, he insists -on the proper subordination of the irritable self, the mere vehicle of an idea or combination which, being produced by the sum total of the human race, must belong to that multiple entity, from the ac- complished lecturer or popularizer who transmits it, to the remotest generation of Fuegians or Hottentots, however indif- THE WASP CREDITED WITH THE HONEYCOMB. 91 ferent these may be to the superiority of their right above that of the eminently perishable dyspeptic author. One may admit that such considerations carry a profound truth to be even religiously contemplated, and yet object all the more to the mode in which Euphorion seems to apply them. I protest against the use of these majestic conceptions to do the dirty work of unscrupulosity and justify the non- payment of conscious debts which cannot be defined or enforced by the law. Especially since it is observable that the large views as to intellectual property which can apparently reconcile an able person to the use of lately borrowed ideas as if they were his own, when this spoliation is favored by the public darkness, never hinder him from joining in the zealous tribute of recognition and applause to those warriors of Truth whose triumphal arches are seen in the public ways, those conquerors whose battles and " annexations " even the carpenters and bricklayers know by name. Surely the acknowledgment of a mental debt which will not be immediately detected, and may never be asserted, is a case to which the traditional sus- ceptibility to " debts of honor " would be suitably transferred. There is no massive public opinion that can be expected to tell on these relations of thinkers and investigators relations to be thoroughly understood and felt only by those who are inter- ested in the life of ideas and acquainted with their history. To lay false claim to an invention or discovery which lias an immediate market value ; to vamp up a professedly new book of reference by stealing from the pages of one already produced at the cost of much labor and material ; to copy somebody else's poem and send the manuscript to a magazine, or hand it about among friends as an original " effusion " ; to deliver an elegant extract from a known writer as a piece of improvised eloquence: these are the limits within which the dishonest pretence of originality is likely to get hissed or hooted and bring more or less shame on the culprit. It is not necessary to understand the merit of a performance, or even to spell with any comfortable confidence, in order to perceive at once that such pretences are not respectable. But the difference between these vulgar frauds, these devices of ridiculous jays whose ill-secured plumes are seen falling off them as they run, 92 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. and the quiet appropriation of other people's philosophic 01 scientific ideas, can hardly be held to lie in their moral quality unless we take impunity as our criterion. The pitiable jays had no presumption in their favor and foolishly fronted an alert incredulity; but Euphorion, the accomplished theorist, has an audience who expect much of him, and take it as the most natural thing in the world that every unusual view which he presents anonymously should be due solely to his ingenuity. His borrowings are no incongruous feathers awkwardly stuck onj they have an appropriateness which makes them seem an answer to anticipation, like the return phrases of a melody. Certainly one cannot help the ignorant conclusions of polite society, and there are perhaps fashionable persons who, if a speaker has occasion to explain what the occiput is, will con- sider that he has lately discovered that curiously named por- tion of the animal frame : one cannot give a genealogical intro- duction to every long-stored item of fact or conjecture that may happen to be a revelation for the large class of persons who are understood to judge soundly on a small basis of knowl- edge. But Euphorion would be very sorry to have it supposed that he is unacquainted with the history of ideas, and some- times carries even into minutiae the evidence of his exact regis- tration of names in connection with quotable phrases or sug- gestions : I can therefore only explain the apparent infirmity of his memory in cases of larger " conveyance " by supposing that he is accustomed by the very association of largeness to range them at once under those grand laws of the universe in the light of which Mine and Thine disappear and are resolved into Everybody's or Nobody's, and one man's particular obli- gations to another melt untraceably into the obligations of the earth to the solar system in general. Euphorion himself, if a particular omission of acknowledg- ment were brought home to him, would probably take a nar- rower ground of explanation. It was a lapse of memory ; or it did not occur to him as necessary in this case to mention a name, the source being well known or (since this seems usually to act as a strong reason for mention) he rather ab- stained from adducing the name because it might injure the excellent matter advanced, just as an obscure trade-mark casts THE WASP CREDITED WITH THE HONEYCOMB. 93 discredit on a good commodity, and even on the retailer who has furnished himself from a quarter not likely to be esteemed first-rate. No doubt this last is a genuine and frequent rea- son for the non-acknowledgment of indebtedness to what one may call impersonal as well as personal sources: even an American editor of school classics, whose own English could not pass for more than a syntactical shoddy of the cheapest sort, felt it unfavorable to his reputation for sound learning that he should be obliged to the Penny Cyclopaedia, and dis- guised his references to it under contractions in which Us. Knowl. took the place of the low word Penny. Works of this convenient stamp, easily obtained and well nourished with matter, are felt to be like rich but unfashionable relations who are visited and received in privacy, and whose capital is used or inherited without any ostentatious insistence on their names and places of abode. As to memory, it is known that this frail faculty naturally lets drop the facts which are less flattering to our self-love- when it does not retain them care- fully as subjects not to be approached, marshy spots with a warning flag over them. But it is always interesting to bring forward eminent names, such as Patricius or Scaliger, Euler Of Lagrange, Bopp or Humboldt. To know exactly what has been drawn from them is erudition and heightens our own in- fluence, which seems advantageous to mankind; whereas to cite an author whose ideas may pass as higher currency under our own signature can have no object except the contradictory one of throwing the illumination over his figure when it is im- portant to be seen one's self. All these reasons must weigh con- siderably with those speculative persons who have to ask them- selves whether or not Universal Utilitarianism requires that in the particular instance before them they shouldMujure a man who has been of service to them, and rob a fellow-work- man of the credit which is due to him. After all, however, it must be admitted that hardly any accusation is more difficult to prove, and more liable to be false, than that of a plagiarism which is the conscious theft of ideas and deliberate reproduction of them as original. The arguments on the side of acquittal are obvious and strong: the inevitable coincidences of contemporary thinking ; and our 94 THEOPHRASTU8 SUCH. continual experience of finding notions turning up in our minds without any label on them to tell us whence they came, so that if we are in the habit of expecting much from our own capacity we accept them at once as a new inspiration. Then, in rela- tion to the elder authors, there is the difficulty first of learning and then of remembering exactly what has been wrought into the backward tapestry of the world's history, together with the fact that ideas acquired long ago reappear as the sequence of an awakened interest or a line of inquiry which is really new in us, whence it is conceivable that if we were ancients some of us might be offering grateful hecatombs by mistake, and proving our honesty in a ruinously expensive manner. On the other hand, the evidence on which plagiarism is con- cluded is often of a kind which, though much trusted in ques- tions of erudition and historical criticism, is apt to lead us injuriously astray in our daily judgments, especially of the resentful, condemnatory sort. How Pythagoras came by his ideas, whether St. Paul was acquainted with all the Greek poets, what Tacitus must have known by hearsay and syste- matically ignored, are points on which a false persuasion of knowledge is less damaging to, justice and charity than an er- roneous confidence, supported by reasoning fundamentally simi- lar, of my neighbor's blameworthy behavior in a case where I am personally concerned. No premises require closer scrutiny than those which lead to the constantly echoed con- clusion, "He must have known," or "He must have read." I marvel that this facility of belief on the side of knowledge can subsist under the daily demonstration that the easiest of all things to the human mind is not to know and not to read. To praise, to blame, to shout, grin, or hiss, where others shout, grin, or hiss these are native tendencies ; but to know and to read are artificial, hard accomplishments, concerning which the only safe supposition is, that as little of them has been done as the case admits. An author, keenly conscious of having written, can hardly help imagining his condition of lively interest to be shared by others, just as we are all apt to suppose that the chill or heat we are conscious of must be gen- eral, or even to think that our sons and daughters, our pet schemes, and our quarrelling correspondence, are themes to THE WASP CREDITED WITH THE HONEYCOMB. 96 which intelligent persons will listen long without weariness. But if the ardent author happen to be alive to practical teach- ing he will soon learn to divide the larger part of the enlight- ened public into those who have not read him and think it necessary to tell him so when they meet him in polite society, and those who have equally abstained from reading him, but wish to conceal this negation and speak of his " incomparable works" with that trust in testimony which always has its cheering side. Hence it is worse than foolish to entertain silent suspicions of plagiarism, still more to give them voice, when they are founded on a construction of probabilities which a little more attention to every-day occurrences as a guide in reasoning would show us to be really worthless, considered as proof. The "length to which one man's memory can go in letting drop associations that are vital to another can hardly find a limit. It is not to be supposed that a person desirous to make an agreeable impression on you would deliberately choose to insist to you, with some rhetorical sharpness, on an argument which you were the first to elaborate in public ; yet any one who lis- tens may overhear such instances of obliviousness. You natu- rally remember your peculiar connection with your acquaint- ance's judicious views ; but why should he ? Your fatherhood, which is an intense feeling to you, is only an additional fact of meagre interest for him to remember ; and a sense of obliga- tion to the particular living fellow-struggler who has helped us in our thinking, is not yet a form of memory the want of which is felt to be disgraceful or derogatory, unless it is taken to be a want of polite instruction, or causes the missing of a cockade on a day of celebration. In our suspicions of plagiar- ism, we must recognize as the first weighty probability, that what we who feel injured remember best is precisely what is least likely to enter lastingly into the memory of our neigh- bors. But it is fair to maintain that the neighbor who bor- rows your property, loses it for a while, and when it turns up again forgets your connection with it and counts it his own, shows himself so much the feebler in grasp and rectitude of mind. Some absent persons cannot remember the state of wear in their own hats and umbrellas, and have no mental % THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. check to tell them that they have carried home a fellow-visi- tor's more recent purchase: they may be excellent household- ers, far removed from the suspicion of low devices, but one wishes them a more correct perception, and a more wary sense that a neighbor's umbrella may be newer than their own. True, some persons are so constituted that the very excel- lence of an idea seems to them a convincing reason that it must be, if not solely, yet especially theirs. It fits in so beautifully with their general wisdom, it lies implicitly in so many of their manifested opinions, that if they have not yet expressed it (because of preoccupation) it is clearly a part of their indigenous produce, and is proved by their immediate eloquent promulgation of it to belong more naturally and ap- propriately to them than to the person who seemed first to have alighted on it, and who sinks in their all-originating con- sciousness to that low kind of entity, a second cause. This is not lunacy, nor pretence, but a genuine state of mind very effective in practice and often carrying the public with it, so that the poor Columbus is found to be a very faulty adventurer and the continent is named after Amerigo. Lighter examples of this instinctive appropriation are constantly met with among brilliant talkers. Aquila is too agreeable and amusing for any one who is not himself bent on display to be angry at his con- versational rapine his habit of darting down on every morsel of booty that other birds may hold in their beaks, with an in- nocent air as if it were all intended for his use and honestly counted on by him as a tribute in kind. Hardly any man, I imagine, can have had less trouble in gathering a showy stock of information than Aquila. On close inquiry you would probably find that he had not read one epoch-making book of modern times, for he has a career which obliges him to much correspondence and other official work, and he is too fond of being in company to spend his leisure moments in study ; but to his quick eye, ear, and tongue, a few predatory excursions in conversation where there are instructed persons gradually furnish surprisingly clever modes of statement and allusion on the dominant topic. When he first adopts a subject he neces- sarily falls into mistakes, and it is interesting to watch his progress into fuller information and better nourished irony, THE WASP CREDITED WITH THE HONEYCOMB. 9fr without his ever needing to admit that he has made a blunder or to appear conscious of correction. Suppose, for example, he had incautiously founded some ingenious remarks on a hasty reckoning that nine thirteens made a hundred and two, and the insignificant Bantam, hitherto silent, seemed to spoil the flow of ideas by stating that the product could not be taken as less than a hundred and seventeen, Aquila would glide on in the most graceful manner from a repetition of his previous remark to the continuation " All this is on the supposition that a hundred and two were all 7 that could be got out of nine thirteens ; but as all the world knows that nine thirteens will yield," etc. proceeding straightway into a new train of inge- nious consequences, and causing Bantam to be regarded by all present as one of those slow persons who take irony for igno- rance, and who would warn the weasel to keep awake. How should a small-eyed, feebly crowing mortal like him be quick- er in arithmetic than the keen -faced forcible Aquila, in whom universal knowledge is easily credible? Looked into closely, the conclusion from a man's profile, voice, and fluency to his certainty in multiplication beyond the twelves, seems to show a confused notion of the way in which very common things are connected; but it is on such false correlations that men found half their inferences about each other, and high places of trust may sometimes be held on no better foundation. It is a commonplace that words, writings, measures, and performances in general, have qualities assigned them not by a direct judgment on the performances themselves, but by a presumption of what they are likely to be, considering who is the performer. We all notice in our neighbors this reference to names as guides in criticism, and all furnish illustrations of it in our own practice; for, check ourselves as we will, the first impression from any sort of work must depend on a pre- vious attitude of mind, and this will constantly be determined by the influences of a name. But that our prior confidence or want of confidence in given names is made up of judgments just as hollow as the consequent praise or blame they are ta-' ken to warrant, is less commonly perceived, though there is a conspicuous indication of it in the surprise or disappointment often manifested in the disclosure of an authorship about T 98 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. which everybody has been making wrong guesses. No doubt if it had been discovered who wrote the " Vestiges, " many an ingenious structure of probabilities would have been spoiled, and some disgust might have been felt for a real author who made comparatively so shabby an appearance of likelihood. It is this foolish trust in prepossessions, founded on spurious evidence, which makes a medium of encouragement for those who, happening to have the ear of the public, give other people's ideas the advantage of appearing under their own well-received name, while any remonstrance from the real pro- ducer becomes an unwelcome disturbance of complacency with each person who has paid complimentary tributes in the wrong place. Hardly any kind of false reasoning is more ludicrous than this on the probabilities of origination. It would be amusing to catechise the guessers as to their exact reasons for thinking their guess " likely " : why Hoopoe of John's has fixed on Toucan of Magdalen ; why Shrike attributes its peculiar style to Buzzard, who has not hitherto been known as a writer; why the fair Columba thinks it must belong to the reverend Merula ; and why they are all alike disturbed in their previous judgment of its value by finding that it really came from Skunk, whom they had either not thought of at all, or thought of as belonging to a species excluded by the nature of the case. Clearly they were all wrong in their notion of the specific con- ditions, which lay unexpectedly in the small Skunk, and in him alone in spite of his education nobody knows where, in spite of somebody's knowing his uncles and cousins, and in spite of nobody's knowing that he was cleverer than they thought him. Such guesses remind one of a fabulist's imaginary council of animals assembled to consider what sort of creature had con- structed a honeycomb found and much tasted by Bruin and other epicures. The speakers all started from the probability that the maker was a bird, because this was the quarter from which a wondrous nest might be expected ; for the animals at that time, knowing little of their own history, would have re- jected as inconceivable the notion that a nest could be made by a fish ; and as to the insects, they were not willingly received THE WASP CREDITED WITH THE HONEYCOMB. 99 in society and their ways were little known. Several compli- mentary presumptions were expressed that the honeycomb was due to one or the other admired and popular bird, and there was much fluttering on the part of the Nightingale and Swal- low, neither of whom gave a positive denial, their confusion perhaps extending to their sense of identity; but the Owl hissed at this folly, arguing from his particular knowledge that the animal which produced honey must be the Musk-rat, the wondrous nature of whose secretions required no proof; and, in^the powerful logical procedure of the Owl, from musk to honey was but a step. Some disturbance arose hereupon, for the Musk-rat began to make himself obtrusive, believing in the Owl's opinion of his powers, and feeling that he could have produced the honey if he had thought of it; until an experimental Butcher-bird proposed to anatomize him as a help to decision. The hubbub increased, the opponents of the Musk-rat inquiring who his ancestors were ; until a diversion was created by an able discourse of the Macaw on structures generally, which he classified so as to include the honeycomb, entering into so much admirable exposition that there was a prevalent sense of the honeycomb having probably been pro- duced by one who understood it so well. But Bruin, who had probably eaten too much to listen with edification, grumbled in his low kind of language, that " Fine words butter no pars- nips, " by which he meant to say that there was no new honey forthcoming. Perhaps the audience generally was beginning to tire, when the Fox entered with his snout dreadfully swollen, and report- ed that the beneficent originator in question was the Wasp, which he had found much smeared with undoubted honey, having applied his nose to it whence indeed the able insect, perhaps justifiably irritated at what might seem a sign of scep- ticism, had stung him with some severity, an infliction Rey- nard could hardly regret, since the swelling of a snout nor- mally so delicate would corroborate his statement and satisfy the assembly that he had really found the honey-creating genius. The Fox's admitted acuteness, combined with the visible swelling, were taken as undeniable evidence, and the revela- tion undoubtedly met a general desire for information on a 100 THEOPHRA.STTJS SUCH. point of interest. Nevertheless, there was a murmur the re- verse of delighted, and the feelings of some eminent animals were too strong for them : the Orang-outang's jaw dropped so as seriously to impair the vigor of his expression, the edifying Pelican screamed and flapped her wings, the Owl hissed again, the Macaw became loudly incoherent, and the Gibbon gave his hysterical laugh ; while the Hyena, after indulging in a more splenetic guffaw, agitated the question whether it would not be better to hush up the whole affair, instead of giving public recognition to an insect whose produce, it was now plain, had been much over-estimated. But this narrow-spirited motion was negatived by the sweet-toothed majority. A compliment- ary deputation to the Wasp was resolved on, and there was a confident hope that this diplomatic measure would tell on the production of honey. XII. " SO YOUNG ! " GANYMEDE was once a girlishly handsome, precocious youth. That one cannot for any considerable number of years go on being youthful, girlishly handsome, and precocious, seems on consideration to be a statement as worthy of credit as the famous syllogistic conclusion, "Socrates was mortal." But many circumstances have conspired to keep up in Ganymede the illusion that he is surprisingly young. He was the last born of his family, and from his earliest memory was accus- tomed to be commended as such to the care of his elder broth- ers and sisters: he heard his mother speak of him as her youngest darling with a loving pathos in her tone, which natu- rally suffused his own views of himself, and gave him the habitual consciousness of being at once very young and very interesting. Then, the disclosure of his tender years was a constant matter of astonishment to strangers who had had proof of his precocious talents, and the astonishment extended to what is called the world at large when he produced " A Com- parative Estimate of European Nations " before he was well out of his teens. All comers, on a first interview, told him that he was marvellously young, and some repeated the state- ment each time they saw him ; all critics who wrote about him called attention to the same ground for wonder : his deficien- cies and excesses were alike to be accounted for by the flatter- ing fact of his youth, and his youth was the golden back- ground which set off his many-hued endowments. Here was already enough to establish a strong association between his sense of identity and his sense of being unusually young. But after this he devised and founded an ingenious organization for consolidating the literary interests of all the four continents (subsequently including Australasia and Polynesia), he him- 102 THEOPHKASTUS SUCH. self presiding in the central office, which thus became a new theatre for the constantly repeated situation of an astonished stranger in the presence of a boldly scheming administrator found to be remarkably young. If we imagine with due char- ity the effect on Ganymede, we shall think it greatly to his credit that he continued to feel, the necessity of being some- thing more than young, and did not sink by rapid degrees into a parallel of that melancholy object, a superannuated youthful phenomenon. Happily he had enough of valid, active faculty to save him from that tragic fate. He had not exhausted his fountain of eloquent opinion in his "Comparative Estimate," so as to feel himself like some other juvenile celebrities, the sad survivor of his own manifest destiny, or like one who has risen too early in the morning, and finds all the solid day turned into a fatigued afternoon. He has continued to be productive both of schemes and writings, being perhaps helped by the fact that his " Comparative Estimate " did not greatly affect the currents of European thought, and left him with the stimulating hope that he had not done his best, but might yet produce what would make his youth more surprising than ever. I saw something of him through his Antinoiis period, the time of rich chestnut locks, parted not by a visible white line, but by a shadowed furrow from which they fell in massive ripples to right and left. In these slim days he looked the younger for being rather below the middle size, and though at last one perceived him contracting an indefinable air of self- consciousness, a slight exaggeration of the facial movements, the attitudes, the little tricks, and the romance in shirt-collars, which must be expected from one who, in spite of his knowl- edge, was so exceedingly young, it was impossible to say that he was making any great mistake about himself. He was only undergoing one' form of a common moral disease : being strongly mirrored for himself in the remark of others, he was getting to see his real characteristics as a dramatic part, a type to which his doings were always in correspondence. Owing to my absence on travel and to other causes I had lost sight of him for several years, but such a separation between two who have not missed each other seems in this busy century only a "80 YOUNG!" 103 pleasant reason, when they happen to meet again in some old accustomed haunt, for the one who has stayed at home to be more communicative about himself than he can well be to those who have all along been in his neighborhood. He had married in the interval, and as if to keep up his surprising youthful- ness in all relations, he had taken a wife considerably older than himself. It would probably have seemed to him a dis- turbing inversion of the natural order that any one very near to him should have been younger than he, except his own chil- dren who, however young, would not necessarily hinder the normal surprise at the youthfulness of their father. And if my glance had revealed my impression on first seeing him again, he might have received a rather disagreeable shock, which was far from my intention. My mind, having retained a very exact image of his former appearance, took note of un- mistakable changes such as a painter would certainly not have made by way of flattering his subject. He had lost his slim- ness, and that curved solidity which might have adorned a taller man was a rather sarcastic threat to his short figure. The English branch of the Teutonic race does not produce many fat youths, and I have even heard an American lady say that she was much " disappointed " at the moderate number and size of our fat men, considering their reputation in the United States ; hence a stranger would now have been apt to remark that Ganymede was unusually plump for a distin- guished writer, rather than unusually young. But how was he to know this? Many long-standing prepossessions are as hard to be corrected as a long-standing mispronunciation, against which the direct experience of eye and ear is often powerless. And I could perceive that Ganymede's inwrought sense of his surprising youthfulness had been stronger than the superficial reckoning of his years and the merely optical phe- nomena of the looking-glass. He now held a post under Gov- ernment, and not only saw, like most subordinate function- aries, how ill everything was managed, but also what were the changes that a high constructive ability would dictate; and in mentioning to me his own speeches and other efforts toward propagating reformatory views in his department, he concluded by changing his tone to a sentimental head voice and saving 104 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. "But I am so young; people object to any prominence on my part ; I can only get myself heard anonymously, and when some attention has been drawn the name is sure to creep out. The writer is known to be young, and things are none the for- warder." " Well, " said I, " youth seems the only drawback that is sure to diminish. You and I have seven years less of it than when we last met. " "Ah?" returned Ganymede, as lightly as possible, at the same time casting an observant glance over me, as if he were marking the effect of seven years on a person who had prob- ably begun life with an old look, and even as an infant had given his countenance to that significant doctrine, the trans- migration of ancient souls into modern bodies. I left him on that occasion without any melancholy forecast that his illusion would be suddenly or painfully broken up. I saw that he was well victualled and defended against a ten years' siege from ruthless facts ; and in the course of time ob- servation convinced me that his resistance received consider- able aid from without. Each of his written productions, as it came out, was still commented on as the work of a very young man. One critic, finding that he wanted solidity, charitably referred to his youth as an excuse. Another, dazzled by his brilliancy, seemed to regard his youth as so wondrous that all authors appeared decrepit by comparison, and their style such as might be looked for from gentlemen of the old school. Able pens (according to a familiar metaphor) appeared to shake their heads good-humoredly, implying that Ganymede's cru- dities were pardonable in one so exceedingly young. Such unanimity amid diversity, which a distant posterity might take for evidence that on the point of age at least there could have been no mistake, was not really more difficult to account for than the prevalence of cotton in our fabrics. Ganymede had been first introduced into the writing world as remarkably young, and it was no exceptional consequence that the first deposit of information about him held its ground against facts which, however open to observation, were not necessarily thought of. It is not so easy, with our rates and taxes and need for economy in all directions, to cast away an epithet or "80 YOUNG!" 105 remark that turns up cheaply, and to go in expensive search after more genuine substitutes. There is high Homeric prec- edent for keeping fast hold of an epithet under all changes of circumstance, and so the precocious author of the " Com- parative Estimate " heard the echoes repeating " Young Gany- mede " when an illiterate beholder at a railway station would have given him forty years at least. Besides, important elders, sachems of the clubs and public meetings, had a genuine opinion of him as young enough to be checked for speech on subjects which they had spoken mistakenly about when he was in his cradle; and then, the midway parting of his crisp hair, not common among English committee-men, formed a presump- tion against the ripeness of his judgment which nothing but a speedy baldness could have removed. It is but fair to mention all these outward confirmations of Ganymede's illusion, which shows no signs of leaving him. It is true that he no longer hears expressions of surprise at his youthf ulness, on a first introduction to an admiring reader ; but this sort of external evidence has becomo an unnecessary crutch to his habitual inward persuasion. His manners, his costume, his suppositions of the impression he makes on others, have all their former correspondence with the dramatic part of the young genius. As to the incongruity of his contour and other little accidents of physique, he is probably no more aware that they will affect others as incongruities than Ar- mida is conscious how much her rouge provokes our notice of her wrinkles, and causes us to mention sarcastically that motherly age which we should otherwise regard with affection- ate reverence. But let us be just enough to admit that there may be old- young coxcombs as well as old-young coquettes. XIII. HOW WE COME TO GIVE OURSELVES FALSE TES- TIMONIALS, AND BELIEVE IN THEM. IT is my way when I observe any instance of folly, any queer habit, any absurd illusion, straightway to look for some- thing of the same type in myself, feeling sure that amid all differences there will be a certain correspondence; just as there is more or less correspondence in the natural history even of continents widely apart, and of islands in opposite zones. No doubt men's minds differ in what we may call their climate or share of solar energy, and a feeling or tendency which is comparable to a panther in one may have no more imposing aspect than that of a weasel in another : some are like a tropical habitat in which the very ferns cast a mighty shadow, and the grasses are a dry ocean in which a hunter may be submerged : others like the chilly latitudes in which your forest-tree, fit elsewhere to prop a mine, is a pretty min- iature suitable for fancy potting. The eccentric man might be typified by the Australian fauna, refuting half our judi- cious assumptions of what nature allows. Still, whether fate commanded us to thatch our persons among the Eskimos or to choose the latest thing in tattooing among the Polynesian isles, our precious guide Comparison would teach us in the first place by likeness, and our clew to further knowledge would be resemblance to what we already know. Hence, having a keen interest in the natural history of my inward self, I pursue this plan I have mentioned of using my observation as a clew or lantern by which I detect small herbage or lurking life; or I take my neighbor in his least becoming tricks or efforts as an opportunity for luminous deduction concerning the figure the human genus makes in the specimen which I myself furnish. Introspection which starts with the purpose of finding out SOW WE GIVE FALSE TESTIMONIALS. 107 one's own absurdities is not likely to be very mischievous, yet of course it is not free from dangers any more than breathing is, or the other functions that keep us alive and active. To judge of others by one's self is in its most innocent meaning the briefest expression for our only method of knowing man- kind ; yet, we perceive, it has come to mean in many cases eith- er the vulgar mistake which reduces every man's value to the very low figure at which the valuer himself happens to stand ; or else, the amiable illusion of the higher nature misled by a too generous construction of the lower. One cannot give a recipe for wise judgment : it resembles appropriate muscular action, which is attained by the myriad lessons in nicety of balance and of aim that only practice can give. The danger of the inverse procedure, judging of self by what one observes in others, if it is carried on with much impartiality and keen- ness of discernment, is that it has a laming effect, enfeebling the energies of indignation and scorn, which are the proper scourges of wrong-doing and meanness, and which should con- tinually feed the wholesome restraining power of public opin- ion. I respect the horsewhip 1 when applied to the back of Cruelty, and think that he who applies it is a more perfect human being because his outleap of indignation is not checked by a too curious reflection on the nature of guilt a more per- fect human being because he more completely incorporates the best social life of the race, which can never be constituted by ideas that nullify action. This is the essence of Dante's sen- timent (it is painful to think that he applies it very cruelly) "E cortesia fu, lui esser villano" ' and it is undeniable that a too intense consciousness of one's kinship with all frailties and vices undermines the active heroism which battles against wrong. But certainly nature has taken care that this danger should not at present be very threatening. One could not fairly de- scribe the generality of one's neighbors as too lucidly aware of manifesting in their own persons the weaknesses which they observe in the rest of her Majesty's subjects; on the contrary, 1 Inferno xxxiii. 150. 108 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. a hasty conclusion as to schemes of Providence might lead to the supposition that one man was intended to correct another by being most intolerant of the ugly quality or trick which he himself possesses. Doubtless philosophers will be able to explain how it must necessarily be so, but pending the full extension of the a priori method, which will show that only blockheads could expect anything to be otherwise, it does seem surprising that Heloisa should be disgusted at Laura's attempts to disguise her age, attempts which she recognizes so thorough- ly because they enter into her own practice ; that Semper, who often responds at public dinners and proposes resolutions on platforms, though he has a trying gestation of every speech and a bad time for himself and others at every delivery, should yet remark pitilessly on the folly of precisely the same course of action in Ubique ; that Aliquis, who lets no attack on him- self pass unnoticed, and for every handful of gravel against his windows sends a stone in reply, should deplore the ill-advised retorts of Quispiam, who does not perceive that to show one- self angry with an adversary is to gratify him. To be un- aware of our own little tricks, of manner or our own mental blemishes and excesses is a comprehensible unconsciousness ; the puzzling fact is that people should apparently take no ac- count of their deliberate actions, and should expect them to be equally ignored by others. It is an inversion of the accepted order : there it is the phrases that are official and the conduct or privately manifested sentiment that is taken to be real; here it seems that the practice is taken to be official and en- tirely nullified by the verbal representation which contradicts it. The thief making a vow to heaven of full restitution and whispering some reservations, expecting to cheat Omniscience by an "aside," is hardly more ludicrous than the many ladies and gentlemen who have more belief, and expect others to have it, in their own statement about their habitual doings than in the contradictory fact which is patent in the daylight. One reason of the absurdity is that we are led by a tradition about ourselves, so that long after a man has practically de- parted from a rule or principle, he continues innocently to state it as a true description of his practice just as he has a long tradition that he is not an old gentleman, and is startled when HOW WE GIVE FALSE TESTIMONIALS. 109 he is seventy at overhearing himself called by an epithet which he has only applied to others. " A person with your tendency of constitution should take as little sugar as possible, " said Pilulus to Bovis somewhere in the darker decades of this century. " It has made a great difference to Avis since he took my advice in that matter : he used to consume half a pound a day." " God bless me ! " cries Bovis. " I take very little sugar myself." " Twenty-six large lumps every day of your life, Mr. Bovis, " says his wife. " No such thing ! " exclaims Bovis. " You drop them into your tea, coffee, and whiskey your- self, my dear, and I count them." "Nonsense!" laughs Bovis, turning to Pilulus, that they may exchange a glance of mutual amusement at a woman' s in- accuracy. But she happened to be right. Bovis had never said in- wardly that he would take a large allowance of sugar, and he had the tradition about himself that he was a man of the most moderate habits ; hence, with this conviction, he was naturally disgusted at the saccharine excesses of Avis. I have sometimes .thought that this facility of men in believ- ing that they are still what they once meant to be this undis- turbed appropriation of a traditional character which is often but a melancholy relic of early resolutions, like the worn and soiled testimonial to soberness and honesty carried in the pocket of a tippler whom the need of a dram has driven into peculation may sometimes diminish the turpitude of what seems a flat, barefaced falsehood. It is notorious that a man may go on uttering false assertions about his own acts till he at last believes in them : is it not possible that sometimes in the very first utterance there may be a shade of creed-reciting belief, a reproduction of a traditional self which is clung to against all evidence? There is no knowing all the disguises of the lying serpent. When we come to examine in detail what is the sane mind in the sane body, the final test of completeness seems to be a security of distinction between what we have professed and 110 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. what we have done ; what we have aimed at and what we have achieved ; what we have invented and what we have wit- nessed or had evidenced to us; what we think and feel in the present and what we thought and felt in the past. I know that there is a common prejudice which regards the habitual confusion of now and then, of it was and it is, of it seemed so and I should like it to be so, as a mark of high imag- inative endowment, while the power of precise statement and description is rated lower, as the attitude of an every -day pro- saic mind. High imagination is often assigned or claimed as if it were a ready activity in fabricating extravagances such as are presented by fevered dreams, or as if its possessors were in that state of inability to give credible testimony which would warrant their exclusion from the class of acceptable witnesses in a court of justice; so that a creative genius might fairly be subjected to the disability which some laws have stamped on dicers, slaves, and other classes whose position was held perverting to their sense of social responsibility. This endowment of mental confusion is often boasted of by persons whose imaginativeness would not otherwise be known, unless it were by the slow process of detecting that their de- scriptions and narratives were not to be trusted. Callista is always ready to testify of herself that she is an imaginative person, and sometimes adds in illustration, that if she had taken a walk and seen an old heap of stones on her way, the account she would give on returning would include many pleas- ing particulars of her own invention, transforming the simple heap into an interesting castellated ruin. This creative free- dom is all very well in the right place, but before I can grant it to be a sign of unusual mental power, I must inquire wheth- er, on being requested to give a precise description of what she saw, she would be able to cast aside her arbitrary combi- nations and recover the objects she really perceived so as to make them recognizable by another person who passed the same way. Otherwise her glorifying imagination is not an addition to the fundamental power of strong, discerning per- ception, but a cheaper substitute. And, in fact, I find on lis- tening to Callista' s conversation, that she has a very lax con- ception even of common objects, and an equally lax memory HOW WE GIVE FALSE TESTIMONIALS. HI of events. It seems of no consequence to her whether she shall say that a stone is overgrown with moss or with lichen, that a building is of sandstone or of granite, that Meliboeus once forgot to put on his cravat or that he always appears without it ; that everybody says so, or that one stock-broker's wife said so yesterday ; that Philemon praised Euphemia up to the skies, or that he denied knowing any particular evil of her. She is one of those respectable witnesses who would testify to the exact moment of an apparition, because any de- sirable moment will be as exact as another to her remembrance ; or who would be the most worthy to witness the action of spirits on slates and tables because the action of limbs would not probably arrest her attention. She would describe the surprising phenomena exhibited by the powerful Medium with the same freedom that she vaunted in relation to the old heap of stones. Her supposed imaginativeness is simply a very usual lack of discriminating perception, accompanied with a less usual activity of misrepresentation, which, if it had been a little more intense, or had been stimulated by circumstance, might have made her a profuse writer unchecked by the troub- lesome need of veracity. These characteristics are the very opposite of such as yield a fine imagination, which is always based on a keen vision, a keen consciousness of what is, and carries the store of definite knowledge as material for the construction of its inward visions. "Witness Dante, who is at once the most precise and homely in his reproduction of actual objects, and the most soaringly at large in his imaginative combinations. On a much lower level we distinguish the hyperbole and rapid development in descriptions of persons and events which are lit up by hu- morous intention in the speaker we distinguish this charm- ing play of intelligence which resembles musical improvisation on a given motive, where the farthest sweep of curve is looped into relevancy by an instinctive method, from the florid inaccuracy or helpless exaggeration which is really something commoner than the correct simplicity often depreciated as prosaic. Even if high imagination were to be identified with illusion, there would be the same sort of difference between the im- 112 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. perial wealth of illusion which is informed by industrious sub- missive observation and the trumpery stage-property illusion which depends on the ill-defined impressions gathered by capricious inclination, as there is between a good and a bad picture of the Last Judgment. In both these the subject is a combination never actually witnessed, and in the good picture the general combiDation may be of surpassing boldness; but on examination it is seen that the separate elements have been closely studied from real objects. And even where we find the charm of ideal elevation with wrong drawing and fantastic color, the charm is dependent on the selective sensibility of the painter to certain real delicacies of form which confer the expression he longed to render ; for apart from this basis of an effect perceived in common, there could be no conveyance of aesthetic meaning by the painter to the beholder. In this sense it is as true to say of Fra Angelico's Coronation of the Virgin, that it has a strain of reality, as to say so of a portrait by Eembrandt, which also has its strain of ideal elevation due to Rembrandt's virile selective sensibility. To correct such self -flatterers as Callista, it is worth repeat- ing that powerful imagination is not false outward vision, but intense inward representation, and a creative energy con- stantly fed by susceptibility to the veriest minutiae of experi- ence, which it reproduces and constructs in fresh and fresh wholes ; not the habitual confusion of provable fact with the fictions of fancy and transient inclination, but a breadth of ideal association which informs every material object, every incidental fact with far-reaching memories and stored residues of passion, bringing into new light the less obvious relations of human existence. The illusion to which it is liable is not that of habitually taking duckponds for lilied pools, but of being more or less transiently and in varying degrees so ab- sorbed in ideal vision as to lose the consciousness of sur- rounding objects or occurrences; and when that rapt condition is past, the sane genius discriminates clearly between what has been given in this parenthetic state of excitement, and what he has known, and may count on, in the ordinary world of experience. Dante seems to have expressed these condi- tions perfectly in that passage of the Purgatbrio where, after HOW WE GIVE FALSE TESTIMONIALS. 113 a triple vision which has made him forget his surroundings, he says "Quando 1'anima mia toni6 di fuori Alle cose che son fuor di lei vere, lo riconobbi i miei non falsi errori." (c. xv.) He distinguishes the ideal truth of his entranced vision from the series of external facts to which his consciousness had re- turned. Isaiah gives us the date of his vision in the Temple "the year that King Uzziah died" and if afterward the mighty-winged seraphim were present with him as he trod the street, he doubtless knew them for images of memory, and did not cry " Look ! " to the passers-by. Certainly the seer, whether prophet, philosopher, scientific discoverer, or poet, may happen to be rather mad : his powers may have been used up, like Don Quixote's, in their visionary or theoretic constructions, so that the reports of common sense fail to affect him, or the continuous strain of excitement may have robbed his mind of its elasticity. It is hard for our frail mortality to carry the burden of greatness with steady gait and full alacrity of perception. But he is the strongest seer who can support the stress of creative energy and yet keep that sanity of expectation which consists in dis- tinguishing, as Dante does, between the cose che son vere out- side the individual mind, and the non falsi errori which are the revelations of true imaginative power. 8 XIV. THE TOO READY WRITER. ONE who talks too much, hindering the rest of the company from taking their turn, and apparently seeing no reason why they should not rather desire to know his opinion or experi- ence in relation to all subjects, or at least to renounce the dis- cussion of any topic where he can make no figure, has never been praised for this industrious monopoly of work which others would willingly have shared in. However various and brilliant his talk may be, we suspect him of impoverishing us by excluding the contributions of other minds, which attract our curiosity the more because he has shut them up in silence. Besides, -we get tired of a " manner " in conversation as in painting, when one theme after another is treated with the same lines and touches. I begin with a liking for an estima- ble master, but by the time he has stretched his interpretation of the world unbrokenly along a palatial gallery, I have had what the cautious Scotch mind would call " enough " of him. There is monotony and narrowness already to spare in my own identity; what comes to me from without should be larger and more impartial than the judgment of any single in- terpreter. On this ground even a modest person, without power or will to shine in the conversation, may easily find the predominating talker a nuisance, while those who are full of matter on special topics are continually detecting miserably thin places in the web of that information which he will not desist from imparting. Nobody that I know of ever proposed a testimonial to a man for thus volunteering the whole expense of the conversation. Why is there a different standard of judgment with regard to a writer who plays much the same part in literature as the excessive talker plays in what is traditionally called conversa,- THE TOO READY WRITER. 115 tion? The busy Adrastus, whose professional engagements might seem more than enough for the nervous energy of one man, and who yet finds time to print essays on the chief cur- rent subjects, from the tri-lingual inscriptions, or the Idea of the Infinite among the prehistoric Lapps, to the Colorado beetle and the grape disease in the south of France, is gen- erally praised if not admired for the breadth of his mental range and his gigantic powers of work. Poor Theron, who has some original ideas on a subject to which he has given years of research and meditation, has been waiting anxiously from month to month to see whether his condensed exposition will find a place in the next advertised programme, but sees it, on the contrary, regularly excluded, and twice the space he asked for filled with the copious brew of Adrastus, whose name carries custom like a celebrated trademark. Why should the eager haste to tell what he thinks on the shortest no- tice, as if his opinion were a needed preliminary to discus- sion, get a man the reputation of being a conceited bore in conversation, when nobody blames the same tendency if it shows itself in print? The excessive talker can only be in one gathering at a time, and there is the comfort of thinking that everywhere else other fellow-citizens who have something to say may get a chance of delivering themselves; but the ex- orbitant writer can occupy space and spread over it the more or less agreeable flavor of his mind in four " mediums " at once, and on subjects taken from the four winds. Such rest- less and versatile occupants of literary space and time should have lived earlier when the world wanted summaries of all extant knowledge, and this knowledge being small, there was the more room for commentary and conjecture. They might have played the part of an Isidor of Seville or a Vincent of Beauvais brilliantly, and the willingness to write everything themselves would have been strictly in place. In the present day, the busy retailer of other people's knowledge which he has spoiled in the handling, the restless guesser and commen- tator, the importunate hawker of undesirable superfluities, the everlasting word-compeller who rises early in the morning to praise what the world has already glorified, or makes himself haggard at night in writing out his dissent from what nobody 116 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. ever believed, is not simply "gratis anhelans, multa agendo nihil agens" lie is an obstruction. Like an incompetent architect with too much interest at his back, he obtrudes his ill-considered work where place ought to have been left to better men. Is it out of the question that we should entertain some scruple about mixing our own flavor, as of the too cheap and insistent nutmeg, with that of every great writer and every great subject? especially when our flavor is all we have to giv e e, the matter or knowledge having been already given by somebody else. What if we were only like the Spanish wine- skins which impress the innocent stranger with the notion that the Spanish grape has naturally a taste of leather? One could wish that even the greatest minds should leave some themes unhandled, or at least leave us no more than a para- graph or two on them to show how well they did in not being more lengthy. Such entertainment of scruple can hardly be expected from the young ; but happily their readiness to mirror the universe anew for the rest of mankind is not encouraged by easy pub- licity. In the vivacious Pepin I have often seen the image of my early youth, when it seemed to me astonishing that the philosophers had left so many difficulties unsolved, and that so many great themes had raised no great poet to treat them. I had an elated sense that I should find my brain full of theo- retic clews when I look';l for them, and that wherever a poet had not done what I expected, it was for want of my insight. Not knowing what had been said about the play of Romeo and Juliet, I felt myself capable of writing something orig- inal on its blemishes and beauties. In relation to all subjects I had a joyous consciousness of that ability which is prior to knowledge, and of only needing to apply myself in order to master any task to conciliate philosophers whose systems were at present but dimly known to me, to estimate foreign poets whom I had not yet read, to show up mistakes in an historical monograph that roused my interest in an epoch which I had been hitherto ignorant of, when I should once have had time to verify my views of probability by looking into an encyclopaedia. So Pepin ; save only that he is indus- THE TOO READY WRITER. 117 trious while I was idle. Like the astronomer in Rasselas, I swayed the universe in niy consciousness without making any difference outside me; whereas Pepin, while feeling himself powerful with the stars in their courses, really raises some dust here below. He is no longer in his spring-tide, but hav- ing been always busy he has been obliged to use his first impressions as if they were deliberate opinions, and to range himself on the corresponding side in ignorance of much that he commits himself to ; so that he retains some characteristics of a comparatively tender age, and among them a certain sur- prise that there have not been more persons equal to himself. Perhaps it is unfortunate for him that he early gained a hear- ing, or at least a place in print, and was thus encouraged in acquiring a fixed habit of writing, to the exclusion of any other bread-winning pursuit. He is already to be classed as a "general writer," corresponding to the comprehensive wants of the " general reader, " and with this industry on his hands it is not enough for him to keep up the ingenuous self-reliance of youth : he finds himself under an obligation to be skilled in various methods of seeming to know ; and having habitually expressed himself before he was convinced, his interest in all subjects is chiefly to ascertain that he has not made a mistake, and to feel his infallibility confirmed. That impulse to de- cide, that vague sense of being able to achieve the unattempted, that dream of aerial unlimited movement at will without feet or wings, which were once but the joyous mounting of young sap, are already taking shape as unalterable woody fibre: the impulse has hardened into "style," and into a pattern of per- emptory sentences; the sense of ability in the presence of other men's failures is turning into the official arrogance of one who habitually issues directions which he has never himself been called on to execute ; the dreamy buoyancy of the strip- ling has taken on a fatal sort of reality in written pretensions which carry consequences. He is on the way to become like the loud-buzzing, bouncing Bombus who combines conceited illusions enough to supply several patients in a lunatic asylum with the freedom to show himself at large in various forms of print. If one who takes himself for the telegraphic centre of all American wires is to be confined as unfit to transact affairs, 118 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. what shall we say to the man who believes himself in posses- sion of the unexpressed motives and designs dwelling in the breasts of all sovereigns and all politicians? And I grieve to think that poor Pepin, though less political, may by and by manifest a persuasion hardly more sane, for he is beginning to explain people's writing by what he does not know about them. Yet he was once at the comparatively innocent stage which I have confessed to be that of my own early astonish- ment at my powerful originality ; and copying the just humil- ity of the old Puritan, I may say, " But for the grace of dis- couragement, this coxcombry might have been mine." Pepin made for himself a necessity of writing (and getting printed) before he had considered whether he had the knowl- edge or belief that would furnish eligible matter. At first perhaps the necessity galled him a little, but it is now as easily borne, nay, is as irrepressible a habit as the outpouring of in- considerate talk. He is gradually being condemned to have no genuine impressions, no direct consciousness of enjoyment or the reverse from the quality of what is before him ; his per- ceptions are continually arranging themselves in forms suitable to a printed judgment, and hence they will often turn out to be as much to the purpose if they are written without any direct contemplation of the object, and are guided by a few external conditions which serve to classify it for him. In this way he is irrevocably losing the faculty of accurate mental vision : having bound himself to express judgments which will satisfy some other demands than that of veracity, he has blunted his perceptions by continual preoccupation. We can- not command veracity at will : the power of seeing and report- ing truly is a form of health that has to be delicately guarded, and as an ancient Rabbi has solemnly said, " The penalty of untruth is untruth." But Pepin is only a mild example of the fact that incessant writing with a view to printing carries internal consequences which have often the nature of disease. And however unpractical it may be held to consider whether we have anything to print which it is good for the world to read, or which has not been better said before, it will perhaps be allowed to be worth considering what effect the printing may have on ourselves. Clearly there is a sort of writing THE TOO READY WRITER. 110 which helps to keep the writer in a ridiculously contented ignorance ; raising in him continually the sense of having de- livered himself effectively, so that the acquirement of more thorough knowledge seems as superfluous as the purchase of costume for a past occasion. He has invested his vanity (perhaps his hope of income) in his own shallownesses and mis- takes, and must desire their prosperity. Like the professional prophet, he learns to be glad of the harm that keeps up his credit, and to be sorry for the good that contradicts him. It is hard enough for any of us, amid the changing winds of for- tune and the hurly-burly of events, to keep quite clear of a gladness which is another's calamity ; but one may choose not to enter on a course which will turn such gladness into a fixed habit of mind, committing ourselves to be continually pleased that others should appear to be wrong in order that we may have the air of being right. In some cases, perhaps, it might be urged that Pepin has remained the more self-contented because he has not written everything he believed himself capable of. He once asked me to read a sort of programme of the species of romance which he should think it worth while to write a species which he contrasted in strong terms with the productions of illustrious but overrated authors in this branch. Pepin's romance was to present the splendors of the Eoman Empire at the culmination of its grandeur, when decadence was spiritu- ally but not visibly imminent : it was to show the workings of human passion in the most pregnant and exalted of human circumstances, the designs of statesmen, the interfusion of philosophies, the rural relaxation and converse of immortal poets, the majestic triumphs of warriors, the mingling of the quaint and sublime in religious ceremony, the gorgeous de- lirium of gladiatorial shows, and under all the secretly work- ing leaven of Christianity. Such a romance would not call the attention of society to the dialect of stable-boys, the low habits of rustics, the vulgarity of small schoolmasters, the manners of men in livery, or to any other form of uneducated talk, and sentiments : its characters would have virtues and vices alike on the grand scale, and would express themselves in an English representing the discourse of the most powerful 1->0 TIIKOPHRASTUS SUCH. minds in the best Latin, or possibly Greek, when there oc- curred a scene with a Greek philosopher on a visit to Rome or resident there as a teacher. In this way Pepin would do in fiction what had never been done before : something not at all like " Rienzi " or " Notre Dame de Paris," or any other at- tempt of that kind; but something at once more penetrating and more magnificent, more passionate and more philosophical, more panoramic yet more select : something that would pre- sent a conception of a gigantic period ; in short, something truly Roman and world-historical. When Pepin gave me this programme to read he was much younger than at present. Some slight success in another vein diverted him from the production of panoramic and select romance, and the experience of not having tried to carry out his programme has naturally made him more biting and sar- castic on the failures of those who have actually written romances without apparently having had a glimpse of a con- ception equal to his. Indeed, I am often comparing his rather touchingly inflated na'ivete, as of a small young person walk- ing on tiptoe while he is talking of elevated things, at the time when he felt himself the author of that unwritten ro- mance, with his present epigrammatic curtness and affecta- tion of power kept strictly in reserve. His paragraphs now seem to have a bitter smile in them, from the consciousness of a mind too penetrating to accept any other man's ideas, and too equally competent in all directions to seclude his power in any one form of creation, but rather fitted to hang over them all as a lamp of guidance to the stumblers below. You perceive how proud he is of not being indebted to any writer: even with the dead he is on the creditor's side, for he is doing them the service of letting the world know what they meant better than those poor pre-Pepinians themselves had any means of doing, and he treats the mighty shades very- cavalierly. Is this fellow-citizen of ours, considered simply in the light of a baptized Christian and tax-paying Englishman, really as madly conceited, as empty of reverential feeling, as unveracious and careless of justice, as full of catch-penny devices and stagey attitudinizing as on examination his writing shows THE TOO READY WRITER. 121 itself to be? By no means. He has arrived at his present pass in " the literary calling " through the sell-imposed obliga- tion to give himself a manner which would convey the impres- sion of superior knowledge and ability. He is much worthier and more admirable than his written productions, because the moral aspects exhibited in his writing are felt to be ridiculous or disgraceful in the personal relations of life. In blaming Pepin's writing we are accusing the public conscience, which is so lax and ill informed on the momentous bearings of author- ship that it sanctions the total absence of scruple in undertak- ing and prosecuting what should be the best warranted of vocations. Hence I still accept friendly relations with Pepin, for he has much private amiability, and though he probably thinks of me as a man of slender talents, without rapidity of coup d'ceil and with no compensatory penetration, he meets me very cordially, and would not, I am sure, willingly pain me in conversation by crudely declaring his low estimate of my capacity. Yet I have often known him to insult my betters and contribute (perhaps unreflectingly) to encourage injurious conceptions of them but that was done in the course of his professional writing, and the public conscience still leaves such writing nearly on the level of the Merry- Andrew's dress, which permits an impudent deportment and extraordinary gambols to one who in his ordinary clothing shows himself the decent father of a family. XV. DISEASES OF SMALL AUTHORSHIP. PARTICULAR callings, it is known, encourage particular dis- eases. There is a painter's colic : the Sheffield grinder falls a victim to the inhalation of steel dust : clergymen, so often have a certain kind of sore throat that this otherwise secular ailment gets named after them. And perhaps, if we were to inquire, we should find a similar relation between certain moral ailments and these various occupations, though here in the case of clergymen there would be specific differences : the poor curate, equally with the rector, is liable to clergyman's sore throat, but he would probably be found free from the chronic moral ailments encouraged by the possession of glebe and those higher chances of preferment which follow on having a good position already. On the other hand, the poor curate might have severe attacks of calculating expectancy concern- ing parishioners' turkeys, cheeses, and fat geese, or of uneasy rivalry for the donations of clerical charities. Authors are so miscellaneous a class that their personified diseases, physical and moral, might include the whole pro- cession of human disorders, led by dyspepsia and ending in madness the awful Dumb Show of a world-historic tragedy. Take a large enough area of human life and all comedy melts into tragedy, like the Fool's part by the side of Lear. The chief scenes get filled with erring heroes, guileful usurpers, persecuted discoverers, dying deliverers : everywhere the pro- tagonist has a part pregnant with doom. The comedy sinks to an accessory, and if there are loud laughs they seem a con- vulsive transition from sobs; or if the comedy is touched with a gentle lovingness, the panoramic scene is one where "Sadness is a kind of mirth So mingled as if mirth did make us sad And sadness merry." ' 1 Two Noble Kinsmen. DISEASES OF SMALL AUTHORSHIP 123 But I did not set out on the wide survey that would carry me into tragedy, and in fact had nothing more serious in my mind than certain small chronic ailments that come of small authorship. I was thinking principally of Vorticella, who flourished in my youth not only as a portly lady walking in silk attire, but also as the authoress of a book entitled " The Channel Islands, with Notes and an Appendix." I would by no means make it a reproach to her that she wrote no more than one book ; on the contrary, her stopping there seems to me a laudable example. What one would have wished, after experience, was that she had refrained from producing even that single volume, and thus from giving her self-importance a troublesome kind of double incorporation which became oppressive to her acquaintances, and set up in herself one of those slight chronic forms of disease to which I have just re- ferred. She lived in the considerable provincial town of Pumpiter, which had its own newspaper press, with the usual divisions of political partisanship and the usual varieties of literary criticism the florid and allusive, the staccato and peremptory, the clairvoyant and prophetic, the safe and pat- tern-phrased, or what one might call "the many-a-long-day style." Vorticella being the wife of an important townsman had naturally the satisfaction of seeing " The Channel Islands " reviewed by all the organs of Pumpiter opinion, and their articles or paragraphs held as naturally the opening pages in the elegantly bound album prepared by her for the reception of "critical opinions." This ornamental volume lay on a spe- cial table in her drawing-room close to the still more gor- geously bound work of which it was the significant effect, and every guest was allowed the privilege of reading what had been said of the authoress and her work in the "Pumpiter Gazette and Literary Watchman," the " Pumpshire Post, " the "Church Clock," the "Independent Monitor," and the lively but judicious publication known as the " Medley Pie " ; to be followed up, if he chose, by the instructive perusal of the strikingly confirmatory judgments, sometimes concurrent in the very phrases, of journals from the most distant counties; as the "Latchgate Argus," the "Penllwy Universe," the 124 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. " Cockaleekie Advertiser, " the " Goodwin Sands Opinion, " and the " Land's End Times." I had friends in Pumpiter and occasionally paid a long visit there. When I called on Vorticella, who had a cousinship with my hosts, she had to excuse herself because a message claimed her attention for eight or ten minutes, and handing me the album of critical opinions said, with a certain em- phasis which, considering my youth, was highly compliment- ary, that she would really like me to read what I should find there. This seemed a permissive politeness which I could not feel to be an oppression, and I ran my eyes over the dozen pages, each with a strip or islet of newspaper in the centre, with that freedom of mind (in my case meaning freedom to forget) which would be a perilous way of preparing for exami- nation. This ad libitum perusal had its interest for me. The private truth being that I had not read " The Channel Islands," I was amazed at the variety of matter which the volume must contain to have impressed these different judges with the writer's surpassing capacity to handle almost all branches of inquiry and all forms of presentation. In Jersey she had shown herself an historian, in Guernsey a poetess, in Alder- ney a political economist, and in Sark a humorist : there were sketches of character scattered through the pages which might put our " fictionists " to the blush ; the style was eloquent and racy, studded with gems of felicitous remark; and the moral spirit throughout was so superior that, said one, " the record- ing angel " (who is not supposed to take account of literature as such) " would assuredly set down the work as a deed of religion." The force of this eulogy on the part of several reviewers was much heightened by the incidental evidence of their fastidious and severe taste, which seemed to suffer con- siderably from the imperfections of our chief writers, even the dead and canonized : one afflicted them with the smell of oil, another lacked erudition and attempted (though vainly) to dazzle them with trivial conceits, one wanted to be more philosophical than nature had made him, another in attempt- ing to be comic produced the melancholy effect of a half- starved Merry-Andrew ; while one and all, from the author of the " Areopagitica " downward, had faults of style which must DISEASES OF SMALL AUTHORSHIP. 126 have made an able hand in the " Latchgate Argus " shake the many-glanced head belonging thereto with a smile of compas- sionate disapproval. Not so the authoress of " The Channel Islands " : Vorticella and Shakespeare were allowed to be faultless. I gathered that no blemishes were observable in the work of this accomplished writer, and the repeated infor- mation that she was " second to none " seemed after this super- fluous. Her thick octavo notes, appendix, and all was un- flagging from beginning to end ; and the " Land's End Times," using a rather dangerous rhetorical figure, recommended you not to take up the volume unless you had leisure to finish it at a sitting. It had given one writer more pleasure than he had had for many a long day a sentence which had a melancholy resonance, suggesting a life of studious languor such as all previous achievements of tho human mind failed to stimulate into enjoyment. I think the collection of critical opinions wound up with this sentence, and I had turned back to look at the lithographed sketch of the authoress which fronted the first page of the album, when the fair original re-entered and I laid down the volume on its appropriate table. "Well, what do you think of them? " said Vorticella, with an emphasis which had some significance unperceived by me. " I know you are a great student. Give me your opinion of these opinions." " They must be very gratifying to you, " I answered with a little confusion, for I perceived that I might easily mistake my footing, and I began to have a presentiment of an exami- nation for which I was by no means crammed. " On the whole yes, " said Vorticella, in a tone of conces- sion. " A few of the notices are written with some pains, but not one of them has really grappled with the chief idea in the appendix. I don't know whether you have studied political economy, but you saw what I said on page 398 about the Jersey fisheries? " I bowed I confess it with the mean hope that this move- ment in the nape of my neck would be taken as sufficient proof that I had read, marked, and learned. I do not forgive my- self for this pantomimic falsehood, but I was young and morally timorous, and Vorticella's personality had an effect 126 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. on me something like that of a powerful mesmerizer when he directs all his ten fingers toward your eyes, as unpleasantly visible ducts for the invisible stream. I felt a great power of contempt in her, if I did not come up to her expectations. " Well, " she resumed, " you observe that not one of them has taken up that argument. But I hope I convinced you about the drag-nets?" Here was a judgment on me. Orientally speaking, I had lifted up my foot on the steep descent of falsity and was com- pelled to set it down on a lower level. " I should think you must be right," said I, inwardly resolving that on the next topic I would tell the truth. "I know that I am right," said Vorticella. " The fact is that no critic in this town is fit to meddle with such subjects, unless it be Volvox, and he, with all his command of lan- guage, is very superficial. It is Volvox -who writes in the 'Monitor.' I hope you noticed how he contradicts himself?" My resolution, helped by the equivalence of dangers, stoutly prevailed, and I said, " No. " "No! I am surprised. He is the only one who finds fault with me. He is a Dissenter, you know. The ' Monitor ' is the Dissenters' organ, but my husband has been so useful to them in municipal affairs that they would not venture to run my book down ; they feel obliged to tell the truth about me. Still Volvox betrays himself. After praising me for my pene- tration and accuracy, he presently says I have allowed my- self to be imposed upon and have let my active imagination run away with me. That is like his dissenting impertinence. Active my imagination may be, but I have it under control. Little Vibrio, who writes the playful notice in the ' Medley Pie, ' has a clever hit at Volvox in that passage about the steeplechase of imagination; where the loser wants to make it appear that the winner was only run away with. But if you did not notice Volvox's self-contradiction you would not see the point," added Vorticella, with rather a chilling intonation. "Or perhaps you did not read the 'Medley Pie' notice? That is a pity. Do take up the book again. Vibrio is a poor little tippling creature, but, as Mr. Carlyle would say, he has an eye, and he is always lively." DISEASES OP SMALL AUTHORSHIP. 127 I did take up the book again, and read as demanded. " It is very ingenious, " said I, really appreciating the diffi- culty of being lively in this connection : it seemed even more wonderful than that a Vibrio should have an eye. "You are probably surprised to see no notices from the London press," said Vorticella. "I have one a very re- markable one. But I reserve it until the others have spoken, and then I shall introduce it to wind up. I shall have them reprinted, of course, and inserted in future copies. This from the ' Candelabrum ' is only eight lines in length, but full of venom. It calls my style dull and pompous. I think that will tell its own tale, placed after the other critiques." " People' s impressions are so different, " said I. " Some persons find ' Don Quixote ' dull. " "Yes," said Vorticella, in emphatic chest tones, "dulness is a matter of opinion ; but pompous ! That I never was and never could be. Perhaps he means that my matter is too im- portant for his taste; and I have no objection to that. I did not intend to be trivial. I should just like to read you that passage about the drag-nets, because I could make it clearer to you." A second (less ornamental) copy was at her elbow and was already opened, when to my great relief another guest was announced, and I was able to take my leave without seeming to run away from " The Channel Islands, " though not without being compelled to carry with me the loan of " the marked copy," which I was to find advantageous in a reperusal of the appendix, and was only requested to return before my depar- ture from Pumpiter. Looking into the volume now with some curiosity, I found it a very ordinary combination of the com- monplace and ambitious, one of those books which one might imagine to have been written under the old Grub Street coer- cion of hunger and thirst, if they were not known beforehand to be the gratuitous productions of ladies and gentlemen whose circumstances might be called altogether easy, but for an uneasy vanity that happened to have been directed toward authorship. Its importance was that of a polypus, tumor, fungus, or other erratic outgrowth, noxious and disfiguring in its effect on the individual organism which nourishes it. Poor 128 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. Vorticella might not have been more wearisome on a visit than the majority of her neighbors, but for this disease of magni- fied self-importance belonging to small authorship. I under- stand that the chronic complaint of " The Channel Islands " never left her. As the years went on and the publication tended to vanish in the distance for her neighbors' memory, she was still bent on dragging it to the foreground, and her chief interest in new acquaintances was the possibility of lend- ing them her book, entering into all details concerning it, and requesting them .to read her album of "critical opinions." This really made her more tiresome than Gregarina, whose distinction was that she had had cholera, and who did not feel herself in her true position with strangers until they knew it. My experience with Vorticella led me for a time into the false supposition that this sort of fungous disfiguration, which makes Self disagreeably larger, was most 'common to the fe- male sex ; but I presently found that here too the male could assert his superiority and show a more vigorous boredom. I have known a man with a single pamphlet containing an as- surance that somebody else was wrong, together with a few approved quotations, produce a more powerful effect of shud- dering at his approach than ever Vorticella did with her varied octavo volume, including notes and appendix. Males of more than one nation recur to my memory who produced from their pocket on the slightest encouragement a small pink or buff duodecimo pamphlet, wrapped in silver paper, as a present held ready for an intelligent reader. "A mode of propagandism, " you remark in excuse ; " they wished to spread some useful corrective doctrine. " Not necessarily : the indoc- trination aimed at was perhaps to convince you of their own talents by the sample of 'an " Ode on Shakespeare's Birthday, " or a translation from Horace. Vorticella may pair off with Monas, who had also written his one book " Here and There ; or, a Trip from Truro to Transylvania" and not only carried it in his portmanteau when he went on visits, but took the earliest opportunity of depositing it in the drawing-room, and afterward would enter to look for it, as if under pressure of a need for reference, DISEASES OP SMALL AUTHORSHIP. 129 begging the lady of the house to tell him whether she had seen "a small volume bound in red." One hostess at last ordered it to be carried into his bedroom to save his time; but it presently reappeared in his hands, and was again left with inserted slips of paper on the drawing-room table. Depend upon it, vanity is human, native alike to men and women ; only in the male it is of denser texture, less volatile, so that it less immediately informs you of its presence, but is more massive and capable of knocking you down if you come into collision with it; while in women vanity lays by its small revenges as in a needle-case always at hand. The difference is in muscle and finger-tips, in traditional habits and mental perspective, rather than in the original appetite of vanity. It is an approved method now to explain ourselves by a refer- ence to the races as little like us as possible, which leads me to observe that in Fiji the men use the most elaborate hair- dressing, and that wherever tattooing is in vogue the male expects to carry off the prize of admiration for pattern and workmanship. Arguing analogically, and looking for this tendency of the Fijian or Hawaiian male in the eminent Euro- pean, we must suppose that it exhibits itself under the forms of civilized apparel ; and it would be a great mistake to esti- mate passionate effort by the effect it produces on our percep- tion or understanding. It is conceivable that a man may have concentrated no less will and expectation on his wrist-bands, gaiters, and the shape of his hat-brim, or an appearance which impresses you as that of the modern " swell," than the Ojibbe- way on an ornamentation which seems to us much more elab- orate. In what concerns the search for admiration at least, it is not true that the effect is equal to the cause and resembles it. The cause of a flat curl on the masculine forehead, such as might be seen when George the Fourth was king, must have been widely different in quality and intensity from the im- pression made by that small scroll of hair on the organ of the beholder. Merely to maintain an attitude and gait which I notice in certain club-men, and especially an inflation of the chest accompanying very small remarks, there goes, I am con- vinced, an expenditure of physical energy little appreciated by the multitude a mental vision of Self and deeply impressed 130 THEOPHRASTUS beholders which is quite without antitype in what we call the effect produced by that hidden process. No I there is no need to admit that women would carry away the prize of vanity in a competition where differences of custom were fairly considered. A man caunot show his van- ity in a tight skirt which forces him to walk sideways down the staircase; but let the match be between the respective vanities of largest beard and tightest skirt, and here too the battle would be to the strong. XVL MOKAL SWINDLERS. IT is a familiar example of irony in the degradation of words that " what a man is worth " has come to mean how much money he possesses ; but there seems a deeper and more melancholy irony in the shrunken meaning that popular or polite speech assigns to " morality " and " morals. '* The poor part these words are made to play recalls the fate of those pagan divinities who, after being understood to rule the pow- ers of the air and the destinies of men, came down to the level of insignificant demons, or were even made a farcical show for the amusement of the multitude. Talking to Melissa in a time of commercial trouble, I found her disposed to speak pathetically of the disgrace which had fallen on Sir Gavial Mantrap, because of his conduct in rela- tion to the Eocene Mines, and to other companies ingeniously devised by him for the punishment of ignorance in people of small means : a disgrace by which the poor titled gentleman was actually reduced to live in comparative obscurity on his wife's settlement of one or two hundred thousand in the con- sols. " Surely your pity is misapplied, " said I, rather dubiously, for I like the comfort of trusting that a correct moral judg- ment is the strong point in woman (seeing that she has a majority of about a million in our islands), and I imagined that Melissa might have some unexpressed grounds for her opinion. " I should have thought you would rather be sorry for Mantrap's victims the widows, spinsters, and hard-work- ing fathers whom his unscrupulous haste to make himself rich has cheated of all their savings, while he is eating well, lying softly, and after impudently justifying himself before the public, is perhaps joining in the General Confession with a 132 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. sense that he is an acceptable object in the sight of God, though decent men refuse to meet him. " " Oh, all that about the Companies, I know, was most un- fortunate. In commerce people are led to do so many things, and he might not know exactly how everything would turn out. But Sir Gavial made a good use of his money, and he is a thoroughly moral man. " "What do you mean by a thoroughly moral man? " said I. "Oh, I suppose every one means the same by that," said Melissa, with a slight air of rebuke. " Sir Gavial is an excel- lent family man quite blameless there; and so charitable round his place at Tiptop. Very different from Mr, Barabbas, whose life, my husband tells me, is most objectionable, with actresses and that sort of thing. I think a man's morals should make a difference to us. I'm not sorry for Mr. Barab- bas, but / am sorry for Sir Gavial Mantrap. " I will not repeat my answer to Melissa, for I fear it was offensively brusque, my opinion being that Sir Gavial was the more pernicious scoundrel of the two, since his name for virtue served as an effective part of a swindling apparatus ; and per- haps I hinted that to call such a man moral showed rather a silly notion of human affairs. In fact, I had an angry wish to be instructive, and Melissa, as will sometimes happen, noticed my anger without appropriating rny instruction, for I have since heard that she speaks of me as rather violent-tem- pered, and not over strict in my views of morality. I wish that this narrow use of words which are wanted in their full meaning were confined to women like Melissa. See- ing that Morality and Morals under their alias of Ethics are the subject of voluminous discussion, and their true basis a pressing matter of dispute seeing that the most famous book ever written on Ethics, and forming a chief study in our col- leges, allies ethical with political science or that which treats of the constitution and prosperity of States, one might expect that educated men would find reason to avoid a perversion of language which lends itself to no wider view of life than that of village gossips. Yet I find even respectable historians of our own and of foreign countries, after showing that a king was treacherous, rapacious, and ready to sanction gross breaches MORAL SWINDLERS. 133 in the administration of justice, end by praising him for his pure moral character, by which one must suppose them to mean that he was not lewd nor debauched, not the European twin of the typical Indian potentate whom Macaulay describes as passing his life in chewing bang and fondling dancing-girls. And since we are sometimes told of such maleficent kings that they were religious, we arrive at the curious result that the most serious wide-reaching duties of man lie quite outside both Morality and Religion the one of these consisting in not keeping mistresses (and perhaps not drinking too much), and the other in certain ritual and spiritual transactions with God which can be carried on equally well side by side with the basest conduct toward men. With such a classification as this it is no wonder, considering the strong reaction of lan- guage on thought, that many minds, dizzy with indigestion of recent science and philosophy, are far to seek for the grounds of social duty, and without entertaining any private intention of committing a perjury which would ruin an inno- cent man, or seeking gain by supplying bad preserved meats to our navy, feel themselves speculatively obliged to inquire why they should not do so, and are inclined to measure their intellectual subtlety by their dissatisfaction with all answers to this " Why? " It is of little use to theorize in ethics while our habitual phraseology stamps the larger part of our social duties as something that lies aloof from the deepest needs and affections of our nature. The informal definitions of popular language are the only medium through which theory really affects the mass of minds even among the nominally educated ; and when a man whose business hours, the solid part of every day, are spent in an unscrupulous course of public or private action which has every calculable chance of causing wide- spread injury and misery, can be called moral because he comes home to dine with his wife and children and cherishes the happiness of his own hearth, the augury is not good for the use of higfa ethical and theological disputation . Not for one moment would one willingly lose sight of the truth that the relation of the sexes and the primary ties of kinship are the deepest roots of human wellbeing, but to make them by themselves the equivalent of morality is tp cut off the, 134 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. channels of feeling through which they are the feeders of that wellbeing. They are the original fountains of a sensibility to the claims of others, which is the bond of societies ; but being necessarily in the first instance a private good, there is always the danger that individual selfishness will see in them only the best part of its own gain; just as knowledge, navigation, com- merce, and all the conditions which are of a nature to awaken men's consciousness of their mutual dependence and to make the world one great society, are the occasions of selfish, un- fair action, of war and oppression, so long as the public con- science or chief force of feeling and opinion is not uniform and strong enough in its insistence on what is demanded by the general welfare. And among the influences that must re- tard a right public judgment, the degradation of words which involve praise and blame will be. reckoned worth protesting against by every mature observer. To rob words of half their meaning, while they retain their dignity as qualifications, is like allowing to men who have lost half their faculties the same high and perilous command which they won in their time of vigor; or like selling food and seeds after fraudulently abstracting their best virtues : in each case what ought to be beneficently strong is fatally enfeebled, if not empoisoned. Until we have altered our dictionaries and have found some other word than morality to stand in popular use for the duties of man to man, let us refuse to accept as moral the contractor who enriches himself by using large machinery to make pasteboard soles pass as leather for the feet of unhappy conscripts fighting at miserable odds against invaders : let us rather call him a miscreant, though he were the tenderest, most faithful of husbands, and contend that his own experi- ence of home happiness makes his reckless infliction of suffer- ing on others all the more atrocious. Let us refuse to accept as moral any political leader who should allow his conduct in relation to great issues to be determined by egoistic passion, and boldly say that he would be less immoral even though he were as lax in his personal habits as Sir Robert Walpole, if at the same time his sense of the public welfare were supreme in his mind, quelling all pettier impulses beneath a magnanimous impartiality. And though we were to find among that class MORAL SWINDLERS. 135 of journalists who live by recklessly reporting injurious ru- mors, insinuating the blackest motives in opponents, descant- ing at large and with an air of infallibility on dreams which they both find and interpret, and stimulating bad feeling between nations by abusive writing which is as empty of real conviction as the rage of a pantomime king, and would be ludicrous if its effects did not make it appear diabolical though we were to find among these a man who was benig- nancy itself in his own circle, a healer of private differences, a soother in private calamities, let us pronounce him neverthe- less flagrantly immoral, a root of hideous cancer in the com- monwealth, turning the channels of instruction into feeders of social and political disease. In opposite ways one sees bad effects likely to be encour- aged by this narrow use of the word morals, shutting out from its meaning half those actions of a man's life which tell momentously on the well-being of his fellow-citizens, and on the preparation of a future for the children growing uj/ around him. Thoroughness of workmanship, care in the execution of every task undertaken, as if it were the acceptance of a trust which it would be a breach of faith not to discharge well, is a form of duty so momentous that if it were to die out from the feeling and practice of a people, all reforms of institutions would be helpless to create national prosperity and national happiness. Do we desire to see public spirit penetrating all classes of the community and affecting every man's conduct, so that he shall make neither the saving of his soul nor any other private saving an excuse for indifference to the general welfare? Well and good. But the sort of public spirit that sea' >$ its bread- winning work, whether with the trowel, the pen, or the overseeing brain, that it may hurry to scenes of political or social agitation, would be as baleful a gift to our people as any malignant demon could devise. One best part of educational training is that which comes through special knowledge and manipulative or other skill, with its usual ac- companiment of delight, in relation to work which is the daily bread- winning occupation which is a man's contribution to the effective wealth of society in return for what he takes as his own share, But this duty of doing one's proper work 136 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. well, and taking care that every product of one's labor shall be genuinely what it pretends to be, is not only left out ol morals in popular speech, it is very little insisted on by public teachers, at least in the only effective way by tracing the continuous effects of ill-done work. Some of them seem to be still hopeful that it will follow as a necessary consequence from week-day services, ecclesiastical decoration, and im- proved hymn-books; others apparently trust to descanting on self-culture in general, or to raising a general sense of faulty circumstances; and meanwhile lax, makeshift work from the high conspicuous kind to the average and obscure, is allowed to pass unstamped with the disgrace of immorality, though there is not a member of society who is not daily suf- fering from it materially and spiritually, and though it is the fatal cause that must degrade our national rank and our com- merce in spite of all open markets and discovery of available coal-seams. I suppose one may take the popular misuse of the words Morality and Morals as some excuse for certain absurdities which are occasional fashions in speech and writing certain old lay figures, as ugly as the queerest Asiatic idol, which at different periods get propped into loftiness, and attired in magnificent Venetian drapery, so that whether they have a human face or not is of little consequence. One is, the notion that there is a radical, irreconcilable opposition between in- tellect and morality. I do not mean the simple statement of fact, which everybody knows, that remarkably able men have had very faulty morals, and have outraged public feeling even at its ordinary standard ; but the supposition that the ablest intellect, the highest genius, will see through morality as a sort of twaddle for bibs and tuckers, a doctrine of dulness, a mere incident in human stupidity. We begin to understand the acceptance of this foolishness by considering that we live in a society where we may hear a treacherous monarch, or a malignant and lying politician, or a man who uses either offi- cial or literary p'ower as an instrument of his private partiality or hatred, or a manufacturer who devises the falsification of wares, or a trader who deals in virtueless seed-grains, praised or compassionated because of his excellent morals. Clearly MORAL SWINDLERS. 13? if morality meant no more than such decencies as are practised by these poisonous members of society, it would be possible to say, without suspicion of light-headedness, that morality lay aloof from the grand stream of human affairs, as a small chan- nel fed by the stream and not missed from it. While this form of nonsense is conveyed in the popular use of words, there must be plenty of well-dressed ignorance at leisure to run through a box of books, which will feel itself initiated in the freemasonry of intellect by a view of life which might take for a Shakespearian motto "Fair is foul and foul is fair, Hover through the fog and filthy air " and will find itself easily provided with striking conversation by the rule of reversing all the judgments on good and evil which have come to be the calendar and clockwork of so- ciety. But let our habitual talk give morals their full mean- ing as the conduct which, in every human relation, would follow from the fullest knowledge and the fullest sympathy a meaning perpetually corrected and enriched by a more thor- ough appreciation of dependence in things, and a finer sensi- bility to both physical and spiritual fact and this ridiculous ascription of superlative power to minds which have no effect- ive awe-inspiring vision of the human lot, no response of un- derstanding to the connection between duty and the material processes by which the world is kept habitable for cultivated man, will be tacitly discredited without any need to cite the immortal names 'that all are obliged to take as the measure of intellectual rank and highly charged genius. Suppose a Frenchman I mean no disrespect to the great French nation, for all nations are afflicted with their peculiar parasitic growths, which are lazy, hungry forms, usually char- acterized by a disproportionate swallowing apparatus: sup- pose a Parisian who should shuffle down the Boulevard with a soul ignorant of the gravest cares and the deepest tender- ness of manhood, and a frame more or less fevered by debauch- ery, mentally polishing into utmost refinement of phrase and rhythm verses which were an enlargement on that Shakes- pearian motto, and worthy of the most expensive title to be 138 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. furnished by the vendors of such antithetic ware as Les mar' guerites de V Enfer, or Les delices de Beelzebuth. Tlxis sup- posed personage might probably enough regard his negation of those moral sensibilities which make half the warp and woof of human history, his indifference to the hard thinking and hard handiwork of life, to which he owed even his own gauzy mental garments with their spangles of poor paradox, as the royalty of genius, for we are used to witness such self-crown- ing in many forms of mental alienation ; but he would not, I think, be taken, even by his own generation, as a living proof that there can exist such a combination as that of moral stu- pidity and trivial emphasis of personal indulgence with the large yet finely discriminating vision which marks the intel- lectual masters of our kind. Doubtless there are many sorts of transfiguration, and a man who has come to be worthy of all gratitude and reverence may have had his swinish period, wallowing in ugly places; but suppose it had been handed down to us that Sophocles or Virgil had at one time made himself scandalous in this way : the works which have conse- crated their memory for our admiration and gratitude are not a glorifying of swinishness, but an artistic incorporation of the highest sentiment known to their age. All these may seem to be wide reasons for objecting to Me- lissa's pity for Sir Gavial Mantrap on the ground of his good morals ; but their connection will not be obscure to any one who has taken pains to observe the links uniting the scattered signs of our social development. XVlt SHADOWS OF THE COMING MY friend Trost, who is no optimist as to the state of the universe hitherto, but is confident that at some future period within the duration of the solar system, curs will be the best of all possible worlds a hope which I always honor as a sign of beneficent qualities my friend Trost always tries to keep up my spirits under the sight of the extremely unpleasant and disfiguring work by which many of our fellow-creatures have to get their bread, with the assurance that " all this will soon be done by machinery." But he sometimes neutralizes the consolation by extending it over so large an area of human labor, and insisting so impressively on the quantity of energy which will thus be set free for loftier purposes, that I am tempted to desire an occasional famine of invention in the coming ages, lest the humbler kinds of work should be entirely nullified while there are still left some men and women who are not fit for the highest. Especially, when one considers the perfunctory way in which some of the most exalted tasks are already executed by those who are understood to be educated for them, there rises a fearful vision of the human race evolving machine^ which will by and by throw itself fatally out of work. When, in the Bank of England, I see a wondrously delicate machine for testing sovereigns, a shrewd implacable little steel Rhadaman- thus that, once the coins are delivered up to it, lifts and bal- ances each in turn for the fraction of an instant, finds it want- ing or sufficient, and dismisses it to right or left with rigorous justice; when I am told of micrometers and thermopiles .and tasimeters which deal physically with the invisible, the* im- palpable, and the unimaginable; of cunning wires and wheels and pointing needles which Will register your and my quick- 140 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. ness so as to exclude flattering opinion; of a machine for drawing the right conclusion, which will doubtless by and by be improved into an automaton for finding true premises ; of a microphone which detects the cadence of the fly's foot on the ceiling, and may be expected presently to discriminate the noises of our various follies as they soliloquize or converse in our brains my mind seeming too small for these things, I get a little out of it, like an unfortunate savage too suddenly brought face to face with civilization, and I exclaim " Am I already in the shadow of the Coming Race? and will the creatures who are to transcend and finally supersede us be steely organisms giving out the effluvia of the laboratory, and performing with infallible exactness more than everything that we have performed with a slovenly approximativeness and self-defeating inaccuracy?" " But, " says Trost, treating me with cautious mildness on hearing me vent this raving notion, "you forget that these wonder-workers are the slaves of our race, need our tendance and regulation, obey the mandates of our consciousness, and are only deaf and dumb bringers of reports which we decipher and make use of. They are simply extensions of the human organism, so to speak, limbs immeasurably more powerful, ever more subtle finger-tips, ever more mastery over the in- visibly great and the invisibly small. Each new machine needs a new appliance of human skill to construct it, new devices to feed it with material, and often keener- edged facul- ties to note its registrations or performances. How then can machines supersede us? they depend upon us. When we cease, they cease." " I am not so sure of that, " said I, getting back into my mind, and becoming rather wilful in consequence. " If, as I have heard you contend, machines as they are more and more perfected will require less and less of tendance, how do I know that they may not be ultimately made to carry, or may not in themselves evolve, conditions of self-supply, self-re- pair, and reproduction, and not only do all the mighty and subtle work possible on this planet better than we could do it, but with the immense advantage of banishing from the earth's atmosphere screaming consciousnesses which, in our compara- SHADOWS OF THE COMING RACE. 141 tively clumsy race, make an intolerable noise and fuss to each other about every petty ant-like performance, looking on at all work only as it were to spring a rattle here or blow a trumpet there, with a ridiculous sense of being effective? I for my part cannot see any reason why a sufficiently penetrat- ing thinker, who can see his way through a thousand years or so, should not conceive a parliament of machines, in which the manners were excellent and the motions infallible in logic : one honorable instrument, a remote descendant of the Voltaic family, might discharge a powerful current (entirely without animosity) on an honorable instrument opposite, of more up- start origin, but belonging to the ancient edge-tool race which we already at Sheffield see paring thick iron as if it were mel- low cheese by this unerringly directed discharge operating on movements corresponding to what we call Estimates, and by necessary mechanical consequence on movements corre- sponding to what we call the Funds, which with a vain analogy we sometimes speak of as ' sensitive. ' For every machine would be perfectly educated, that is to say, would have the suitable molecular adjustments, which would act not the less infallibly for being free from the fussy accompaniment of that consciousness to which our prejudice gives a supreme govern- ing rank, when in truth it is an idle parasite on the grand sequence of things. " " Nothing of the sort ! " returned Trost, getting angry, and judging it kind to treat me with some severity ; " what you have heard me say is, that our race will and must act as a nervous centre to the utmost development of mechanical pro- cesses: the subtly refined powers of machines will react in producing more subtly refined thinking processes which will occupy the minds set free from grosser labor. Say, for ex- ample, that all the scavengers' work of London were done, so far as human attention is concerned, by the occasional pres- sure of a brass button (as in the ringing of an electric bell), you will then have a multitude of brains set free for the exquisite enjoyment of dealing with the exact sequences and high speculations supplied and prompted by the delicate ma- chines which yield a response to the fixed stars, and give readings of the spiral vortices fundamentally concerned in the 144 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. those of human language and all the intricate web of what we call its effects, without sensitive impression, without sensitive impulse : there may be, let us say, mute orations, mute rhap- sodies, mute discussions, and no consciousness there even to enjoy the silence." " Absurd ! " grumbled Trost. "The supposition is logical," said I. "It is well argued from the premises." "Whose premises?" cried Trost, turning on me with some fierceness. "You don't mean to call them mine, I hope." " Heaven forbid ! They seem to be flying about in the air with other germs, and have found a sort of nidus among my melancholy fancies. Nobody really holds them. They bear the same relation to real belief as walking on the head for a show does to running away from an explosion or walking fast to catch the train." XYIII. THE MODEKN HEP! HEP! HEP! To discern likeness amidst diversity, it is well known, does not require so fine a mental edge as the discerning of diversity amidst general sameness. The primary rough classification depends on the prominent resemblances of things : the prog- ress is toward finer and finer discrimination according to minute differences. Yet even at this stage of European culture one's attention is continually drawn to the prevalence of that grosser mental sloth which makes people dull to the most ordinary prompting of comparison the bringing things together because of their like- ness. The same motives, the same ideas, the same practices, are alternately admired and abhorred, lauded and denounced, according to their association with superficial differences, his- torical or actually social: even learned writers treating of great subjects often show an attitude of mind not greatly supe- rior in its logic to that of the frivolous fine lady who is in- dignant at the frivolity of her maid. To take only the subject of the Jews: it would be difficult to find a form of bad reasoning about them which has not been heard in conversation or been admitted to the dignity of print-, but the neglect of resemblances is a common property of dul- ness which unites all the various points of view the preju- diced, the puerile, the spiteful, and the abysmally ignorant. That the preservation of national memories is an element and a means of national greatness, that their revival is a sign of reviving nationality, that every heroic defender, every pa- triotic restorer, has been inspired by such memories and has made them his watchword, that even such a corporate ex- istence as that of a Koman legion or an English regiment has been made valorous by memorial standards, these are JO 144 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. those of human language and all the intricate web of what we call its effects, without sensitive impression, without sensitive impulse: there may be, let us say, mute orations, mute rhap- sodies, mute discussions, and no consciousness there even to enjoy the silence." " Absurd ! " grumbled Trost. "The supposition is logical," said I. "It is well argued from the premises." "Whose premises?" cried Trost, turning on me with some fierceness. "You don't mean to call them mine, I hope." " Heaven forbid ! They seem to be flying about in the air with other germs, and have found a sort of nidus among my melancholy fancies. Nobody really holds them. They bear the same relation to real belief as walking on the head for a show does to running away from an explosion or walking fast to catch the train." XVIII. THE MODERN HEP! HEP! HEP! To discern likeness amidst diversity, it is well known, does not require so fine a mental edge as the discerning of diversity amidst general sameness. The primary rough classification depends on the prominent resemblances of things : the prog- ress is toward finer and finer discrimination according to minute differences. Yet even at this stage of European culture one's attention is continually drawn to the prevalence of that grosser mental sloth which makes people dull to the most ordinary prompting of comparison the bringing things together because of their like- ness. The same motives, the same ideas, the same practices, are alternately admired and abhorred, lauded and denounced, according to their association with superficial differences, his- torical or actually social: even learned writers treating of great subjects often show an attitude of mind not greatly supe- rior in its logic to that of the frivolous fine lady who is in- dignant at the frivolity of her maid. To take only the subject of the Jews : it would be difficult to find a form of bad reasoning about them which has not been heard in conversation or been admitted to the dignity of print-, but the neglect of resemblances is a common property of dul- ness which unites all the various points of view the preju- diced, the puerile, the spiteful, and the abysmally ignorant. That the preservation of national memories is an element and a means of national greatness, that their revival is a sign of reviving nationality, that every heroic defender, every pa- triotic restorer, has been inspired by such memories and has made them his watchword, that even such a corporate ex- istence as that of a Roman legion or an English regiment has been made valorous by memorial standards, these $r 10 146 THEOPHRASTU8 SUCH. the glorious commonplaces of historic teaching at our public schools and universities, being happily ingrained in Greek and Latin classics. They have also been impressed on the world by conspicuous modern instances. That there is a free mod- ern Greece is due through all infiltration of other than Greek blood to the presence of ancient Greece in the consciousness of European men ; and every speaker would feel his point safe if he were to praise Byron's devotion to a cause made glorious by ideal identification with the past; hardly so, if he were to insist that the Greeks were not to be helped further because their history shows that they were anciently unsurpassed in treachery and lying, and that many modern Greeks are highly disreputable characters, while others are disposed to grasp too large a share of our commerce. The same with Italy : the pathos of his country's lot pierced the youthful soul of Maz- zini, because, like Dante's, his blood was fraught with the kinship of Italian greatness, his imagination filled with a ma- jestic past that wrought itself into a majestic future. Half a century ago, what was Italy? An idling-place of dilettante- ism or of itinerant motiveless wealth, a territory parcelled out for papal sustenance, dynastic convenience, and the profit of an alien Government. What were the Italians? No people, no voice in European counsels, no massive power in European affairs: a race thought of in English and French society as chiefly adapted to the operatic stage, or to serve as models for painters ; disposed to smile gratefully at the reception of half- pence ; and by the more historical remembered to be rather polite than truthful, in all probability a combination of Mach- iavelli, Rubini, and Masaniello. Thanks chiefly to the divine gift of a memory which inspires the moments with a past, a present, and a future, and gives the sense of corporate existence that raises man above the otherwise more respectable and inno- cent brute, all that, or most of it, is changed. Again, one of our living historians finds just sympathy in his vigorous insistence on our true ancestry, on our being the strongly marked heritors in language and genius of those old English seamen who, beholding a rich country with a most convenient seaboard, came, doubtless with a sense of divine warrant, and settled themselves on this or the other side of THE MODERN HEP! HEP! HEP! 147 fertilizing streams, gradually conquering more and more of the pleasant land from the natives who knew nothing of Odin, and finally making unusually clean work in ridding themselves of those prior occupants. " Let us, " he virtually says, " let us know who were our forefathers, who it was that won the soil for us, and brought the good seed of those institutions through which we should not arrogantly but gratefully feel ourselves distinguished among the nations as possessors of long-inherited freedom ; let us not keep up an ignorant kind of naming which disguises our true affinities of blood and language, but let us see thoroughly what sort of notions and traditions our fore- fathers had, and what sort of song inspired them. Let the poetic fragments which breathe forth their fierce bravery in battle and their trust in fierce gods who helped them, be treasured with affectionate reverence. These seafaring, in- vading, self -asserting men were the English of old time, and were our fathers who did rough work by which we are profit- ing. They had virtues which incorporated themselves in wholesome usages to which we trace our own political bless- ings. Let us know and acknowledge our common relationship to them, and be thankful that over and above the affections and duties which spring from our manhood, we have the closer and more constantly guiding duties which belong to us as Englishmen. " To this view of our nationality most persons who have feel- ing and understanding enough to be conscious of the connec- tion between the patriotic affection and every other affection which lifts us above emigrating rats and free-loving baboons, will be disposed to say Amen. True, we are not indebted to those ancestors for our religion : we are rather proud of having got that illumination from elsewhere. The men who planted our nation were not Christians, though they began their work centuries after Christ ; and they had a decided ob- jection to Christianity when it was first proposed to them: they were not monotheists, and their religion was the reverse of spiritual. But since we have been fortunate enough to keep the island-home they won for us, and have been on the whole a prosperous people, rather continuing the plan of in- yading and spoiling other lands than being forced to beg for 148 THEOPHRA8TUS SUCH. * shelter in them, nobody has reproached us because our fathers thirteen hundred years ago worshipped Odin, massacred Brit- ons, and were with difficulty persuaded to accept Christianity, knowing nothing of Hebrew history and the reasons why Christ should be received as the Saviour of mankind. The Red In- dians, not liking us when we settled among them, might have been willing to fling such facts in our faces, but they were too ignorant, and besides, their opinions did not signify, because we were able, if we liked, to exterminate them. The Hindoos also have doubtless had their rancors against us and still en- tertain enough ill will to make unfavorable remarks on our character, especially as to our historic rapacity and arrogant notions of our own superiority ; they perhaps do not admire the usual English profile, and they are not converted to our way of feeding : but though we are a small number of an alien race profiting by the territory and produce of these prejudiced people, they are unable to turn us out; at least, when they tried we showed them their mistake. We do not call our- selves a dispersed and a punished people : we are a colonizing people, and it is we wio have punished others. Still the historian guides us rightly in urging us to dwell on the virtues of our ancestors with emulation, and to cherish our sense of a common descent as a bond of obligation. The emi- nence, the nobleness of a people, depends on its capability of being stirred by memories, and of striving for what we call spiritual ends ends which consist not ir immediate material possession, but in the satisfaction of a great feeling that animates the collective body as with one soul. A people hav- ing the seed of worthiness in it must feel an answering thrill when it is adjured by the deaths of its heroes who died to pre- serve its national existence; when it is reminded of its small beginnings and gradual growth through past labors and strug- gles, such as are still demanded of it in order that the freedom and well-beirig thus inherited may be transmitted unimpaired to children and children's children; when an appeal against the permission of injustice is made to great precedents in its history and to the better genius breathing in its institutions. It is this living force of sentiment in common which makes a national consciouanesss. Nations so moved will resist; con- THE MODERN HEP! HEP! HEP! 149 quest with the very breasts of their women, will pay their millions and their blood to abolish slavery, will share priva- tion in famine and all calamity, will produce poets to sing " some great story of a man, " and thinkers whose theories will bear the test of action. An individual man, to be harmoni- ously great, must belong to a nation of this order, if not in actual existence yet existing in the past, in memory, as a de- parted, invisible, beloved ideal, once a reality, and perhaps to be restored. A common humanity is not yet enough to feed the rich blood of various activity which makes a complete man. The time is not come for cosmopolitanism to be highly virtu- ous, any more than for communism to suffice for social energy. I am not bound to feel for a Chinaman as I feel for my fellow- countryman : I am bound not to demoralize him with opium, not to xjornpel him to my will by destroying or plundering the fruits of his labor on the alleged ground that he is not cosmo- politan enough, and not to insult him for his want of my tail- oring and religion when he appears as a peaceable visitor on the London pavement. It is admirable in a Briton with a good purpose to learn Chinese, but it would not be a proof of fine intellect in him to taste Chinese poetry in the original more than he tastes the poetry of his own tongue. Affection, intelligence, duty, radiate from a centre, and nature has de- cided that for us English folk that centre can be neither China nor Peru. Most of us feel this unreflectingly ; for the affecta- tion of undervaluing everything native, and being too fine for one's own country, belongs only to a few minds of no danger- ous leverage. What is wanting is, that we should recognize a corresponding attachment to nationality as legitimate in every other people, and understand that its absence is a privation of the greatest good. For, to repeat, not only the nobleness of a nation depends on the presence of this national consciousness, but also the no- bleness of each individual citizen. Our dignity and rectitude are proportioned to our sense of relationship with something great, admirable, pregnant with high possibilities, worthy of sacrifice, a continual inspiration to self-repression and disci- pline by the presentation of aims larger and more attractive to our generous part than the securing of personal ease or pros- 150 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. perity. And a people possessing this good should surely feel not only a ready sympathy with the effort of those who, hav- ing lost the good, strive to regain it, but a profound pity for any degradation resulting from its loss; nay, something more than pity when happier nationalities have made victims of the unfortunate whose memories nevertheless are the very fountain to which the persecutors trace their most vaunted blessings. These nations are familiar : few will deny them in the ab- stract, and many are found loudly asserting them in relation to this or the other particular case. But here as elsewhere, in the ardent application of ideas, there is a notable lack of sim- ple comparison or sensibility to resemblance. The European world has long been used to consider the Jews as altogether exceptional, and it has followed naturally enough that they have been excepted from the rules of justice and mercy, which are based on human likeness. But to consider a people whose ideas have determined the religion of half the world, and that the more cultivated half, and who made the most eminent struggle against the power of Rome, as a purely exceptional race, is a demoralizing offence against rational knowledge, a stultifying inconsistency in historical interpretation. Every nation of forcible character i.e., of strongly marked charac- teristics, is so far exceptional. The distinctive note of each bird-species is in this sense exceptional, but the necessary ground of such distinction is a deeper likeness. The super- lative peculiarity in the Jews admitted, our affinity with them is only the more apparent when the elements |of their pecu- liarity are discerned. From whatever point of view the writings of the Old Testa- ment may be regarded, the picture they present of a national development is of high interest and speciality, nor can their historic momentousness be much affected by any varieties of theory as to the relation they bear to the New Testament or to the rise and constitution of Christianity. Whether we ac- cept the canonical Hebrew books as a revelation or simply as part of an ancient literature, makes no difference to the fact that we find there the strongly characterized portraiture of a people educated from an earlier or later period to a sense of THE MODERN HEP! HEP! HEP! 151 separateness unique in its intensity, a people taught by many concurrent influences to identify faithfulness to its national traditions with the highest social and religious blessings. Our too scanty sources of Jewish history, from the return un- der Ezra to the beginning of the desperate resistance against Rome, show us the heroic and triumphant struggle of the Mac- cabees, which rescued the religion and independence of the nation from the corrupting sway of the Syrian Greeks, adding to the glorious sum of its memorials, and stimulating continu- ous efforts of a more peaceful sort to maintain and develop that national life which the heroes had fought and died for, by internal measures of legal administration and public teaching. Thenceforth the virtuous elements of the Jewish life were en- gaged, as they had been with varying aspects during the long and changeful prophetic period and the restoration under Ezra, on the side of preserving the specific national character against a demoralizing fusion with that of foreigners whose religion and ritual were idolatrous and often obscene. There was always a Foreign party reviling the National party as narrow, and sometimes manifesting their own breadth in extensive views of advancement or profit to themselves by flattery of a foreign power. Such internal conflict naturally tightened the bands of conservatism, which needed to be strong if it were to rescue the sacred ark, the vital spirit of a small nation " the smallest of the nations " whose territory lay on the high- way between three continents ; and when the dread and hatred of foreign sway had condensed itself into dread and hatred of the Romans, many Conservatives became Zealots, whose chief mark was that they advocated resistance to the death against the submergence of their nationality. Much might be said on this point toward distinguishing the desperate struggle against a conquest which is regarded as degradation and corruption, from rash, hopeless insurrection against an established native government ; and for my part (if that were of any consequence) I share the spirit of the Zealots. I take the spectacle of the Jewish people defying the Roman edict, and preferring death by starvation or the sword to the introduction of Caligula's deified statue into the temple, as a sublime type of steadfast- ness. But all that need be noticed here is the continuity of 152 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. that national education (by outward and in ward circumstance) which created in the Jews a feeling of race, a sense of corpo- rate existence, unique in its intensity. But not, before the dispersion, unique in essential qualities. There is more likeness than contrast between the way we English got our island and the way the Israelites got Canaan. We have not been noted for forming a low estimate of our- selves in comparison with foreigners, or for admitting that our institutions are equalled by those of any other people under the sun. Many of us have thought that our sea-wall is a spe- cially divine arrangement to make and keep us a nation of sea- kings after the manner of our forefathers, secure against inva- sion and able to invade other lands when we need them, though they may lie on the other side of the ocean. Again, it has been held that we have a peculiar destiny as a Protestant peo- ple, not only able to bruise the head of an idolatrous Chris- tianity in the midst of us, but fitted as possessors of the most truth and the most tonnage to carry our purer religion over the world and convert mankind to our way of thinking. The Puritans, asserting their liberty to restrain tyrants, found the Hebrew history closely symbolical of their feelings and pur- pose ; and it can hardly be correct to cast the blame of their less laudable doings on the writings they invoked, since their opponents made use of the same writings for different ends, finding there a strong warrant for the divine right of kings and the denunciation of those who, like Korah, Dathan, and Abi- rarn, took on themselves the office of the priesthood, which belonged of right solely to Aaron and his sons, or, in other words, to men ordained by the [English bishops. We must rather refer the passionate use of the Hebrew writings to affin- ities of disposition between our own race and the Jewish. Is it true that the arrogance of a Jew was so immeasurably be- yond that of a Calvinist? And the just sympathy and admi- ration which we give to the ancestors who resisted the op- pressive acts of our native kings, and by resisting rescued or won for us the best part of our civil and religious liberties is it justly to be withheld from those brave and steadfast men of Jewish race who fought and died, or strove by wise admin- istration to resist, the oppression and corrupting influences of r THE MODERN HEP! HEP! HEP! 153 foreign tyrants, and by resisting, rescued the nationality which was the very hearth of our own religion? At any rate, seeing that the Jews were more specifically than any other nation educated into a sense of their supreme moral value, the chief matter of surprise is that any other nation is found to rival them in this form of self-confidence. More exceptional less like the course of our own -history has been their dispersion and their subsistence as a separate people through ages in which for the most part they were re- garded and treated very much as beasts hunted for the sake of their skins, or of a valuable secretion peculiar to their species. The Jews showed a talent for accumulating what was an ob- ject of more immediate desire to Christians than animal oils or well-furred skins, and their cupidity and avarice were found at once particularly hateful and particularly useful : hateful when seen as a reason for punishing them by mulcting or rob- bery, useful when this retributive process could be successfully carried forward. Kings and emperors naturally were more alive to the usefulness of subjects who could gather and yield money ; but edicts issued to protect " the King's Jews " equally with the King's game from being harassed and hunted by the commonalty were only slight mitigations to the deplorable lot of a race held to be under the divine curse, and had little force after the Crusades began. As the slave-holders in the United States counted the curse on Ham a justification of negro slav- ery, so the curse on the Jews was counted a justification for hindering them from pursuing agriculture and handicrafts; for marking them out as execrable figures by a peculiar dress ; for torturing them to make them part with their gains, or for more gratuitously spitting at them and pelting them ; for taking it as certain that they killed and ate babies, poisoned the wells, and took pains to spread the plague ; for putting it to them whether they would be baptized or burned, and not failing to burn and massacre them when they were obstinate; but also for suspecting them of disliking the baptism when they had got it, and then burning them in punishment of their insin- cerity ; finally, for hounding them by tens on tens of thousands from the homes where they had found shelter for centuries, and inflicting on them the horrors of a new exile and a new 154 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. dispersion. All this to avenge the Saviour of mankind, or else to compel these stiff-necked people to acknowledge a Master whose servants showed such beneficent effects of His teaching. With a people so treated one of two issues was possible : either from being of feebler nature than their persecutors, and caring more for ease than for the sentiments and ideas which constituted their distinctive character, they would everywhere give way to pressure and get rapidly merged in the populations around them; or, being endowed with uncommon tenacity, physical and mental, feeling peculiarly the ties of inheritance both in blood and faith, remembering national glories, trusting in their recovery, abhorring apostasy, able to bear all things and hope all things with the consciousness of being steadfast to spiritual obligations, the kernel of their number would harden into an inflexibility more and more insured by motive and habit. They would cherish all differences that marked them off from their hated oppressors, all memories that consoled them with a sense of virtual though unrecognized superiority; and the sep- arateness which was made their badge of ignominy would be their inward pride, their source of fortifying defiance. Doubt- less such a people would get confirmed in vices. An oppressive government and a persecuting religion, while breeding vices in those who hold power, are well known to breed answering vices in those who are powerless and suffering. What more direct plan than the course presented by European history could have been pursued in order to give the Jews a spirit of bitter isolation, of scorn for the wolfish hypocrisy that made victims of them, of triumph in prospering at the expense of the blunderers who stoned them away from the open paths of industry? or, on the other hand, to encourage in the less de- fiant a lying conformity, a pretence of conversion for the sake of the social advantages attached to baptism, an outward re- nunciation of their hereditary ties with the lack of real love toward the society and creed which exacted this galling trib- ute? or again, in the most unhappy specimens of the race, to rear transcendent examples of odious vice, reckless instruments of rich men with bad propensities, unscrupulous grinders of the alien people who wanted to grind them ? THE MODERN HEP! HEP! HEP! 155 No wonder the Jews have their vices : no wonder if it were proved (which it has not hitherto appeared to be) that some of them have a bad pre-eminence in evil, an unrivalled super- fluity of naughtiness. It would be more plausible to make a wonder of the virtues which have prospered among them under the shadow of oppression. But instead of dwelling on these, or treating as admitted what any hardy or ignorant person may deny, let us found simply on the loud assertions of the hostile. The Jews, it is said, resisted the expansion of their own religion into Christianity ; they were in the habit of spit- ting on the cross ; they have held the name of Christ to be Anathema. Who taught them that? The men who made Christianity a curse to them : the men who made the name of Christ a symbol for the spirit of vengeance, and, what was worse, made the execution of the vengeance a pretext for sat- isfying their own savageness, greed, and envy : the men who sanctioned with the name of Christ a barbaric and blundering copy of pagan fatalism in taking the words " His blood be upon us and on our children " as a divinely appointed verbal warrant for wreaking cruelty from generation to generation on the people from whose sacred writings Christ drew His teach- ing. Strange retrogression in the professors of an expanded religion, boasting an illumination beyond the spiritual doc- trine of Hebrew prophets ! For Hebrew prophets proclaimed a God who demanded mercy rather' than sacrifices. The Christians also believed that God delighted not in the blood of rams and of bulls, but they apparently conceived Him as re- quiring for His satisfaction the sighs and groans, the blood and roasted flesh of men whose forefathers had misunderstood the metaphorical character of prophecies which spoke of spir- itual pre-eminence under the figure of a material kingdom. Was this the method by which Christ desired His title to the Messiahship to be commended to the hearts and understandings of the nation in which He was born? Many of His sayings bear the stamp of that patriotism which places fellow-country- men in the inner circle of affection and duty. And did the words " Father, forgive them, they know not what they do, " refer only to the centurion and his band, a tacit exception being made of every Hebrew there present from the mercy of 156 THEOPHRASTU8 SUCH. tne Father and the compassion of the Son? nay, more, of every Hebrew yet to come who remained unconverted after hearing of His claim to the Messiahship, not from His own lips or those of His native apostles, but from the lips of alien men whom cross, creed, and baptism had left cruel, rapacious, and debauched? It is more reverent to Christ to believe that He must have approved the Jewish martyrs who deliberately chose to be burned or massacred rather than be guilty of a blaspheming lie, more than He approved the rabble of cru- saders who robbed and murdered them in His name. But these remonstrances seem to have no direct application to personages who take up the attitude of philosophic thinkers and discriminating critics, professedly accepting Christianity from a rational point of view as a vehicle of the highest relig- ious and moral truth, and condemning the Jews on the ground that they are obstinate adherents of an outworn creed, main- tain themselves in moral alienation from the peoples with whom they share citizenship, and are destitute of real interest in the welfare of the community and state with which they are thus identified. These anti-Judaic advocates usually be- long to a party which has felt itself glorified in winning for Jews, as well as Dissenters and Catholics, the full privileges of citizenship, laying open to them every path to distinction. At one time the voice of this party urged that differences of creed were made dangerous only by the denial of citizenship that you must make a man a citizen before he could feel like one. At present, apparently, this confidence has been suc- ceeded by a sense of mistake : there is a regret that no limit- ing clauses were insisted on, such as would have hindered the Jews from coming too far and in too large proportion along those opened pathways ; and the Roumanians are thought to have shown an enviable wisdom in giving them as little chance as possible. But then, the reflection occurring that some of the most objectionable Jews are baptized Christians, it is obvi- ous that such clauses would have been insufficient, and the doctrine that you can turn a Jew into a good Christian is em- phatically retracted. But clearly, these liberal gentlemen, too late enlightened by disagreeable events, must yield the pal in of wise foresight to those who argued against them long THE MODERN HEP! HEP! HEP! 157 ago j and it is a striking spectacle to witness minds so panting for advancement in some directions that they are ready to force it on an unwilling society, in this instance despairingly recurring to mediaeval types of thinking insisting that the Jews are made viciously cosmopolitan by holding the world's money-bag, that for them all national interests are resolved into the algebra of loans, that they have suffered an inward degradation stamping them as morally inferior, and " serve them right," since they rejected Christianity. All which is mirrored in an analogy, namely, that of the Irish, also a ser- vile race, who have rejected Protestantism though it has been repeatedly urged on them by fire and sword and penal laws, and whose place in the moral scale may be judged by our ad- vertisements, where the clause, " No Irish need apply, " par- allels the sentence which for many polite persons sums up the question of Judaism "I never did like the Jews." It is certainly worth considering whether an expatriated, denationalized race, used for ages to live among antipathetic populations, must not inevitably lack some conditions of noble- ness. If they drop that separateness which is made their re- proach, they may be in danger of lapsing into a cosmopolitan indifference equivalent to cynicism, and of missing that inward identification with the nationality immediately around them which might make some amends for their inherited privation. No dispassionate observer can deny this danger. Why, our own countrymen Avho take to living abroad without purpose or function to keep up their sense of fellowship in the affairs of their own land are rarely good specimens of moral healthi- ness ; still, the consciousness of having a native country, the birthplace of common memories and habits of mind, existing like a parental hearth quitted but beloved; the dignity of being included in a people which has a part in the comity of nations and the growing federation of the world; that sense of special belonging which is the root of human virtues, both public and private, all these spiritual links may preserve migratory Englishmen from the worst consequences of their voluntary dispersion. Unquestionably the Jews, having been more than any other race exposed to the adverse moral influ- ences of alienism, must, both in individuals and in groups, 158 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. have suffered some corresponding moral degradation ; but in fact they have escaped with less of abjectness and less of hard hostility toward the nations whose hand has been against them, than could have happened in the case of a people who had neither their adhesion to a separate religion founded on historic memories, nor their characteristic family affectionate- ness. Tortured, flogged, spit upon, the corpus vile on which rage or wantonness vented themselves with impunity, their name flung at them as an opprobrium by superstition, hatred, and contempt, they have remained proud of thir origin. Does any one call this an evil pride? Perhaps he belongs to that order of man who, while he has a democratic dislike to dukes and earls, wants to make believe that his father was an idle gentleman, when in fact he was an honorable artisan, or who would feel flattered to be taken for other than an Englishman. It is possible to be too arrogant about our blood or our calling, but that arrogance is virtue compared with such mean pretence. The pride which identities us with a great historic body is a humanizing, elevating habit of mind, inspiring sacrifices of individual comfort, gain, or other selfish ambition, for the sake of that ideal whole : and no man swayed by such a senti- ment can become completely abject. That a Jew of Smyrna, where a whip is carried by passengers ready to flog off the too officious specimens of his race, can still be proud to say, " I am a Jew," is surely a fact to awaken admiration in a mind capable of understanding what we may call the ideal forces in human history. And again, a varied, impartial observation of the Jews in different countries tends to the impression that they have a predominant kindliness which must have been deeply ingrained in the constitution of their race to have out- lasted' the ages of persecution and oppression. The concen- tration of their joys in domestic life has kept up in them the capacity of tenderness: the pity for the fatherless and the widow, the care for the women and the little ones, blent inti- mately with their religion, is a well of mercy that cannot long or widely be pent up by exclusiveness. And the kindliness of the Jew overflows the line of division between him and the Gentile. On the whole, one of the most remarkable phenom- ena in the history of this scattered people, made for ages " a THE MODERN HEP! HEP! HEP! 169 scorn and a hissing," is, that after being subjected to this process, which might have been expected to be in every sense deteriorating and vitiating, they have come out of it (in any estimate which allows for numerical proportion) rivalling the nations of all European countries in healthiness and beauty of physique, in practical ability, in scientific and artistic apti- tude, and in some forms of ethical value. A significant indi- cation of their natural rank is seen in the fact that at this moment, the leader of the Liberal party in Germany is a Jew, the leader of the Eepublican party in France is a Jew, and the head of the Conservative ministry in England is a Jew. And here it is that we find the ground for the obvious jeal- ousy which is now stimulating the revived expression of old antipathies. " The Jews, " it is felt, " have a dangerous ten- dency to get the uppermost places not only in commerce but in political life. Their monetary hold on governments is tend- ing to perpetuate in leading Jews a spirit of universal alienism (euphemistically called cosmopolitanism), even where the West has given them a full share in civil and political rights. A people with oriental sunlight in their blood, yet capable of being everywhere acclimatized, they have a force and tough- ness which enables them to carry off the best prizes ; and their wealth is likely to put half the seats in Parliament at their disposal." There is truth in these views of Jewish social and political relations. But it is rather too late for liberal pleaders to urge them in a merely vituperative sense. Do they propose as a remedy for the impending danger of our healthier national influences getting overridden by Jewish predominance, that we should repeal our emancipatory laws? Not all the Germanic immigrants who have been settling among us for genera- tions, and are still pouring in to settle, are Jews, but thor- oughly Teutonic and more or less Christian craftsman, mech- anicians, or skilled and erudite functionaries; and the Semitic Christians who swarm among us are dangerously like their unconverted brethren in complexion, persistence, and wealth. Then there are the Greeks who, by the help of Phoenician blood or otherwise, are objectionably strong in the city. Some judges think that the Scotch are more numerous and prosper- 160 THEOPHRA8TUS SUCH. ous here in the South than is quite for the good of us South- erners ; and the early inconvenience felt under the Stuarts of being quartered upon by a hungry hard-working people with a distinctive accent and form of religion, and higher cheek- bones than English taste requires, has not yet been quite neu- tralized. As for the Irish, it is felt in high quarters that we have always been too lenient toward them; at least, if they had been harried a little more there might not have been so many of them on the English press, of which they divide the power with the Scotch, thus driving many Englishmen to hon- est and ineloquent labor. So far shall we be carried if we go in search of devices to hinder people of other blood than our own from getting the advantage of dwelling among us. Let it be admitted that it is a calamity to the English, as to any other great historic people, to undergo a premature fusion with immigrants of alien blood; that its distinctive national characteristics should be in danger of obliteration by the pre- dominating quality of foreign settlers. I not only admit this, I am ready to unite in groaning over the threatened danger. To one who loves his native language, who would delight to keep our rich and harmonious English uudefiled by foreign accent, foreign intonation, and those foreign tinctures of ver- bal meaning which tend to confuse all writing and discourse, it is an affliction as harassing as the climate, that on our stage, in our studios, at our public and private gatherings, in our offices, warehouses, and workshops, we must expect to hear our beloved English with its words clipped, its vowels stretched and twisted, its phrases of acquiescence and politeness, of cordiality, dissidence or argument, delivered always in the wrong tones, like ill-rendered melodies, marred beyond recog- nition; that there should be a general ambition to speak every language except our mother English, which persons " of style " are not ashamed of corrupting with slang, false foreign equiv- alents, and a pronunciation that crushes out all color from the vowels and jams them between jostling consonants. An an- cient Greek might not like to be resuscitated for the sake of hearing Homer read in our universities, still he would at least find more instructive marvels in other developments to be wit- THE MODERN HEP! HEP! HEP! 161 nessed at those institutions; but a modem Englishman is in- vited from his after-dinner repose to hear Shakespeare deliv- ered under circumstances which offer no other novelty than some novelty of false intonation, some new distribution of strong emphasis on prepositions, some new misconception of a familiar idiom. Well ! it is our inertness that is in fault, our carelessness of excellence, our willing ignorance of the treas- ures that lie in our national heritage, while we are agape after what is foreign, though it may be only a vile imitation of what is native. This marring of our speech, however, is a minor evil com- pared with what must follow from the predominance of wealth- acquiring immigrants, whose appreciation of our political and social life must often be as approximative or fatally erroneous as their delivery of our language. But take the worst issues what can we do to hinder them? Are we to adopt the ex- clusiveness for which we have punished the Chinese? Are we to tear the glorious flag of hospitality which has made our freedom the world- wide blessing of the oppressed? It is not agreeable to find foreign accents and stumbling locutions pass- ing from the piquant exception to the general rule of discourse. But to urge on that account that we should spike away the peaceful foreigner, would be a view of international relations not in the long run favorable to the interests of our fellow- countrymen ; for we are at least equal to the races we call ob- trusive in the disposition to settle wherever money is to be made and cheaply idle living to be found. In meeting the national evils which are brought upon us by the onward course of the world, there is often no more immediate hope or resource than that of striving after fuller national excellence, which must consist in the moulding of more excellent individual na- tives. The tendency of things is toward the quicker or slower fusion of races. It is impossible to arrest this tendency : all we can do is to moderate its course so as to hinder it from de- grading the moral status of societies by a too rapid effacement of those national traditions and customs which are the language of the national genius the deep suckers of healthy sentiment. Such moderating and guidance of inevitable movement is worthy of all effort. And it is in this sense that the modern in- 11 162 THEOPHRASTtJS SUCH. sistence on the idea of Nationalities has value. That any people at once distinct and coherent enough to form a state should be held in subjection by an alien antipathetic government has been becoming more and more a ground of sympathetic indignation ; and in virtue of this, at least one great State has been added to European councils. Nobody now complains of the result in this case, though far-sighted persons see the need to limit analogy by discrimination. We have to consider who are the stifled people and who the stiflers before we can be sure of our ground. The only point in this connection on which English- men are agreed is, that England itself shall not be subject to foreign rule. The fiery resolve to resist invasion, though with an improvised array of pitchforks, is felt to be virtuous, and to be worthy of a historic people Why? Because there is a national life in our veins. Because there is something specifi- cally English which we feel to be supremely worth striving for, worth dying for, rather than living to renounce it. Be- cause we too have our share perhaps a principal share in that spirit of separateness which has not yet done its work in the education of mankind, which has created the varying gen- ius of nations, and, like the Muses, is the offspring of memory. Here, as everywhere else, the human task seems to be the discerning and adjustment of opposite claims. But the end can hardly be achieved by urging contradictory reproaches, and instead of laboring after discernment as a preliminary to in- tervention, letting our zeal burst forth according to a capricious selection, first determined accidentally and afterward justified by personal predilection. Not only John Gilpin and his wife, or Edwin and Angelina, seem to be of opinion that their pref- erence or dislike of Eussians, Servians, or Greeks, consequent, perhaps, on hotel adventures, has something to do with the merits of the Eastern Question ; even in a higher range of in- tellect and enthusiasm we find a distribution of sympathy or pity for sufferers of different blood or votaries of differing religions, strangely unaccountable on any other ground than a fortuitous direction of study or trivial circumstances of travel. With some even admirable persons, one is never quite sure of any particular being included under a general term. A pro- vincial physician, it is said, once ordering a lady patient not MODERN HEP! HEP! HEP! 163 to eat salad, was asked pleadingly by the affectionate husband whether she might eat lettuce, or cresses, or radishes; The physician had too rashly believed in the comprehensiveness of the word " salad," just as we, if not enlightened by experience, might believe in the all-embracing breadth of " sympathy with the injured and oppressed." What mind can exhaust the grounds of exception which lie in each particular case? There is understood to be a peculiar odor from the negro body, and we know that some persons, too rationalistic to feel bound by the curse on Ham, used to hint very strongly that this odor determined the question on the side of negro slavery. And this is the usual level of thinking in polite society con- cerning the Jews. Apart from theological purposes, it seems to be held surprising that anybody should take an interest in the history of a people whose literature has furnished all our devotional language ; and if any reference is made to their past or future destinies some hearer is sure to state as a relevant fact which may assist our judgment, that she, for her part, is not fond of them, having known a Mr. Jacobson who was very unpleasant, or that he, for his part, thinks meanly of them as a race, though on inquiry you find that he is so little acquainted with their characteristics that he is astonished to learn how many persons whom he has blindly admired and applauded are Jews to the backbone. Again, men who con- sider themselves in the very van of modern advancement, knowing history and the latest philosophies of history, indi- cate their contemptuous surprise that any one should entertain the destiny of the Jews as a worthy subject, by referring to Moloch and their own agreement with the theory that the re- ligion of Jehovah was merely a transformed Moloch-worship, while in the same breath they are glorifying " civilization " as a transformed tribal existence of which some lineaments are traceable in grim marriage customs of the native Australians. Are these erudite persons prepared to insist that the name " Father " should no longer have any sanctity for us, because in their view of likelihood our Aryan ancestors were mere im- provers on a state of things in which nobody knew his own father? For less theoretic men, ambitious to be regarded as practi- 164 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. cal politicians, the value of the Hebrew race has been nieas j ured by their unfavorable opinion of a prime minister who is a Jew by lineage. But it is possible to form a very ugly opin- ion as to the scrupulousness of Walpole, or of Chatham ; and in any case I think Englishmen would refuse to accept the character and doings of those eighteenth century statesmen as the standard of value for the English people and the part they have to play in the fortunes of mankind. If we are to consider the future of the Jews at all, it seems reasonable to take as a preliminary question : Are they des- tined to complete fusion with the peoples among whom they are dispersed, losing every remnant of a distinctive conscious- ness as Jews; or, are there in the breadth and intensity with which the feeling of separateness, or what we may call the organized memory of a national consciousness, actually exists in the world-wide Jewish communities the seven millions scattered from east to west and again, are there in the polit- ical relations of the world, the conditions present or approach- ing for the restoration of a Jewish state planted on the old ground as a centre of national feeling, a source of dignifying protection, a special channel for special energies which may contribute some added form of national genius, and an added voice in the councils of the world? They are among us everywhere ; it is useless to say we are not fond of them. Perhaps we are not fond of proletaries and their tendency to form Unions, but the world is not there- fore to be rid of them. If we wish to free ourselves from the inconveniences that we have to complain of, whether in prole- taries or in Jews, our best course is to encourage all means of improving these neighbors who elbow us in a thickening crowd, and of sending their incommodious energies into beneficent channels. Why are we so eager for the dignity of certain populations of whom perhaps we have never seen a single specimen, and of whose history, legend, or literature we have been contentedly ignorant for ages, while we sneer at the no- tion of a renovated national dignity for the Jews, whose ways of thinking and whose very verbal forms are on our lips in every prayer which we end with an Amen? Some of us con- sider this question dismissed when they have said that the THE MODERN HEPl HEP! HEP! 165 wealthiest Jews have no desire to forsake their European pal- aces, and go to live in Jerusalem. But in a return from exile, in the restoration of a people, the question is not whether cer- tain rich men will choose to remain behind, but whether there will be found worthy men who will choose to lead the return. Plenty of prosperous Jews remained in Babylon when Ezra marshalled his band of forty thousand and began a new glori- ous epoch in the history of his race, making the preparation for that epoch in the history of the world which has been held glorious enough to be dated from forevermore. The hinge of possibility is simply the existence of an adequate community of feeling as well as widespread need in the Jewish race, and the hope that among its finer specimens there may arise some men of instruction and ardent public spirit, some new Ezras, some modern Maccabees, who will know how to use all favor- ing outward conditions, how to triumph by heroic exampler over the indifference of their fellows and the scorn of their foes, and will steadfastly set their faces toward making their people once more one among the nations. Formerly, evangelical orthodoxy was prone to dwell on the fulfilment of prophecy in the " restoration of the Jews. " Such interpretation of the prophets is less in vogue now. The domi- nant' mode is to insist on a Christianity that disowns its origin, that is not a substantial growth having a genealogy, but is a vaporous reflex of modern notion. The Christ of Matthew had the heart of a Jew " Go ye first to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." The Apostle of the Gentiles had the heart of a Jew : " For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh : who are Israelites ; to whom pertaineth the adop- tion, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises ; whose are the fathers, and of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came." Modern apostles, extolling Christianity, are found using a dif- ferent tone : they prefer the mediaeval cry translated into mod- ern phrase. But the mediaeval cry too was in substance very ancient more ancient than the days of Augustus. Pagans in successive ages said, " These people are unlike us, and refuse to be made like us: let us punish them." The Jews were 166 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. steadfast in their separateness, and through that separateness Christianity was born. A modern book on Liberty has main- tained that from the freedom of individual men to persist in idiosyncrasies the world may be enriched. Why should we not apply this argument to the idiosyncrasy of a nation, and pause in our haste to hoot it down? There is still a great function for the steadfastness of the Jew : not that he should shut out the utmost illumination which knowledge can throw on his national history, but that he should cherish the store of inheritance which that history has left him. Every Jew should be conscious that he is one of a multitude possessing common objects of piety in the immortal achievements and immortal sorrows of ancestors who have transmitted to them a physical and mental type strong enough, eminent enough in faculties, pregnant enough with peculiar promise, to constitute a new beneficent individuality among the nations, and, by con- futing the traditions of scorn, nobly avenge the wrongs done to their Fathers. There is a sense in which the worthy child of a nation that has brought forth illustrious prophets, high and unique among the poets of the world, is bound by their visions. Is bound? Yes, for the effective bound of human action is feeling, and the worthy child of a people owning the triple name of He- brew, Israelite, and Jew, feels his kinship with the glories and the sorrows, the degradation and the possible renovation of his national family. Will any one teach the nullification of this feeling and call bis doctrine a philosophy? He will teach a blinding supersti- tion the superstition that a theory of human well-being can be constructed in disregard of the influences which have made us human. THE END. Foleshill (Home of George Eliot from 1841 to 1849). Frontis. Eliot's Essays ESSAYS AND LEAVES FROM A NOTE-BOOK CONTENTS. ESSAYS. nun WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS : THE POET YOUNG, . 7 (" Westminster Review," 1857.) GERMAN WIT : HEINRICH HEINE, 65 ( "Westminster Review," 1856.) EVANGELICAL TEACHING : DR. CUMMING, 92 (" Westminster Review," 1855.) THE INFLUENCE OF RATIONALISM : LECKY'S HISTORY, . . . 123 (" Fortnightly Review," 1865.) THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE : RIEHL, . . . 139 (" Westminster Review," 1856.) THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR, 174 (" Eraser's Magazine," 1855.) ADDRESS TO WORKING MEN, BY FELIX HOLT, .... 192 (" Blackwood's Magazine," 1868.) LEAVES FROM A NOTE-BOOK. AUTHORSHIP, 208 JUDGMENTS ON AUTHORS, 213 STORY TELLING, 215 HISTORIC IMAGINATION, 217 VALUE IN ORIGINALITY, 219 To THE PROSAIC ALL THINGS ARE PROSAIC, ..... 219 4 CONTENTS. PACT " DE AH RELIGIOUS LOVE," . 220 W* MAKE OUR OWN PRECEDENTS, 220 BIRTH OF TOLERANCE, 220 FELIX Qui NON POTUIT, 221 DITINB GRACE A REAL EMANATION, ...... 221 "A FINE EXCESS." FEELING Is ENERGY, . . . . .222 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. Foleshill (Home of George Eliot from 1841 to 1849) . . . .Frontispiece. PAGE Portrait of Heine 55 Portrait of Goethe 175 Rosehill (a favorite resting place of George Eliot) 208 Essays of George Eliot. PREFACE. WISHES have often been expressed that the articles known to have been written by George Eliot in the " Westminster Review " before she had become famous under that pseudo- nym, should be republished. Those wishes are now grati- fied as far, at any rate, as it is possible to gratify them. For it was not George Eliot's desire that the whole of those articles should be rescued from oblivion. And in order that there might be no doubt on the subject, she made some time before her death a collection of such of her fugitive writings as she considered deserving of a permanent form; carefully revised them for the press ; and left them, in the order in which they here appear, with written injunctions that no other pieces written by her, of date prior to 1857, should be republished. It will thus be seen that the present collection of Essays has the weight of her sanction, and has had, moreover, the advantage of such corrections and alterations as a revision long subsequent to the period of writing may have suggested to her. The opportunity afforded by this republication seemed a suitable one for giving to the world some " notes, " as George Eliot simply called them, which belong to a much later period, and which have not been previously published. The exact date of their writing cannot be fixed with any certainty, but it must have been some time between the appearance of " Mid- dlemarch" and that of " Theophrastus Such." They were probably written without any distinct view to publication some of them for the satisfaction of her own mind ; others perhaps as memoranda, and with an idea of working them out 6 PREFACE. more fully at some later time. It may be of interest to know that, besides the " notes " here given, the note-book contains four which appeared in " Theophrastus Such, " three of them practically as they there stand ; and it is not impossible that some of those in the present volume might also have been so utilized had they not happened to fall outside the general scope of the work. The marginal titles are George Eliot's own, but for the general title, " Leaves from a Note-Book, " I am responsible. I need only add that, in publishing these notes, I have the complete concurrence of my friend Mr. Cross. CHARLES LEE LEWES, HIGHGKA.TE, December 1883. ESSAYS. WOBLDLESTESS AND OTHER- WOKLDLINESS : THE POET YOUNG. THE study of men, as they have appeared in different ages, and under various social conditions, may be considered as the natural history of the race. Let us, then, for a moment im- agine ourselves, as students of this natural history, " dredg- ing " the first half of the eighteenth century in search of speci- mens. About the year 1730 we have hauled up a remarkable individual of the species divine a surprising name, consid- ering the nature of the animal before us; but we are used to unsuitable names in natural history. Let us examine this in- dividual at our leisure. He is on the verge of fifty, and has recently undergone his metamorphosis into the clerical form. Rather a paradoxical specimen, if you observe him narrowly : a sort of cross between a sycophant and a psalmist ; a poet whose imagination is alternately fired by the " Last Day " and by a creation of peers, who fluctuates between rhapsodic ap- plause of King George and rhapsodic applause of Jehovah. After spending " a foolish youth, the sport of peers and poets," after being a hanger-on of the profligate Duke of Wharton, after aiming in vain at a parliamentary career, and angling for pensions and preferment with fulsome dedications and fustian odes, he is a little disgusted with his imperfect success, and has determined to retire from the general mendicancy busi- ness to a particular branch; in other words, he has deter- mined on that renunciation of the world implied in " taking orders, " with the prospect of a good living and an advanta- geous matrimonial connection. And he personifies the nicest 8 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER- WORLDLINESS . balance of temporalities and spiritualities. He is equally im- pressed with the momentousness of death and of burial fees; he languishes at once for immortal life and for " livings " ; he has a fervid attachment to patrons in general, but on the whole prefers the Almighty. He will teach, with something more than official conviction, the nothingness of earthly things ; and he will feel something more than private disgust if his merito- rious efforts in directing men's attention to another world are not rewarded by substantial preferment iiv this. His secular man believes in cambric bands and silk stockings as character- istic attire for " an ornament of religion and virtue " ; hopes courtiers will never forget to copy Sir Robert TYalpole; and writes begging-letters to the King's mistress. His spiritual man recognizes no motives more familiar than Golgotha and " the skies " ; it walks in graveyards, or it soars among the stars. His religion exhausts itself in ejaculations and rebukes, and knows no medium between the ecstatic and the sententious. If it were not for the prospect of immortality, he considers, it would be wise and agreeable to be indecent, or to murder one's father; and, heaven apart, it would be extremely irra- tional in- any man not to be a knave. Man, he thinks, is a com- pound of the angel and the brute : the brute is to be humbled by being reminded of its " relation to the stalls, " and frightened into moderation by the contemplation of death-beds and skulls ; the angel is to be developed by vituperating this world and ex- alting the next ; and by this double process you get the Chris- tian "the highest style of man." With all this, our new- made divine is an unmistakable poet. To a clay compounded chiefly of the worldling and the rhetorician, there is added a real spark of Promethean fire. He will one day clothe his apostrophes and objurgations, his astronomical religion and his charnel-house morality, in lasting verse, which will stand, like a Juggernaut made of gold and jewels, at once magnificent and repulsive : for this divine is Edward Young, the future author of the "Night Thoughts." Judging from Young's works, one might imagine that the preacher had been organized in him by hereditary transmis- sion through a long line of clerical forefathers, that the dia- monds of the " Night Thoughts " had been slowly condensed THE POET YOUNG. 9 from the charcoal of ancestral sermons. Yet it was not so. His grandfather, apparently, wrote himself gentleman, not clerk; and there is no evidence that preaching had run in the family blood before it took that turn in the person of the poet's father, who was quadruply clerical, being at once rector, preb- endary, court chaplain, and dean. Young was born at his father's rectory of Upham, in 1681. In due time the boy went to Winchester College, and subsequently, though not till he was twenty -two, to Oxford, where, for his father's sake, he was befriended by the wardens of two colleges, and in 1708, three years after his father' s death, nominated by Arch- bishop Tenison to a law fellowship at All Souls. Of Young's life at Oxford in these years, hardly anything is known. His biographer, Croft, has nothing to tell us but the vague report that, when " Young found himself independent and his own master at All Souls, he was not the ornament to religion and morality that he afterward became," and the perhaps apocry- phal anecdote, that Tindal, the atheist, confessed himself em- barrassed by the originality of Young's arguments. Both the report and the anecdote, however, are borne out by indirect evidence. As to the latter, Young has left us sufficient proof that he was fond of arguing on the theological side, and that he had his own way of treating old subjects. As to the former, we learn that Pope, after saying other things which we know to be true of Young, added, that he passed " a foolish youth, the sport of peers and poets " ; and, from all the indications we possess of his career till he was nearly fifty, we are in- clined to think that Pope's statement only errs by defect, and that he should rather have said, t( a foolish youth and middle age." It is not likely that Young was a very hard student, for he impressed Johnson, who caw him in his old age, as "not a great scholar," and as surprisingly ignorant of what Johnson thought " quite common maxims " in literature; and there is no evidence that he filled either his leisure or his purse by taking pupils. His career as an author did not be- gin till he was nearly thirty, even dating from the publication of a portion of the " Last Day, " in the Tatler; so that he could hardly have been absorbed in composition. But where the fully developed insect is parasitic, we believe the larva is usu- 10 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS : ally parasitic also, and we shall probably not be far wrong in supposing that Young at Oxford, as elsewhere, spent a good deal of his time in hanging about possible and actual patrons, and accommodating himself to their habits with considerable flexibility of conscience and of tongue; being none the less ready, upon occasion, to present himself as the champion of theology, and to rhapsodize at convenient moments in the com- pany of the skies or of skulls. That brilliant profligate, the Duke of Wharton, to whom Young afterward clung as his chief patron, was at this time a mere boy ; and, though it is proba- ble that their intimacy had already begun, since the Duke's father and mother were friends of the old Dean, that intimacy ought not to aggravate any unfavorable inference as to Young's Oxford life. It is less likely that he fell into any exceptional vice, than that he differed from the men around him chiefly in his episodes of theological advocacy and rhapsodic solemn- ity. He probably sowed his wild oats after the coarse fashion of his times, for he has left us sufficient evidence that his moral sense was not delicate ; but his companions, who were occupied in sowing their own oats, perhaps took it as a mat- ter of course that he should be a rake, and were only struck with the exceptional circumstance that he was a pious and moralizing rake. There is some irony in the fact that the two first poetical productions of Young, published in the same year, were his " Epistle to Lord Lansdowne, " celebrating the recent creation of peers Lord Lansdowne's creation in particular ; and the "Last Day." Other poets, besides Young, found the device for obtaining a Tory majority by turning twelve insignificant commoners into insignificant lords, an irresistible stimulus to verse; but no other poet showed so versatile an enthusiasm so nearly equal an ardor for the honor of the new baron and the honor of the Deity. But the twofold nature of the syco- phant and the psalmist is not more strikingly shown in the contrasted themes of the two poems, than in the transitions from bombast about monarchs, to bombast about the resurrec- tion, in the " Last Day " itself. The dedication of this poem to Queen Anne, Young afterward suppressed, for he was always ashamed of having flattered a dead patron. In this THE POET YOUNG. 11 dedication, Croft tells us, " he gives her Majesty praise indeed for her victories, but says that the author is more pleased to see her rise from this lower world, soaring above the clouds, passing the first and second heavens, and leaving the fixed stars behind her; nor will he lose her there, he says, but keep her still in view through the boundless spaces on the other side of creation, in her journey toward eternal bliss, till he behold the heaven of heavens open, and angels receiving and conveying her still onward from the stretch of his imagina- tion, which tires in her pursuit, and falls back again to earth." The self-criticism which prompted the suppression of the dedication, did not, however, lead him to improve either the rhyme or the reason of the unfortunate couplet, " When other Bourbons reign in other lands, And, if men's sins forbid not, other Annes." In the " Epistle to Lord Lansdowne, " Young indicates his taste for the drama ; and there is evidence that his tragedy of " Busiris " was " in the theatre " as early as this very year, 1713, though it was not brought on the stage till nearly six years later ; so that Young was now very decidedly bent on authorship, for which his degree of B.C.L., taken in this year, was doubtless a magical equipment. Another poem, " The Force of Religion ; or, Vanquished Love, " founded on the execution of Lady Jane Grey and her husband, quickly followed, showing fertility in feeble and tasteless verse ; and on the Queen's death, in 1714, Young lost no time in making a poetical lament for a departed patron a vehicle for extrav- agant laudation of the new monarch. No further literary production of his appeared until 1716, when a Latin oration which he delivered on the foundation of the Codrington Library at All Souls, gave him a new opportunity for displaying his alacrity in inflated panegyric. In 1717 it is probable that Young accompanied the Duke of Wharton to Ireland, though so slender are the materials for his biography, that the chief basis for this supposition is a passage in his " Conjectures on Original Composition," written when he was nearly eighty, in which he intimates that he had once been in that country. But there are many facts surviv- 12 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER- WORLDLINESS: ing to indicate that for the next eight or nine years Young was a sort of attache of Wharton's. In 1719, according to legal records, the Duke granted him an annuity, in considera- tion of his having relinquished the office of tutor to Lord Bur- leigh, with a life annuity of 100 a year, on his Grace's as- surances that he would provide for him in a much more ample manner. And again, from the same evidence, it appears that in 1721 Young received from Wharton a bond for 600, in compensation of expenses incurred in standing for Parliament at the Duke' s desire, and as an earnest of greater services which his Grace had promised him on his refraining from the spiritual and temporal advantages of taking orders with a cer- tainty of two livings in the gift of his college. It is clear, therefore, that lay advancement, as long as there was any chance of it, had more attractions for Young than clerical preferment ; and that at this time he accepted the Duke of Wharton as the pilot of his career. A more creditable relation of Young's was his friendship with Tickell, with whom he was in the habit of interchanging criticisms, and to whom in 1719 the same year, let us note, in which he took his doctor's degree he addressed his " Lines on the Death of Addison." Close upon these followed his " Paraphrase of Part of the Book of Job, " with a dedication to Parker, recently made Lord Chancellor, showing that the possession of Wharton's patronage did not prevent Young from fishing in other waters. He knew nothing of Parker, but that did not prevent him from magnifying the new Chancellor's merits; on the other hand, he did know Wharton, but this again did not prevent him from prefixing to his tragedy, " The Eevenge," which appeared in 1721, a dedication attributing to the Duke all virtues, as well as all accomplishments. In the concluding sentence of this dedication, Young naively indicates that a considerable ingredient in his gratitude was a lively sense of anticipated favors. " My present fortune is his bounty, and my future his care ; which I will venture to say will always be remembered to his honor; since he, I know, intended his generosity as an encouragement to merit, though, through his very pardonable partiality to one who bears him so sincere a duty and respect, I happen to receive THE POET YOUNG. 13 the benefit of it." Young was economical with his ideas and images ; he was rarely satisfied with using a clever thing once, and this bit of ingenious humility was afterward made to do duty in the " Instalment, " a poem addressed to Walpole : "Be this thy partial smile, from censure free, 'Twas meant for merit, though it fell on me." It was probably " The Keveuge " that Young was writing when, as we learn from Spence's "Anecdotes," the Duke of Wharton gave him a skull with a candle fixed in it, as the most appropriate lamp by which to write tragedy. Accord- ing to Young' s dedication, the Duke was " accessory " to the scenes of this tragedy in a more important way, "not only by suggesting the most beautiful incident in them, but by making all possible provision for the success of the whole." A state- ment which is credible, not indeed on the ground of Young's dedicatory assertion, but from the known ability of the Duke, who, as Pope tells us, possessed "Each gift of Nature and of Art, And wanted nothing but an honest heart." The year 1722 seems to have been the period of a visit to Mr. Dodington, at Eastbury, in Dorsetshire the " pure Dor- setian downs " celebrated by Thomson, in which Young made the acquaintance of Voltaire ; for in the subsequent dedication of his " Sea Piece " to " Mr. Voltaire," he recalls their meeting on Dorset Downs ; and it was in this year that Christopher Pitt, a gentleman-poet of those days, addressed an " Epistle to Dr. Edward Young, at Eastbury, in Dorsetshire," which has at least the merit of this biographical couplet, "While with your Dodington retired you sit, Charm'd with his flowing Burgundy and wit." Dodington, apparently, was charmed in his turn, for he told Dr. Warton that Young was " far superior to the French poet in the variety and novelty of his bonmots and repartees. " Un- fortunately, the only specimen of Young's wit on this occasion that has been preserved to us is the epigram represented as an 14 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER WORLDLlNEBS ; extempore retort (spoken aside, surely) to Voltaire's criticism of Milton' s episode of Sin and Death : "Thou art so witty, profligate, and thin, At once we think thee Milton, Death, and Sin" ; an epigram which, in the absence of " flowing Burgundy, " does not strike us as remarkably brilliant. Let us give Young the benefit of the doubt thrown on the genuineness of this epi- gram by his own poetical dedication, in which he represents himself as having " soothed " Voltaire's " rage " against Milton " with gentle rhymes " ; though in other respects that dedica- tion is anything but favorable to a high estimate of Young's wit. Other evidence apart, we should not be eager for the after-dinner conversation of the man who wrote, "Thine is the Drama, h6w renown 'd! Thine Epic's loftier trump to sound ; But let Arion's sea-strung harp be mine : But where's his dolphin ? Know'st thou where f May that be found in thee, Voltaire ! " The " Satires" appeared in 1725 and 1726, each, of course, with its laudatory dedication and its compliments insinuated amongst the rhymes. The seventh and last is dedicated to Sir Kobert Walpole, is very short, and contains nothing in particular except lunatic flattery of George I. and his prime minister, attributing that monarch's late escape from a storm at sea to the miraculous influence of his grand and virtuous soul for George, he says, rivals the angels : " George, who in foes can soft affections raise, And charm envenomed satire into praise. Nor human rage alone his pow'r perceives, But the mad winds and the tumultuous waves. Ev'n storms (Death's fiercest ministers !) forbear, And in their own wild empire learn to spare. Thus, Nature's self, supporting Man's decree, Styles Britain's sovereign, sovereign of the sea." As for Walpole, what he felt at this tremendous crisis "No powers of language, but his own, can tell, His own, which Nature and the Graces form, At will, to raise, or hush, the civil storm." THE POET YOUNG. 15 It is a coincidence worth noticing, that this seventh Satire was published in 1726, and that the warrant of George I., granting Young a pension of 200 a year from Lady -day 1725, is dated May 3, 1726. The gratitude exhibited in this Satire may have been chiefly prospective, but the " Instalment " a poem inspired by the thrilling event of Walpole's installa- tion as Knight of the Garter was clearly written with the double ardor of a man who has got a pension, and hopes for something more. His emotion about Walpole is precisely at the same pitch as his subsequent emotion about the Second Advent. In the " Instalment " he says : "With invocations some their hearts inflame ; I need no muse, a Walpole is my theme." And of God coming to judgment, he says, in the "Night Thoughts " : "I find my inspiration in my theme ; The grandeur of my subject is my muse. " Nothing can be feebler than this "Instalment," except in the strength of impudence with which the writer professes to scorn the prostitution of fair fame, the " profanation of celes- tial fire." Herbert Croft tells us that Young made more than three thousand pounds by his "Satires," a surprising statement, taken in connection with the reasonable doubt he throws on the story related in Spence's "Anecdotes," that the Duke of Wharton gave Young 2,000 for this work. Young, however, seems to have been tolerably fortunate in the pecuniary results of his publications; and with his literary profits, his annuity from Wharton, his fellowship, and his pension, not to men- tion other bounties which may be inferred from the high merits he discovers in many men of wealth and position, we may fairly suppose that he now laid the foundation of the con- siderable fortune he left at his death. It is probable that the Duke of Wharton's final departure for the Continent and disgrace at Court in 1726, and the con- sequent cessation of Young's reliance on his patronage, tended not only to heighten the temperature of his poetical enthu- 16 WORLDLIXESS AND OTHER- WO RLDLINESS: siasm for Sir Robert Walpole, but also to turn his thoughts toward the Church again, as the second-best means of rising in the world. On the accession of George II., Young found the same transcendent merits in him as in his predecessor, and celebrated them in a style of poetry previously unat- tempted by him the Pindaric ode, a poetic form which helped him to surpass himself in furious bombast. " Ocean, an Ode : concluding with a Wish," was the title of this piece. He afterward pruned it, and cut off, amongst other things, the concluding Wish, expressing the yearning for humble retire- ment, which, of course, had prompted him to the effusion ; but we may judge of the rejected stanzas by the quality of those he has allowed to remain. For example, calling on Britain' s dead mariners to rise and meet their "country's full-blown glory " in the person of the new King, he says : " What powerful charm Can Death disarm? Your long, your iron slumbers break? By Jove, by Fame, By George's name Awake ! awake ! awake ! awake ! " Soon after this notable production, which was written with the ripe folly of forty-seven, Young took orders, and was pres- ently appointed chaplain to the King. "The Brothers," his third and last tragedy, which was already in rehearsal, he now withdrew from the stage, and sought reputation in a way more accordant with the decorum of his new profession, by turning prose-writer. But after publishing "A True Esti- mate of Human Life," with a dedication to the Queen, as one of the " most shining representatives " of God on earth, and a sermon, entitled " An Apology for Princes ; or, the Rever- ence due to Government, " preached before the House of Com- mons, his Pindaric ambition again seized him, and he matched his former ode by another, called "Imperium Pelagi; a Naval Lyric, written in Imitation of Pindar's spirit, occasioned by his Majesty's Return from Hanover, 1729, and the succeeding Peace." Since he afterward suppressed this second ode, we must suppose that it was rather worse than the first. Next came his two " Epistles to Pope, concerning the Authors of the THE POET YOUNG. 17 Age," remarkable for nothing but the audacity of affectation with which the most servile of poets professes to despise servility. In 1730, Young was presented by his college with the rec- tory of Welwyn, in Hertfordshire ; and in the following year, when he was just fifty, he married Lady Elizabeth Lee, a widow with two children, who seems to have been in favor with Queen Caroline, and who probably had an income two attractions which doubtless enhanced the power of her other charms. Pastoral duties and domesticity probably cured Young of some bad habits ; but, unhappily, they did not cure him either of flattery or of fustian. Three more odes followed, quite as bad as those of his bachelorhood, except that in the third he announced the wise resolution of never writing another. It must have been about this time, since Young was now " turned of fifty," that he wrote the letter to Mrs. Howard (afterward Lady Sufrolk), George II. 's mistress, which proves that he used other engines, besides the Pindaric, in " besieging Court favor." The letter is too characteristic to be omitted : "Monday Morning. "MADAM, I know his majesty's goodness to his servants, and his love of justice in general, so well, that I am confident, if his majesty knew my case, I should not have any cause to despair of his gracious favor to me. "Abilities. Want. Good Manners. Sufferings } . . Service. and V ma1estv Age. Zeal jmajestj. These, madam, are the proper points of consideration in the person that humbly hopes his majesty's favor "As to Abilities, all I can presume to say is, I have done the best I could to improve them. "As to Good Manners, I desire no favor, if any just objection lies against them. "As for Service, I have been near seven years in his majesty's, and never omitted any duty in it, which few can say "As for Age, I am turned of fifty. "As for Want, I have no manner of preferment. "As for Sufferings, I have lost 300 per ami. by being in his majesty's service , as I have shown in a Representation which his majesty has been so good as to read and consider. 18 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER WORLDLINESS : "As tor Zeal, I have written nothing without showing my duty to their majesties, and some pieces are dedicated to them. " This, madam, is the short and true state of my case. They that make their court to the ministers, and not their majesties, succeed better. If my case deserves some consideration, and you can serve me in it, I humbly hope and believe 'you will I shall, therefore, trouble you no farther ; but beg leave to subscribe myself, with truest respect and gratitude, yours, &c. EDWARD YODNG. 11 P. S. I have some hope that my Lord Townshend is my friend ; if therefore soon and before he leaves the court, you had an opportunity ot mentioning me, with that favor you have been so good to show, I think it would not fail of success; and, if not, I shall owe you more than any." Suffolk Letters, vol. i. p. 285. Young's wife died in 1741, leaving him one son, born in 1733. That he had attached himself strongly to her two daughters by her former marriage, there is better evidence in the report, mentioned by Mrs. Montagu, of his practical kind- ness and liberality to the younger, than in his lamentations over the elder as the "Narcissa" of the "Night Thoughts." " Narcissa " had died in 1735, shortly after marriage to Mr. Temple, the son of Lord Palmerston ; and Mr. Temple him- self, after a second marriage, died in 1740, a year before Lady Elizabeth Young. These, then, are the three deaths supposed to have inspired " The Complaint, " which forms the three first books of the " Night Thoughts " ; "Insatiate archer, could not one suffice? Thy shaft flew thrice ; and thrice my peace was slain ; And thrice, ere thrice yon moon had filled her horn." Since we find Young departing from the truth of dates, in order to heighten the effect of his calamity, or at least of his climax, we need not be surprised that he allowed his imagina- tion great freedom in other matters besides chronology, and that the character of " Philander " can, by no process, be made to fit Mr. Temple. The supposition that the much-lectured "Lorenzo" of the "Night Thoughts" was Young's own son, is hardly rendered more absurd by the fact that the poem was written when that son was a boy, than by the obvious artifi- ciality of the characters Young introduces as targets for his arguments and rebukes. Among all the trivial efforts of con- jectural criticism, there can hardly be one more futile than the THE POET YOUNG. 19 attempt to discover the original bf those pitiable lay -figures, the "Lorenzos" and " Altamonts" of Young's didactic prose and poetry. His muse never stood face to face with a genu- ine, living human being ; she would have been as much startled by such an encounter as a stage necromancer whose incantations and blue fire had actually conjured up a demon. The " Night Thoughts " appeared between 1741 and 1745. Although he declares in them that he has chosen God for his " patron " henceforth, this is not at all to the prejudice of some half-dozen lords, duchesses, and right honorables, who have the privilege of sharing finely turned compliments with their co-patron. The line which closed the Second Night in the earlier editions "Wits spare not Heaven, O Wilmington !- nor thee" is an intense specimen of that perilous juxtaposition of ideas by which Young, in his incessant search after point and nov- elty, unconsciously converts his compliments Jinto "sarcasms ; and his apostrophe to the moon as more likely to be favorable tc his song if he calls her "fair Portland of the skies," is worthy even of his Pindaric ravings. His ostentatious re- nunciation of worldly schemes, and especially of his ^twenty- years' siege of Court favor, are in the tone of one who retains some hope, in the midst of his querulousness. He descended from the astronomical rhapsodies of his Ninth Night, published [in 1745, to more terrestrial strains in his " Keflections on the Public Situation of the Kingdom, " dedi- cated to the Duke of Newcastle ; but in this critical year we get a glimpse of him through a more prosaic and less refract- ing medium. He spent a part of the year at Tunbridge Wells ; and Mrs. Montagu, who was there too, gives a very lively pic- ture of the " divine Doctor " in her letters to the Duchess of Portland, on whom Young had bestowed the superlative bom- bast to which we have just referred. We shall borrow the quotations from Dr. Doran, in spite of their length, because, to our mind, they present the most agreeable portrait we pos- sess of Young : '"I have great joy in Dr. Young, whom I disturbed in a reverie. At first he started, then bowed, then fell back into a surprise ; then began 20 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER- WORLDL1NESS : a speech, relapsed into his astonishment two or three times, forgot what he had been saying ; began a new subject, and so went on. I told him your grace desired he would write longer letters ; to which he cried " Ha ! " most emphatically, and I leave you to interpret what it meant. He has made a friendship with one person here, whom I believe you would not imagine to have been made for his bosom friend. You would, perhaps, suppose it was a bishop or dean, a prebend, a pious preacher, a clergyman of exemplary life, or, if a layman, of most virtuous conversa- tion, one that had paraphrased St. Matthew, or wrote comments on St. Paul. . . . You would not guess that this associate of the doctor's was old Gibber ! Certainly, in their religious, moral, and civil character, there is no relation ; but in their dramatic capacity there is some. ' Mrs. Montagu was not aware that Gibber, whom Young had named not disparagingly in his Satires, was the brother of his old schoolfellow ; but to return to our hero. ' The waters, ' says Mrs. Montagu, ' have raised his spirits to a fine pitch, as your grace will imagine, when I tell you how sublime an answer he made to a very vulgar question. I asked him how long he stayed at the Wells : he said, As long as my rival stayed ; as long as the sun did.' Among the visitors at the Wells were Lady Sunderland (wife of Sir Robert Sutton) and her sister, Mrs. Tichborne. : He did an admirable thing to Lady Sunderland : on .her mentioning" Sir Robert Sutton, he asked her where Sir Robert's lady was ; on which we all laughed very heartily, and I brought him off, half ashamed, to my lodgings, where, during breakfast, he assured me he had asked after Lady Sunderland, because he had a great honor for her ; and that, hav- ing a respect for her sister, he designed to have inquired after her, if we had notput it out of his head by laughing at him. You must know, Mrs. Tichborne sat next to Lady Sunderland. It would have been ad- mirable to have had him finish his compliment in that manner.' . . . : His expressions all bear the stamp of novelty, and his thoughts of ster- ling sense. He practises a kind of philosophical abstinence. ... He carried Mrs. Rolt and myself to Tunbridge, five miles from hence, where we were to see some fine old ruins. . . . First rode the doctor on a tall steed, decently caparisoned in dark gray ; next, ambled Mrs. Rolt on a hackney horse ; . . . then followed your humble servant on a milk-white palfrey. I rode on in safety, and at leisure to observe the company, especially the two figures that brought up the rear. The first was my servant, valiantly armed with two uncharged pistols ; the last was the doctor's man, whose uncombed hair so resembled the mane of the horse he rode, one could not help imagining they were of kin, and wishing, for the honor of the family, that they had had one comb betwixt them. On his head was a velvet cap, much resembling a black saucepan, and on his side hung a little basket. At last we arrived at the King's Head, where the loyalty of the doctor induced him to alight; and then, knight-errant-like, he took his damsels from off their palfreys, and courteously handed us into the inn.' . . . The party returned to the Wells; and 'the silver Cynthia held up her lamp in the heavens' the THE POET YOUNG. 21 while. 'The night silenced all but our divine doctor, who sometimes uttered things fit to be spoken in a season when all nature seems to be hushed and hearkening. I followed, gathering wisdom as I went, till I found, by iny horse's stumbling, that I was in a bad road, and that the blind was leading the blind. So I placed my servant between the doctor and myself ; which he not perceiving, went on in a most philosophical strain, to the great admiration of my poor clown of a servant, who, not being wrought up to any pitch of enthusiasm, nor making any answer to all the fine things he heard, the doctor, wondering I was dumb, and grieving I was so stupid, looked round and declared his surprise.'" Young's oddity and absence of mind are gathered from other sources besides these stories of Mrs. Montagu's, and gave rise to the report that he was the original of Fielding's "Parson Adams''; but this Croft denies, and mentions an- other Young, who really sat for the portrait, and who, we imag- ine, had both more Greek and more genuine simplicity than the poet. His love of chatting with Colley Gibber was an indication that the old predilection for the stage survived, in spite of his emphatic contempt for " all joys but joys that never can expire"; and the production of "The Brothers" at Drury Lane in 1753, after a suppression of fifteen years, was perhaps not entirely due to the expressed desire to give the proceeds to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. The author's profits were not more than 400 in those days a disappointing sum, and Young, as we learn from his friend Richardson, did not make this the limit of his donation, but gave a thousand guineas to the Society. " I had some talk with him," says Richardson, in one of his letters, "about this great action. ' I always,' said he, ' intended to do something handsome for the Society. Had I deferred it to my demise, I should have given away my son's money. All the world are inclined to pleasure ; could I have given myself a greater by disposing of the sum to a different use, I should have done it.' ' His next work was " The Centaur not Fabulous ; in Six Let- ters to a Friend, on the Life in Vogue," which reads very much like the most objurgatory parts of the " Night Thoughts '' reduced to prose. It is preceded by a preface which, though addressed to a lady, is in itc denunciations of vice as grossly indecent and almost as flippant as the epilogues written by " friends, " which he allowed to be reprinted after his tragedies 22 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS : in the latest edition of his works. We like much better than "The Centaur," "Conjectures on Original Com position, "writ- ten in 1759, for the sake, he says, of communicating to the world the well-known anecdote about Addison's death-bed, and, with the exception of his poem on Eesignation, the last thing he ever published. The estrangement from his son, which must have imbittered the later years of his life, appears to have begun not many years after the mother's death. On the marriage of her second daughter, who had previously presided over Young's house- hold, a Mrs. Hallows, understood to be a woman of discreet age, and the daughter (or widow) of a clergyman who was an old friend of Young's, became housekeeper at Welwyn. Opinions about ladies are apt to differ. " Mrs. Hallows was a woman of piety, improved by reading," says one witness. "She was a very coarse woman," says Dr. Johnson ; and we shall presently find some indirect evidence that her temper was perhaps not quite so much improved as her piety. Ser- vants, it seems, were not fond of remaining long in the house with her , a satirical curate, named Kidgell, hints at " drops of juniper" taken as a cordial (but perhaps he was spiteful, and a teetotaler) ; and Young's son is said to have told his father that " an old man should not resign himself to the man- agement of anybody." The result was, that the son was ban- ished from home for the rest of his father's lifetime, though Young seems never to have thought of disinheriting him. Our latest glimpses of the aged poet are derived from cer- tain letters of Mr. Jones, his curate letters preserved in the British Museum, and, happily, made accessible to common mor- tals in Nichols's 'Anecdotes.' Mr. Jones was a man of some literary activity and ambition, a collector of interesting docu- ments, and one of those concerned in the " Free and Candid Disquisitions, " the design of which was " to point out such things in our ecclesiastical establishment as want to be re- viewed and amended." On these and kindred subjects he cor- responded with Dr. Birch, occasionally troubling him with queries and manuscripts. We havo a respect for Mr. Jones. Unlike most persons who trouble others with queries or manu- scripts, he mitigates the infliction by such gifts as "a fat THE POET YOUNG. 23 pullet," wishing he "had anything better to send; but this depauperizing, vicarage (of Alconbury) too often checks the freedom and forwardness of my mind. " Another day comes a "pound canister of tea"; another, a "young fatted goose. " Mr. Jones' s first letter from Welwyn is dated June, 1759, not quite six years before Young's death. In June, 1762, he ex- presses a wish to go to London " this summer. But, " he con- tinues, " My time and pains are almost continually taken up here, and . . . I have been (I now find) a considerable loser, upon the whole, by con- tinuing here so long. The consideration of this, and the inconveniences I sustained, and do still experience from my late illness, obliged me at last to acquaint the Doctor (Young) with my case, and to assure him that I plainly perceived the duty and confinement here to be too much for me ; for which reason I must (I said) beg to be at liberty to resign my charge at Michaelmas. I began to give him these notices in Febru- ary, when I was very ill : and now I perceive, by what he told me the other day, that he is in some difficulty for which reason he is at last (he says) resolved to advertise, and even (which is much wondered at) to raise Ike salary considerably higher. (What he allowed my predecessors was 20 per annum ; and now he proposes 50, as he tells me.) I never asked him to raise it for me, though r well knew it was not equal to the duty ; nor did I say a word about myself when he lately suggested to me his intentions upon this subject." In a postscript to this letter he says : "I may mention to you farther, as a friend that may be trusted, that, in all likelihood, the poor old gentleman will not find it a very easy matter, unless by dint of money, and force upon himself, to procure a man that he can like for his next curate, nor one that will stay with hi?n so long as 1 have done. Then, his great age will recur to people's thoughts, and if he has any foibles, either in temper or conduct, they will be sure not to be forgotten on this occasion by those who know him ; and those who do not will probably be on their guard. On these and the like considerations, it is by no means an eligible office to be seeking out for a curate for him, as he has several times wished me to do ; and would, if he knew that I am now writing to you, wish your assistance also. But my best friends here, who well foresee the probable consequences, and wish me well, earnestly dissuade me from complying ; and I will decline the office with as much decency as I can : but high salary will, I suppose, fetch in somebody or other, soon." In the following July, he writes : " The old gentleman here (I may venture to tell you freely) seems to me to be in a pretty odd way of late, moping, dejected, self-willed, and 24 WORLDLINESS A!ND OTHER- WORLDLINESS . as if surrounded with some perplexing circumstances. Though I visit him pretty frequently for short intervals, I say very little to his affairs, not choosing to be a party concerned, especially in cases of so critical and tender a nature. There is much mystery in almost all his temporal affairs, as -well as in many of his speculative theories. Whoever lives in this neighborhood to see his exit, will probably see and hear some very strange things. Time will show ; I am afraid, not greatly to hia credit. There is thought to bean, irremovable obstructionto his happiness within his walls, as well as another without them; but the former is the more powerful, and like to continue so. He has this day been trying anew to engage me to stay with him. Ko lucrative views can tempt me to sacrifice my liberty or my health, to such measures as are pro- posed here. Nor do I like to have to do with persons whose word and honor cannot be depended on. So much for this very odd and unhappy topic." In August, Mr. Jones's tone is slightly modified. Earnest entreaties, not lucrative considerations, have induced him to cheer the Doctor's dejected heart by remaining at Welwyn some time longer. The Doctor is, " in various respects, a very unhappy man, " and few know so much of these " respects " as Mr. Jones. In September, he recurs to tho subject : "My ancient gentleman here is still full of trouble : which moves my concern, though it moves only the secret laughter of many, and some untoward surmises in disfavor of him and his household. The loss of a very large sum of money (about 200) is talked of ; whereof this vill and neighborhood is full. Some disbelieve ; others say. 'It is no wonder, ichere about eighteen or more servants are sometimes taken and dismissed in the course of a year.'' The gentleman himself is allowed by all to be far more harmless and easy in his family than some one else who hath too much the lead in it. This, among others, was one reason for my late motion to quit." No other mention of Young's affairs occurs until April 2, 1765, when he says that Dr. Young is very ill, attended by two physicians. " Having mentioned this young gentleman (Dr. Young's son), I would acquaint you next, that he came hither this morning, having been sent for, as I am told, by the direction of Mrs. Hallows. Indeed, she in- timated to me as much herself. And if this be so. I must say that it is one of the most prudent acts she ever did, or could have done in such a case as this ; as it may prove a means of preventing much confusion after the death of the Doctor. I have had some little discourse with the son : he seems much affected, and I believe really is so. He earnestly wishes his father might be pleased to ask after him ; for you must know THE POET YOUNG. 25 he has not yet done this, nor is, in iny opinion, like to do it. And it has been said farther, that upon a late application made to him on the behalf of his son, he desired that no more might be said to him about it. How true this may be, I cannot as yet be certain ; all I shall say is, it seems not improbable. ... I heartily wish the ancient man's heart may prove tender toward his son ; though, knowing him so well, I can scarce hope to hear such desirable news." Eleven days later, he writes : "I have now the pleasure to acquaint you, that the late Dr. Young, though he had for many years kept his son at a distance from him, yet has now at last left him all his possessions, after the payment of certain legacies ; so that the young gentleman (who bears a fair character, and behaves well, as far as I can hear or see) will, I hope, soon enjoy and make a prudent use of a handsome fortune. The father, on his death- bed, and since my return from London, was applied to in the tenderest manner, by one of his physicians, and by another person, to admit the son into his presence, to make submission, entreat forgiveness, and ob- tain his blessing. As to an interview with his son, he intimated that he chose to decline it, as his spirits'were then low, and his nerves weak. With regard to the next particular, he said, 'I heartily forgive him' ; and upon mention of this last, he gently lifted up his hand, and letting it gently fall, pronounced these words, ' God bless him /'.".-. I know it will give you pleasure to be farther informed, that he was pleased to make respectful mention of me in his will ; expressing his satisfaction in my care of his parish, bequeathing to me a handsome legacy, and ap- pointing me to be one of his executors." So far Mr. Jones, in his confidential correspondence with a " friend who may be trusted. " In a letter communicated ap- parently by him to the " Gentleman's Magazine " seventeen years later namely, in 1782 on the appearance of Croft's biography of Young, we find him speaking of " the ancient gentleman " in a tone of reverential eulogy, quite at variance with the free comments we have just quoted. But the Kev. John Jones was probably of opinion, with Mrs. Montagu, whose contemporary and retrospective letters are also set in a different key, that " the interests of religion were connected with the character of a man so distinguished for piety as Dr. Young." At all events, a subsequent quasi official statement weighs nothing as evidence against contemporary, spontaneous, and confidential hints. To Mrs. Hallows, Young left a legacy of 1,000, with the 26 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER WORLDLINESS ; request that she would destroy all his manuscripts. This final request, from some unknown cause, was not complied with, and among the papers he left behind him was the following letter from Archbishop Seeker, which probably marks the date of his latest effort after preferment : "DEANERY or ST PAUL'S, July 8, 1758. "GOOD DR. YOUNG, I have long wondered that more suitable notice of your great merit hath not been taken by persons in power. But how to remedy the omission I see not. No encouragement hath ever been given me to mention things of this nature to his Majesty. And there- fore, in all likelihood, the only consequence of doing it would be weak- ening the little influence which else I may possibly have on some other occasions. Your fortune and your reputation set you above the need of advancement; and your sentiments above that concern for it on your own account, which, on that of the public, is sincerely feit by "Your loving Brother, "THO. CANT." The loving brother's irony is severe! Perhaps the least questionable testimony to the better side of Young's character is that of Bishop Hildesley, who, as the vicar of a parish near Welwyn, had been Young's neighbor for upward of twenty years. The affection of the clergy for each other, we have observed, is, like that of the fair sex, not at all of a blind and infatuated kind ; and we may therefore the rather believe them when they give each other any extra- official praise. Bishop Hildesley, then, writing of Young to Richardson, says: "The impertinence of my frequent visits to him was amply rewarded ; forasmuch as, I can truly say, he never received me but with agreeable open complacency , and I never left him but with profitable pleasure and improvement. He was one or other, the most modest, the most patient of contradiction, and the most informing and entertaining I ever con- versed with at least, of any man who had so just pretensions to per- tinacity and reserve." Mr. Langton, however, who was also a frequent visitor of Young's, informed Boswell "That there was an air of benevolence in his manner ; but that he could obtain from him less information than he had hoped to receive from one who had lived so much in intercourse with the brightest men of what had been called the Augustan age of England ; and that he THE POET YOUNG. 27 showed a degree of eager curiosity concerning the common occurrences that were then passing, which appeared somewhat remarkable in a man of such intellectual stores, of such an advanced age, and who had retired from life with declared disappointment in his expectations." The same substance, we know, will exhibit different quali- ties under different tests ; and, after all, imperfect reports of individual impressions, whether immediate or traditional, are a very frail basis on which to build our opinion of a man. One's character may be very indifferently mirrored in the mind of the most intimate neighbor; it all depends on the quality of that gentleman's reflecting surface. But, discarding any inferences from such uncertain evi- dence, the outline of Young's character is too distinctly trace- able in the well-attested facts of his life, and yet more in the self-betrayal that runs through all his works, for us to fear that our general estimate of him may be false. For, while no poet seems less easy and spontaneous than Young, no poet discloses himself more completely. Men's minds have no hid- ing-place out of themselves their affectations do but betray another phase of their nature. And if, in the present view of Young, we seem to be more intent on laying bare unfavorable facts than on shrouding them in charitable speeches, it is not because we have any irreverential pleasure in turning men's characters the seamy side without, but because we see no great advantage in considering a man as he was not. Young's bi- ographers and critics have usually set out from the position that he was a great religious teacher, and that his poetry is morally sublime ; and they have toned down his failings into harmony with their conception of the divine and the poet. For our own part, we set out from precisely the opposite con- viction namely, that the religious and moral spirit of Young's poetry is low and false ; and we think it of some importance to show that the " Night Thoughts " are the reflex of a mind in which the higher human sympathies were inactive. This judgment is entirely opposed to our youthful predilections and enthusiasm. The sweet garden-breath of early enjoyment lin- gers about many a page of the " Night Thoughts, " and even of the " Last Day, " giving an extrinsic charm to passages of stilted rhetoric and false sentiment j but the sober and re- 28 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER- WORLDLINESS : peated reading of maturer years has convinced us that it would hardly be possible to find a more typical instance than Young's poetry, of the mistake which substitutes interested obedience for sympathetic emotion, and baptizes egoism as religion. Pope said of Young, that he had " much of a sublime genius without common sense." The deficiency Pope meant to indi- cate was, we imagine, moral rather than intellectual : it was the want of that fine sense of what is fitting in speech and action, which is often eminently possessed by men and women whose intellect is of a very common order, but who have the sincerity and dignity which can never coexist with the selfish preoccupations of vanity or interest. This was the " common sense " in which Young was conspicuously deficient ; and it was partly owing to this deficiency that his genius, waiting to be determined by the highest prizes, fluttered uncertainly from effort to effort, until, when he was more than sixty, it sud- denly spread its broad wing, and soared so as to arrest the gaze of other generations besides his own. For he had no versatility of faculty to mislead him. The " Night Thoughts " only differ from his previous works in the degree and not in the kind of power they manifest. Whether he writes prose or poetry, rhyme or blank verse, dramas, satires, odes, or meditations, we see everywhere the same Young the same narrow circle of thoughts, the same love of abstractions, the same telescopic view of human things, the same appetency toward antithetic apothegm and rhapsodic climax. The pas- sages that arrest us in his tragedies are those in which he an- ticipates some fine passage in the " Night Thoughts, " and where his characters are only transparent shadows through which we see the bewigged embonpoint of the didactic poet, excogitating epigrams or ecstatic soliloquies by the light of a candle fixed in a skull. Thus, in " The Revenge, " Alonzo, in the conflict of jealousy and love that at once urges and fo-bids him to murder his wife, says: "This vast and solid earth, that blazing sun, Those skies, through which it rolls, must all have end. What then is man? The smallest part of nothing. Day buries day ; month, month ; and year the year I Our life is but a chain of many deaths. THE POET YOUNG. 29 Can then Death's self be feared? Our life much rather : Life is the desert, life the solitude ; Death joins us to the great majority : 'Tis to be born to Plato and to Caesar ; 'Tis to be great forever ; 'Tis pleasure, 'tis ambition, then, to die." His prose writings all read like the " Night Thoughts, " either diluted into prose, or not yet crystallized into poetry. For example, in his " Thoughts for Age, " he says : "Though we stand on its awful brink, such our leaden bias to the world, we turn our faces the wrong way ; we are still looking on our old acquaintance, Time; though now so wasted and reduced, that we can see little more of him than his wings and his scythe : our age en- larges his wings to our imagination ; and our fear of death, his scythe ; as Time himself grows less. His consumption is deep; his annihilation is at hand." This is a dilution of the magnificent image : "Time in advance behind him hides his wings, And seems to creep decrepit with his age. Behold him when past by ! What then is seen But his broad pinions, swifter than the winds? " Again : "A requesting Omnipotence? What can stun and confound thy reason more? What more can ravish and exalt thy heart? It cannot but ravish and exalt ; it cannot but gloriously disturb and perplex thee, to take in all that thought suggests. Thou child of the dust ! thou speck of misery and sin ! how abject thy weakness ! how great is thy power ! Thou crawler on earth, and possible (I was about to say) controller of the skies ! weigh, and weigh well, the wondrous truths I have in view : which cannot be weighed too much ; which the more they are weighed, amaze the more , -which to have supposed, before they were revealed, would have been as great madness, and to have presumed on as great sin, as it is now madness and sin not to believe." Even in his Pindaric odes, in which he made the most vio- lent effort against nature, he is still neither more nor less than the Young of the " Last Day, " emptied and swept of his genius, and possessed by seven demons of fustian and bad rhyme. Even here, his " Ercles' vein " alternates with his 30 WOBLDLINESS AND OTHER WORLDLINESS : moral platitudes, and we have the perpetual text of the " Night Thoughts " : " Gold pleasure buys ; But pleasure dies, For soon the gross fruition oloys ; Though raptures court, The sense is short ; But virtue kindles living joys ; "Joys felt alone ! Joys asked of none ! Which Time's and Fortune's arrows miss: Joys that subsist, Though fates resist, An unprecarious, endless bliss I " Unhappy they 1 And falsely gay ! Who bask forever in success ; A constant feast Quite palls the taste, And long enjoyment is distress." In the " Last Day, " again, which is the earliest thing he wrote, we have an anticipation of all his greatest faults and merits. Conspicuous among the faults is that attempt to exalt our conceptions of Deity by vulgar images and comparisons, which is so offensive in the later "Night Thoughts." In a burst of prayer and homage to God, called forth by the con- templation of Christ coming to judgment, he asks, Who brings the change of the seasons? and answers "Not the great Ottoman, or greater Czar ; Not Europe's arbitress of peace and war ! " Conceive the soul, in its most solemn moments, assuring God that it does not place His power below that of Louis Napoleon or Queen Victoria! But in the midst of uneasy rhymes, inappropriate imagery, vaulting sublimity that o'erleaps itself, and vulgar emotions, we have in this poem an occasional flash of genius, a toucfi of simple grandeur, which promises as much as Young ever achieved. Describing the oncoming of the dissolution of all things, he says: THE POET YOUNG. 31 "No sun in radiant glory shines on high; No light butjrom the terrors of the sky." And again, speaking of great armies : "Whose rear lay wrapt in night, while breaking dawn Rous'd the broad front, and call'd the battle on." And this wail of the lost souls is fine : "And this for sin? Could I offend if I had never been? But still increas'd the senseless, happy mass, Flow'd in the stream, or shiver' d in the grass f Father of mercies ! why from silent earth Didst Thou awake and curse me into birth? Tear me from quiet, ravish me from night, And make a thankless present of Thy light? Push into being a reverse of Thee, And animate a clod with misery ? " But it is seldom in Young's rhymed poems that the effect of a felicitous thought or image is not counteracted by our sense of the constraint he suffered from the necessities of rhyme, that " Gothic demon, " as he afterward called it, " which mod- ern poetry tasting, became mortal." In relation to his own power, no one will question the truth of his dictum, that " blank verse is verse unf alien, uncurst ; verse reclaimed, re- enthroned in the true language of the gods ; who never thun- dered nor suffered their Homer to thunder in rhyme." His want of mastery in rhyme is especially a drawback on the effect of his Satires ; for epigrams and witticisms are pecul- iarly susceptible to the intrusion of a superfluous word, or to an inversion which implies constraint. Here, even more than elsewhere, the art that conceals art is an absolute requisite, and to have a witticism presented to us in limping or cumbrous rhythm is as counteractive to any electrifying effect as to see the tentative grimaces by which a comedian prepares a gro- tesque countenance. We discern the process, instead of being startled by the result. This is one reason why the Satires, read seriatim, have a flatness to us, which, when we afterward read picked pass- ages, we are inclined to disbelieve in, and to attribute to some 32 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER- WORLDLINESS: deficiency in our own mood. But there are deeper reasons for that dissatisfaction. Young is not a satirist of a high order. His satire has neither the terrible vigor, the lacerating energy of genuine indignation, nor the humor which owns loving fel- lowship with the poor human nature it laughs at; nor yet the personal bitterness which, as in Pope's characters of Sporus and Atticus, insures those living touches by virtue of which the individual and particular in Art becomes the universal and immortal. Young could never describe a real complex human being; but what he could do with eminent success, was to de- scribe with neat and finished point obvious types of manners rather than of character, to write cold and clever epigrams on personified vices and absurdities. There is no more emo- tion in his satire than if he were turning witty verses on a waxen image of Cupid, or a lady's glove. He has none of those felicitous epithets, none of those pregnant lines, by which Pope's Satires have enriched the ordinary speech of ed- ucated men. Young's wit will be found in almost every in- stance to consist in that antithetic combination of ideas which, of all the forms of wit, is most within reach of clever effort. In his gravest arguments, as, well as in his lightest satire, one might imagine that he had set himself to work out the problem, how much antithesis might be got out of a given subject. And there he completely succeeds. His neatest portraits are all wrought on this plan. Narcissus, for example, who "Omits no duty ; nor can Envy say He miss'd, these many years, the Church or Play He makes no noise in Parliament, 'tis true ; But pays his debts, and visit when 'tis due ; His character and gloves are ever clean, And then he can out-bow the bowing Dean ; A smile eternal on his lip he wears, Which equally the wise and worthless shares. In gay fatigues, this most undaunted chief, Patient of idleness beyond belief, Most charitably lends the town his face For ornament in every public place ; As sure as cards he to th' assembly comes, And is the furniture of drawing-rooms : When Ombre calls, his hand and heart are free. And, joined to two, he fails not to make three . THE POET YOUNG. 33 Narcissus is the glory of his race ; For who does nothing with a better grace? To deck my list by nature were designed Such shining expletives of human kind, Who want, while through blank life they dream along, Sense to be right and passion to be wrong." It is but seldom that we find a touch, of that easy slyness which gives an additional zest to surprise} but here is an instance : "See Tityrus, with merriment possest, Is burst with laughter ere he hears the jest. What need he stay? for when the joke is o'er, His teeth will be no whiter than before." Like Pope, whom "he imitated, he sets out with a psycholog- ical mistake as the basis of his satire, attributing all forms of folly to one passion the love of fame, or vanity, a much grosser mistake, indeed, than Pope's exaggeration of the ex- tent to which the " ruling passion " determines conduct in the individual. Not that Young is consistent in his mistake. He sometimes implies no more than what is the truth that the love of fame is the cause, not of all follies, but of many. Young's satires on women are superior to Pope's } which is only saying that they are superior to Pope's greatest failure. We can more frequently pick out a couplet as successful than an entire sketch. Of the too emphatic Syrena, he says : " Her judgment just, her sentence is too strong ; Because she's right, she's ever in the wrong." Of the diplomatic Julia : "For her own breakfast she'll project a scheme, Nor take her tea without a stratagem." Of Lyce, the old painted coquette : " In vain the cock has summoned sprites away ; She walks at noon and blasts the bloom of day." Of the nymph who, " gratis, clears religious mysteries " : " 'Tis hard, too, she who makes no use but chat Of her religion, should be barr'd in that." 3 34 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER WORLDLINESS : The description of the literary belle, Daphne, well prefaces that of Stella, admired by Johnson : "With legs toss'd high, on her sopbee she sita, Vouchsafing audience to contending wits: Of each performance she's the final test ; One act read o'er, she prophesies the rest ; And then, pronouncing with decisive air, Fully convinces all the town she's fair. Had lovely Daphne Hecatessa's face, How would her elegance of taste decrease I Some ladies' judgment in their features lies, And all their genius sparkles in their eyes. But hold, she cries, lampooner ! have a care : Must I want common sense because I'm fair? O no ; see Stella her eyes shine &s bright As if her tongue was never in the right ; And yet what real learning, judgment, fire ! She seems inspir'd, and can herself inspire. How then (if malice ruled not all the fair) Could Daphne publish, and could she forbear 1" After all, when we have gone through Young's seven Sa- tires, we seem to have made but an indifferent meal. They are a sort of fricassee, with little solid meat in them, and yet the flavor is not always piquant. It is curious to find him, when he pauses a moment from his satiric sketching, recurring to his old platitudes : "Can gold calm passion, or make reason shine ? Can we dig peace or wisdom from the mine? Wisdom to gold prefer " ; platitudes which he seems inevitably to fall into, for the same reason that some men are constantly asserting their contempt for criticism because he felt the opposite so keenly. The outburst of genius in the earlier books of the " Night Thoughts " is the more remarkable, that in the interval be- tween them and the Satires, he had produced nothing but his Pindaric odes, in which he fell far below the level of his pre- vious works. Two sources of this sudden strength were the freedom of blank verse and the presence of a genuine emotion. Most persons, in speaking of the "Night Thoughts," have in their minds only the two or three first Nights, the majority of THE POET YOUNG. 36 readers rarely getting beyond these, unless, as Wilson says, they " have but few books, are poor, and live in the country." And in these earlier Nights there is enough genuine sublimity and genuine sadness to bribe us into too favorable a judgment of them as a whole. Young had only a very few things to say or sing such as that life is vain, that death is imminent, that man is immortal, that virtue is wisdom, that friendship is sweet, and that the source of virtue is the contemplation of death and immortality, and even in his two first Nights he had said almost all he had to say in his finest manner. Through these first outpourings of " complaint " we feel that the poet is really sad, that the bird is singing over a rifled nest ; and we bear with his morbid picture of the world and of life, as the Job-like lament of a man whom " the hand of God hath touched." Death has carried away his best-beloved, and that " silent land " whither they are gone has more reality for the desolate one than this world which is empty of their love : "This is the desert, this the solitude ; How populous, how vital is the grave ! " Joy died with the loved one : "The disenchanted earth Lost all her lustre. Where her glitt'ring towers? Her golden mountains, where? All darken 'd down To naked waste ; a dreary vale of tears . The great magician's dead ! " Under the pang of parting, it seems to the bereaved man as if love were only a nerve to suffer with, and he sickens at the thought of every joy of which he must one day say " it was." In its unreasoning anguish, the soul rushes to the idea of per- petuity as the one element of bliss : "O ye blest scenes of permanent delight ! Could ye, so rich in rapture, fear an end, That ghastly thought would drink up all your joy, And quite unparadise the realms of light." In a man under the immediate pressure of a great sorrow, we tolerate morbid exaggerations ; we are prepared to see him 36 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS : turn away a weary eye from sunlight and flowers and sweet human faces, as if this rich and glorious life had no signifi- cance but as a preliminary of death; we do not criticise his views, we compassionate his feelings. And so it is with Young in these earlier Nights. There is already some arti- ficiality even in his grief, and feeling often slides into rhetoric, but through it all we are thrilled with the unmistakable cry of pain, which makes us tolerant of egoism and hyperbole : "In every varied posture, place, and hour, How widow 'd ev'ry thought of ev'ry joy ! Thought, busy thought ! too busy for my peace ! Through the dark postern of time long elapsed Led softly, by the stillness of the night, Led like a murderer (and such it proves !) Strays (wretched rover !) o'er the pleasing past, In quest of wretchedness, perversely strays ; And finds all desert now ; and meets the ghosts Of my departed joys." But when he becomes didactic, rather than complaining, when he ceases to sing his sorrows, and begins to insist on his opinions, when that distaste for life which we pity as a transient feeling, is thrust upon us as a theory, we become perfectly cool and critical, and are not in the least inclined to be indulgent to false views and selfish sentiments. Seeing that we are about to be severe on Young's failings and failures, we ought, if a reviewer's space were elastic, to dwell also on his merits, on the startling vigor of his imagery on the occasional grandeur of his thought on the piquant force of that grave satire into which his meditations continually run. But, since our " limits " are rigorous, we must content ourselves with the less agreeable half of the critic's duty j and we may the rather do so, because it would be difficult to say anything new of Young in the way of admiration, while we think there are many salutary lessons remaining to be drawn from his faults. One of the most striking characteristics of Young is his rad- ical insincerity as a poetic artist. This, added to the thin and artificial texture of his wit, is the true explanation of the par- adox that a poet who is often inopportunely witty has the opposite vice of bombastic absurdity. The source of all gran- THE POET YOUNG. 37 diloquence is the want of taking for a criterion the true quali- ties of the object described, or the emotion expressed. The grandiloquent man is never bent on saying what he feels or what he sees, but on producing a certain effect on his audience ; hence he may float away into utter inanity without meeting any criterion to arrest him. Here lies the distinction between grandiloquence and genuine fancy or bold imaginativeness. The fantastic or the boldly imaginative poet may be as sincere as the most realistic : he is true to his own sensibilities or in- ward vision, and in his wildest flights he never breaks loose from his criterion the truth of his own mental state. Now, this disruption of language from genuine thought and feeling is what we are constantly detecting in Young ; and his insin- cerity is the more likely to betray him into absurdity, because he habitually treats of abstractions, and not of concrete objects or specific emotions. He descants perpetually on virtue, re- ligion, " the good man, " life, death, immortality, eternity sub- jects which are apt to give a factitious grandeur to empty wordiness. When a poet floats in the empyrean, and only takes a bird's-eye view of the earth, some people accept the mere fact of his soaring for sublimity, and mistake his dim vision of earth for proximity to heaven. Thus : " His hand the good man fixes on the skies, And bids earth roll, nor feels her idle whirl," may perhaps pass for sublime with some readers. But pause a moment to realize the image, and the monstrous absurdity of a man's grasping the skies, and hanging habitually sus- pended there, while he contemptuously bids the earth roll, warns you that no genuine feeling could have suggested so un- natural a conception. Examples of such vicious imagery, resulting from insincer- ity, may be found, perhaps, in almost every page of the "Night Thoughts." But simple assertions or aspirations, undisguised by imagery, are often equally false. No writer whose rhetoric was checked by the slightest truthful inten- tions, could have said, 1 " An eye of awe and wonder let me roll, And roll for ev^r." 38 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER WORLDLINESS: Abstracting the more poetical associations with the eye, this is hardly less absurd than if he had wished to stand forever with his mouth open. Again "Far beneath A soul immortal is a mortal joy." Happily for human nature, we are sure no man really believes that. Which of us has the impiety not to feel that our souls are only too narrow for the joy of looking into the trusting eyes of our children, of reposing on the love of a husband or wife, nay, of listening to the divine voice of music, or watch- ing the calm brightness of autumn afternoons? But Young could utter this falsity without detecting it, because, when he spoke of " mortal joys," he rarely had in his mind any object to which he could attach sacredness. He was thinking of bishoprics and benefices, of smiling monarchs, patronizing prime ministers, and a "much indebted muse." Of anything between these and eternal bliss, he was but rarely and moder- ately conscious. Often, indeed, he sinks very much below even the bishopric, and seems to have no notion of earthly pleasure, but such as breathes gaslight and the fumes of wine. His picture of life is precisely such as you would expect from a man who has risen from his bed at two o'clock in the after- noon with a headache, and a dim remembrance that he has added to his " debts of honor " : "What wretched repetition cloys us here ! What periodic potions for the sick, Distemper'd bodies, and distemper'd minds I" And then he flies off to his usual antithesis : "In an eternity what scenes shall strike ! Adventures thicken, novelties surprise ! " " Earth " means lords and levees, duchesses and Dalilahs, South-Sea dreams and illegal percentage ; and the only things distinctly preferable to these are, eternity and the stars. Deprive Young of this antithesis, and more than half his elo- quence would be shrivelled up. Place him on a breezy com- mon, where the furze is in its golden bloom, where children are playing, and horses are standing in the sunshine with THE POET YOUNG. 39 fondling necks, and he would have nothing to say. Here are neither depths of guilt, nor heights of glory ; and we doubt whether in such a scene he would bo able to pay his usual compliment to the Creator : "Where'er I turn, what claim on all applause ! " It is true that he sometimes not often speaks of virtue as capable of sweetening life, as well as of taking the sting from death and winning heaven ; and, lest we should be guilty of any unfairness to him, we will quote the two passages which convey this sentiment the most explicitly. In the one, he gives Lorenzo this excellent recipe for obtaining cheerf ulness : " Go, fix some weighty truth ; Chain down some passion ; do some generous good ; Teach Ignorance to see, or Grief to smile ; Correct thy friend ; befriend thy greatest foe ; Or, with warm heart, and confidence divine, Spring up, and lay strong hold on Him who made thee." The other passage is vague, but beautiful, and its music has murmured in our minds for many years : " The cuckoo seasons sing The same dull note to such as nothing prize But what those seasons from the teeming earth To doting sense indulge. But nobler minds, Which relish fruit unripen'd by the sun, Make their days various ; various as the dyes On the dove's neck, which wanton in his rays. On minds of dove-like innocence possess'd, On lighten'd minds that bask in Virtue's beams, Nothing hangs tedious, nothing old revolves In that for which they long, for which they live. Their glorious efforts, wing'd with heavenly hopes, Each rising morning sees still higher rise ; Each bounteous dawn its novelty presents To worth maturing, new strength, lustre, fame ; While Nature's circle, like a chariot wheel, Rolling beneath their elevated aims, Makes their fair prospect fairer every hour ; Advancing virtue in a line to bliss." Even here, where he is in his most amiable mood, you see at what a telescopic distance he stands from mother Earth and 40 WORLDLINES8 AND OTHER- WORLDLINESS: simple human joys " Nature's circle rolls beneath. ' Indeed, we remember no mind in poetic literature that seems to have absorbed less of the beauty and the healthy breath of the common landscape than Young's. His images, often grand and finely presented witness that sublimely sudden leap of thought, "Embryos we must be till we burst the shell, Yon ambient azure shell, and spring to life" lie almost entirely within that circle of observation which would be familiar to a man who lived in town, hung about the theatres, read the newspaper, and went home often by moon and star light. There is no natural object nearer than the moon that seems to have any strong attraction for him, and even to the moon he chiefly appeals for patronage, and " pays his court " to her. It is reckoned among the many deficiencies of Lorenzo, that he " never asked the moon one question " an omission which Young thinks eminently unbecoming a rational being. He describes nothing so well as a comet, and is tempted to linger with fond detail over nothing more familiar than the day of judgment and an imaginary journey among the stars. Once on Saturn's ring, he feels at home, and his language becomes quite easy : "What behold I now? A wilderness of wonders burning round, Where larger sons inhabit higher spheres ; Perhaps the villas of descending gods ! " It is like a sudden relief from a strained posture when, in the " Night Thoughts, " we come on any allusion that carries us to the lanes, woods, or fields. Such allusions are amaz- ingly rare, and we could almost count them on a single hand. That we may do him no injustice, we will quote the three best : "Like blossomed trees o'erturned by vernal storm, Lovely in death the beauteous ruin lay." "In the same brook none ever bathed him twice: To the same life none ever twice awoke. We call the brook the same the same we think Our life, though still more rapid in its flow ; THE POET YOUNG. 41 Nor mark the much irrevocably lapsed, And mingled with the sea." "The crown of manhood is a winter joy ; An evergreen that stands the northern blast, And blossoms in the rigor of our fate." The adherence to abstractions, or to the personification of abstractions, is closely allied in Young to the want of genuine emotion. He sees Virtue sitting on a mount serene, far above the mists and storms of earth : he sees Religion coming down from the skies, with this world in her left hand and the other world in her right : but we never find him dwelling on virtue or religion as it really exists in the emotions of a man dressed in an ordinary coat, and seated by his fireside of an evening, with his hand resting on the head of his little daughter ; in courageous effort for unselfish ends, in the internal triumph of justice and pity over personal resentment, in all the sublime self-renunciation and sweet charities which are found in the details of ordinary life. Now, emotion links itself with par- ticulars, and only in a faint and secondary manner with ab- stractions. An orator may discourse very eloquently on injus- tice in general, and leave his audience cold ; but let him state a special case of oppression, and every heart will throb. The most untheoretic persons are aware of this relation between true emotion and particular facts, as opposed to general terms, and implicitly recognize it in the repulsion they feel toward any one who professes strong feeling about abstractions, in the inter jectional "humbug! " which immediately rises to their lips. If we except the passages in Philander, Narcissa, and Lucia, there is hardly a trace of human sympathy, of self -forgetful- ness in the joy or sorrow of a fellow -being, throughout this long poem, which professes to treat the various phases of man's destiny. And even in the Narcissa Night, Young repels us by the low moral tone of his exaggerated lament. This married step-daughter died at Lyons, and, being a Protestant, was denied burial, so that her friends had to bury her in secret one of the many miserable results of superstition, but not a fact to throw an educated, still less a Christian wan, into a 42 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER- WORLDLINESS : fury of hatred and vengeance, in contemplating it after the lapse of five years. Young, however, takes great pains to simulate a bad feeling : "Of grief And indignation rival bursts I pour'd, Half execration mingled with my pray'r; Kindled at man, while I his God ador'd ; Sore grudg'd the savage land her sacred dust; Stamp 'd the cursed soil ; and with humanity (Denied Narcissa) wish'd them all a grave." The odiously bad taste of this last clause makes up hope that it is simply a platitude, and not intended as a witticism, until he removes the possibility of this favorable doubt by immedi- ately asking, " Flows my resentment into guilt? " When, by an afterthought, he attempts something like sym- pathy, he only betrays more clearly his want of it. Thus, in the first Night, when he turns from his private griefs to depict earth as a hideous abode of misery for all mankind, and asks "What then am I, who sorrow for myself? " he falls at once into calculating the benefit of sorrowing for others : " More generous sorrow, while it sinks, exalts : And conscious virtue mitigates the pang. Nor virtue, more than prudence, bids me give Swollen thought a second channel." This remarkable negation of sympathy is in perfect consistency with Young's theory of ethics: "Virtue is a crime, A crime to reason, if it costs us pain Unpaid." If there is no immortality for man, "Sense ! take the rein ; blind Passion, drive us on; And Ignorance ! befriend us on our way. . . . Yes ; give the pulse full empire ; live the brute, Since as the brute we die. The sum of man, Of godlike man, to revel and to rot." THE POET YOUNG. 43 "If this life's gain invites him to the deed, Why not his country sold, his father slain? " "Ambition, avarice, by the wise disdain'd, Is perfect wisdom, while mankind are fools, And think a turf or tombstone covers all." " Die for thy country, thou romantic fool ! Seize, seize the plank thyself, and let her sink.". "As in the dying parent dies the child, Virtue with Immortality expires. Who tells me he denies his soul immortal, Whatever his boast, has told me he's a knave. His duty 'tis to love himself alone, Nor care though mankind perish, if he smiles." We can imagine the man who "denies his soul 'immortal," replying, " It is quite possible that you would be a knave, and love yourself alone, if it were not for your belief in immortal- ity ; but you are not to force upon me what would result from your own utter want of moral emotion. I am just and honest, not because I expect to live in another world, but because, having felt the pain of injustice and dishonesty toward myself, I have a fellow-feeling with other men, who would suffer the same pain if I were unjust or dishonest toward them. Why should I give my neighbor short weight in this world, because there is not another world in which I should have nothing to weigh out to him? I am honest, because I don't like to inflict evil on others in this life, not because I'm afraid of evil to myself in another. The fact is, I do not love myself alone, whatever logical necessity there may be for that conclusion in your mind. I have a tender love for my wife, and children, and friends, and through that love I sympathize with like affections in other men. It is a pang to me to witness the suffering of a fellow-being, and I feel his suffering the more acutely because he is mortal because his life is so short, and I would have it, if possible, filled with happiness and not mis- ery. Through my union and fellowship with the men and women I have seen, I feel a like, though a fainter, sympathy with those I have not seen ; and I am able so to live in imag- ination with the generations to come, that their good is not 44 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS : alien to me, and is a stimulus to me to labor for ends which, may not benefit myself, but will benefit them. It is possible that you might prefer to ' live the brute, ' to sell your countiy, or to slay your father, if you were not afraid of some disagree- able consequences from the criminal laws of another world; but even if I could conceive no motive but by my own worldly interest or the gratification of my animal desires, I have not observed that beastliness, treachery, and parricide, are the direct way to happiness and comfort on earth." Thus far the man who " denies himself immortal " might give a warrantable reply to Young's assumption of peculiar lofti- ness in maintaining that "virtue with immortality expires." We may admit, indeed, that if the better part of virtue con- sists, as Young appears to think, in contempt for mortal joys, in " meditation of our own decease," and in "applause "of God in the style of a congratulatory address to her Majesty all which has small relation to the well-being of mankind on this earth the motive to it must be gathered from something that lies quite outside the sphere of human sympathy. But, for certain other elements of virtue, which are of more obvious importance to plain people, a delicate sense of our neighbor's rights, an active participation in the joys and sorrows of our fellow-men, a magnanimous acceptance of privation or suffer- ing for ourselves when it is the condition of rescue for others in a word, the widening and strengthening of our sympa- thetic nature, it is surely of some moment to contend, that they have no more direct dependence on the belief in a future state than the interchange of gases in the lungs on the plural- ity of worlds. Nay, it is conceivable that in some minds the deep pathos lying in the thought of human mortality that we are here for a little while and then vanish away, that this earthly life is all that is given to our loved ones and to our many suffering fellow-men lies nearer the fountains of moral emotion than the conception of extended existence. And surely it ought to be a welcome fact, if the thought of mortal- ity, as well as of immortality, be favorable to virtue. We can imagine that the proprietors of a patent water-supply may have a dread of common springs ; but for those who only share the general need there cannot be too great a security against a THE POET YOUNG. . 45 lack of fresh water or of pure morality. It should be matter of unmixed rejoicing if this latter necessary of healthful life has its evolution insured in the interaction of human souls as certainly as the evolution of science or of art, with which, in- deed, it is but a twin ray, melting into them with undefinable limits. To return to Young. We can often detect a man's defi- ciencies in what he admires more clearly than in what he con- temns, in the sentiments he presents as laudable rather than in those he decries. And in Young's notion of what is lofty he casts a shadow by which we can measure him without fur- ther trouble. For example, in arguing for human immortality, he says : "First, what is true ambition ? The pursuit Of glory nothing less than man can share. The Visible and Present are for brutes, A slender portion, and a narrow bound ! These Reason, with an energy divine O'erleaps, and claims the Future and Unseen ; The vast Unseen, the Future fathomless ! When the great soul buoys" up to this high point, Leaving gross Nature's sediments below, Then, and then only, Adam's offspring quits The sage and hero of the fields and woods, Asserts his rank, and rises into man." So, then, if it were certified that, as some benevolent minds have tried to infer, our dumb fellow-creatures would share a future existence, in which it is. to be hoped we should neither beat, starve, nor maim them, our ambition for a future life would cease to be " lofty " ! This is a notion of loftiness which may pair off with Dr. Whewell's celebrated observation, that Bentham's moral theory is low, because it includes justice and mercy to brutes. But, for a reflection of Young's moral personality on a colos- sal scale, we must turn to those passages where his rhetoric is at its utmost stretch of inflation where he addresses the Deity, discourses of the Divine operations, or describes the last judgment. As a compound of vulgar pomp, crawling adula- \bn, and hard selfishness, presented under the guise of piety, 46 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER- WORLDLINES8 : there are few things in literature to surpass the ninth Night, entitled " Consolation, '' especially in the pages where he de- scribes the last judgment a subject to which, with naive self- betrayal, he applies phraseology favored by the exuberant penny-a-liner. Thus, when God descends, and the groans of hell are opposed by " shouts of joy," much as cheers and groans contend at a public meeting where the resolutions are not passed unanimously, the poet completes his climax in this way: " Hence, in one peal of loud, eternal praise, The charmed spectators thunder their applause." In the same taste, he sings : " Eternity, the various sentence past, Assigns the sever 'd throng distinct abodes, Sulphureous or ambrosial." Exquisite delicacy of indication ! He is too nice to be specific as to the interior of the " sulphureous " abode j but when once half the human race are shut up there, hear how he enjoys turning the key on them! "What ensues? The deed predominant, the deed of deeds ! Which makes a hell of hell, a heaven of heaven I The goddess, with determin'd aspect, turns Her adamantine key's enormous size Through Destiny 's inextricable wards, Deep driving every bolt on both their fates. Then, from the crystal battlements of heaven, Down, down she hurls it through the dark profound, Ten thousand, thousand fathom ; there to rust And ne'er unlock her resolution more. The deep resounds ; and Hell, through all her glooms, Returns, in groans, the melancholy roar." This is one of the blessings for which Dr. Young thanks God " most " : " For all I bless Thee, most, for the severe Her death my own at hand the fiery gulf, That flaming bound of wrath omnipotent I It thunders ; but it thunders to preserve ; its wholesome dread Averts the dreaded pain ; its hideous groan* THE POET YOUNG. 47 Join Heaven's sweet Hallelujahs in Thy praise, Great Source of good alone ! How kind in all ! In vengeance kind! Pain, Death, Gehenna, save" . . i.e., save me, Dr. Young, who, in return for that favor, prom- ise to give my divine patron the monopoly of that exuberance in laudatory epithet, of which specimens may be seen at any moment in a large number of dedications and odes to kings, queens, prime ministers, and other persons of distinction. That, in Young's conception, is what God delights in. His crowning aim in the " drama " of the ages is to vindicate his own renown. The God of the " Night Thoughts " is simply Young himself " writ large " a didactic poet, who " lectures " mankind in the antithetic hyperbole of mortal and immortal joys, earth and the stars, hell and heaven; and expects the tribute of inexhaustible " applause. " Young has no concep- tion of religion as anything else than egoism turned heaven- ward ; and he does not merely imply this, he insists on it. Religion, he tells us, in argumentative passages too long to quote, is " ambition, pleasure, and the love of gain, " directed toward the joys of the future life instead of the present. And his ethics correspond to his religion. He vacillates, indeed, in his ethical theory, and shifts his position in order to suit his immediate purpose in argument; but he never changes his level so as to see beyond the horizon of mere selfishness. Sometimes he insists, as we have seen, that the belief in a fu- ture life is the only basis of morality ; but elsewhere he tells us "In self-applause is virtue's golden prize." Virtue, with Young, must always squint must never look straight toward the immediate object of its emotion and effort. Thus, if a man risks perishing in the snow himself rather than forsake a weaker comrade, he must either do this because his hopes and fears are directed to another world, or because he desires to applaud himself afterward ! Young, if we may be- lieve him, would despise the action as folly unless it had these motives. Let us hope he was not so bad as he pretended to be ! The tides of the divine life in man move under the thick- est ice of theory. , WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS : Another indication of Young's deficiency in moral, i.e., in sympathetic emotion, is his unintermitting habit of pedagogic moralizing. On its theoretic and perceptive side, Morality- touches Science ; on its emotional side, poetic Art. Now, the products of poetic Art are great in proportion as they result from the immediate prompting of innate power, and not from labored obedience to a theory or rule; and the presence of genius or innate prompting is directly opposed to the perpetual consciousness of a rule. The action of faculty is imperious, and supersedes the reflection why it should act. In the same way, in proportion as morality is emotional, it will exhibit itself in direct sympathetic feeling and action, and not as the recognition of a rule. Love does not say, " I ought to love "- it loves. Pity does not say, " It is right to be pitiful " it pities. Justice does not say, "I am bound to be just" it feels justly. It is only where moral emotion is comparatively weak that the contemplation of a rule or theory habitually mingles with its action ; and in accordance with this, we think experience, both in literature and life, has shown that the minds which are predominantly didactic, are deficient in sympathetic emotion. A man who is perpetually thinking in monitory apothegms, who has an unintermittent flux of rebuke, can have little energy left for simple feeling. And this is the case with Young. In his highest flights of contemplation, and his most wailing soliloquies, he interrupts himself to fling an admonitory parenthesis at Lorenzo, or to hint that "folly's creed" is the reverse of his own. Before his thoughts can flow, he must fix his eye on an imaginary miscreant, who gives unlimited scope for lecturing, and recriminates just enough to keep the spring of admonition and argument going to the ex- tent of nine books. It is curious to see how this pedagogic habit of mind runs through Young's contemplation of Nature. As the tendency to see our own sadness reflected in the exter- nal world has been called by Mr. Ruskin the " pathetic fal- lacy, " so we may call Young' s disposition to see a rebuke or a warning in every natural object, the " pedagogic fallacy." To his mind, the heavens are "forever scolding as they shine"; and the great function of the stars is to be a " lecture to man- kind." The conception of the Beity as a didactic author is THE POET YOUNG. 49 not merely an implicit point of view with him ; he works it out in elaborate imagery, and at length makes it the occasion of his most extraordinary achievement in the " art of sinking," by exclaiming a propos, we need hardly say, of the nocturnal heavens "Divine Instructor I Thy first volume this For man's perusal ! all in CAPITALS 1 " . It is this pedagogic tendency, this sermonizing attitude of Young' s mind, which produces the wearisome monotony of his pauses. After the first two or three Nights, he is rarely sing- ing, rarely pouring forth any continuous melody inspired by the spontaneous flow of thought or feeling. He is rather occu- pied with argumentative insistence, with hammering in the proofs of his propositions by disconnected verses, which he puts down at intervals. The perpetual recurrence of the pause at the end of the line throughout long passages, makes them as fatiguing to the ear as a monotonous chant, which consists of the endless repetition of one short musical phrase. For example : "Past hours, If not by guilt, yet wound us by their flight, If folly bound our prospect by the grave, All feeling of futurity be numb'd, All godlike passion for eternals quench'd, All relish of realities expired ; Renounced all correspondence with the skies ; Our freedom chain 'cl ; quite wingless our desire; In sense dark-prison'd all that ought to soar; Prone to the centre ; crawling in the dust; Dismounted every great and glorious aim ; Enthralled every faculty divine, Heart-buried in the rubbish of the world." How different from the easy, graceful melody of Cowper's blank verse! Indeed it is hardly possible to criticise Young, without being reminded at every step of the contrast presented to him by Cowper. And this contrast urges itself upon us the more from the fact that there is, to a certain extent, a parallelism between the "Night Thoughts" and the "Task." In both poems, the author achieves his greatest in virtue of the new freedom conferred by blank verse ; both poems are 4 50 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER- WORLDLINESS : professedly didactic, and mingle much satire with their graver meditations; both poems are the productions of men whose estimate of this life was formed by the light of a belief in immortality, and who were intensely attached to Christianity. On some grounds, we might have anticipated a more morbid view of things from Cowper than from Young. Cowper's re- ligion was dogmatically the more gloomy, for he was a Cal- vinist; while Young was a " low " Arminian, believing that Christ died for all, and that the only obstacle to any man's salvation lay in his will, which he could change if he chose. There was deep and unusual sadness involved in Cowper's personal lot; while Young, apart from his ambitious and greedy discontent, seems to have had no exceptional sorrow. Yet see how a lovely, sympathetic nature manifests itself in spite of creed and circumstance! Where is the poem that sur- passes the " Task " in the genuine love it breathes, at once toward inanimate and animate existence. in truthfulness of perception and sincerity of presentation in the calm gladness that springs from a delight in objects for their own sake, with- out self-reference in divine sympathy with the lowliest pleas- ures, with the most short-lived capacity for pain? Here is no railing at the earth's "melancholy map," but the happiest lingering over her simplest scenes with all the fond minute- ness of attention that belongs to love; no pompous rhetoric about the inferiority of the "brutes," but a warm plea on their behalf against man's inconsiderateness and cruelty, and a sense of enlarged happiness from their companionship in enjoyment; no vague rant about human misery and human virtue, but that close and vivid presentation of particular sor- rows and privations, of particular deeds and misdeeds, which is the direct road to the emotions. How Cowper's exquisite mind falls with the mild warmth of morning sunlight on the commonest objects, at once disclosing every detail and invest- ing every detail with beauty! No object is too small to prompt his song not the sooty film on the bars, or the spout- less teapot holding a bit of mignonette that serves to cheer the dingy town-lodging with a " hint that Nature lives " ; and yet his song is never trivial, for he is alive to small objects, not because his mind is narrow, bat because his glance is clear THE POET YOUNG. 51 and his heart is large. Instead of trying to edify us oy super- cilious allusions to the " brutes " and the " stalls, " he interests us in that tragedy of the hen-roost when the thief has wrenched the door "Where Chanticleer amidst his harem sleeps In unsuspecting pomp "; in the patient cattle, that on the winter's morning " Mourn in corners where the fence Screens them, and seem half petrified to sleep In unrecumbent sadness "; in the little squirrel, that, surprised by him in his woodland walk, "At once, swift as a bird, Ascends the neighboring beech ; there whisks his brush, And perks his ears, and stamps, and cries aloud, With all the prettiness of feigned alarm And anger insignificantly fierce." And then he passes into reflection, not with curt apothegm and snappish reproof, but with that melodious flow of utter- ance which belongs to thought when it is carried in a stream of feeling : "The heart is hard in nature, and unfit For human fellowship, as being void Of sympathy, and therefore dead alike To love and friendship both, that is not pleased With sight of animals enjoying life, Nor feels their happiness augment his own." His large and tender heart embraces the most every-day forms of human life : the carter driving his team through the wintry storm; the cottager's wife who, painfully nursing the- embers on her hearth, while her infants " sit cowering o'er the sparks," " Retires, content to quake, so they be warmed " ; or the villager, with her little ones, going out to pick " A cheap but wholesome salad from the brook " ; and he compels our colder natures to follow his in its manifold sympathies, not by exhortations, not by telling us to meditate 52 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS : at midnight, to " indulge " the thought of death, or to ask our- selves how we shall " weather an eternal night, " but by pre' senting to us the object of his compassion truthfully and lovingly. And when he handles greater themes, when he takes a wider survey, and considers the men or the deeds which have a di- rect influence on the welfare of communities and nations, there is the same unselfish warmth of feeling, the same scrupulous truthfulness. He is never vague in his remonstrance or his satire; but puts his finger on^sorne particular vice or folly, which excites his indignation or " dissolves his heart in pity, " because of some specific injury it does to his fellow-man or to a sacred cause. And when he is asked why he interests him- self about the sorrows and wrongs of others, hear what is the reason he gives. Not, like Young, that the movements of the planets show a mutual dependence, and that or that,' "Thus man his sovereign duty learns in this Material picture of benevolence " ; "More generous sorrow while it sinks, exalts, And conscious virtue mitigates the pang." What is Cowper's answer, when he imagines some "sage eru- dite, profound," asking him " What's the world to you? " " Much. I was born of woman, and drew milk As sweet as charity from human breasts. I think, articulate, I laugh and weep, And exercise all functions of a man. How then should I and any man that lives Be strangers to each other?" Young is astonished that men can make war on each other- that any one can " seize his brother's throat," while "The Planets cry, 'Forbear.'" Cowper weeps because "There is no flesh in man's obdurate heart ; It does not feel for man." Young applauds God as a monarch with an empire and a court THE POET YOUNG. 63 quite superior to the English, or as an author who produces "volumes for man's perusal." Cowper sees his Father's love in all the gentle pleasures of the home fireside, in the charms even of the wintry landscape, and thinks " Happy who walks with Him ! whom what he finds Of flavor or of scent in fruit or flower, Or what he views of beautiful or grand In nature, from the broad majestic oak To the green blade that twinkles in the sun, Prompts with remembrance of a present God." To conclude for we must arrest ourselves in a contrast that would lead us beyond our bounds : Young flies for his utmost consolation to the day of judgment, when "Final Ruin fiercely drives Her ploughshare o'er Creation"; when earth, stars, and suns are swept aside "And now, all dross removed, Heaven's own pure day Full on the confines of our ether, flames : While (dreadful contrast !) far (how far !) beneath, Hell, bursting, belches forth her blazing seas, And storms sulphureous ; her voracious jaws Expanding wide, and roaring for her prey," Dr. Young, and similar " ornaments of religion and virtue," passing, of course, with grateful "applause" into the upper region. Cowper finds his highest inspiration in the Millen- nium in the restoration of this our beloved home of earth to perfect holiness and bliss, when the Supreme "Shall visit earth in mercy ; shall descend Propitious in His chariot paved with love ; And what His storms have blasted and defaced For man's revolt, shall with a smile repair." And into what delicious melody his song flows at the thought of that blessedness to be enjoyed by future generations on earth! "The dwellers in the vales and on the rocks Shout to each other, and the mountain-tops From distant mountains catch the flying joy , Till, nation after nation taught the strain, Earth rolls the rapturous Hosanna round ! " 64 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER- WORLDLINESS. The sum of our comparison is this : In Young we have the type of that deficient human sympathy, that impiety toward the present and the visible, which flies for its motives, its sanctities, and its religion, to the remote, the vague, and the unknown ; in Cowper we have the type of that genuine love which cherishes things in proportion to their nearness, and feels its reverence grow in proportion to the intimacy of its knowledge. Portrait of Heine. Page 55. Eliot's Essays. GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. "NOTHING/' says Goethe, " is more significant of men's char- acter than what they find laughable. " The truth of this ob- servation would perhaps have been more apparent if he had said culture instead of character. The last thing in which the cultivated man can have community with the vulgar is their jocularity ; and we can hardly exhibit more strikingly the wide gulf which separates him from them than by comparing the object which shakes the diaphragm of a coal-heaver with the highly complex pleasure derived from a real witticism. That any high order of wit is exceedingly complex, and demands a ripe and strong mental development, has one evidence in the fact that we do not find it in boys at all in proportion to their manifestation of other powers. Clever boys generally aspire to the heroic and poetic rather than the comic, and the crudest of all their efforts are their jokes. Many a witty man will remember how, in his school-days, a practical joke, more or less Rabelaisian, was for him the neplus ultra of the ludicrous. It seems to have been the same with the boyhood of mankind. The fun of early races was, we fancy, of the after-dinner kind loud-throated laughter over the wine-cup, taken too little account of in sober moments to enter as an element into their Art, and differing as much from the laughter of a Chamfort or a Sheridan as the gastronomic enjoyment of an ancient Briton, whose dinner had no other " removes " than from acorns to beechmast and back again to acorns, differed from the subtle pleasures of the palate experienced by his turtle-eating de- scendant. It was their lot to live seriously through stages which to later generations were to become comedy, as those amiable-looking pre- Adamite amphibia which Professor Owen has restored for us in effigy' at Sydenharn doubtless took seri- ously the grotesque physiognomies of their kindred. Heavy 56 GERMAN WIT: experience in their case, as in every other, was the base from which the salt of future wit was to be made. Humor is of earlier growth than Wit, and it is in accordance with this earlier growth that it has more affinity with the poetic tendencies, while Wit is more nearly allied to the ratiocinative intellect. Humor draws its materials from situ- ations and characteristics ; Wit seizes on unexpected and com- plex relations. Humor is chiefly representative and descrip- tive ; it is diffuse, and flows along without any other law than its own fantastic will; or it flits about like a will-o'-the-wisp, amazing us by its whimsical transitions. Wit is brief and sudden, and sharply defined as a crystal : it does not make pictures, it is not fantastic; but it detects an unsuspected analogy, or suggests a startling or confounding inference. Every one who has had the opportunity of making the com- parison will remember that the effect produced on him by- some witticisms is closely akin to the effect produced on him by subtle reasoning which lays open a fallacy or absurdity ; and there are persons whose delight in such reasoning always manifests itself in laughter. This affinity of Wit with ratio- cination is the more obvious in proportion as the species of wit is higher and deals less with words and with superficialities than with the essential qualities of things. Some of John- son's most admirable witticisms consist in the suggestion of an analogy which immediately exposes the absurdity of an action or proposition ; and it is only their ingenuity, conden- sation, and instantaneousness which lift them from reasoning into Wit they are reasoning raised to a higher power. On the other hand, Humor, in its higher forms, and in proportion as it associates itself with the sympathetic emotions, continu- ally passes into poetry : nearly all great modern humorists may be called prose poets. Some confusion as to the nature of humor has been created by the fact, that those who have written most eloquently on it have dwelt almost exclusively on its higher forms, and have defined humor in general as the sympathetic presentation of incongruous elements in human nature and life a definition which only applies to its later development. A great deal of humor may coexist with a great deal of barbarism, as we see HEINRICH HEINE. 57 in the middle ages ; but the strongest flavor of the humor in auch cases will come, not from sympathy, but more probably from triumphant egoism or intolerance ; at best it will be the love of the ludicrous exhibiting itself in illustrations of suc- cessful cunning and of the lex talionis, as in " Reineke Fuchs," or shaking off in a holiday mood the yoke of a too exacting faith, as in the old Mysteries. Again, it is impossible to deny a high degree of humor to many practical jokes, but no sym- pathetic nature can enjoy them. Strange as the genealogy may seem, the original parentage of that wonderful and deli- cious mixture of fun, fancy, philosophy, and feeling which constitutes modern humor, was probably the cruel mockery of a savage at the writhings of a suffering enemy- such is the tendency of things toward the better and more beautiful! Probably the reason why high culture demands more complete harmony with its moral sympathies in humor than in wit, is that humor is in its nature more prolix that it has not the direct and irresistible force of wit. Wit is an electric shock, which takes us by violence quite independently of our pre- dominant mental disposition; but humor approaches us more deliberately and leaves us masters of ourselves. Hence it is that, while coarse and cruel humor has almost disappeared from contemporary literature, coarse and cruel wit abounds. Even refined men cannot help laughing at a coarse bon-mot or a lacerating personality, if the " shock " of the witticism is a powerful one ; while mere fun will have no power over them if it jar on their moral taste. Hence, too, it is that, while wit is perennial, humor is liable to become superannuated. As is usual with definitions and classifications, however, this distinction between wit and humor does not exactly rep- resent the actual fact. Like all other species, Wit and Humor overlap and blend with each other. There are Ion-mots, like many of Charles Lamb's, which are a sort of facetious hybrids, we hardly know whether to call them witty or humorous ; there are rather lengthy descriptions or narratives which, like Vol- taire's " Micromegas, " would be humorous if they were-not so sparkling and antithetic, so pregnant with suggestion and satire, that we are obliged to call them witty. We rarely find wit un tempered by humor, or humor without a spice of 58 GERMAN WIT: wit; and sometimes we find them both united in the highest degree in the same mind, as in Shakespeare and Moliere. A happy conjunction this, for wit is apt to be cold, and thin- lipped, and Mephistophelean in men who have no relish for humor, whose lungs do never crow like Chanticleer at fun and drollery ; and broad-faced rollicking humor needs the refining .influence of wit. Indeed it may be said that there is no really .fine writing in which wit has not an implicit, if not an ex- plicit action. The wit may never rise to the surface, it may never flame out into a witticism; but it helps to give bright- ness and transparency, it warns off from flights and exaggera- tions which verge on the ridiculous in every genre of writing it preserves a man from sinking into the genre ennuyeux. And it is eminently needed for this office in humorous writing ; for, as humor has no limits imposed on it by its material, no law but its own exuberance, it is apt to become preposterous and wearisome unless checked by wit, which is the enemy of all monotony, of all lengthiness, of all exaggeration. Perhaps the nearest approach Nature has given us to a com- plete analysis, in which wit is as thoroughly exhausted of humor as possible, and humor as bare as possible of wit, is in the typical Frenchman and the typical German. Voltaire, the intensest example of pure wit, fails in most of his fictions from his lack of humor. " Micromegas " is a perfect tale, be- cause, as it deals chiefly with philosophic ideas and does not touch the marrow of human feeling and life, the writer's wit and wisdom were all-sufficient for his purpose. Not so with " Candide." Here Voltaire had to give pictures of life as well as to convey philosophic truth and satire, and here we feel the want of humor. The sense of the ludicrous is continually defeated by disgust, and the scenes, instead of presenting us with an amusing or agreeable picture, are only the frame for a witticism. On the other hand, German humor generally shows no sense of measure, no instinctive tact; it is either floundering and clumsy as the antics of a leviathan, or labori- ous an.d interminable as a Lapland day, in which one loses all hope that the stars and quiet will ever come. For this reason Jean Paul, the greatest of German humorists, is unendurable to many readers, and frequently tiresome to all. Here, as HEINRICH HEINE. o elsewhere, the German shows the absence of that delicate per- ception, that sensibility to gradation, which is the essence of tact and taste and the necessary concomitant of wit. All his subtlety is reserved for the region of metaphysics. For Identitat, in the abstract, no one can have an acuter vision ; but in the concrete he is satisfied with a very loose approxima- tion. He has the finest nose for Empirismus in philosophical doctrine, but the presence of more or less tobacco-smoke in the air he breathes is imperceptible to him. To the typical Ger- man Vetter Michel it is indifferent whether his door-lock will catch ; whether his teacup be more or less than an inch thick ; whether or not his book have every other leaf unstitched ; whether his neighbor's conversation be more or less of a shout; whether he pronounces b or p, t or d ; whether or not his adored one's teeth be few and far between. He has the same sort of insensibility to gradations in time. A German comedy is like a German sentence : you see no reason in its structure why it should ever come to an end, and you accept the conclusion as an arrangement of Providence rather than of the author. We have heard Germans use the word Langeweile, the equivalent for ennui, and we have secretly wondered what it can be that produces ennui in a German. Not the longest of long trage- dies, for we have known him to pronounce that hochst fesselnd; not the heaviest of heavy books, for he delights in that as griindlich; not the slowest of journeys in a Post-wag en, for the slower the horses the more cigars he can smoke before he reaches his journey's end. German ennui must be something as superlative as Barclay's treble X, which, we suppose, im- plies an extremely unknown quantity of stupefaction. It is easy to see that this national deficiency in nicety of perception must have its effect on the national appreciation and exhibition of Humor. You find in Germany ardent ad- mirers of Shakespeare, who tell you that what they think most admirable in him is his Wortspiel, his verbal quibbles ; and it is a remarkable fact that, among the five great races concerned in modern civilization, the German race is the only one which, up to the present century, had contributed nothing classic to the common stock of European wit and humor ; unless " Reineke Fuchs " can be fairly claimed as a peculiarly Teutonic product. 60 GERMAN WIT- Italy was the birthplace of Pantomime and the immortal Pul- cinello; Spain had produced Cervantes ; France had produced Rabelais and Moliere, and classic wits innumerable; England had yielded Shakespeare and a host of humorists. But Ger- many had borne no great comic dramatist, no great satirist, and she has not yet repaired the omission ; she had not even produced any humorist of a high order. Among her great writers, Lessing is the one who is the most specifically witty. We feel the implicit influence of wit the " flavor of mind " throughout his writings; and it is often concentrated into pungent satire, as every reader of the " Hamburgische Drama- turgic" remembers. Still, Lessing's name has not become European through his wit, and his charming comedy, " Minna von Barnhelm, " has won no place on a foreign stage. Of course, we do not pretend to an exhaustive acquaintance with German literature; we not only admit we are sure that it includes much comic writing of which we know nothing. We simply state the fact, that no German production of that kind, before the present century, ranked as European a fact which does not, indeed, determine the amount of the national face- tiousness, but which is quite decisive as to its quality. What- ever may be the stock of fun which Germany yields for home consumption, she has provided little for the palate of other lands. All honor to her for the still greater things she has done for us ! She has fought the hardest fight for freedom of thought, has produced the grandest inventions, has made mag- nificent contributions to science, has given us some of the divinest poetry, and quite the divinest music, in the world. We revere and treasure the products of the German mind. To say that that mind is not fertile in wit, is only like saying that excellent wheat-land is not rich pasture ; to say that we do not enjoy German facetiousness, is no more than to say, that though the horse is the finest of quadrupeds, we do not like him to lay his hoof playfully on our ^shoulder. Still, as we have noticed that the pointless puns and stupid jocularity of the boy may ultimately be developed into the epigrammatic brilliancy and polished playfulness of the man ; as we believe that racy wit and chastened delicate humor are inevitably the results of invigorated and refined mental activity, we can also HEINRICH HEINE. 61 believe that Germany will one day yield a crop of wits and humorists. Perhaps there is already an earnest of that future crop in the existence of Heinrich Heine, a German born with the present century, who, to Teutonic imagination, sensibility, and humor, adds an amount of esprit that would make him brilliant among the most brilliant of Frenchmen. True, this unique German wit is half a Hebrew ; but he and his ancestors spent their youth in German air, and were reared on Wurst and Sauerkraut, so that he is as much a German as a pheasant is an English bird, or a potato an Irish vegetable. But what- ever else he may be, Heine is one of the most remarkable men of this age ; no echo, but a real voice, and therefore, like all genuine things in this world, worth studying; a surpassing lyric poet, who has uttered our feelings for us in delicious song; a humorist, who touches leaden folly with the magic wand of his fancy, and transmutes it into the fine gold of art who sheds his sunny smile on human tears, and makes them a beauteous rainbow on the cloudy background of life; a wit, who holds in his mighty hand the most scorching lightnings of satire ; an artist in prose literature, who has shown even more completely than Goethe the possibilities of German prose; and in spite of all charges against him, true as well as false a lover of freedom, who has spoken wise and brave words on behalf of his fellow-men. He is, moreover, a suffering man, who, with all the highly wrought sensibility of genius, has to endure terrible physical ills ; and- as such he calls forth more than an intellectual interest. It is true, alas ! that there is a heavy weight in the other scale that Heine's magnificent powers have often served only to give electric force to the ex- pression of debased feeling, so that his works are no Phidian statue of gold, and ivory, and gems, but have not a little brass, and iron, and miry clay mingled with the precious metal. The audacity of his occasional coarseness and personality is unpar- alleled in contemporary literature, and has hardly been ex- ceeded by the license of former days. Hence, before his vol- umes are put within the reach of immature minds, there is need of a friendly penknife to exercise a strict censorship. Yet, when all coarseness, all scurrility, all Mephistophelean 62 GERMAN WIT: contempt for the reverent feelings of other men, is removed, there will be a plenteous remainder of exquisite poetry, of wit,^ humor, and just thought. It is apparently too often a congenial task to write severe words about the transgressions committed by men of genius, especially when the censor has the advantage of being himself a man of no genius, so that those transgressions seem to him quite gratuitous; he, for- sooth, never lacerated any one by his wit, or gave irresistible piquancy to a coarse allusion, and his indignation is not miti- gated by any knowledge of the temptation that lies in tran- scendent power. We are also apt to measure what a gifted man has done by our arbitrary conception of what he might have done, rather than by a comparison of his actual doings with our own or those of other ordinary men. We make our- selves over-zealous agents of heaven, and demand that our brother should bring usurious interest for his five Talents, for- getting that it is less easy to manage five Talents than two. Whatever benefit there may be in denouncing the evil, it is after all more edifying, and certainly more cheering, to appre- ciate the good. Hence, in endeavoring to give our readers some account of Heine and, his works, we shall not dwell lengthily on his failings ; we shall not hold the candle up to dusty, vermin-haunted corners, but let the light fall as much as possible on the nobler and more attractive details. Our sketch of Heine's life,, which has been drawn from various sources, will be free from everything like intrusive gossip, and will derive its coloring chiefly from the autobiographical hints and descriptions scattered through his own writings. Those of our readers who happen to know nothing of Heine, will in this way be making their acquaintance with the writer while they are learning the outline of his career. We have said that Heine was born with the present cen- tury ; but this statement is not precise, for we learn that, ac- cording to his certificate of baptism, he was born December 12, 1799. However, as he himself says, the important point is, that he was born, and born on the banks of the Rhine, at Dilsseldorf, where his father was a merchant. In his " Reise-? bilder " he gives us some recollections, in his wild poetic way, of the dear old town where he spent his childhood, and of hia ETEINRICH HEUTE 63 schoolboy troubles there. We shall quote from these in but- terfly fashion, sipping a little nectar here and there, without regard to any strict order : " I first saw the light on the banks of that lovely stream, where Folly grows on the green hills, and in autumn is plucked, pressed, poured into casks, and sent into foreign lands. Believe me, I yesterday heard some one utter folly which, in anno 1811, lay in a bunch of grapes I then saw growing on the Johannisberg. . . . Mon Dieu ! if I had only such faith in me that I could remove mountains, the Johannisberg would be the very mountain I should send for wherever I might be ; but as my faith is not so strong, imagination must help me, and it transports me at once to the lovely Rhine. ... 1 am again a child, and playing with other children on the Schlossplatz, at Dusseldorf on the Rhine. Yes, madam, there was I born ; and I note this expressly, in case, after my death, se\en cities Schilda, Krahwinkel, Polkwitz, Bockurn, Diilken, Gottin- gen, andSchbppenstadt should contend for the honor of being my birth- place. Dusseldorf is a town on the Rhine; sixteen thousand men live there, and many hundred thousand men besides he buried there. . . . Among them, many of whom my mother says, that it would be better if they were still living; for example, my grandfather and my uncle, the old Herr Von Geldern and the young Herr Von Geldern, both such cele- brated doctors, who saved so many men from death, and yet must die themselves, And the pious Ursula, who carried me in her arms when I was a child, also lies buried there, and a rose-bush grows on her grave ; she loved the scent of roses so well in life, and her heart was pure rose- incense and goodness. The knowing old Canon, too, lies buried there. Heavens, what an object he looked when I last saw him ! He was made up of nothing but mind and plasters, and nevertheless studied day and night, as if he were alarmed lest the worms should find an idea too little in his head. And the little William lies there, and for this I am to blame. We were schoolfellows in the Franciscan monastery, and were playing on that side of it where the Dussel flows between stone walls, and I said ' William, fetch out the kitten that has just fallen in 1 and merrily he went down on to the plank which lay across the brook, snatched the kitten out of the water, but fell in himself, and was dragged out dripping and dead. The kitten lived to a good old age. . . . Princes in that day were not the tormented race they are now ; the crown grew firmly on their heads, and at night they drew a nightcap over it, and slept peacefully, and peacefully slept the people at their feet ; and when the people waked in the morning, they said ' Good-morning, father ! ' and the princes answered, ' Good-morning, dear children ! ' But it was suddenly quite otherwise ; for when we awoke one morning at Diisselr dorf, and were ready to say. ' Good-morning, father ! ' lo ! the father was gone away ; and in the whole town there was nothing but dumb sorrow, everywhere a sort of funeral disposition ; and people glided along silently to the market, and read the long placard placed on the. 64 GERMAN WIT: door of the Town Hall. It was dismal weather ; yet the lean tailor, Kilian, stood in his nankeen jacket which he usually wore only in the house, and his blue worsted stockings hung down so that his naked legs peeped out mournfully, and his thin lips trembled while he muttered the announcement to himself. And an old soldier read rather louder, ana at many a word a crystal tear trickled down to his brave old mustache. I stood near him and wept in company, and asked him, ' Why we wept? ' He answered, ' The Elector has abdicated. ' And then he read again, and at the words, 'for the long-manifested fidelity of my subjects, 1 and ' hereby set you free from your allegiance, ' he wept more than ever. It is strangely touching to see an old man like that, with faded uniform and scarred face, weep so bitterly all of a sudden. While we were read- ing, the Electoral arms were taken down from the Town Hall ; every- thing had such a desolate air, that it was as if an eclipse of the sun were expected. ... I went home and wept, and wailed out, ' The Elector has abdicated ! ' In vain my mother took a world of trouble to explain the thing to me. I knew what I knew ; I was not to be persuaded, but went crying to bed, and in the night dreamed that the world was at an end." The next morning, however, the sun rises as usual, and Joachim Murat is proclaimed Grand Duke, whereupon there is a holiday at the public school, and Heinrich (or Harry, for that was his baptismal name, which he afterward had the good taste to change), perched on the bronze horse of the Electoral statue, sees quite a different scene from yesterday's : "The next day the world was again all in order, and we had school as before, and things were got by heart as before the Roman emperors, chronology, the nouns in im, the verba irregularia, Greek, Hebrew, geography, mental arithmetic! heavens! my head is still dizzy with it, all must be learned by heart ! And a great deal of this came in very conveniently for me in after life. For if I had not known the Roman kings by heart, it would subsequently have been quite indiffer- ent to me whether Niebuhr had proved or had not proved that they never really existed. . . . But oh ! the trouble I had at school with the end- less dates. And with arithmetic it was still worse. What I understood best was subtraction, for that has a very practical rule : 'Four can't be taken from three, therefore I must borrow one. ' But I advise every one in such a case to borrow a few extra pence, for no one can tell what may happen. ... As for Latin, you have no idea, madam, what a com- plicated affair it is. The Romans would never have found time to conquer the world if they had first had to learn Latin. Luckily for them, they already knew in their cradles what nouns have their accusa- tive in im. I, on the contrary, had to learn them by heart in the sweat of my brow ; nevertheless, it is fortunate for me that I know them ; . . . and the fact that I have them at my iiuger-euds if J should ever happen HEINRICH HEINE. 65 to want them suddenly, affords me much inward repose and consolation in many troubled hours of life. ... Of Greek I will not say a word , I should get too much irritated. The monks in the middle ages were not so far wrong when they maintained that Greek was an invention of the devil. God knows the suffering I endured over it. ... With Hebrew it went somewhat better, for I had always a great liking for the Jews, though to this very hour they crucify my good name ; but I could never get on so far in Hebrew as my watch, which had much familiar inter- course with pawnbrokers, and in this way contracted many Jewish habits for example, it wouldn't go on Saturdays." Heine's parents were apparently not wealthy, but his edu- cation was cared for by his uncle, Solomon Heine, a great banker in Hamburg, so that he had no early pecuniary disad- vantages to struggle with. He seems to have been very happy in his mother, who was not of Hebrew, but of Teutonic blood ; he often mentions her with reverence and affection, and in the " Buch der Lieder " there are two exquisite sonnets addressed to her, which tell how his proud spirit was always subdued by the charm of her presence, and how her love was the home of his heart after restless weary wandering : "Wie machtig auch mein stolzer Muth sich blahe, In deiner selig siissen, trauten Nahe Ergreift mich oft ein demuthvolle Zagen. Und immer irrte ich nach Liebe, immer Nach Liebe, doch die Liebe fand ich nimmer, Und kehrte um nach Hause, krank und triibe. Doch da bist du entgegen mir gekommen, Und ach ! was da in deinem Aug' geschwommen, Das war die siisse, langgesuchte Liebe." He was at first destined for a mercantile life, but Nature declared too strongly against this plan. "God knows," he has lately said in conversation with his brother, "I would willingly have become a banker, but I could never bring my- self to that pass. I very early discerned that bankers would one day be the rulers of the world." So commerce was at length given up for law, the study of which he began in 1819 at the University of Bonn. He had already published some poems in the corner of a newspaper, and among them was one 6 66 GERMAN WIT: on Napoleon, the object of his youthful enthusiasm. This poem, he says in a letter to St. Rene Taillandier, was written, when he was only sixteen. It is still to be found in the " Buch der Lieder " under the title " Die Grenadiere, " and it proves that even in its earliest efforts his genius showed a strongly specific character. It will be easily imagined that the germs of poetry sprouted too vigorously in Heine's brain for jurisprudence to find much room there. Lectures on history and literature, we are told, were more diligently attended than lectures on law. He had .taken care, too, to furnish his trunk with abundant editions of the poets, and the poet he especially studied at that time was Byron. At a later period we find his taste taking another direction, for he writes : " Of all authors, Byron is precisely the one who excites in me the most intolerable emotion; whereas Scott, in every one of his works, gladdens my heart, soothes and invigorates me." Another indication of his bent in these Bonn days was a newspaper essay, in which he at- tacked the Romantic school ; and here also he went through that chicken-pox of authorship the production of a tragedy. Heine's tragedy "Almansor" is, as might be expected, better than the majority of these youthful mistakes. The tragic collision lies in the conflict between natural affection and the deadly hatred of religion and of race in the sacrifice of youthful lovers to the strife between Moor and Spaniard, Moslem and Christian. Some of the situations are striking, and there are passages of considerable poetic merit ; but the characters are little more than shadowy vehicles for the poe- try, and there is a want of clearness and probability in the structure. It was published two years later, in company with another tragedy, in one act, called "William Ratcliffe," in which there is rather a feeble use of the Scotch second-sight after the manner of the Fate in the Greek tragedy. We smile to find Heine saying of his tragedies, in a letter to a friend soon after their publication : " I know they will be terribly cut up, but I will confess to you in confidence that they are very good, better than my collection of poems, which are not worth a shot. " Elsewhere he tells us, that when, after one of Paganini's concerts, he was passionately complimenting the HEINRICH HEIKE. 67 great master on his violin-playing, Paganini interrupted him thus ; " But how were you pleased with my bows ? " In 1820, Heine left Bonn for Gottingen. He there pursued his omission of law studies ; and at the end of three months he was rusticated for a breach of the laws against duelling. While there, he had attempted a negotiation with Brockhaus for the printing of a volume of poems, and had endured that first ordeal of lovers and poets a refusal. It was not until a year after, that he found a Berlin publisher for his first vol- ume of poems, subsequently transformed, with additions, into the " Buch der Lieder." He remained between two and three years at Berlin, and the society he found there seems to have made these years an important epoch in his culture. He was one of the youngest members of a circle which assembled at the house of the poetess Elise von Hohenhausen, the translator of Byron a circle which included Chaniisso, Varnhagen, and Eahel (Varnhagen' s wife) . For Rahel, Heine had a profound admiration and regard. He afterward dedicated to her the poems included under the title "Heimkehr"; and he fre- quently refers to her or quotes her in a way that indicates how he valued her influence. According to his friend, F. von Ho- henhausen, the opinions concerning Heine's talent were very various among his Berlin friends, and it was only a small minority that had any presentiment of his future fame. In this minority was Elise von Hohenhausen, who proclaimed Heine as the Byron of Germany ; but her opinion was met with much head-shaking and opposition. We can imagine how precious was such a recognition as hers to the young poet, then only two or three and twenty, and with by no means an impressive personality for superficial eyes. Perhaps even the deep-sighted were far from detecting in that small, blond, pale young man, with quiet, gentle manners, the latent pow- ers of ridicule and sarcasm the terrible talons that were one day to be thrust out from the velvet paw of the young leopard. It was apparently during this residence in Berlin that Heine united himself with the Lutheran Church. He would will- ingly, like many of his friends, he tells us, have remained free from all ecclesiastical ties if the authorities there had not forbidden residence in Prussia, and especially in Berlin, to 68 GERMAN WIT: every one who did not belong to one of the positive religions recognized by the State : "As Henry IV. once laughingly said, ' Paris vaut bien une messe, ' so I might with reason say, ' Berlin vaut bien unepreche ' , and I could after- ward, as before, accommodate myself to the very enlightened Chris- tianity, filtrated from all superstition, which could then be had in the churches of Berlin, and which was even free from the divinity of Christ, like turtle-soup without turtle." At the same period, too, Heine became acquainted with Hegel. In his lately published " Gestandnisse " (Confes- sions), he throws on Hegel's influence over him the blue light of demoniacal wit, and confounds us by the most bewildering, double-edged sarcasms; but that influence seems to have been at least more wholesome than the one which produced the mocking retractations of the " Gestandnisse. " Through all his self-satire, we discern that in those days he had something like real earnestness and enthusiasm, which are certainly not apparent in his present theistic confession of faith : "On the whole, I never felt a strong enthusiasm for this philosophy, and conviction on the subject was out of the question. I never was an abstract thinker, and I accepted the synthesis of the Hegelian doctrine without demanding any proof, since its consequences flattered my vanity. I was young and proud, and it pleased my vainglory when I learned from Hegel that the true God was not, as my grandmother believed, the God who lives in heaven, but myself here upon earth. This foolish pride had not in the least a pernicious influence on my feelings , on the contrary, it heightened these to the pitch of heroism. I was at that time so lavish in generosity and self-sacrifice, that I must assuredly have eclipsed the most brilliant deeds of those good bourgeois of virtue who acted merely from a sense of duty, and simply oBeyed the laws of morality." His sketch of Hegel is irresistibly amusing ; but we must warn the reader that Heine's anecdotes are often mere devices of style by 'which he conveys his satire or opinions. The reader will see that he does not neglect an opportunity of giving a sarcastic lash or two, in passing, to Meyerbeer, for whose music he has a great contempt. The sarcasm conveyed in the substitution of reputation for music and journalists for musicians might perhaps escape any one unfamiliar with the sly and unexpected turns of Heine's ridicule: HEINRICH HEINE. 69 "To speak frankly, I seldom understood him, and only "arrived at the meaning of his words by subsequent reflect! on. I believe he wished not to be understood ; and hence his practice of sprinkling his discourse with modifying parentheses ; hence, perhaps, his preference for persons of whom he knew that they did not understand him, and to whom he all the more willingly granted the honor of his familiar acquaintance. Thus every one in Berlin wondered at the intimate companionship of the profound Hegel with the late Heinrich Beer, a brother of Giacomo Meyerbeer, who is universally known by his reputation, and who has been celebrated by the cleverest journalists. This Beer, namely Hein- rich,*was a thoroughly stupid fellow, and indeed was afterward actually declared imbecile by his family, and placed under guardianship, because instead of making a name for himself in art or in science by means of his great fortune, he squandered his money on childish trifles ; and, for example, one day bought six thousand thalers' worth of walking-sticks- This poor man, who had no wish to pass either for a great tragic drama- tist, or for a great star-gazer, or for a laurel-crowned musical genius, a rival of Mozart and Rossini, and preferred giving his money for walking- sticks this degenerate Beer enjoyed Hegel's most confidential society ; he was the philosopher's bosom friend, his Pylades, and accompanied him everywhere like his shadow. The equally witty and gifted Felix Mendelssohn once sought to explain thi s phenomenon by maintaining that Hegel did not understand Heinrich Beer. I now believe, however, that the real ground of that intimacy consisted in this Hegel was con- vinced that no word of what he said was understood by Heinrich Beer ; and he could therefore, in his presence, give himself up to all the intel- lectual outpourings of the moment. In general, Hegel's conversation was a sort of monologue, sighed forth by starts in a noiseless voice : the odd roughness of his expressions often struck me, and many of them have remained in my memory. One beautiful starlight evening we stood together at the window, and I, a young man of one-and-twenty, having just had a good dinner and finished my coffee, spoke with en- thusiasm of the stars, and called them the habitations of the departed. But the master muttered to himself, ' The stars ! hum ! hum ! The stars are only a brilliant leprosy on the face of the heavens. ' 'For God's sake,' I cried, 'is there, then, no happy place above, where virtue is re- warded after death? ' But he, staring at me with his pale eyes, said, cuttingly, ' So you want a bonus for having taken care of your sick mother, and refrained from poisoning your worthy brother? ' At these words he looked anxiously round, but appeared immediately set at rest when he observed that it was only Heinrich Beer, who had approached to invite him to a game of whist." In 1823, Heine returned to Gottingen to complete his career as a law-student, and this time he gave evidence of advanced mental maturity, not only by producing many of the charming poems subsequently included in the " Keisebilder, " but also by 70 GERMAN WIT: prosecuting his professional studies diligently enough to leave Gottingen in 1.825 as Doctor juris. Hereupon he settled at Hamburg as an advocate, but his profession seems to have been the least pressing of his occupations. In those days, a small blond young man, with the brim of his hat drawn over his nose, his coat flying open, and his hands stuck in his trou- ser-pockets, might be seen stumbling along the streets of Ham- burg, staring from side to side, and appearing to have small regard to the figure he made in the eyes of the good citizens. Occasionally an inhabitant, more literary than usual, would point out this young man to his companion as Heinrich Heine ; but in general, the young poet had not to endure the incon- veniences of being a lion. His poems were devoured, but he was not asked to devour flattery in return. Whether because the fair Hamburgers acted in the spirit of Johnson's advice to Hannah More to " consider what her flattery was worth before she choked him with it " or for some other reason, Heine, according to the testimony of August Lewald, to whom we owe these particulars of his Hamburg life, was left free from the persecution of tea-parties. Not, however, from an- other persecution of genius nervous headaches, which some persons, we are told, regarded as an improbable fiction, in- tended as a pretext for raising a delicate white hand to his forehead. It is probable that the sceptical persons alluded to were themselves untroubled with nervous headache, and that their hands were not delicate. Slight details these, but worth telling about a man of genius, because they help us to keep in mind that he is, after all, our brother, having to endure the petty every-day ills of life as we have; with this difference, that his heightened sensibility converts what are mere insect- stings for us into scorpion-stings for him. It was perhaps in these Hamburg days that Heine paid the visit to Goethe, of which he gives us this charming little pic- ture : " When I visited him in Weimar, and stood before him, I involuntarily glanced at his side to see whether the eagle was not there with the light- ning in his beak. I was nearly speaking Greek to him ; but, as I ob- served that he understood German, I stated to him, in German, that the plums on the road between Jeua and Weimar were very good, I had for HEINRICH HEINE. fl So many long winter nights thought over what lofty and profound things I would say to Goethe, if ever I saw him. And when I saw him at last, I said to him, that the Saxon plums were very good I And Goethe smiled." During the next few years, Heine produced the most popu- lar of all his works those which have won him his place as the greatest of living German poets and humorists. Between 1826 and 1829 appeared the four volumes of the " Keisebilder " (Pictures of Travel), and the " Buch der Lieder " (Book of Songs) a volume of lyrics, of which it is hard to say whether their greatest charm is the lightness and finish of their style, their vivid and original imaginativeness, or their simple, pure sensibility. In his " Reisebilder, " Heine carries us with him to the Harz, to the isle of Norderney, to his native town Dus- seldorf, to Italy, and to England, sketching scenery and char- acter, now with the wildest, most fantastic humor, now with the finest idyllic sensibility, letting his thoughts wander from poetry to politics, from criticism to dreamy revery, and blend- ing fun, imagination, reflection, and satire in a sort of exquis- ite, ever-varying shimmer, like the hues of the opal. Heine's journey to England did not at all heighten his re- gard for the English. He calls our language the "hiss of egoism " (Zischlaute des Egoismus) ; and his ridicule of English awkwardness is as merciless as English ridicule of German awkwardness. His antipathy toward us seems to have grown in intensity, like many of his other antipathies; and in his " Vermischte Schriften " he is more bitter than ever. Let us quote one of his philippics ; since bitters are understood to be wholesome : "It is certainly a frightful injustice to pronounce sentence of con- demnation on an entire people. But with regard to the English, mo- mentary disgust might betray me into this injustice ; and on looking at the mass, I easily forget the many brave and noble men who distin- guished themselves by intellect and love of freedom. But these, espe- cially the British poets, were always all the more glaringly in contrast with the rest of the nation ; they were isolated martyrs to their national relations; and besides, great geniuses do not belong to the particular land of their birth : they scarcely belong to this earth, the Golgotha of their sufferings. The mass the English blockheads, God forgive me ! are hateful to me in my inmost soul ; and I often regard them not at all as my fellow-men, but as miserable automata machines, whose 7 GERMAN WIT: motive-power is egoism. In these moods, it seems to me as if I heard the whizzing wheel-work by which they think, feel, reckon, digest, and pray ; their praying, their mechanical Anglican cluirch-going, with the gilt Prayer-book under their arms, their stupid, tiresome Sunday, their awkward piety, is most of all odious to me. I am firmly convinced that a blaspheming Frenchman is a more pleasing sight for the Divinity than a praying Englishman." On his return from England, Heine was employed at Munich in editing the Allgemeinen Politischen Annalen ; but in 1830 he was again in the north, and the news of the July Revolu- tion surprised him on the island of Heligoland. He has given us a graphic picture of his democratic enthusiasm in those days in some letters, apparently written from Heligoland, which he has inserted in his book on Borne. We quote some passages, not only for their biographic interest as showing a phase of Heine's mental history, but because they are a speci- men of his power in that kind of dithyrambic writing which, in less masterly hands, easily becomes ridiculous : "The thick packet of newspapers arrived from the Continent with these warm, glowing-hot tidings. They were sunbeams wrapped up in packing-paper, and they inflamed my soul till it burst into the wildest conflagration. ... It is all like a dream to me ; especially the name Lafayette sounds to me like a legend out of my earliest childhood. Does he really sit again on horseback, commanding the National Guard? I almost fear it may not be true, for it is in print. I will myself go to Paris, to be convinced of it with my bodily eyes. ... It must be splen- did, when he rides through the streets, the citizen of two worlds, the god-like old man, with his silver locks streaming down his sacred shoulder. . . . He greets, with his dear old eyes, the grandchildren of those who once fought with him for freedom and equality. . . It is now sixty years since he returned from America with the Declaration of Human Rights the decalogue of the world's new creed, which was revealed to him amid the thunders and lightnings of cannon. . . . And the tricolored flag waves again on the towers of Paris, and its streets resound with the Marseillaise! ... It is all over with my yearning for repose. I know now again what I will do, what I ought to do, what I must do. ... I am the son of the Revolution, and seize again the hallowed weapons on which my mother pronounced her magic benedic- tion. . . . Flowers! flowers! I will crown my head for the death-fight. And the lyre too reach me the lyre, that I may sing a battle-song. . . . Words like flaming stars, that shoot down from the heavens, and burn up the palaces, and illuminate the huts. . . . Words like bright javelins, that whirr up to the seventh heaven and strike the pious hypocrites who have skulked into the Holy of Holies. ... I am all joy and song, all HEINRICH HEINE. 73 sword and flame ! Perhaps, too, all delirium. . . . One of those sun- beams wrapped in brown paper has flown to my brain, and set my thoughts aglow. In vain I dip my head into the sea. No water extin- guishes this Greek fire. . . . Even the poor Heligolanders shout for joy, although they have only a sort of dim instinct of what has occurred. The fisherman who yesterday took me over to the little sand island, which is the bathing-place here, said to me, smilingly, ' The poor people have won ! ' Yes ; instinctively the people comprehend such events perhaps better than we, with all our means of knowledge. Thus Frau von Varnhagen once told me that when the issue of the battle of Leipzig was not yet known, the maid-servant suddenly rushed into the room, with the sorrowful cry, ' The nobles have won ! ' . . . This morning an- other packet of newspapers is come. I devour them like manna. Child that I am, affecting details touch me yet more than the momentous whole. Oh, if I could but see the dog Medor ! . . . The dog Medor brought his master his gun and cartridge-box, and when his master fell, and was buried with his fellow-heroes in the Court of the Louvre, there stayed the poor dog, like a monument of faithfulness, sitting motionless on the grave, day and night, eating but little of the food that was offered him burying the greater part of it in the earth, perhaps as nourishment for his buried master ! " The enthusiasm which was kept thus at boiling-heat by im- agination, cooled down rapidly when brought into contact with reality. In the same book he indicates, in his caustic way, the commencement of that change in his political temperature for it cannot be called a change in opinion which has drawn down on him immense vituperation from some of the patriotic party, but which seems to have resulted simply from the essen- tial antagonism between keen wit and fanaticism : "On the very first days of my arrival in Paris, I observed that things wore, in reality, quite different colors from those which had been shed on them, when in perspective, by the light of my enthusiasm. The silver locks which I saw fluttering so majestically on the shoulders of Lafayette, the hero of two worlds, were metamorphosed into a brown perruque, which made a pitiable covering for a narrow skull. And even the dog Medor, which I visited in the Court of the Louvre, and which, encamped under tricolored flags and trophies, very quietly allowed him- self to be fed he was not at all the right dog, but quite an ordinary brute, who assumed to himself merits not his own, as often happens with the French ; and, like many others, he made a profit out of the glory of the Revolution. . He was pampered and patronized, perhaps promoted to the highest posts, while the true Medor, some days after the battle, modestly slunk out of sight, like the true people who created the Revolution." 74 GERMAN WIT: That it was not merely interest in French politics which sent Heine to Paris in 1831, but also a perception that German air was not friendly to sympathizers in July revolutions, is humorously intimated in the " Gestandnisse " : "I had done much and suffered much, and when the sun of the July Revolution arose in France, I had become very weary, and needed some recreation. Also, my native air was every day more unhealthy for me, and it was time I should seriously think of a change of climate. I had visions the clouds terrified me, and made all sorts of ugly faces at me. It often seemed to me as if the sun were a Prussian cockade ; at night I dreamed of a hideous black eagle, which gnawed my liver ; and I was very melancholy. Add to this, I had become acquainted with an old Berlin Justizrath, who had spent many years in the fortress of Spandau, and he related to me how unpleasant it is when one is obliged to wear irons in winter. For myself I thought it very unchristian that the irons were not warmed a trifle. If the irons were warmed a little for us they would not make so unpleasant an impression, and even chilly natures might then bear them very well ; it would be only proper consideration, too, if the fetters were perfumed with essence of roses and laurels, as is the case in this country (France). I asked my Justizrath whether he often got oysters to eat at Spandau? He said, No ; Spandau was too far from the sea. Moreover, he said meat was very scarce there, and there was no kind of volatile except flies, which fell into one's soup. . . . Now, as I really needed some recreation, and as Spandau is too far from the sea for oysters to be got there, and the Spandau fly-soup did not seem very appetizing to me ; as, besides all this, the Prussian chains are very cold in winter, and could not be conducive to my health, I resolved to visit Paris." Since this time Paris has been Heine's home, and his best prose works have been written either to inform the Germans on French affairs or to inform the French on German philoso- phy and literature. He became a correspondent of the " All- gemeine Zeitung," and his correspondence, which extends, with an interruption of several years, from 1831 to 1844, forms the volume entitled " Franzosische Zustande " (French Affairs), and the second and third volumes of his " Vermischte Schriften." It is a witty and often wise commentary on pub- lic men and public events: Louis Philippe, Casiniir Perier, Thiers, Guizot, Rothschild, the Catholic party, the Socialist party, have their turn of satire and appreciation, for Heine deals out both with an impartiality which made his less favor- able critics Borne, for example charge him with the rather HEINRICH HEINE. 75 incompatible sins of reckless caprice and venality. Literature and art alternate with politics: we have now a sketch of George Sand, or a description of one of Horace Vernet's pic- tures, now a criticism of Victor Hugo, or of Liszt, now an irresistible caricature of Spontini, or Kalkbrenner, and occa- sionally the predominant satire is relieved by a fine saying or a genial word of admiration. And all is done with that airy lightness, yet precision of touch, which distinguishes Heine beyond any living writer. The charge of venality was loudly made against Heine in Germany : first, it was said that he was paid to write; then, that he was paid to abstain from, writing; and the accusations were supposed to have an irref- ragable basis in the fact that he accepted a stipend from the French Government. He has never attempted to conceal the reception of that stipend, and we think his statement (in the " Vermischte Schriften ") of the circumstances under which it was offered and received is a sufficient vindication of himself and M. Guizot from any dishonor in the matter. It may be readily imagined that Heine, with so large a share of the Gallic element as he has in his composition, was soon at his ease in Parisian society, and the years here were bright with intellectual activity and social enjoyment. " His wit, " .wrote August Lewald, " is a perpetual gushing fountain ; he throws off the most delicious descriptions with amazing facility, and sketches the most comic characters in conver- sation." Such a man could not be neglected in Paris, and Heine was sought on all sides as a guest in distinguished salons, as a possible proselyte in the circle of the Saint Simo- nians. His literary productiveness seems to have been fur- thered by this congenial life, which, however, was soon to some extent imbittered by the sense of exile; for since 1835 both his works and his person have been the object of denunciation by the German Governments. Between 1833 and 1845 ap- peared the four volumes of the "Salon," "Die Eomantische Schule " (both written, in the first instance, in French) ; the book on Borne; "Atta Troll," a romantic poem; "Deutsch- land, " an exquisitely humorous poem, describing his last visit to Germany, and containing some grand passages of serious Writing } and the " Neue Gedichte, " a collection of lyrical poems, 76 GERMAN WIT: Among the most interesting of his prose works are the second volume of the " Salon, " which contains a survey of religion and philosophy in Germany, and the " Romantische Schule," a delightful introduction to that phase of German literature known as the Romantic School. The book on Borne, which appeared in 1840, two or three years after the death of that writer, excited great indignation in Germany, as a wreaking of vengeance on the dead, an insult to the memory of a man who had worked and suffered in the cause of freedom a cause which was Heine's own. Borne, we may observe parentheti- cally, for the information of those who are not familiar with recent German literature, was a remarkable political writer of the ultra-liberal party in Germany, who resided in Paris at the same time as Heine, a man of stern uncompromising par- tisanship, and bitter hamor. Without justifying Heine's pro- duction of this book, we see excuses for him which should temper the condemnation passed on it. There was a radical opposition of nature between him and Borne : to use his own distinction, Heine is a Hellene sensuous, realistic, exquisitely alive to tha beautiful ; while Borne was a Nazarene ascetic, spiritualistic, despising the pure artist as destitute of earnest- ness. Heine has too keen a perception of practical absurdities and damaging exaggerations ever to become a thoroughgoing partisan ; and with a love of freedom, a faith in the ultimate triumph of democratic principles, of which we see no just reason to doubt the genuineness and consistency, he has been unable to satisfy more zealous and one-sided Liberals by giv- ing his adhesion to their views and measures, or by adopt- ing a denunciatory tone against those in the opposite ranks. Borne could not forgive what he regarded as Heine' s epicurean indifference and artistic dalliance, and he at length gave vent to his antipathy in savage attacks on him through the press, accusing him of utterly lacking character and principle, and even of writing under the influence of venal motives. To these attacks Heine remained absolutely mute -from con- tempt, according to his own account; but the retort, which he resolutely refrained from making during Borne's life, comes in this volume published after his death with the concentrat- ed force of long-gathering thunder. The utterly inexcusable HEItfRICH HEIKE. 77 part of the book is the caricature of Borne's friend, Madame Wohl, and the scurrilous insinuations concerning Borne's do- mestic life. It is said, we know not with how much truth, that Heine had to answer for these in a duel with Madame Wohl's husband, and that, after receiving a serious wound, he promised to withdraw the offensive matter from a future edition. That edition, however, has not been called for. Whatever else we may think of the book, it is impossible to deny its transcendent talent the dramatic vigor with which Borne is made present to us, the critical acumen with which he is characterized, and the wonderful play of wit, pathos, and thought which runs through the whole. But we will let Heine speak for himself, and first we will give part of his graphic description of the way in which Borne's mind and manners grated on his taste : "To the disgust which, in intercourse with Borne, I was in danger of feeling toward those who surrounded him, was added the annoyance I felt from his perpetual talk about politics. Nothing but political argu- ment, and again political argument, even at table, where he managed to hunt me out. At dinner, when I so gladly forget all the vexations of the world, he spoiled the best dishes for me by his patriotic gall, which he poured as a bitter sauce over everything. Calf's feet, ft la maltre d'hotel, then my innocent bonne bouche, he completely spoiled for me by Job's tidings from Germany, which he scraped together out of the most unreliable newspapers. And then his accursed remarks, which spoiled ' one's appetite ! . . . This was a sort of table-talk which did not greatly exhilarate me, and I avenged myself by affecting an excessive, almost impassioned indifference for the objects of Borne's enthusiasm. For example, Borne was indignant that immediately on my arrival in Paris, I had nothing better to do than to write for German papers a long account of the Exhibition of Pictures. I omit all discussion as to whether that interest in Art which induced me to undertake this work was so utterly irreconcilable with the revolutionary interests of the day ; but Borne saw in it a proof of my indifference toward the sacred cause of human- ity, and I could in my turn spoil the taste of his patriotic Sauerkraut for him by talking all dinner-time of nothing but pictures, of Robert's Reapers, Horace Vernet's Judith, and Scheffer's Faust. . . . That I never thought it worthwhile to discuss my political principles with him it is needless to say ; and once when he declared that he had found a contradiction in my writings, I satisfied myself with the ironical an- swer, 'You are mistaken, mon cher; such contradictions never occur in my works, for always before I begin to write I read over the statement of my political principles in my previous writings, that I may not con- ?8 GERMAN WIT: tradict myself, and that no one maybe able to reproach me withapostasj from my liberal principles. ' " And here is his own account of the spirit in which the book was written: "I was never Borne 's friend, nor -was I ever his enemy. The dis- pleasure which he could.often excite in me was never very important, and he atoned for it sufficiently by the cold silence which I opposed to all his accusations and raillery. While he lived I wrote not a line against him, I never thought about him, I ignored him completely ; and that enraged him beyond measure. If I now speak of him, I do so neither out of enthusiasm nor out of uneasiness ; I am conscious of the coolest impartiality. I write here neither an apology nor a critique, and as in painting the man I go on my own observation, the image I present of him ought perhaps to be regarded as a real portrait'. And such a monument is due to him to the great wrestler who, in the arena of our political games, wrestled so courageously, and earned, if not the laurel, certainly the crown of oak leaves. I give an image with his true features, without idealization the more like him the more honorable for his memory. He was neither a genius nor a hero; he was np Olympian god. He was a man, a denizen of this earth , he was a good writer and a great patriot. . . . Beautiful delicious peace, which I feel at this moment in the depths of my soul ! thou rewardest me sufficiently for everything I have done and for everything I have despised. ... I shall defend myself neither from the reproach of indifference nor from the suspicion of venality. I have for years, during the life of the in- sinuator, held such self-justification unworthy of me ; now even decency demands silence. That would be a frightful spectacle ! polemics be- tween Death and Exile ! Dost thou stretch out to me a beseeching hand from the grave? Without rancor I reach mine toward thee. . . . See how noble it is and pure ! It was never soiled by pressing the hands of the mob, any more than by the impure gold of the people's enemy. In reality thou hast never injured me. ... In all thy insinuations there is not a Zowis-tTor's worth of truth." In one of these years Heine was married, and, in deference to the sentiments of his wife, married according to the rites of the Catholic Church. On this fact busy rumor afterward founded the story of his conversion to Catholicism, and could of course name the day and the spot on which he abjured Protestantism. In his " Gestandnisse " Heine publishes a de- nial of this rumor ; less, he says, for the sake of depriving the Catholics of the solace they may derive from their belief in a new convert, than in order to cut off from another party the more spiteful satisfaction of bewailing his instability : HEINRICH HEINE. 79 "That statement of time and place was entirely correct. I was actu- a'ly on the specified day in the specified church, which was, moreover, a Jesuit church namely, St. Sulpice ; and I then went through a relig- ious act. But this act was no odious abjuration, but a very innocent conjugation ; that is to say, my marriage, already performed according to the civil law, there received the ecclesiastical consecration, because my wife, whose family are stanch Catholics, would not have thought her marriage sacred enough without such a ceremony. And I would on no account cause this beloved being any uneasiness or disturbance in her religious views." For sixteen years from 1831 to 1847 Heine lived that rapid concentrated life which is known only in Paris; but then, alas! stole on the " days of darkness," and they were to be many. In 1847 he felt the approach of the terrible spinal disease which has for seven years chained him to his bed in acute suffering. The last time he went out of doors, he tells us, was in May, 1848 ; "With difficulty I dragged myself to the Louvre, and I almost sank down as I entered the magnificent hall where the ever-blessed goddess of beauty, our beloved Lady of Milo, stands on her pedestal. At her feet I lay long, and wept so bitterly that a stone must have pitied me. The goddess looked compassionately on me, but at the same time dis- consolately, as if she would say : Dost thou not see, then, that I have no arms, and thus cannot help thee? " Since 1848, then, this poet, whom the lovely objects of Na- ture have always "haunted like a passion," has not descended from the second story of a Parisian house; this man of hungry intellect has been shut out from all direct observation of life, all contact with society, except such as is derived from visit- ors to his sick-room. The terrible nervous disease has affected his eyes; the sight of one is utterly gone, and he can only raise the lid of the other by lifting it with his finger. Opium alone is the beneficent genius that stills his pain. We hardly know whether to call it an alleviation or an intensification of the torture that Heine retains his mental vigor, his poetic im- agination, and his incisive wit; for if his intellectual activ- ity fills up a blank, it widens the sphere of suffering. His brother described him in 1851 as still, in moments when the hand of pain was not too heavy on him, the same Heinrich Heine, poet and satirist by turns. In such moments, he would 80 GERMAN WIT narrate the strangest things in the gravest manner. But when he came to an end, he would roguishly lift up the lid of his right eye with his finger to see the impression he had pro- duced ; and if his audience had been listening with a serious face, he would break into Homeric laughter. We have other proof than personal testimony that Heine's disease allows his genius to retain much of its energy, in the " Romanzero, " a volume of poems published in 1851, and written chiefly during the first three years of his illness ; and in the first volume of the " Vermischte Schriften," also the product of recent years. Very plaintive is the poet's own description of his condition, in the epilogue to the " Romanzero " : " Do I really exist? My body is so shrunken that I am hardly any- thing but a voice ; and my bed reminds me of the singing grave of the magician Merlin, which lies in the forest of Brozeliand, in Brittany, under tall oaks whose tops soar like green flames toward heaven. Alas ! I envy thee those trees and the fresh breeze that moves their branches, brother Merlin, for no green leaf rustles about my mattress-grave in Paris, where early and late I hear nothing but the rolling of vehicles, hammering, quarrelling, and piano-strumming. A grave without repose, death without the privileges of the dead, who have no debts to pay, and need write neither letters nor books that is a piteous condition. Long ago the measure has been taken for my coffin and for my necrology ; but I die so slowly, that the process is tedious for me as well as my friends. But patience ; everything has an end. You will one day find the booth closed where the puppet-show of my humor has so often delighted you." As early as 1850, it was rumored that since Heine's illness a change had taken place in his religious views ; and as rumor seldom stops short of extremes, it was soon said that he had become a thorough pietist, Catholics and Protestants by turns claiming him as a convert. Such a change in so uncompro- mising an iconoclast, in a man who had been so zealous in his negations as Heine, naturally excited considerable sensation in the camp he was supposed to have quitted, as well as in that he was supposed to have joined. In the second volume of the " Salon " and in the " Romantische Schule, " written in 1834 and '35, the doctrine of Pantheism is dwelt on with a fervor and unmixed seriousness which show that Pantheism was then an animating faith to Heine, and he attacks what he considers the false spiritualism and asceticism of Christianity HEINRICH HEINE. 81 as the enemy of true beauty in Art, and of social well-being. Now, however, it was said that Heine had recanted all his heresies; but from the fact that visitors to his sick-room brought away very various impressions as to his actual relig- ious views, it seemed probable that his love of mystification had found a tempting opportunity for exercise on this subject, and that, as one of his friends said, he was not inclined to pour out unmixed wine to those who asked for a sample out of mere curiosity. At length, in the epilogue to the " Roman- zero," dated 1851, there appeared, amidst much mystifying "banter, a declaration that he had embraced Theism and the belief in a future life ; and what chiefly lent an air of serious- ness and reliability to this affirmation, was the fact that he took care to accompany it with certain negations : "As concerns myself, lean boast of no particular progress in politics ; I adhered (after 1848) to the same democratic principles which had the homage of my youth, and for which I have ever since glowed with in- creasing fervor. In theology, on the contrary, I must accuse myself of retrogression, since, as I have already confessed, I returned to the old superstition to a personal God. This fact is, once for all, not to be stifled, as many enlightened and well-meaning friends would fain have had it. But I must expressly contradict the report that my retrograde movement has carried me as far as to the threshold of a Church, and that I have even been received into her lap. No : my religious convic- tions and views have remained free from any tincture of ecclesiasticism ; no chiming of bells has allured me, no altar-candles have dazzled me. I have dallied with no dogmas, and have not utterly renounced my reason," This sounds like a serious statement. But what shall we say to a convert who plays with his newly acquired belief in a future life as Heine does in the very next page? He says to his reader : "Console thyself ; we shall meet again in a better world, where I also mean to write thee better books. I take for granted that my health will there be improved, and that Swedenborg has not deceived me. He relates, namely, with great confidence, that we shall peacefully carry on our old occupations in the other world, just as we have done in this ; that we shall there preserve our individuality unaltered, and that death will produce no particular change in our organic development. Sweden- borg is a thoroughly honorable fellow, and quite worthy of credit in what he tells us about the other world, where he saw with his own eyes 6 82 GERMAN WIT: the persons who had played a great part on our earth. Most of them, he says, remained unchanged, and busied themselves with the same things as formerly ; they remained stationary, were old-fashioned, rococo which now and then produced a ludicrous effect. For example, our dear Dr. Martin Luther kept fast by his doctrine of Grace, about which he had for three hundred years daily written down the same mouldy argu- ments just in the same way as the late Baron Ekstein, who during twenty years printed in the 'Allgemeine Zeitung' one and the same article, perpetually chewing over again the old cud of Jesuitical doctrine. But, as we have said, all persons who once figured here below were not found by Swedenborg in such a state of fossil immutability : many have considerably developed their character, both for good and evil, in the other world ; and this gave rise to some singular results. Some who had been heroes and saints on earth had there sunk into scamps and good-for-nothings , and there were examples, too, of a contrary trans- formation. For instance, the fumes of self-conceit mounted to St. An- thony's head when he learned what immense veneration and adoration had been paid to him by all Christendom ; and he who here below with- stood the most terrible temptations, was now quite an impertinent rascal and dissolute gallows-bird, who vied with his pig in rolling himself in the mud. The chaste Susanna, from having been excessively vain of her virtue, which she thought indomitable, came to a shameful fall, and she who once so gloriously resisted the two old men, was a victim to the seductions of the young Absalom, the son of David. On the con- trary, Lot's daughters had in the lapse of time become very virtuous, and passed in the other world for models of propriety . the old man, alas ! had stuck to the wine-flask." In his " Gestandnisse, " the retractation of former opinions and profession of Theism are renewed, but in a strain of irony that repels our sympathy and baffles our psychology. Yet what strange, deep pathos is mingled with the audacity of the following passage ! "What avails it me, that enthusiastic youths and maidens crown my marble bust with laurel, when the withered hands of an aged nurse are pressing Spanish flies behind my ears? What avails it me, that all the roses of Shiraz glow and waft incense for me? Alas ! Shiraz is two thousand miles from the Rue d' Amsterdam, where, in the wearisome loneliness of my sick-room, I get no scent except it be, perhaps, the perfume of warmed towels. Alas ! God's satire weighs heavily on me. The great Author of the universe, the Aristophanes of Heaven, was bent on demonstrating, with crushing force, to me, the little, earthly, Ger- man Aristophanes, how my wittiest sarcasms are only pitiful attempts at jesting in comparison with His, and how miserably I am beneath Him in humor, in colossal mockery." HEINRICH HEINE. 83, For our own part, we regard the paradoxical irreverence with which Heine professes his theoretical reverence as patho- ; logical, as the diseased exhibition of a predominant tendency urged into anomalous action by the pressure -of pain and men- tal privation as the delirium of wit starved of its proper nourishment. It is not for us to condemn, who have never had the same burden laid on us ; it is not for pygmies at their ease to criticise the writhings of the Titan chained to the rock. On one other point we must touch before quitting Heine's personal history. There is a standing accusation against him in some quarters of wanting political principle, of wishing to denationalize himself, and of indulging in insults against his native country. Whatever ground may exist for these accu- sations, that ground is not, so far as we see, to be found in his writings. He may not have much faith in German revolutions and revolutionists ; experience, in his case as in that of others, may have thrown his millennial anticipations into more distant perspective; but we see no evidence that he has ever swerved from his attachment to the principles of freedom, or written anything which to a philosophic mind is incompatible with true patriotism. He has expressly denied the report that he wished to become naturalized in France; and his yearning toward his native land and the accents of his native language is expressed with a pathos the more reliable from the fact that he is sparing in such effusions. We do not see why Heine's satire of the blunders and foibles of his fellow-countrymen should be denounced as the crime of lese-patrie, any more than the political caricatures of any other satirist. The real of- fences of Heine are his occasional coarseness and his unscru- pulous personalities, which are reprehensible, not because they are directed against his fellow-countrymen, but because they are personalities. That these offences have their precedents in men whose memory the world delights to honor, does not remove their turpitude, but it is a fact which should modify our condemnation in a particular case unless, indeed, we are to deliver our judgments on a principle of compensation, mak- ing up for our indulgence in one direction by our severity in another. On this ground of coarseness and personality, a true 84 GERMAN WIT: bill may be found against Heine not, we think, 011 the ground that he has laughed at what is laughable in his com- patriots. Here is a specimen of the satire under which we suppose German patriots wince : "Rhenish Bavaria was to be the starting-point of the German revolu- tion. Zweibriicken was the Bethlehem in which the infant Saviour Freedom lay in the cradle, and gave whimpering promise of redeeming the world. Near his cradle bellowed many an ox, who afterward, when his horns were reckoned on, showed himself a very harmless brute. It was confidently believed that the German revolution would begin in Zweibrticken, and everything was there ripe for an outbreak. But, as lias been hinted, the tender-heartedness of some persons frustrated that illegal undertaking. For example, among the Bipontine conspirators there was a tremendous braggart, who was always loudest in his rage, who boiled over with the hatred of tyranny, and this man was fixed onto strike the first blow, by cutting down a sentinel who kept an important post. . . . ' What ! ' cried the man, when this order was given him ' what ! me ! Can you expect so horrible, so bloodthirsty an act of me? I 7, kill an innocent sentinel? I, who am father of a family ! And this sentinel is perhaps also father of a family. One father of a family kill another father of a family? Yes! Kill murder!'" In political matters, Heine, like all men whose intellect and taste predominate too far over their impulses to allow of their becoming partisans, is offensive alike to the aristocrat and the democrat. By the one he is denounced as a man who holds incendiary principles, by the other as a half-hearted " trimmer. " He has no sympathy, as he says, with " that vagtie, barren pa- thos, that useless effervescence of enthusiasm, which plunges, with the spirit of a martyr, into an ocean of generalities, and which always reminds me of the American sailor, who had so fervent an enthusiasm for General Jackson that he at last sprang from the top of a mast into the sea, crying, ' / die for General Jackson ! ' " "But thou liest, Brutus, thou liest, Cassius, and thou, too, liest, Asinius, in maintaining that my ridicule attacks these ideas which are the precious acquisition of Humanity, and tor which I myself have so striven and suffered. No ! for the very reason that those ideas con- stantly hover before the poet in glorious splendor and majesty, he is the more irresistibly overcome by laughter whew he sees how rudely, awk- wardly, and clumsily those ideas are seized and mirrored in the con- tracted minds of contemporaries. . . . There are mirrors which have so rough a surface that even an Apollo reflected in them becomes a carica- HEOTRICH HEINE. 85 ture, and excites our laughter. But we laugh then only at the caricature, not at the god." For the rest, why should we demand of Heine that he should be a hero, a patriot, a solemn prophet, any more than we should demand of a gazelle that it should draw well in har- ness? Nature has not made him of her sterner stuff not of iron and adamant, but of pollen of flowers, the juice of the grape, and Puck's mischievous brain, plenteously mixing also the dews of kindly affection and the gold-dust of noble thoughts. It is, after all, a tribute which his enemies pay him when they utter their bitterest dictum namely, that he is " nur Dichter " only a poet. Let us accept this point of view for the present, and, leaving all consideration of him as a man, look at him simply as a poet and literary artist. Heine is essentially a lyric poet. The finest products of his genius are " Short swallow-flights of song that dip Their wings in tears, and skim away " ; and they are so emphatically songs, that, in reading them, we feel as if each must have a twin melody born in the same moment and by the same inspiration. Heine is too impressi- ble and mercurial for any sustained production : even in his short lyrics his tears sometimes pass into laughter, and his laughter into tears; and his longer poems, " Atta Troll" and " Deutschland, " are full of Ariosto-like transitions. His song has a wide compass of notes : he can take us to the shores of the Northern Sea and thrill us by the sombre sublimity of his pictures and dreamy fancies ; he can draw forth our tears by the voice he gives to our own sorrows, or to the sorrows of " Poor Peter " ; he can throw a cold shudder over us by a mys- terious legend, a ghost-story, or a still more ghastl} r rendering of hard reality ; he can charm us by a quiet idyl, shake us with laughter at his overflowing fun, or give us a piquant sen- sation of surprise by the ingenuity of his transitions from the lofty to the ludicrous. This last power is not, indeed, essen- tially poetical; but only a poet can use it with the same suc- cess as Heine, for only a poet can poise our emotion and ex- pectation at such a height as to give effect to the sudden fall. 86 GERMAN WIT: Heine's greatest power as a poet lies in his simple pathos, in the ever varied but always natural expression he has given to the tender emotions. We may perhaps indicate this phase of his genius by referring to Wordsworth' s beautiful little poem, " She dwelt among the untrodden ways " ; the conclusion " She dwelt alone, and few could know When Lucy ceased to be ; But she is in her grave, and oh ! The difference to me " is entirely in Heine's manner; and so is Tennyson's poem of a dozen lines, called " Circumstance." Both these poems have Heine's pregnant simplicity. But lest this comparison should mislead, we must say tha't there is no general resemblance between either Wordsworth, or Tennyson, and Heine. Their greatest qualities lie quite away from the light, delicate lucid- ity, the easy, rippling music, of Heine's style. The dis- tinctive charm of his lyrics may best be seen by comparing them with Goethe's. Both have the same masterly finished simplicity and rhythmic grace; but there is more thought mingled with Goethe's feeling his lyrical genius is a vessel that draws more water than Heine's, and though it seems to glide along with equal ease, we have a sense of greater weight and force accompanying the grace of its movement. But, for this very reason, Heine touches our hearts more strongly ; his songs are all music and feeling they are like birds that not only enchant us with their delicious notes, but nestle against us with their soft breasts, and make us feel the agitated beat- ing of their hearts. He indicates a whole sad history in a single quatrain: there is not an image in it, not a thought; but it is beautiful, simple, and perfect as a " big round tear " it is pure feeling breathed in pure music : "Anfangs wollt' ich fast verzagen Und ich glaubt' ich trug es nie, Und ich hab' es doch getragen, Aber fragt mich nur nicht, wie." 1 He excels equally in the more imaginative expression of 1 At first I was almost in despair, and I thought I could never bear it and yet I have borne it only do not ask me how f HEINRICH HEINE. 87 feeling : he represents it by a brief image, like a finely cut cameo; lie expands it into a mysterious dream, or dramatizes it in a little story, half ballad, half idyl; and in all these, forms his art is so perfect, that we never have a sense of arti- ficiality or of unsuccessful effort; but all seems to have de- veloped itself by the same beautiful necessity that brings forth vine-leaves and grapes and the natural curls of childhood. Of Heine's humorous poetry, " Deutschland " is the most charm- ing specimen charming especially, because its wit and humor grow out of a rich loam of thought. " Atta Troll " is more original, more various, more fantastic ; but it is too great a strain on the imagination to be a general favorite. We have said that feeling is the element in which Heine' s poetic genius habitually floats; but he can occasionally soar to a higher region, and impart deep significance to picturesque symbol- ism ; he can flash a sublime thought over the past and into the future ; he can pour forth a lofty strain of hope or indig- nation. Few could forget, after once hearing them, the stanzas at the close of "Deutschland," in which he warns the King of Prussia not to incur the irredeemable hell which the injured poet can create for him the singing flames of a Dante's terza rima! " Kennst du die Holle des Dante nicht, Die schrecklichen Terzetten? Wen da der Dichter hineingesperrt Den kann kein Gott mehr retten. "Kein Gott, kein Heiland, erlost ihn je Aus diesen singenden flammen ! Nimm dich in Acht, das wir dich nicht Zu solcher Hblle verdammen." 1 As a prosaist, Heine is, in one point of view, even more distinguished than as a poet. The German language easily 1 It is not fair to the English reader to indulge in German quotations, but in our opinion poetical translations are usually worse than valueless. For those who think differently, however, we may mention that Mr. Stores Smith has published a modest little book, containing "Selections from the Poetry of Heinrich Heine," and that a meritorious (American) translation of Heine's complete works, by Charles Leland, is now ap- pearing in shilling numbers. 88 GERMAN WIT: lends itself to all the purposes of poetry ; like the ladies of the Middle Ages, it is gracious and compliant to the Trouba- dours. But as these same ladies were often crusty and repul- sive to their unmusical mates, so the German language gener- ally appears awkward and unmanageable in the hands of prose writers. Indeed the number of really fine German prosaists before Heine would hardly have exceeded the numerating powers of a New Hollander, who can count three and no more. Persons the most familiar with German prose testify that there is an extra fatigue in reading it, just as we feel an extra fatigue from our walk when it takes us over a ploughed clay. But in Heine's hands German prose, usually so heavy, so clumsy, so dull, becomes, like clay in the hands of the chem- ist, compact, metallic, brilliant; it is German in an allotropic condition. No dreary, labyrinthine sentences in which you find " no end in wandering mazes lost " ; no chains of adjective in linked harshness long drawn out; no digressions thrown in as parentheses ; but crystalline definiteness and clearness, fine and varied rhythm, and all that delicate precision, all those felicities of word and cadence, which belong to the highest order of prose. And Heine has proved what Madame de Stael seems to have doubted that it is possible to be witty in German; indeed, in reading him, you might imagine that German was pre-eminently the language of wit, so flexible, so subtle, so piquant does it become under his management. He is far more an artist in prose than Goethe. He has not the breadth and repose, and the calm development which belong to Goethe's style, for they are foreign to his mental character; but he excels Goethe in susceptibility to the manifold quali- ties of prose, and in mastery over its effects. Heine is full of variety, of light and shadow : he alternates between epi- grammatic pith, imaginative grace, sly allusion, and daring piquancy ; and athwart all these there runs a vein of sadness, tenderness, and grandeur which reveals the poet. He con- tinually throws out those finely chiselled sayings which stamp themselves on the memory, and become familiar by quotation. For example : " The People have time enough, they are im- mortal: kings only are mortal." "Wherever a great soul utters its thoughts^ there is Golgotha. " " Nature wanted to HEINRICH HEINE. 89 See how she looked, and she created Goethe." "Only the man who has known bodily suffering is truly a man ; his limbs have their Passion-history, they are spiritualized." He calls Kubens " this Flemish Titan, the wings of whose genius were so strong that he soared as high as the sun, in spite of the hundred-weight of Dutch cheeses that hung on his legs." Speaking of Borne' s dislike to the calm creations of the true artist, he says, " He was like a child which, insensible to the glowing significance of a Greek statue, only touches the mar- ble and complains of cold." The most poetic and specifically humorous of Heine's prose writings are the " Reisebilder. " The comparison with Sterne is inevitable here ; but Heine does not suffer from it, for if he falls below Sterne in raciness of humor, he is far above him in poetic sensibility, and in reach and variety of thought. Heine's humor is never persistent, it never flows on long in easy gayety and drollery ; where it is not swelled by the tide of poetic feeling, it is continually dashing down the precipice of a witticism. It is not broad and unctuous ; it is aerial and sprite-like, a momentary resting-place between his poetry and his wit. In the " Eeisebilder " he runs through the whole gamut of his powers, and gives us every hue of thought, from the wildly droll and fantastic to the sombre and the terrible. Here is a passage almost Dantesque in its conception : "Alas! one ought in truth to write against no one in this world. Each of us is sick enough in this great lazaretto, and many a polemical writing reminds me involuntarily of a revolting quarrel, in a little hospital at Cracow, of which I chanced to be a witness, and where it was horrible to hear how the patients mockingly reproached each other with their infirmities : how one who was wasted by consumption jeered at another who was bloated by dropsy ; how one laughed at another's cancer in the nose, and this one again at his neighbor's locked-jaw or squint, until at last the delirious fever-patient sprang out of bed and tore away the coverings from the wounded bodies of his companions, and nothing was to be seen but hideous misery and mutilation." And how fine is the transition in the very next chapter where, after quoting the Homeric description of the feasting gods, he says : "Then suddenly approached, panting, a pale Jew, with drops of blood on his brow, with a crown of thorns on his head, and a great cross laid 90 GERMAN WIT-. Oil bis shoulders ; and lie threw the cross on the high table of the gods, so that the golden cups tottered, and the gods became dumb and pale, and grew even paler, till they at last melted away into vapor." The richest specimens of Heine's wit are perhaps to be found in the works which have appeared since the " Reise- bilder." The years, if they have intensified his satirical bit- terness, have also given his wit a finer edge and polish. His sarcasms are so subtly prepared and so slyly allusive, that they may often escape readers whose sense of wit is not very acute ; but for those who delight in the subtle and delicate flavors of style, there can hardly be any wit more irresistible than Heine's. We may measure its force by the degree in which it has subdued the German language to its purposes, and made that language brilliant in spite of a long hereditary transmission of dulness. As one of the most harmless exam- ples of his satire, take this on a man who has certainly had his share of adulation : "Assuredly it is far from my purpose to depreciate M. Victor Cousin. The titles of this celebrated philosopher even lay me under an obligation to praise him. He belongs to that living pantheon of France, which we call the peerage, and his intelligent legs rest on the velvet benches of the Luxembourg. I must indeed sternly repress all private feelings which might seduce me into an excessive enthusiasm. Otherwise I might be suspected of servility ; for M. Cousin is very influential in the State by means of his position and his tongue. This consideration might even move me to speak of his faults as frankly as of his virtues. Will he himself disprove of this? Assuredly not. I know that we cannot do higher honor to great minds than when we throw as strong a light on their demerits as on their merits. When we sing the praises of a Her- cules, we must also mention that he once laid aside the lion's skin and sat down to the distaff : what then? he remains notwithstanding a Her- cules ! So when we relate similar circumstances concerning M. Cousin, we must nevertheless add, with discriminating eulogy: M. Cousin, if he has sometimes sat twaddling at the distaff, has never laid aside the lion's skin. ... It is true that, having been suspected of demagogy, he spent some time in a German prison, just as Lafayette and Richard Coeur de Lion. But that M. Cousin there in his leisure hours studied Kant's ' Critique of Pure Reason ' is to be doubted on three grounds. First, this book is written in German. Secondly, in order to read this book, a man must understand German. Thirdly, M. Cousin does not under- stand German. ... I fear I am passing unawares from the sweet waters of praise into the bitter ocean of blame. Yes, on one account I cannot refrain from bitterly blaming M. Cousin namely, that he who loves HEINRICH HEINE. 01 truth far more than he loves Plato and Tenneman, is unjust to himself when he wants to persuade us that he has borrowed something from the philosophy of Schelling and Hegel. Against this self-accusation, I must take M. Cousin under my protection. On my word and conscience ! this honorable man has not stolen a jot from Schelling and Hegel, and if he brought home anything of theirs, it was merely their friendship. That does honor to his heart. But there are many instances of such false self-accusation in psychology. I knew a man who declared that he had stolen silver spoons at the king's table ; and yet we all knew that the poor devil had never been presented at Court, and accused himself of stealing these spoons to make us believe that he had been a guest at the palace. No ! In German philosophy M. Cousin has always kept the sixth commandment ; here he has never pocketed a single idea, not so much as a salt-spoon of an idea. All witnesses agree in attesting that in this respect M. Cousin is honor itself. ... I prophesy to you that the renown of M. Cousin, like the French Revolution, will go round the world ! I hear some one wickedly add Undeniably the renown of M. Cousin is going round the world, and it has already taken its departure from France." The following " symbolical myth " about Louis Philippe is very characteristic of Heine' s manner : "I remember very well that immediately on my arrival [in Paris] I hastened to the Palais Royal to see Louis Philippe. The friend who conducted me told me that the king now appeared on the terrace only at stated hours, but that formerly he was to be seen at any time for five francs. ' For five francs ! ' I cried, with amazement ; ' does he then show himself for money? ' 'No; but he is shown for money, and it happens in this way: there is a society of claqueurs, marchands de con- trernarques, and such riff-raff, who offered every foreigner to show him the king for five francs- if he would give ten francs, he might see the king raise his eyes to heaven, and lay his hand protestingly on his heart ; if he would give twenty francs, the king would slug the Marseillaise. If the foreigner gave five francs, they raised a loud cheering under the king's windows, and his Majesty appeared on the terrace, bowed, and retired. If ten francs, they shouted still louder, and gesticulated as if they had been possessed, when the king appeared, who then, as a sign of silent emotion, raised his eyes to heaven, and laid his hand on his heart. English visitors, however, would sometimes spend as much as twenty francs, and then the enthusiasm mounted to the highest pitch : no sooner did the king appear on the terrace, than the Marseillaise was struck up and roared out frightfully, until Louis Philippe, perhaps only for the sake of putting an end to the singing, bowed, laid his hand on his heart, and joined in the Marseillaise. Whether, as is asserted, he beat time with his foot, I cannot say. ' " EVANGELICAL TEACHING: DE. CUMMING. GIVEN, a man with moderate intellect, a moral standard not higher than the average, some rhetorical affluence and great glibness of speech, what is the career in which, without the aid of birth or money, he may most easily attain power and reputation in English society? Where is that Goshen of mediocrity in which a smattering of science and learning will pass for profound instruction, where platitudes will be accepted as wisdom, bigoted narrowness as holy zeal, unctuous egoism as God-given piety? Let such a man become an evangelical preacher; he will then find it possible to reconcile small abil- ity with great ambition, superficial knowledge with the pres- tige of erudition, a middling morale with a high reputation for sanctity. Let him shun practical extremes and be ultra only in what is purely theoretic : let him be stringent on predesti- nation, but latitudinarian on fasting ; unflinching in insisting on the eternity of punishment, but diffident of curtailing the substantial comforts of time ; ardent and imaginative on the premillennial advent of Christ, but cold and cautious toward every other infringement of the status quo. Let him fish for souls not with the bait of inconvenient singularity, but with the drag-net of comfortable conformity. Let him be hard and literal in his interpretation only when he wants to hurl texts at the heads of unbelievers and adversaries, but when the letter of the Scriptures presses too closely on the genteel Christianity of the nineteenth century, let him use his spirit- ualizing alembic and disperse it into impalpable ether. Let him preach less of Christ than of Antichrist ; let him be less definite in showing what sin is than in showing who is the Man of Sin, less expansive on the blessedness of faith than on the accursedness of infidelity. Above all, let him set up as an interpreter of prophecy, and rival Moore' s Almanack in the prediction of political events, tickling the interests of hearers EVANGELICAL TEACHING. DR. CUMMING. 93 who are but moderately spiritual by showing how the Holy Spirit has dictated problems and charades for their benefit, and how, if they are ingenious enough to solve these, they may have their Christian graces nourished by learning precisely to whom they may point as the " horn that had eyes," " the lying prophet," and the "unclean spirits." In this way he will draw men to him by the strong cords of their passions, made reason-proof by being baptized with the name of piety. In this way he may gain a metropolitan pulpit ; the avenues to his church will be as crowded as the passages to the opera; he has but to print his prophetic sermons and bind them in lilac and gold, and they will adorn the drawing-room table of all evangelical ladies, who will regard as a sort of pious " light reading " the demonstration that the prophecy of the locusts whose sting is in their tail, is fulfilled in the fact of the Turk- ish commander's having taken a horse's tail for his standard, and that the French are the very frogs predicted in the Keve- lation. Pleasant to the clerical flesh under such circumstances is the arrival of Sunday ! Somewhat at a disadvantage during the week, in the presence of working-day interests and lay splendors, on Sunday the preacher becomes the cynosure of a thousand eyes, and predominates at once over the Amphi- tryon with whom he dines, and the most captious member of his church or vestry. He has an immense advantage over all other public speakers. The platform orator is subject to the criticism of hisses and groans. Council for the plaintiff ex- pects the retort of council for the defendant. The honorable gentleman on one side of the House is liable to have his facts and figures shown up by his honorable friend on the opposite side. Even the scientific or literary lecturer, if he is dull or incompetent, may see the best part of -his audience slip quietly out one by one. But the preacher is completely master of the situation: no one may hiss, no one may depart. Like the writer of imaginary conversations, he may put what imbecili- ties he pleases into the mouths of his antagonists, and swell with triumph when he has refuted them. He may riot in gratuitous assertions, confident that no man will contradict he may exercise perfect free- will in logic, and invent 94 EVANGELICAL TEACHING: illustrative experience; he may give an evangelical edition of history with the inconvenient facts omitted ; all this he may do with impunity, certain that those of his hearers who are not sympathizing are not listening. For the Press has no band of critics who go the round of the churches and chapels, and are on the watch for a slip or defect in the preacher, to make a " feature " in their article : the clergy are, practically, the most irresponsible of all talkers. For this reason, at least, it is well that they do not always allow their discourses to be merely fugitive, but are often induced to fix them in that black and white in which they are open to the criticism of any man who has the courage and patience to treat them with thorough freedom of speech and pen. It is because we think this criticism of clerical teaching de- sirable for the public good, that we devote some pages to Dr. Gumming. He is, as every one knows, a preacher of immense popularity, and of the numerous publications in which he per- petuates his pulpit labors, all circulate widely, and some, ac- cording to their title-page, have reached the sixteenth thou- sand. Now our opinion of these publications is the very opposite of that given by a newspaper eulogist : we do not " believe that the repeated issues of Dr. Gumming' s thoughts are having a beneficial effect on society, " but the reverse ; and hence, little inclined as we are to dwell on his pages, we think it worth while to do so, for the sake of pointing out in them what we believe to be profoundly -mistaken and pernicious. Of Dr. Gumming personally we know absolutely nothing : our acquaintance with him is confined to a perusal of his works ; our judgment of him is founded solely on the manner in which he has written himself down on his pages. We know neither how he looks nor how he lives. We are ignorant whether, like St. Paul, he has a bodily presence that is weak and con- temptible, or whether his person is as florid and as prone to amplification as his style. For aught we know, he may not only have the gift of prophecy, but may bestow the profits of all his works to feed the poor, and be ready to give his own body to be burned with as much alacrity as he infers the ever- lasting burning of Roman Catholics and 'Puseyites. Out of the pulpit he may be a model of justice, truthfulness, and the DR. GUMMING. 95 love that thinketh no evil; but we are obliged to judge of his charity by the spirit we find in his sermons, and shall only be glad to learn that his practice is, in many respects, an amiable non sequitur from his teaching. Dr. Gumming' s mind is evidently not of the pietistic order. There is not the slightest leaning toward mysticism in his Christianity no indication of religious raptures, of delight in God, of spiritual communion with the Father. He is most at home in the forensic view of Justification, and dwells on sal- vation as a scheme rather than as an experience. He insists on good works as the sign of justifying faith, as labors to be achieved to the glory of God, but he rarely represents them as the spontaneous, necessary outflow of a soul filled with Divine love. He is at home in the external, the polemical, the his- torical, the circumstantial, and is only episodically devout and practical. The great majority of his published sermons are occupied with argument or philippic against Eomanists and unbelievers, with " vindications " of the Bible, with the politi- cal interpretation of prophecy, or the criticism of public events ; and the devout aspiration, or the spiritual and practical exhor- tation, is tacked to them as a sort of fringe in a hurried sen- tence or two at the end. He revels in the demonstration that the Pope is the Man of Sin; he is copious on the downfall of the Ottoman empire ; he appears to glow with satisfaction in turning a story which tends to show how he abashed an " in- fidel " ; it is a favorite exercise with him to form conjectures of the process by which the earth is to be burned up, and to picture Dr. Chalmers and Mr. Wilberforce being caught up to meet Christ in the air, while Romanists, Puseyites, and in- fidels are given over to gnashing of teeth. But of really spir- itual joys and sorrows, of the life and death of Christ as a. manifestation of love that constrains the soul, of sympathy with that yearning over the lost and erring which made Jesus weep over Jerusalem, and prompted the sublime prayer, " Fa- ther, forgive them," of the gentler fruits of the Spirit, and the peace of God which passeth understanding of all this^ we find little trace in Dr. Cumming's discourses. His style is in perfect correspondence with this habit of 96 EVANGELICAL TEACHING. mind. Though diffuse, as that of all preachers must be, it has rapidity of movement, perfect clearness, and some aptness of illustration. He has much of that literary talent which makes a good journalist the power of beating out an idea over a large space, and of introducing far-fetched apropos. His writings have, indeed, no high merit : they have no origi- nality or force of thought, no striking felicity of presenta- tion, no depth of emotion. Throughout nine volumes we have alighted on no passage which impressed us as worth extract- ing and placing among the " beauties " of evangelical writers, such as Robert Hall, Foster the Essayist, or Isaac Taylor. Everywhere there is commonplace cleverness, nowhere a spark of rare thought, of lofty sentiment, or pathetic tenderness. We feel ourselves in company with a voluble retail talker, whose language is exuberant but not exact, and to whom we should never think of referring for precise information, or for well-digested thought and experience. His argument contin- ually slides into wholesale assertion and vague declamation, and in his love of ornament he frequently becomes tawdry. For example, he tells us (Apoc. Sketches, p. 265) that " Botany weaves around the cross her amaranthine garlands; and Newton comes from his starry home Linnaeus from his flowery resting-place and Werner and Hutton from their sub- terranean graves at the voice of Chalmers, to acknowledge that all they learned and elicited in their respective provinces has only served to show more clearly that Jesus of Nazareth is enthroned on the riches of the universe." And so prosaic an injunction to his hearers as that they should choose a residence within an easy distance of church, is magnificently draped by him as an exhortation to prefer a house " that basks in the sunshine of the countenance of God." Like all preach- ers of his class, he is more fertile in imaginative paraphrase than in close exposition, and in this way he gives us some remarkable fragments of what we may call the romance of Scripture, rilling up the outline of the record with an elaborate coloring quite undreamed of by more literal minds. The ser- pent, he informs us, said to Eve, "Can it be so? Surely you are mistaken, that God hath said you shall die, a creature so fair, so lovely, so beautiful. It is impossible. The laws of DR. GUMMING. 97 'nature and physical science tell you that my interpretation is correct; you shall not die. I can tell you by my own expe- rience as an angel that you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." (Apoc. Sketches, p. 294.) Again, according to Dr. Gumming, Abel had so clear an idea of the Incarnation and Atonement, that when he offered his sacrifice '' he must have said, 'I feel myself a guilty sinner, and that in myself I can- not meet Thee alive; I lay on Thine altar this victim, and I shed its blood as my testimony that mine should be shed; and I look for forgiveness and undeserved mercy through Him who is to bruise the serpent's head, and whose atonement this typifies.' " (Occas. Disc., vol. i. p. 23.) Indeed his produc- tions are essentially ephemeral; he is essentially a journalist, who writes sermons instead of leading articles, who, instead of venting diatribes against her Majesty's Ministers, directs his power of invective against Cardinal Wiseman and the Puseyites, instead of declaiming on public spirit, perorates on the " glory of God. " We fancy he is called, in the more refined evangelical circles, an " intellectual preacher " ; by the plainer sort of Christians, a " flowery preacher " ; and we are inclined to think that the more spiritually minded class of believers, who look with greater anxiety for the kingdom of God within them than for the visible advent of Christ in 1864, will be likely to find Dr. Gumming' s declamatory flights and historico-prophetical exercitations as little better than " clouts o' cauld parritch." Such is our general impression from his writings after an attentive perusal. There are some particular characteristics which we shall consider more closely, but in doing so we must be understood as altogether declining any doctrinal discussion. We have no intention to consider the grounds of Dr. Gumming' s dogmatic system, to examine the principles of his prophetic exegesis, or to question his opinion concerning the little horn, the river Euphrates, or the seven vials. We identify our- selves with no one of the bodies whom he regards it as his special mission to attack : not giving adhesion either to Ro- manism, to Puseyism, or to that anomalous combination of opinions which he introduces to us under the name of infidel- ity. It is simply as spectators that we criticise Dr. Gumming' s 7 98 EVANGELICAL TEACHING: mode of warfare : as spectators concerned less with what he holds to be Christian truth than with his manner of enforcing that truth, less with the doctrines he teaches than with the moral spirit and tendencies of his teaching. One of the most striking characteristics of Dr. Gumming' s writings is unscrupulosity of statement. His motto apparently is, Christianitatem, quocunque modo, Christianitatem ; and the only system he includes under the term Christianity is Calvin- istic Protestantism. Experience has so long shown that the human brain is a congenial nidus for inconsistent beliefs, that we do not pause to inquire how Dr. Gumming, who attributes the conversion of the unbelieving to the Divine Spirit, can think it necessary to co-operate with that Spirit by argument- ative white lies. Nor do we for a moment impugn the gen- uineness of his zeal for Christianity, or the sincerity of his conviction that the doctrines he preaches are necessary to sal- vation; on the contrary, we regard the flagrant un veracity found on his pages as an indirect result of that conviction as a result, namely, of the intellectual and moral distortion of view which is inevitably produced by assigning to dogmas, based on a very complex structure of evidence, the place and authority of first truths. A distinct appreciation of the value of evidence in other words, the intellectual perception of truth is more closely allied to truthfulness of statement, or the moral quality of veracity, than is generally admitted. That highest moral habit, the constant preference of truth, both theoretically and practically, pre-eminently demands the co-operation of the intellect with the impulses as is indicated by the fact that it is only found in anything like completeness in the highest class of minds. And it is commonly seen that, in proportion as religious sects believe themselves to be guided by direct inspiration rather than by a spontaneous exertion of their faculties, their sense of truthfulness is misty and confused. No one can have talked to the more enthusiastic Methodists and listened to their stories of miracles without perceiving that they require no other passport to a statement than that it accords with their wishes and their general con- ception of God's dealings; nay, they regard as a symptom of sinful scepticism an inquiry into the evidence for a story DR. GUMMING. 9d which they think unquestionably tends to the glory of God, and in retailing such stories, new particulars, further tending to His glory, are " borne in " upon their minds. Now, Dr. Gumming, as we have said, is no enthusiastic pietist : within a certain circle within the mill of evangelical orthodoxy his intellect is perpetually at work; but that principle of sophistication which our friends the Methodists derive from the predominance of their pietistic feelings, is involved for him in the doctrine of verbal inspiration ; what is for them a state of emotion submerging the intellect, is with him a formula imprisoning the intellect, depriving it of its proper function the free search for truth and making it the mere servant-of -all- work to a foregone conclusion. Minds fettered by this doctrine no longer inquire concerning a proposition whether it is attested by sufficient evidence, but whether it accords with Scripture; they do not search for facts, as such, but for facts that will bear out their doctrine. They become accustomed to reject the more direct evidence in favor of the less direct, and where adverse evidence reaches demonstra- tion they must resort to devices and expedients in order to explain away contradiction. It is easy to see that this men- tal habit blunts not only the perception of truth, but the sense of truthfulness, and that the man whose faith drives him into fallacies, treads close upon the precipice of falsehood. We have entered into this digression for the sake of miti- gating the inference that is likely to be drawn from that char- acteristic of Dr. Cumming's works to whkJh we have pointed. He is much in the same intellectual condition as that professor of Padua, who, in order to disprove Galileo's discovery of Jupiter's satellites, urged that as there were only seven metals there could not be more than seven planets a mental condi- tion scarcely compatible with candor. And we may well sup- pose that if the professor had held the belief in seven planets, and no more, to be a necessary condition of salvation, his mental vision would have been so dazed that even if he had consented to look through Galileo's telescope, his eyes would have reported in accordance with his inward alarms rather than with the external fact. So long as a belief in proposi- tions is regarded as indispensable to salvation, the pursuit of 100 EVANGELICAL TEACHING: truth as such is not possible, any more than it is possible for a man who is swimming for his life to make meteorological observations on the storm which threatens to overwhelm him. The sense of alarm and haste, the anxiety for personal safety, which Dr. Gumming insists upon as the proper religious atti- tude, unmans the nature, and allows no thorough, calm think- ing, no truly noble, disinterested feeling. Hence, we by no means suspect that the unscrupulosity of statement with which we charge Dr. Gumming, extends beyond the sphere of his theological prejudices : religion apart, he probably appreciates and practises veracity. A grave general accusation must be supported by details, and in adducing these, we purposely select the most obvious cases of misrepresentation such as require no argument to expose them, but can be perceived at a glance. Among Dr. Gumming' s numerous books, one of the most notable for un- scrupulosity of statement is the " Manual of Christian Evi- dences," written, as he tells us in his Preface, not to give the deepest solutions of the difficulties in question, -but to furnish Scripture-readers, city missionaries, and Sunday-school teach- ers with a " ready reply " to sceptical arguments. This an- nouncement that readiness was the chief quality sought for in the solutions here given, modifies our inference from the other qualities which those solutions present; and it is but fair to presume, that when the Christian disputant is not in a hurry, Dr. Gumming would recommend replies less ready and more veracious. Here is an example of what in another place ' he tells his readers is " change in their pocket, . . . a little ready argument which they can employ, and therewith answer a fool according to his folly." From the nature of this argumentative small-coin, we are inclined to think Dr. Camming understands answering a fool according to his folly to mean, giving him a foolish answer. We quote from the "Manual of Christian Evidences," p. 62: "Some of the gods which the heathen worshipped were among the greatest monsters that ever walked the earth. Mercury was a thief ; and because he was an expert thief he was enrolled among the gods. Bacchus was a mere sensualist and drunkard ; and therefore he was enrolled 1 Lect. on Daniel, p. 6. DR. GUMMING. 101 among the gods. Venus was a dissipated and abandoned courtesan ; and therefore she was enrolled among the goddesses. Mars was a sav- age, that gloried in battle and in blood ; and therefore he was deified and enrolled among the gods." Does Dr. Gumming believe the purport of these sentences? If so, this passage is worth handing down as his theory of the Greek myth as a specimen of the astounding ignorance which was possible in a metropolitan preacher A.D. 1854. And if he does not believe them . . . The inference must then be, that he thinks delicate veracity about the ancient Greeks is not a Christian virtue, but only a " splendid sin " of the unre- generate. This inference is rendered the more probable by our finding, a little further on, that he is not more scrupulous about the moderns, if they come under his definition of " Infi- dels. " But the passage we are about to quote in proof of this has a worse quality than its discrepancy with fact. Who that has a spark of generous feeling, that rejoices in the pres- ence of good in a fellow-being, has not dwelt with pleasure on the thought that Lord Byron's unhappy career was ennobled and purified toward its close by a high and sympathetic pur- pose, by honest and energetic efforts for his fellow-men? Who has not read with deep emotion those last pathetic lines, beau- tiful as the after-glow of sunset, in which love and resignation are mingled with something of a melancholy heroism? Who has not lingered with compassion over the dying scene at Missolonghi the sufferer's inability to make his farewell messages of love intelligible, and the last long hours of silent pain? Yet for the sake of furnishing his disciples with a "ready reply," Dr. Gumming can prevail on himself to inocu- late them with a bad-spirited falsity like the following : "We have one striking exhibition of an infidel's brightest thoughts, in some lines written in his dying moments by a man, gifted with great genius, capable of prodigious intellectual prowess, but of worthless principle, and yet more worthless practices I mean the celebrated Lord Byron. He says, "'Though gay companions o'er the bowl Dispel awhile the sense of ill, Though pleasure fills the maddening soul, The heart the heart is lonely still. 102 EVANGELICAL TEACHING: "'Ay, but to die, and go, alas ! Where all have gone and all must go ; To be the Nothing that I was, Ere born to life and living woe ! "'Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen, Count o'er thy days from anguish free, And know, whatever thou hast been, 'Tis something better not to be. "'Nay, for myself, so dark my fate Through every turn of life hath been, Man and the world so much I hate, I care not when I quit the scene. ' " It is difficult to suppose that Dr. Gumming can have been so grossly imposed upon that he can be so ill informed as really to believe that these lines were "written" by Lord Byron in his dying moments; but, allowing him the full benefit of that possibility, how shall we explain his introduc- tion of this feebly rabid doggerel as " an infidel's brightest thoughts " ? In marshalling the evidences of Christianity, Dr. Gumming directs most of his arguments against opinions that are either totally imaginary, or that belong to the past rather than to the present; while he entirely fails to meet the difficulties actually felt and urged by those who are unable to accept Revelation. There can hardly be a stronger proof of miscon- ception as to the character of free-thinking in the present day than the recommendation of Leland's " Short and Easy Method with the Deists," a method which is unquestionably short and easy for preachers disinclined to consider their stereotyped modes of thinking and arguing, but which has quite ceased to realize those epithets in the conversion of Deists. Yet Dr. Gumming not only recommends this book, but takes the trou- ble himself to write a feebler version of its arguments. For example, on the question of the genuineness and authenticity of the New Testament writings, he says : "If therefore, at a period long subsequent to the death of Christ, a number of men had appeared in the world, drawn up a book which they christened by the name of Holy Scripture, and recorded these things which appear in it as facts when they were only the fancies of their own DR. GUMMING. 103 imagination, surely the Jews would have instantly reclaimed that no such events transpired, that no such person as Jesus Christ appeared in their capital, and that their crucifixion of Him, and their alleged evil treatment of His apostles, were mere fictions." 1 It is scarcely necessary to say that, in such argument as this, Dr. Gumming is beating the air. He is meeting a hypoth- esis which no one holds, and totally missing the real ques- tion. The only type of " infidel " whose existence Dr. Gum- ming recognizes is that fossil personage who " calls the Bible a lie and a forgery. " He seems to be ignorant or he chooses to ignore the fact that there is a large body of eminently in- structed and earnest men who regard the Hebrew and Chris- tian Scriptures as a series of historical documents, to be dealt with according to the rules of historical criticism ; and that an equally large number of men, who are not historical critics, find the dogmatic scheme built on the letter of the Scriptures opposed to their profoundest moral convictions. Dr. Cum- ming's infidel is a man who, because his life is vicious, tries to convince himself that there is no God, and that Christian- ity is an imposture, but who is all the while secretly conscious that he is opposing the truth, and cannot help " letting out " admissions "that the Bible is the Book of God." We are favored with the following " Creed of the Infidel " : "I believe that there is no God, but that matter is God, and God is matter ; and that it is no matter whether there is any God or not. I believe also that the world was not made, but that the world made itself or that it had no beginning, and that it will last forever. I believe that man is a beast ; that the soul is the body, and that the body is the soul ; and that after death there is neither body nor soul. I believe that there is no religion, that natural religion is the only religion, and all religion unnatural. I believe not in Moses ; I believe in the first philosophers. I believe not in the evangelists ; I believe in Chubb, Collins, Toland, Tindal, and Hobbes. I believe in Lord Bolingbroke, and I believe not in St. Paul. I believe not in revelation ; I believe in tradition; I believe in the Talmud: 1 believe in the Koran; I believe not in the Bible. I be- lieve in Socrates; I believe in Confucius ; I believe in Mahomet; I be- lieve not in Christ And lastly, I believe in all unbelief." The intellectual and moral monster whose creed is this com- plex web of contradictions is, moreover, according to Dr. Com- !Man. of Ev., p. 81. 104 EVANGELICAL TEACHING ming, a being who unites much simplicity and imbecility with his Satanic hardihood, much tenderness of conscience with his obdurate vice. Hear the " proof " : "I once met with an acute and enlightened infidel, with whom I reasoned day after day, and for hours together ; I submitted to him the internal, the external, and the experimental evidences, but made no im- pression on his scorn and unbelief. At length I entertained a suspicion that there was something morally, rather than intellectually wrong, and that the bias was not in the intellect, but in the heart ; one day there- fore I said to him ' I must now state my conviction, and you may call me uncharitable, but duty compels me: you are living in some known and gross sin.' The man's countenance became pale; he bowed and left me." Man. of Evidences, p. 254. Here we have the remarkable psychological phenomenon of an " acute and enlightened " man who, deliberately purposing to indulge in a favorite sin, and regarding the Gospel with scorn and unbelief, is nevertheless so much more scrupulous than the majority of Christians, that he cannot " embrace sin and the Gospel simultaneously " ; who is so alarmed at the Gospel in which he does not believe, that he cannot be easy without trying to crush it; whose acuteness and enlightenment suggest to him, as a means of crushing the Gospel, to argue from day to day with Dr. Gumming; and who is withal so naive that he is taken by surprise when Dr. Gumming, failing in argument, resorts to accusation, and so tender in conscience that, at the mention of his sin, he turns pale and leaves the spot. If there be any human mind in existence capable of holding Dr. Cumming's " Creed of the Infidel," of at the same time believing in tradition and "believing in all unbelief," it must be the mind of the infidel just described, for whose ex- istence we have Dr. Cumming's ex officiowoTd as a theologian; and to theologians we may apply what Sancho Panza says of the bachelors of Salamanca, that they never tell lies except when it suits their purpose. The total absence from Dr. Cumming's theological mind of any demarcation between fact and rhetoric is exhibited in an- other passage, where he adopts the dramatic form : "Ask the peasant on the hills and I have asked amid the mountains Of Braemar and Deeside ' How do you know that this book is divine, DR. CUMMINQ. 105 and that the religion you profess is true? You never read Paley? * 4 No, I never heard of him. ' ' You have never read Butler? ' ' No, I have never heard of him. ' ' Nor Chalmers? ' ' No, I do not know him. ' 4 You have never read any books on evidence? ' ' No, I have read no such books. ' ' Then, how do you know this book is true? ' ' Know it ! Tell me that the Dee, the Cluuie, and the Garrawalt, the streams at my feet, do not run ; that the winds do not sigh amid the gorges of these blue hills ; that the sun does not kindle the peaks of Loch-na-Gar, tell me my heart does not beat, and I will believe you ; but do not tell me the Bible is not divine. I have found its truth illuminating my footsteps ; its consolations sustaining my heart. May my tongue cleave to my mouth's roof, and my right hand forget its cunning, if I ever deny what is my deepest inner experience, that this blessed book is the Book of God. ' "Church before the Flood, p. 35. Dr. Gumming is so slippery and lax in his mode of presen- tation, that we find it impossible to gather whether he means to assert, that this is what a peasant on the mountains of Braemar did say, or that it is what such a peasant would say : in the one case, the passage may be taken as a measure of his truthfulness ; in the other, of his judgment. His own faith, apparently, has not been altogether intuitive, like that of his rhetorical peasant, for he tells us (Apoc. Sketches, p. 405) that he has himself experienced what it is to have religious doubts. " I was tainted while at the Uni- versity by this spirit of scepticism. I thought Christianity might not be true. The very possibility of its being true was the thought I felt I must meet and settle. Conscience could give me no peace till I had settled it. I read, and I have read from that day, for fourteen or fifteen years, till this, and now I am as convinced, upon the clearest evidence, that this book is the Book of God, as that I now address you." This experience, however, instead of impressing on him the fact that doubt may be the stamp of a truth-loving mind that sunt quibus non credidisse honor est, et fidei futurce pignus seems to have produced precisely the contrary effect. It has not enabled him even to conceive the condition of a mind "perplext in faith but pure in deed," craving light, yearning for a faith that will harmonize and cherish its highest powers and aspirations, but unable to find that faith in dogmatic Christianity. His own doubts apparently were of a different kind. Nowhere iu his pages have we found a humble, cap,- 106 EVANGELICAL TEACHING: did, sympathetic attempt to meet the difficulties that may be felt by an ingenuous mind. Everywhere he supposes .that the doubter is hardened, conceited, consciously shutting his eyes to the light a fool who is to be answered according to his folly that is, with ready replies made up of reckless asser- tions, of apocryphal anecdotes, and, where other resources fail, of vituperative imputations. As to the reading which he has prosecuted for fifteen years either it has left him totally ignorant of the relation which his own religious creed bears to the criticism and philosophy of the nineteenth century, or he systematically blinks that criticism arid that philosophy; and instead of honestly and seriously endeavoring to meet and solve what he knows to be the real difficulties, contents him- self with setting up popinjays to shoot at, for the sake of confirming the ignorance and winning the cheap admiration of his evangelical hearers and readers. Like the Catholic preacher who, after throwing down his cap and apostrophizing it as Luther, turned to his audience and said, " You see this heretical fellow has not a word to say for himself, " Dr. Gum- ming, having drawn his ugly portrait of the infidel, and put arguments of a convenient quality into his mouth, finds a " short and easy method " of confounding this " croaking frog. " In his treatment of infidels, we imagine he is guided by a mental process which may be expressed in the following syllo- gism : Whatever tends to the glory of God is true ; it is for the glory of God that infidels should be as bad as possible; therefore, whatever tends to show that infidels are as bad as possible is true. All infidels, he tells us, have been men of "gross and licentious lives." Is there not some well-known unbeliever David Hume, for example of whom even Dr. Gumming' a readers may have heard as an exception? No mat- ter. Some one suspected that he was not an exception ; and as that suspicion tends to the glory of God, it is one for a Christian to entertain. (See Man. of Ev., p. 73.) If we were unable to imagine this kind of self-sophistication, we should be obliged to suppose that, relying on the ignorance of his evangelical disciples, he fed them with direct and con- scious falsehoods. "Voltaire," he informs them, "declares there is no God " j he was " an antitheist that is, one who DR. GUMMING. 10T deliberately and avowedly opposed and hated God ; who swore in his blasphemy that he would dethrone Him " ; and " advo- cated the very depths of the lowest sensuality." With regard to many statements of a similar kind, equally at variance with truth, in Dr. Gumming' s volumes, we presume that he has been misled by hearsay or by the second-hand character of his acquaintance with free-thinking literature. An evangelical preacher is not obliged to be well read. Here, however, is a case which the extremest supposition of educated ignorance will not reach. Even books of " evidences " quote from Vol- taire the line "Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait 1'inventer" ; even persons fed on the mere whey and buttermilk of litera- ture must know that in philosophy Voltaire was nothing if not a theist must know that he wrote not against God, but against Jehovah, the God of the Jews, whom he believed to be a false God must know that to say Voltaire was an athe- ist on this ground is as absurd as to say that a Jacobite op- posed hereditary monarchy because he declared the Brunswick family had no title to the throne. That Dr. Gumming should repeat the vulgar fables about Voltaire's death is merely what we might expect from the specimens we have seen of his illus- trative stories. A man whose accounts of his own experience are apocryphal is not likely to put borrowed narratives to any severe test. The alliance between intellectual and moral perversion is strikingly typified by the way in which he alternates from the unveracious to the absurd, from misrepresentation to contra- diction. Side by side with the adduction of " facts " such as those we have quoted, we find him arguing on one page that the doctrine of the Trinity was too grand to have been con- ceived by man, and was therefore Divine j and on another page, that the Incarnation had been preconceived by man, and is therefore to be accepted as Divine. But we are less con- cerned with the fallacy of his " ready replies " than with their falsity ; and even of this we can only afford space for a very few specimens. Here is one : " There is a thousand times more proof that the Gospel of John was written by him than there 108 EVANGELICAL TEACHING: is that the ^Avd,3aiau. of Christ. Ev., p. 184. DR. GUMMING. 117 them ; just as the same food tells differently on different con- stitutions: and there are certain qualities in Dr. Gumming that cause the perversion of which we speak to exhibit itself with peculiar prominence in his teaching. A single extract will enable us to explain what we mean : "The ' thoughts ' are evil. If it were possible for human eye to dis- cern and to detect the thoughts that flutter round the heart of an unre- generate man to mark their hue and their multitude it would be found that they are indeed ' evil. ' We speak not of the thief, and the murderer, and the adulterer, and suchlike, whose crimes draw down the cognizance of earthly tribunals, and whose unenviable character it is to take the lead in the paths of sin ; but we refer to the men who are marked out by their practice of many of the seemliest moralities of life by the exercise of the kindliest affections, and the interchange of the sweetest reciprocities and of these men, if unrenewed and unchanged, we pro- nounce that their thoughts are evil. To ascertain this, we must refer to the object around which our thoughts ought continually to circulate. The Scriptures assert that this object is the glory of God; that for this we ought to think, to act, and to speak ; and that in thus thinking, act- ing, and speaking, there is involved the purest and most endearing bliss. Now it will be found true of the most amiable men, that with all their good society and kindliness of heart, and all their strict and unbending integrity, they never or rarely think of the glory of God. The question never occurs to them Will this redound to the glory of God? Will this make His name more known, His being more loved, His praise more sung? And just inasmuch as their every thought comes short of this lofty aim, in so much does it come short of good, and entitle itself to the character of evil. If the glory of God is not the absorbing and the influential aim of their thoughts, then they are evil; but God's glory never enters into their minds. They are amiable, because it chances to be one of the constitutional tendencies of their individual character, left uneffaced by the Fall ; and they are just and upright, because they have perhaps no occasion to be otherwise, orjind it subservient to their in- terests to maintain such a character." Occ. Disc., vol. i. p. 8. Again we read (Ibid., p. 236) : "There are traits in the Christian character which the mere worldly man cannot understand. He can understand the outward morality, but he cannot understand the inner spring of it ; he can understand Dorcas's liberality to the poor, ttut he cannot penetrate the ground of Dorcas's liberality. Some men give to the poor because they are ostentatious, or because they think the poor will ultimately avenge their neglect ; but the Christian gives to the poor, not only because he has sensibilities like other men, but because inasmuch as ye did it to the least of these my brethren, ye did it unto me." 118 EVANGELICAL TEACHING: Before entering on the more general question involved in these quotations, we must point to the clauses we have marked with italics, where Dr. Gumming appears to express senti- ments which, we are happy to think, are not shared by the majority of his brethren in the faith. Dr. Gumming, it seems, is unable to conceive that the aatural man can have any other motive for being just and upright than that it is useless to be otherwise, or that a character for honesty is profitable ; ac- cording to his experience, between the feelings of ostentation and selfish alarm and the feeling of love to Christ, there lie no sensibilities which can lead a man to relieve want. Grant- ing, as we should prefer to think, that it is Dr. Gumming' s exposition of his sentiments which is deficient rather than his sentiments themselves, still, the fact that the deficiency lies precisely here, and that he can overlook it not only in the haste of oral delivery but in the examination of proof-sheets, is strongly significant of his mental bias of the faint degree in which he sympathizes with the disinterested elements of human feeling, and of the fact, which we are about to dwell upon, that those feelings are totally absent from his religious theory. Now, Dr. Gumming invariably assumes that, in ful- minating against those who differ from him, he is standing on a moral elevation to which they are compelled reluctantly to look up; that his theory of motives and conduct is in its lofti- ness and purity a perpetual rebuke to their low and vicious desires and practice. It is time he should be told that the reverse is the fact; that there are men who do not merely cast a superficial glance at his doctrine, and fail to see its beauty or justice, but who, after a close consideration of that doctrine, pronounce it to be subversive of true moral develop- ment, and therefore positively noxious. Dr. Gumming is fond of showing up the teaching of Romanism, and accusing it of undermining true morality : it is time he should be told that there is a large body, both of thinkers and practical men, who hold precisely -the same opinion of his own teaching with this difference, that they do not regard it as the inspiration of Satan, but as the natural crop of a human mind where the soil is chiefly made up of egoistic passions and dogmatic beliefs. DR. CUMMING. 119 Dr. Gumming' s theory, as we have seen, is that actions are good or evil according as they are prompted or not prompted by an exclusive reference to the "glory of God." God, then, in Dr. Gumming' s conception, is a Being who has no pleasure in the exercise of love and truthfulness and justice, considered as affecting the well-being of His creatures ; He has satisfac- tion in us only in so far as we exhaust our motives and dispo- sitions of all relation to our fellow-beings, and replace sym- pathy with men by anxiety for the "glory of God." The deed of Grace Darling, when she took a boat in the storm to rescue drowning men and women, was not good if it was only compassion that nerved her arm and impelled her to brave death for the chance of saving others ; it was only good if she asked herself Will this redound to the glory of God? The man who endures tortures rather than betray a trust, the man who spends years in toil in order to discharge an obligation from which the law declares him free, must be animated not by the spirit of fidelity to his fellow-man, but by a desire to make "the name of God more known." The sweet charities of domestic life the ready hand and the soothing word in sickness, the forbearance toward frailties, the prompt helpful- ness in all efforts and sympathy in all joys are simply evil if they result from a " constitutional tendency " or from disposi- tions disciplined by the experience of suffering and the per- ception of moral loveliness. A wife is not to devote herself to her husband out of love to him and a sense of the duties implied by a close relation she is to be a faithful wife for the glory of God; if she feels her natural affections welling up too strongly, she is to repress them ; it will not do to act from natural affection she must think of the glory of God. A man is to guide his affairs with energy and discretion, not from an honest desire to fulfil his responsibilities as a mem- ber of society and a father, but that "God's praise may be sung." Dr. Gumming' s Christian pays his debts for the glory of God : were it not for the coercion of that supreme motive, it would be evil to pay them. A man is not to be just from a feeling of justice ; he is not to help his fellow-men out of good-will to his fellow-men ; he is not to be a tender husband and father out of affection: all these natural muscles and 120 EVANGELICAL TEACHING: fibres are to be torn away and replaced by a patent steel spring anxiety for the "glory of God." Happily, the constitution of human nature forbids the com- plete prevalence of such a theory. Fatally powerful as relig- ious systems have been, human nature is stronger and wider than religious systems, and though dogmas may hamper, they cannot absolutely repress its growth : build walls round the living tree as you will, the bricks and mortar have by and by to give way before the slow and sure operation of the sap. But next to that hatred of the enemies of God which is the principle of persecution, there perhaps has been no perversion more obstructive of true moral development than this substi- tution of a reference to the glory of God for the direct prompt- ings of the sympathetic feelings. Benevolence and justice are strong only in proportion as they are directly and inevitably called into activity by their proper objects : pity is strong only because we are strongly impressed by suffering; and only in proportion as it is compassion that speaks through the eyes when we soothe, and moves the arm when we succor, is a deed strictly benevolent. If the soothing or the succor be given because another being wishes or approves it, the deed ceases to be one of benevolence, and becomes one of deference, of obe- dience, of self-interest, or vanity. Accessory motives may aid in producing an action, but they presuppose the weakness of the direct motive ; and conversely, when the direct motive is strong, the action of accessory motives will be excluded. If then, as Dr. Gumming inculcates, the glory of God is to be " the absorbing and the influential aim " in our thoughts and actions, this must tend to neutralize the human sympathies ; the stream of feeling will be diverted from its natural current in order to feed an artificial canal. The idea of God is really moral in its influence it really cherishes all that is best and loveliest in man only when God is contemplated as sympa- thizing with the pure elements of human feeling, as possessing infinitely all those attributes which we recognize to be moral in humanity. In this light, the idea of God and the sense of His presence intensify all noble feeling, and encourage all noble effort, on the same principle that human sympathy is found a source of strength : the brave man feels braver when DR. GUMMING 121 ie knows that another stout heart is beating time with his ; the devoted woman who is wearing out her years in patient effort to alleviate suffering or save vice from the last stages of degradation, finds aid in the pressure of a friendly hand which tells her that there is one who understands her deeds, and in her place would do the like. The idea of a God who not only sympathizes with all we feel and endure for our fellow- men, but who will pour new life into our too languid love, and give firmness to our vacillating purpose, is an extension and multi- plication of the effects produced by human sympathy ; and it has been intensified for the better spirits who have been under the influence of orthodox Christianity, by the contemplation of Jesus as " God manifest in the flesh." But Dr. Gumming' s God is the very opposite of all this : He is a God who, instead of sharing and aiding our human sympathies, is directly in collision with them ; who, instead of strengthening the bond between man and man, by encouraging the sense that they are both alike the objects of His love and care, thrusts Himself between them and forbids them to feel for each other except as they have relation to Him. He is a God who, instead of adding His solar force to swell the tide of those impulses that tend to give humanity a common life in which the good of one is the good of all, commands us to check those impulses, lest they should prevent us from thinking of His glory. It is in vain for Dr. Gumming to say that we are to love man for God's sake : with the conception of God which his teaching presents, the love of man for God's sake involves, as his writings abun- dantly show, a strong principle of hatred. We can only love one being for the sake of another when thsre is an habitual delight in associating the idea of those two beings that is, when the object of our indirect love is a source of joy and honor to the object of our direct love. But, according to Dr. Gumming' s theory, the majority of mankind the majority of his neighbors are in precisely the opposite relation to God. His soul has no pleasure in them : they belong more to Satan than to Him ; and if they contribute to His glory, it is against their will. Dr. Gumming, then, can only love some men for God's sakej the rest he must in consistency hate for God's sake. 122 EVANGELICAL TEACHING DR. GUMMING. There must be many, even in the circle of Dr. Gumming* s admirers, who would be revolted by the doctrine we have just exposed, if their natural good sense and healthy feeling were not early stifled by dogmatic beliefs, and their reverence mis- led by pious phrases. But as it is, many a rational question, many a generous instinct, is repelled as the suggestion of a supernatural enemy, or as the ebullition of human pride and corruption. This state of inward contradiction can be put an end to only by the conviction that the free and diligent exer- tion of the intellect, instead of being a sin, is a part of their responsibility that Right and Keason are synonymous. The fundamental faith for man is faith in the result of a brave, honest, and steady use of all his faculties : "Let knowledge grow from more to more, But more of reverence in us dwell ; That mind and soul, according well, May make one music as before, But vaster." Before taking leave of Dr. Gumming, let us express a hope that we have in no case exaggerated the unfavorable character of the inferences to be drawn from his pages. His creed often obliges him to hope the worst of men, and to exert himself in proving that the worst is true ; but thus far we are happier than he. We have no theory which requires us to attribute unworthy motives to Dr. Gumming, no opinions, religious or irreligious, which can make it a gratification to us to detect him in delinquencies. On the contrary, the better we are able to think of him as a man, while we are obliged to disapprove him as a theologian, the stronger will be the evidence for our conviction, that the tendency toward good in human nature has a force which no creed can utterly counteract, and which insures the ultimate triumph of that tendency over all dog- matic perversions. THE INFLUENCE OF RATIONALISM; LECKY'S HISTORY. THERE is a valuable class of books on great subjects which have something of the character and functions of good popular lecturing. They are not original, not subtle, not of close logi- cal texture, not exquisite either in thought or style ; but by virtue of these negatives they are all the more fit to act on the average intelligence. They have enough of organizing purpose in them to make their facts illustrative, and to leave a distinct result in the mind, even when most of the facts are forgotten ; and they have enough of vagueness and vacillation in their theory to win them ready acceptance from a mixed audience. The vagueness and vacillation are not devices of timidity; they are the honest result of the writer's own mental charac- ter, which adapts him to be the instructor and the favorite of "the general reader." For the most part, the general reader of the present day does not exactly know what distance he goes; he only knows that he does not go "too far." Of any remarkable thinker whose writings have excited controversy, he likes to have it said that "his errors are to be deplored," leaving it not too certain what those errors are : he is fond of what may be called disembodied opinions, that float in vapory phrases above all systems of thought or action ; he likes an undefined Christianity which opposes itself to nothing in par- ticular, an undefined education of the people, an undefined amelioration of all things: in fact, he likes sound views, nothing extreme, but something between the excesses of the past and the excesses of the present. This modern type of the general reader may be known in conversation by the cor- diality with which he assents to indistinct, blurred statements : say that black is black, he will shake his head and hardly think it; say that black is not so very black, he will reply, "Exactly." He has no hesitation, if you wish it^ even to get 124 THE INFLUENCE OF RATIONALISM: up at a public meeting and express his conviction that at times, and within certain limits, the radii of a circle have a tendency to be equal ; but, on the other hand, he would urge that the spirit of geometry may be carried a little too far. His only bigotry is a bigotry against any clearly defined opinion; not in the least based on a scientific scepticism, but belonging to a lack of coherent thought, a spongy texture of mind, that gravitates strongly to nothing. The one thing he is stanch for is the utmost liberty of private haziness. But precisely these characteristics of the general reader, rendering him incapable of assimilating ideas unless they are administered in a highly diluted form, make it a matter of re- joicing that there are clever, fair-minded men, who will write books for him, men very much above him in knowledge and ability, but not too remote from him in their habits of think- ing, and who can thus prepare for him infusions of his- tory and science that will leave some solidifying deposit, and save him from a fatal softening of the intellectual skeleton. Among such serviceable writers, Mr. Lecky's " History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe " entitles him to a high place. He has prepared himself for its production by an unusual amount of well-directed reading ; he has chosen his facts and quotations with much judgment; and he gives proof of those important moral qualifications impar- tiality, seriousness, and modesty. This praise is chiefly appli- cable to the long chapter on the history of magic and witchcraft which opens the work, and to the two chapters on the antece- dents and history of persecution, which occur, the one at the end of the first volume, the other at the beginning of the sec- ond. In these chapters Mr. Lecky has a narrower and better- traced path before him than in other portions of his work ; he is more occupied with presenting a particular class of facts in their historical sequence, and in their relation to certain grand tide-marks of opinion, than with disquisition ; and his writ- ing is freer than elsewhere from an apparent confusedness of thought and an exuberance of approximative phrases, which can be serviceable in no other way than as diluents needful for the sort of reader we have just described. The history of magic and witchcraft has been judiciously LECKY'S HISTORY. 126 chosen by Mr. Lecky as the subject of his first section on the Declining Sense of the Miraculous, because it is strikingly illustrative of a position with the truth of which he is strongly impressed, though he may not always treat of it with desirable clearness and precision namely, that certain beliefs become obsolete, not in consequence of direct arguments against them, but because of their incongruity with prevalent habits of thought. Here is his statement of the two " classes of influ- ences, " by which the mass of men, in what is called civilized society, get their beliefs gradually modified : ' "If we ask why it is that the world has rejected what was once so universally and so intensely believed, why a narrative of an old woman who had been seen riding on a broomstick, or who was proved to have transformed herself into a wolf, and to have devoured the flocks of her neighbors, is deemed so entirely incredible, most persons would prob- ably be unable to give a very definite answer to the question. It is not because we have examined the evidence and found it insufficient, for the disbelief always precedes, when it does not prevent, examination. It is rather because the idea of absurdity is so strongly attached to such nar- ratives, that it is difficult even to consider them with gravity. Yet at one time no such improbability was felt, and hundreds of persons have been burnt simply on the two grounds I have mentioned. "When so complete a change takes place in public opinion, it may be ascribed to one or other of two causes. It may be the result of a con- troversy which has conclusively settled the question, establishing to the satisfaction of all parties a clear preponderance of argument or fact in favor of one opinion, and making that opinion a truism which is ac- cepted by all enlightened men, even though they have not themselves ex- amined the evidence on which it rests Thus, if any one in a company of ordinarily educated persons were to deny the motion of the earth, or the circulation of the blood, his statement would be received with de- rision, though it is probable that some of his audience would be unable to demonstrate the first truth, and that very few of them could give sufficient reasons for the second. They may not themselves be able to defend their position , but they are aware that, at certain known periods of history, controversies on those subjects took place, and that known writers then brought forward some definite arguments or experi- ments, which were ultimately accepted by the whole learned world as rigid and conclusive demonstrations. It is possible, also, for as com- plete a change to be affected by what is called the spirit of the age. The general intellectual tendencies pervading the literature of a century pro- foundly modify the character of the public mind. They form a new tone and habit of thought. They alter the measure of probability. They create new attractions and uew antipathies, and they eventually catiso as 126 THE INFLUENCE OF RATIONALISM: absolute a rejection of certain old opinions as could be produced by th most cogent and definite arguments." Mr. Lecky proceeds to some questionable views concerning the evidences of witchcraft, which seem to be irreconcilable even with his own remarks later on; but they lead him to the statement, thoroughly made out by his historical survey, that " the movement was mainly silent, unargumentative, and insensible; that men came gradually to disbelieve in witch- craft, because they came gradually to look upon it as absurd; and that this new tone of thought appeared, first of all, in those who were least subject to theological influences, and soon spread through the educated laity, and, last of all, took possession of the clergy." We have rather painful proof that this " second class of in- fluences " with a vast number go hardly deeper than fashion, and that withcraft to many of us is absurd only on the same ground that our grandfathers' gigs are absurdo It is felt pre posterous to think of spiritual agencies in connection with ragged beldames soaring on broomsticks, in an age when it is known that mediums of communication with the invisible world are usually unctuous personages dressed in excellent broadcloth, who soar above the curtain-poles without any broomstick, and who are not given to unprofitable intrigues. The enlightened imagination rejects the figure of a witch with her profile in dark relief against the moon and her broomstick cutting a constellation. No undiscovered natural laws, no names of " respectable " witnesses, are invoked to make us feel our presumption in questioning the diabolic intimacies of that obsolete old woman, for it is known now that the undiscovered laws, and the witnesses qualified by the payment of income- tax, are all in favor of a different conception the image of a heavy gentleman in boots and black coat-tails foreshortened against the cornice. Yet no less a person than Sir Thomas Browne once wrote that those who denied there were witches, inasmuch as they thereby denied spirits also, were " obliquely and upon consequence a sort, not of infidels, but of atheists." At present, doubtless, in certain circles, unbelievers in heavy gentlemen who float in the air by means of undiscovered laws are also taxed with atheism j illiberal as it is not to admit that LECKY'S HISTORY 127 mere weakness of understanding may prevent one from seeing how that phenomenon is necessarily involved in the Divine origin of things. With still more remarkable parallelism, Sir Thomas Browne goes on : " Those that, to refute their incre- dulity, desire to see apparitions, shall questionless never be- hold any, nor have the power to be so much as witches. The devil hath made them already in a heresy as capital as witch- craft, and to appear to them, were but to convert them." It would be difficult to see what has been changed here but the mere drapery of circumstance, if it were not for this promi- nent difference between our own days and the days of witch- craft, that iii stead of torturing, drowning, or burning the innocent, we give hospitality and large pay to the highly distinguished medium. At least we are safely rid of certain horrors ; but if the multitude that " farraginous concurrence of all conditions, tempers, sexes, and ages " do not roll back even to a superstition that carries cruelty in its train, it is not because they possess a cultivated Reason, but because they are pressed upon and held up by what we may call an external Reason the sum of conditions resulting from the laws of ma- terial growth, from changes produced by great historical colli- sions shattering the structures of ages and making new high- ways for events and ideas, and from the activities of higher minds no longer existing merely as opinions and teaching, but as institutions and organizations with which the interests, the affections, and the habits of the multitude are inextricably interwoven. No undiscovered laws accounting for small phe- nomena going forward under drawing-room tables are likely to affect the tremendous facts of the increase of population, the rejection of convicts by our colonies, the exhaustion of the soil by cotton plantations, which urge even upon the foolish certain questions, certain claims, certain views concerning the scheme of the world, that can never again be silenced. If right reason is a right representation of the coexistences and sequences of things, here are coexistences and sequences that do not wait to be discovered, but press themselves upon us like bars of iron. No seances at a guinea a head for the sake of being pinched by " Mary Jane " can annihilate railways, steamships, and electric telegraphs, which are demonstrating 128 THE INFLUENCE OF RATIONALISM. the interdependence of all human interests, and making self- interest a duct for sympathy. These things are part of the external Reason to which internal silliness has inevitably to accommodate itself. Three points in the history of magic and witchcraft are well brought out by Mr. Lecky. First, that the cruelties connected with it did not begin until men's minds had ceased to repose implicitly in a sacramental system which made them feel well armed against evil spirits that is, until the eleventh century, when there came a sort of morning d/earn of doubt and heresy, bringing on the one side the terror of timid consciences, and on the other the terrorism of authority or zeal bent on check- ing the rising struggle. In that time of comparative mental repose, says Mr. Lecky "All those conceptions of diabolical presence ; all that predisposition toward the miraculous, which acted so fearfully upon the imaginations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, existed ; but the implicit faith, the boundless and triumphant credulity with which the virtue of ec- clesiastical rites was accepted, rendered them comparatively innocuous. If men had been a little less superstitious, the effects of their supersti- tion would have been much more terrible. It was firmly believed that any one who deviated from the strict line of orthodoxy must soon suc- cumb beneath the power of Satan ; but as there was no spirit of rebellion or doubt, this persuasion did not produce any extraordinary terrorism." The Church was disposed to confound heretical opinion with sorcery ; false doctrine was especially the devil's work, and it was a ready conclusion that a denier or innovator had held consultation with the father of lies. It is a saying of a zeal- ous Catholic in the sixteenth century, quoted by Maury in his excellent work, 'De la Magie' " Crescit cum magia hceresis, cum hceresi magia." Even those who doubted were terrified at their doubts, for trust is more easily undermined than terror. Fear is earlier born 'than hope, lays a stronger grasp on man's system than any other passion, and remains master of a larger group of involuntary actions. A chief aspect of man's moral development is the slow subduing of fear by the gradual growth of intelligence, and its suppression as a motive by the presence of impulses less animally selfish ; so that in relation to invis- ible Power, fear at last ceases to exist, save in that interfusion with higher faculties which we call awe, LECKY'S HISTORY. 120 Secondly, Mr. Lecky shows clearly that dogmatic Protestant- ism, holding the vivid belief in Satanic agency to be an /essen- tial of piety, would have felt it shame to be a whit behind Catholicism in severity against the devil's servants. Luther's sentiment was that he would not suffer a witch to live (he was not much more merciful to Jews) ; and, in spite of his fond- ness for children, believing a certain child to have been begot- ten by the devil, he recommended the parents to throw it into the river. The torch must be turned on the worst errors of heroic minds not in irreverent ingratitude, but for the sake of measuring our vast and various debt to all the influences which have concurred, in the intervening ages, to make us recognize as detestable errors the honest convictions of men who, in mere individual capacity and moral force, were very much above us. Again, the Scotch Puritans, during the comparatively short period of their ascendency, surpassed all Christians before them in the elaborate ingenuity of the tor- tures they applied for the discovery of witchcraft and sorcery, and did their utmost to prove that if Scotch Calvinism was the true religion, the chief " note " of the true religion was cruelty. It is hardly an endurable task to read the story of their doings ; thoroughly to imagine them as a past reality is already a sort of torture. One detail is enough, and it is a comparatively mild one. It was the regular profession of men called " prickers " to thrust long pins into the body of a sus- pected witch in order to detect the insensible spot which was the infallible sign of her guilt. On a superficial view one would be in danger of saying that the main difference between the teachers who sanctioned these things and the much- despised ancestors who offered human victims inside a huge wicker idol, was that they arrived at a more elaborate barbar- ity by a longer series of dependent propositions. I do not share Mr. Buckle's opinion that a Scotch minister's groans were a part of his deliberate plan for keeping the people in a state of terrified subjection; the ministers themselves held the belief they taught, and might well groan over it. What a blessing has a little false logic been to the world! Seeing that men are so slow to question their premises, they must have made each other much more miserable, if pity had not some- 9 130 THE INFLUENCE OF RATIONALISM: times drawn tender conclusion not warranted by Major and Minor ; if there had not been people with an amiable imbecil- ity of reasoning which enabled them at once to cling to hide- ous beliefs, and to be conscientiously inconsistent with them in their conduct. There is nothing like acute deductive rea- soning for keeping a man in the dark : it might be called the technique of the intellect, and the concentration of the mind upon it corresponds to that predominance of technical skill in art which ends in degradation of the artist's function, unless new inspiration and invention come to guide it. And of this there is some good illustration furnished by that third node in the history of witchcraft, the beginning of its end, which is treated in ?.n interesting manner by Mr. Lecky. It is worth noticing, that the most important defences of the belief in witchcraft, against the growing scepticism in the lat- ter part of the sixteenth century and in the seventeenth, were the productions of men who in some departments were among the foremost thinkers of their time. One of them was Jean Bodin, the famous writer on government and jurisprudence, whose " Republic," Hallam thinks, had an important influence in England, and furnished " a store of arguments and examples that were not lost on the thoughtful minds of our country- men. " In some of his views he was original and bold ; for example, he anticipated Montesquieu in attempting to appre- ciate the relations of government and climate. Hallam in- clines to the opinion that he was a Jew, and attached Divine authority only to the Old Testament. But this was enough to furnish him with his chief data for the existence of witches and for their capital punishment; and in the account of his " Republic " given by Hallam, there is enough evidence that the sagacity which often enabled him to make fine use of his learning was also often entangled in it, to temper our surprise at finding a writer on political science of whom it could be said that, along with Montesquieu, he was " the most philo- sophical of those who had read so deeply, the most learned of those who had thought so much," in the van of the forlorn hope to maintain the reality of witchcraft. It should be said that he was equally confident of the unreality of the Coperni- can hypothesis, on the ground that it was contrary to the tenets LECKY'S HISTORY. 131 of the theologians and philosophers and to common sense, and therefore subversive of the foundations of every science. Of his work on witchcraft, Mr. Lecky says : "The ' De"monomanie des Sorciers ' is chiefly an appeal to authority, which the author deemed on this subject so unanimous and so conclu- sive, that it was scarcely possible for any sane man to resist it. He ap- pealed to the popular belief in all countries, in all ages, and in all re- ligions. He cited the opinions of an immense multitude of the greatest writers of pagan antiquity, and of the most illustrious of the Fathers. He showed how the laws of all nations recognized the existence of witchcraft; and he collected hundreds of cases which had been investi- gated before the tribunals of his own or of other countries. He relates with the most minute and circumstantial detail, and with the most unfaltering confidence, all the proceedings at the witches' Sabbath, the methods which the witches employed in transporting themselves through the air, their transformations, their carnal intercourse with the Devil, their various means of injuring their enemies, the signs that lead to their detection, their confessions when condemned, and their de- meanor at the stake." Something must be allowed for a lawyer's affection toward a belief which had furnished so many " cases." Bodin's work had been immediately prompted by the treatise " De Prestigiis Daemonum," written by John Wier, a German physician a treatise which is worth notice as an example of a transitional form of opinion for which many analogies may be found in the history both of religion and science. Wier believed in demons, and in possession by demons, but his practice as a physician had convinced him that the so-called witches were patients and victims, that the Devil took advantage of their diseased condition to delude them, and that there was no con- sent of an evil will on the part of the women. He argued that the word in Leviticus translated "witch" meant "poisoner," and besought the princes of Europe to hinder the further spill- ing of innocent blood. These heresies of Wier threw Bodin into such a state of amazed indignation, that if he had been an ancient Jew instead of a modern economical one, he would have rent his garment. " No one had ever heard of pardon being accorded to sorcerers"; and probably the reason why Charles IX. died young was because he had pardoned the sorcerer, Trois Echelles! We must remember that this was in 1581, when the great scientific movement of the Renaissance had 132 THE INFLUENCE OF RATIONALISM: "hardly begun when Galileo was a youth of seventeen, and Kepler a boy of ten. But directly afterward, on the other side, came Montaigne, whose sceptical acuteness could arrive at negatives without any apparatus of method. A certain keen narrowness of na- ture will secure a man from many absurd beliefs which the larger soul, vibrating to more manifold influences, would have a long struggle to part with. And so we find the charming, chatty Montaigne in one of the brightest of his essays, " Des Boiteux, " where he declares that, from his own observation of witches and sorcerers, he should- have recommended them to be treated with curative hellebore stating in his own way a pregnant doctrine, since taught more gravely. It seems to him much less of a prodigy that men should lie, or that their imaginations should deceive them, than that a human body should be carried through the air on a broomstick, or up a chimney, by some unknown spirit. He thinks it a sad busi- ness to persuade one's self that the test of truth lies in the multitude of believers " en une presse oil les fols surpassent de tant les sages en nombre. " Ordinarily, he has observed, when men have something stated to them as a fact, they are more ready to explain it than to inquire whether it is real: "Us passent par-dessus les propositions, rnais ils examinent les consequences ; ils laissent les choses, et courent aux causes. " There is a sort of strong and generous ignorance which is as honorable and courageous as science " ignorance pour laquelle concevoir il n'y a pas moins de science qu'a concevoir la science." And a propos of the immense traditional evidence which weighed with such men as Bodin, he says : " As for the proofs and arguments founded on experience and facts, I do not pretend to unravel these. What end of a thread is there to lay hold of? I often cut them as Alexander did his knot. Apres tout, c'est mettre ses conjectures a bien Tiaut prix, que d'enfaire cuire un homme tout vif." Writing like this, when it finds eager readers, is a sign that the weather is changing; yet much later, namely, after 1665, when the Eoyal Society had been founded, our own Glanvil, the author of the " Scepsis Scientifica, " a work that was a re- markable advance toward a true definition of the limits of LECKY'S HISTORY. 133 inquiry, and that won him his election as fellow of the Soci- ety, published an energetic vindication of the belief in witch- craft, of which Mr. Lecky gives the following sketch : " The ' Sadducismus Triumphatus, ' which is probably the ablest book ever published in defence of the superstition, opens with a striking picture of the rapid progress of the scepticism in England. Everywhere a disbelief in witchcraft was becoming fashionable in the upper classes ; but it was a disbelief that arose entirely from a strong sense of its an- tecedent improbability. All who were opposed to the orthodox faith united in discrediting witchcraft. They laughed at it, as palpably absurd, as involving the most grotesque and ludicrous conceptions, as so essentially incredible that it would be a waste of time to examine it. This spirit had arisen since the Restoration, although the laws were still in force, and although little or no direct reasoning had been brought to bear upon the subject. In order to combat it, Glanvil proceeded to examine the general question of the credibility of the miraculous. He saw that the reason why witchcraft was ridiculed was, because it was a phase of the miraculous and the work of the Devil ; that the scepticism was chiefly due to those who disbelieved in miracles and the Devil ; and that the instances of witchcraft or possession in the Bible were invari- ably placed on a level with those that were tried in the law courts of England. That the evidence of the belief was overwhelming, he firmly believed and this, indeed, was scarcely disputed; but, until the sense of (t priori improbability was removed, no possible accumulation of facts would cause men to believe it. To that task he accordingly addressed himself. Anticipating the idea and almost the words of modern con- troversialists, he urged that there was such a thing as a credulity of un- belief ; and that those who believe so strange a concurrence of delusions, as was necessary on the supposition of the unreality of witchcraft, were far more credulous than those who accepted the belief. He made his very scepticism his principal weapon ; and, analyzing with much acuteuess the d priori objections, he showed that they rested upon an unwarrant- able confidence in our knowledge of the laws of the spirit world ; that they implied the existence of some strict analogy between the faculties of men and of spirits ; and that, as such analogy most probably did not exist, no reasoning based on the supposition could dispense men from examining the evidence. He concluded with a large collection of cases, the evidence of which was, as he thought, incontestable." We have quoted this sketch because Glanvil's argument against the a priori objection of absurdity is fatiguingly urged in relation to other alleged marvels which, to busy people seriously occupied with the difficulties of affairs, of science, or of art, seem as little worthy of examination as aeronautic broomsticks. And also because we here see Glanvil, in com- 134 THE INFLUENCE OF RATIONALISM: bating an incredulity that does not happen to be his own, wielding that very argument of traditional evidence which he had made the subject of vigorous attack in his " Scepsis Scientifica." But perhaps large minds have been peculiarly liable to this fluctuation concerning the sphere of tradition, because, while they have attacked its misapplications, they have been the more solicited by the vague sense that tradition is really the basis of our best life. Our sentiments may be called organized traditions ; and a large part of our actions gather all their justification, all their attraction and aroma, from the memory of the life lived, of the actions done, before we were born. In the absence of any profound research into psychological functions or into the mysteries of inheritance, in the absence of any comprehensive view of man's historical development and the dependence of one age on another, a mind at all rich in sensibilities must always have had an in- definite uneasiness in an undistinguishing attack on the coer- cive influence of tradition. And this may be the apology for the apparent inconsistency of Glanvil's acute criticism on the one side, and his indignation at the "looser gentry," who laughed at the evidences for witchcraft, on the other. We have already taken up too much space with this subject of witchcraft, else we should be tempted to dwell on Sir Thomas Browne, who far surpassed Glanvil in magnificent incongruity of opinion, and whose works are the most remarkable combi- nation existing, of witty sarcasm against ancient nonsense and modern obsequiousness, with indications of a capacious credu- lity. After all, we may be sharing what seems to us the hard- ness of these men who sat in their studies and argued at their ease about a belief that would be reckoned to have caused more misery and bloodshed than any other superstition, if there had been no such thing as persecution on the ground of religious opinion. On this subject of persecution, Mr. Lecky writes his best: with clearness of conception, with calm justice, bent on ap- preciating the necessary tendency of ideas, and with an appro- priateness of illustration that could be supplied only by exten- sive and intelligent reading. Persecution, he shows, is not in any sense peculiar to the Catholic Church; it is a direct LECKY'S HISTORY. 135 sequence of the doctrines that salvation is to be had only within the Church, and that erroneous belief is damnatory doctrines held as fully by Protestant sects as by the Catholics ; and in proportion to its power, Protestantism has been as per- secuting as Catholicism. He maintains, in opposition to the favorite modern notion of persecution defeating its own object, that the Church, holding the dogma of exclusive salvation, was perfectly consequent, and really achieved its end of spreading one belief and quenching another by calling in the aid of the civil arm. Who will say that Governments, by their power over institutions and patronage, as well as over punishment, have not power also over the interests and inclinations of men, and over most of those external conditions into which subjects are born, and which make them adopt the prevalent belief as a second nature? Hence, to a sincere believer in the doctrine of exclusive salvation, Governments had it in their power to save men from perdition ; and wherever the clergy were at the elbow of the civil arm, no matter whether they were Catholic or Protestant, persecution was the result. " Compel them to come in " was a rule that seemed sanctioned by mercy, and the horrible sufferings it led men to inflict seemed small to minds accustomed to contemplate, as a per- petual source of motive, the eternal unmitigated miseries of a hell that was the inevitable destination of a majority amongst mankind. It is a significant fact, noted by Mr. Lecky, that the only two leaders of the Eeformation who advocated tolerance were Zuinglius and Socinus, both of them disbelievers in exclusive salvation. And in corroboration of other evidence that the chief triumphs of the Reformation were due to coercion, he commends to the special attention of his readers the following quotation from a work attributed without question to the famous Protestant theologian, Jurieu, who had himself been hindered, as a Protestant, from exercising his professional functions in France, and was settled as pastor at Rotterdam. It should be remembered that Jurieu' s labors fell in the lat- ter part of the seventeenth century and in the beginning of the eighteenth, and that he was the contemporary of Bayle, with whom he was in bitter controversial hostility. He wrote, 136 THE INFLUENCE OF RATIONALISM: then, at a time when there was warm debate on the question of Toleration; and it was his great object to vindicate him- self and his French fellow-Protestants from all laxity on this point : "Peut-on nierque le paganisme est tornbe" dans le rnondepar 1'autorite" des empereurs Remains? On peut assurer sans te'me'rite' que le pagan- isme seroit encore debout, et que les trois quarts de PEurope seroient encore payens si Constantin et ses successeurs n'avaient employe" leur autorite" pour 1'abolir. Mais, je vous prie, de quelles voies Dieu s'est-il servi dans ces derniers siecles pour re"tablir la veritable religion dans 1'Occident? Les rois de Suede, ceux de Danemarck, ceux d' Angleterre, les magistrals souverains de Suisse, des Pais Bos, des miles libres d'Al- lemagne, les princes dlecteurs, et autres princes souverains de rempire, n'ont-ils pas emploit leur autorite pour abbattre le Papisme ? " Indeed, wherever the tremendous alternative of everlasting torments is believed in believed in so that it becomes a motive determining the life not only persecution, but every other form of severity and gloom, are the legitimate conse- quences. There is much ready declamation in these days against the spirit of asceticism and against zeal for doctrinal conversion ; but surely the macerated form of a Saint Francis, the fierce denunciations of a Saint Dominic, the groans and prayerful wrestlings of the Puritan who seasoned his bread with tears and made all pleasurable sensation sin, are more in keeping with the contemplation of unending anguish as the destiny 6f a vast multitude whose nature we share, than the rubicund cheerfulness of some modern divines, who profess to unite a smiling liberalism with a well-bred and tacit but un- shaken confidence in the reality of the bottomless pit. But in fact, as Mr. Lecky maintains, that awful image, with its group of associated dogmas concerning the inherited curse, and the damnation of unbaptized infants, of heathens, and of heretics, has passed away from what he is fond of calling "the realizations" of Christendom. These things are no longer the objects of practical belief. They may be mourned for in encyclical letters; bishops may regret them; doctors of divinity may sign testimonials to the excellent character of these decayed beliefs ; but for the mass of Christians they are no more influential than unrepealed but forgotten statutes. And with these dogmas has melted away the strong basis for LECKY'S HISTORY. 137 the defence of persecution. No man now writes eager vindi- cations of himself and his colleagues from the suspicion of ad- hering to the principle of toleration. And this momentous change, it is Mr. Lecky's object to show, is due to that con- currence of conditions which he has chosen to call " the ad- vance of the Spirit of Rationalism." In other parts of his work, where he attempts to trace the action of the same conditions on the acceptance of miracles and on other chief phases of our historical development, Mr. Lecky has laid himself open to considerable criticism. The chapters on the Miracles of the Church, the aesthetic, scien- tific, and moral Development of Rationalism, the Seculariza- tion of Politics, and the Industrial history of Rationalism, embrace a wide range of diligently gathered facts ; but they are nowhere illuminated by a sufficiently clear conception and statement of the agencies at work, or the mode of their action in the gradual modification of opinion and of life. The writer frequently impresses us as being in a state of hesitation con- cerning his own standing-point, which may form a desirable stage in private meditation but not in published exposition. Certain epochs in theoretic conception, certain considerations, which should be fundamental to his survey, are introduced quite incidentally in a sentence or two, or in a note which seems to be an afterthought. Great writers and their ideas are touched upon too slightly and with too little discrimina- tion, and important theories are sometimes characterized with a rashness which conscientious revision will correct. There is a fatiguing use of vague or shifting phrases, such as " mod- ern civilization," "spirit of the age," "tone of thought," "in- tellectual type of the age," " bias of the imagination," " habits of religious thought," unbalanced by any precise definition; and the spirit of rationalism is sometimes treated of as if it lay outside the specific mental activities of which it is a gen- eralized expression. Mr. Curdle' s famous definition of the dramatic unities as " a sort of a general oneness," is not totally false ; but such lurninousness as it has could only be perceived by those who already knew what the unities were. Mr. Lecky has the advantage of being strongly impressed with the great part played by the emotions in the formation of opinion, and 138 THE INFLUENCE OF RATIONALISM. with the high complexity of the causes at work in social evo- lution; but he frequently writes as if he had never yet distin- guished between the complexity of the conditions that produce prevalent states of mind, and the inability of particular minds to give distinct reasons for the preferences or persuasions pro- duced by those states. In brief, he does not discriminate, or does not help his reader to discriminate, between objective complexity and subjective confusion. But the most muddle- headed gentleman who represents the spirit of the age by observing, as he settles his collar, that the development-theory is quite "the thing," is a result of definite processes, if we could only trace them. " Mental attitudes " and " predisposi- tions, " however vague in consciousness, have not vague causes, any more than the " blind motions of the spring " in plants and animals. The word "Rationalism" has the misfortune, shared by most words in this gray world, of being somewhat equivocal. This evil may be nearly overcome by careful preliminary definition ; but Mr. Lecky does not supply this, and the origi- nal specific application of the word to a particular phase of Biblical interpretation seems to have clung about his use of it with a misleading effect. Through some parts of his book he appears to regard the grand characteristic of modern thought and civilization, compared with ancient, as a radiation in the first instance from a change iu religious conceptions. The supremely important fact, that the gradual reduction of all phenomena within the sphere of established law, which carries as a consequence the rejection of the miraculous, has its de- termining current in the development of physical science, seems to have engaged comparatively little of his attention ; at least, he gives it no prominence. The great conception of universal regular sequence, without partiality and without caprice the conception which is the most potent force at work in the modification of our faith, and of the practical form given to our sentiments could only grow out of that patient watching of external fact, and that silencing of pre- conceived notions, which are urged upon the mind by the problems of physical science. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE: RIEHL. IT is an interesting branch of psychological observation to note the images that are habitually associated with abstract or collective terms what may be called the picture-writ- ing of the mind, which it carries on concurrently with the more subtle symbolism of language. Perhaps the fixity or variety of these associated images would furnish a tolerably fair test of the amount of concrete knowledge and experience which a given word represents, in the minds of two persons who use it with equal familiarity. The word railways, for example, will probably call up, in the mind of a man who is not highly locomotive, the image either of a " Bradshaw, " or of the station with which he is most familiar, or of an in- definite length of tram-road; he will alternate between these three images, which represent his stock of concrete acquaint- ance with railways. But suppose a man to have had succes- sively the experience of a " navvy, " an engineer, a traveller, a railway director and shareholder, and a landed proprietor in treaty with a railway company, and it is probable that the range of images which would by turns present themselves to his mind at the mention of the word " railways," would include all the essential facts in the existence and relations of the thing. Now it is possible for the first-mentioned personage to enter- tain very expanded views as to the multiplication of railways in the abstract, and their ultimate function in civilization. He may talk of a vast network of railways stretching over the globe, of future " lines " in Madagascar, and elegant refresh- ment-rooms in the Sandwich Islands, with none the less glib- ness because his distinct conceptions on the subject do not extend beyond his one station and his indefinite length of tram-road. But it is evident that if we want a railway to be 140 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE. made, or its affairs to be managed, this man of wide views and narrow observation will not serve our purpose. Probably, if we could ascertain the images called up by the terms " the people, " " the masses, " " the proletariat, " " the peasantry," by many who theorize on those bodies with elo- quence, or who legislate for them without eloquence, we should find that they indicate almost as small an amount of concrete knowledge that they are as far from completely representing the complex facts summed up in the collective term, as the railway images of our non-locomotive gentleman. How little the real characteristics of the working classes are known to those who are outside them, how little their natural history has been studied, is sufficiently disclosed by our Art as well as by our political and social theories. Where, in our picture exhibitions, shall we find a group of true peasantry? What English artist even attempts to rival in truthfulness such studies of popular life as the pictures of Teniers or the ragged boys of Murillo? Even one of the greatest painters of the pre-eminently realistic school, while, in his picture of "The Hireling Shepherd," he gave us a landscape of marvel- lous truthfulness, placed a pair of peasants in the foreground who were not much more real than the idyllic swains and damsels of our chimney ornaments. Only a total absence of acquaintance and sympathy with our peasantry could give a moment's popularity to such a picture as "Cross Purposes," where we have a peasant girl who looks as if she knew L. E. L.'s poems by heart, and English rustics, whose costume seems to indicate that they are meant for ploughmen, with exotic features that remind us of a handsome primo tenore, Eather than such Cockney sentimentality as this, as an edu- cation for the taste and sympathies, we prefer the most crap- ulous group of boors that Teniers ever painted. But even those among our painters who aim at giving the rustic type of features, who are far above the effeminate feebleness of the " Keepsake " style, treat their subjects under the influence of traditions and prepossessions rather than of direct observa- tion. The notion that peasants are joyous, that the typical moment to represent a man in a smock-frock is when he is cracking a joke and showing a row of sound teeth, that cot* RIEHL. 141 tage matrons are usually buxom, and village children neces- sarily rosy and merry, are prejudices difficult to dislodge from the artistic mind, which looks for its subjects into literature instead of life. The painter is still under the influence of idyllic literature, which has always expressed the imagination of the cultivated and town-bred, rather than the truth of rus- tic life. Idyllic ploughmen are jocund when they drive their team afield ; idyllic shepherds make bashful love under haw- thorn-bushes ; idyllic villagers dance in the checkered shade and refresh themselves, not immoderately, with spicy nut- brown ale. But no one who has seen much of actual plough- men thinks them jocund; no one who is well acquainted with the English peasantry can pronounce them merry. The slow gaze, in which no sense of beauty beams, no humor twinkles, the slow utterance, and the heavy slouching walk, remind one rather of that melancholy animal the camel, than of the sturdy countryman, with striped stockings, red waistcoat, and hat aside, who represents the traditional English peasant. Observe a company of haymakers. When you see them at a distance, tossing up the forkfuls of hay in the golden light, while the wagon creeps slowly with its increasing burden over the meadow, and the bright green space which tells of work done gets larger and larger, you pronounce the scene " smil- ing," and you think these companions in labor must be as bright and cheerful as the picture to which they give anima- tion. Approach nearer, and you will certainly find that hay- making-time is a time for joking, especially if there are women among the laborers ; but the coarse laugh that bursts out every now and then, and expresses the triumphant taunt, is as far as possible from your conception of idyllic merriment. That delicious effervescence of the mind which we call fun has no equivalent for the northern peasant, except tipsy revelry ; the only realm of fancy and imagination for the English clown exists at the bottom of the third quart-pot. The conventional countryman of the stage, who picks up pocket-books and never looks into them, and who is too sim- ple even to know that honesty has its opposite, represents the still lingering mistake, that an unintelligible dialect is a guar- anty for ingenuousness, and that slouching shoulders indicate 142 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE: an upright disposition. It is quite true that a thresher is likely to be innocent of any adroit arithmetical cheating, but he is not the less likely to carry home his master's corn in his shoes and pocket; a reaper is not given to writing begging- letters, but he is quite capable of cajoling the dairymaid into filling his small-beer bottle with ale. The selfish instincts are not subdued by the sight of buttercups, nor is integrity in the least established by that classic rural occupation, sheep- washing. To make men moral, something more is requisite than to turn them out to grass. Opera peasants, whose unreality excites Mr. Ruskin's in- dignation, are surely too frank an idealization to be mislead- ing; and since popular chorus is one of the most effective elements of the opera, we can hardly object to lyrio rustics in elegant laced bodices and picturesque motley, unless we are prepared to advocate a chorus of colliers in their pit costume, or a ballet of charwomen and stocking- weavers. But our so- cial novels profess to represent the people as they are, and the unreality of their representations is a grave evil. The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novel- ist, is the extension of our sympathies. Appeals founded on generalizations and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity ; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from them- selves, which may be called the raw material of moral senti- ment. When Scott takes us into Luckie Mucklebackit's cottage, or tells the story of "The Two Drovers," when Wordsworth sings to us the reverie of "Poor Susan," when Kingsley shows us Alton Locke gazing yearningly over the gate which leads from the highway into the first wood he ever saw, when Hornung paints a group of chimney-sweepers, more is done toward linking the higher classes with the lower, toward obliterating the vulgarity of exclusiveness, than by hundreds of sermons and philosophical dissertations. Art is the nearest thing to life ; it is a mode of amplifying experi- ence and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot. All the more sacred is the task of the artist when he undertakes to paint the life of the KEEHL. 143 People. Falsification here is far more pernicious than in the more artificial aspects of life. It is not so very serious that we should have false ideas about evanescent fashions about the manners and conversation of beaux and duchesses ; but it is serious that our sympathy with the perennial joys and struggles, the toil, the tragedy, and the humor in the life of our more heavily laden fellow-men, should be perverted, and turned toward a false object instead of the true one. This perversion is not the less fatal because the misrepre- sentation which gives rise to it has what the artist considers a moral end. The thing for mankind to know is, not what are the motives and influences which the moralist thinks ought to act on the laborer or the artisan, but what are the motives and influences which do act on him. We want to be taught to feel, not for the heroic artisan or the sentimental peasant, but for the peasant in all his coarse apathy, and the artisan in all his suspicious selfishness. We have one great novelist who is gifted with the utmost power of rendering the external traits of our town population ; and if he could give us their psychological character their conceptions of life, and their emotions with the same truth as their idiom and manners, his books would be the greatest contribution Art has ever made to the awakening of social sympathies. But while he can copy Mrs. Flemish's colloquial style with the delicate accuracy of a sun-picture, while there is the same startling inspiration in his description of the ges- tures and phrases of "Boots," as in the speeches of Shake- speare's mobs or numskulls, he scarcely ever passes from the humorous and external to the emotional and tragic, without becoming as transcendent in his unreality as he was a moment before in his artistic truthfulness. But for the precious salt of his humor, which compels him to reproduce external traits that serve, in some degree, as a corrective to his frequently false psychology, his preternaturally virtuous poor children and artisans, his melodramatic boatmen and courtesans, would be as noxious as Eugene Sue's idealized proletaires in encour- aging the miserable fallacy that high morality and refined sentiment can grow out of harsh social relations, ignorance, and want ; or that the working classes are in a condition to 144 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE: enter at once into a millennial state of altruism, wherein every one is caring for every one else, and no one for himself. If we need a true conception of the popular character to guide our sympathies rightly, we need it equally to check our theories, and direct us in their application. The tendency created by the splendid conquests of modern generalization, to believe that all social questions are merged in economical science, and that the relations of men to their neighbors may be settled by algebraic equations, the dream that the uncul- tured classes are prepared for a condition which appeals prin- cipally to their moral sensibilities, the aristocratic dilettante- ism which attempts to restore the "good old times" by a sort of idyllic masquerading, and to grow feudal fidelity and vener- ation as we grow prize turnips, by an artificial system of cul- ture, none of these diverging mistakes can coexist with a real knowledge of the People, with a thorough study of their hab- its, their ideas, their motives. The land-holder, the clergy- man, the mill-owner, the mining-agent, have each an oppor- tunity for making precious observations on different sections of the working classes; but unfortunately their experience is too often not registered at all, or its results are too scattered to be available as a source of information and stimulus to the public mind generally. If any man of sufficient moral and intellectual breadth, whose observations would not be vitiated by a foregone conclusion, or by a professional point of view, would devote himself to studying the natural history of our social classes, especially of the small shopkeepers, artisans, and peasantry, the degree in which they are influenced by local conditions, their maxims and habits, the points of view from which they regard their religious teachers, and the de- gree in which they are influenced by religious doctrines, the interaction of the various classes on each other, and what are the tendencies in their position toward disintegration or toward development, and if, after all this study, he would give us the result of his observations in a book well nourished with specific facts, his work would be a valuable aid to the social and political reformer. What we are desiring for ourselves has been in some degree done for the Germans by Biehl, the author of the very re- RIEHL. 145 raarkable books the titles of which are placed at the bottom of this page ; ' and we wish to make these books known to our readers, not only for the sake of the interesting matter they contain and the important reflections they suggest, but also as a model for some future or actual student of our own people. By way of introducing Riehl to those who are unacquainted with his writings, we will give a rapid sketch from his pic- ture of the German Peasantry, and perhaps this indication of the mode in which he treats a particular branch of his subject may prepare them to follow us with more interest when we enter on the general purpose and contents of his works. In England, at present, when we speak of the peasantry, we mean scarcely more than the class of farm-servants and farm-laborers ; and it is only in the most primitive districts as in Wales, for example that farmers are included under the term. In order to appreciate what Riehl says of the Ger- man peasantry, we must remember what the tenant-farmers and small proprietors were in England half a century ago, when the master helped to milk his own cows, and the daugh- ters got up at one o'clock in the morning to brew, when the family dined in the kitchen with the servants, and sat with them round the kitchen fire in the evening. In those days the quarried parlor was innocent of a carpet, and its only specimens of art were a framed sampler and the best tea- board; the daughters even of substantial farmers had often no greater accomplishment in writing and spelling than they could procure at a dame-school ; and, instead of carrying on sentimental correspondence, they were spinning their future table-linen, and looking after every saving in butter and eggs that might enable them to add to the little stock of plate and china which they were laying in against their marriage. In our own day, setting aside the superior order of farmers, whose style of living and mental culture are often equal to that of the professional class in provincial towns, we can hardly enter the least imposing farmhouse without finding a bad piano in the " drawing-room," and some old annuals, dis- posed with a symmetrical imitation of negligence, on the table; l Die Burgerliche Gesellschaft. Von W. H. Riebl. Dritte Auflage, 1856. Land und Leide. Von W. H. Riehl. Dritte Auflage, 185(5. 10 146 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE: though the daughters may still drop their A's, their vowels are studiously narrow; and it is only in very primitive regions that they will consent to sit in a covered vehicle without springs, which was once thought an advance in luxury on the pillion. The condition of the tenant-farmers and small proprietors in Germany is, we imagine, about on a par, not, certainly, in material prosperity, but in mental culture and habits, with that of the English farmers who were beginning to be thought old-fashioned nearly fifty years ago ; and if we add to these the farm-servants and laborers, we shall have a class approxi- mating in its characteristics to the Bauernthum, or peasantry," described by Biehl. In Germany, perhaps more than in any other country, it is among the peasantry that we must look for the historical type of the national physique. In the towns this type has become so modified to express the personality of the individual, that even " family likeness " is often but faintly marked. But the peasants may still be distinguished into groups by their physi- cal peculiarities. In one part of the country we find a longer- legged, in another a broader-shouldered race, which has inher- ited these peculiarities for centuries. For example, in certain districts of Hesse are seen long faces, with high foreheads, long straight noses, and small eyes with arched eyebrows and large eyelids. On comparing these physiognomies with the sculptures in the church of St. Elizabeth, at Marburg, exe- cuted in the thirteenth century, it will be found that the same old Hessian type has subsisted unchanged, with this distinc- tion only, that the sculptures represent princes and nobles, whose features then bore the stamp of their race, while that stamp is now to be found only among the peasants. A painter who wants to draw mediseval characters with historic truth, must seek his models among the peasantry. This explains why the old German painters gave the heads of their subjects a greater uniformity of type than the painters of our day; the race had not attained to a high degree of individualiza- tion in features and expression. It indicates, too, that the cultured man acts more as an individual ; the peasant, more as one of a group. Hans drives the plough, lives, and thinks RIEHL. 147 just as Kuiiz does ; and it is this fact, that many thousands of men are as like each other in thoughts and habits as so many sheep or oysters, which constitutes the weight of the peasantry in the social and political scale. In the cultivated world each individual has his style of speaking and writing. But among the peasantry it is the race, the district, the province, that has its style namely, its dialect, its phraseology, its proverbs, and its songs, which be- long alike to the entire body of the people. This provincial style of the peasant is again, like his physique, a remnant of history to which he clings with the utmost tenacity. In cer- tain parts of Hungary, there are still descendants of German colonists of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, who go about the country as reapers, retaining their old Saxon songs and manners, while the more cultivated German emigrants in a very short time forget their own language, and speak Hun- garian. Another remarkable case of the same kind is that of the Wends, a Sclavonic race settled in Lusatia, whose num- bers amount to 200,000, living either scattered among the German population or in separate parishes. They have their own schools and churches, and are taught in the Sclavonic tongue. The Catholics among them are rigid adherents of the Pope ; the Protestants not less rigid adherents of Luther, or Doctor Luther, as they are particular in calling him a custom which, a hundred years ago, was universal in Protes- tant Germany. The Wend clings tenaciously to the usages of his Church, and perhaps this may contribute not a little to the purity in which he maintains the specific characteris- tics of his race. German education, German law and govern- ment, service in the standing army, and many other agencies, are in antagonism to his national exclusiveness ; but the wives and mothers here, as elsewhere, are a conservative influence, and the habits temporarily laid aside in the outer world are recovered by the fireside. The Wends form several stout regiments in the Saxou army ; they are sought far and wide, as diligent and honest servants ; and many a weakly Dresden or Leipzig child becomes thriving under the care of a Wendish nurse. In their villages they have the air and habits of gen- uine, sturdy peasants, and all their customs indicate that they 148 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE: have been, from the first, an agricultural people. For exam- ple, they have traditional modes of treating their domestic animals. Each co\7 has its own name, generally chosen care- fully, so as to express the special qualities of the animal ; and all important family events are narrated to the bees a custom which is found also in Westphalia. Whether by the help of the bees or not, the Wend farming is especially prosperous; and when a poor Bohemian peasant has a son born to him, he binds him to the end of a long pole and turns his face tow- ard Lusatia, that he may be as lucky as the Wends who live there. The peculiarity of the peasant's language consists chiefly in his retention of historical peculiarities, which gradually disappear under the friction of cultivated circles. He prefers any proper name that may be given to a day in the calendar, rather than the abstract date, by which he very rarely reckons. In the baptismal names of his children he is guided by the old custom of the country, not at all by whim and fancy. Many old baptismal names, formerly common in Germany, would have become extinct but for their preservation among the peasantry, especially in North Germany ; and so firmly have they adhered to local tradition in this matter, that it would be possible to give a sort of topographical statistics of proper names, and distinguish a district by its rustic names as we do by its Flora and Fauna. The continuous inheritance of cer- tain favorite proper names in a family, in some districts, forces the peasant to adopt the princely custom of attaching a nu- meral to the name, and saying, when three generations are living at once, Hans I., II., and III. ; or, in the more an- tique fashion, Hans the elder, the middle, and the younger. In some of our English counties there is a similar adherence to a narrow range of proper names ; and as a mode of distin- guishing collateral branches in the same family, you will hear of Jonathan's Bess, Thomas's Bess, and Samuel's Bess the three Bessies being cousins. The peasant's adherence to the traditional has much greater inconvenience than that entailed by a paucity of proper names. In the Black Forest and in Hiittenberg you will see him in the dog-days wearing a thick fur cap, because it is a historical fur RIEHL. 149 cap a cap worn by his grandfather. In the Wetterau, that peasant girl is considered the handsomest who wears the most petticoats. To go to field-labor in seven petticoats can be anything but convenient or agreeable, but it is the tradition- ally correct thing; and a German peasant girl would think herself as unfavorably conspicuous in an untraditional cos- tume as an English servant-girl would now think herself in a " linsey-woolsey " apron or a thick muslin cap. In many dis- tricts no medical advice would induce the rustic to renounce the tight leather belt with which he injures his digestive functions; you could more easily persuade him to smile on a new communal system than on the unhistorical invention of braces. In the eighteenth century, in spite of the philan- thropic preachers of potatoes, the peasant for years threw his potatoes to the pigs and the dogs, before he could be persuaded to put them on his own table. However, the unwillingness of the peasant to adopt innovations has a not unreasonable foun- dation in the fact, that for him experiments are practical, not theoretical, and must be made with expense of money instead of brains a fact that is not, perhaps, sufficiently taken into account by agricultural theorists, who complain of the farm- er's obstinacy. The peasant has the smallest possible faith in theoretic knowledge; he thinks it rather dangerous than otherwise, as is well indicated by a Lower Rhenish proverb : "One is never -too old to learn, said an old woman; so she learned to be a witch. " Between many villages an historical feud once perhaps the occasion of much bloodshed is still kept up under the milder form of an occasional round of cudgelling, and the launching of traditional nicknames. An historical feud of this kind still exists, for example, among many villages on the Rhine and more inland places in the neighborhood. Hheinschnacke (of which the equivalent is perhaps " water-snake ") is the standing term of ignominy for the inhabitant of the Rhine village, who repays it in kind by the epithet " karst " (mat- tock) or "kukuk" (cuckoo), according as the object of his hereditary hatred belongs to the field or the forest. If any Romeo among the " mattocks " were to marry a Juliet among the " water-snakes, " there would be no lack of Tybalts and 150 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE: Mercutios to carry the conflict from words to blows, though, neither side knows a reason for the enmity. A droll instance of peasant conservatism is told of a village on the Taunus, whose inhabitants from time immemorial had been famous for impromptu cudgelling. For this historical offence the magistrates of the district had always inflicted the equally historical punishment of shutting up the most incor- rigible offenders, not in prison, but in their own pig-sty. In recent times, however, the Government, wishing to correct the rudeness of these peasants, appointed an " enlightened " man as a magistrate, who at once abolished the original pen- alty above-mentioned. But this relaxation of punishment was so far from being welcome to the villagers, that they pre- sented a petition praying that a more energetic man might be given them as a magistrate, who would have the courage to punish according to law and justice, "as had been before- time." And the magistrate who abolished incarceration in the pig-sty could never obtain the respect of the neighbor- hood. This happened no longer ago than the beginning of the present century. But it must not be supposed that the historical piety of the German peasant extends to anything not immediately connected with himself. He has the warmest piety toward the old tumble-down house which his grandfather built, and which nothing will induce him to improve; but toward the venerable ruins of the old castle that overlooks his village he has no piety at all, and carries off its stones to make a fence for his garden, or tears down the Gothic carving of the old monastic church, which is " nothing to him, " to mark off a footpath through his field. It is the same with historical tra- ditions. The peasant has them fresh in his memory, so far as they relate to himself. In districts where the peasantry are unadulterated, you discern the remnants of the feudal relations in innumerable customs and phrases, but you will ask in vain for historical traditions concerning the empire, or even concerning the particular princely house to which the peasant is subject. He can tell you what " half people and whole people " mean ; in Hesse you will still hear of " four horses making a whole peasant, " or of " four-day and three- RIEHL. 151 day peasants " : but you will ask in vain about Charlemagne and Frederic Barbarossa. Riehl well observes that the feudal system, which made the peasant the bondman of his lord, was an immense benefit in a country the greater part of which had still to be colonized, rescued the peasant from vagabondage, and laid the foundation of persistency and endurance in future generations. If a free German peasantry belongs only to modern times, it is to his ancestor who was a serf, and even, in the earliest times, a slave, that the peasant owes the foundation of his independ- ence namely, his capability of a settled existence, nay, his unreasoning persistency, which has its important function in the development of the race. Perhaps the very worst result of that unreasoning persist- ency is the peasant's inveterate habit of litigation. Every one remembers the immortal description of Dandie Dinmont's importunate application to Lawyer Pleydell to manage his "bit lawsuit," till at length Pleydell consents to help him ruin himself, on the ground that Dandie may fall into worse hands. It seems, this is a scene which has many parallels in Germany. The farmer's lawsuit is his point of honor; and he will carry it through, though he knows from the very first day that he shall get nothing by it. The litigious peasant piques himself, like Mr. Saddletree, on his knowledge of the law, and this vanity is the chief impulse to many a lawsuit. To the mind of the peasant, law presents itself as the " cus- tom of the country, " and it is his pride to be versed in all customs. Custom with him holds the place of sentiment, of theory, and in many cases of affection. Eiehl justly urges the importance of simplifying law proceedings, so as to cut off this vanity at its source, and also of encouraging, by every possible means, the practice of arbitration. The peasant never begins his lawsuit in summer, for the same reason that he does not make love and marry in summer, because he has no time for that sort of thing. Anything is easier to him than to move out of his habitual course, and he is attached even to his privations. Some years ago, a peasant youth, out of the poorest and remotest region of the Wester- wald, was enlisted as a recruit, at Weil burg in Nassau. The 152 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE: lad having never in his life slept in a bed, when he had to get into one for the first time began to cry like a child ; and he deserted twice because he could not reconcile himself to sleep- ing in a bed, and to the " fine " life of the barracks : he was homesick at the thought of his accustomed poverty and his thatched hut. A strong contrast this with the feeling of the poor in towns, who would be far enough from deserting be- cause their condition was too much improved! The genuine peasant is never ashamed of his rank and calling ; he is rather inclined to look down on every one who does not wear a smock-frock, and thinks a man who has the manners of the gentry is likely to be rather windy and unsubstantial. In some places, even in French districts, this feeling is strongly symbolized by the practice of the peasantry, on certain festi- val days, to dress the images of the saints in peasant's cloth- ing. History tells us of all kinds of peasant insurrections, the object of which was to obtain relief for the peasants from some of their many oppressions ; but of an effort on their part to step out of their hereditary rank and calling, to become gentry, to leave the plough and carry on the easier business of capitalists or Government functionaries, there is no example. The German novelists who undertake to give pictures of peasant life, fall into the same mistake as our English novel- ists ; they transfer their own feelings to ploughmen and wood- cutters, and give them both joys and sorrows of which they know nothing. The peasant never questions the obligation of family ties he questions no custom, but tender affection, as it exists amongst the refined part of mankind, is almost as foreign to him as white hands and filbert-shaped nails. That the aged father who has given up his property to his children on condition of their maintaining him for the remainder of his life, is very far from meeting with delicate attentions, is indi- cated by the proverb current among the peasantry " Don't take your clothes off before you go to bed." Among rustic; moral tales and parables, not one is more universal than the story of the ungrateful children, who made their gray-headed father, dependent on them for a maintenance, eat at a wooden trough because he shook the food out of his trembling hands. 1 This proverb is common among the Euglish farmers also. RIEHL. 153 Then these same ungrateful children observed one day that their own little boy was making a tiny wooden trough; and when they asked him what it was for, he answered that his father and mother might eat out of it, when he was a man and had to keep them. Marriage is a very prudential affair, especially among the peasants who have the largest share of property. Politic mar- riages are as common among them as among princes; and when a peasant-heiress in Westphalia marries, her husband adopts her name, and places his own after it with the prefix geborner (ne). The girls marry young, and the rapidity with which they get old and ugly is one among the many proofs that the early years of marriage are fuller of hardships than of conjugal tenderness. " When our writers of village stories," says Eiehl, "transferred their own emotional life to the peasant, they obliterated what is precisely his most pre- dominant characteristic namely, that with him general cus- tom holds the place of individual feeling." We pay for greater emotional susceptibility too often by nervous diseases of which the peasant knows nothing. To him headache is the least of physical evils, because he thinks head-work the easiest and least indispensable of all labor. Happily, many of the younger sons in peasant families, by going to seek their living in the towns, carry their hardy ner- vous system to amalgamate with the over-wrought nerves of our town population, and refresh them with a little rude vigor. And a return to the habits of peasant life is the best remedy for many moral as well as physical diseases induced by per- verted civilization. Eiehl points to colonization as presenting the true field for this regenerative process. On the other side of the ocean a man will have the courage to begin life again as a peasant, while at home, perhaps, opportunity as well as courage will fail him. Apropos of this subject of emigration, he remarks the striking fact that the native shrewdness and mother-wit of the German peasant seem to forsake him en- tirely when he has to apply them under new circumstances, and on relations foreign to his experience. Hence it is that the German peasant who emigrates, so constantly falls a vic- tim to unprincipled adventurers in the preliminaries to emi- 164 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE: gration ; but if once he gets his foot on the American soil, hd exhibits all the first-rate qualities of an agricultural colonist ; and among all German emigrants, the peasant class are the most successful. But many disintegrating forces have been at work on the peasant character, and degeneration is unhappily going on at a greater pace than development. In the wine districts espe- cially, the inability of the small proprietors to bear up under the vicissitudes of the market, or to ensure a high quality of wine by running the risks of a late vintage, and the competi- tion of beer and cider with the inferior wines, have tended to produce that uncertainty of gain which, with the peasant, is the inevitable cause of demoralization. The small peasant proprietors are not a new class in Germany, but many of the evils of their position are new. They are more dependent on ready money than formerly : thus, where a peasant used to get his wood for building and firing from the common forest, he has now to pay for it with hard cash ; he used to thatch his own house, with the help perhaps of a neighbor, but now he pays a man to do it for him ; he used to pay taxes in kind, he now pays them in money. The chances of the market have to be discounted, and the peasant falls into the hands of money-lenders. Here is one of the cases in which social policy clashes with a purely economical policy. Political vicissitudes have added their influence to that of economical changes in disturbing that dim instinct, that rev- erence for traditional custom, which is the peasant's princi- ple of action. He is in the midst of novelties for which he knows no reason changes in political geography, changes of the Government to which he owes fealty, changes in bureau- cratic management and police regulations. He finds himself in a new element before an apparatus for breathing in it is developed in him. His only knowledge of modern history is in some of its results for instance, that he has to pay heavier taxes from year to year. His chief idea of a Government is of a power that raises his taxes, opposes his harmless customs, and torments him with new formalities. The source of all this is the false system of " enlightening " the peasant which has been adopted by the bureaucratic Governments. A sys- 155 tern which disregards the traditions and hereditary attach- ments of the peasant, and appeals only to a logical understand- ing which is not yet developed in him, is simply disintegrating and ruinous to the peasant character. The interference with the communal regulations has been of this fatal character. Instead of endeavoring to promote to the utmost the healthy life of the Commune, as an organism the conditions of which are bound up with the historical characteristics of the peas- ant, the bureaucratic plan of government is bent on improve- ment by its patent machinery of State-appointed functionaries, and off-hand regulations in accordance with modern enlighten- ment. The spirit of communal exclusiveness the resistance to the indiscriminate establishment of strangers is an in- tense traditional feeling in the peasant. " This gallows is for us and our children," is the typical motto of this spirit. But such exclusiveness is highly irrational and repugnant to mod- ern liberalism; therefore a bureaucratic Government at once opposes it, and encourages to the utmost the introduction of new inhabitants in the provincial communes. Instead of allowing the peasants to manage their own affairs, and, if they happen to believe that five and four make eleven, to unlearn the prej- udice by their own experience in calculation, so that they may gradually understand processes, and not merely see re- sults, bureaucracy comes with its " Ready Reckoner " and works all the peasant's sums for him the surest way of maintaining him in his stupidity, however it may shake his prejudice. Another questionable plan for elevating the peasant is the supposed elevation of the clerical character, by preventing the clergyman from cultivating more than a trifling part of the land attached to his benefice, that he may be as much as possible of a scientific theologian, and as little as possible of a peasant. In this, Eiehl observes, lies one great source of weakness to the Protestant Church as compared with the Cath- olic, which finds the great majority of its priests among the owner orders ; and we have had the opportunity of making an analogous comparison in England, where many of us can re- member country districts in which the great mass of the peo- ple were christianized by illiterate Methodist and Independent 156 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE: ministers ; while the influence of the parish clergyman among the poor did not extend much beyond a few old women in scar- let cloaks, and a few exceptional church-going laborers. Bearing in mind the general characteristics of the German peasant, it is easy to understand his relation to the revolu- tionary ideas and revolutionary movements of modern times. The peasant in Germany, as elsewhere, is a born grumbler. He has always plenty of grievances in his pocket, but he does not generalize those grievances ; he does not complain of " gov- ernment " or " society, " probably because he has good reason to complain of the burgomaster. When a few sparks from the first French Revolution fell among the German peasantry, and in certain villages of Saxony the country people assembled together to write down their demands, there was no glimpse in their petition of the " universal rights of man, " but simply of their own particular affairs as Saxon peasants. Again, after the July revolution of 1830, there were many insignifi- cant peasant insurrections; but the object of almost all was the removal of local grievances. Toll -houses were pulled down; stamped paper was destroyed; in some places there was a persecution of wild boars, in others of that plentiful tame animal, the German Rath, or councillor who is never called into council. But in 1848 it seemed as if the move- ments of the peasants had taken a new character; in the small western states of Germany it seemed as if the whole class of peasantry was in insurrection. But, in fact, the peasant did not know the meaning of ^the part he was playing. He had heard that everything was being set right in the towns, and that wonderful things were happening there, so he tied up his bundle and set off. Without any distinct ob- ject or resolution, the country people presented themselves on the scene of commotion, and were warmly received by the party leaders. But, seen from the windows of ducal palaces and ministerial hotels, these swarms of peasants had quite another aspect, and it was imagined that they had a common plan of co-operation. This, however, the peasants have never had. Systematic co-operation implies general conceptions, and a provisional subordination of egoism, to which even the artisans of towns have rarely shown themselves equal, and RIEHL. 157 which are as foreign to the mind of the peasant as logarithms or the doctrine of chemical proportions. And the revolution- ary fervor of the peasant was soon cooled. The old mis- trust of the towns was reawakened on the spot. The Tyro- lese peasants saw no great good in the freedom of the press and the constitution, because these changes " seemed to please the gentry so much. v Peasants who had given their voices stormily for a German parliament asked afterward, with a doubtful look, whether it were to consist of infantry or cav- alry. When royal domains were declared the property of the State, the peasants in some small principalities rejoiced over this, because they interpreted it to mean that every one would have his share in them, after the manner of the old common and forests rights. The very practical views of the peasants, with regard to the demands of the people, were in amusing contrast with the abstract theorizing of the educated townsmen. The peasant continually withheld all State payments until he saw how matters would turn out, and was disposed to reckon up the solid benefit, in the form of land or money, that might come to him from the changes obtained. While the townsman was heating his brains about representation on the broadest basis, the peasant asked if the relation between tenant and landlord would continue as before, and whether the removal of the " feudal obligations " meant that the farmer should become owner of the land? It is in the same naive way that Communism is interpreted by the German peasantry. The wide spread among them of communistic doctrines, the eagerness with which they listened to a plan for the partition of property, seemed to countenance the notion that it was a delusion to suppose the peasant would be secured from this intoxication by his love of secure posses- sion and peaceful earnings. But, in fact, the peasant contem- plated " partition " by the light of a historical reminiscence rather than of novel theory. The golden age, in the imagina- tion of the peasant, was the time when every member of the commune had a right to as much wood from the forest as would enable him to sell some, after using what he wanted in iiring, in which the communal possessions were so profit- 158 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE: able that, instead of his having to pay rates at the end of the year, each member of the commune was something in pocket. Hence the peasants in general understood by " partition " that the State lands, especially the forests, would be divided among the communes, and that, by some political legerdemain or other, everybody would have free firewood, free grazing for his cattle, and, over and above that, a "piece of gold without working for it. That he should give up a single clod of his own to further the general " partition " had never entered the mind of the peasant communist ; and the perception that this was an essential preliminary to " partition " was often a suffi- cient cure for his Communism. In villages lying in the neighborhood of large towns, how- ever, where the circumstances of the peasantry are very differ- ent, quite another interpretation of Communism is prevalent. Here the peasant is generally sunk to the position of the pro- letaire, living from hand to mouth ; he has nothing to lose, but everything to gain by " partition." The coarse nature of the peasant has here been corrupted into bestiality by the disturbance of his instincts, while he is as yet incapable of principles ; and in this type of the degenerate peasant is seen the worst example of ignorance intoxicated by theory. A significant hint as to the interpretation the peasants put on revolutionary theories, may be drawn from the way they employed the few weeks in which their movements were un- checked. They felled the forest trees and shot the game; they withheld taxes; they shook off the imaginary or real burdens imposed on them by their mediatized princes, by pre- senting their " demands " in a very rough way before the du- cal or princely " Schloss " ; they set their faces against the bureaucratic management of the communes, deposed the Gov- ernment functionaries who had been placed over them as bur- gomasters and magistrates, and abolished the whole bureau- cratic system of procedure, simply by taking no notice of its regulations, and recurring to some tradition some old order or disorder of things. In all this it is clear that they were animated not in the least by the spirit of modern revolution, but by a purely narrow and personal impulse toward reaction. The idea of constitutional government lies quite beyond the RIEHL. 159 range of the German peasant's conceptions. His only notion of representation is that of a representation of ranks of classes ; his only notion of a deputy is of one who takes care, not of the national welfare, but of the interests of his own order. Herein lay the great mistake of the democratic party, in common with the bureaucratic Governments, that they en- tirely omitted the peculiar character of the peasant from their political calculations. They talked of the " people," and for- got that the peasants were included in the term. Only a base- less misconception of the peasant's character could induce the supposition that he would feel the slightest enthusiasm about the principles involved in the reconstitution of the Empire, or even about that reconstitution itself. He has no zeal for a written law, as such, but only so far as it takes the form of a living law a tradition. It was the external authority which the revolutionary party had won in Baden that attracted the peasants into a participation in the struggle. Such, Kiehl tells us, are the general characteristics of the German peasantry characteristics which subsist amidst a wide variety of circumstances. In Mecklenburg, Pomerania, and Brandenburg, the peasant lives on extensive estates; in Westphalia he lives in large isolated homesteads ; in the West- erwald and in Sauerland, in little groups of villages and ham- lets ; on the Khine, land is for the most part parcelled out among small proprietors, who live together in large villages. Then, of course, the diversified physical geography of Ger- many gives rise to equally diversified methods of land-culture ; and out of these various circumstances grow numerous specific differences in manner and character. But the generic charac- ter of the German peasant is everywhere the same : in the clean mountain-hamlet and in the dirty fishing-village on the coast ; in the plains of North Germany and in the backwoods of America. " Everywhere he has the same historical char- acter everywhere custom is his supreme law. Where relig- ion and patriotism are still a na'ive instinct are still a sacred custom there begins the class of the German Peasantry." Our readers will perhaps already have gathered from the foregoing portrait of the German peasant, that Biehl is not a 160 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE: man who looks at objects through the spectacles either of the doctrinaire or the dreamer ; and they will be ready to believe what he tells us in his Preface namely, that years ago he began his wanderings over the hills and plains of Germany for the sake of obtaining, in immediate intercourse with the people, that completion of his historical, political, and eco- nomical studies which he was unable to find in books. He began his investigations with no party prepossessions, and his present views were evolved entirely from his own gradually amassed observations. He was, first of all, a pedestrian, and only in the second place a political author. The views at which he has arrived by this inductive process, he sums up in the term social-political-conservatism; but his conservatism is, we conceive, of a thoroughly philosophical kind. He sees in European society incarnate history, and auy attempt to disengage it from its historical elements must, he believes, be simply destructive of social vitality. l What has grown up historically can only die out historically, by the gradual oper- ation of necessary laws. The external conditions which soci- ety has inherited 'from the past are but the manifestation of inherited internal conditions in the human beings who com- pose it; the internal conditions and the external are related to each other as the organism and its medium, aud develop- ment can take place only by the gradual consentaneous devel- opment of both. Take the familiar example of attempts to abolish titles, which have been about as effective as the proc- ess of cutting off poppy -heads in a corn-field. " Jedem Men- schen," says Riehl, " ist sein Zopf angeboren, warum soil denn der sociale Sprachgebrauch nickt auch seinen Zopf haben ? " which we may render "As long as snobbism runs in the blood, why should it not run in our speech? " As a necessary preliminary to a purely rational society, you must obtain purely rational men, free from the sweet and bitter prejudices of hereditary affection and antipathy ; which is as easy as to get running streams without springs, or the leafy shade of the forest without the secular growth of trunk and branch. 'Throughout this article, in our statement of Riehl's opinions, we must be understood not as quoting Riehl, but as interpreting and illus- trating him, RIEHL. 161 The historical conditions of society may be compared with those of language. It must be admitted that the language of cultivated nations is in anything but a rational state ; the great sections of the civilized world are only approximatively intel- ligible to each other, and. even that, only at the cost of long study ; one word stands for many things, and many words for one thing; the subtle shades of meaning, and still subtler echoes of association, make language an instrument which scarcely anything short of genius can wield with definiteness and certainty. Suppose, then, that the effort which has been again and again made to construct a universal language on a rational basis has at length succeeded, and that you have a language which has no uncertainty, no whims of idiom, no cumbrous forms, no fitful shimmer of rnany-hued significance, no hoary archaisms " familiar with forgotten years " a patent deodorized and non-resonant language, which effects the pur- pose of communication as perfectly and rapidly as algebraic signs. Your language may be a perfect medium of expression to science, but will never express life, which is a great deal more than science. With the anomalies and inconveniences of historical language, you will have parted with its music and its passion, with its vital qualities as an expression of in- dividual character, with its subtle capabilities of wit, with everything that gives it power over the imagination ; and the next step in simplification will be the invention of a talking watch, which will achieve the utmost facility and despatch in the communication of ideas by a graduated adjustment of ticks, to be represented in writing by a corresponding arrange- ment of dots. A melancholy " language of the future " ! The sensory and motor nerves that run in the same sheath, are scarcely bound together by a more necessary and delicate union than that which binds men's affections, imagination, wit, and humor, with the subtle ramifications of historical language. Language must be left to grow in precision, com- pleteness, and unity, as minds grow in clearness, comprehen- siveness, and sympathy. And there is an analogous relation between the moral tendencies of men and the social conditions they have inherited. The nature of European men has its roots intertwined with the past, and can only be developed 11 THE NATURAL HISTORY OP GERMAN LIFE: by allowing those roots to remain undisturbed while the proc- ess of development is going on, until that perfect ripeness of the seed which carries with it a life independent of the root. This vital connection with the past is much more vividly felt on the Continent than in England, where we have to recall it by an effort of memory and reflection ; for though our English life is in its core intensely traditional, Protestantism and com- merce have modernized the face of the land and the aspects of society in a far greater degree than in any Continental country : "Abroad," says Ruskin, "a building of the eighth or tenth century stands ruinous in the open street ; the children play around it, the peas- ants heap their corn in it, the buildings of yesterday nestle about it, and fit their new stones in its rents, and tremble in sympathy as it trembles. No one wonders at it, or thinks of it as separate, and of another time ; we feel the ancient world to be a real thing, and one with the new ; an- tiquity is no dream ; it is rather the children playing about the old stones that are the dream. But all is continuous, and the words, 'from generation to generation,' understandable here." This conception of European society as incarnate history, is the fundamental idea of Riehl's books. After the notable failure of revolutionary attempts con- ducted from the point of view of abstract democratic and so- cialistic theories, after the practical demonstration of the evils resulting from a bureaucratic system which governs by an un- discriminating, dead mechanism, Riehl wishes to urge on the consideration of his countrymen a social policy founded on the special study of the people as they are on the natural his- tory of the various social ranks. He thinks it wise to pause a little from theorizing, and see what is the material actually present for theory to work upon. It is the glory of the So- cialists in contrast with the democratic doctrinaires who have been too much occupied with the general idea of " the people " to inquire particularly into the actual life of the peo- ple that they have thrown themselves with enthusiastic zeal into the study at least of one social group namely, the fac- tory operatives ; and here lies the secret of their partial suc- cess. But, unfortunately, they have made this special study of a single fragment of society the basis of a theory which RIEHL. 163 quietly substitutes for the small group of Parisian proletaires or English factory-workers, the society of all Europe nay, of the whole world. And in this way they have lost the best fruit of their investigations. "For, says Eiehl, the more deeply we penetrate into the knowledge of society in its details, the more thoroughly we shall be convinced that a universal social policy has no validity except on paper, and can never be car- ried into successful practice. The conditions of German soci- ety are altogether different from those of French, of English, or of Italian society ; and to apply the same social theory to these nations indiscriminately, is about as wise a procedure as Triptolemus Yellowley's application of the agricultural direc- tions in Virgil's " Georgics " to his farm in the Shetland Isles. It is the clear and strong light in which Biehl places this important position, that in our opinion constitutes the sugges- tive value of his books for foreign as well as German readers. It has not been sufficiently insisted on, that in the various branches of Social Science there is an advance from the gen- eral to the special, from the simple to the complex, analogous with that which is found in the series of the sciences, from Mathematics to Biology. To the laws of quantity comprised in Mathematics and Physics are superadded, in Chemistry, laws of quality ; to these again are added, in Biology, laws of life; and lastly, the conditions of life in general branch out into its special conditions, or Natural History, on the one hand, and into its abnormal conditions, or Pathology, on the other. And in this series or ramification of the sciences, the more general science will not suffice to solve the problems of the more special. Chemistry embraces phenomena which are not explicable by Physics ; Biology embraces phenomena which are not explicable by Chemistry ; and no biological generaliza- tion will enable us to predict the infinite specialities produced by the complexity of vital conditions. So Social Science, while it has departments which in their fundamental gener- ality correspond to mathematics and physics namely, those grand and simple generalizations which trace out the inevi- table march of the human race as a whole, and, as a ramifica- tion of these, the laws of economical science has also, in the departments of government and jurisprudence, which 164 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE: embrace the conditions of social life in all their complexity, what may be called its Biology, carrying us on to innumer- able special phenomena which outlie the sphere of science, and belong to Natural History. And just as the most thor- ough acquaintance with physics, or chemistry, or general physi- ology will not enable you at once to establish the balance of life in your private vivarium, so that your particular society of zoophytes, molluscs, and echinoderms may feel themselves, as the Germans say, at ease in their skin ; so the most com- plete equipment of theory will not enable a statesman or a political and social reformer to adjust his measures wisely, in the absence of a special acquaintance with the section of soci- ety for which he legislates, with the peculiar characteristics of the nation, the province, the class whose well-being he has to consult. In other words, a wise social policy must be based not simply on abstract social science, but on the Natural History of social bodies. Biehl's books are not dedicated merely to the argumentative maintenance of this or of any other position; they are in- tended chiefly as a contribution to that knowledge of the Ger- man people on the importance of which he insists. He is less occupied with urging his own conclusions than with impress- ing on his readers the facts which have led him to those con- clusions. In the volume entitled "Land und Leute," which, though published last, is properly an introduction to the vol- ume entitled "Die Btirgerliche Gesellschaf t, " he considers the German people in their physical-geographical relations; he compares the natural divisions of the race, as determined by land and climate, and social traditions, with the artificial di- visions which are based on diplomacy ; and he traces the gen- esis and influences of what we may call the ecclesiastical geography of Germany its partition between Catholicism and Protestantism. He shows that the ordinary antithesis of North and South Germany represents no real ethnographical distinction, and that the natural divisions of Germany, found- ed on its physical geography, are threefold namely, the low plains, the middle mountain region, and the high mountain region, or Lower, Middle, and Upper Germany ; and on this primary natural division all the other broad ethnographical RIEHL. 165 distinctions of Germany will be found to rest. The plains of North or Lower Germany include all the seaboard the nation possesses ; and this, together with the fact that they are trav- ersed to the depth of 600 miles by navigable rivers, makes them the natural seat of a trading race. Quite different is the geographical character of Middle Germany. While the north- ern plains are marked off into great divisions, by such rivers as the Lower Ehine, the Weser, and the Oder, running almost in parallel lines, this central region is cut up like a mosaic by the capricious lines of valleys and rivers. Ilere is the region in which you find those famous roofs from which the rain- water runs toward two different seas, and the mountain-tops from which you may look into eight or ten German States. The abundance of water-power and the presence of extensive coal-mines allow of a very diversified industrial development in Middle Germany. In Upper Germany, or the high mountain region, we find the same symmetry in the lines of the rivers as in the north; almost all the great Alpine streams flow par- allel with the Danube. But the majority of these rivers are neither navigable nor available for industrial objects, and in- stead of serving for communication, they shut off one great tract from another. The slow development, the simple peas- ant-life of many districts, is here determined by the mountain and the river. In the southeast, however, industrial activity spreads through Bohemia toward Austria, and forms a sort of balance to the industrial districts of the Lower Ehine. Of course, the boundaries of these three regions cannot be very strictly defined; but an approximation to the limits of Middle Germany may be obtained by regarding it as a triangle, of which one angle lies in Silesia, another in Aix-la-Chapelle, and a third at Lake Constance. This triple division corresponds with the broad distinctions of climate. In the northern plains the atmosphere is damp and heavy ; in the southern mountain region it is dry and rare, and there are abrupt changes of temperature, sharp contrasts between the seasons, and devastating storms ; but in both these zones men are hardened by conflict with the roughnesses of the climate. In Middle Germany, on the contrary, there is little of this struggle ; the seasons are more equable, and the 166 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE: mild, soft air of the valleys tends to make the inhabitants luxurious and sensitive to hardships. It is only in exceptional mountain districts that one is here reminded of the rough, bracing air on the heights of Southern Germany. It is a curi- ous fact that, as the air becomes gradually lighter and rarer from the North German coast toward Upper Germany, the average of suicides regularly decreases. Mecklenburg has the highest number, then Prussia, while the fewest suicides occur in Bavaria and Austria. Both the northern and southern regions have still a large extent of waste lands, downs, morasses, and heaths; and to these are added, in the south, abundance of snow-fields and naked rock; while in Middle Germany culture has almost overspread the face of the land, and there are no large tracts of waste. There is the same proportion in the distribution of forests. Again, in the north we see a monotonous contin- uity of wheat-fields, potato-grounds, meadow-lands, and vast heaths ; and there is the same uniformity of culture over large surfaces in the southern table-lands and the Alpine pastures. In Middle Germany, on the contrary, there is a perpetual va- riety of crops within a short space : the diversity of land sur- face, and the corresponding variety in the species of plants, are an invitation to the splitting up of estates, and this again en- courages to the utmost the motley character of the cultivation. According to this threefold division, it appears that there are certain features common to North and South Germany in which they differ from Central Germany, and the nature of this difference Riehl indicates by distinguishing the former as Centralized Land and the latter as Indwid^lal^zed Land a distinction which is well symbolized by the fact that North and South Germany possess the great lines of railway which are the medium for the traffic of the world, while Middle Ger- many is far richer in lines for local communication, and pos- sesses the greatest length of railway within the smallest space. Disregarding superficialities, the East Frieslanders, the Schles- wig-Holsteiners, the Mecklenburgers, and the Pomeranians are much more nearly allied to the old Bavarians, the Tyro- lese, and the Styrians, than any of these are allied to the Saxr cms, the Thuringians, or the Rhinelanders. Both in North RIEHL. 167 and South Germany original races are still found in large masses, and popular dialects are spoken ; you still find there thoroughly peasant districts, thorough villages, and also, at great intervals, thorough cities j you still find there a sense of rank. In Middle Germany, on the contrary, the original races are fused together or sprinkled hither and thither ; the peculiarities of the popular dialects are worn down or con- fused ; there is no very strict line of demarcation between the country and the town population, hundreds of small towns and large villages being hardly distinguishable in their character- istics; and the sense of rank, as part of the organic structure of society, is almost extinguished. Again, both in the north and south there is still a strong ecclesiastical spirit in the peo- ple, and the Pomeranian sees Antichrist in the Pope as clearly as the Tyrolese sees him in Doctor Luther ; while in Middle Germany the confessions are mingled they exist peaceably side by side in very narrow space, and tolerance or indiffer- ence has spread itself widely even in the popular mind. And the analogy, or rather the causal relation, between the physi- cal geography of the three regions and the development of the population goes still further : "For," observes Riehl, "the striking connection which has been pointed out between the local geological formations in Germany and the revolutionary disposition of the people, has more than a metaphorical significance. Where the primeval physical revolutions of the globe have been the wildest in their effects, and the most multiform strata have been tossed together or thrown one upon the other, it is a very intelli- gible consequence that on a land surface thus broken up, the population- should sooner develop itself into small communities, and. that the more intense life generated in these smaller communities should become the most favorable nidus for the reception of modern culture, and with this a susceptibility for its revolutionary ideas ; while a people settled in a region where its groups are spread over a large space will persist much more obstinately in the retention of its original character. The people of Middle Germany have none of that exclusive one-sidedness which determines the peculiar genius of great national groups, just as this one-sidedness or uniformity is wanting to the geological and geographical character of their land." This ethnographical outline Riehl fills up with special and typical descriptions, and then makes it the starting-point for a criticism of the actual political condition of Germany. The 168 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE: volume is full of vivid pictures, as well as penetrating glances into the maladies and tendencies of modern society. It would be fascinating as literature, if it were not important for its facts and philosophy. But we can only commend it to our readers, and pass on to the volume entitled " Die Biirgerliche Gesellschaf t, " from which we have drawn our sketch of the German peasantry. Here Riehl gives us a series of studies in that natural history of the people, which he regards as the proper basis of social policy. He holds that, in European so- ciety, there are three natural ranks or estates : the hereditary landed aristocracy, the citizens or commercial class, and the peasantry or agricultural class. By natural ranks he means ranks which have their roots deep in the historical structure of society, and are still, in the present, showing vitality above ground ; he means those great social groups which are not only distinguished externally by their vocation, but essentially by their mental character, their habits, their mode of life, by the principle they represent in the historical development of society. In his conception of the " Fourth Estate " he differs from the usual interpretation, according to which it is simply equivalent to the Proletariat, or those who are dependent on daily wages, whose only capital is their skill or bodily strength factory operatives, artisans, agricultural laborers, to whom might be added, especially in Germany, the day- laborers with the quill, the literary proletariat. This, Biehl observes, is a valid basis of economical classification, but not of social classification. In his view, the Fourth Estate is a stratum produced by the perpetual abrasion of the other great social groups ; it is the sign and result of the decomposition which is commencing in the organic constitution of society. Its elements are derived alike from the aristocracy, the bour- geoisie, and the peasantry. It assembles under its banner the deserters of historical society, and forms them into a terrible army, which is only just awaking to the consciousness of its corporate power. The tendency of this Fourth Estate, by the very process of its formation, is to do away with the distinc- tive historical character of the other estates, and to resolve their peculiar rank and vocation into a uniform social relation founded on an abstract conception of society. According to RIEHL. 169 Riehl's classification, the day-laborers, whom the political economist designates as the Fourth Estate, belong partly to the peasantry or agricultural class, and partly to the citizens or commercial class. Biehl considers, in the first place, the peasantry and aris- tocracy as the " Forces of social persistence, " and, in the sec- ond, the bourgeoisie and the " fourth estate " as the " Forces of social movement." The aristocracy, he observes, is the only one among these four groups which is denied by others besides Socialists to have any natural basis as a separate rank. It is admitted that there was once an aristocracy which had an intrinsic ground of existence ; but now, it is alleged, this is an historical fossil, an antiquarian relic, venerable because gray with age. In what, it is asked, can consist the peculiar vocation of the aris- tocracy, since it has no longer the monopoly of the land, of the higher military functions, and of Government offices, and since the service of the Court has no Jonger any political im- portance? To this Kiehl replies that in great revolutionary crises, the " men of progress " have more than once " abol- ished" the aristocracy. But remarkably enough, the aris- tocracy has always reappeared. This measure of abolition showed that the nobility were no longer regarded as a real class, for to abolish a real class would be an absurdity. It is quite possible to contemplate a voluntary breaking up of the peasant or citizen class in the socialistic sense, but no man in his senses would think of straightway " abolishing " citizens and peasants. The aristocracy, then, was regarded as a sort of cancer, or excrescence of society. Nevertheless, not only has it been found impossible to annihilate a hereditary nobility by decree; but also, the aristocracy of the eighteenth cen- tury outlived even the self-destructive acts of its own perver- sity. A life which was entirely without object, entirely desti- tute of functions, would not, says Riehl, be so persistent. He has an acute criticism of those who conduct a polemic against the idea of a hereditary aristocracy while they are proposing an " aristocracy of talent, " which after all is based on the principle of inheritance. The Socialists are, therefore, only consistent in declaring against an aristocracy of talent. " But 170 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN" LIFE: when they have turned the worlcTinto a great Foundling Hos- pital, they will still be unable to eradicate the ' privileges of birth.' ' We nmst not follow him in his criticism, however; nor can we afford to do more than mention hastily his inter- esting sketch of the mediaeval aristocracy, and his admonition to the German aristocracy of the present day, that the vitality of their class is not to be sustained by romantic attempts to revive mediaeval forms and sentiments, but only by the exer- cise of functions as real and salutary for actual society as those of the mediaeval aristocracy were for the feudal age. " In modern society the divisions of rank indicate division of labor, according to that distribution of functions in the social organism which the historical constitution of society has de- termined. In this way the principle of differentiation and the principle of unity are identical." The elaborate study of the German bourgeoisie which forms the next division of the volume must be passed over ; but we may pause a moment to note Riehl's definition of the social Philister (Philistine), an epithet for which we have no equiv- alent not at all, however, for want of the object it repre- sents. Most people who read a little German, know that the epithet Philister originated in the Burschen-Leben, or student- life in Germany, and that the antithesis of Bursch and Phi- lister was equivalent to the antithesis of " gown " and " town " ; but since the word has passed into ordinary language, it has assumed several shades of significance which have not yet been merged in a single absolute meaning ; and one of the questions which an English visitor in Germany will probably take an opportunity of asking is, " What is the strict meaning of the word Philister?" Eiehl's answer is, that the Philister is one who is indifferent to all social interests, all public life, as distinguished from selfish and private interests; he has no sympathy with political and social events except as they af- fect his own comfort and prosperity, as they offer him ma- terial for amusement or opportunity for gratifying uis van- ity. He has no social or political creed, but is always of the opinion which is most convenient for the moment. He is al- ways in the majority, and is the main element of unreason and stupidity in the judgment of a " discerning public." It seem.s RIEHL. 171 presumptuous to us to dispute Kiehl's interpretation of a Ger- man word, but we must think that, in literature, the epithet Philister has usually a wider meaning than this includes his definition and something more. We imagine the Philister is the personification of the spirit which judges everything from a lower point of view than the subject demands which judges the affairs of the parish from the egotistic or purely personal point of view which judges the affairs of the nation from the parochial point of view, and does not hesitate to measure the merits of the universe from the human point of view. At least, this must surely be the spirit to which Goethe alludes in a passage cited by Kiehl himself, where he says that the Ger- mans need not be ashamed of erecting a monument to him as well as to Bllicher ; for if Bliicher had freed them from the French, he (Goethe) had freed them from the nets of the Philister : "Ihr mogt mir immer ungescheut Gleich Bliichern Denkmal setzen ! Von Franzosen hat er each befreit, Ich von Philister-Netzen." Goethe could hardly claim to be the apostle of public spirit; but he is eminently the man who helps us to rise to a lofty point of observation, so that we may see things in their rela- tive proportions. The most interesting chapters in the description of the "Fourth Estate," which concludes the volume, are those on* the " Aristocratic Proletariat " and the " Intellectual Proleta- riat." The Fourth Estate in Germany, says Riehl, has its centre of gravity not, as in England and France, in the day- laborers and factory operatives, and still less in the degener- ate peasantry. In Germany, the educated proletariat is the leaven that sets the mass in fermentation; the dangerous classes there go about, not in blouses, but in frock-coats ; they begin with the impoverished prince and end in the hungriest litterateur. The custom that all the sons of a nobleman shall inherit their father's title, necessarily goes on multiplying that class of aristocrats who are not only without function but without adequate provision, and who shrink from entering the ranks of the citizens by adopting some honest calling. The 172 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE: younger son of a prince, says Riehl, is usually obliged to re- main without any vocation; and however zealously he may study music, painting, literature, or science, he can never be a regular musician, painter, or man of science; his pursuit will be called a " passion, " not a " calling, " and to the end of his days he remains a dilettante. " But the ardent pursuit of a fixed practical calling can alone satisfy the active man. " Direct legislation cannot remedy this evil. The inheritance of titles by younger sons is the universal custom, and custom is stronger than law. But if all Government preference for the " aristocratic proletariat " were withdrawn, the sensible men among them would prefer emigration, or the pursuit of some profession, to the hungry distinction of a title without rents. The intellectual proletaires Riehl calls the "church mili- tant " of the Fourth Estate in Germany. In no other coun- try are they so numerous ; in no other country is the trade in material and industrial capital so far exceeded by the whole- sale and retail trade, the traffic and the usury, in the intellec- tual capital of the nation. Germany yields more intellectual produce than it can use and pay for. "This over-production, which is not transient but permanent, nay, is constantly on the increase, evidences a diseased state of the national industry, a perverted application of industrial powers, and is a far more pungent satire on the national condition than all the poverty of opera- tives and peasants. . . . Other nations need not envy us the preponder- ance of the intellectual proletariat over the proletaires of manual labor. For man more easily becomes diseased from over-study than from the labor of the hands ; and it 5s precisely in the intellectual proletariat that there are the most dangerous seeds of disease. This is the group in which the opposition between earnings and wants, between the ideal social position and the real, is the most hopelessly irreconcilable." We must unwillingly leave our readers to make acquaint- ance for themselves with the graphic details with which Riehl follows up this general statement : but before quitting these admirable volumes, let us say, lest our inevitable omissions should have left room for a different conclusion, that Riehl' s conservatism is not in the least tinged with the partisanship of a class, with a poetic fanaticism for the past, or with the prej- udice of a mind incapable of discerning the grander evolution RIEHL. 173 of things to which all social forms are but temporarily subser- vient. It is the conservatism of a clear-eyed, practical, but withal large-minded man a little caustic, perhaps, now and then in his epigrams on democratic doctrinaires who have their nostrum for all political and social diseases, and on communis- tic theories which he regards as " the despair of the individual in his own manhood, reduced to a system," but nevertheless able and willing to do justice to the elements of fact and rea- son in every shade of opinion and every form of effort. He is as far as possible from the folly of supposing that the sun will go backward on the dial, because we put the hands of our clock backward ; he only contends against the opposite folly of decreeing that it shall be mid-day, while in fact the sun is only just touching the mountain-tops, and all along the valley men are stumbling in the twilight. THKEE MONTHS IN WEIMAE. IT was between three and four o'clock, on a fine morning in August, that, after a ten hours' journey from Frankfort, I awoke at the Weimar station. No tipsiness can be more dead to all appeals than that which comes from fitful draughts of sleep on a railway journey by night. To the disgust of your wakeful companions, you are totally insensible to the existence of your umbrella, and to the fact that your carpet-bag is stowed under your seat, or that you have borrowed books and tucked them behind the cushion. " What's the odds, so long as one can sleep?" is your philosophic formula, and it is not until you have begun to shiver on the platform in the early morning air that you become alive to property and its duties i.e., to the necessity of keeping a fast grip upon it. Such was my condition when I reached the station at Weimar. The ride to the town thoroughly roused me, all the more because the glimpses I caught from the carriage-window were ir start- ling contrast with my preconceptions. The lines of houses looked rough and straggling, and were often interrupted by trees peeping out from the gardens behind. At last we stopped before the Erbprinz, an inn of long standing in the heart of the town, and were ushered along heavy-looking in-and-out corridors, such as are found only in German inns, into rooms which overlooked a garden just like one you may see at the back of a farmhouse in many an English village. A walk in the morning in search of lodgings confirmed the impression that Weimar was more like a market-town than the precinct of a Court. "And this is the Athens of the North ! " we said. Materially speaking, it is more like Sparta. The blending of rustic and civic life, the indications of a cen- tral government in the midst of very primitive-looking objects, has some distant analogy with the condition of old Lacedse- mon. The shops are most of them such as you would see in Portrait of Goethe. Page 175. Eliot's Essays. THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAft. 175 the back streets of an English provincial town, and the com- modities on sale are often chalked on the doorposts. A loud rumbling of vehicles may indeed be heard now and then; but the rumbling is loud, not because the vehicles are many, but because the springs are few. The inhabitants seemed to us to have more than the usual heaviness of Germanity ; even their stare was slow, like that of herbivorous quadrupeds. We set out with the intention of exploring the town, and at every other turn we came into a street which took us out of the town, or else into one that led us back to the market from which we set out. One's first feeling was, How could Goethe live here in this dull, lifeless village? The reproaches cast on him for his worldliness and attachment to Court splendor seemed ludicrous enough, and it was inconceivable that the stately Jupiter, in a frock-coat, so familiar to us all through Ranch's statuette, could have habitually walked along these rude streets and among these slouching mortals. Not a pic- turesque bit of building was to be seen ; there was no quaint- ness, nothing to remind one of historical associations, nothing but the most arid prosaism. This was the impression produced by a first morning's walk in Weimar an impression which very imperfectly represents what Weimar is, but which is worth recording, because it is true as a sort of back view. Our ideas were considerably modified when, in the evening, we found our way to the Bel- vedere chaussee, a splendid avenue of chestnut-trees, two miles in length, reaching from the town to the summer residence of Belvedere ; when we saw the Schloss, and discovered the labyrinthine beauties of the park; indeed every day opened to us fresh charms in this quiet little valley and its environs. To any one who loves Nature in her gentle aspects, who de- lights in the checkered shade on a summer morning, and in a walk on the corn-clad upland at sunset, within sight of a little town nestled among the trees below, I say come to Weimar. And if you are weary of English unrest, of that society of " eels in a jar," where each is trying to get his head above the other, the somewhat stupid well-being of the Wei- marians will not be an unwelcome contrast, for a short time at least. If you care nothing about Goethe and Schiller and 176 THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR. Herder and Wieland, "why, so much the worse for you you will miss many interesting thoughts and associations; still, Weimar has a charm independent of these great names. First among all its attractions is the Park, which would be remarkably beautiful even among English parks, and it has one advantage over all these namely, that it is without a fence. It runs up to the houses, and far out into the corn- fields and meadows, as if it had a " sweet will " of its own, like a river or a lake, and had not been planned and plant- ed by human will. Through it flows the Ilm, not a clear stream, it must be confessed, but, like all water, as Novalis says, " an eye to the landscape. " Before we came to Weimar we had had dreams of boating on the Ilm, and we were not a little amused at the difference between this vision of our own and the reality. A few water-fowl are the only navigators of the river, and even they seem to confine themselves to one spot, as if they were there purely in the interest of the pic- turesque. The real extent of the park is small, but the walks are so ingeniously arranged, and the trees are so luxuriant and various, that it takes weeks to learn the turnings and wind- ings by heart, so as no longer to have the sense of novelty. In the warm weather our great delight was the walk which follows the course of the Ilm, and is overarched by tall trees with patches of dark moss on their trunks, in rich contrast with the transparent green of the delicate leaves, through which the golden sunlight played, and checkered the walk be- fore us. On one side of this walk the rocky ground rises to the height of twenty feet or more, and is clothed with mosses and rock-plants. On the other side there are, every now and then, openings, breaks in the continuity of shade, which show you a piece of meadow-land, with fine groups of trees ; and at every such opening a seat is placed under the rock, where you may sit and chat away the sunny hours, or listen to those delicate sounds which one might fancy came from tiny bells worn on the garment of Silence to make us aware of her invisible presence. It is along this walk that you come upon a truncated column, with a serpent twined round it, devouring cakes, placed on the column as offerings, a bit of rude sculp- ture in stone. The inscription Genio loci enlightens the THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR. 177 learned as to the significance of this symbol, but the people of Weimar, unedified by classical allusions, have explained the sculpture by a story which is an excellent example of a modern myth. Once on a time, say they, a huge serpent infested the park, and evaded all attempts to exterminate him, until at last a cunning baker made some appetizing cakes which con- tained an effectual poison, and placed them in the serpent's reach, thus meriting a place with Hercules, Theseus, and other monster-slayers. Weimar, in gratitude, erected this column as a memorial of the baker's feat and its own deliverance. A little farther on is the Borkenhaus, where Carl August used to play the hermit for days together, and from which he used to telegraph to Goethe in his Gartenhaus. Sometimes we took our shady walk in the Stern, the oldest part of the park plan- tations, on the opposite side of the river, lingering on our way to watch the crystal brook which hurries on, like a foolish young maiden, to wed itself with the muddy Ilm. The Stern (Star), a large circular opening amongst the trees, with walks radiating from it, has been thought of as the place for the projected statues of Goethe and Schiller. In Ranch's model for these statues the poets are draped in togas, Goethe, who was considerably the shorter of the two, resting his hand on Schiller's shoulder; but it has been wisely determined to rep- resent them in their " habit as they lived " ; so Eauch' s de- sign is rejected. Against classical idealizing in portrait sculp- ture, Weimar has already a sufficient warning in the colossal statue of Goethe, executed after Bettina's design, which the readers of the "Correspondence with a Child" may see en- graved as a frontispiece to the second volume. This statue is locked up in an odd structure, standing in the park, and look- ing like a compromise between a church and a summer-house (Weimar does not shine in its buildings!) How little real knowledge of Goethe must the mind have that could wish to see him represented as a naked Apollo, with a Psyche at his knee! The execution is as feeble as the sentiment is false; the Apollo-Goethe is a caricature, and the Psyche is simply vulgar. The statue was executed under Bettina's encourage- ment, in the hope that it would be bought by. the King of Prussia ; but a breach having taken place between her and her 12 178 THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR. Royal friend, a purchaser was sought in the Grand Duke of Weimar, who, after transporting it at enormous expense from Italy, wisely shut it up where it is seen only by the curious. As autumn advanced and the sunshine became precious, we preferred the broad walk on the higher grounds of -the park, where the masses of trees are finely disposed, leaving wide spaces of meadow which extend on one side to the Belvedere allee with its avenue of chestnut-trees, and on the other to the little cliffs which I have already described as forming a wall by the walk along the Ilm. Exquisitely beautiful were the graceful forms of the plane-trees, thrown in golden relief on a background of dark pines. Here we used to turn and turn again in the autumn afternoons, at first bright and warm, then sombre with low-lying purple clouds, and chill with winds that sent the leaves raining from the branches. The eye here welcomes, as a contrast, the white facade of a build- ing looking like a small Greek temple, placed on the edge of the cliff, and you at once conclude it to be a bit of pure orna- ment, a device to set off the landscape ; but you presently see a porter seated near the door of the basement story, be- guiling the ennui of his sinecure by a book and a pipe, and you learn with surprise that this is another retreat for ducal dignity to unbend and philosophize in. Singularly ill-adapted to such a purpose it seems to beings not ducal. On the other side of the Ilm the park is bordered by the road leading to the little village of Ober Weimar, another sunny walk which has the special attraction of taking one by Goethe's Garten- haus, his first residence at Weimar. Inside, this Gartenhaus is a homely sort of cottage, such as many an English noble- man's gardener lives in; no furniture is left in it, and the family wish to sell it. Outside, its aspect became to us like that of a dear friend, whose irregular features and rusty clothes have a peculiar charm. It stands, with its bit of garden and orchard, on a pleasant slope, fronting the west; before it the park stretches one of its meadowy openings to the trees which fringe the Ilm, and between this meadow and the garden hedge lies the said road to Ober Weimar. A grove of weeping birches sometimes tempted us to turn out of this road up to the fields at the top of the slope, on which not only THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR. 179 the Gartenhaus but several other modest villas are placed. From this little height one sees to advantage the plantations of the park in their autumnal coloring ; the town with its steep- roofed church, and castle clock-tower, painted a gay green; the bushy line of the Belvedere chaussee, and Belvedere itself peeping on an eminence from its nest of trees. Here, too, was the place for seeing a lovely sunset, such a sunset as September sometimes gives us, when the western horizon is like a rippled sea of gold, sending over the whole hemisphere golden vapors, which, as they near the east, are subdued to a deep rose-color. The Schloss is rather a stately, ducal-looking building, form- ing three sides of a quadrangle. Strangers are admitted to see a suit of rooms called the Dichter-Zimmer (Poets' Eooms), dedicated to Goethe, Schiller, and Wieland. The idea of these rooms is really a pretty one : in each of them there is a bust of the poet who is its presiding genius, and the walls of the Schiller and Goethe rooms are covered with frescos representing scenes from their works. The Wieland room is much smaller than the other two, and serves as an ante-cham- ber to them ; it is also decorated more sparingly, but the ara- besques on the walls are very tastefully designed, and satisfy one better than the ambitious compositions from Goethe and Schiller. A more interesting place to visitors is the library, which occupies a large building not far from the Schloss. The prin- cipal Saal, surrounded by a broad gallery, is ornamented with some very excellent busts and some very bad portraits. Of the busts, the most remarkable is that of Gluck, by Houdon a striking specimen of the real in art. The sculptor has given every scar made by the small-pox; he has left the nose as pug and insignificant, and the mouth as common, as Nature made them; but then he has done what, doubtless, Nature also did he has spread over those coarsely cut features the irradiation of genius. A specimen of the opposite style in art is Trippel's bust of Goethe as the young Apollo, also fine in its way. It was taken when Goethe was in Italy; and in the " Italianische Reise," mentioning the progress of the bust, he says that he sees little likeness to himself, but is not discon- 180 THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR. tented that he should go forth to the world as such a good- looking fellow hubscher Bursch. This bust, however, is a frank idealization : when an artist tells us that the ideal of a Greek god divides his attention with his immediate subject, we are warned. But one gets rather irritated with idealiza- tion in portrait when, as in Dannecker's bust of Schiller, one has been misled into supposing that Schiller's brow was square and massive, while, in fact, it was receding. We say this partly on the evidence of his skull, a cast of which is kept in the library, so that we could place it in juxtaposition with the bust. The story of this skull is curious. When it was deter- mined to disinter Schiller's remains, that they might repose in company with those of Carl August and Goethe, the ques- tion of identification was found to be a difficult one, for his bones were mingled with those of ten insignificant fellow- mortals. When, however, the eleven skulls were placed in juxtaposition, a large number of persons who had known Schiller, separately and successively fixed upon the same skull as his, and their evidence was clinched by the discovery that the teeth of this skull corresponded to the statement of Schil- ler's servant, that his master had lost no teeth, except one, which he specified. Accordingly it was decided that this was Schiller's skull, and the comparative anatomist, Loder, was sent for from Jena to select the bones which completed the skeleton. ' The evidence certainly leaves room for a doubt ; but the receding forehead of the skull agrees with the testimony of persons who knew Schiller, that he had, as Rauch said to us, a " miserable forehead " ; it agrees, also, with a beautiful miniature of Schiller, taken when he was about twenty. This miniature is deeply interesting; it shows us a youth whose clearly cut features, with the mingled fire and melancholy of their expression, could hardly have been passed with indiffer- ence; it has the langer Gdnsehals (long goose-neck) which he gives to his Karl Moor; but instead of the black, sparkling eyes, and the gloomy, overhanging, bushy e'yebrows he chose 'I tell this story from my recollection of Stahr's account in bis "Weimar und Jena," an account which was confirmed to me by residents in Weimar ; but as I have not the book by me, I eannot test the accuracy of uiy memory. THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR. 181 for his robber hero, it has the fine wavy, auburn locks, and the light-blue eyes which belong to our idea of pure German race. We may be satisfied that we know at least the form of Schiller's features, for in this particular his busts and portraits are in striking accordance; unlike the busts and portraits of Goethe, which are a proof, if any were wanted, how inevitably subjective art is, even when it professes to be purely imitative how the most active perception gives us rather a reflex of what we think and feel, than the real sum of objects before us. The Goethe of Rauch or of Schwan- thaler is widely different in form, as well as expression, from the Goethe of Stieler ; and Winterberger, the actor, who knew Goethe intimately, told us that to him not one of all the Mke- nesses, sculptured or painted, seemed to have more than a faint resemblance to their original. There is, indeed, one likeness, taken in his old age, and preserved in the library, which is startling from the conviction it produces of close re- semblance, and Winterberger admitted it to be the best he had seen. It is a tiny miniature painted on a small cup, of Dresden china, and is so wonderfully executed, that a magni- fying-glass exhibits the perfection of its texture as if it were a flower or a butterfly's wing. It is more like Stieler' s por- trait than any other; the massive neck, unbent though with- ered, rises out of his dressing-gown, and supports majestically a head, from which one might imagine (though, alas ! it never is so in reality) that the discipline of seventy years had purged away all meaner elements than those of the sage and the poet a head which might serve as a type of sublime old age. Amongst the collection of toys and trash, melancholy records of the late Grand Duke's eccentricity, which occupy the upper rooms of the library, there are some precious relics hanging together in a glass case, which almost betray one into sympathy with "holy coat" worship. They are Luther's gown, the coat in which Gustavus Adolphus was shot, and Goethe's Court coat and Schlafrock. What a rush of thoughts from the mingled memories of the passionate reformer, the heroic warrior, and the wise singer! The only one of its great men to whom Weimar has at pres- ent erected a statue in the open air is Herder. His statue, 182 THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR. erected in 1850, stands in what is called the Herder Platz, with its back to the church in which he preached; in the right hand is a roll bearing his favorite motto Licht, Liebe, Leben (Light, Love, Life), and on the pedestal is the inscrip- tion Von Deutschen oiler Lander (from Germans of all lands). This statue, which is by Schaller of Munich, is very much admired; but, remembering the immortal description in the "Dichtung uud Wahrheit," of Herder's appearance when Goethe saw him for the first time at Strasburg, I was disap- pointed with the parsonic appearance of the statue, as well as of the bust in the library. The part of the town which im- prints itself on the memory, next to the Herder Platz, is the Markt, a cheerful square, made smart by a new Rath-haus. Twice a week it is crowded with stalls and country people ; and it is the very pretty custom for the band to play in the balcony of the Rath-haus about twenty minutes every market- day to delight the ears of the peasantry. A head-dress worn by many of the old women, and here and there by a young one, is, I think, peculiar to Thuringia. Let the fair reader imagine half a dozen of her broadest French sashes dyed black, and attached as streamers to the back of a stiff black skull-cap, ornamented in front with a large bow, which stands out like a pair of donkey's ears; let her further imagine, min- gled with the streamers of ribbon, equally broad pendants of a thick woollen texture, something like the fringe of an urn- rug, and she will have an idea of the head-dress in which I have seen a Thuringian damsel figure on a hot summer's day. Two houses in the Markt are pointed out as those from which Tetzel published his indulgences and Luther thundered against them ; but it is difficult to one's imagination to conjure up scenes of theological controversy in Weimar, where, from princes down to pastry-cooks, rationalism is taken as a matter of course. Passing along the Schiller-strasse, a broad pleasant street, one is thrilled by the inscription, Hier wohnte Schiller, over the door of a small house with casts in its bow-window. Mount up to the second story and you will see Schiller's study very nearly as it was when he worked in it. It is a cheerful room with three windows, two toward the street and one looking THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR. 183 on a little garden which divides his house from the neighbor- ing one. The writing-table, which he notes as an important purchase in one of his letters to Kb'rner, and in one of the drawers of which he used to keep rotten apples for the sake of their scent, stands near the last-named window, so that its light would fall on his left hand. On another side of the room is his piano, with his guitar lying upon it; and above these hangs an ugly print of an Italian scene, which has a .companion equally ugly on another wall. Strange feelings it awakened in me to run my ringers over the keys of the little piano and call forth its tones, now so queer and feeble, like those of an invalided old woman whose voice could once make ;a heart beat with fond passion or soothe its angry pulses into calm. The bedstead on which Schiller died has been removed into the study, from the small bedroom behind, which is now empty. A little table is placed close to the head of the bed, with his driuking-glass upon it, and on the wall above the, bedstead there is a beautiful sketch of him lying dead. He used to occupy the whole of the second floor. It contains, be- sides the study and bedroom, an ante-chamber, now furnished with casts and prints on sale, in order to remunerate the cus- todiers of the house, and a salon tricked out, since his death, with a symbolical cornice, statues, and a carpet worked by the ladies of Weimar. Goethe's house is much more important-looking, but, to English eyes, far from being the palatial residence which might be expected, from the descriptions of German writers. The entrance-hall is indeed rather imposing, with its statues in niches, and its broad staircase, but the rest of the house is not proportionately spacious and elegant. The only part of the house open to the public and this only on a Friday is the principal suite of rooms which contain his collection of casts, pictures, cameos, etc. This collection is utterly insig- nificant, except as having belonged to him; and one turns away from bad pictures and familiar casts, to linger over the manuscript of the wonderful " Eomische Elegien, " written by himself in the Italian character. It is to be regretted that a large sum offered for this house by the German Diet, was refused by the Goethe family, in the hope, it is said, of ob- 184 THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR. taining a still larger sum from that mythical English Croesus always ready to turn fabulous sums into dead capital, who haunts the imagination of Continental people. One of the most fitting tributes a nation can pay to its great dead, is to make their habitation, like their works, a public possession, a shrine where affectionate reverence may be more vividly reminded that the being who has bequeathed to us immortal thoughts or immortal deeds, had to endure the daily struggle with the petty details, perhaps with the sordid cares of this working-day world; and it is a sad pity that Goethe's study, bedroom, and library, so fitted to call up that kind of sym- pathy, because they are preserved just as he left them, should be shut out from all but the specially privileged. We were happy enough to be amongst these, to look through the mist of rising tears at the dull study with its two small windows, and without a single object chosen for the, sake of luxury or beauty; at the dark little bedroom with the bed on which he died, and the arm-chair where he took his morning coffee as he read; at the library with its common deal shelves, and books containing his own paper marks. In the presence of this hardy simplicity, the contrast suggests itself of the study at Abbotsford with its elegant Gothic fittings, its delicious easy-chair, and its oratory of painted glass. We were very much amused at the privacy with which peo- ple keep their shops at Weimar. Some of them have not so much as their names written up ; and there is so much indif- ference of manner toward customers, that one might suppose every shopkeeper was a salaried functionary employed by Gov- ernment. The distribution of commodities, too, is carried on according to a peculiar Weiniarian logic : we bought our lemons at a ropemaker's, and should not have felt ourselves very un- reasonable if we had asked for shoes at a stationer's. As to competition, I should think a clever tradesman or artificer is almost as free from it at Weimar as JEsculapius or Vulcan in the days of old Olympus. Here is an illustration. Our landlady's husband was called the ".*/ Rabenhorst," by way of distinguishing him from a brother of his who was the reverse of sweet. This Rabenhorst, who was not sweet, but who nevertheless dealt in sweets, for he was a confectioner, MONTHS IX WEIMAR. 185 was so utter a rogue that any transaction with him was avoided almost as much as if he had been the Evil One himself, yet so clever a rogue that he always managed to keep on the windy side of the law. Nevertheless, he had so many dainties in the confectionery line so viel Siissigkeiten und Leckerbissen that people bent on giving a fine entertainment were at last constrained to say, "After all, I must go to Rabenhorst" ; and so he got abundant custom, in spite of general detestation. A very fair dinner is to be had at several tables d'hote in Weimar for ten or twelve groschen (a shilling or fifteen- pence). The Germans certainly excel us in their Mehlspeise, or farinaceous puddings, and in their mode of cooking vege- tables ; they are bolder and more imaginative in their combi- nation of sauces, fruits, and vegetables with animal food, and they are faithful to at least one principle of dietetics variety. The only thing at table we have any pretext for being super- cilious about is the quality and dressing of animal food. The meat at a table d'hote in Thuringia, and even Berlin, except in the very first hotels, bears about the same relation to ours as horse-flesh probably bears to German beef and mutton; .and an Englishman with a bandage over his eyes would often be sorely puzzled to guess the kind of flesh he was eating. For example, the only flavor we could ever discern in hare, which is a very frequent dish, was that of the more or less disagreeable fat which predominated in the dressing; and roast meat seems to be considered an extravagance rarely ad- missible. A melancholy sight is a flock of Weimarian sheep, followed or led by their shepherd. They are as dingy as Lon- don sheep, and far more skinny; indeed an Englishman who dined with us said the sight of the sheep had set him against mutton. Still, the variety of dishes you get for ten groschen is something marvellous to those who have been accustomed to English charges, and among the six courses it is not a great evil to find a dish or two the reverse of appetizing. I sup- pose, however, that the living at tables d'hote gives one no cor- rect idea of the mode in which the people live at home. The basis of the national food seems to be raw ham and sausage, with a copious superstratum of Blaukraut. Sauerkraut, and black bread. Sausage seems to be to the German what pota- 186 THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR. toes were to the Irish the sine qua non of bodily sustenance. Goethe asks the Frau von Stein to send him so eine Wurst when he wants to have a makeshift dinner away from home ; and in his letters to Kestner he is in enthusiastic about the delights of dining on Blaukraut and Leberwurst (blue cab- bage and liver sausage). If Kraut and Wurst may be called the solid prose of Thuringian diet, fish and Kuchen (generally a heavy kind of fruit tart) are the poetry : the German appe- tite disports itself with these as the English appetite does with ices and whipped creams. At the beginning of August, when we arrived in Weimar, almost every one was away "at the Baths," of course ex- cept the tradespeople. As birds nidify in the spring, so Ger- mans wash themselves in the summer ; their Waschungstrleb acts strongly only at a particular time of the year ; during all the rest, apparently, a decanter and a sugar-basin or pie-dish are an ample toilet-service for them. We were quite con- tented, however, that it was not yet the Weimar "season," fashionably speaking, since it was the very best time for en- joying something far better than Weimar gayeties the lovely park and environs. It was pleasant, too, to see the good bo- vine citizens enjoying life in their quiet fashion. Unlike our English people, they take pleasure into their calculations, and seem regularly to set aside part of their time for recreation. It is understood that something is to be done in life besides business and housewifery : the women take their children and their knitting to the Erholung, or walk with their husbands to Belvedere, or in some other direction where a cup of coffee is to be had. The HJrholung, by the way, is a pretty garden, with shady walks, abundant seats, an orchestra, a ball-room, and a place for refreshments. The higher classes are sub- scribers and visitors here as well as the bourgeoisie; but there are several resorts of a similar kind frequented by the latter exclusively. The reader of Goethe will remember his little poem, " Die Lustigen von Weimar, " which still indicates the round of amusements in this simple capital : the walk to Bel- vedere or Tiefurt; the excursion to Jena, or some other trip, not made expensive by distance; the round game at cards; the dance ; the theatre ; and so many other enjoyments to be THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR. 187 had by a people not bound to give dinner-parties and " keep up a position." " It is charming to see how real an amusement the theatre is to the Weimar people. The greater number of places are oc- cupied by subscribers, and there is no fuss about toilet or es- cort. The ladies come alone, and slip quietly into their places without need of " protection '- a proof of civilization perhaps more than equivalent to our pre-eminence in patent locks and carriage springs and after the performance is over, you may see the same ladies following their servants, with lanterns, through streets innocent of gas, in which an oil-lamp, sus- pended from a rope slung across from house to house, occa- sionally reveals to you the shafts of a cart or omnibus conven- iently placed for you to run upon them. A yearly autumn festival at Weimar is the Vogelschiessen, or Bird-shooting ; but the reader must not let his imagination wander at this word into fields and brakes. The bird here concerned is of wood, and the shooters, instead of wandering over breezy down and common, are shut up, day after day, in a room clouded with tobacco-smoke, that they may take their turn at shooting with the rifle from the window of a closet about the size of a sentinel's box. However, this is a mighty enjoyment to the Thuringian yeomanry, and an occasion of profit to our friend Punch, and other itinerant performers ; for while the Vogelschiessen lasts, a sort of fair is held in the field where the marksmen assemble. Among the quieter every-day pleasures of the Weimariaus, perhaps the most delightful is the stroll on a bright afternoon or evening to the Duke's summer residence of Belvedere, about two miles from Weimar. As I have said, a glorious avenue of chestnut-trees leads all the way from the town to the en- trance of the grounds, which are open to all the world as much as to the Duke himself. Close to the palace and its subsidiary buildings there is an inn, for the accommodation of the good people who come to take dinner or any other meal here, by way of holiday-making. A sort of pavilion stands on a spot commanding a lovely view of Weimar and its valley, and here the Weimarians constantly come on summer and autumn even- ings to smoke a cigar, or drink a cup of coffee. In one wing 1S8 THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR. of the little palace, which is made smart by wooden cupolas, with gilt pinnacles, there is a saloon, which I recommend to the imitation of tasteful people in their country houses. It has no decoration but that of natural foliage : ivy is trained at regular intervals up the pure white walls, and all round the edge of the ceiling, so as to form pilasters and a cornice; ivy again, trained on trellis- work, forms a blind to the window, which looks toward the entrance court; and beautiful ferns, arranged in tall baskets, are placed here and there against the walls. The furniture is of light cane-work. Another pretty thing here is the Natur-Theater a theatre constructed with living trees, trimmed into walls and side scenes. We pleased ourselves for a little while with thinking that this was one of the places where Goethe acted in his own dramas, but we afterward learned that it was not made until his acting days were over. The inexhaustible charm of Belvedere, however, is the grounds, which are laid out with a taste worthy of a first- rate landscape-gardener. The tall and graceful limes, plane- trees, and weeping birches, the little basins of water here and there, with fountains playing in the middle of them, and with a fringe of broad-leaved plants, or other tasteful bordering round them, the gradual descent toward the river, and the hill clothed with firs and pines on the opposite side, forming a fine dark background for the various and light foliage of the trees that ornament the gardens all this we went again and again to enjoy, from the time when everything was of a vivid green until the Virginian creepers which festooned the silver stems of the birches were bright scarlet, and the touch of autumn had turned all the green to gold. One of the spots to linger in is at a semicircular seat against an artificial rock, on which are placed large glass globes of different colors. It is wonderful to see with what minute perfection the scenery around is painted in these globes. Each is like a pre-Raphaelite picture, with every little detail of gravelly walk, mossy bank, and delicately leaved, interlacing boughs, presented in accurate miniature. In the opposite direction to Belvedere lies Tiefurt, with its small park and tiny chateau, formerly the residence of the Duchess Amalia, the mother of Carl August, and the friend and patroness of Wieland, but now apparently serving as little THEEE MONTHS IN WEIMAR, 189 else than a receptacle for the late Duke Carl Friederich's rather childish collections. In the second story there is a suite of rooms, so small that the largest of them does not take up as much spacS as a good dining-table, and each of these doll- house rooms is crowded with prints, old china, and all sorts of knick-knacks and rococo wares. The park is a little para- dise. The Ilm is seen here to the best advantage : it is clearer than at Weimar, and winds about gracefully between the banks, on one side steep r and curtained with turf and shrubs, or fine trees. It was here, at a point where the bank forms a promontory into the river, that Goethe and his Court friends got up the performance of an operetta, "Die Fischerin," by torchlight. On the way to Tiefurt lies the Webicht, a beau- tiful wood, through which runs excellent carriage-roads and grassy footpaths. It was a rich enjoyment to skirt this wood along the Jena road, and see the sky arching grandly down over the open fields on the other side of us, the evening red flushing the west over the town, and the stars coming out as if to relieve the sun in its watch ; or to take the winding road through the wood, under its tall overarching trees, now bend- ing their mossy trunks forward, now standing with the stately erectness of lofty pillars ; or to saunter along the grassy foot- paths where the sunlight streamed through the fairy -like foliage of the silvery barked birches. Stout pedestrians who go to Weimar will do well to make a walking excursion, as we did, to Ettersburg, a more distant summer residence of the Grand Duke, interesting to us before- hand as the scene of private theatricals and sprees in the Goethe days. We set out on one of the brightest and hottest mornings that August ever bestowed, and it required some resolution to trudge along the shadeless chaussee, which formed the first two or three miles of our way. One compen- sating pleasure was the sight of the beautiful mountain-ash trees in full berry, which, alternately with cherry-trees, bor- der the road for a considerable distance. At last we rested from our broiling walk on the borders of a glorious pine-wood, so extensive that the trees in the distance form a complete wall with their trunks, and so give one a twilight very wel- come on a summer's noon. Under these pines you tread on a. 190 THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR. carpet of the softest moss, so that you hear no sound of a foot- step, and all is as solemn and still as in the crypt of a cathe- dral. Presently we passed out of the pine-wood into one of limes, beeches, and other trees of transparent and light foliage, and from this again we emerged into the open space of the Ettersburg Park in front of the Schloss, which is finely placed on an eminence commanding a magnificent view of the far- reaching woods. Prince Puckler Muskau has been of service here by recommending openings to be made in the woods, in the taste of the English parks. The Schloss, which is a fa- vorite residence of the Grand Duke, is a house of very moder- ate size, and no pretension of any kind. Its stuccoed walls, and doors long unacquainted with fresh paint, would look dis- tressingly shabby to the owner of a villa at Richmond or Twickenham; but much beauty is procured here at slight expense, by the tasteful disposition of creepers on the ba- lustrades, and pretty vases full of plants ranged along the steps, or suspended in the little piazza beneath them. A walk through a beech-wood took us to the Mooshlitte, in front of which stands the famous beech from whence Goethe denounced Jacobi's " Woldemar." The bark is covered with initials cut by him and his friends. People who only allow themselves to be idle under the pre- text of hydropathizing, may find all the apparatus necessary to satisfy their conscience at Bercka, a village seated in a lovely valley about six miles from Weimar. Now and then a Wei- mar family takes lodgings here for the summer, retiring from the quiet of the capital to the deeper quiet of Bercka ; but generally the place seems not much frequented. It would be difficult to imagine a more peace-inspiring scene than this lit- tle valley. The hanging woods the soft coloring and grace- ful outline of the uplands the village, with its roofs and spire of a reddish-violet hue, muffled in luxuriant trees the white Kurhaus glittering on a grassy slope-^-the avenue of poplars contrasting its pretty primness with the wild bushy outline of the wood-covered hill, which rises abruptly from the smooth, green meadows the clear winding stream, now sparkling in the sun, now hiding itself under soft gray willows, all this makes an enchanting picture. The walk to Bercka and back THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR. 191 was a favorite expedition with us and a few Weimar friends, for the road thither is a pleasant one, leading at first through open cultivated fields, dotted here and there with villages, and then through wooded hills the outskirts of the Thurin- gian Forest. We used not to despise the fine plums which hung in tempting abundance by the road-side ; but we after- ward found that we had been deceived in supposing ourselves free to pluck them, as if it were the golden age, and that we were liable to a penalty of ten groschen for our depredations. But I must not allow myself to be exhaustive on pleasures which seem monotonous when told, though in enjoying them one is as far from wishing them to be more various as from wishing for any change in the sweet sameness of successive summer days. I will only advise the reader who has yet to make excursions in Thuringia to visit Jena, less for its tradi- tions than for its fine scenery, which makes it, as Goethe says, a delicious place, in spite of its dull, ugly streets ; and exhort him, above all, to brave the discomforts of a Postwagen for the sake of getting to Ilmenau. Here he will find the grandest pine-clad hills, with endless walks under their sol- emn shades ; beech-woods where every tree is a picture ; an air that he will breathe with as conscious a pleasure as if he were taking iced water on a hot day; baths ad libitum, with a douche lofty and tremendous enough to invigorate the giant Cormoran; and, more than all, one of the most interesting relics of Goethe, who had a great love for Ilmenau. This is the small wooden house, on the height called the Kickelhahn, where he often lived in his long retirements here, and where you may see written by his own hand, near the window-frame, those wonderful lines perhaps the finest expression yet given to the sense of resignation inspired by the sublime calm of Nature : "Ueber alien Gipfeln 1st Ruh, In alien Wipfeln Spiirest du Kaum einen Hauch ; Die Vogelein schweigen im Walde. Warte nur, balde fullest du auch." ADDRESS TO WORKING MEN, BY FELIX HOLT. FELLOW- WORKMEN, I am not going to take up your time by complimenting you. It has been the fashion to compli- ment kings and other authorities when they have come into power, and to tell them that, under their wise and beneficent rule, happiness would certainly overflow the land. But the end has not always corresponded to that beginning. If it were true that we who work for wages had more of the wis- dom and virtue necessary to the right use of power than has been shown by the aristocratic and mercantile classes, we should not glory much in that fact, or consider that it carried with it any near approach to infallibility. In my opinion, there has been too much complimenting of that sort; and whenever a speaker, whether he is one of our- selves or not, wastes our time in boasting or flattery, I say, let us hiss him. If we have the beginning of wisdom, which is, to know a little truth about ourselves, we know that as a body we are neither very wise nor very virtuous. And to prove this, I will not point specially to our own habits and doings, but to the general state of the country. Any nation that had within it a majority of men and we are the major- ity possessed of much wisdom and virtue, would not toler- ate the bad practices, the commercial lying and swindling, the poisonous adulteration of goods, the retail cheating, and the- political bribery, which are carried on boldly in the midst of us. A majority has the power of creating a public opinion.. We could groan and hiss before we had the franchise : if we had groaned and hissed in the right place, if we had discerned better between good and evil, if the multitude of us artisans, and factory hands, and miners, and laborers of all sorts, had been skilful, faithful, well-judging, industrious, sober and I don't see how there can be wisdom and virtue anywhere with- out those qualities we should have made an audience that* ADDRESS TO WORKING MEN. 193 would have shamed the other classes out of their share in the national vices. We should have had better members of Parliament, better religious teachers, honester tradesmen, fewer foolish demagogues, less impudence in infamous and brutal men ; and we should not have had among us the abomi- nation of men calling themselves religious while living in splendor on ill-gotten gains. I say, it is not possible for any society in which there is a very large body of wise and virtu- ous men to be as vicious as our society is to have as low a standard of right and wrong, to have so much belief in false- hood, or to have so degrading, barbarous a notion of what pleasure is, or of what justly raises a man above his fellows. Therefore, let us have done with this nonsense about our be- ing much better than the rest of our countrymen, or the pre- tence that that was a reason why we ought to have such an extension of the franchise as has been given to us. The rea- son for our having the franchise, as I want presently to show, lies somewhere else than in our personal good qualities, and does not in the least lie in any high betting chance that a dele- gate is a better man than a duke, or that a Sheffield grinder is a better man than any one of the firm he works for. However, we have got our franchise now. We have been sarcastically called in the House of Commons the future mas- ters of the country ; and if that sarcasm contains any truth, it seems to me that the first thing we had better think of is, our heavy responsibility ; that is to say, the terrible risk we run of working mischief and missing good, as others have done before us. Suppose certain men, discontented with the irrigation of a country which depended for all its prosperity on the right direction being given to the waters of a great river, had got the management of the irrigation before they were quite sure how exactly it could be altered for the bet- ter, or whether they could command the necessary agency for such an alteration. Those men would have a difficult and dangerous business on their hands ; and the more sense, feeling, and knowledge they had, the more they would be likely to tremble rather than to triumph. Our situation is not altogether unlike theirs. For general prosperity and well-being is a vast crop, that like the corn in Egypt can 13 '194 ADDRESS TO WORKING MEN, be come at, not at all by hurried snatching, but only by a well-judged patient process ; and whether our political power will be any good to us now we have got it, must depend entirely on the means and materials the knowledge, abil- ity, and honesty we have at command. These three things are the only conditions on which we can get any lasting bene- fit, as every clever workman among us knows: he knows that for an article to be worth much there must be a good invention or plan to go upon, there must be well-prepared material, and there must be skilful and honest work in carry- ing out the plan. And by this test we may try those who want to be our leaders. Have they anything to offer us be- sides indignant talk? When they tell us we ought to have this, that, or the other thing, can they explain to us any rea- sonable, fair, safe way of getting it? Can they argue in favor of a particular change by showing us pretty closely how the change is likely to work? I don't want to decry a just indig- nation ; on the contrary, I should like it to be more thorough and general. A wise man, more than two thousand years ago, when he was asked what would most tend to lessen injustice in the world, said, " That every bystander should feel as indig- nant at a wrong as if he himself were the sufferer." Let us cherish such indignation. But the long-growing evils of a great nation are a tangled business, asking for a good deal more than indignation in order to be got rid of. Indignation is a fine war-horse, but the war-horse must be ridden by a man : it must be ridden by rationality, skill, courage, armed with the right weapons, and taking definite aim. We have reason to be discontented with many things, and, looking back either through the history of England to much earlier generations or to the legislation and administration of later times, we are justified in saying that many of the evils under which our country now suffers are the consequences of folly, ignorance, neglect, or self-seeking in those who, at different times, have wielded the powers of rank, office, and money. But the more bitterly we feel this, the more loudly we utter" it, the stronger is the obligation we lay on ourselves to beware lest we also, by a too hasty wrestling of measures which seem to promise an immediate partial relief, make a BY FELIX HOLT. worse time of it for our own generation, and leave a bad in- heritance to our children. The deepest curse of wrong-doing, whether of the foolish or wicked sort, is that its effects are difficult to be undone. I suppose there is hardly anything more, to be shuddered at than that part of the history of dis- ease which shows how, when a man injures his constitution by a life of- vicious excess, his children and grandchildren inherit diseased bodies and minds, and how the effects of that un- happy inheritance continue to spread beyond our calculation. This is only one example of the law by which human lives are linked together: another example of what we complain of when we point to our pauperism, to the brutal ignorance of multitudes among our fellow-countrymen, to the weight of tax- ation laid on us by blamable wars, to the wasteful channels made for the public money, to the expense and trouble of getting justice, and call these the effects of bad rule. This is the law that we all bear the yoke of, the law of no man's making, and which no man can undo.' Everybody now sees an example of it in the case of Ireland. We who are living now are sufferers by the wrong-doing of those who lived be- fore us; we are sufferers by each other's wrong-doing ; and the children who come after us are and will be sufferers from the same causes. Will any man say he doesn't care for that law it is nothing to him what he wants is to better him- self? With what face then will he complain of any injury? If he says that in politics or in any sort of social action he will not care to know what are likely to be the consequences to others besides himself, he is defending the very worst do- ings that have brought about his discontent. He might as well say that there is no better rule needful for men than that each should tug and rive for what will please him, without car- ing how that tugging will act on the fine widespread network of society in which he is fast meshed. If any man taught that as a doctrine, we should know him for a fool. But there are men who act upon it : every scoundrel, for example, whether he is a rich religious scoundrel who lies and cheats on a large scale, and will perhaps come and ask you to send him to Parliament, or a poor pocket-picking scoundrel, who will steal your loose pence while you are listening round the 196 ADDRESS TO WORKING MEN, platform. None of us are so ignorant as not to know that a society, a nation, is held together by just the opposite doc- trine and action by the dependence of men on each other and the sense they have of a common interest in preventing injury. And we working men are, I think, of all classes the last that can afford to forget this ; for if we did we should be much like sailors cutting away the timbers of our own ship to warm our grog with. For what else is the meaning of our Trades- unions? What else is the meaning of every flag we carry, every procession we make, every crowd we collect for the sake of making some protest on behalf of our body as receivers of wages, if not this : that it is our interest to stand by each other, and that this being the common interest, no one of us will try to make a good bargain for himself without consider- ing what will be good for his fellows? And every member of a union believes that the wider he can spread his union, the stronger and surer will be the effect of it. So I think I shall be borne out in saying that a working man who can put two and two together, or take three from four and see what will be the remainder, can understand that a society, to be well off, must be made up chiefly of men who consider the general good as well as their own. Well, but taking the world as it is and this is one way we must take it when we want to find out how it can be -improved no society is made up of a single class : society stands before us like that wonderful piece of life, the human body, with all its various parts depending on one another, and with a terrible liability to get wrong because of that delicate dependence. We all know how many diseases the human body is apt. to suffer from, and how difficult it is even for the doctors to find out exactly where the seat or beginning of the "disorder is. That is because the body is made up of so many various parts, all related to each other, or likely all to feel the effect if any one of them goes wrong. It is somewhat the same with our old nations or societies. No society ever stood long in tne world without getting to be composed of different classes. Now, it is all pretence to say that there is no such thing as Class Interest. It is clear that if any particular number of men get a particular benefit from any existing institution, BY FELIX HOLf. 197 they are likely to band together, in order to keep up that ben- efit and increase it, until it is perceived to be unfair and inju- rious to another large number, who get knowledge and strength enough to set up a resistance. And this, again, has been part of the history of every great society since history began. But the simple reason for this being, that any large body of men is likely to have more of stupidity, narrowness, and greed than of far-sightedness and generosity, it is plain that the number who resist unfairness and injury are in danger of becoming injurious in their turn. And in this way a justifiable resist- ance has become a damaging convulsion, making everything worse instead of better. This has been seen so often that we ought to profit a little by the experience. So long as there is selfishness in men; so long as they have not found out for themselves institutions which express and carry into practice the truth, that the highest interest of mankind must at last be a common and not a divided interest ; so long as the gradual operation of steady causes has not made that truth a part of every man's knowledge and feeling, just as we now not only know that it is good for our health to be cleanly, but feel that cleanliness is only another word for comfort, which is the under-side or lining of all pleasure; so long, I say, as men wink at their own knowingness, or hold their heads high, be- cause they have got an advantage over their fellows ; so long Class Interest will be in danger of making itself felt injuri- ously. No set of men will get any sort of power without being in danger of wanting more than their right share. But, on the other hand, it is just as certain that no set of men will get angry at having less than their right share, and set up a claim on that ground, without falling into just the same dan- ger of exacting too much, and exacting it in wrong ways. It' s human nature we have got to work wibh all round, and noth- ing else. That seems like saying something very common- place nay, obvious ; as if one should say that where there are hands there are mouths. Yet, to hear a good deal of the speech- ifying and to see a good deal of the action that goes forward, one might suppose it was forgotten. But I come back to this : that, in our old society, there are old institutions, and among them the various distinctions and 198 ADDRESS TO WORKING MEN, inherited advantages of classes, which have shaped themselves along with all the wonderful slow-growing system of things made up of our laws, our commerce, and our stores of all sorts, whether in material objects, such as buildings and machinery, or in knowledge, such as scientific thought and professional skill. Just as in that case I spoke of before, the irrigation of a coun- try, which must absolutely have its water distributed or it will bear no crop ; there are the old channels, the old banks, and the old pumps, which must be used as they are until new and better have been prepared, or the structure of the old has been gradually altered. But it would be fool's work to batter down a pump only because a better might be made, when you had no machinery ready for a new one : it would be wicked work, if villages lost their crops by it. Now the only safe way by which society can be steadily improved and our worst evils reduced, is not by any attempt to do away directly with the actually existing class distinctions and advantages, as if every- body could have the same sort of work, or lead the same sort of life (which none of my hearers are stupid enough to sup- pose), but by the turning of Class Interests into Class Func- tions or duties. What I mean is, that each class should be urged by the surrounding conditions to perform its particular work under the strong pressure of responsibility to the nation at large ; that our public affairs should be got into a state in which there should be no impunity for foolish or faithless con- duct. In this way, the public judgment would sift out inca- pability and dishonesty from posts of high charge, and even personal ambition would necessarily become of a worthier sort, since the desires of the most selfish men must be a good deal shaped by the opinions of those around them; and for one person to put on a cap and bells, or to go about dishonest or paltry ways of getting rich that he may spend a vast sum of money in having more finery than his neighbors, ho must be pretty sure of a crowd who will applaud him. Now changes can only be good in proportion as they help to bring about this sort of result : in proportion as they put knowledge in the place of ignorance, and fellow-feeling in the place of selfish- ness. In the course of that substitution class distinctions must inevitably change their character, and represent the varying BY FELIX HOLT. Duties of men, not their varying Interests. But this end will not come by impatience. " Day will not break the sooner be- cause we get up before the twilight. " Still less will it come by mere undoing, or change merely as change. And more- over, if we believed that it would be unconditionally hastened by our getting the franchise, we should be what I call super- stitious men, believing in magic, or the production of a result by hocus-pocus. Our getting the franchise will greatly hasten that good end in proportion only as every one of us has the knowledge, the foresight, the conscience, that will make him well- judging and scrupulous in the use of it. The nature of things in this world has been determined for us beforehand, and in such a way that no ship can be expected to sail well on a difficult voyage, and reach the right port, unless it is well manned: the nature of the winds and the waves, of the tim- bers, the sails, and the cordage, will not accommodate itself to drunken, mutinous sailors. You will not suspect me of wanting to preach any cant to you, or of joining in the pretence that everything is in a fine way, and need not be made better. What I am striving to keep in our minds is the care,' the precaution, with which we should go about making things better, so that the public order may not be destroyed, so that no fatal shock may be given to this society of ours, this living body in which our lives are bound up. After the Reform Bill of 1832 I was in an elec- tion riot, which showed me clearly, on a small scale, what public disorder must always be; and I have never forgotten that the riot was brought about chiefly by the agency of dis- honest men who professed to be on the people's side. Now, the danger hanging over change is great, just in proportion as it tends to produce such disorder by giving any large number of ignorant men, whose notions of what is good are of a low and brutal sort, the belief that they have got power into their hands, and may do pretty much as they like. If any one can look round us and say that he sees no signs of any such dan- ger now, and that our national condition is running along like a clear broadening stream, safe not to get choked with mud, I call him a cheerful man : perhaps he does his own garden- ing, and seldom takes exercise far away from home. To ua 200 ADDRESS TO WORKING MEN, who have no gardens, and often walk abroad, it is plain that we can never get into a bit of a crowd but we must rub clothes with a set of Roughs, who have the worst vices of the worst rich who are gamblers, sots, libertines, knaves, or else mere sensual simpletons and victims. They are the ugly crop that has sprung up while the stewards have been sleeping; they are the multiplying brood begotten by parents who have been left without all teaching save that of a too craving body, with- out all well-being save the fading delusions of drugged beer and gin. They are the hideous margin of society, at one edge drawing toward it the undesigning ignorant poor, at the other darkening imperceptibly into the lowest criminal class. Here is one of the evils which cannot be got rid of quickly, and against which any of us who have got sense, decency, and in- struction have need to watch. That these degraded fellow- men could really get the mastery in a persistent disobedience to the laws and in a struggle to subvert order, I do not be- lieve ; but wretched calamities would come from the very be- ginning of such a struggle, and the continuance of it would be a civil war, in which the inspiration on both sides might soon cease to be even a false notion of good, and might become the direct savage impulse of ferocity. We have all to see U) it that we do not help to rouse what I may call the savage beast in the breasts of our generation that we do not help to poison the nation' s blood, and make richer provision for besti ality to come. We know well enough that oppressors have sinned in this way that oppression has notoriously made men mad; and we are determined to resist oppression. But let us, if possible, show that we can keep sane in our resistance, and shape our means more and more. reasonably toward the least harmful, and therefore the speediest, attainment of our end. Let us, I say, show that our spirits are too strong to be driven mad, but can keep that sober determination which alone gives mastery over the adaptation of means. And a first guaranty of this sanity will be to act as if we understood that the fun- damental duty of a Government is to preserve order, to enforce obedience of the laws. It has been held hitherto that a man can be depended on as a guardian of order only when he has much money and comfort to lose. But a better state of things BY FELIX HOLT. 201 would be, that men who had little money and not much com- fort should still be guardians of order, because they had sense to see that disorder would do no good, and had a heart of jus- tice, pity, and fortitude, to keep them from making more mis- ery only because they felt some misery themselves. There are thousands of artisans who have already shown this fine spirit, and have endured much with patient heroism. If such a spirit spread, and penetrated us all, we should soon become the mas- ters of the country in the best sense and to the best ends. For, the public order being preserved, there can be no govern- ment in future that will not be determined by our insistence on our fair and practicable demands. It is only by disorder that our demands will be choked, that we shall find ourselves lost amongst a brutal rabble, with all the intelligence of the country opposed to us, and see government in the shape of guns that will sweep us down in the ignoble martyrdom of fools. It has been a too common notion that to insist much on the preservation of order is the part of a selfish aristocracy and a selfish commercial class, because among these, in the nature of things, have been found the opponents of change. I am a Radical ; and, what is more, I am not a Eadical with a title or a French cook or even an entrance into fine society. I expect great changes, and I desire them. But I don't expect them to come in a hurry, by mere inconsiderate sweeping. A Hercules with a big besom is a fine thing for a filthy stable, but not for weeding a seed-bed, where his besom would soon make a barren floor. That is old-fashioned talk, some one may say. We know all that. Yes, when things are put in an extreme way, most people think they know them ; but, after all, they are comparatively few who see the small degrees by which those extremes are arrived at, or have the resolution and self-control to resist the little impulses by which they creep on surely toward a fatal end. Does anybody set out meaning to ruin himself, or to drink himself to death, or to waste his life so that he becomes a despicable old man, a superannuated nuisance, like a fly in winter? Yet there are plenty, of whose lot this is the piti- 202 ADDRESS TO WORKING MEN, able story. Well now, supposing us all to have the best in- tentions, we working men, as a body, run some risk of bring- ing evil on the nation in that unconscious manner half -hur- rying, half-pushed in a jostling march toward an end we are not thinking of. For just as there are many things which we know better and feel much more strongly than the richer, softer-handed classes can know or feel them; so there are many things many precious benefits which we, by the very fact of our privations, our lack of leisure and instruction, are not so likely to be aware of and take into our account. Those precious benefits form a chief part of what I may call the com- mon estate of society : a wealth over and above buildings, ma- chinery, produce, shipping, and so on, though closely con- nected with these ; a wealth of a more delicate kind, that we may more unconsciously bring into danger, doing harm and not knowing that we do it. I mean that treasure of knowledge, science, poetry, refinement of thought, feeling, and manners, great memories, and the interpretation of great records, which is carried on from the minds of one generation to the minds of another. This is something distinct from the indulgences of luxury and the pursuit of vain finery ; and one of the hard- ships in the lot of working men is that they have been for the most part shut out from sharing in this treasure. It can make a man's life very great, very full of delight, though he has no smart furniture and no horses : it also yields a great deal of discovery that corrects error, and of invention that lessens bodily pain, and must at last make life easier for all. Now the security of this treasure demands, not only the preservation of order, but a certain patience on our part with many institutions and facts of various kinds, especially touch- ing the accumulation of wealth, which, from the light we stand in, we are more likely to discern the evil than the good of. It is constantly the task of practical wisdom not to say, " This is good, and I will have it," but to say, "This is the less of two unavoidable evils, and I will bear it." And this treasure of knowledge, which consists in the fine activity, the exalted vision of many minds, is bound up at present with conditions which have much evil in them. Just as in the case of mate- rial wealth and its distribution we are obliged to take the self- BY FELIX HOLT. 203 ishness and weakness of human nature into account, and, how- ever we insist that men might act better, are forced, unless we are fanatical simpletons, to consider how they are likely to act; so in this matter of the wealth that is carried in men's minds, we have to reflect that the too absolute predominance of a class whose wants have been of a common sort, who are chiefly struggling to get better and more food, clothing, shel- ter, and bodily recreation, may lead to hasty measures for the sake of having things more fairly shared, which, even if they did not fail of their object, would at last debase the life of the nation. Do anything which will throw the classes who hold the treasures of knowledge nay, I may say, the treasure of refined needs into the background, cause them to withdraw from public affairs, stop too suddenly any of the sources by which their leisure and ease are furnished, rob them of the chances by which they may be influential and pre-eminent, and you do something as short-sighted as the acts of France and Spain when in jealousy and wrath, not altogether unpro- voked, they drove from among them races and classes that held the traditions of handicraft and agriculture. You injure your own inheritance and the inheritance of your children. You may truly say that this which I call the common estate of society has been anything but common to you ; but the same may be said, by many of us, of the sunlight and the air, of the sky and the fields, of parks and holiday gamjes. Neverthe- less, that these blessings exist makes life worthier to us, and urges us the more to energetic, likely means of getting our share in them ; and I say, let us watch carefully, lest we do anything to lessen this treasure which is held in the minds of men, while we exert ourselves first of all, and to the very ut- most, that we and our children may share in all its benefits. Yes ; exert ourselves to the utmost, to break the yoke of igno- rance. If we demand more leisure, more ease in our lives, let us show that we don't deserve the reproach of wanting to shirk that industry which, in some form or other, every man, whether rich or poor, shall feel himself as much bound to as he is bound to decency. Let us show that we want to have some time and strength left to us, that we may use it, not for brutal indulgence, but for the rational exercise of the faculties 204 ADDRESS TO WORKING MEN, which make us men. Without this no political measures can benefit us. No political institution will alter the nature of Ignorance, or hinder it from producing vice and misery. Let Ignorance start how it will, it must run the same round of low appetites, poverty, slavery, and superstition. Some of us know this well nay, I will say, feel it ; for knowledge of this kind cuts deep ; and to us it is one of the most painful facts belonging to our condition that there are numbers of our fel- low-workmen who are so far from feeling in the same way, that they never use the imperfect opportunities already offered them for giving their children some schooling, but turn their little ones of tender age into bread-winners, often at cruel tasks, exposed to the horrible infection of childish vice. Of course, the causes of these hideous things go a long way back. Parents' misery has made parents' wickedness. But we, who are still blessed with the hearts of fathers and the consciences of men we who have some knowledge of the curse entailed on broods of creatures in human shape, whose enfeebled bodies and dull perverted minds are mere centres of uneasiness, in whom even appetite is feeble, and joy impossible, I say we are bound to use all the means at our command to help put- ting a stop to this horror. Here, it seems to me, is a way in which we may use extended co-operation among us to the most momentous of all purposes, and make conditions of enrolment that would strengthen all educational measures. It is true enough that there is a low sense of parental duties in the na- tion at large, and that numbers who have no excuse in bodily hardship seem to think it a light thing to beget children, to bring human beings, with all their tremendous possibilities, into this difficult world, and then take little heed how they are disciplined and furnished for the perilous journey they are sent on without any asking of their own. This is a sin shared in more or less by all classes ; but there are sins which, like taxation, fall the heaviest on the poorest, and none have such galling reasons as we working men to try and rouse to the utmost the feeling of responsibility in fathers and mothers. We have been urged into co-operation by the pressure of com- mon demands. In war men need each other more; and where a given point has to be defended, fighters inevitably find them' BY FELIX HOLT. 206 selves shoulder to shoulder. So fellowship grows ; so grow the rules of fellowship, which gradually shape themselves to thoroughness as the idea of a common good becomes more complete. We feel a right to say, If you will be one of us, you must make such and such a contribution, you must re- nounce such and such a separate advantage, you must set your face against such and such an infringement. If we have any false ideas about our common good, our rules will be wrong, and we shall be co-operating to damage each other. But now, here is a part of our good, without which everything else we strive for will be worthless, I mean the rescue of our children. Let us demand from the members of our Unions that they fulfil their duty as parents in this definite matter, which rules can reach. Let us demand that they send their children to school, so as not to go on recklessly breeding a moral pestilence among us, just as strictly as we demand that they pay their contributions to a common fund, understood to be for a common benefit. While we watch our public men, let us watch one another as to this duty, which is also public, and more momentous even than obedience to sanitary regula- tions. While we resolutely declare against the wickedness in high places, let us set ourselves also against the wicked- ness in low places ; not quarrelling which came first, or which is the worse of the two, not trying to settle the miserable precedence of plague or famine, but insisting unflinchingly on remedies once ascertained, and summoning those who hold the treasure of knowledge to remember that they hold it in trust, and that with them lies the task of searching for new reme- dies, and finding the right methods of applying them. To find right remedies and right methods! Here is the great function of knowledge : here the life of one man may make a fresh era straight away, in which a sort of suffering that has existed shall exist no more. For the thousands of years, down to the middle of the sixteenth century since Christ, that human limbs had been hacked and amputated, nobody knew how to stop the bleeding except by searing the ends of the vessels with red-hot iron. But then came a man named Ambrose Pare, and said, " Tie up the arteries ! " That was a fine word to utter. It contained the statement of a 206 ADDRESS TO WORKING MEN, method a plan by which a particular evil was forever as- suaged. Let us try to discern tlie men whose words carry that sort of kernel, and choose such men to be our guides and rep- resentatives not choose platform swaggerers, who bring us nothing but the ocean to make our broth with. To get the chief power into the hands of the wisest, which means to get our life regulated according to the truest princi- ples mankind is in possession of, is a problem as old as the very notion of wisdom. The solution comes slowly, because men collectively can only be made to embrace principles, and to act on them, by the slow stupendous teaching of the world's events. Men will go on planting potatoes, and nothing else but potatoes, till a potato disease comes and forces them to find out the advantage of a varied crop. Selfishness, stupid- ity, sloth, persist in trying to adapt the world to their desires, till a time comes when the world manifests itself as too decid- edly inconvenient to them. Wisdom stands outside of man and urges itself upon him, like the marks of the changing sea- sons, before it finds a home within him, directs his actions, and from the precious effects of obedience begets a correspond- ing love. But while still outside of us, wisdom often looks terrible, and wears strange forms, wrapped in the changing conditions of a struggling world. It wears now the form of wants and just demands in a great multitude of British men : wants and demands urged into existence by the forces of a maturing world. And it is in virtue of this in virtue of this presence of wisdom on our side as a mighty fact, physical and moral, which must enter into and shape the thoughts and actions of mankind that we working men have obtained the suffrage. Not because we are. an excellent multitude, but because we are a needy multitude. But now, for our own part, we have seriously to consider this outside wisdom which lies in the supreme unalterable na- ture of things, and watch to give it a home within us and obey it. If the claims of the unendowed multitude of working men hold within them principles which must shape the future, it is not less true that the endowed classes, in their inheritance from the past, hold the precious material without which n BY FELIX HOLT. 207 worthy, noble future can be moulded. Many of the highest uses of life are in their keeping; and if privilege has often been abused, it has also been the nurse of excellence. Here again we have to submit ourselves to the great law of inheri- tance. If we quarrel with the way in which the labors' and earnings of the past have been preserved and handed down, we are just as bigoted, just as narrow, just as wanting in that religion which keeps an open ear and an obedient mind to the teachings of fact, as we accuse those of being who quarrel with the new truths and new needs which are disclosed in the pres- ent. The deeper insight we get into the causes of human trouble, and the ways by which men are made better and hap- pier, the less we shall be inclined to the unprofitable spirit and practice of reproaching classes as such in a wholesale fashion. Not all the evils of our condition are such as we can justly blame others for ; and, I repeat, many of them are such as no change of institutions can quickly remedy. To discern between the evils that energy can remove and the evils that patience must bear, makes the difference between manliness and child- ishness, between good sense and folly. And more than that, without such discernment, seeing that we have grave duties toward our own body and the country at large, we can hardly escape acts of fatal rashness and injustice. I am addressing a mixed assembly of workmen, and some of you may be as well or better fitted than I am to take up this office. But they will not think it amiss in me that I have tried to bring together the considerations most likely to be of service to us in preparing ourselves for the use of our new opportunities. I have avoided touching on special ques- tions. The best help toward judging well on these is to ap- proach them in the right temper, without vain expectation, and with a resolution which is mixed with temperance. LEAVES FROM A NOTE-BOOK. To lay down in the shape of practical moral rules courses of conduct only to be made real by the rarest states of motive and disposition, tends not to elevate but to de- Authorship ,, , TIT i grade the general standard, by turning that rare attainment from an object of admiration into an impossible prescription, against which the average nature first rebels and then flings out ridicule. It is for art to present images of a lovelier order than the actual, gently winning the affections, and so determining the taste. But in any rational criticism of the time which is meant to guide a practical reform, it is idle to insist that action ought to be this or that, without con- sidering how far the outward conditions of such change are present, even supposing the inward disposition toward it. Practically, we must be satisfied to aim at something short of perfection and at something very much further off it in one case than in another. While the fundamental conceptions of morality seem as stationary through ages as the laws of life, so that a moral manual written eighteen centuries ago still admonishes us that we are low in our attainments, it is quite otherwise with the degree to which moral conceptions have penetrated the various forms of social activity, and made what may be called the special conscience of each calling, art, or industry. While on some points of social duty public opinion has reached a tolerably high standard, on others a public opin- ion is not yet born; and there are even some functions and practices with regard to which men far above the line in hon- orableness of nature feel hardly any scrupulosity, though their consequent behavior is easily shown to be as injurious as bri- bery, or any other slowly poisonous procedure which degrades the social vitality. LEAVES FROM A NOTE BOOK. 209 Among those callings which have not yet acquired anything near a full-grown conscience in the public mind is Author- ship. Yet the changes brought about by the spread of instruc- tion and the consequent struggles of an uneasy ambition, are, or at least might well be, forcing on many minds the need of some regulating principle with regard to the publication of intellectual products, which would override the rule of the market : a principle, that is, which should be derived from a fixing of the author's vocation according to those characteris- tics in which it differs from the other bread- winning profes- sions. Let this be done, if possible, without any cant, which would carry the subject into Utopia away from existing needs. The guidance wanted is a clear notion of what should justify men and women in assuming public authorship, and of the way in which they should be determined by what is usually called success. But the forms of authorship must be distin- guished; journalism, for example, carrying a necessity for that continuous production which in other kinds of writing is precisely the evil to be fought against, and judicious careful compilation, which is a great public service, holding in its modest diligence a guaranty against those deductions of van- ity and idleness which draw many a young gentleman into reviewing, instead of the sorting and copying which his small talents could not rise to with any vigor and completeness. A manufacturer goes on producing calicoes as long and as fast as he can find a market for them ; and in obeying this indication of demand he gives his factory its utmost useful- ness to the world in general and to himself in particular. An- other manufacturer buys a new invention of some light kind likely to attract the public fancy, is successful in finding a multitude who will give their testers for the transiently desir- able commodity, and before the fashion is out, pockets a con- siderable sum the commodity was colored with a green which had arsenic in it that damaged the factory workers and the purchasers. What then? These, he contends (or does not know or care to contend), are superficial effects, which it is folly to dwell upon while we have epidemic diseases and bad government. The first manufacturer we will suppose blameless. Is an 14 210 LEAVES FROM A NOTE-BOOK. author simply on a par with him, as to the rules of produc- tion? The author's capital is his brain-power power of inven- tion, power of writing. The manufacturer's capital, in fortu- nate cases, is being continually reproduced and increased. Here is the first grand difference between the capital which is turned into calico and the brain capital which is turned into literature. The calico scarcely varies in appropriateness of quality, no consumer is in danger of getting too much of it, and neglecting his boots, hats, and flannel-shirts in conse- quence. That there should be large quantities of the same sort in the calico manufacture is an advantage : the sameness is desirable, and nobody is likely to roll his person in so many folds of calico as to become a mere bale of cotton goods, and nullify his senses of hearing and touch, while his morbid pas- sion for Manchester shirtings makes him still cry " More ! n The wise manufacturer gets richer and richer, and the consum- ers he supplies have their real wants satisfied and no more. Let it be taken as admitted that all legitimate social activ- ity must be beneficial to others besides the agent. To write prose or verse as a private exercise and satisfaction is not social activity; nobody is culpable for this any more than for learning other people's verse by heart if he does not neglect his proper business in consequence. If the exercise made him sillier or secretly more self-satisfied, that, to be sure, would be a roundabout way of injuring society ; for though a certain mixture of silliness may lighten existence, we have at present more than enough. But man or woman who publishes writings inevitably as- sumes the office of teacher or influencer of the public mind. Let him protest as he will that he only seeks to amuse, and has no pretension to do more than while away an hour of leisure or weariness " the idle singer of an empty day " he can no more escape influencing the moral taste, and with it the action of the intelligence, than a setter of fashions in fur- niture and dress can fill the shops with his designs and leave the garniture of persons and houses unaffected by his indus- try. For a man who has a certain gift of writing to say, "I LEAVES FROM A NOTE BOOK. 211 wDl make the most of it while the public likes my wares- as long as the market is open and I am able to supply it at a money profit such profit being the sign of liking " he should have a belief that his wares have nothing akin to the arsenic green in them, and also that his continuous supply is secure from a degradation in quality which the habit of consumption encouraged in the buyers may hinder them from marking their sense of by rejection; so that they complain, but pay, and read while they complain. Unless he has that belief, he is on a level with the manufacturer who gets rich by fancy-wares colored with arsenic green. He really cares for nothing but his income. He carries on authorship on the principle of the gin-palace. And bad literature of the sort called amusing is spiritual gin. A writer capable of being popular can only escape this so- cial culpability by first of all getting a profound sense that literature is good-for-nothing, if it is not admirably good : he must detest bad literature too heartily to be indifferent about producing it if only other people don't detest it. And if he has this sign of the divine afflatus within him, he must make up his mind that he must not pursue authorship as a vocation with a trading determination to get rich by it. It is in the highest sense lawful for him to get as good a price as he hon- orably can for the best work he is capable of ; but not for him to force or hurry his production, or even do over again what has already been done, either by himself or others, so as to render his work no real contribution, for the sake of bringing up his income to the fancy pitch. An author who would keep a pure and noble conscience, and with that a developing in- stead of degenerating intellect and taste, must cast out of his aims the aim to be rich. And therefore he must keep his ex- penditure low he must make for himself no dire necessity to earn sums in order to pay bills. In opposition to this, it is common to cite Walter Scott's case, and cry, " Would the world have got as much innocent (and therefore salutary) pleasure out of Scott, if he had not brought himself under the pressure of money-need? " I think it would and more; but since it is impossible to prove what 212 LEAVES FROM A NOTE BOOK. would have been, I confine myself to replying that Scott was not justified in bringing himself into a position where severe consequences to others depended on his retaining or not retain- ing his mental competence. Still less is Scott to be taken as an example to be followed in this matter, even if it were ad- mitted that money-need served to press at once the best and the most work out of him ; any more than a great navigator who has brought his ship to port in spite of having taken a wrong and perilous route, is to be followed as to his route by navigators who are not yet ascertained to be great. But after the restraints and rules which must guide the ac- knowledged author, whose power of making a real contribu- tion is ascertained, comes the consideration, how or on what principle are we to find a check for that troublesome disposi- tion to authorship arising from the spread of what is called Education, which turns a growing rush of vanity and ambi- tion into this current? The well-taught, an increasing num- ber, are almost all able to write essays on given themes, which demand new periodicals to save them from lying in cold ob- struction. The ill-taught also an increasing number read many books, seem to themselves able to write others surpris- ingly like what they read, and probably superior, since the variations are such as please their own fancy, and such as they would have recommended to their favorite authors : these ill-taught persons are perhaps idle and want to give them- selves " an object " ; or they are short of money, and feel dis- inclined to get it by a commoner kind of work ; or they find a facility in putting sentences together which gives them more than a suspicion that they have genius, which, if not very cor- dially believed in by private confidants, will be recognized by an impartial public; or finally, they observe that writing is sometimes well paid, and sometimes a ground of fame or dis- tinction, and without any use of punctilious logic, they con- clude to become writers themselves. As to these ill-taught persons, whatever medicines of a spiritual sort can be found good against mental emptiness and inflation such medicines are needful for them. The con- tempt of the world for their productions only comes after their disease has wrought its worst effects. But what is to be said LEAVES FROM A NOTE-BOOK. 213 to the well-taught, who have such an alarming equality in their power of writing " like a scholar and a gentleman n ? Perhaps they, too, can only be cured by the medicine of higher ideals in social duty, and by a fuller representation to themselves of the processes by which the general culture is furthered or impeded. In endeavoring to estimate a remarkable writer who aimed at more than temporary influence, we have first to consider what was his individual contribution to the spiritual wealth of mankind? Had he a new conception? Did he animate long-known but neglected truths with new vigor, and cast fresh light on their relation to other admitted truths? Did he impregnate any ideas with a fresh store of emotion, and in this way enlarge the area of moral sentiment? Did he by a wise emphasis here, and a wise disregard there, give a more useful or beau- tiful proportion to aims or motives? And even where his thinking was most mixed with the sort of mistake which is obvious to the majority, as well as that which can only be dis- cerned by the instructed, or made manifest by the progress of things, has it that salt of a noble enthusiasm which should rebuke our critical discrimination if its correctness is inspired with a less admirable habit of feeling? This is not the common or easy course to take iu estimating a modern writer. It requires considerable knowledge of what he has himself done, as well as of what others had done be- fore him, or what they were doing contemporaneously ; it re- quires deliberate reflection as to the degree in which our own prejudices may hinder us from appreciating the intellectual or moral bearing of what on a first view offends us. An easier course is to notice some salient mistakes, and take them as decisive of the writer's incompetence; or to find out that something apparently much the same as what he has said in some connection not clearly ascertained, had been said by somebody else, though without great effect, until this new ef- fect of discrediting the other's originality had shown itself as an adequate final cause : or to pronounce from the point of view 214 LEAVES FROM A NOTE BOOK of individual taste that this writer for whom regard is claimed is repulsive, wearisome, not to be borne except by those dull persons who are of a different opinion. Elder writers who have passed into classics were doubtless treated in this easy way when they were still under the mis- fortune of being recent nay, are still dismissed with the same rapidity of judgment by daring ignorance. But people who think that they have a reputation to lose in the matter of knowledge, have looked into cyclopaedias and histories of phi- losophy or literature, and possessed themselves of the duly bal- anced epithets concerning the immortals. They are not left to their own unguided rashness, or their own unguided pusil- lanimity. And it is this sheeplike flock who have no direct impressions, no spontaneous delight, no genuine objection or self-confessed neutrality in relation to the writers become clas- sic it is these who are incapable of passing a genuine judg- ment on the living. Necessarily. The susceptibility they have kept active is a susceptibility to their own reputation fox- passing the right judgment, not the susceptibility to qualities in the object of judgment. Who learns to discriminate shades of color by considering what is expected of him? The habit of expressing borrowed judgments stupefies the sensibilities, which are the only foundation of genuine judgments, just as the constant reading and retailing of results from other men's observations through the microscope, without ever looking through the lens one's self, is an instruction in some truths and some prejudices, but is no instruction in observant suscep- tibility ; on the contrary, it breeds a habit of inward seeing according to verbal statement, which dulls the power of out- ward seeing according to visual evidence. On this subject, as on so many others, it is difficult to strike the balance between the educational needs of passivity or re- ceptivity, and independent selection. We should learn noth- ing without the tendency to implicit acceptance; but there must clearly be a limit to such mental submission, else we should come to a stand-still. The human mind would be no better than a dried specimen, representing an unchangeable type. When the assimilation of new matter ceases, decay must begin. In a reasoned self -restraining deference there is . LEAVES FROM A NOTE BOOK. as much energy as in rebellion; but among the less capable, one must admit that the superior energy is on the side of the rebels. And certainly a man who dares to say that he finds an eminent classic feeble here, extravagant there, and in gen- eral overrated, may chance to give an opinion which has some, genuine discrimination in it concerning a new work or a living thinker an opinion such as can hardly ever be got from the reputed judge who is a correct echo of the most approved phrases concerning those who have been already canonized. What is the best way of telling a story? Since the stand- ard must be the interest of the audience, there must be sev- eral or many good ways rather than one best. , . / . , . . ,.. Story Telling. For we get interested in the stories life presents to us through divers orders and modes of presentation. Very commonly our first awakening to a desire of knowing a man's past or future comes from our seeing him as a stranger in some unusual or pathetic or humorous situation, or manifest- ing some remarkable characteristics. We make inquiries in consequence, or we become observant and attentive whenever opportunities of knowing more may happen to present them- selves without our search. You have seen a refined face among the prisoners picking tow in jail; you afterward see the same unforgetable face in a pulpit : he must be of dull fibre who would not care to know more about a life which showed such contrasts, though he might gather his knowledge in a fragmentary and unchronological way. Again, we have heard much, or at least something not quite common, about a man whom we have never seen, and hence we look round with curiosity when we are told that he is pres- ent; whatever he says or does before us is charged with a meaning due to our previous hearsay knowledge about him, gathered either from dialogue of which he was expressly and emphatically the subject, or from incidental remark, or from general report either in or out of print. These indirect ways of arriving at knowledge are always the most stirring even in relation to impersonal subjects. To see 216 LEAVES FROM A NOTE BOOK. a chemical experiment gives an attractiveness to a definition of chemistry, and fills it with a significance which it would never have had without the pleasant shock of an unusual se- quence such as the transformation of a solid into gas, and vke versa. To see a word for the first time either as substantive or adjective in a connection where we care about knowing its complete meaning, is the way to vivify its meaning in our rec- ollection. Curiosity becomes the more eager from the incom- pleteness of the first information. Moreover, it is in this way that memory works in its incidental revival of events : some salient experience appears in inward vision, and in conse- quence the antecedent facts are retraced from what is regarded as the beginning of the episode in which that experience made a more or less strikingly memorable part. " Ah ! I remember addressing the mob from the hustings at Westminster you wouldn't have thought that I could ever have been in such a position. Well, how I came there was in this way " ; and then follows a retrospective narration. The modes of telling a story founded on these processes of outward and inward life derive their effectiveness from the superior mastery of images and pictures in grasping the atten- tion or, one might say with more fundamental accuracy, from the fact that our earliest, strongest impressions, our most in- timate convictions, are simply images added to more or less of sensation. These are the primitive instruments of thought. Hence it is not surprising that early poetry took this way telling a daring deed, a glorious achievement, without caring for what went before. The desire for orderly narration is a later, more reflective birth. The presence of the Jack in the box affects every child : it is the more reflective lad, the minia- ture philosopher, who wants to know how he got there. The only stories life presents to us in an orderly way are those of our autobiography, or the career of our companions from our childhood upward, or perhaps of our own children. But it is a great art to make a connected strictly relevant nar- ative of such careers as we can recount from the beginning. In these cases the sequence of associations is almost sure to over- master the sense of proportion. Such narratives ab ovo are surnmer's-day stories for happy loungers j not the cup of self- LEAVES FROM A NOTE BOOK. 217 forgetting excitement to the busy who can snatch an hour of entertainment. But the simple opening of a story with a date and necessary account of places and people, passing on quietly toward the more rousing elements of narrative and dramatic presentation, without need of retrospect, has its advantages which have to be measured by the nature of the story. Spirited narrative, without more than a touch of dialogue here and there, may be made eminently interesting, and is suited to the novelette. Examples of its charm are seen in the short tales in which the French have a mastery never reached by the English, who usually demand coarser flavors than are given by that delight- ful gayety which is well described by La Fontaine J as not any- thing that provokes fits of laughter, but a certain charm, an agreeable mode of handling which lends attractiveness to all subjects even the most serious. And it is this sort of gayety which plays around the best French novelettes. But the open- ing chapters of the " Vicar of Wakefield " are as fine as any- thing that can be done in this way. Why should a story not be told in the most irregular fash- ion that an author's idiosyncrasy may prompt, provided that he gives us what we can enjoy? The objections to Sterne's wild way of telling " Tristram Shandy " lie more solidly in the quality of the interrupting matter than in the fact of in- terruption. The dear public would do well to reflect that they are often bored from the want of flexibility in their own minds. They are like the topers of "one liquor." The exercise of a veracious imagination in historical pictur- ing seems to be capable of a development that might help the judgment greatly with regard to present and future events. By veracious imagination, I mean the working out in detail of the various steps by which political or a social change was reached, using all extant evidence and supplying deficiencies by careful ana- ! "Je n'appelle pas gayete" ce qui excite le rire, mais un certain charme, un air agr6able qu'on peut donner a toutes sortes de sujets, mesme les plus s6rieux." Preface to Fables. 218 LEAVES FROM A KOTE-BOOK. logical creation. How triumphant opinions originally spread how institutions arose what were the conditions of great inventions, discoveries, or theoretic conceptions what circum- stances affecting individual lots are attendant on the decay of long-established systems, all these grand elements of his- tory require the illumination of special imaginative treatment. But effective truth in this application of art requires freedom from the vulgar coercion of conventional plot, which is become hardly of higher influence on imaginative representation than a detailed " order " for a picture sent by a rich grocer to an eminent painter allotting a certain portion of the canvas to a rural scene, another to a fashionable group, with a request for a murder in the middle distance, and a little comedy to relieve it. A slight approximation to the veracious glimpses of history artistically presented, which I am indicating, but ap- plied only to an incident of contemporary life, is " Uri paquet de lettres " by Gustave Droz. For want of such real, minute vision of how changes come about in the past, we fall into ridiculously inconsistent estimates of actual movements, con- demning in the present what we belaud in the past, and pro- nouncing impossible processes that have been repeated again and again in the historical preparation of the very system under which we live. A false kind of idealization dulls our percep- tion of the meaning in words when they relate to past events which have had a glorious issue : for lack of comparison no warning image rises to check scorn of the very phrases which in other associations are consecrated. Utopian pictures help the reception of ideas as to construc- tive results, but hardly so much as a vivid presentation of how results have been actually brought about, especially in religious and social change. And there is the pathos, the heroism often accompanying the decay and final struggle of old systems, which has not had its share of tragic commemo- ration. What really took place in and around Constantino before, upon, and immediately after his declared conversion? Could a momentary flash be thrown on Eusebius in his say- ings and doings as an ordinary man in bishop's garments? Or on Julian and Libanius? There has been abundant writing on such great turning-points, but not such as serves to instruct LEAVES FROM A NOTE-BOOK. 219 the imagination in true comparison. I want something differ- ent from the abstract treatment which belongs to grave history from a doctrinal point of view, and something different from the schemed picturesqueness of ordinary historical fiction. I want brief, severely conscientious reproductions, in their con- crete incidents, of pregnant movements in the past. The supremacy given in European cultures to the literatures of Greece and Rome has had an effect almost equal to that of a common religion in binding the Western na- tions together. It is foolish to be forever com- origixiaUt plaining of the consequent uniformity, as if there were an endless power of originality in the human mind. Great and precious origination must always be comparatively rare, and can only exist on condition of a wide massive uni- formity. When a multitude of men have learned to use the same language in speech and writing, then and then only can the greatest masters of language arise. For in what does their mastery consist? They use words which are already a famil- iar medium of understanding and sympathy in such a way as greatly to enlarge the understanding and sympathy. Origi- nality of this order changes the wild grasses into world-feed- ing grain. Idiosyncrasies are pepper and spices of question- able aroma. " Is the time we live in prosaic? " " That depends : it must certainly be prosaic to one whose mind takes a prosaic stand in contemplating it." "But it is precisely the most poetic minds that most groan over the vul- prosaic all garity of the present, its degenerate sensibility Things are to beauty, eagerness for materialistic explana- . tion, noisy triviality." "Perhaps they would have had the same complaint to make about the age of Elizabeth, if, living then, they had fixed their attention on its more sordid ele- ments, or had been subject to the grating influence of its every -day meannesses, and had sought' refuge from them in 220 LEAVES FROM A NOTE BOOK, the contemplation of whatever suited their taste in a former age." We get our knowledge of perfect Love by glimpses and in fragments chiefly the rarest only among us knowing what it is to worship and caress, reverence and cher- ious^Love "* * s k> Divide our bread and mingle our thoughts at one and the same time, under inspiration of the same object. Finest aromas will so often leave the fruits to which they are native and cling elsewhere, leaving the fruit empty of all but its coarser structure! In the times of national mixture when modern Europe was, as one may say, a-brewing, it was open to a man who did not like to be judged by the Roman law, to choose We Make which of certain other codes he would be tried Precedents, by- So, in our own times, they who openly adopt a higher rule than their neighbors, do thereby make active choice as to the laws and precedents by which they shall be approved or condemned, and thus it may happen that we see a man morally pilloried for a very custom- ary deed, and yet having no right to complain, inasmuch as in his foregoing deliberative course of life he had referred him- self to the tribunal of those higher conceptions, before which such a deed is without question condemnable. Tolerance first comes through equality of struggle, as in the case of Arianism and Catholicism in the early times Valens, Eastern and Arian, Valentinian, Western and Tolerance Catholic, alike publishing edicts of tolerance; or it comes from a common need of relief from an oppressive predominance, as when James II. published his Act of Tolerance toward non-Anglicans, being forced into liberality toward the Dissenters by the need to get it for the Catholics. Community of interest is the root of justice; com- munity of suffering, the root of pity; community of joy, the root of love. LEAVES FROM A NOTE-BOOK. 221 Enveloped in a common mist, we seem to walk in clearness ourselves, and behold only the mist that enshrouds others. Sympathetic people are often incommunicative about them- selves : they give back reflected images which hide their own depths. The pond said to the ocean, " Why do you rage so? The wind is not so very violent nay, it is already fallen. Look at me. I rose into no foaming waves, and am already smooth again. " Many feel themselves very confidently on safe ground when they say : It must be good for man to know the Truth. But it is clearly not good for a particular man to know some particular truth, as irremediable treachery in one whom he cherishes better that he should die without knowing it. Of scientific truth, is it not conceivable that some facts as to the tendency of things affecting the final destination of the race might be more hurtful when they had entered into the human consciousness than they would have been if they had remained purely external in their activity? There is no such thing as an impotent or neutral deity, if the deity be really believed in, and contemplated either in prayer or meditation. Every object of thought reacts on the mind that conceives it, still more Divine Grace ~f & J&G&l i^nia.- on that which habitually contemplates it. In nation, this we may be said to solicit help from a gen- eralization or abstraction. Wordsworth had this truth in his consciousness when he wrote (in the Prelude) : "Nor general truths, which are themselves a sort Of elements and agents, Under-powers Subordinate helpers of the living mind" not indeed precisely in the same relation, but with a meaning which involves that wider moral influence, 222 LEAVES FROM A NOTE BOOK One can hardly insist too much, in the present stage of thinking, on the efficacy of feeling in stimulating to ardent co-operation, quite apart from the conviction Excess^ that such co-operation is needed for the achieve- Feeling is ment of the end in view. Just as hatred will vent itself in private curses no longer believed to have any potency, and joy, in private singing far out among the woods and fields, so sympathetic feeling can only be satisfied by joining in the action which expresses it, though the added " Bravo! " the added push, the added penny, is no more than a grain of dust on a rolling mass. When students take the horses out of a political hero's carriage, and draw him home by the force of their own muscle, the struggle in each is simply to draw or push, without consideration whether his place would not be as well filled by somebody else, or whether his one arm be really needful to the effect. It is under the same inspiration that abundant help rushes toward the scene of a fire, rescuing imperilled lives, and laboring with generous rivalry in carrying buckets. So the old blind King John of Bohemia at the battle of Crecj" begged his vassals to lead him into the fight that he might strike a good blow, though his .own stroke, possibly fatal to himself, could not turn by a hair's -breadth the imperious course of victory. The question, " Of what use is it for me to work toward an end confessedly good? " comes from that sapless kind of rea- soning which is falsely taken for a sign of supreme mental activity, but is really due to languor, or incapability of that mental grasp which makes objects strongly present, and to a lack of sympathetic emotion. In the " Spanish Gypsy " Fe- dalma says, "The grandest death ! to die in vain for Love Greater than sways the forces of the world," 1 referring to the image of the disciples throwing themselves, consciously in vain, on the Roman spears. I really believe and mean this, not as a rule of general action, but as a pos- 1 V. what Demosthenes says (De Corona) about Athens pursuing the same course, though she had known from the beginning that her heroic resistance would be in vain. LEAVES FROM A NOTE-BOOK. 223 sible grand instance of determining energy in human sym- pathy, which even in particular cases, where it has only a magnificent futility, is more adorable, or as we say divine, than unpitying force, or than a prudent calculation of results. Perhaps it is an implicit joy in the resources of our human nature which has stimulated admiration for acts of self-sacri- fice which are vain as to their immediate end. Marcus Cur- tius was probably not imagined as concluding to himself that he and his horse would so fill up the gap as to make a smooth terra firma. The impulse and act made the heroism, not the correctness of adaptation. No doubt the passionate inspira^ tion which prompts and sustains a course of self-sacrificing labor in the light of soberly estimated results gathers the highest title to our veneration, and makes the supreme hero- ism. But the generous leap of impulse is needed too to swell the flood of sympathy in us beholders, that we may not fall completely under the mastery of calculation, which in its turn may fail of ends for want of energy 'got from ardor. We have need to keep the sluices open for possible influxes of the rarer sort. THE END. Fedalma entered, cast away the cloud Of serge and linen, and, outbeaming bright, Advanced a pace towards Silva." Front is. Eliot Spanish Gypsy. POETICAL WORKS. CONTENTS. PA6X TUB 8PXI8H GTPOY, ......... 6 THB LEGENI> OF JUBAL, 260 (Reprinted from ** MacmUlun's Magazine.") AGATHA, 272 (Reprinted from " The Atlantic Monthly.") ARMGART, . 284 (Reprinted from " Macmillan's Magazine.") How LISA LOVED THB KINO, ........ 826 (Reprinted from " Blackwood's Magazine,") A MINOR PROPHBT, 843 BROTHBB AND SISTER, 362 STRADIVARIUB, . .-. . . .. 858 A COLLEGE BREAKFAST-PARTY, ....... 363 (Reprinted from " Macml Han's Magazine.") Two LOVERS, 886 SELF AND LIFE, 38 ^ " SWEET EVENINGS COMB AND Go, LOVE," 391 THB DEATH OP MOSES, 892 ARIOS, . 396 " O MAT I JOIN TH8 CHOIR INVISIBLE I " 3" LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. POEMS OF GEOKGE ELIOT. " Fedalma entered, cast away the cloud of serge and linen, and, outbeaming bright, advanced a pace towards Silva.". .Front IK. PAGE "This deep mountain gorge slopes widening on the olive-plumed plains of fair Granada." 5 "A figure lithe, all white and saffron robed, flashed right across the circle. " 45 " My father . . . comes . . . my father." 94 "His doublet loose, his right arm backward flung, his left caressing close the long-necked lute. " 160 "Ay, 'tis a sword that parts the Spaniard and the Zincala." 190 " Down fell the great chief, and Silva staggering back, heard not the gypsies shriek." 229 " Their sails . . . like broad wings poised." 235 "Then Jubal poured his triumph in a song." 259 ' ' He sought the screen of thorny thickets, and there fell unseen. " 269 "Come with me to the mountain where earth spreads soft and rounded breasts to feed her children." 272 " Fair Countess Linda sat upon the bench close fronting the old knitter." 275 "Place for the Queen of Song." 287 " Armgart, dear Armgart, only speak to me." 306 "Across the homestead to the rookery elms, whose tall old trunks had each a grassy mound." 353 " Two lovers by a moss-grown spring, they leaned soft cheeks together there." 386 Poems of George Eliot. " This deep mountain gorge Slopes widening on the olive-plumed plains Of fair Granada." Page 5. Eliot -Spanish Gypsy. THE SPANISH GYPSY This Work was originally written in the winter of 1864-66 ; after a visit to Spain in 1867 it was rewritten and amplified. The reader con- versant with Spanish poetry will see that in two of the Lyrics an at- tempt has been made to imitate the trochaic measure and assonance of the Spanish Ballad. May 1868. BOOK I. 'Tis the warm South, where Europe spreads her lands Like fretted leaflets, breathing on the deep : Broad-breasted Spain, leaning with equal love On the Mid Sea that moans with memories, And on the un travelled Ocean's restless tides. This river, shadowed by the battlements And gleaming silvery toward the northern sky, Feeds the famed stream that waters Andalus And loiters, amorous of the fragrant air, By C6rdova and Seville to the bay Fronting Algarva and the wandering flood Of Guadiana. This deep mountain gorge Slopes widening on the olive -plumed plains Of fair Granada . one far-stretching arm Points to Elvira, one to eastward heights Of Alpuj arras where the new-bathed Day With oriflamme uplifted o'er the peaks Saddens the breasts of northward-looking snows That loved the night, and soared with soaring stars j Flashing the signals of his nearing swiftness 6 POEMS OF GEORGE ELIOT. From Almeria's purple-shadowed bay On to the far-off rocks that gaze and glow- On to Alhambra, strong and ruddy heart Of glorious Morisma, gasping now, A maime'd giant in his agony. This town that dips its feet within the stream, And seems to sit a tower-crowned Cybele Spreading her ample robe adown the rocks, Is rich Bedmar. 'twas Moorish long ago, But now the Cross is sparkling on the Mosque, And bells make Catholic the trembling air. The fortress gleams in Spanish sunshine now ('Tis south a mile before the rays are Moorish) Hereditary jewel, agraffe bright On all the many-titled privileges Of young Duke Silva. No Castilian knight That serves Queen Isabel has higher charge ; For near this frontier sits the Moorish king, Not Bobadil the waverer, who usurps A throne he trembles in, and fawning licks The feet of conquerors, but that fierce lion Grisly El Zagal, who has made his lair In Guadix' fort, and rushing thence with strength, Half his own fierceness, half the untainted heart Of mountain bands that fight for holiday, Wastes the fair lands that lie by Alcala, Wreathing his horse's neck with Christian heads. To keep the Christian frontier such high trust Is young Duke Silva' s; and the time is great. (What times are little? To the sentinel That hour is regal when he mounts on guard.) The fifteenth century since the Man Divine Taught and was hated in Capernaum Is near its end is falling as a husk Away from all the fruit its years have riped. The Moslem faith, now flickering like a torch In a night struggle on this shore of Spain, Glares, a broad column of advancing flame, THE SPANISH GYPSY. Along the Danube and the Illyrian shore Far into Italy, where eager monks, Who watch in dreams and dream the while they watch, See Christ grow paler in the baleful light, Crying again the cry of the forsaken. But faith, the stronger for extremity, Becomes prophetic, hears the far-off tread Of western chivalry, sees downward sweep The archangel Michael with the gleaming sword, And listens for the shriek of hurrying fiends Chased from their revels in God's sanctuary. So trusts the monk, and lifts appealing eyes To the high dome, the Church' s firmament, Where the blue light-pierced curtain, rolled away, Reveals the throne and Him who sits thereon. So trust the men whose best hope for the world Is ever that the world is near its end : Impatient of the stars that keep their course And make no pathway for the coming Judge. But other futures stir the world's great heart. The West now enters on the heritage Won from the tombs of mighty ancestors, The seeds, the gold, the gems, the silent harps That lay deep buried with the memories Of old renown. No more, as once in sunny Avignon, The poet-scholar spreads the Homeric page, And gazes sadly, like the deaf at song; For now the old epic voices ring again And vibrate with the beat and melody Stirred by the warmth of old Ionian days. The martyred sage, the Attic orator, Immortally incarnate, like the gods, In spiritual bodies, winged words Holding a universe impalpable, Find a new audience. For evermore, With grander resurrection than was feigned Qf Attila's fierce Huns, the soul of Greece POEMS OF GEORGE ELIOT. Conquers the bulk of Persia. The maimed form Of calmly-joyous beauty, marble-limbed, Yet breathing with the thought that shaped its lips, Looks mild reproach from out its open grave At creeds of terror ; and the vine-wreathed god Fronts the pierced Image with the crown of thorns The soul of man is widening toward the past : No longer hanging at the breast of life Feeding in blindness to his parentage Quenching all wonder with Omnipotence, Praising a name with indolent piety He spells the record of his long descent, More largely conscious of the life that was. And from the height that shows where morning shone On far-off summits pale and gloomy now, The horizon widens round him, and the west Looks vast with untracked waves whereon his gaze Follows the flight of the swift-vanished bird That like the sunken sun is mirrored still Upon the yearning soul within the eye. And so in C<5rdova through patient nights Columbus watches, or he sails in dreams Between the setting stars and finds new day; Then wakes again to the old weary days, Girds on the cord and frock of pale Saint Francis, And like him zealous pleads with foolish men. " I ask but for a million maravedis : Give me three caravels to find a world, New shores, new realms, new soldiers for the Cross. Son cosas grandes ! " Thus he pleads in vain ; Yet faints not utterly, but pleads anew, Thinking, "God means it, and has chosen me." For this man is the pulse of all mankind Feeding an embryo future, offspring strange Of the fond Present, that with mother-prayers And mother-fancies looks for championship Of all her loved beliefs and old-world ways From that young Time she bears within her womb. The sacred places shall be purged again, THE SPANISH GYPSY. The Turk converted, and the Holy Church, Like the mild Virgin with the outspread robe, Shall fold all tongues and nations lovingly. But since God works by armies, who shall be The modern Cyrus? Is it France most Christian, Who with his lilies and brocaded knights, French oaths, French vices, and the newest style . Of out-puffed sleeve, shall pass from west to east, A winnowing fan to purify the seed For fair millennial harvests soon to come? Or is not Spain the land of chosen warriors? Crusaders consecrated from the womb, Carrying the sword-cross stamped upon their souls By the long yearnings of a nation's life, Through all the seven patient centuries Since first Pelayo and his resolute band Trusted the God within their Gothic hearts At Covadunga, and defied Mahound; Beginning so the Holy War of Spain That now is panting with the eagerness Of labor near its end. The silver cross Glitters o'er Malaga and streams dread light On Moslem galleys, turning all their stores From threats to gifts. What Spanish knight is he Who, living now, holds it not shame to live Apart from that hereditary battle Which needs his sword? Castilian gentlemen Choose not their task they choose to do it well. The time is great, and greater no man's trust Than his who keeps the fortress for his king, Wearing great honors as some delicate robe Brocaded o'er with names 'twere sin to tarnish. Born de la Cerda, Calatravan knight, Count of Segura, fourth Duke of Bedmir, Offshoot from that high stock of old Castile Whose topmost branch is proud Medina Cell Such titles with their blazonry are his 10 POEMS OF GEORGE ELIOT. Who keeps this fortress, its sworn governor, Lord of the valley, master of the town, Commanding whom he will, himself commanded By Christ his Lord who sees him from the Cross And from bright heaven where the Mother pleads ;- By good Saint James upon the milk-white steed, Who leaves his bliss to fight for chosen Spain; By the dead gaze of all his ancestors ; And by the mystery of his Spanish blood Charged with the awe and glories of the past. See now with soldiers in his front and rear He winds at evening through the narrow streets That toward the Castle gate climb devious : His charger, of fine Andalusian stock, An Indian beauty, black -but delicate, Is conscious of the herald trumpet note, The gathering glances, and familiar ways That lead fast homeward : she forgets fatigue, And at the light touch of the master's spur Thrills with the zeal to bear him royally, Arches her neck and clambers up the stones As if disdainful of the difficult steep. Night-black the charger, black the rider's plume, But all between is bright with morning hues Seems ivory and gold and deep blue gems, And starry flashing steel and pale vermilion, All set in jasper: on his surcoat white Glitter the sword-belt and the jewelled hilt, Bed on the back and breast the holy cross, And 'twixt the helmet and the soft-spun white Thick tawny wavelets like the lion's mane Turn backward from his brow, pale, wide, erect, Shadowing blue eyes blue as the rain-washed sky That braced the early stem of Gothic kings He claims for ancestry. A goodly knight, A noble caballero, broad of chest And long of limb. So much the August sun, Xow in the west but shooting half its beams THE SPANISH GYPSY. 11 Past a dark rocky profile toward the plain, At windings of the path across the slope Makes suddenly luminous for all who see : For women smiling from the terraced roofs ; For boys that prone on trucks with head up-propped Lazy and curious, stare irreverent; For men who make obeisance with degrees Of good-will shading toward servility, Where-good-will ends and secret fear begins And curses, too, low-muttered through the teeth, Explanatory to the God of Shein. Five, grouped within a whitened tavern court Of Moorish fashion, where the trellised vines Purpling above their heads made odorous shade, Note through the open door the passers-by, Getting some rills of novelty to speed The lagging stream of talk and help the wine. "Tis Christian to drink wine : whoso denies His flesh at bidding save of Holy Church, Let him beware and take to Christian sins Lest he be taxed with Moslem sanctity. The souls are five, the talkers only three. (No time, most tainted by wrong faith and rule, But holds some listeners and dumb animals.) MINE HOST is one : he with the well-arched nose, Soft-eyed, fat-handed, loving men for nought But his own humor, patting old and young Upon the back, and mentioning the cost With confidential blandness, as a tax That he collected much against his will. From Spaniards who were all his bosom friends: Warranted Christian else how keep an inn, Which calling asks true faith? though like his wine Of cheaper sort, a trifle over-new. His father was a convert, chose the chrism As men choose physic, kept his chimney warm With smokiest wood upon a Saturday, 12 POEMS OF GEORGE ELIOT. Counted his gains and grudges on a chaplet, And crossed himself asleep for fear of spies; Trusting the God of Israel would see 'Twas Christian tyranny that made him base". Our host his son was born ten years too soon, Had heard his mother call him Ephraim, Knew holy things from common, thought it sin To feast on days when Israel's children mourned, So had to be converted with his sire, To doff the awe he learned as Ephraim, And suit his manners to a Christian name. But infant awe, that unborn moving thing, Dies with what nourished it, can never rise From the dead womb and walk and seek new pasture. Thus baptism seemed to him a merry game Not tried before, all sacraments a mode Of doing homage for one's property, And all religions a queer human whim Or else a vice, according to degrees : As, 'tis a whim to like your chestnuts hot, Burn your own mouth and draw your face awry, A vice to pelt frogs with them animals Content to take life coolly. And Lorenzo Would have all lives made easy, even lives Of spiders and inquisitors, yet still Wishing so well to flies and Moors and Jews He rather wished the others easy death; For loving all men clearly was deferred Till all men loved each other. Such mine Host, With chiselled smile caressing Seneca, The solemn mastiff leaning on his knee. His right-hand guest is solemn as the dog, Square-faced and massive : BLASCO is his name, A prosperous silversmith from Aragon ; In speech not silvery, rather tuned as notes From a deep vessel made of plenteous iron, Or some great bell of slow but certain swing That, if you only wait, will tell the hour As well as flippant clocks that strike in haste THE SPANISH GYPSY. 13 And set off chiming a superfluous tnine Like JUAN there, the spare man with the lute, Who makes you dizzy with his rapid tongue, Whirring athwart your mind with comment swift On speech you would have finished by and by, Shooting your bird for you while you are loading, Cheapening your wisdom as a pattern known, Woven by any shuttle on demand. Can never sit quite still, too : sees a wasp And kills it with a movement like a flash ; Whistles low notes or seems to thrum his lute As a mere hyphen 'twixt two syllables Of any steadier man ; walks up and down And snuffs the orange flowers and shoots a pea To hit a streak of light let through the awning. Has a queer face : eyes large as plums, a nose Small, round, uneven, like a bit of wax Melted and cooled by chance. Thin-fingered, lithe, And as a squirrel noiseless, startling men Only by quickness. In his speech and look A touch of graceful wildness, as of things Not trained or tamed for uses of the world ; Most like the Fauns that roamed in days of old About the listening whispering woods, and shared The subtler sense of sylvan ears and eyes Undulled by scheming thought, yet joined the rout Of men and women on the festal days, And played the syrinx too, and knew love's pains, Turning their anguish into melody. For Juan was a minstrel still, in times When minstrelsy was held a thing outworn. Spirits seem buried and their epitaph Is writ in Latin by severest pens, Yet still they flit above the trodden grave And find new bodies, animating them In quaint and ghostly way with antique souls. So Juan was a troubadour revived, Freshening life's dusty road with babbling rills Of wit and song, living 'mid harnessed men 14 POEMS OF GEORGE ELIOT. With limbs ungalled by armor, ready so To soothe them weary, and to cheer them sad. Guest at the board, companion in the camp, A crystal mirror to the life around, Flashing the comment keen of simple fact Defined in words; lending brief lyric voice To grief and sadness ; hardly taking note Of difference betwixt his own and others' ; But rather singing as a listener To the deep moans, the cries, the wild strong joys Of universal Xature, old yet young. Such Juan, the third talker, shimmering bright As butterfly or bird with quickest life. The silent ROLDAN has his brightness too, But only in his spangles and rosettes. His parti-colored vest and crimson hose Are dulled with old Valencian dust, his eyes With straining fifty years at gilded balls To catch them dancing, or with brazen looks At men and women as he made his jests Some thousand times and watched to count the pence His wife was gathering. His olive face Has an old writing in it, characters Stamped deep by grins that had no merriment, The soul's rude mark proclaiming all its blank; As on some faces that have long grown old In lifting tapers up to forms obscene On ancient walls and chuckling with false zest To please my lord, who gives the larger fee For that hard industry in apishness. Boldan would gladly never laugh again; Pensioned, he would be grave as any ox, And having beans and crumbs and oil secured Would borrow no man's jokes for evermore. 'Tis harder now because his wife is gone, Who had quick feet, and danced to ravishment Of every ring jewelled with Spanish eyes, But died and left this boy, lame from his birth, And sad and obstinate, though when he will THE SPANISH GYPSY. 15 He sings God-taught such marrow-thrilling strains As seem the very voice of dying Spring, A flute-like wail that mourns the blossoms gone, And sinks, and is not, like their fragrant breath, With fine transition on the trembling air. He sits as if imprisoned by some fear, Motionless, with wide eyes that seem not made For hungry glancing of a twelve-year'd boy To mark the living thing that he could tease, But for the gaze of some primeval sadness Dark twin with light in the creative ray. This little PABLO- has his spangles too, And large rosettes to hide his poor left foot Bounded like any hoof (his mother thought God willed it so to punish all her sins). I said the souls were five besides the dog. But there was still a sixth, with wrinkled face, Grave and disgusted with all merriment Not less than Roldan. It is ANXIBAL, The experienced monkey who performs the tricks, Jumps through the hoops, and carries round the hat. Once full of sallies and impromptu feats, Now cautious not to light on aught that's new, Lest he be whipped to do it o'er again From A to Z, and make the gentry laugh : A misanthropic monkey, gray and grim, Bearing a lot that has no remedy For want of concert in the monkey tribe. We see the company, above their heads The braided matting, golden as ripe corn, Stretched in a curving strip close by the grapes, Elsewhere rolled back to greet the cooler sky ; A fountain near, vase-shapen and broad-lipped, Where timorous birds alight with tiny feet, And hesitate and bend wise listening ears, And fly away again with undipped beak. On the stone floor the juggler's heaped-up goods, 16 POEMS OF GEORGE ELIOT. Carpet and hoops, viol and tambourine, Where Annibal sits perched with brows severe, A serious ape whom nxme take seriously, Obliged in this fool's world to earn his nuts By hard buffoonery. We see them all, And hear their talk the talk of Spanish men, With Southern intonation, vowels turned Caressingly between the consonants, Persuasive, willing, with such intervals As music borrows from the wooing birds, That plead with subtly curving, sweet descent And yet can quarrel, as these Spaniards can. JUAN (near the doorway). You hear the trumpet? There's old Eamon's blast No bray but his can shake the air so well. He takes his trumpeting as solemnly As angel charged to wake the dead; thinks war Was made for trumpeters, and their great art Made solely for themselves who understand it. His features all have shaped themselves to blowing, And when his trumpet's bagged or left at home He seems a chattel in a broker's booth, A spoutless watering-can, a promise to pay No sum particular. fine old Ramon! The blasts get louder and the clattering hoofs ; They crack the ear as well as heaven's thunder For owls that listen blinking. There's the banner. HOST (joining him : the others follow to the door). The Duke has finished reconnoitring, then? We shall hear news. They say he means a sally Would strike El Zagal's Moors as they push home Like ants with booty heavier than themselves; Then, joined by other nobles with their bands, Lay siege to Guadix. Juan, you're a bird That nest within the Castle. What say you? THE SPANISH GYPSY. 17 JUAN. Nought, I say nought. "Tis but a toilsome game To bet upon that feather Policy, And guess where after twice a hundred puffs 'Twill catch another feather crossing it: Guess how the Pope will blow and how the king; What force my lady's fan has; how a cough Seizing the Padre's throat may raise a gust, And how the queen may sigh the feather down. Such catching at imaginary threads, Such spinning twisted air, is not for me. If I should want a game, I'll rather bet On racing snails, two large, slow, lingering snails - No spurring, equal weights a chance sublime, Nothing to guess at, pure uncertainty. Here comes the Duke. They give but feeble shouts. And some look sour. HOST. That spoils a fair occasion. Civility brings no conclusions with it, And cheerful Vivas make the moments glide Instead of grating like a rusty wheel, JUAN. they are dullards, kick because they're stung, And bruise a friend to show they hate a wasp. HOST. Best treat your wasp with delicate regard ; When the right moment comes say, " By your leave, " Use your heel so ! and make an end of him. That's if we talked of wasps ; but our young Duke Spain holds not a more gallant gentleman. Live, live Duke Silva! 'Tis a rare smile he has, But seldom seen. 2 18 POEMS OF GEORGE ELIOT. JUAN. A true hidalgo's smile, That gives much favor, but beseeches none. His smile is sweetened by his gravity : It comes like dawn upon Sierra snows, Seeming more generous for the coldness gone ; Breaks from the calm a sudden opening flower On dark deep waters : now a chalice shut, A mystic shrine, the next a full-rayed star, Thrilling, pulse-quickening as a living word. I'll make a song of that. HOST. Prithee, not now. You'll fall to staring like a wooden saint, And wag your head as it were set on wires. Here's fresh sherbet. Sit, be good company. (To BLASCO) You are a stranger, sir, and cannot know How our Duke's nature suits his princely frame. BLASCO. Nay, but I marked his spurs chased cunningly ! A duke should know good gold and silver plate; Then he will know the quality of mine. I've ware for tables and for altars too, Our Lady in all sizes, crosses, bells : He'll need such weapons full as much as swords If he would capture any Moorish town. For, let me tell you, when a mosque is cleansed . . . JUAN. The demons fly so thick from sound of bells And smell of incense, you may see the air Streaked with them as with smoke. Why, they are spirits : You may well think how crowded they must be To make a sort of haze. THE SPANISH GYPSY. 19 BLASCO. I knew not that. Still, they're of smoky nature, demons are; And since you say so well, it proves the more The need of bells and censers. Ay, your Duke Sat well : a true hidalgo. I can judge Of harness specially. I saw the camp, The royal camp at Velez Malaga. 'Twas like the court of heaven such liveries! And torches carried by the score at night Before the nobles. Sirs, I made a dish To set an emerald in would fit a crown, For Don Alonzo, lord of Aguilar. Your Duke's no whit behind him in his mien Or harness either. But you seem to say The people love him not. HOST. They've nought against him. But certain winds will make men's temper bad. When the Solano blows hot venomed breath, It acts upon men's knives : steel takes to stabbing Which else, with cooler winds, were honest steel, Cutting but garlick. There's a wind just now Blows right from Seville BLASCO. Ay, you mean the wind . . . Yes, yes, a wind that's rather hot . . . HOST. With fagots. JUAN. A wind that suits not with our townsmen's blood. Abram, 'tis said, objected to be scorched, And, as the learned Arabs vouch, he gave The antipathy in full to Ishmael. 'Tis true, these patriarchs had their oddities. 20 POEMS OF GEORGE ELIOT. BLASCO. Their oddities? I'm of their mind, I know. Though, as to Abraham and Ishmael, I'm an old Christian, and owe nought to them Or any Jew among them. But I know We made a stir in Saragossa we : The men of Aragon ring hard true metal. Sirs, I'm no friend to heresy, but then A Christian's money is not safe. As how? A lapsing Jew or any heretic May owe me twenty ounces : suddenly He's prisoned, suffers penalties 'tis well: If men will not believe, 'tis good to make them, But let the penalties fall on them alone. The Jew is stripped, his goods are confiscate; Now, where, I pray you, go my twenty ounces? God knows, and perhaps the King may, but not I. And more, my son may lose his young wife's dower Because 'twas promised since her father's soul Fell to wrong thinking. How was I to know? I could but use my sense and cross myself. Christian is Christian I give in but still Taxing is taxing, though you call it holy. We Saragossans liked not this new tax They call the nonsense, I'm from Aragon! I speak too bluntly. But, for Holy Church, No man believes more. HOST. Nay, sir, never fear! Good Master Koldan here is no delator. HOLD AN (starting from a reverie). You speak to me, sirs? I perform to-night The Pla^a Santiago. Twenty tricks, All different. I dance, too. And the boy Sings like a bird. I crave your patronage. THE SPANISH GYPSY. 21 BLASCO. Faith, you shall have it, sir. In travelling I take a little freedom, and am gay. You marked not what I said just now? EOLDAN. I? no. I pray your pardon. I've a twinging knee, That makes it hard to listen. You were saying? BLASCO. Nay, it was nought. (Aside to HOST) Is it his deepness? HOST. No. He's deep in nothing but his poverty. BLASCO. But 'twas his poverty that made me think . * HOST. His piety might wish to keep the feasts As well as fasts. No fear ; he hears not. BLASCO. Good* J speak my mind about the penalties, But, look you, I'm against assassination. You know my meaning Master Arbue's, The grand Inquisitor in Aragon. I knew nought paid no copper toward the deed. But 1 was there, at prayers, within the church. How could I help it? Why, the saints were there, And looked straight on above the altars. I ... JUAN. Looked carefully another way. 22 POEMS OF GEORGE ELIOT. BLASCO. Why, at my beads. 'Twas after midnight, and the canons all Were chanting matins. I was not in church To gape and stare. I saw the martyr kneel : I never liked the look of him alive He was no martyr then. I thought he made An ugly shadow as he crept athwart The bands of light, then passed within the gloom By the broad pillar. 'Twas in our great Seo, At Saragossa. The pillars tower so large You cross yourself to see them, lest white Death Should hide behind their back. And so it was. I looked away again and told my beade Unthinkingly ; but still a man has ears ; And right across the chanting came a sound As if a tree had crashed above the roar Of some great torrent. So it seemed to me ; For when you listen long and shut your eyes Small sounds get thunderous. He had a shell Like any lobster : a good iron suit From top to toe beneath the innocent serge. That made the tell-tale souud. But then came shrieks. The chanting stopped and turned to rushing feet, And in the midst lay Master Arbues, Felled like an ox. 'Twas wicked butchery. Some honest men had hoped it would have scared The Inquisition out of Aragon. 'Twas money thrown away I would say, crime Clean thrown away. HOST. That was a pity now. Next to a missing thrust, what irks me most Is a neat well-aimed stroke that kills your man, Yet ends in mischief as in Aragon. It was a lesson to our people here. Else there's a monk within our city walls, THE SPANISH GYPSY. \ A holy, high-born, stern Dominican, They might have made the great mistake to kill. BLASCO. What! is he? ... HOST. Yes ; a Master Arbues Of finer quality. The Prior here And uncle to our Duke. BLASCO. He will want plate : A holy pillar or a crucifix. But, did you say, he was like Arbue's? JUAN. As a black eagle with gold beak and claws Is like a raven. Even in his cowl, Covered from head to foot, the Prior is known From all the black herd round. When he uncovers And stands white-frocked, with ivory face, his eyes Black-gleaming, black his coronal of hair Like shredded jasper, he seems less a man With struggling aims, than pure incarnate Will, Fit to subdue rebellious nations, nay, That human flesh he breathes in, charged with passion Which quivers in his nostril and his lip, But disciplined by long in-dwelling will To silent labor in the yoke of law. A truce to thy comparisons, Lorenzo! Thine is no subtle nose for difference; 'Tis dulled by feigning and civility. HOST. Pooh, thou'rt a poet, crazed with finding words May stick to things and seem like qualities. No pebble is a pebble in thy hands : 24 POEMS OP GEORGE ELIOT. 'Tis a moon out of work, a barren egg, Or twenty things that no man sees but thee. Our Father Isidor's a living saint, And that is heresy, some townsmen think: Saints should be dead, according to the Church. My mind is this : the Father is so holy 'Twere sin to wish his soul detained from bliss. . Easy translation to the Tealms above, The shortest journey to the seventh heaven, Is what I'd never grudge him. BLASCO. Piously said. Look you, I'm dutiful, obey the Church When there's no help for it: I mean to say, When Pope and Bishop and all customers Order alike. But there be bishops now, And were aforetime, who have held it wrong, This hurry to convert the Jews. As how? Your Jew pays tribute to the bishop, say. That's good, and must please God, to see the Church Maintained in ways that ease the Christian's purse. Convert the Jew, and where's the tribute, pray? He lapses, too: 'tis slippery work, conversion: And then the holy taxing carries off His money at one sweep. No tribute morel He's penitent or burnt, and there's an end. Now guess which pleases God . . . JUAN. Whether he likes A well-burnt Jew or well-fed bishop best. [While Juan put this problem theologic Entered, with resonant step, another guest A soldier : all his keenness in his sword, His eloquence in scars upon his cheek, His virtue in much slaying of the Moor : THE SPANISH GYPSY. 25 With brow well-creased in horizontal folds To save the space, as having nought to do : Lips prone to whistle whisperingly no tune, But trotting rhythm : meditative eyes, Most often fixed upon his legs and spurs: Styled Captain Lopez.] LOPEZ. At your service, sirs. JUAN. Ha, Lopez? Why, thou hast a face full-charged As any herald's. What news of the wars? LOPEZ. Such news as is most bitter on my tongue. JUAN. Then spit it forth. HOST. Sit, Captain: here's a cup, Fresh-filled. What news? LOPEZ. 'Tis bad. We make no sally: We sit still here and wait whate'er the Moor Shall please to do. HOST. Some townsmen will be glad. LOPEZ. Glad, will they be? But I'm not glad, not I, Nor any Spanish soldier of clean blood. But the Duke's wisdom is to wait a siege Instead of laying one. Therefore meantime He will be married straightway. 26 POEMS OP GEORGE ELIOT. HOST. Ha, ha, ha! Thy speech is like an hourglass; turn it down The other way, 'twill stand as well, and say The Duke will wed, therefore he waits a siege. But what say Don Diego and the Prior? The holy uncle and the fiery Don? LOPEZ. there be sayings running all abroad As thick as nuts o'erturned. No man need lack. Some say, 'twas letters changed the Duke's intent: From Malaga, says Bias. From Rome, says Quintin. From spies at Guadix, says Sebastian. Some say, 'tis all a pretext say, the Duke Is but a lapdog hanging on a skirt, Turning his eyeballs upward like a monk: 'Twas Don Diego said that so says Bias; Last week, he said . . . JUAN. do without the " said " ! Open thy mouth and pause in lieu of it. 1 had as lief be pelted with a pea Irregularly in the self -same spot As hear such iteration without rule, Such torture of uncertain certainty. LOPEZ. Santiago! Juan, thou art hard to please. I speak not for my own delighting, I. I can be silent, I. BLASCO. Nay, sir, speak on ! I like your matter well. I deal in plate. This wedding touches me. Who is the bride? THE SPANISH GYPSY. 27 LOPEZ. One that some say the Duke does ill to wed. One that his mother reared God rest her soull Duchess Diana she who died last year. A bird picked up away from any nest. Her name the Duchess gave it is Fedalma. No harm in that. But the Duke stoops, they say, In wedding her. And that's the simple truth. JUAN. Thy simple truth is but a false opinion: The simple truth of asses who believe Their thistle is the very best of food. Pie, Lopez, thou a Spaniard with a sword Dreamest a Spanish noble ever stoops By doing honor to the maid he loves! He stoops alone when he dishonors her. LOPEZ. Nay, I said nought against her. JUAN. Better not. Else I would challenge thee to fight with wits, And spear thee through and through ere thou couldst draw The bluntest word. Yes, yes, consult thy spurs : Spurs are a sign of knighthood, and should tell thee That knightly love is blent with reverence As heavenly air is blent with heavenly blue. Don Silva's heart beats to a loyal tune: He wills no highest-born Castilian dame, Betrothed to highest noble, should be held More sacred than Fedalma. He enshrines Her virgin image for the general awe And for his own will guard her from the world, Nay, his profaner self, lest he should lose The place of his religion. He does well. Nought can come closer to the poet's strain. 28 POEMS OF GEORGE ELIOT. HOST. Or farther from his practice, Juan, eh? If thou'rt a sample? JUAN. Wrong there, my Lorenzo Touching Fedalma the poor poet plays A finer part even than the noble Duke. LOPEZ. -By making ditties, singing with round mouth Likest a crowing cock? Thou meanest that? JUAN. Lopez, take physic, thou art getting ill, Growing descriptive; 'tis unnatural. I mean, Don Silva's love expects reward, Kneels with a heaven to come ; but the poor poet Worships without reward, nor hopes to rind A heaven save in his worship. He adores The sweetest woman for her sweetness' sake, Joys in the love that was not born for him, Because 'tis lovingness, as beggars joy, Warming their naked limbs on wayside walls, To hear a tale of princes and their glory. There's a poor poet (poor, I mean, in coin) Worships Fedalma with so true a love That if her silken robe were changed for rags, And she were driven out to stony wilds Barefoot, a scorned wanderer, he would kiss Her ragged garment's edge, and only ask For leave to be her slave. Digest that, friend, Or let it lie upon thee as a weight To check light thinking of Fedalma. LOPEZ. I? I think no harm of her ; I thank the saints I wear a sword and peddle not in thinking. THE SPANISH GYPSY. 'Tis Father Marcos says she'll not confess And loves not holy water ; says her blood Is infidel; says the Duke's wedding her Is union of light with darkness. JUAN. Tush I [Now Juan who by snatches touched his lute With soft arpeggio, like a whispered dream Of sleeping music, while he spoke of love In jesting anger at the soldier's talk Thrummed loud and fast, then faster and more loud, Till, as he answered " Tush ! " he struck a chord " Sudden as whip-crack close by Lopez' ear. Mine host and Blasco smiled, the mastiff barked, Eoldan looked up and Annibal looked down, Cautiously neutral in so new a case ; The boy raised longing, listening eyes that seemed An exiled spirit's waiting in strained hope Of voices coming from the distant land. But Lopez bore the assault like any rock : That was not what he drew his sword at he! He spoke with neck erect.] LOPEZ. If that's a hint The company should ask thee for a song, Sing, then! HOST. Ay, Juan, sing, and jar no more. Something brand new. Thou'rt wont to make my ear A test of novelties. Hast thou aught fresh? JUAN. As fresh as rain-drops. Here's a Cancidn Springs like a tiny mushroom delicate Out of the priest's foul scandal of Fedalma, POEMS OP GEORGE ELIOT. [He preluded with querying intervals, Rising, then falling just a semitone, In minor cadence sound with poised wing Hovering and quivering toward the needed fall. Then in a voice that shook the willing air With masculine vibration sang this song. Should I long that dark were fair ? Say, song ! Lacks my love aught, that I should long ? Dark the night, with breath allflow'rs, And tender broken voice that fills With ravishment the listening hours : Whisperings, wooings, Liquid ripples and soft ring-dove cooings In low-toned rhythm that love's aching stills. Dark the night, Vet is she bright, For in her dark she brings the mystic star, Trembling yet strong, as is the voice of love, from some unknown afar. radiant Dark ! darkly-fostered ray ! Thou hast a joy too deep for shallow Day. While Juan sang all round the tavern court Gathered a constellation of black eyes. Fat Lola leaned upon the balcony With arms that might have pillowed Hercules (Who built, 'tis known, the mightiest Spanish towns); Thin Alda's face, sad as a wasted passion, Leaned o'er the nodding baby's; 'twixt the rails The little Pepe showed his two black beads, His flat-ringed hair and small Semitic nose, Complete and tiny as a new-born minnow; Patting his head and holding in her arms The baby senior, stood Lorenzo's wife All negligent, her kerchief discomposed By little clutches, woman's coquetry THE SPANISH GYPSY. 31 Quite turned to mother's cares and sweet content. These on the balcony, while at the door Gazed the lank boys and lazy- shouldered men, "Tis likely too the rats and insects peeped, Being southern Spanish ready for a lounge. The singer smiled, as doubtless Orpheus smiled, To see the animals both great and small, The mountainous elephant and scampering mouse, Held by the ears in decent audience ; Then, when mine host desired the strain once more, He fell to preluding with rhythmic change Of notes recurrent, soft as pattering drops That fall from off the eaves in faery dance When clouds are breaking ^ till at measured pause He struck with strength, in rare responsive chords.] HOST. Come, then, a gayer ballad, if thou wilt : I quarrel not with change. What say you, Captain? LOPEZ. All's one to me. I note no change of tune, Not I, save in the ring of horses' hoofs, Or in the drums and trumpets when they call To action or retreat. I ne'er could see The good of singing. BLASCO. Why, it passes time Saves you from getting over-wise : that's good. For, look you, fools are merry here below, Yet they will go to heaven all the same, Having the sacraments; and, look you, heaven Is a long holiday, and solid men, Used to much business, might be ill at ease Not liking play. And so, in travelling, I shape myself betimes to idleness And take fools' pleasures . . . ' 32 POEMS OF GEORGE ELIOT. HOST. Hark, the song begins! JUAN (sings). Maiden, crowned with glossy blackness, Lithe as panther forest-roaming, Long-armed naiad, ^vhen she dances, On a stream of ether floating Bright, bright Fedalma ! Form, all curves like softness drifted, Wave-kissed marble roundly dimpling, Far-off music slowly winged, Gently rising, gently sinking Bright, bright Fedalma ! Pure as rain-tear on a rose-leaf, Cloud high-born in noonday spotless, Sudden perfect as the dew-bead, Gem of earth and sky begotten Bright, bright Fedalma! Beauty has no mortal father, Holy light her form engendered Out of tremor, yearning, gladness, Presage sweet and joy remembered Child of Light, Fedalma ! BLASCO. Faith, a good song, sung to a stirring time. I like the words returning in a round ; It gives a sort of sense. Another such! RoLDAisr (rising). Sirs, you will hear my boy. 'Tis very hard When gentles sing for nought to all the town. THE SPANISH GYPSY. 33 How can a poor man live? And now 'tis time I go to the Plaxja who will give me pence When he can hear hidalgos and give nought? JUAN. True, friend. Be pacified. I'll sing no more. Go thou, and we will follow. Never fear. My voice is common as the ivy-leaves, Plucked in all seasons bears no price ; thy boy's Is like the almond blossoms. Ah, he's lame! HOST. Load him not heavily. Here, Pedro ! help. Go with them to the Plac,a, take the hoops. The sights will pay thee. BLASCO. I'll be there anon, And set the fashion with a good white coin. But let us see as well as hear. HOST. Ay, prithee. Some tricks, a dance. BLASCO. Yes, 'tis more rational. ROLDAN (turning round with the bundle and mon~ key on his shoulders). You shall see all, sirs. There's no man in Spain Knows his art better. I've a twinging knee Oft hinders dancing, and the boy is lame. But no man's monkey has more tricks than mine. [At this high praise the gloomy Annibal, Mournful professor of high drollery, 3 34 POEMS OF GEORGE ELIOT. Seemed to look gloomier, and the little troop Went slowly out, escorted from the door By all the idlers. From the balcony Slowly subsided the black radiance Of agate eyes, and broke in chattering sounds, Coaxings and trampings, and the small hoarse squeak Of Pepe's reed. And our group talked again.] HOST. I'll get this juggler, if he quits him well, An audience here as choice as can be lured. Tor me, when a poor devil does his best, 'Tis my delight to soothe his soul with praise. What though the best be bad? remains the good Of throwing food to a lean hungry dog. I'd give up the best jugglery in life To see a miserable juggler pleased. But that's my humor. Crowds are malcontent And cruel as the Holy .... Shall we go? All of us now together? LOPEZ. Well, not I. I may be there anon, but first I go To the lower prison. There is strict command That all our gypsy prisoners shall to-night Be lodged within the fort. They've forged enough Of balls and bullets used up all the metal. At morn to-morrow they must carry stones Up the south tower. 'Tis a fine stalwart band, Fit for the hardest tasks. Some say, the queen Would have the Gypsies banished with the Jews. Some say, 'twere better harness them for work. They' d feed on any filth and save the Spaniard. Some say but I must go. ' Twill soon be time To head the escort. We shall meet again. THE SPANISH GYPSY. 35 BLASCO. Go, sir, with God (exit Lopez). A very proper man, And soldierly. But, for this banishment Some men are hot on, it ill pleases me. The Jews, now (sirs, if any Christian here Had Jews for ancestors, I blame him not; We cannot all be Goths of Aragon) Jews are not fit for heaven, but on earth They are most useful. 'Tis the jsame with mules, Horses, or oxen, or with any pig Except Saint Anthony's. They are useful here (The Jews I mean) though they may go to hell. And, look you, useful sins why, Providence Sends Jews to do 'em, saving Christian souls. The very Gypsies, curbed and harnessed well, Would make draught cattle, feed on vermin too, Cost less than grazing brutes, and turn bad food To handsome carcasses ; sweat at the forge For little wages, and well drilled and flogged Might work like slaves, some Spaniards looking on. I deal in plate, and am no priest to say What God may mean, save when he means plain sense; But when he sent the Gypsies wandering In punishment because they sheltered not Our Lady and Saint Joseph (and no doubt Stole the small ass they fled with into Egypt), Why send them here? 'Tis plain he saw the use They'd be to Spaniards. Shall we banish them, And tell God we know better? 'Tis a sin. They talk of vermin ; but, sirs, vermin large Were made to eat the small, or else to eat The noxious rubbish, and picked Gypsy men Might serve in war to climb, be killed, and fall To make an easy ladder. Once I saw A Gpysy sorcerer, at a spring and grasp Kill one who came to seize him ; talk of strength ! Nay, swiftness too, for while we crossed ourselves He vanished like say, like . . . 36 POEMS OP GEORGE ELIOT. JUAN. A swift black snake, Or like a living arrow fledged with will. BLASCO. Why, did you see him, pray? JUAN. Not then, but now, As painters see the many in the one. We have a Gypsy in Bedmar whose frame Nature compacted with such fine selection, 'T would yield a dozen types : all Spanish knights, From him who slew Rolando at the pass Up to the mighty Cid ; all deities, Thronging Olympus in fine attitudes ; Or all hell's heroes whom the poet saw Tremble like lions, writhe like demigods. HOST. Pause not yet, Juan more hyperbole! Shoot upward still and flare in meteors Before thou sink to earth in dull brown fact. BLASCO. Nay, give me fact, high shooting suits not me. I never stare to look for soaring larks. What is this Gypsy? HOST. Chieftain of a band, The Moor's allies, whom full a month ago Our Duke surprised and brought as captives home. He needed smiths, and doubtless the brave Moor - Has missed some useful scouts and archers too. THE SPANISH GYPSY. 37 Juan's fantastic pleasure is to watch These Gypsies forging, and to hold discourse With this great chief, whom he transforms at will To sage or warrior, and like the sun Plays daily at fallacious alchemy, Turns sand to gold, and dewy spider-webs To myriad rainbows. Still the sand is sand, And still in sober shade you see the web. 'Tis so, I'll wager, with his Gypsy chief A piece of stalwart cunning, nothing more. JUAN. No 1 My invention has been all too poor To frame this Zarca as I saw him first. 'Twas when they stripped him. In his chieftain's gear, Amidst his men he seemed a royal barb - Followed by wild-maned Audalusian colts. He had a necklace of a strange device In finest gold of unknown workmanship, But delicate as Moorish, fit to kiss Fedalma's neck, and play in shadows there. He wore fine mail, a rich-wrought sword and belt, And on his surcoat black a broidered torch, A pine-branch flaming, grasped by two dark hands. But when they stripped him of his ornaments It was the baubles lost their grace, not he. His eyes, his mouth, his nostril, all inspired With scorn that mastered utterance of scorn, With power to check all rage until it turned To ordered force, unleashed on chosen prey It seemed the soul within him made his limbs And made them grand. The baubles were well gone. He stood the more a king, when bared to man. BLASCO. Maybe. But nakedness is bad for trade, And is not decent. Well-wrought metal, sir, Is not a bauble. Had you seen the camp, 38 POEMS OF GEORGE ELIOT. The royal camp at Velez Malaga, Ponce de Leon and the other dukes, The king himself and all his thousand knights For bodyguard, 'twould not have left you breath To praise a Gypsy thus. A man's a man; But when you see a king, you see the work Of many thousand men. King Ferdinand Bears a fine presence, and hath proper limbs ; But what though he were shrunken as a relic? You'd see the gold and gems that cased him o'er, And all the pages round him in brocade, And all the lords, themselves a sort of kings, Doing him reverence. That strikes an awe Into a common man especially A judge of plate. HOST. Faith, very wisely said. Purge thy speech, Juan. It is over-full Of this same Gypsy. Praise the Catholic King. And come now, let us see the juggler's skill. The Pla$a Santiago. 'Tis daylight still, but now the golden cross Uplifted by the angel on the dome Stands rayless in calm color clear-defined Against the northern blue ; from turrets high The flitting splendor sinks with folded wing Dark-hid till morning, and the battlements Wear soft relenting whitness mellowed o'er By summers generous and winters bland. Now in the east the distance casts its veil And gazes with a deepening earnestness. The old rain- fretted mountains in their robes Of shadow-broken gray ; the rounded hills Keddened with blood of Titans, whose huge limbs. Entombed within, feed full the hardy flesh Of cactus green and blue broad-sworded aloes THE SPANISH GYPSY. 39 The cypress soaring black above the lines Of white court- walls ; the jointed sugar-canes Pale-golden with their feathers motionless In the warm 'quiet : all thought-teaching form Utters itself in firm unshimmering hues. For the great rock has screened the westering sun That still on plains beyond streams vaporous gold Among the branches ; and within Bedmar Has come the time of sweet serenity When color grows unglittering, and the soul Of visible things shows silent happiness, As that of lovers trusting though apart. The ripe-cheeked fruits, the crimson-petalled flowers: The winged life that pausing seems a gem Cunningly carven on the dark green leaf; The face of man with hues supremely blent To difference fine as of a voice 'mid sounds : Each lovely light-dipped thing seems to emerge Flushed gravely from baptismal sacrament. All beauteous existence rests, yet wakes, Lies still, yet conscious with clear open eyes And gentle breath and mild suffused joy. 'Tis day, but day that falls like melody Eepeated on a string with graver tones Tones such as linger in a long farewell. The Plaqa widens in the passive air The Placja Santiago, where the church, A mosque converted, shows an eyeless face Ked-checkered, faded, doing penance still Bearing with Moorish arch the imaged saint, Apostle, baron, Spanish warrior, Whose charger's hoofs trample the turbaned dead, Whose banner with the Cross, the bloody sword Flashes athwart the Moslem's glazing eye, And mocks his trust in Allah who forsakes. Up to the church the Plaqa gently slopes, In shape most like the pious palmer' s shell, Girdled with low" white houses j high above 40 POEMS OF GEORGE ELIOT. Tower the strong fortress and sharp-angled wall And well-flanked castle gate. From o'er the roofs, And from the shadowed patios cool, there spreads The breath of flowers and aromatic leaves Soothing the sense with bliss indefinite A baseless hope, a glad presentiment, That curves the lip more softly, fills the eye With more indulgent beam. And so it soothes, So gently sways the pulses of the crowd Who make a zone about the central spot Chosen by Roldan for his theatre. Maids with arched eyebrows, delicate-pencilled, dark, Fold their round arms below the kerchief full; Men shoulder little girls ; and grandames gray, But muscular still, hold babies on their arms ; While mothers keep the stout-legged boys in front Against their skirts, as old Greek pictures show The Glorious Mother with the Boy divine. Youths keep the places for themselves, and roll Large lazy eyes, and call recumbent dogs (For reasons deep below the reach of thought). The old men cough with purpose, wish to hint Wisdom within that cheapens jugglery, Maintain a neutral air, and knit their brows In observation. None are quarrelsome, Noisy, or very merry ; for their blood Moves slowly into fervor they rejoice Like those dark birds that sweep with heavy wing, Cheering their mates with melancholy cries. But now the gilded balls begin to play In rhythmic numbers, ruled by practice fine Of eye and muscle: all the juggler's form Consents harmonious in swift-gliding change, Easily forward stretched or backward bent With lightest step and movement circular Bound a fixed point: 'tis not the old Roldan now, The dull, hard, weary, miserable man, The soul all parched to languid app'etite THE SPANISH GYPSY. 41 And memory of desire : 'tis wondrous force That moves in combination multiform Toward conscious ends: 'tis Roldan glorious, Holding all eyes like any meteor, King of the moment save when Annibal Divides the scene and plays the comic part, Gazing with blinking glances up and down, Dancing and throwing nought and catching it> With mimicry as merry as the tasks Of penance-working shades in Tartarus. Pablo stands passive, and a space apart, Holding a viol, waiting for command. Music must not be wasted, but must rise As needed climax ; and the audience Is growing with late comers. Juan now, And the familiar Host, with Blasco broad, Find way made gladly to the inmost round Studded with heads. Lorenzo knits the crowd Into one family by showing all Good- will and recognition. Juan casts His large and rapid-measuring glance around; But with faint quivering, transient as a breath Shaking a flame his eyes make sudden pause Where by the jutting angle of a street Castle-ward leading stands a female form, A kerchief pale square-drooping o'er the brow, About her shoulders dim brown serge in garb Most like a peasant woman from the vale, Who might have lingered after marketing To see the show. What thrill mysterious, Ray-borne from orb to orb of conscious eyes, The swift observing sweep of Juan's glance Arrests an instant, then with prompting fresh Diverts it lastingly? He turns at once To watch the gilded balls, and nod and smile At little round Pepita, blondest maid In all Bedmar Pepfta, fair yet flecked, Saucy of lip and nose, of hair as red 42 POEMS OF GEORGE ELIOT. As breasts of robins stepping on the snow Who stands in front with little tapping feet, And baby-dimpled hands that hide enclosed Those sleeping crickets, the dark castanets. But soon the gilded balls have ceased to play And Annibal is leaping through the hoops, That turn to twelve, meeting him as he flies In the swift circle. Shuddering he leaps, But with each spring flies swift and swifter still To loud and louder shouts, while the great hoops Are changed to smaller. Now the crowd is fired. The motion swift, the living victim urged, The imminent failure and repeated 'scape Hurry all pulses and intoxicate With subtle wine of passion many-mixt. 'Tis all about a monkey leaping hard Till near to gasping; but it serves as well As the great circus or arena dire, Where these are lacking. Koldan cautiously Slackens the leaps and lays the hoops to rest, And Annibal retires with reeling brain And backward stagger pity, he could not smile! Now Roldan spreads his carpet, now he shows Strange metamorphoses : the pebble black Changes to whitest egg within his hand ; A staring rabbit, with retreating ears, Is swallowed by the air and vanishes ; He tells men's thoughts about the shaken dice, Their secret choosing ; makes the white beans pass With causeless act sublime from cup to cup Turned empty on the ground diablerie That pales the girls and puzzles all the boys : These tricks are samples, hinting to the town Roldan's great mastery. He tumbles next, And Annibal is called to mock each feat With arduous comicality and save By rule romantic the great public mind Koldan' s body) from too sericus strain. THE SPANISH GYPSY. 43 But with the tumbling, lest the feats should fail, And so need veiling in a haze of sound, Pablo awakes the viol and the bow The masculine bow that draws the woman's heart From out the strings and makes them cry, yearn, plead, Tremble, exult, with mystic union Of joy acute and tender suffering. To play the viol and discreetly mix Alternate with the bow's keen biting tones The throb responsive to the finger's touch Was rarest skill that Pablo half had caught From an old blind and wandering Catalan; The other half was rather heritage From treasure stored by generations past In winding chambers of receptive sense. The winged sounds exalt the thick-pressed crowd With a new pulse in common, blending all The gazing life into one larger soul With dimly widened consciousness : as waves In heightened movement tell of waves far off. And the light changes ; westward stationed clouds, The sun's ranged outposts, luminous message spread, Rousing quiescent things to doff their shade And show themselves as added audience. Now Pablo, letting fall the eager bow, Solicits softer murmurs from the strings, And now above them pours a wondrous voice (Such as Greek reapers heard in Sicily) With wounding rapture in it, like love's arrows; And clear upon clear air as colored gems Dropped in a crystal cup of water pure, Fall words of sadness, simple, lyrical : Spring comes hither, Buds the rose ; Roses wither, Sweet spring goes. Ojala, would she carry me t 44 POEMS OP GEORGE ELIOT. Summer soars Wide-winged day White light pours, Flies away. Ojala, would he carry mel Soft winds blow, Westward born, Onward go Toward the morn. Ojala, would they carry me/ Sweet birds sing O'er the graves, Then take wing O'er the waves. Ojala, would they carry met When the voice paused and left the viol's note To plead forsaken, 'twas as when a cloud Hiding the sun makes all the leaves and flowers Shiver. But when with measured change the strings Had taught regret new longing, clear again, Welcome as hope recovered, flowed the voice. Warm whispering through the slender olive leaves Came to me a gentle sound, Whispering of a secret found In the clear sunshine } mtd the golden sheaves . Said it was sleeping for me in the morn, Called it gladness, called it joy, Drew me on ' Come hither, boy" To where the blue wings rested on the corn. 1 thought the gentle sound had whispered true Thought the little heaven mine, Leaned to clutch the thing divine, And saw the blue wings melt within the blue. The long notes linger on the trembling air, With subtle penetration enter all " A figure lith j, all white and saffron robed, Flashed right across the circle." Page 45. Eliot Spanish Gypsy. THE SPANISH GYPSY. 45 The myriad corridors of the passionate soul, Message-like spread, and answering action rouse. Not angular jigs that warm the chilly limbs In hoary northern mists, but action curved To soft andante strains pitched plaintively. Vibrations sympathetic stir all limbs : Old men live backward in their dancing prime, And move in memory ; small legs and arms With pleasant agitation purposeless Go up" and down like pretty fruits in gales. All long in common for the expressive act Yet wait for it ; as in the olden time Men waited for the bard to tell their thought. " The dance ! the dance ! " is shouted all around. Now Pablo lifts the bow, Pepita now, Ready as bird that sees the sprinkled corn, When Juan nods and smiles, puts forth her foot And lifts her arm to wake the castanets. Juan advances, too, from out the ring And bends to quit his lute; for now the scene Is empty ; Eoldan, weary, gathers pence, Followed by Annibal with purse and stick. The carpet lies a colored isle untrod, Inviting feet: "The dance, the dance," resounds, The bow entreats with slow melodic strain, And all the air with expectation yearns. Sudden, with gliding motion like a flame That through dim vapor makes a path of glory, A figure lithe, all white and saffron-robed, Flashed right across the circle, and now stood With ripened arms uplift and regal head, Like some tall flower whose dark and intense heart Lies half within a tulip-tinted cup. Juan stood fixed and pale ; Pepita stepped Backward within the ring : the voices fell From shouts insistent to more passive tones Half meaning welcome, half astonishment. "Lady Fedalma! will she dance for us?" 46 POEMS OF GEORGE ELIOT. But she, sole swayed by impulse passionate, Feeling all life was music and all eyes The warming quickening light that music makes, Moved as, in dance religious, Miriam, When on the Red Sea shore she raised her voice And led the chorus of the people's joy; Or as the Trojan maids that reverent sang Watching the sorrow-crowned Hecuba : Moved in slow curves voluminous, gradual, Feeling and action flowing into one, In Eden's natural taintless marriage-bond; Ardently modest, sensuously pure, With young delight that wonders at itself And throbs as innocent as opening flowers, Knowing not comment soilless, beautiful. The spirit'in her gravely glowing face With sweet community informs her limbs, Filling their fine gradation with the breath Of virgin majesty ; as fiill-vowelled words Are new impregnate with the master's thought. Even the chance-strayed delicate tendrils black, That backward 'scape from out her wreathing hair- Even the pliant folds that cling transverse When with obliquely soaring bend altern She seems a goddess quitting earth again Gather expression a soft undertone And resonance exquisite from the grand chord Of her harmoniously bodied soul. At first a reverential silence guards The eager senses of the gazing crowd : They hold their breath, and live by seeing her. But soon the admiring tension finds relief Sighs of delight, applausive murmurs low, And stirrings gentle as of eared corn Or seed-bent grasses, when the ocean's breath Spreads landward. Even Juan is impelled By the swift-travelling movement : fear and doubt Give way before the hurrying energy ; THE SPANISH GYPSY. 47 He takes his lute and strikes in fellowship, Filling more full the rill of melody Raised ever and anon to clearest flood By Pablo's voice, that dies away too soon, Like the sweet blackbird' s fragmentary chant, Yet wakes again, with varying rise and fall, In songs that seem emergent memories Prompting brief utterance little cancidns And villancicos, Andalusia-born. PABLO (sings). It was in the prime Of the sweet Spring-time. In the linnet's throat Trembled the love-note, And the love-stirred air Thrilled the blossoms there. Little shadoivs danced Each a tiny elf, Happy in large light And the thinnest self. It was but a minute In a far-off Spring, But each gentle thing, Sweetly-wooing linnet, Soft-thrilled hawthorn tree, Happy shadowy elf With the thinnest self, Live still on in me. the sweet, siveet prime Of the past Spring-time ! And still the light is changing : high above Moat soft pink clouds ; others with deeper flush Stretch like flamingos bending toward the south. Comes a more solemn brilliance o'er the sky, A meaning more intense upon the air The inspiration of the dying day. 48 POEMS OF GEORGE ELIOT. And Juan now, when Pablo's notes subside, Soothes the regretful ear, and breaks the pause With masculine voice in deep antiphony. JUAN (sings) . Day is dying ! Float, song, Down the westward river, Requiem chanting to the Day Day, the mighty Giver. Pierced by shafts of Time he bleeds, Melted rubies sending Through the river and the sky, Earth and heaven blending / All the long-drawn earthy banks Up to cloud-land lifting: Slow between them drifts the swan, 'Twixt two heavens drifting. Wings half open, like a flow* r Inly deeper flushing, Neck and breast as virgin's pure Virgin proudly blushing. Day is dying ! Float, swan. Down the ruby river ; Follow, song, in requiem To the mighty Giver. The exquisite hour, the ardor of the crowd, The strains more plenteous, and the gathering night Of action passionate where no effort is, But self's poor gates open to rushing power That blends the inward ebb and outward vast All gathering influences culminate And urge "Fedalma. Earth and heaven seem one, Like a glad trembling on the outer edge Of unknown rapture. Swifter now she moves, Filling the measure with a double beat THE SPANISH GYPSY. And widening circle ; now she seems to glow With more declared presence, glorified. Circling, she lightly bends and lifts on high The multitudinous-sounding tambourine, And makes it ring and boom, then lifts it higher, Stretching her left arm beauteous ; now the crowd Exultant shouts, forgetting poverty In the rich moment of possessing her. But sudden, at one point, the exultant throng Is pushed and hustled, and then thrust apart : Something approaches something cuts the ring Of jubilant idlers startling as a streak From alien wounds across the blooming flesh Of careless sporting childhood. 'Tis the band Of Gypsy prisoners. Soldiers lead the van And make sparse flanking guard, aloof surveyed By gallant Lopez, stringent in command. The Gypsies chained in couples, all save one, Walk in dark file with grand bare legs and arms And savage melancholy in their eyes That star-like gleam from out black clouds of hair ; Now they are full in sight, and now they stretch Right to the centre of the open space. Fedalma now, with gentle wheeling sweep Returning, like the loveliest of the Hours Strayed from her sisters, truant lingering, Faces again the centre, swings again The uplifted tambourine. . . . When lo! with sound Stupendous throbbing, solemn as a voice Sent by the invisible choir of all the dead, Tolls the great passing bell that calls to prayer For souls departed : at the mighty beat It seems the light sinks awe-struck 'tis the note Of the sun's burial; speech and action pause; Religious silence and the holy sign Of everlasting memories (the sign Of death that turned to more diffusive life) 4 60 POEMS OF GEORGE ELIOT. Pass o'er the Pla