OF CALIFORNIA 
 S ANGELES
 
 A ^^" 
 
 ^ /
 
 MAKERS OF LITERATURE
 
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 i 
 
 i
 
 MAKEES OF LITERATURE 
 
 BEING 
 
 ESSAYS ON SHELLEY, LANDOR, BROWNING 
 
 BYRON, ARNOLD, COLERIDGE, LOWELL 
 
 WHITTIER, AND OTHERS 
 
 BT 
 
 GEOEGE EDWARD WOODBEERY 
 
 AUTHOR OF "wild KDBN," " HEART OF MAN," ETC. 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
 1900 
 
 All rights reserved
 
 COPTKIGHT, 1890, 
 
 By HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 
 
 Copyright, 1900, 
 By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 
 
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 Nottoootj ^rtss 
 
 J. S. Gushing & Co. — Berwick St Sniitll 
 Norwood Mass. U.S.A.
 
 
 ^ PREFACE 
 
 The greater portion of the contents of 
 this volume were published in 1890 as 
 " Studies in Letters and Life," and orig- 
 
 
 CO inally appeared in the Atlantic Monthly 
 
 ^ and the Nation, 1878-1890. The author's 
 
 CM 
 
 Q- later j)apers have been added to this edi- 
 
 ^ tion, and are from the Century Magazine, 
 
 the Atlantic, the Library of the World's 
 Best Literature (R. S, Peale and J. A. Hill, 
 1896, 1897), the edition of the "Essays 
 of Elia" (Little, Brown & Co., 1892), and 
 the author's selection from the poems of 
 Aubrey de Vere (Macmillan, 1894). The 
 volume thus comprises all of the author's 
 critical work which it seems desirable to 
 reprint. 
 
 2 Columbia College, 
 
 (d Janaary 1, 1900. 
 
 O 
 
 855238
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Matthew Arnold 1 
 
 Coleridge 27 
 
 Shelley's Poetry : A Sketch 51 
 
 Landor 63 
 
 Crabbb , . . .01 
 
 Charles Lamb ; or Elia 109 
 
 The Poetry of Aubrey de Verb .... 124 
 
 Aubrey de Verb on Poetry 139 
 
 Illustrations of Idealism . . . . .158 
 
 Bemarks on Shelley 186 
 
 Some Actors' Criticisms of Othello, Iago, and 
 
 Shylock 229 
 
 Sir George Beaumont, Coleridge, and Words- 
 worth 250 
 
 Three Men of Piety 271 
 
 St John Greenleaf Whittier 302
 
 Viu CONTENTS 
 
 f>k. James Kdssell Lowell 324 
 
 Darwin's Life 35O 
 
 Byron's Centenary 371 
 
 On Browning's Death 386 
 
 Shelley's Work 407
 
 MAKERS OF LITERATURE
 
 MAKERS OF LITERATURE. 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 
 That considerable portion of Arnold's 
 writings which was concerned with edu- 
 cation and politics, or with phases of the- 
 ological thought and religious tendency, 
 however valuable in contemporary discus- 
 sion, and to men and movements of the 
 third quarter of the century, must be set 
 on one side. It is not because of anything 
 there contained that he has become a per- 
 manent figure of his time, or is of interest 
 in literature. He achieved distinction as 
 a critic and as a poet ; but although he was 
 earlier in the field as a poet, he was first 
 recognized by the public at large as a critic. 
 The union of the two functions is not un- 
 usual in the story of literature ; but where 
 success has been attained in both, the 
 critic has commonly sprung from the poet 
 in the man, and his range and quality have 
 been limited thereby. It was so with Dry- 
 
 1
 
 2 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 
 den and Wordsworth, and, less obviously, 
 with Landor and Lowell. In Arnold's 
 case there was no such growth: the -two 
 modes of writing, prose and verse, were 
 disconnected. One might read his essays 
 without suspecting a poet, and his poems 
 without discerning a critic, except so far 
 as one finds the moralist there. In fact, 
 Arnold's critical faculty belonged rather 
 to the practical side of his life, and was a 
 part of his talents as a public man. 
 
 This appears by the very definitions that 
 he gave, and by the turn of his phrase, 
 which always keeps an audience rather 
 than a meditative reader in view. "What 
 is the function of criticism at the present 
 time ? " he asks, and answers — "A disin- 
 terested endeavor to learn and propagate 
 the best that is known and thought in the 
 world." That is a wide warrant. The 
 writer who exercises his critical function 
 under it, however, is plainly a reformer at 
 heart, and labors for the social welfare. 
 He is not an analyst of the form of art for 
 its own sake, or a contemplator of its sub- 
 stance of wisdom or beauty merely. He is 
 not limited to literature or the other arts 
 of expression, but the world — the intel-
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 3 
 
 lectual world — is all before him where to 
 choose; and having learned the best that 
 is known and thought, his second and 
 manifestly not inferior duty is to go into 
 all nations, a messenger of the propaganda 
 of intelligence. It is a great mission, and 
 nobly characterized ; but if criticism be so 
 defined, it is criticism of a large mould. 
 
 The scope of the word conspicuously 
 appears also in the phrase, which became 
 proverbial, declaring that literature is " a 
 criticism of life." In such an employment 
 of terms, ordinary meanings evaporate ; 
 and it becomes necessary to know the 
 thought of the author rather than the 
 usage of men. Without granting the dic- 
 tum, therefore, which would be far from 
 the purpose, is it not clear that by "critic " 
 and "criticism" Arnold intended to des- 
 ignate, or at least to convey, something 
 peculiar to his own conception, — not 
 strictly related to literature at all, it may 
 be, but more closely tied to society in its 
 general mental activit}'? In other words, 
 Arnold was a critic of civilization more 
 than of books, and aimed at illumination 
 by means of ideas. With this goes his 
 manner, — that habitual air of telling you
 
 4 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 
 something which you did not know before, 
 and doing it for your good, which stamps 
 him as a preacher born. Under the mask 
 of the critic is the long English face of 
 the gospeler; that type whose persistent 
 physiognomy was never absent from the 
 conventicle of English thought. 
 
 This evangelizing prepossession of 
 Arnold's mind must be recognized in 
 order to understand alike his attitude of 
 superiority, his stiffly didactic method, and 
 his success in attracting converts in whom 
 the seed proved barren. The first impres- 
 sion that his entire work makes is one of 
 limitation ; so strict is this limitation, and 
 it profits him so much, that it seems the 
 element in which he had his being. On 
 a close survey, the fewness of his ideas is 
 most surprising, though the fact is some- 
 what cloaked by the lucidity of his thought, 
 its logical vigor, and the manner of its 
 presentation. He takes a text, either 
 some formula of his own or some adopted 
 phrase that he has made his own, and from 
 that he starts out only to return to it again 
 and again with ceaseless iteration. In his 
 illustrations, for example, when he has 
 pilloried some poor gentleman, otherwise
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 5 
 
 unknown, for the astounded and amused 
 contemplation of the Anglican monocle, 
 he cannot let him alone. So too when, 
 with the journalist's knack for nicknames, 
 he divides all England into three parts, 
 he cannot forget the rhetorical exploit. 
 He never lets the points he has made fall 
 into oblivion ; and hence his work in gen- 
 eral, as a critic, is skeletonized to the 
 memory in watchwords, formulas, and 
 nicknames, which, taken altogether, make 
 up only a small number of ideas. 
 
 His scale, likewise, is meagre. His 
 essay is apt to be a book review or a plea 
 merely; it is without that free allusive- 
 ness and undeveloped suggestion which 
 indicate a full mind and give to such brief 
 pieces of writing the sense of overflow. 
 He takes no large subject as a whole, but 
 either a small one or else some phases of 
 the larger one; and he exhausts all that 
 he touches. He seems to have no more to 
 say. It is probable that his acquaintance 
 with literature was incommensurate with 
 his reputation or apparent scope as a writer. 
 As he has fewer ideas than any other 
 author of his time of the same rank, so he 
 discloses less knowledge of his own or
 
 6 MATTHEW ARNOLD, 
 
 foreign literatures. His occupations for- 
 bade wide acquisition; he husbanded his 
 time, and economized also by giving the 
 best direction to his private studies ; and 
 he accomplished much ; but he could not 
 master the field as any man whose profes- 
 sion was literature might easily do. Con- 
 sequently, in comparison with Coleridge 
 or Lowell, his critical work seems dry and 
 bare, with neither the fluency nor the rich- 
 ness of a master. 
 
 In yet another point this paucity of 
 matter appears. What Mr. Richard Holt 
 Hutton says in his essay on the poetry of 
 Arnold is so apposite here that it will be 
 best to quote the passage. He is speak- 
 ing, in an aside, of Arnold's criticisms : — 
 
 " They are fine, they are keen, they are often true ; 
 but they are always too much limited to the thin super- 
 ficial layer of the moral nature of their subjects, and 
 seem to take little comparative interest in the deeper 
 individuality beneath. Eead his essay on Heine, and 
 you will see the critic engrossed with the relation of 
 Heine to the political and social ideas of his day, and 
 passing over with comparative indifference the true 
 soul of Heine, the fountain of both his poetry and his 
 cynicism. Read his five lectures on translating Homer, 
 and observe how exclusively the critic's mind is occu- 
 pied with the form as distinguished from the substance 
 of the Homeric poetry. Even when he concerns him-
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 7 
 
 self \Yith the greatest modern poets, — with Shake- 
 speare as in the preface to the earlier edition of liis 
 poems, or with Goethe in reiterated poetical criticisms, 
 or when he again and again in his poems treats of 
 Wordsworth, — it is always the style and superficial 
 doctrine of their poetry, not the individual character 
 and unique genius, which occupy him. He will tell 
 you whether a poet is ' sane and clear,' or stormy and 
 fervent ; whether he is rapid and noble, or loquacious 
 and quaint ; whether a thinker penetrates the husks 
 of conventional thought which mislead the crowd ; 
 whether there is sweetness as well as lucidity in his 
 aims; whether a descriptive writer has 'distinction' 
 of style, or is admirable only for his vivacity : but he 
 rarely goes to the individual heart of any of the sub- 
 jects of his criticism ; he finds their style and class, 
 but not their personality in that class ; he ranks his 
 men, but does not portray them ; hardly even seems 
 to find much interest in the individual roots of their 
 character." 
 
 In brief, this is to say that Arnold took 
 little interest in human nature ; nor is 
 there anything in his later essays on Byron, 
 Keats, Wordsworth, Milton, or Gray, to 
 cause us to revise the judgment on this 
 point. In fact, so far as he touched on 
 the personality of Keats or Gray, to take 
 the capital instances, he was most unsat- 
 isfactory. 
 
 Arnold was not, then, one of those 
 critics who are interested in life itself,
 
 8 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 
 and through the literary work seize on the 
 soul of the author in its original bright- 
 ness, or set forth the life-stains in the suc- 
 cessive incarnations of his heart and mind. 
 Nor was he of those who consider the work 
 itself final, and endeavor simply to un- 
 derstand it, — form and matter, — and so 
 to mediate between genius and our slower 
 intelligence. He followed neither the psy- 
 chological or the aesthetic method. It 
 need hardly be said that he was born too 
 early to be able ever to conceive of litera- 
 ture as a phenomenon of society, and its 
 great men as only terms in an evolutionary 
 series. He had only a moderate knowl- 
 edge of literature, and his stock of ideas 
 was small ; his manner of speech was hard 
 and dry, there was a trick in his style, and 
 his self-repetition is tiresome. 
 
 What gave him vogue, then, and what 
 still keeps his volumes of essays alive? 
 Is it anything more than the temper in 
 which he worked, and the spirit which he 
 evoked in the reader? He stood for the 
 very spirit of intelligence in his time. He 
 made his readers resjoect ideas, and want 
 to have as many as possible. He enveloped 
 them in an atmosphere of mental curiosity
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 9 
 
 and alertness, and put them in contact 
 with novel and attractive themes. In par- 
 ticular, he took their minds to the Conti- 
 nent and made them feel that they were 
 becoming cosmopolitan by knowing Jou- 
 bert ; or at home, he rallied them in oppo- 
 sition to the dullness of the period, to 
 " barbarism " or other objectionable traits 
 in the social classes : and he volleyed con- 
 tempt upon the common multitudinous foe 
 in general, and from time to time cheered 
 them with some delectable examples of 
 single combat. It cannot be concealed 
 that there was much malicious pleasure in 
 it all. He was not indisposed to high- 
 bred cruelty. Like Lamb, he "loved a 
 fool," but it was in a mortar; and pleasant 
 it was to see the spectacle when he really 
 took a man in hand for the chastisement 
 of irony. It is thus that "the seraphim 
 illuminati sneer." And in all his contro- 
 versial writing there was a brilliancy and 
 unsparingness that will appeal to the 
 deepest instincts of a fighting race, willy- 
 nilly; and as one had only to read the 
 words to feel himself among the children 
 of light, so that our withers were un- 
 wrung, there was high enjoyment.
 
 10 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 
 This liveliness of intellectual conflict, 
 together with the sense of ideas, was a 
 boon to youth especially; and the '^aca- 
 demic air in which the thought and style 
 always moved, with scholarly self-posses- 
 sion and assurance, with the dogmatism of 
 " enlightenment " in all ages and among 
 all sects, with serenity and security unas- 
 sailable, from within at least — this aca- 
 demic "clearness and purity without 
 shadow or stain " had an overpowering 
 charm to the college-bred and cultivated, 
 who found the rare combination of infor- 
 mation, taste, and aggressiveness in one 
 of their own ilk. Above all, there was 
 the play of intelligence on every page; 
 there was an application of ideas to life in 
 many regions of the world's interests ; 
 there was contact with a mind keen, clear, 
 and firm, armed for controversy or persua- 
 sion equall}'-, and filled with eager belief 
 in itself, its ways, and its will. 
 
 To meet such personality in a book was 
 a bracing experience ; and for many these 
 essays were an awakening of the mind 
 itself. We may go to others for the 
 greater part of what criticism can give, — 
 for definite and fundamental principles,
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 11 
 
 for adequate characterization, for the in- 
 tuition and the revelation, the penetrant 
 flash of thought and phrase: but Arnold 
 generates and supports a temper of mind 
 in which the work of these writers best 
 thrives even in its own sphere; and 
 through him this temper becomes less in- 
 dividual than social, encompassing the 
 whole of life. Few critics have been 
 really less "disinterested," few have kept 
 their eyes less steadily " upon the object": 
 but that fact does not lessen the value of 
 his precepts of disinterestedness and ob- 
 jectivity ; nor is it necessary in becoming 
 "a child of light," to join in spirit the 
 unhappy "remnant" of the academy, or to 
 drink too deep of that honeyed satisfac- 
 tion, with which he fills his readers, of 
 being on his side. As a critic, Arnold 
 succeeds if his main purpose does not fail, 
 and that was to reinforce the party of 
 ideas, of culture, of the children of light; 
 to impart, not moral vigor, but openness 
 and reasonableness of mind ; and to arouse 
 and arm the intellectual in contradistinc- 
 tion to the other energies of civilization. 
 
 The poetry of Arnold, to pass to the 
 second portion of his work, was less Avidely
 
 12 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 
 welcomed than his prose, and made its 
 way very slowly; but it now seems the 
 more important and permanent part. It is 
 not small in quantity, though his unpro- 
 ductiveness in later years has made it 
 appear that he was less fluent and abun- 
 dant in verse than he really was. The 
 remarkable thing, as one turns to his 
 poems, is the contrast in spirit that they 
 afford to the essays : there is here an at- 
 mosphere of entire calm. We seem to be 
 in a different world. This fact, with the 
 singular silence of his familiar letters in 
 regard to his verse, indicates that his 
 poetic life was truly a thing apart. 
 
 In one respect only is there something 
 in common between his prose and verse: 
 just as interest in human nature is ab- 
 sent in the former, it is absent also in the 
 latter. There is no action in the poems; 
 neither is there character for its own sake. 
 Arnold was a man of the mind, and he 
 betrays no interest in personality except 
 for its intellectual traits ; in Clough as in 
 Obermann, it is the life of thought, not 
 the human being, that he portrays. As a 
 poet, he expresses the moods of the medi- 
 tative spirit in view of nature and our
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 13 
 
 moral existence; and he represents life, 
 not lyrically by its changeful moments, 
 nor tragically by its conflict in great char- 
 acters, but philosophically by a self-con- 
 tained and unvarying monologue, deeper 
 or less deep in feeling and with cadences 
 of tone, but always with the same grave 
 and serious effect. He is constantly 
 thinking, whatever his subject or his 
 mood ; his attitude is intellectual, his sen- 
 timents are maxims, his conclusions are 
 advisory. His world is the sphere of 
 thought, and his poems have the distance 
 and repose and also the coldness that befit 
 that sphere ; and the character of his im- 
 agination, which lays hold of form and 
 reason, makes natural to him the classical 
 style. 
 
 It is obvious that the sources of his 
 poetical culture are Greek. It is not 
 merely, however, that he takes for his early 
 subjects Merope and Empedocles, or that 
 he strives in Balder Dead for Homeric 
 narrative, or that in the recitative to 
 which he was addicted he evoked an im- 
 melodious phantom of Greek choruses ; nor 
 is it the " marmoreal air " that chills while 
 it ennobles much of his finest work. One
 
 14 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 
 feels the Greek quality not as a source, 
 but as a presence. In Tennyson, Keats, 
 and Shelley, there was Greek influence, 
 bat in them the result was modern. In 
 Arnold the antiquity remains ; remains in 
 mood, just as in Landor it remains in form. 
 The Greek twilight broods over all his 
 poetry. It is pagan in philosophic spirit; 
 not Attic, but of a later and stoical time, 
 with the very virtues of patience, endur- 
 ance, suffering, not in their Christian 
 types, but as they now seem to a post- 
 Christian imagination looking back to the 
 imperial past. There is a difference, it is 
 true, in Arnold's expression of the mood: 
 he is as little Sophoclean as he is Homeric, 
 as little Lucretian as he is Vergilian. 
 The temperament is not the same, not a 
 survival or a revival of the antique, but 
 original and living. And yet the mood of 
 the verse is felt at once to be a reincarna- 
 tion of the deathless spirit of Hellas that 
 in other ages also has made beautiful and 
 solemn for a time the shadowed places of 
 the Christian world. If one does not 
 realize this, he must miss the secret of 
 the tranquillity, the chill, the grave aus- 
 terity, as well as the philosophical resig-
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 15 
 
 nation, wliich are essential to the verse. 
 Even in those parts of the poems which 
 use romantic motives, one reason of their 
 original charm is that they suggest how 
 the Greek imagination would have dealt 
 with the forsaken merman, the church of 
 Brou, and Tristram and Iseult. The 
 presence of such motives, such mythology, 
 and such Christian and chivalric color in 
 the work of Arnold does not disturh the 
 simple unity of its feeling, which finds no 
 solvent for life, whatever its accident of 
 time and place and faith, except in that 
 Greek spirit which ruled in thoughtful 
 men before the triumph of Christianity, 
 and is still native in men who accept the 
 intellect as the sole guide of life. 
 
 It was with reference to these modern 
 men and the movement they took part in, 
 that he made his serious claim to greatness ; 
 to rank, that is, with Tennyson and Brown- 
 ing, as he said, in the literature of his 
 time. "My poems, "he wrote, "represent 
 on the whole the main movement of mind 
 of the last quarter of a century; and thus 
 they will probably have their day as people 
 become conscious to themselves of what 
 that movement of mind is, and interested
 
 16 MATTHEW ABNOLD. 
 
 in the literary productions that reflect it. 
 It might be fairly urged that I have less 
 poetical sentiment than Tennyson, and 
 less intellectual vigor and abundance than 
 Browning; yet because I have, perhaps, 
 more of a fusion of the two than either of 
 them, and have more regularly applied 
 that fusion to the main line of modern 
 development, I am likely enough to have 
 my turn, as they have had theirs." If the 
 main movement had been such as he 
 thought of it, or if it had been of impor- 
 tance in the long run, there might be a 
 sounder basis for this hope than now ap- 
 pears to be the case ; but there can be no 
 doubt, let the contemporary movement 
 have been what it may, that Arnold's 
 mood is one that will not pass out of men's 
 hearts to-day nor to-morrow. 
 
 On the modern side the example of 
 Wordsworth was most formative, and in 
 fact it is common to describe Arnold as a 
 Wordsworthian: and so, in his contempla- 
 tive attitude to nature, and in his habitual 
 recourse to her, he was ; but both nature 
 herself as she appeared to him, and his 
 mood in her presence, were very different 
 from Wordsworth's conception and emo-
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 17 
 
 tion. Arnold finds in nature a refuge 
 from life, an anodyne, an escape; but 
 Wordsworth, in going into the hills for 
 poetical communion, passed from a less to 
 a fuller and deeper life, and obtained an 
 inspiration, and was seeking the goal of 
 all his being. In the method of approach, 
 too, as well as in the character of the ex- 
 perience, there was a profound difference 
 between the two poets. Arnold sees with 
 the outward rather than the inward eye. 
 He is pictorial in a way that Wordsworth 
 seldom is ; he uses detail much more, and 
 gives a group or a scene with the exter- 
 nality of a painter. The method resem- 
 bles that of Tennyson rather than that of 
 Wordsworth, and has more direct analogy 
 with the Greek manner than with the 
 modern and emotional schools ; it is ob- 
 jective, often minute, and always care- 
 fully composed, in the artistic sense of 
 that term. The description of the river 
 Oxus, for example, though faintly charged 
 with suggested and allegoric meaning, is 
 a noble close to the poem which ends in 
 it. The scale is large, and Arnold was 
 fond of a broad landscape of mountains, 
 and prospects over the land; but one can-
 
 18 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 
 not fancy Wordsworth Avriting it. So too, 
 on a small scale, the charming scene of the 
 English garden in Thj^rsis is far from 
 Wordsworth's manner: — 
 
 " When garden walks and all the grassy floor 
 With blossoms red and white of fallen May 
 
 And chestnut-flowers are strewn — 
 So have I heard the cuckoo's parting cry, 
 From the wet field, through the vext garden trees, 
 Come with the volleying rain and tossing breeze." 
 
 This is a picture that could be framed: 
 how different from Wordsworth's "wan- 
 derinof voice " ! Or to take another notable 
 example, which, like the Oxus passage, is 
 a fine close in the Tristram and Iseult, 
 — the hunter on the arras above the dead 
 lovers : — 
 
 " A stately huntsman, clad in green, 
 And round him a fresh forest scene. 
 On that clear forest-knoll he stays. 
 With his pack round him, and delays. 
 
 ****** 
 The wild boar rustles in his lair. 
 The fierce hounds snuff the tainted air, 
 But lord and hounds keep rooted there. 
 Cheer, cheer thy dogs into the brake, 
 hunter ! and without a fear 
 Thy golden tasseled bugle blow — " 
 
 But no one is deceived, and the hunter 
 does not move from the arras, but is still
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 19 
 
 "rooted there," with his green suit and his 
 golden tassel. The piece is pictorial, and 
 highly wrought for pictorial effects only, 
 obviously decorative and used as stage 
 scenery precisely in the manner of our 
 later theatrical art, with that accent of 
 forethought which turns the beautiful into 
 the jesthetic. This is a method which 
 Wordsworth never used. Take one of 
 his pictures, the Reaper for example, and 
 see the difference. The one is out-of- 
 doors, the other is of the studio. The pur- 
 pose of these illustrations is to show that 
 Arnold's nature-pictures are not only con- 
 sciously artistic, with an arrangement that 
 approaches artifice, but that he is inter- 
 ested through his eye primarily and not 
 through his emotions. It is characteristic 
 of his temperament also that he reminds 
 one most often of the painter in water- 
 colors. 
 
 If there is this difference between Ar- 
 nold and Wordsworth in method, a greater 
 difference in spirit is to be anticipated. It 
 is a fixed gulf. In nature Wordsworth 
 found the one spirit's "plastic stress," 
 and a near and intimate revelation to the 
 soul of truths that were his greatest joy
 
 20 MATTHEW ARNOLD, 
 
 and support in existence. Arnold finds 
 there no inhabitancy of God, no such 
 streaming forth of wisdom and beauty 
 from the fountain heads of being; but the 
 secret frame of nature is filled only with 
 the darkness, the melancholy, the waiting 
 endurance that is projected from him- 
 self: — 
 
 " Yet, Fausta, the mute turf we tread, 
 Tlie solemn hills about vis spread, 
 The stream that falls incessantly. 
 The strange-scrawled rocks, the lonely sky, 
 If I might lend their life a voice, 
 Seem to bear rather than rejoice." 
 
 Compare this with Wordsworth's Stan- 
 zas on Peele Castle, and the important 
 reservations that must be borne in mind 
 in describing Arnold as a Wordsworthian 
 will become clearer. It is as a relief from 
 thought, as a beautiful and half -physical 
 diversion, as a scale of being so vast and 
 mysterious as to reduce the pettiness of 
 human life to nothingness, — it is in these 
 ways that nature has value in Arnold's 
 verse. Such a poet may describe natural 
 scenes well, and obtain by means of them 
 contrast to human conditions, and decora- 
 tive beauty; but he does not penetrate
 
 MATTHEW ABNOLB. 21 
 
 nature or interpret what her significance 
 is in the human spirit, as the more emo- 
 tional poets have done. He ends in an 
 antithesis, not in a synthesis, and both 
 nature and man lose by the divorce. One 
 looks in vain for anything deeper than 
 landscapes in Arnold's treatment of nature ; 
 she is emptied of her own infinite, and 
 has become spiritually void: and in the 
 simple great line in which he gave the 
 sea — 
 
 "The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea — " 
 
 he is thinking of man, not of the ocean: 
 and the mood seems ancient rather than 
 modern, the feeling of a Greek, just as the 
 sound of the waves to him is always 
 ^gean. 
 
 In treating of man's life, which must be 
 the main thing in any poet's work, Arnold 
 is either very austere or very pessimistic. 
 If the feeling is moral, the predominant 
 impression is of austerity; if it is intel- 
 lectual, the predominant impression is of 
 sadness; he was not insensible to the 
 charm of life, but he feels it in his senses 
 only to deny it in his mind. The illus- 
 trative passage is from Dover Beach : —
 
 22 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 
 " Ah, love, let us be true 
 To one another ! for the world which seems 
 To lie before us like a land of dreams. 
 
 So various, so beautiful, so new, .^- 
 
 Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, 
 Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain." 
 
 This is the contradiction of sense and 
 thought, the voice of a regret grounded 
 in the intellect (for if it were vital and 
 grounded in the emotions, it would 
 become despair); the creed of illusion 
 and futility in life, which is the charac- 
 teristic note of Arnold, and the reason of 
 his acceptance by many minds. The one 
 thins: about life which he most insists on 
 is its isolation, its individuality. In the 
 series called "Switzerland," this is the 
 substance of the whole ; and the doctrine 
 is stated with an intensity and power, 
 with an amplitude and prolongation, that 
 set these poems apart as the most remark- 
 able of all his lyrics. From a poet so 
 deeply impressed with this aspect of ex- 
 istence, and unable to find its remedy or 
 its counterpart in the harmony of life, no 
 joyful or hopeful word can be expected, 
 and none is found. The second thing 
 about life which he dwells on is its fu-
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 23 
 
 tility ; tliougli he bids one strive and work, 
 and points to the example of the strong 
 whom he has known, yet one feels that 
 his voice rings more true when he writes 
 of Obermann than in any other of the ele- 
 giac poems. In such verse as the Sum- 
 mer Night, again, the genuineness of the 
 mood is indubitable. In The Sick King of 
 Bokhara, the one dramatic expression of 
 his genius, futility is the very centre 
 of the action. The fact that so much of 
 his poetry seems to take its motive from 
 the subsidence of Christian faith has set 
 him among the skeptic or agnostic poets, 
 and the "main movement" which he be- 
 lieved he had expressed was doubtless 
 that in which agnosticism was a leading 
 element. The unbelief of the third quar- 
 ter of the century was certainly a control- 
 ling influence over him, and in a man 
 mainly intellectual by nature it could not 
 well have been otherwise. 
 
 Hence, as one looks at his more philo- 
 sophical and lyrical poems — the pro- 
 founder part of his work — and endeavors 
 to determine their character and sources 
 alike, it is plain to see that in the old 
 phrase, "the pride of the intellect" lifts
 
 24 MATTHEW ABNOLD. 
 
 its lonely column over the desolation of 
 every page. The man of the academy is 
 here, as in the prose, after all. He re- 
 veals himself in the literary motive, the 
 bookish atmosphere of the verse, in its 
 vocabulary, its elegance of structure, its 
 precise phrase and its curious allusions 
 (involving foot-notes), and in fact, 
 throughout all its form and structure. So 
 self-conscious is it that it becomes frankly 
 prosaic at inconvenient times, and is more 
 often on the level of eloquent and grace- 
 ful rhetoric than of poetry. It is fre- 
 quently liquid and melodious, but there 
 is no burst of native song in it anywhere. 
 It is the work of a true poet, nevertheless; 
 for there are many voices for the Muse. 
 It is sincere, it is touched with reality ; it 
 is the mirror of a phase of life in our 
 times, and not in our times only, 'but 
 whenever the intellect seeks expression 
 for its sense of the limitation of its own 
 career, and its sadness in a world which it 
 cannot solve. 
 
 A word should be added concerning the 
 personality of Arnold which is revealed 
 in his familiar letters, — a collection that 
 has dignified the records of literature with
 
 MATTHEW ABNOLD. 25 
 
 a singularly noble memory of private life. 
 Few who did not know Arnold could have 
 been prepared for the revelation of a nature 
 so true, so amiable, so dutiful. In every 
 relation of private life he is shown to have 
 been a man of exceptional constancy and 
 plainness. The letters are mainly home 
 letters ; but a few friendships also yielded 
 up their hoard, and thus the circle of pri- 
 vate life is made complete. Every one 
 must take delight in the mental association 
 with Arnold in the scenes of his existence, 
 thus daily exposed, and in his family affec- 
 tions. A nature warm to its own, kindly 
 to all, cheerful, fond of sport and fun, and 
 always fed from pure fountains, and with 
 it a character so founded upon the rock, so 
 humbly serviceable, so continuing in 
 power and grace, must wake in all the 
 responses of happy appreciation, and leave 
 the charm of memory. 
 
 He did his duty as naturally as if it 
 required neither resolve, nor effort, nor 
 thought of any kind for the morrow, and 
 he never failed, seemingly, in act or word 
 of sympathy, in little or great things; 
 and when, to this, one adds the clear ether 
 of the intellectual life where he habitually
 
 26 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 
 moved in his own life apart, and the hu- 
 manity of his home, the gift that these 
 letters bring may be appreciated. .That 
 gift is the man himself; but set in the 
 atmosphere of home, with sonship and 
 fatherhood, sisters and brothers, with the 
 bereavements of years fully accomplished, 
 and those of babyhood and boyhood, — a 
 sweet and wholesome English home, with 
 all the cloud and sunshine of the English 
 world drifting over its roof-tree, and the 
 soil of England beneath its stones, and 
 English duties for the breath of its being. 
 To add such a home to the household- 
 rights of English literature is perhaps 
 something from which Arnold would have 
 shrunk, but it endears his memory.
 
 COLERIDGE. 
 
 The poetic genius of Coleridge, the 
 highest of his many gifts, found brilliant 
 and fascinating expression. His poems 
 — those in which his fame lives — are as 
 unique as they are memorable ; and though 
 their small number, their confined range, 
 and the brief period during which his fac- 
 ulty was exercised with full freedom and 
 power, seem to indicate a narrow vein, 
 yet the remainder of his work in prose and 
 verse leaves an impression of extraordinary 
 and abundant intellectual force. In pro- 
 portion as his imaginative creations stand 
 apart, the spirit out of which they came 
 must have possessed some singularity : and 
 if the reader is not content with simple 
 sesthetic appreciation of what the gods pro- 
 vide, but has some touch of curiosity lead- 
 ing him to look into the source of such 
 remarkable achievement and its human 
 history, he is at once interested in the 
 personality of the "subtle-souled psycholo- 
 gist," as Shelley with his accurate critical 
 
 27
 
 28 COLEBIDGE. 
 
 insight first named him; in experiencing 
 the fascination of the poetry one remem- 
 bers the charm which Coleridge had in life, 
 that quality which arrested attention in 
 all companies and drew men's minds and 
 hearts with a sense of something marvel- 
 ous in him — "the most wonderful man," 
 said Wordsworth, " that I ever met." The 
 mind and heart of Coleridge, his whole 
 life, have been laid open by himself and 
 his friends and acquaintances without re- 
 serve in many volumes of letters and 
 memoirs; it is easy to figure him as he 
 lived and to recover his moods and aspect: 
 but in order to conceive his nature and 
 define its traits, it is necessary to take 
 account especially of his incomplete and 
 less perfect work, of his miscellaneous 
 interests, and those activities which filled 
 and confused his life without having any 
 important share in establishing his fame. 
 
 The intellectual precocit}^ which is the 
 leading trait of Coleridge's boyhood, in 
 the familiar portrait of "the inspired 
 charity-boy " drawn by Lamb from school- 
 boy memories, is not unusual in a youth 
 of genius ; but the omnivorousness of 
 knowledge which he then displayed con-
 
 COLERIDGE. 29 
 
 tinued into his manhood. He consumed 
 vast quantities of book-learning. It is a 
 more remarkable characteristic that from 
 the earliest period in which he comes into 
 clear view, he was accustomed to give out 
 his ideas with freedom in an inexhaustible 
 stream of talk. The activity of his mind 
 was as phenomenal as its receptivity. In 
 his college days, too, he was fanatical in 
 all his energies. The remark of Southey 
 after Shelley's visit to him, that here was 
 a young man who was just what he him- 
 self had been in his college days, is illus- 
 trative ; for if Southey was then inflamed 
 with radicalism, Coleridge was yet more 
 deeply infected and mastered by that wild 
 fever of the revolutionary dawn. The 
 tumult of Coleridge's mind, its incessant 
 action, the lack of discipline in his thought, 
 of restraint in his expression, of judgment 
 in his affairs, are all important elements 
 in his character at a time which in most 
 men would be called the formative period 
 of manhood, but which in him seems to 
 have been intensely chaotic; what is most 
 noticeable, however, is the volume of his 
 mental energy. He expressed himself, 
 too, in ways natural to such self-abun-
 
 30 COLERIDGE. 
 
 dance. He was always a discourser, if 
 the name may be used, from the London 
 days at the " Salutation and the Ca^t " of 
 which Lamb tells, saying that the land- 
 lord was ready to retain him because of the 
 attraction of his conversation for custom- 
 ers ; and as he went on to the more set 
 forms of such monologue, he became a 
 preacher without pay in Unitarian chap- 
 els, a journalist with unusual capacity for 
 ready and sonorous writing in the press, a 
 composer of whole periodicals such as his 
 ventures The WatcJmian and The Friend, 
 and a lecturer using only slight notes as 
 the material of his remarks upon literature, 
 education, philosophy, theology, or what- 
 ever the subject might be. In all these 
 methods of expression which he took uj) 
 one after the other, he merely talked in an 
 ample way upon multifarious topics; in 
 the conversation, sermon, leading article, 
 written discourse, or flowing address, he 
 was master of a swelling and often bril- 
 liant volubility, but he had neither the 
 certainty of the orator nor the unfailing 
 distinction of the author; there was an 
 occasional and impromptu quality, a collo- 
 quial and episodical manner, the style of
 
 COLERIDGE. 31 
 
 the irresponsible speaker. In his earlier 
 days especially, the dominant note in 
 Coleridge's whole nature was excitement. 
 He was always animated, he was often 
 violent, he was always without the princi- 
 ple of control. Indeed, a weakness of 
 moral power seems to have been congeni- 
 tal, in the sense that he was not perma- 
 nently bound by a practical sense of duty 
 nor apparently observant of what place 
 duty has in real life. There was misdi- 
 rection of his affairs from the time when 
 they came into his own hands ; there was 
 impulsiveness, thoughtlessness, a lack of 
 judgment which augured ill for him ; and 
 in its total effect this amounted to folly. 
 His intoxication with the scheme known 
 as Pantisocracy, by which he with Southey 
 and a few like-minded projectors were to 
 found a socialistic community on the 
 banks of the Susquehanna, is the most 
 obvious comment on his practical sense. 
 But his marriage, with the anecdotes of 
 its preliminaries (one of which was that 
 in those colloquies with Lamb at the Lon- 
 don tavern, so charmingly described by 
 his boon companion, he had forgotten his 
 engagement or was indifferent to it), more
 
 32 COLERIDGE. 
 
 strikingly exemplifies the irresponsible 
 course of his life, more particularly as it 
 proved to be ill-sorted, full of petty diffi- 
 culties and makeshift expedients, and in 
 the end a disastrous failure. A radical 
 social scheme and an imprudent marriage 
 might have fallen to his share of human 
 folly, however, without exciting remark, 
 if in other ways or at a later time he had 
 exhibited the qualities which would allow 
 one to dismiss these matters as mere in- 
 stances of immaturity ; but wherever Cole- 
 ridge's reasonable control over himself or 
 his affairs is looked to, it appears to have 
 been feeble. On the other hand, the con- 
 stancy of his excitement is plain. It was 
 not only mental, but physical. He was, 
 as a young man, full of energy and capable 
 of a good deal of hard exercise; he had 
 animal spirits, and Wordsworth describes 
 him as "noisy" and "gamesome," as one 
 who 
 
 " His limbs would toss about him -with delight, 
 Like branches when strong winds the trees annoy ; " 
 
 and from several passages of his own writ- 
 ing, which are usually disregarded, the 
 evidence of a spirit of rough humor and
 
 COLERIDGE. 33 
 
 fun is easily obtained. The truth is that 
 Coleridge changed a great deal in his life ; 
 he felt himself to be very different in later 
 years from what he was in the time when, 
 to his own memory he was a sort of glori- 
 fied spirit : and this earlier Coleridge had 
 many traits which are ignored sometimes, 
 as Carlyle ignored them, and are sometimes 
 remembered rather as idealizations of his 
 friends in their affectionate thoughts of 
 him, but in any event are irreconcilable 
 with the figure of the last period of his 
 life. 
 
 It has been suggested that there was 
 something of disease or at least of ill 
 health in Coleridge always, and that it 
 should be regarded as influencing his tem- 
 perament. Whether it were so or not, the 
 plea itself shows the fact. If excitement 
 was the dominant note, as has been said, 
 in his whole nature, it could not exist 
 without a physical basis and accompani- 
 ment; and his bodily state appears to have 
 been often less one of animation than of 
 agitation, and his correspondence fre- 
 quently discloses moods that seem almost 
 frantic. In the issue, under stress of pain 
 and trouble, he became an opium-eater;
 
 34 COLERIDGE. 
 
 but his physical nature may fairly be 
 described as predisposed to such states as 
 lead to the use of opium and also .result 
 from its use, with the attendant mental 
 moods. His susceptibility to sensuous 
 impressions, to a voluptuousness of the 
 entire being, together with a certain lassi- 
 tude and languor, lead to the same conclu- 
 sion, which thus seems to be supported on 
 all sides, — that Coleridge was, in his 
 youth and early manhood, fevered through 
 all his intellectual and sensuous nature, 
 and deficient on the moral and practical 
 sides in those matters that related to his 
 personal affairs. It is desirable to bring 
 this out in plain terms, because in Cole- 
 ridge it is best to acknowledge at once 
 that his character was, so far as our part 
 — the world's part — in him is concerned, 
 of less consequence than his temperament; 
 a subtler and more profound thing than 
 character, though without moral meaning. 
 It is not unfair to say, since literature is 
 to be regarded most profitably as the ex- 
 pression of human personality, that Avith 
 Coleridge the modern literature of tem- 
 j)erament, as it has been lately recognized 
 in extreme phases, begins; not that tem-
 
 COLERIDGE. (35 
 
 perament is a new thing in the century 
 now chising, nor that it lias been without 
 influence hitherto, but that now it is more 
 often considered, and has in fact more 
 often been, an exclusive ground of artistic 
 expression. The temperament of Cole- "^ 
 ridge was one of diffused sensuousness 
 physically, and of abnormal mental moods, 
 — moods of weakness, languor, collapse, 
 of visionary imaginative life with a night 
 atmosphere of the spectral, moonlit, swim- 
 ming, scarcely substantial world; and the 
 poems he wrote, which are the contribu- 
 tions he made to the world's literature, are 
 based on this temperament, like some 
 Fata Morgana upon the sea. The appar- ■— 
 ent exclusion of reality from the poems in 
 which his genius was most manifest finds 
 its analogue in the detachment of his own 
 mind from the moral, the practical, the 
 usual in life as he led it in his spirit; and 
 his work of the highest creative sort, which 
 is all there is to his enduring fame, stands 
 amid his prose and verse composition of a 
 lower sort like an island in the waste of 
 waters. This may be best shown, perhaps, 
 by a gradual approach through his cruder 
 to his most j)erfect compositions.
 
 COLEBIDGE. 
 
 The cardinal fact in Coleridge's genius 
 is that notwithstanding his immense sen- 
 suous susceptibilities and mental receptiv- 
 ity, and the continual excitement of his 
 spirit, he never rose into the highest 
 sphere of creative activity except for the 
 brief period called his annus mirahilis, 
 when his great poems were written ; and 
 with this is the further related fact that 
 in him we witness the spectacle of the 
 imaginative instinct overborne and 
 supplanted by the intellectual faculty 
 exercising its speculative and critical 
 functions; and in addition, one observes 
 in his entire work an extraordinary in- 
 equality not only of treatment, but also 
 of subject-matter. In general, he was 
 an egoistic writer. His sensitiveness to- 
 nature was twofold: in the first place he 
 noticed in the objects and movements of 
 nature evanescent and minute details, and 
 as his sense of beauty was keen, he saw 
 and recorded truly the less obvious and 
 less common loveliness in the phenomena 
 of the elements and the seasons, and this 
 gave distinction to his mere description 
 and record of fact; in the second place he 
 often felt in himself moods induced by
 
 COLERIDGE. 37 
 
 nature, but yet subjective, — states of his 
 own spirit, which sometimes deepened the 
 charm of night, for example, by his enjoy- 
 ment of its placid aspects, and sometimes 
 imparted to the external world a despair 
 reflected from his personal melancholy. 
 In his direct treatment of nature, how- 
 ever, as Mr. Stopford Brooke points out, 
 he seldom achieves more than a catalogue of 
 his sensations, which though touched with 
 imaginative detail are never lifted and 
 harmonized into lyrical unity; though he 
 can moralize nature in Wordsworth's 
 fashion, when he does so the result re- 
 mains Wordsworth's and is stamped with 
 that poet's originality; and in his own 
 original work Coleridge never equaled' 
 either the genius of Slielley, who can-s 
 identify nature with himself, or the charm 
 of Tennyson, who can at least parallel 
 nature's phenomena with his own human 
 moods. Coleridge would not be thought 
 of as a poet of nature, except in so far as 
 he describes what he observes in the way 
 of record, or gives a metaphj'sical inter- 
 pretation to phenomena. This is the more 
 remarkable because he had to an eminent 
 degree that intellectual power, that over- 

 
 38 COLERIDGE. 
 
 mastering desire of the mind, to rationalize 
 the facts of life. It was this quality that 
 made him a philosopher, an analyst, a 
 critic on the great lines of Aristotle, seek- 
 ing to impose an order of ethics and meta- 
 physics on all artistic productions. But 
 in those poems in which he describes 
 nature directly and without metaphysical 
 thought, there is no trace of anything 
 more than a sensuous order of his own per- 
 ceptions. Beautiful and often unique as 
 his nature poems are, they are not creative. 
 They are rather in the main autobio- 
 graphic; and it is surprising to notice 
 how large a proportion of his verse is thus 
 autobiographic, not in those phases of his 
 own life which may be, or at least are 
 thought of, as representative of human 
 life in the mass, but which are personal," 
 such as the lines written after hearing 
 Wordsworth read the Prelude, or those 
 entitled Dejection. When his verse is 
 not confined to autobiographic expres- 
 sion, it is often a product of his interest 
 in his friends or in his family. What is 
 not personal in it, of this sort, is apt to 
 be domestic or social. 
 
 If we turn from the poems of nature to
 
 COLERIDGE. 39 
 
 those concerned with man, a similar shal- 
 lowness, either of interest or of power, 
 appears. He was in early years a radical; 
 he was stirred by the Revolution in Francef" 
 and he was emotionally charged with the 
 ideas of the time, — ideas of equality, fra- 
 ternity, and liberty. But this interest 
 died out, as is shown by his political 
 verse. He had none but a social and a 
 philosophical interest in any case. Man, 
 the individual, did not at any time attract 
 him. There was nothing dramatic in his 
 genius, in the narrow and exact sense; he 
 did not engage his curiosity or his philoso- 
 phy in individual fortunes. It results 
 from this limitation that his verse lacks 
 human interest of the dramatic kind. The 
 truth was that he was interested in 
 thought rather than in deeds, in human 
 nature rather than in its concrete pity and 
 terror. Thus he did not seize on life 
 itself as the material of his imagination 
 and reflection. In the case of man as in 
 the case of nature he gives us only an 
 egoistic account, telling us of his own 
 private fortune, his fears, pains, and de- 
 spairs, but only as a diary gives them ; as 
 he did not transfer his nature impressions
 
 40 COLERIDGE. 
 
 into the world of creative art, so he did 
 not transfer his personal experiences into 
 that world. 
 
 What has been said would perhaps be 
 accepted, were it not for the existence 
 of those poems. The Ancient Mariner, 
 Christabel, Kubla Khan, which are the 
 marvelous creations of his genius. In "^ 
 these it will be said there is both a world — 
 of nature new created, and a dramatic 
 method and interest. It is enough for the 
 purpose of the analysis if it be granted 
 that nowhere else in Coleridge's work, 
 except in these and less noticeably in a 
 few other instances, do these high charac- 
 teristics occur. The very point which is 
 here to be brought out is that Coleridge 
 applied that intellectual power, that over- 
 mastering desire of the mind to rationalize 
 the phenomena of life, which has been 
 mentioned as his great mental trait, — 
 that he applied this faculty with different 
 degrees of power at different times, so 
 that his poetry falls naturally into higher 
 and inferior categories; in the autobio- 
 graphic verse, in the political and dra- 
 matic verse which form so large a part of 
 his work, it appears that he did not have
 
 COLERIDGE. 41 
 
 sufficient feeling or exercise sufficient 
 power to raise it out of the lower levels 
 of composition ; in his great works of con- 
 structive and impersonal art, of moral 
 intensity or romantic beauty and fascina- 
 tion, he did so exercise the creative im- 
 agination as to make these of the highest 
 rank, or at least one of them. 
 
 The Ancient Mariner, apart from its 
 many minor merits, has this distinction in 
 Coleridge's work, — it is a poem of per- 
 fect unity. Christabel is a fragment, 
 Kubla Khan is a glimpse; and though 
 the Ode to France, Love, Youth and 
 Age, and possibly a few other short 
 pieces, have this highest artistic virtue 
 .of unity, yet in them it is of a simpler 
 kind. The Ancient Mariner, on the other 
 hand, is a marvel of construction in that 
 its unity is less complex than manifold; 
 it exists, however tlie form be examined. 
 In the merely external sense, the telling 
 of the tale to the Wedding Guest, with 
 the fact that the wedding is going on, 
 gives it unity; in the merely internal 
 sense, the moral lesson of the salvation of 
 the slayer of the albatross by the medium 
 of love felt toward living things, subtly
 
 42 COLERIDGE. 
 
 yet lucidly worked out as the notion is, 
 gives it unity: but in still other ways, as 
 a story of connected and consequential in- 
 cidents with a plot, a change of fortune, a 
 climax, and the other essentials of this 
 species of tale-telling, it has unity; and if 
 its conception either of the physical or the 
 ethical world be analyzed, these too — and 
 these are the fundamental things — are 
 found consistent wholes. It nevertheless" 
 remains true that this sj^stem of nature as 
 a vitalized but not humanized mode of 
 life, with its bird, its spirit, its magical 
 powers, is not the nature that we know or 
 believe to be, — it is a modern presenta- 
 tion of an essentially primitive and ani- 
 mistic belief; and similarly this system 
 of human life, — if the word human can 
 be applied to it, with its dead men, .its 
 skeleton ship, its spirit sailors, its whole 
 miracle of spectral being, — is not the life 
 we know or believe to be; it is an incan- 
 tation, a simulacrum. It may still be true 
 therefore that the imaginative faculty of 
 Coleridge was not applied either to nature 
 or human life, in the ordinary sense. And 
 this it is that constitutes the uniqueness 
 of the poem, and its wonderful fascination.
 
 COLERIDGE. 43 
 
 Coleridge fell heir, by the accidents of 
 time and the revolutions of taste, to the 
 ballad style, its simplicity, directness, and 
 narrative power; he also was most attracted 
 to the machinery of the supernatural, the 
 weird, the terrible, almost to the grotesque 
 and horrid, as these literary motives came 
 into fashion in the crude beginnings of 
 romanticism in that time ; his subtle mind, 
 his fine senses, his peculiar susceptibility 
 to the mystic and shadowy in nature, — as 
 shown by his preference of the moonlight, 
 dreamy, or night aspects of real nature, to 
 its brilliant beauties in the waking world, 
 — gave him ease and finesse in the han- 
 dling of such subject-matter; and he lived 
 late enough to know that all this eerie 
 side of human experience and imaginative 
 capacity, inherited from primeval ages but 
 by no means yet deprived of plausibility, 
 could be effectively used only as an alle- 
 goric or scenic setting of what should be 
 truth to the ethical sense; he combined 
 one of the highest lessons of advanced 
 civilization, one of the last results of spir- 
 itual perception, — the idea of love toward 
 life in an}' form, — with the animistic 
 beliefs and supernatural fancies of the
 
 44 COLERIDGE. 
 
 crude ages of the senses. This seems to 
 be the substantial matter; and in this 
 he was, to repeat Shelley's phrase, the 
 " subtle-souled psychologist." The mate- 
 rial of his imagination, on the sensuous 
 side, was of the slightest: it was the su- 
 pernaturalism of the romantic movement, 
 somewhat modified by being placed in con- 
 nection with the animal world; and he 
 put this to use as a means of illustrating 
 spiritual truth. He thus became the first 
 of those who have employed the super- 
 natural in our recent literature, without 
 losing credence for it, as an allegory of 
 psychological states, moral facts, or illu- 
 sions real to the eye that sees them and 
 having some logical relation to the past of 
 the individual; of such writers Hawthorne 
 and Poe are eminent examples, and both 
 of them, it may be remarked, are writers 
 in whom temperament rather than char- 
 acter is the ground of their creative work. 
 The intimate kinship between imagination 
 so directed and the speculative philo- 
 sophical temper is plain to see. In 
 Christabel, on the other hand, the 
 moral substance is not apparent: the place 
 filled by the moral ideas which are the
 
 COLERIDGE. 45 
 
 centres of the narrative in The Ancient 
 Mariner, is taken here by emotional situ- 
 ations ; but the supernaturalism is practi- 
 cally the same in both poems, and in both 
 is associated with that mystery of the 
 animal world to man, most concentrated 
 and vivid in the fascination ascribed tra- 
 ditionally to the snake, which is the 
 animal motive in Christabel as the 
 goodness of the albatross is in The Ancient 
 Mariner. In these poems the good and 
 the bad omens that ancient augurs minded 
 are made again dominant over men's 
 imagination. Such are the signal and 
 unique elements in these poems, which 
 have besides that wealth of beauty in 
 detail, of fine diction, of liquid melody, 
 of sentiment, thought, and image, which 
 belongs only to poetry of the highest order, 
 and which is too obvious to require any 
 comment. Kubla Khan is a poem of the ' 
 same kind, in which the mystical effect is 
 given almost wholly by landscape; it is 
 to The Ancient Mariner and Christabel 
 what protoplasm is to highly organized 
 cells. 
 
 If it be recognized, then, that the- 
 imagery of Coleridge in the characteristic
 
 46 COLERIDGE. 
 
 parts of these cardinal poems is as pure 
 allegory, is as remote from nature or 
 man, as is the machinery of fairy-land and 
 chivalry in Spenser, for example, and he 
 obtains credibility by the psychological 
 and ethical truth presented in this im- 
 agery, it is not surprising that his work 
 is small in amount; for the method is not 
 only a difficult one, but the poetic machin- 
 ery itself is limited and meagre. The 
 poverty of the subject-matter is manifest, 
 and the restrictions to its successful use 
 are soon felt. It may well be doubted 
 whether Christabel would have gained 
 by being finished. In The Ancient 
 Mariner the isolation of the man is a 
 great advantage; if there had been any 
 companion for him, the illusion could not 
 have been entire : as it is, what he experi- 
 ences has the wholeness and truth within 
 itself of a dream, or of a madman's world, 
 — there is no standard of appeal outside 
 of his own senses and mind, no real world ; 
 but in Christabel the serpentine fable 
 goes on in a world of fact and action, and 
 as soon as the course of the story involved 
 this fable in the probabilities and actual 
 occurrences of life, it might well be that
 
 COLERIDGE. 47 
 
 the tale would have turned into one of 
 simple enchantment and magic, as seems 
 likely from what has been told of its con- 
 tinuation ; certainly it could not have 
 equaled the earlier poem, or have been in 
 the same kind with it, unless the un- 
 earthly magic, the spell, were finally com- 
 pletely dissolved into the world of moral 
 truth as is the case with The Ancient 
 Mariner. Coleridge found it still more 
 impossible to continue Kubla Khan. It 
 seems a fair inference to conclude that 
 Coleridge's genius, however it suffered 
 from the misfortunes and ills of his life, 
 was in these works involved in a field, 
 however congenial, yet of narrow range 
 and infertile in itself. In poetic stjde it 
 is to be observed that he kept what he had 
 gained; the turbid diction of the earlier 
 period never came back to trouble him, 
 and the cadences he had formed still gave 
 their music to his verse. The change, the 
 decline, was not in his power of style ; it 
 was in his power of imagination, if at all, 
 but the fault may have laid in the capaci- 
 ties of the subject-matter. A similar 
 thing certainly happened in his briefer 
 ballad poetry, in that of which Love,
 
 48 COLERIDGE. 
 
 The Three Graces, Alice Du Clos, 
 and The Dark Ladie, are examples; 
 the matter there, the machinery .of the 
 romantic ballad, was no longer capable of 
 use ; that sort of literature was dead from 
 —the exhaustion of its motives'. The great 
 Ode to France, in which he reached his 
 highest point of eloquent and passionate 
 expression, seems to mark the extinction 
 in himself of the revolutionary impulse. 
 On the whole, while the excellence of 
 much of the remainder of his verse, even 
 in later years, is acknowledged, and its 
 originality in several instances, may it not 
 be that in his greatest work Coleridge 
 came to an end because of an impossibility 
 in the kind itself? The supernatural is 
 an accessory rather than a main element in 
 the interpretation of life which literary 
 genius undertakes ; Coleridge so subordi- 
 nates it here by making it contributory 
 to a moral truth; but such a practice 
 would seem to be necessarily incidental 
 to a poet who was also so intellectual 
 as Coleridge, and not to be adopted 
 as a permanent method of self-expres- 
 sion. 
 
 From whatever cause, the fact was that
 
 COLERIDGE. 49 
 
 Coleridge ceased to create in poetry, and 
 fell back on that fluent, manifold, volu- 
 minous faculty he possessed of absorbing 
 and giving out ideas in vast quantities, as 
 it were by bulk. He attended especially 
 to the theory of art as he found it illus- 
 trated in the greatest poets, and he popu- 
 larized among literary men a certain body 
 of doctrine regarding criticism, its growth 
 and methods ; and in later years he worked 
 out metaphysical theological views which 
 he inculcated in ways which won for him 
 recognition as a practical influence in con- 
 temporary church opinion. In these last 
 years of his lecturing and discoursing in 
 private, the figure he makes is pathetic, 
 though Carlyle describes it with a grim 
 humor, as any one may read in the Life 
 of Sterling : over against that figure 
 should be set the descriptions of the young 
 Coleridge by Dorothy Wordsworth and 
 Lamb; and after these perhaps the con- 
 trast which Coleridge himself draws 
 between his spirit and his body may 
 enable a reader to fuse the two — youth 
 and asre — into one. Whatever were the 
 weaknesses of his nature and the trials of 
 his life, he was deeply loved by friends of
 
 50 COLERIDGE. 
 
 many different minds, who if they grew 
 cold, had paid at least once this tribute to 
 the charm, the gentleness, and the delight 
 of his human companionship.
 
 SHELLEY'S POETRY: A SKETCH. 
 
 Shelley himself described his genius 
 as in the main a moral one^and in this he 
 made a correct analysis. It was fed by 
 ideas derived from books, and sustained 
 by a sympathy so intense as to become a 
 passion for moral aims. He was intellectu- 
 ally the child of the Revolution ; and from 
 the moment that he drew thoughtful 
 breath he was a disciple of the radicals in 
 England. The regeneration of mankind 
 was the cause that kindled his enthusi- 
 asm; and the changes he looked for were 
 social as well as political. He spent his 
 strength in advocacy of the doctrines of 
 democracy, and in hostility to its obvious 
 opponents established in the authority of 
 Church and State, and in custom; he held 
 the most advanced position, not only in 
 religion, but in respect to the institution 
 of marriage, the use of property, and the 
 welfare of the masses of mankind. The 
 first complete expression of his opinion, 
 the precipitate from the ferment of his 
 
 51
 
 52 SHELLEY'S POETRY: A SKETCH. 
 
 boyish years, was given in Queen Mab, 
 a crude poem after the style of Southey, 
 by which he was long best and most un- 
 favorably known; he recognized its imma- 
 turity, and sought to suppress a pirated 
 edition published in his last years: the 
 violent prejudice against him in England 
 as an atheist was largely due to this early 
 work, with its long notes, in connection 
 with the decision of the court taking from 
 him the custody of his children. The sec- 
 ond expression of his opinions, similar in 
 scope, was given five years later in The 
 Revolt of Islam, a Spenserian poem in 
 twelve books. In this work the increase 
 of his poetic faculty is shown by his denial 
 of a didactic aim, and by the series of 
 scenes from nature and human life which 
 is the web of the verse ; but the subject of 
 the poem is the regeneration of society, 
 and the intellectual impulse which sustains 
 it is political and philanthropic. Up to 
 the time of its composition the main liter- 
 ary influence that governed him was Latin : 
 now he began to feel the power of Greek 
 literature ; and partly in making responses 
 to it, and partly by the expansion of his 
 mind, he revolutionized his poetic method.
 
 SHELLEY'S POETRY: A SKETCH. 53 
 
 The result was that in the third and great- 
 est of his works of this kind, Prometheus 
 Unbound, lie developed a new type in 
 English, — the lyrical drama. The sub- 
 ject is still the regeneration of society: 
 but the tale has grown into the drama; 
 the ideas have generated abstract imper- 
 sonations which have more likeness to ele- 
 mental beings, to Titanic and mythological 
 creations, than to humanity; while the 
 interest intellectually is still held within 
 the old limits of the general cause of man- 
 kind. The same principles, the same con- 
 victions, the same aims, fused in one moral 
 enthusiasm, are here : but a transformation 
 has come over their embodiment, — imagi- 
 nation has seized upon them, a new lyrical 
 music has penetrated and sublimated them, 
 and the poem so engendered and born is 
 different in kind from those that went 
 before ; it holds a unique place in the lit- 
 erature of the world, and is the most pas- 
 sionate dream of the perfect social ideal 
 ever moulded in verse. In a fourth work, 
 Hellas, Shelley applied a similar method 
 in an effort to treat the Greek Revolution 
 as a single instance of the victory of the 
 general cause which he had most at heart ;
 
 54 SHELLEY'S POETRY: A SKETCH. 
 
 and in several shorter poems, especially 
 odes, lie from time to time took up the 
 same theme. The ideal he sets fprtli in 
 all these writings, clarifying as it goes on, 
 is not different from the millennium of 
 poets and thinkers in all ages : justice and 
 liberty, love the supreme law, are the ends 
 to be achieved, and moral excellence with 
 universal happiness is the goal of all. 
 
 In the works which have been men- 
 tioned, and which contain the most of 
 Shelley's substantial thought, the moral 
 prepossession of his mind is most manifest ; 
 it belonged to the conscious part of his 
 being, and would naturally be foremost in 
 his most deliberate writing. It was, in 
 my judgment, the central thing in his 
 genius; but genius in working itself out 
 displays special faculties of many kinds, 
 which must be noticed in their own 'right. 
 Shelley is, for example, considered as pre- 
 eminently a poet of nature. His suscepti- 
 bility to sensuous impressions was very 
 great, his response to them in love of 
 beauty and in joy in them was constant; 
 and out of his intimacy with nature came 
 not merely descriptive power and the habit 
 of interpreting emotion through natural
 
 SHELLEY'S POETRY: A SKETCH. 55 
 
 images, such as many poets have com- 
 passed, but a peculiar faculty often noticed 
 by his critics, usually called the myth- 
 making faculty, which is thought of as 
 racial rather than individual. During his 
 residence in Italy he was steeped in the 
 Greek spirit as it survives in the philoso- 
 phy and poetry of antiquity ; and it was in 
 harmony with his mood that he should 
 vitalize the elements. What is extraor- 
 dinary is the success, the primitive ease, 
 the magic, with which he did so. In the 
 simple instances which recur to every 
 one's memory — The Skylark, The Cloud, 
 the Ode to the West Wind — he has 
 rendered the sense of non-human, of ele-* 
 mental being; and in the characters of 
 Prometheus Unbound — in Asia especially 
 — he has created such beings, to which 
 the spirits of the moon and earth as he 
 evoked them seem natural concomitants, 
 and to them he has given reality for the 
 imagination. It is largely because he 
 dealt in this witchery, this matter of pri- 
 meval illusion, that he gives to some minds 
 the impression of dwelling in an imaginary 
 and unsubstantial world; and the flood of 
 light and glory of color which he exhales
 
 56 SHELLEY'S POETEY : A SKETCH. 
 
 as an atmosphere about the substance of 
 the verse, dazzle and often bewilder the 
 reader whose eyes are yet to be familiarized 
 with the shapes and air of his scene. But 
 with few exceptions, while using this 
 creative power by poetic instinct, he 
 brings back the verse at the end, whether 
 in the lyrics or the longer works, to " the 
 hopes and fears of men." In the ordinary 
 delineation of nature as it appears, his 
 touch is sure and accurate, with a regard 
 for detail which shows close observation, 
 and a frequent minuteness which shows 
 the contemporary of Coleridge and Words- 
 worth. The opening passage of Julian 
 and Maddalo, the lines at Pisa on the 
 bridge, and the fragment Marenghi, are 
 three widely different examples. 
 
 Shelley was also strongly attracted by 
 the narrative form for its own sake. He 
 was always fond of a story from the days 
 of his boyhood; and though the romantic 
 cast of fiction in his youth, both in prose 
 and verse, might indicate a lack of interest 
 in life, in the taste for this he was not 
 different from the time he lived in, and 
 the way to reality lay then through this 
 path. Rosalind and Helen was a tale
 
 SHELLEY'S POETRY: A SKETCH. 57 
 
 like others of its kind, made up of roman- 
 tic elements; but the instinct which led 
 Shelley to tell it, as he had told still cruder 
 stories in his first romances at Eton, was 
 fundamental in him, and led him after- 
 ward, still further refining his matter, to 
 weave out of airy nothing The Witch of 
 Atlas almost at the close of his career. 
 The important matter is, to connect with 
 these narrative beginnings in prose and 
 verse his serious dramatic work, which has 
 for its prime example The Cenci, other- 
 wise standing too far apart from his life. 
 In this dnima he undertook to deal with 
 the reality of human nature in its most 
 difficult literary form, the tragedy; and 
 the success with which he suppressed his 
 ordinary exuberance of imagery and phrase 
 and kept to a severe restraint, at the same 
 time producing the one conspicuous exam- 
 ple of tragedy in his century in England, 
 has been often wondered at. In the un- 
 finished Charles I. he made a second 
 attempt; while in the various dramatic 
 fragments other than this he seems to have 
 contemplated a new form of romantic 
 drama. It seems to me that this line of 
 his development has been too little
 
 58 SHELLEY'S POETRY: A SKETCH. 
 
 studied; but there is space here only to 
 make the suggestion. 
 
 Another subordinate division of tShel- - 
 ley's work lies in his treatment of the ideal 
 of individual nobility and happiness apart 
 from society. Of course in the character 
 of Laon, and on the grand scale in that of 
 Prometheus, he set forth traits of the in- 
 dividual ideal; but in both instances they 
 were social reformers, and had a relation 
 to mankind. In Alastor, on the con- 
 trary, the individual is dealt with for his 
 own sole sake, and the youth is drawn in 
 lines of melancholy beauty ; he was of the 
 same race as Laon, but existed only in his 
 own poetic unhappiness ; of the same race 
 also was Prince Athanase, .but the poem 
 is too unfinished to permit us to say more 
 than that as he is disclosed, he is only 
 an individual. In Epipsychidion the 
 same character reappears as a persistent 
 type in Shelley's mind, with the traits 
 that he most valued: and the conclusion 
 there is the union of the lover and his 
 beloved in the enchanted isle, far from the 
 world, whicli also is familiar to readers of 
 Shelley in other poems as a persistent idea 
 in his mind. In these poems one finds
 
 SHELLEY^ S POETRY: A SKETCH. 59 
 
 the recoil of Shelley's mind from the task 
 of reform he had undertaken, the antipodes 
 of the social leader in the lonely exile 
 from all but the one kindred spirit, the 
 sense of weariness, of defeat, of despair^ 
 over the world — the refuge. It is nat- 
 ural, consequently, to feel that Shelley 
 himself is near in these characters; that 
 they are successive incarnations of his 
 spirit, and frankly such. They are auto- 
 biographic with conscious art, and stand 
 only at one remove from those lyrics of 
 personal emotion which are unconscious, 
 the cries of the spirit which have sung 
 themselves into the heart of the world. 
 Upon these lyrics, which stand apart from 
 his deliberate work, — impulsive, overflow- 
 ing, irresistible in their spontaneity, — it 
 may be granted that his popular fame rests. 
 Many of them are singularly perfect in 
 poetic form naturally developed; they 
 have the music which is as unforgettable 
 as the tones of a human voice, as unmis- 
 takable, as personal, and which has winged 
 them to fly through the world. They make 
 one forget all the rest in Shelley himself, 
 and they express his world-weary yet still 
 aspiring soul. The most perfect of them.
 
 60 SHELLEY'S POETEY : A' SKETCH. 
 
 in my judgment, is the Ode to the West — 
 Wind: in form it is faultless; and it 
 blends in one expression the power he had 
 to interpret nature's elemental life, the 
 pathos of his own spirit, — portrayed more 
 nobly than in the cognate passage of the 
 Adonais, because more unconscious of 
 
 itself, — and the supreme desire he had to "^ . 
 
 serve the world with those thoughts blown 
 now through the world : — 
 
 " Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind." 
 
 No other of the lyrics seems to me 
 so comprehensive, so adequate. The 
 Adonais only can compare with it for 
 personal power, for the penetration of 
 the verse with Shelley's spirit in its elo- 
 quent passion. Of that elegy the poetry 
 is so direct, and the charm so immediate 
 and constant, that it needs no other men- 
 tion, further than to say that like the 
 Sensitive Plant, it has more affinity 
 with Shelley's lyrics than with his longer 
 works. 
 
 Such are some of the characteristics of 
 Shelley and the relations between his more 
 important works. There is much more to 
 say; but I will add only that in what
 
 SHELLEY'S POETRY: A SKETCH. 61 
 
 seems to me a cardinal point in the criti- 
 cism of poetry, — the poet's conception of 
 ■womanhood, — of all the poets of the cen- 
 tury in England, Shelley is approached 
 only by Burns in tenderness, and excels 
 Burns in nobleness of feeling. The repu- 
 tation of Shelley in his lifetime was but 
 slight in the world; and it emerged only 
 by slow stages from the neglect and oblo- 
 quy which were his portion while he lived- 
 and when he died. In the brief recital of 
 the events of his life, it is obvious at a 
 glance that there is much which needs ex- 
 planation and defense. The best defense 
 was to throw all possible light upon his 
 career, and that was done by all who knew 
 him; so that his life is more minutely 
 exposed from boyhood to his 'death than 
 that of any other English poet. As a 
 consequence of this, opinion regarding 
 him has been much modified ; and though 
 it may still be stern, it is now seldom 
 harsh. The opinions which were regarded 
 as of evil influence, and the acts which 
 were condemned as wrong acts, are open 
 to all to understand and pass judgment 
 upon, as they are related in many books ; 
 and in respect to these, each will have his
 
 62 SHELLEY'S POETRY: A SKETCH. 
 
 own mind. Whatever be the judgment, it 
 must be agreed that the century has 
 brought fame to Shelley, as a poet .of the 
 highest class and of a rare kind; and that 
 as a man he has been an inspiration and 
 almost a creed in many lives, and has won 
 respect and affection from many hearts, 
 and a singular devotion from some akin to 
 that which his friends felt toward him. 
 He has been loved as it is given to few 
 strangers to be loved, — but that is apart 
 from his poetry. 
 
 I
 
 LANDOR. 
 
 Many of the most sensitive and dis- 
 criminating critics of this century have, in 
 the suffrage for fame, listed themselves for 
 Landor. He seemed almost to achieve im- 
 mortality within his lifetime, so continu- 
 ously was the subtle appreciation of the best 
 yielded to him, from the far-off years when 
 Shelley used, at Oxford, to declaim with 
 enthusiasm passages from Gebir, to the 
 time, that seems as yesterday, when Swin- 
 burne made his pilgrimage to Italy, to offer 
 his tribute of adoration to the old man at 
 the close of his solitary and troubled career ; 
 and still each finer spirit, 
 
 " As he passes, turns, 
 And bids fair peace be to his sable shroud." 
 
 During his long life he saw the springtime, 
 and outlived the harvest, of the great poetic 
 revival, and the labor of the Victorian poets 
 
 63
 
 64 LANDOB. 
 
 of the aftermath was half accomplished be- 
 fore his death ; but from all these powerful 
 contemporary influences he was free. He 
 remained apart ; and this single fact, attest- 
 ing, as it does, extraordinary self-possession 
 and assurance of purpose, suffices to make 
 his character interesting, even were his work 
 of inferior worth. As yet, however, even 
 to the minds of cultivated men, he is hard- 
 ly more than a great figure. He is known, 
 praised, and remembered for particular 
 scenes, dramatic fragments, occasional lyrics, 
 quatrains. This is the natural fate of a dis- 
 cursive writer. It matters not that Lan- 
 dor was wide ranging ; it matters not what 
 spoils of thought, what images of beauty, he 
 brought from those far eastern uplands 
 which it was his boast to haunt: he failed to 
 give unity to his work, to give interest to 
 large portions of it, to command public at- 
 . tention for it as a whole. Indeed, his work 
 as a whole does not command the attention 
 even of the best. What does survive, too, 
 lives only in the favor of a small circle. He 
 forfeited popular fame at the beginning, 
 when he selected themes that presuppose 
 rare qualities in his audience, and adopted 
 an antique style ; but such considerations,
 
 LANDOB. 65 
 
 at least in their naked statement, do not tell 
 the whole story. Other poets have missed 
 immediate applause by dealing with sub- 
 jects that assumed* unusual largeness of soul, 
 range of sympathy, and refinement of taste 
 in their readers : like Shelley, singing of un- 
 heeded hopes and fears to which the world 
 was to be wrought ; like Wordsworth, nar- 
 rating the myth of Troy. Other poets, in 
 style, have set forth the object plainly, and 
 left it to work its will on the heart and im- 
 agination, unaided by the romantic spell, the 
 awakening glow, the silent but imperative 
 suggestion, the overmastering passion that 
 takes heart and imagination captive ; and 
 they have not lost their reward. A remote 
 theme, an impersonal style, are not of them- 
 selves able to condemn a poet to long neg- 
 lect. They may make wide appreciation of 
 him impossible ; they may explain the indif- 
 ference of an imperfectly educated public; 
 but they do not account for the fact that 
 Landor is to be read, even by his admirers, 
 in a book of selections, while the dust is 
 shaken from the eight stout octavos that 
 contain his works only by the professional 
 man of letters. 
 
 What first strikes the student of Landor
 
 66 LANBOR. 
 
 is the lack of any development in his genius. 
 This is one reason why Mr. Leslie Stephen, 
 seizing on the characteristic somewhat rude- 
 ly, and leaping to an ungracious conclusion, 
 calls him " a glorified and sublime edition 
 of the sixth-form schoolboy." Men whose 
 genius is of this fixed type are rare in Eng- 
 lish literature, and not of the highest rank. 
 They exhibit no radical change ; they are at 
 the beginning what they are at the end ; 
 their works do not belong to any particular 
 period of their lives ; they seem free from 
 their age, and to live outside of it. Hence, 
 in dealing with them, historical criticism — 
 the criticism whose purpose is to explain 
 rather than to judge — soon finds itself at 
 fault. When the circumstances that deter- 
 mined the original bent of their minds have 
 been set forth, there is nothing more to be 
 said. With Landor, this bent seems to have 
 been given by his classical training. To 
 write Latin verses was the earliest serious 
 employment of his genius, and his efforts 
 were immediately crowned with success. 
 These studies, falling in with natural in- 
 clinations and aptitudes, pledged him to a 
 classical manner ; they made real for him 
 the myths and history of Greece and Rome ;
 
 LAN DOR. 67 
 
 they fed his devotion to the ancient virtues, 
 — love of freedom, aspiration for the cahn 
 of wisdom, reverence for the dignity of he- 
 roism, delight in beauty for its own sake; 
 they supported him in what was more distinc- 
 tively his own, — his refinement in material 
 tastes, his burning indignation, his defense 
 of tyrannicide. These characteristics he had 
 in youth ; they were neither diminished nor 
 increased in age. In youth, too, he displayed 
 all his literary excellences and defects : the 
 fullness and weight of line ; the march of 
 sentences ; the obscurity arising from over- 
 condensation of thought and abrupt and el- 
 liptical constructions ; his command of the 
 grand and impressive as well as the beauti- 
 ful and charming in imagery ; his fondness 
 for heroic situation and for the loveliness of 
 minute objects. This was a high endow- 
 ment ; why, then, do its literary results seem 
 inadequate ? 
 
 With all his gifts, Landor did not possess 
 unifying power. He observed objects as 
 they passed before him at hap-hazard, took 
 them into his mind, and gave them back, un- 
 transformed, in their oiiginal disorder. He 
 thought disconnectedly, and expressed his 
 thoughts as they came, detached and sepa-
 
 68 LANDOn. 
 
 rate. This lack of unity did not result sim- 
 ply from his choice of the classical mode of 
 treatment, or from a defect in logical or con- 
 structive power, although it was connected 
 with these. The ability to fuse experience, 
 to combine its elements and make them one, 
 to give it back to the world, transformed, 
 and yet essentially true, the real creative 
 faculty, is proportioned very strictly to the 
 self-assertive power of genius, to the energy 
 of the reaction of the mind on nature and 
 life ; it springs from a strong personality. 
 To say that Landor's personality was weak 
 would be to stidtify one's self ; but yet the 
 diiference between Landor the man and 
 Landor the author is so great as to make the 
 two almost antithetical ; and in his imagina- 
 tive work, by which he must be judged, it is 
 not too much to say that he denied and for- 
 swore his personality, and obliterated him- 
 self so far as was possible. He not only 
 eliminated self from his style, and, after the 
 classical manner, defined by Arnold, " relied 
 solely on the weight and force of that which, 
 with entire fidelity, he uttered," but he also 
 eliminated self, so far as one can, from his 
 subject. Pie did not bind his work together 
 by the laws of his own mind ; he did not
 
 LANDOR. 69 
 
 root It in the truth, as he saw truth ; he did 
 not interpenetrate and permeate it with his 
 own beliefs, as the great masters have al- 
 ways done. His principles were at the best 
 vague, hardly amounting to more than an 
 unapplied enthusiasm for liberty, heroism, 
 and the other great watchwords of social 
 rather than individual life. These illumi- 
 nate his work, but they do not give it consis- 
 tency. It is crystalline in structure, beau- 
 tiful, ordered, perfect in form when taken 
 part by part, but conglomerate as a whole ; 
 it is a handful of jewels, many of which are 
 singly of the most transparent and glowing 
 light, but unrelated one to another, — placed 
 in juxtaposition, but not set ; and in the crys- 
 talline mass is imbedded grosser matter, 
 and mingled with the jewels are stones of 
 dull color and light weight. A lovely object 
 caught his eye, and he set it forth in verse ; 
 a fine thought came to him, and he inserted 
 it in his dialogues ; but his days were not 
 " bound each to each by natural piety," or 
 by any other of the shaping principles of 
 high genius. He was a spectator of life, not 
 an actor in life. Nature was to him a pano- 
 rama, wonderful, awful, beautiful, and he 
 described its scenes down to its most minute
 
 70 LANDOR. 
 
 and evanescent details. History was his 
 theatre, where the personages played great 
 parts ; and he recorded their words and 
 gestures, always helping them with, the de- 
 vice of the high buskin and something of a 
 histrionic air. He was content to be thus 
 guided from without ; to have his intellec- 
 tual activity determined by the chance of 
 sensation and of reading, rather than by a 
 well-thought-out and enthusiastic purpose of 
 his own soul. And so he became hardly 
 more than a mirror of beauty and an ^olian 
 harp of thought ; if the vision came, if the 
 wind breathed, he responded. 
 
 This self-effacement, this impersonality, 
 as it is called, in literature, is much praised. 
 It is said to be classical, and there is an im- 
 pression in some minds that such an ab- 
 dication of the individual's prerogatives is 
 the distinctive mark of classicism. There 
 is no more misleading and confusing error 
 in criticism. Not impersonality, but univer- 
 sality, is that mark ; and this is by no means 
 the same thing, differently stated. In any 
 age, the first, although not the sole, charac- 
 tei'istic of classical work is that it deals with 
 universal truth, of interest to aU men : and 
 hence the poet is required to keep to him-
 
 LANDOR. 71 
 
 self his idiosyncrasies, hobbies, all that is 
 simply his own ; all that is not identical with 
 the common human nature ; all that men in 
 large bodies cannot sympathize with, under- 
 stand, and appreciate. Under these condi- 
 tions direct self -revelation is exceptional. 
 The poet usually expresses himself by so ar- 
 ranging his plot and developing his charac- 
 ters that they will illustrate the laws of life, 
 as he sees these laws, without any direct 
 statement, — though the Greek chorus is full 
 of didactic sayings ; and he may also express 
 himself by such a powerful presentation of 
 the morality intrinsic in beautiful things 
 and noble actions as " to soothe the cares 
 and lift the thoughts of men," without any 
 dogmatic insistence in his own person. In 
 these ways uEschylus obliterated himself 
 from his work just as much as Shakespeare, 
 and no more ; Swift just as much as Aristoph- 
 anes, and no more ; but the statement that 
 Shakespeare or Swift obliterated themselves 
 from their works needs only to be made to 
 be laughed at. The faith of ^schylus, the 
 wisdom of Sophocles, are in all their dramas ; 
 Anacreon is in all his songs, Horace in all 
 his odes. The lasting significance of their 
 productions to mankind is derived from the
 
 72 LANBOB. 
 
 clearness, the power, the skill, with which 
 they informed their works with their per- 
 sonality. These men had a philosophy of 
 life, that underlay and unified their work. 
 They rebuilt the world in their imagination, 
 and oave it the laws of their own minds. 
 Their spirits were active, moulding, shaping, 
 creating, subduing the whole of nature and 
 life to themselves. It is true that the an- 
 cients accomplished their purpose rather by 
 thought, the moderns rather by emotion; 
 but this difference is incidental to the change 
 in civilization. Either instrument is suffi- 
 cient for its end ; but he who would now 
 choose the ancient instead of the modern 
 mode, narrows, postpones, and abbreviates 
 his fame only less than Landor, in his youth, 
 by writing in Latin. Whatever be the 
 mode of its operation, the energy of person- 
 ality is the very essence of effective genius. 
 
 That Landor had no philosophy of life, in 
 the same sense as Shakespeare or -3i^schylus, 
 is plain to any reader. Those who look on 
 art, including poetry, as removed from ordi- 
 nary human life, who think that its chief 
 service to men lies in affording delight rather 
 than in that quickening of the spirit of 
 which delight is only the sign and efflores-
 
 LANBOR. 73 
 
 cence, would consider Landor's lack o£ this 
 philosophy a virtue. It accounts largely for 
 his failure to interest even the best in the 
 larger part of his work, and especially for 
 the discontinuity of his reflections. These 
 reflections are always his own ; and this fact 
 may seem to make against the view that he 
 eliminated self from his productions so far 
 as possible. But the presence of personality 
 in literature as a force, ordering a great 
 whole and giving it laws, is a very different 
 thing from its presence as a mere mouth- 
 piece of opinion. The thoughts may be nu- 
 merous, varied, wise, noble ; they may have 
 all the virtues of truth and grace ; but if 
 they are disparate and scattered, if they 
 tend nowhither, if they leave the reader 
 where they found him, if they subserve no 
 ulterior purpose and accomplish no end, 
 there is a wide gulf between them and the 
 thoughts of Shakespeare and -^schylus, no 
 less their own than were Landor's his. In 
 the former, personality is a power ; in the 
 latter, it is only a voice. In Landor's eight 
 volumes there are more fine thoughts, more 
 wise apothegms, than in any other discursive 
 author's works in English literature; but 
 they do not teU on the mind. They bloom
 
 74 LAN DOR. 
 
 like flowers In their gardens, but they crown 
 no achievement. At the end, no cause is 
 advanced, no goal is won. This incoherence 
 and inefficiency proceed from the absence of 
 any definite scheme of life, any compacted 
 system of thought, any central princijjles, 
 any strong, pervading, and ordering person- 
 ality. 
 
 In the same way the objectivity of Lan- 
 dor's work, its naturalism as distinguished 
 from imaginativeness, results from the same 
 cause, but with the difference that, while 
 the faults already mentioned are largely due 
 to an imperfect equipment of the mind, his 
 mode of art seems to have been adopted by 
 conscious choice and of set purpose. The 
 opinion of those who look on naturalism as 
 a virtue in art is deserving of respect. We 
 have been admonished for a long while that 
 men should see things as they are, and pre- 
 sent them as they are, and that this wks the 
 Greek way. The dictum, when applied 
 with the meaning that men should be free 
 from prejudice and impartial in judgment, 
 no one would contest ; but when it is pro- 
 claimed with the meaning that poets should 
 express ideas nakedly, and should reproduce 
 objects by portraiture, there is excuse for
 
 LANDOR. 15 
 
 raising some question. No doubt, this was 
 in general the practice of the ancients. The 
 Athenians were primarily intellectual, the 
 Romans unimaginative. But by the opera- 
 tion of various causes — the chief of which 
 are the importance bestowed on the individ- 
 ual and the impulse given to emotion by the 
 Christian religion — mankind has changed 
 somewhat ; and therefore the methods of 
 appeal to men, the ways of touching their 
 hearts and enlightening their minds, have 
 been modified. In literature this change is 
 expressed by saying that the romantic man- 
 ner has, in general, superseded the classical. 
 The romantic manner aims at truth no less 
 than the classical ; it sets forth things as 
 tliey are no less completely and clearly. 
 The difference is rather one of methods than 
 of aims. The classical poet usually per- 
 ceives the object by his intellect, and makes 
 his appeal to the mind ; the romantic poet 
 seizes on the object with his imagination, 
 and makes his appeal to the heart. Not 
 that classical work is without imagination, 
 or romantic work devoid of intellectuality ; 
 but that in one the intellect counts for more, 
 in the other imagination. The classical poet, 
 having once presented ideas and objects,
 
 76 LANDOB. 
 
 leaves them to make their way ; the romantic 
 poet not only presents them, but, by awaken- 
 ing the feelings, predisposes the mood of the 
 mind, makes their reception by the mind 
 easier, wins their way for them. In clas- 
 sical work, consequently, success depends 
 mainly on lucidity of understanding, clear- 
 ness of vision, skill in verbal expression ; in 
 romantic work, the poet must not only pos- 
 sess these qualities, but must superadd, as 
 his prime characteristic, rightness, one might 
 better say sanity, of passion. The classical 
 virtues are more common among authors, 
 the romantic far more rare ; and hence er- 
 ror in the romantic manner is more frequent, 
 especially in dealing with ideas. But with 
 all its liability to mistake in weak hands, 
 romantic art, by its higher range, its fiercer 
 intensity, especially by its greater certainty, 
 has, in the hands of a master, a clear in- 
 crease of power over classical art, and under 
 the changed conditions of civilization its re- 
 sources are not to be lightly neglected. In- 
 deed, one who voluntarily adopts the clas- 
 sical manner as an exclusive mode seems to 
 choose an instrument of less compass and 
 melody, to prefer Greek to modern music. 
 He sings to a secluded and narrow circle,
 
 LANDOB. 77 
 
 and loses the ear of the world. Certainly 
 Landor made this choice, and by it he must 
 stand. 
 
 Let us take an example from the best of 
 Landor's work, and from that region of clas- 
 sical art where it is wholly competent, — the 
 brief description of small objects : — 
 
 " The ever-sacred cup 
 Of the pure lily hath between my hands 
 Felt safe, unsoiled, nor lost one grain of gold." 
 
 How completely, how distinctly, the image 
 is given, — its form, its transparent purit}^ 
 its fragile and trembling gold ! How free 
 from any other than a strictly artistic charm ! 
 And yet how different is its method of ap- 
 peal from Shelley's 
 
 " tender blue-bells, at whose birth 
 The sod scarce heaved ; " 
 
 from Shakespeare's 
 
 " daffodils 
 That come before the swallow dares, and take 
 The winds of March with beauty." 
 
 Or, to select an illustration, also of Landor's 
 best, when the image, no less objective, 
 yields of itself an infinite suggestion : — 
 
 "Borgia, thou once wert almost too august 
 And high for adoration ; now thou 'rt dust. 
 All that remains of thee these plaits unfold, 
 Calm hair meandering in pellucid gold."
 
 78 LAN DOR. 
 
 Again, how perfect is the image, how effec- 
 tive the development of the third line ; how 
 the melody of the last blends with its se- 
 lected epithets to place the object entire and 
 whole before the mind ; how free is the qua- 
 train from any self - intrusion of the poet! 
 But here, too, the method of appeal is very 
 different from Shakespeare's, as in the lines 
 on Yorick's skull : " Here hung those lips 
 that I have kissed I know not how oft." 
 The difference in mood between these two 
 only emphasizes the difference in method. 
 Enough has been said, however, in descrip- 
 tion and exemplification of the two kinds of 
 art. Either is sufficient for its ends, nor 
 would any one desire to dispense with that 
 which has resulted in work so admirable as 
 has been quoted from Landor. The distinc- 
 tively romantic poets do not consign the clas- 
 sical style to disuse. In the presentation of 
 images, Keats has frequent recourse to'it, as 
 in his picture of Autumn lying 
 
 " on a half -reaped furrow sound asleep, 
 Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook 
 Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers." 
 
 So Wordsworth, in expressing ideas, is 
 sometimes more bald than the least imagina- 
 tive of the classics. But such poets do not
 
 LANBOR. 79 
 
 employ this style alone ; they are character- 
 ized by the modern manner ; they give us 
 those " sweet views " which in the ancient 
 mode " can never well be seen." Landor 
 droops below his great contemporaries, not 
 by merely adopting the classical method, 
 but by adopting it exclusively. Whether 
 this choice was entirely fi-ee, or partly de- 
 termined by natural incapacity, is doubtful. 
 Violent and tempestuous as his nature was, 
 with all his boyish intensity of indignation, 
 his boyish delicacy of tenderness, he seems 
 to possess temper rather than true passion. 
 In the verses to his poetic love, lanthe, there 
 are many fine sentiments, graceful turns ; 
 thei'e is courtliness of behavior; but the 
 note of passion is not struck. lanthe is 
 only another poetic mistress of the cavalier 
 school, and in the memory her name is less, 
 both for dignity and pathos, than Rose Ayl- 
 mer's. Without passion, of course, a poet is 
 condemned to the classical style. Passion 
 is the element in which the romantic writer 
 fuses beauty and wisdom ; it is the means 
 by which personality pervades literary work 
 with most ease, directness, and glow. In 
 the great modern poets it is the substance of 
 their genius. But just as neither by a phi-
 
 80 LANDOR. 
 
 losophy of life nor in any other way did 
 Landor fill his subject with himself, so nei- 
 ther by passion nor by any other quality did 
 he breathe his own spirit into his style. 
 
 The consequence is that Landor, unclas- 
 sified in his own age, is now to be ranked 
 among the poets, increasing in number, who 
 appeal rather to the artistic than to the 
 poetic sense. He is to be placed in that 
 group which looks on art as a world re- 
 moved ; which prizes it mainly for the de- 
 light it gives ; which, caring less for truth, 
 deals chiefly with the beauty that charms 
 the senses ; and which therefore weaves po- 
 etry like tapestry, and uses the web of speech 
 to bring out a succession of fine pictures. 
 The watchwords of any school, whether in 
 thought or art, seldom awake hostility until 
 their bearing on the details of practice re- 
 veals their meaning. Art is, in a sense, a 
 world removed from the actual and present 
 life, and beauty is the sole title that admits 
 any work within its limits. Of this there is 
 no question. But that world, however far 
 from what is peculiar to any one age, has its 
 eternal foundations in universal life ; and 
 that beauty has its enduring power because 
 it is the incarnation of universal life. What
 
 LAN DOB. 81 
 
 poem has a better right to admission there 
 than The Eve of .St. Agnes? and in what 
 poem does the heart of life beat more 
 warmly? Laodamia belongs in that world, 
 but it is because it voices abiding human 
 feelings no less than because of its serenity. 
 Nature in itself is savage, sterile, and. void ; 
 individual life in itself is trifling: each ob- 
 tains its value through its interest to human- 
 ity as a whole, and the office of art is to set 
 forth that value. A lovely object, a noble 
 action, are each of worth to men, but the 
 latter is of the more worth ; and, as was 
 long ago pointed out, poetry is by the limit- 
 ations of language at a considerable disad- 
 vantage in treating of formal beauty. But 
 without developing these remarks, of which 
 there is no need, the only point here to be 
 made is that in so far as poetry concerns it- 
 self with objects without relation to ideas, it 
 loses influence ; in so far as it neglects emo- 
 tion and thought for the purpose of gaining 
 sensuous effects it loses worth; in both it 
 declines from the higher to the lower levels. 
 Landor, notwithstanding his success in pre- 
 senting objects of artistic beauty — and his 
 poetry is full of exquisite delineations of 
 them — failed to interest men ; nor could his
 
 82 LANDOB. 
 
 skill in expressing thought, although he was 
 far more intellectual than his successors, 
 save his reputation. Lanclor mistook a few 
 of the marks of art for all. His work has 
 the serenity, the remoteness, that character- 
 ize high art, but it lacks an intimate rela- 
 tion with the general life of men; it sets 
 forth formal beauty, as painting does, but 
 that beauty remains a sensation, and does 
 not pass into thought. This absence of any 
 vital relation between his art and life, be- 
 tween his objects and ideas, denotes his fail- 
 ure. There are so many poets whose works 
 contain as perfect beauty, and in addition 
 truth and passion ; so many who instead of 
 mirroring beauty make it the voice of life, 
 — who instead of responding in melodious 
 thought to the wandering winds of reverie 
 strike their lyres in the strophe and anti- 
 strophe of continuous song, — that the world 
 is content to let Landor go by. The guests 
 at the famous late dinner-party to which he 
 looked forward will indeed be very few, and 
 they will be men of leisure. 
 
 Thus far, in examining the work of Lan- 
 dor as a whole, and endeavoring to under- 
 stand somewhat the public indifference to it, 
 the answer has been found in its objectivity
 
 LANBOR. 83 
 
 and its discontinuity, both springing from 
 the effacement of his personality as an ac- 
 tive power ; or, in other words, in the fact 
 that, by failing to link his images with his 
 thoughts, and his thoughts one with another, 
 so as to make them tell on the mind, and 
 especially by eliminating the romantic ele- 
 ment of passion, he failed to bring his work 
 into sympathetic or helpful relations with 
 the general emotional and intellectual life of 
 men. 
 
 Why, then, do the most sensitive and 
 discriminating critics, as was said at the be- 
 ginning, list themselves in Landor's favor ? 
 They are, without exception, fellow-workers 
 with him in the craft of literature. They 
 have, by their continued eulogy of him, 
 made it a sign of refinement to be charmed 
 by him, a proof of unusually good taste to 
 praise him. His admirers, by their very di- 
 vergence in opinion from the crowd, seem 
 to claim uncommon sensibilities ; and the co- 
 terie is certainly one of the highest order, in- 
 tellectually : Browning, Lowell, Swinburne, 
 to name no more. They are all literary 
 men. They are loud in their plaudits of his 
 workmanship, but are noticeably guarded 
 in their commendation of his entire con-
 
 84 LAN DOE. 
 
 tents ; the passages for which they express 
 unstinted enthusiasm are few. Landor was, 
 beyond doubt, a master-workman, and skill 
 in workmanship is dear to the craft ; others 
 may feel its effects, but none appreciate it 
 with the keen relish of the professional au- 
 thor. The fullness, power, and harmony of 
 Landor's language are clearly evident in his 
 earliest work. He had the gift of literary 
 expression from his youth, and in his mature 
 work it shows as careful and high cultiva- 
 tion as such a gift ever received from its 
 possessor. None could give keener point 
 and smoother polish to a short sentence ; 
 none could thread the intricacies of loner and 
 involved constructions more unerringly. He 
 had at command all the grammatical re- 
 sources of lucidity, though he did not alwaj^s 
 care to employ them. He knew all the de- 
 vices of prose composition to conceal and to 
 disclose ; to bring the commonplace to issue 
 in the unexpected ; to lead up, to soften, to 
 hesitate, to declaim ; to extort all the supple- 
 mentary and new suggestions of an old com- 
 parison ; to frame a new and perfect simile ; 
 in short, he was thoroughly trained to his 
 art. Yet his prose is not, by present canons, 
 perfect prose. It is not self-possessed, sub-
 
 LANBOB. 85 
 
 dued, and graceful conversation, modulated, 
 making its points without aggressive insist- 
 ence, yet with certainty, keeping interest 
 alive hy a brilliant but natural turn and by 
 the brief and luminous flash of truth through 
 a perfect phrase. His prose is rather the 
 monologue of a seer. In reading his works 
 one feels somewhat as if sitting at the feet 
 of Coleridge. Landor has the presence that 
 abashes companions. His manner of speech 
 is more dignified, more ceremonial, his enun- 
 ciation is more resonant, his accent more ex- 
 quisite, than belong to the man of the world. 
 He silences his readers by the mere impos- 
 sibility of interrupting with a question so 
 noble and smooth-sliding a current of words. 
 The style is a sort of modern Miltonic ; it 
 has the suggestion of the pulpit divine in 
 Hooker, the touch of formal artificiality that 
 characterizes the first good English prose. 
 Landor goes far afield for his vocables ; his 
 page is a trifle too polysyllabic, has too 
 much of the surface glitter of Latinity. But 
 in the age that produced the styles of De 
 Quincey, Ruskin, and Carlyle, it would be 
 mere folly to find fault because Landor did 
 not write, we will not say after the French 
 fashion, but after the fashion of Swift, at
 
 86 LANBOR. 
 
 his higliest and on his level, the unrivaled 
 master of simjjle English prose. Landor, at 
 his best, is not so picturesque as De Quin- 
 cey, nor so eloquent as Ruskin, nor so in- 
 tense as Carlyle ; but he has more self-pos- 
 session, more serenity, more artistic charm, 
 a wider compass, a more equal harmony, 
 than any of these. 
 
 Landor pleases his fellow-craftsmen, how- 
 ever, not only by this general command of 
 language as a means of expression, but by 
 the perfection of form in his short pieces. 
 Perfection of form is the great feature of 
 classical art ; it is an intellectual virtue, at 
 least in literature, and appeals to the mind. 
 The moderns are lacking in it. Landor's 
 command of form was limited, insufficient 
 for the construction of a drama ; impressive 
 as Count Julian is, it has not this final ex- 
 cellence. Landor's power in this respect is 
 analogous to Herrick's ; it is perfect ' only 
 within narrow bounds ; but it lacks Her- 
 rick's spontaneity. His verses are not the 
 " swallow flights of song ; " he was not a 
 singer. The lyric on Rose Aylmer is en- 
 tirely exceptional, and much of its charm lies 
 in the beauty of the name, the skillful repe- 
 tition, and, we must add, in the memory of
 
 LANDOR. 87 
 
 Lamb's fondness for it. Familiar as it is, it 
 would be unjust not to quote it : — 
 
 " Ah, what avails the sceptred race ! 
 
 Ah, what the form divine ! 
 What every vu'tue, every grace ! 
 
 Kose Aylmer, all were thine. 
 Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes 
 
 May weep, but never see, 
 A night of memories and of sighs 
 
 I consecrate to thee." 
 
 Ordinarily, however, Landor deals with a 
 beautiful image or one fine sentiment. His 
 objectivity, his discontinuity, help him here ; 
 they insure that simplicity and singleness 
 which are necessary for success. The lack 
 of any temptation in his mind to expound 
 and suggest is probably one reason why he 
 rejected the sonnet, certainly the most beau- 
 tiful poetic mould to give shape to such de- 
 tached thoughts and feelings. He scorned 
 the sonnet ; it was too long for him ; he 
 must be even more brief. He would present 
 the object at once, instead of gradually, as 
 the sonnet does ; not unveiling the perfect 
 and naked image until the last word has 
 trembled away. His best work of this kind 
 is in the quatx-ain, which is rather the moral- 
 ist's than the poet's form, — Martial's, not 
 Horace's.
 
 88 LANDOB. 
 
 " I strove with none, for none was worth my strife. 
 Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art ; 
 I warmed both hands before the fire of life, 
 It sinks, and I am ready to depart." 
 
 This is perfect ; but it is perfect speech, not 
 perfect song. When Landor had something 
 to say at more length, when he had a story 
 to tell, he chose the idyl ; and his work in 
 this kind is no less perfect in form than are 
 his quatrains. Indeed, on the idyls his 
 poetic fame will mainly rest. They are very 
 remote from modern life, but the best of 
 them are very beautiful, and in the highest 
 rank of poetry that appeals to the artistic 
 sense. Those who are able still to hold fast 
 to the truth of Greek mythology to the im- 
 agination will not willingly let them die. To 
 read them is like looking at the youths and 
 maidens of an ancient bas-relief. The cul- 
 tivated will never tire of them ; the peo^Dle 
 will never care for them. The limitations 
 of their interest ai'e inherent in their sub- 
 ject and the mode of its presentation ; but 
 these limitations do not lessen their beauty, 
 although tliey make very small the number 
 who appreciate it. 
 
 Landor's influence over his critics is due 
 chiefly to his power as a stylist, and to the
 
 LANDOR. 89 
 
 perfection of form In his shorter poems and 
 his idyls ; but something is also due to the 
 passages which, apart from those mentioned, 
 they commend so unreservedly ; such as the 
 study of incipent insanity in the dialogue be- 
 tween Tiberius and Vipsania, and the scenes 
 from Antony and Octavius where the boy 
 Caesarion is an actor. Not to be conquered 
 by these argues one's self " dull of soul ; " 
 and scattered through the volumes are other 
 passages of only less mastery, especially in 
 the Greek dialogues, which cannot here be 
 particularized. For this reason no author is 
 more served than Landor by a book of se- 
 lections. After all, too, an author should be 
 judged by his best. Nevertheless, when one 
 remembers the extraordinary gifts of Lan- 
 dor, one cannot but regret the defects of 
 nature and judgment that have so seriously 
 interfered with his influence. His work as 
 a whole exhibits a sadder waste of genius 
 than is the case even with Coleridge. There 
 is no reason to suppose that the verdict of 
 the public on his value will be reversed. His 
 failure may well serve as a warning to the 
 artistic school in poetry ; it affords one more 
 of the long list of illustrations of that funda- 
 mental truth in literature, — the truth that a
 
 90 
 
 LANDOE. 
 
 man's work is of service to mankind in pro- 
 portion as, by expressing himself in it, by 
 filling it with his own personality, he fills it 
 with human interest. 
 
 i 
 
 I
 
 CEABBE. 
 
 We have done with Crabbe. His tales 
 have failed to interest us. Burke and his 
 friends, as we all know, held a different 
 opinion from ours ; and their praise is not 
 likely to have been ill founded. The culti- 
 vated taste of Holland House, thirty years 
 later, is also against our decision. Through 
 two generations of markedly different liter- 
 ary temper Crabbe pleased the men best 
 worth pleasing. Indeed, we owe him to 
 Burke's approval ; for when Lord North, 
 Lord Shelburne, and Lord Thurlow had 
 neglected his entreaties for recognition and 
 aid, and had left him to write, pawn, and 
 go hungry, Burke saved him from the debt- 
 or's prison, took him into his friendship, 
 welcomed him to his home, and gave him to 
 literature. 
 
 Yet the verses which won this recognition 
 from Burke, and gained for Crabbe, besides, 
 praise from Johnson and talk with Fox and 
 idle mornings in Reynolds's studio, were 
 
 91
 
 92 CRABBE. 
 
 only his fledgeling flights. It was not until 
 after more than twenty years of silence, 
 spent in the obscurity of a country clergy- 
 man's life, that he showed the richness and 
 abundance of his vein. Then Burke and his 
 friends had given place to those younger 
 men, in whose lives a new age was dawn- 
 ing ; but as warm a welcome awaited Crabbe 
 among them as' he had ever met with in 
 Burke's club. With them he passed his old 
 age, pleased with Byron's praise, and with 
 the friendliness of Moore and Rogers, and 
 with Scott's kindly regard and correspon- 
 dence. They liked to see him, with his beau- 
 tiful white hair, his formal, old-fashioned 
 garb and old-school manners, the last of that 
 long line of poets through whom the Queen 
 Anne taste had tyrannized for a century in 
 English verse, sitting familiarly among them- 
 selves, who were preparing the way for the 
 next generation to ignore the traditions 
 which Burke and Johnson had fixed in his 
 poetic faith. Especially did Sir Walter 
 honor him ; like Fox, he chose Crabbe's 
 poems to be read to him just before he died. 
 Without reckoning the approval of others, 
 what was the strong attraction in Crabbe's 
 work for Scott and Fox ? Their judgment
 
 CRABBE. 93 
 
 was not so worthless that it can be disre- 
 garded with the complacent assurance with 
 which the decisions of Gifford and Jeffrey 
 are set aside ; on the contrary, Scott had 
 such health and Fox such refinement that 
 their judgment ought to raise a doubt whe- 
 ther our generation is not making a mistake 
 and missing pleasure through its neglect of 
 Crabbe. 
 
 Crabbe is a story-teller. He describes the 
 life he saw, — common, homely life, some- 
 times wretched, not infrequently criminal ; 
 the life of the country poor, with occasional 
 light and shadow from the life of the gen- 
 tlefolk above them. He had been born into 
 it, in a village on the Suffolk coast, amid 
 stern and cheerless natural scenes : land- 
 ward, the bramble-overgrown heath encom- 
 passing crowded and mean houses; east- 
 ward, — 
 
 " Stakes and sea-weed withering- on the mud." 
 Here he had passed his boyhood, in the 
 midst of human life equally barren and 
 stricken with the ugliness of poverty, among 
 surly and sordid fishers given to hard labor 
 and rough brawl, — 
 
 " A joyless, wild, amphibious race, 
 With sullen woe displayed in every face," —
 
 94 CEABBE. 
 
 and the sight had been a burden to him. 
 The desire to throw off this twofold oppres- 
 sion of mean nature and humanity must 
 have counted for much in determining him 
 on that long - remembered December day, 
 when, as the bleak twilight came down, 
 darkening the marshy pool on the heath 
 where he stood, he took his resolve to go up 
 to London and seek poetical fame ; and glad 
 at heart he must have been, that morning of 
 early spring, when he left all this ugliness 
 behind him, ignorant of the struggle and dis- 
 tress he was to meet where he was going. 
 
 In that early poem which Johnson praised 
 Crabbe described this village life with the 
 vigor of a youth who had escaped out of its 
 dreary imprisonment, and without a touch of 
 that tenderness for early associations which 
 softened Goldsmith's retrospect of the scenes 
 of his early days. Crabbe told of exhaust- 
 ing labor leading on to prematurely useless 
 and neglected age ; of storms sweeping away 
 the shelter of the poor ; of smugglers, poach- 
 ers, wreckers, tavern debauchery, and, worst 
 of all, the poor-house — a terrible picture, 
 perhaps the best known of all his drawing 
 — with its deserted inmates cut off from all 
 human care except that of the heedless phy-
 
 CRABBE. 95 
 
 sician and the heartless parson ; a miserable 
 tale, but too much of it only what his own 
 eyes had seen. We do not know the con- 
 tents of those piles of manuscripts which he 
 wrote during his twenty years of silence, 
 and — not much to the world's loss, some 
 think — made bonfires of to amuse his chil- 
 dren ; but his first poem after that long in- 
 terval was the same story, the experience of 
 those whose names appeared in the year's 
 parish register of births, marriages, and 
 deaths, and was a sorrowful survey of seduc- 
 tion, desertion, crime, discontent, and folly. 
 In his later tales he dealt less in unrelieved 
 gloom and bitter misery, and at times made 
 a trial at humor. There are glimpses of plea- 
 sant English life and character, but these 
 are only glimpses; the ground of his painting 
 is shadow, — the shadow that rested on the 
 life of the English poor in his generation. 
 
 Where else would one turn for an ade- 
 quate description of that life, or gain so di- 
 rect an insight into the social sources and 
 conditions of the Methodist revival, or into 
 the motives and convictions of reformers 
 like Mary WoUstonecraft ? Where would 
 one obtain so keen a sense of the vast change 
 which has taken place in the conditions of
 
 96 CRABBE. 
 
 humble liuraan life within this century ? 
 Mr. Leslie Stephen, in that essay which is 
 so good-humored but so unsuccessful an at- 
 tempt to appreciate Crabbe, mentions the 
 few illustrations in modern literature of the 
 life Crabbe described ; it is seen in Char- 
 lotte Bronte's Yorkshiremen, and George 
 Eliot's millers, and in a few other charac- 
 ters, " but," he says, " to get a realistic pic- 
 ture of country life as Crabbe saw it, we 
 must go back to Squire Western, or to some 
 of the roughly-hewn masses of flesh who 
 sat to Hogarth," The setting of Crabbe's 
 tales has this special historic interest. The 
 schools, houses, books, habits, occupations, 
 and all the external characteristics of the 
 tales belong to the time : the press-gang 
 comes to carry off the lover just before his 
 wedding-day, and leaves the bride to nurse 
 an unfathered child, to receive the courtship 
 of a canting and carnal preacher, and to find 
 a refuge from him, and from the father who 
 favors him, in suicide ; orphan boys are 
 bound over to brutal task-masters ; pictures 
 of the sects (from the pen of a respectable 
 clergyman of the Established Church, it is 
 true) recall the beginnings of Methodism 
 with a vividness only to be equaled by the
 
 CBABBE. 97 
 
 books and pamphlets of tlie early converts' 
 own writing. This historic value of the 
 tales, however, great as it is to the student 
 of manners, is secondary to their poetic 
 value, which lies in the sentiment, feeling, 
 and pathos with which the experience of life 
 embodied in them, the workings of simple 
 human nature, in however debased surround- 
 ings, is set forth. It is an experience which 
 results usually from the interplay of low and 
 selfish motives, and of ignoble or weak pas- 
 sions ; it is, too often, the course of brutal 
 appetite, thoughtless or heartless folly, ava- 
 rice, sensuality, and vice, relieved too seldom 
 by amiable character, sympathy, charity, 
 self-sacrifice, or even by the charm of nat- 
 ural beauty. Yet if all the seventy tales 
 be taken into account, they contain nearly 
 all varieties of character and circumstance 
 among the country poor ; and, though the 
 darker side may seem to be more frequently 
 insisted upon, it is because the nature of his 
 subject made it necessary, because he let his 
 light, as Moore said, — 
 
 " Through life's low, dark interior fall, 
 Opening the whole, severely bright," 
 
 rather than because he had any lack of 
 cheerfulness of temper.
 
 98 CRABBE. 
 
 Crabbe does not, in a true sense, give 
 expression to tbe life of tbe poor ; be merely 
 narrates it. Here and tbere, tbrougbout tbe 
 poems, are episodes written out of bis own 
 life ; but usually be is concerned witb tbe 
 experience of otlier men, wbicli he bad ob- 
 served, ratber tban witb what bis own beart 
 bad felt. A description of life is of course 
 far inferior to an utterance of it, such as 
 was given to us by Burns, wbo dealt with 
 tbe life of tbe poor so much more power- 
 fully than Crabbe ; and a realistic descrip- 
 tion has less poetic value tban an imaginative 
 one, such as was given to us by Wordsworth 
 at bis best. Crabbe's description is perhaps 
 the most nakedly realistic of any in English 
 poetry ; but it is an uncommonly good one. 
 Realism has a narrow compass, and Crabbe's 
 powers were confined strictly within it ; but 
 he had the best virtues of a realist. His 
 physical vision — his sight of what presents 
 itself to tbe eye — was almost perfect ; he 
 saw every object, and saw it as it was. Per- 
 haps the minuteness with which he saw was 
 not altogether an advantage, for he does not 
 seem to have taken in the landscape as a 
 whole, but only as a mosaic of separate ob- 
 jects. He never gives general effects of
 
 CRABBE. 99 
 
 beauty or grandeur ; indeed, he seldom saw 
 the beauty of a single object ; he did little 
 more than catalogue the things before him, 
 and employ in writing poetry the same fac- 
 ulty in the same way as in pursuing his fa- 
 vorite studies of botany and entomology. 
 Yet, with these limitations, what realist in 
 painting could exceed in truthfulness and 
 carefulness of detail this picture of a fall 
 morning ? — 
 
 ' ' It was a fair and mild autumnal sky, 
 
 And earth's ripe treasures met th' admiring eye ; 
 The -wet and heavy grass v/here feet had strayed, 
 Not yet erect, the wanderer's way betrayed ; 
 Showers of the night had swelled the deep'ning rill, 
 The morning breeze had urged the quick' ning mill ; 
 Long yellow leaves, from osiers strewed around, 
 Choked the small stream and hushed the feeble sound." 
 
 Or this sketch of light in a decayed ware- 
 house turned into a tenement for the poor? — 
 
 ' ' That window view ! oiled paper and old glass 
 Stain the strong rays, which, though impeded, pass. 
 And give a dusty warmth to that huge room, 
 The conquered sunshine's melancholy gloom ; 
 When all those western rays, without so bright, 
 Within become a ghastly glimmering light, 
 As pale and faint upon the floor they fall, 
 Or feebly gleam on the opposing wall." 
 
 Nor is this carefulness of detail a trick, such 
 as is sometimes employed, to give the ap-
 
 100 CBABBE. 
 
 pearance of reality to unreal human life. 
 Crabbe's mental vision, his sight into the 
 workings of the passions and the feelings, 
 although not so perfect as his physical vis- 
 ion, was yet at its best very keen and clear ; 
 the sentiments, moods, reflections, and ac- 
 tions of his characters are seldom contrary 
 to nature. It would be difficult to show a 
 finer delineation of its kind than his descrip- 
 tion of the meeting of two long-parted broth- 
 ers. As Richard ajiproaches his brother's 
 hall, he reflects, — 
 
 " 'How shall I now my unknown way explore, — 
 He proud and rich, I very proud and poor ? 
 Perhaps my friend a dubious speech mistook. 
 And George may meet me with a stranger's look. 
 How stands the case ? My brother's friend and mine 
 Met at an inn, and set them down to dine ; 
 When, having settled all their own affairs, 
 And kindly canvassed such as were not theirs, 
 Just as my friend was going to retire, 
 
 " Stay ! you will see the brother of our squire," 
 Said his companion ; " be his friend, and tell , 
 
 The captain that his brother loves him well. 
 And when he has no better thing in view 
 Will be rejoiced to see him. Now, adieu ! " 
 
 " 'Well, here I am ; and, brother, take you heed, 
 I am not come to flatter you and feed. 
 You shall no soother, fawner, hearer, find ; 
 I will not brush your coat, nor smooth your mind ; 
 I will not hear your tales the whole day long,
 
 CBABBE. 101 
 
 Nor swear you' re right, if I believe you wrong ; 
 
 I will not earn my dinner when I dine 
 
 By taking all your sentiments for mine ; 
 
 Nor watch the guiding motions of your eye 
 
 Before I venture question or reply. 
 
 Yet, son of that dear mother could I meet — 
 
 But lo ! the mansion, — 't is a fine old seat ! ' 
 
 " The brothers met, with both too much at heart 
 
 To be observant of each other's part. 
 ' Brother, I 'm glad ! ' was all that George could say, 
 Then stretched his hand, and turned his head away ; 
 Richard, meantime, made some attempt to speak, 
 Strong in his purpose, in his trial weak. 
 At length, affection, like a risen tide, 
 Stood still, and then seemed slowly to subside ; 
 Each on the other's looks had power to dwell, 
 And brother brother greeted passing well.' ' 
 
 These qualities of fine, true physical and 
 mental vision are the essential qualities for 
 valuable realistic work ; if there be room 
 for regret in Crabbe's share of them, it is 
 because their range is contracted. The lim- 
 itations of his j)hysical vision have been 
 mentioned ; in respect to his mental vision 
 Crabbe saw only a few and comparatively 
 simple operations of human nature^ — the 
 workings of country-bred minds, not finely 
 or comjilexly organized, but slow-motioned, 
 and perplexed, if perplexed at all, not from 
 the difficulty of the problem, but from their 
 own duUuess. Yet within these limits his
 
 102 CRABBE. 
 
 characters are often pathetic, sometimes 
 tragic, or even terrible, in their energy of 
 evil passion or remorse. 
 
 One other quality, without which clear 
 mental and physical vision would be inef- 
 fective, is essential to realism like Crabbe's, 
 — transparency, the quality by virtue of 
 which life is seen through the text plainly 
 and without distortion ; and this is the qual- 
 ity which Crabbe possessed in most perfec- 
 tion. He not only saw the object as it was ; 
 he presented it as it was. He neither added 
 nor took away ; he did not unconsciously 
 darken or heighten color, soften or harden 
 line. Whatever was before his mind — the 
 conversation of a gossip, the brutality of a 
 ruffian, the cant of a convert — he repro- 
 duced truthfully ; whatever was the charac- 
 ter of his story, mean or tragic, trivial or 
 pathetic, he did not modify it. There was 
 no veil of fancy, no glamour of amiable de- 
 ception or dimness of charitable tears, to ob- 
 scure his view : if he found nudity and dirt, 
 they reappeared in his work nudity and dirt 
 still; if he found courage and patience, he 
 dealt the same even-handed justice. His 
 distinction is that he told a true story. 
 
 It was, perhaps, because he was thus able
 
 CRABBE. 103 
 
 to present accurately and faithfully the hu- 
 man life which he saw so clearly that he won 
 such admiration from Scott ; for Scott had 
 the welcome of genius for any new glimpse 
 of humanity, and he knew how rare, and 
 consequently how valuable, is the gift of 
 simple and direct narration of what one sees. 
 Fox had great sensibility and tenderness of 
 heart ; and Crabbe presented the lot of the 
 poor so vividly, so lucidly, so immediately, 
 that he stirred in Fox the same feelings with 
 which a better poet would have so charged 
 his verses that natures not so finely endowed 
 as Fox would have been compelled to feel 
 them too. Scott and Fox knew what a val- 
 uable acquisition this realistic sketch of hum- 
 ble life in their generation was, so faithful, 
 minute, and trustworthy ; they felt that 
 their experience was enlarged, that real hu- 
 manity had been brought home to them, and 
 in the sway of those emotions, which Crabbe 
 did not infuse into his work, but which his 
 work quickens in sympathetic hearts, they 
 could forgive him his tediousness, his fre- 
 quent commonplace, his not unusual absurd- 
 ity of phrase, his low level of flight with its 
 occasional feebleness of win^. 
 
 In their minds, too, his style must have
 
 104 CRAB BE. 
 
 had more influence than we are apt to think, 
 — the style of the great school which died 
 with him, the form and versification which 
 they had been taught to believe almost es- 
 sential to the best poetry, and from a tradi- 
 tional respect for which they could hardly 
 free their minds as easily as ourselves. 
 Crabbe used the old heroic rhymed couplet, 
 that simplest form of English verse music, 
 which could rise, nevertheless, to the almost 
 lyric loftiness of the last lines of the Dun- 
 ciad ; so supjale and flexible ; made for easy 
 simile and compact metaphor ; lending itself 
 so perfectly to the sudden flash of wit or 
 turn of humor ; the natural shell of an epi- 
 gram ; compelling the poet to practice all 
 the virtues of brevity ; checking the wan- 
 dering fancy, and repressing the secondary 
 thought ; requiring in a masterly use of it 
 the employment of more mental powers than 
 any other metrical form ; despised and, neg- 
 lected now because the literature which is 
 embodied in it is despised and neglected, yet 
 the best metrical form which intelligence, as 
 distinct from poetical feeling, can employ. 
 Crabbe did not handle it in any masterful 
 way ; he was careless, and sometimes slip- 
 shod ; but when he chose he could employ it
 
 CBABBE. 105 
 
 well, and should have credit for it. To take 
 one more example from his poems, how ex- 
 cellently he uses it in this passage ! — 
 
 " Where is that virtue which the generous boy 
 Felt, and resolved that nothing should destroy; 
 He who with noble indignation glowed 
 When vice had triumph ; who his tear bestowed 
 . On injured merit ? He who would possess 
 Power, but to aid the children of distress ! 
 Who has such joy in generous actions shown. 
 And so sincere they might be called his own ; 
 Knight, hero, patriot, martyr ! on whose tongue 
 And potent arm a nation's welfare hung, — 
 Where now this virtue's fervor, spirit, zeal ? 
 Who felt so warmly, has he ceased to feel ? 
 Or are these feelings varied ? Has the knight, 
 Virtue's own champion, now refused to fight ? 
 Is the deliverer turned th' oppressor now ? 
 Has the reformer dropt the dangerous vow ? 
 Or has the patriot's bosom lost its heat, 
 And forced him, shivering, to a snug retreat ? 
 Is such the grievous lapse of human pride ! 
 Is such the victory of the worth untried I ' ' 
 
 Scott felt an attraction in such poetic form 
 which we have perhaps ceased to feel ; and 
 Fox, had he lived to read it, would equally 
 have acknowledged its power. 
 
 But Wordsworth said Crabbe was unpo- 
 etical ; he condemned him for " his unpoet- 
 ical mode of considering human nature and 
 society ; " and, after all, the world has agreed 
 with Wordsworth, and disagreed with Scott
 
 106 CRABBE. 
 
 and Fox. Wordsworth told Scott an anec- 
 dote in illustration of his meaning. Sir 
 George Beaumont, sitting with himself and 
 Crabbe one day, blew out the candle which 
 he had used in sealing a letter. Sir George 
 and Wordsworth, with proper taste, sat 
 watching the smoke rise from the wick in 
 beautiful curves ; but Crabbe seeing — or 
 rather smelling — the object, and not seeing 
 the beauty of it, put on the extinguisher. 
 Therefore, said Wordsworth, Crabbe is un- 
 poetical, — as fine a bit of assthetic priggish- 
 ness as is often met with. Scott's opinion 
 was not much affected by the anecdote, and 
 Wordsworth was on the wrong track. It 
 is true, however, that Crabbe was unpoet- 
 ical in Wordsworth's sense. Crabbe had no 
 imaginative vision, — no such vision as is 
 shown in that stormy landscape of Shelley's, 
 in the opening of The Revolt of Islam, which 
 lacks the truth of actuality, but possesses 
 the higher imaginative truth, like Turner's 
 painting, or that shown in that other storm 
 in Pippa Passes. Crabbe saw sword-grass 
 and saltwort and fen, but he had no secret 
 of the imagination by which he could min- 
 gle them into harmonious beauty ; there is 
 loveliness in a salt marsh, but Crabbe could
 
 CRABBE. 107 
 
 not present it, nor even see it for himself. 
 As in landscape so in life. Goldsmith was 
 untrue to the actual Auburn, but he was 
 faithful to a far more precious truth, the 
 truth of remembered childhood, and he re- 
 vealed with the utmost beauty the effect of 
 the subtlest working of the spirit of man on 
 practical fact ; it is his fidelity to this psy- 
 chological and spiritual truth which makes 
 Auburn the " loveliest village of the plain." 
 Crabbe exhibited nothing of this imagina- 
 tive transformation of the familiar and the 
 commonplace, perhaps saw nothing of it ; he 
 described the fishing village of Aldborough 
 as any one with good powers of perception, 
 who took the trouble, might see it. Through 
 these defects of his powers he loses in poetic 
 value ; his poetry is, as he called it, poetry 
 without an atmosphere ; it is a reflection, 
 almost mirror-like, of plain fact. 
 
 Men go to poetry too often with a pre- 
 conceived notion of what the poet ought to 
 give, instead of with open minds for what- 
 ever he has to give. Too much is not to be 
 expected from Crabbe. He was only a sim- 
 ple country clergyman, half educated, with 
 no burning ideals, no reveries, no passion- 
 ate dreams; his mind did not rise out of
 
 108 CBABBE. 
 
 the capabilities and virtues of respectability. 
 His life was as little poetical, in Words- 
 worth's sense, as his poetry. Yet his gift 
 was not an empty one. Moore, Scott, and 
 Byron were story-tellers who were poetical, 
 in Wordsworth's sense ; but is Crabbe's true 
 description of humble lifeless valuable than 
 Scott's romantic tradition, or Moore's melt- 
 ing, sensuous Oriental dream, or Byron's sen- 
 timental, falsely-heroic adventure ? Has it 
 not another value, because there is more of 
 the human heart in it ; because it contains 
 actual suffering and joy of fellow-men ; be- 
 cause it is humanity, and calls for hospitality 
 in our sympathies and charities ? Unpoet- 
 ical ? Yes ; but it is something to have 
 real life brought home to our tears and 
 laughter, although it be presented barely, 
 and the poet has trusted to the rightness 
 and tenderness of our hearts for those feel- 
 ings the absence of which in his verse led 
 Wordsworth to call these tales unpoetical. 
 But it is only when Crabbe is at his best 
 that his verse has this extraordinary power. 
 
 I
 
 CHARLES LAMB; OR ELIA. 
 
 Charles La]vib really came into this 
 world of man under the name of Elia ; as 
 a "son of memory," so was he christened, 
 and by it he is known, for it is the name, 
 not of his creature-life, but of his better 
 part. His personality finds expression in 
 it, freed from the sad or mean accidents of 
 his mortal career ; and it recalls only what 
 in him was touched with the light and 
 shadow of an inconstant genius or pene- 
 trated with the simplicity of the heart, and 
 yet leaves room for that eccentricity, that 
 strangeness heightened to the point of 
 quaintness, which is an element in the 
 attractiveness of character not less than, 
 as Bacon declared, in beautiful things. 
 Elia is a name of the imagination ; but it 
 was borne by an old acquaintance, an Italian 
 who was a fellow-clerk at the South-Sea 
 House when Lamb was a boy there, thirty 
 years before he sat down to write these 
 Essays; and, as a piece of pleasantrj^ he 
 borrowed his friend's true face to mask his 
 
 109
 
 110 CHARLES LAMB; OB ELI A. 
 
 own. He went, he tells us, to see the 
 Elia of flesh and blood, and laugh over the 
 liberty he had taken, but found the Italian 
 dead; and the incident — the playfulness 
 of the odd plagiarism ending unexpectedly 
 in a solemn moment, a pathetic close — 
 is so in character with the moods of these 
 pages, that even their maker could not 
 have invented better what life gave into 
 his hands. The name had devolved upon 
 him now, he said; he had, as it were, 
 unknowingly adopted a shade, and it was 
 to go about with him thenceforth, and 
 watch at his grave after he too should 
 depart. For two years he used the ruse 
 of this ghost of a name, but the uncanni- 
 ness of it was his own secret ; to the reader 
 of the London Magazine^ in which he pub- 
 lished, Elia was — what it is to us — a 
 name of the eternal humorist in life's 
 various crowd. , 
 
 The form which Lamb chose for himself, 
 the familiar essay as it had been developed 
 in England, was as well fitted to him as 
 his natural voice. He had begun as a 
 poet, but he lacked the condensation, the 
 directness and singleness of intellectual 
 aim, the power of control, which are es-
 
 CHARLES LAMB; OR ELIA. Ill 
 
 sential to the poet; he was an observer of 
 the world without, a rambler in all things, 
 and tended inevitably to that dissipation 
 of the eye among the multitude of men 
 and things, which ends in prose ; even as 
 a humorist he loses himself in his impres- 
 sions, and becomes reportorial. But he 
 had an eye for oddities, and with it went 
 the saving grace that he loved the absurd 
 in man. The spirit of caricature was not 
 in him. He lived in a nation marked by 
 freedom of caprice, and in its chief city; 
 but it is seldom that he chooses his sub- 
 ject from among those whose eccentricity 
 is self-assertive; the absurdities that 
 amuse him are those of nature's making, 
 — "the fool" whom he loves; and the 
 peculiarities that arrest him are oftenest 
 those which result from the misfortunes, 
 the rubs and dents, all the rude buffeting 
 of life leaving its marks on the form and 
 mind of those who are submitted to its 
 rule. How frequently his characters are 
 the broken "hulks" of the voyage! in 
 what author is old age so dreary, or the 
 boon companion so shabby! for Lamb's 
 humor seldom ends in the laughable, but 
 is a plea for toleration, sympathy, forgive-
 
 112 CHARLES LAMB; OB ELIA. 
 
 ness, — the old phrase of the prayer-book, 
 miserable sinners are we all^ but, princi- 
 pally, small sinners in small things. I 
 cannot free myself from the feeling that, 
 as a humorist. Lamb is the father-confessor 
 of venial offences, tender to waifs and 
 cripples, the refuge of the victims of mean 
 misery. It is as if the Good Samaritan 
 should turn humorist. Yet he leaves an 
 impression that is ill-rendered by such a 
 description, because he blends so many 
 strands of human nature with this main 
 thread. 
 
 The charm of these Essays is personal, 
 and it is made a mastering one by the 
 autobiography they contain. Lamb was 
 not less an egotist than a humorist, and 
 in the familiar essay egotism has unim- 
 peded way. He discloses his tastes and 
 habits, and disguises not those things in 
 which he differs from conventional man; 
 he is proud of them, and goes his own 
 pace. There is infinite amusement in a 
 certain kind of self-gossip, seen to its 
 perfection in Pepys; and though Lamb's 
 likings in meat and drink are not to be 
 confounded with things of the Pepysian 
 order, yet the tone is sometimes not to be
 
 CHARLES LAMB; OR ELIA. 113 
 
 discriminated from such "pure idleness." 
 The sinister reflection of how much social 
 hypocrisy saves from, of what concessions 
 of individual preference or even convic- 
 tion are made to the company, reacts in 
 us and heightens the enjoyment when an 
 egotist stands to his egotism and is un- 
 abashed though pilloried in men's minds. 
 Frankness is always engaging, and Lamb 
 wins us by his confidingness. He gives 
 more than this sense of intimacy ; he does 
 really surrender himself, and all his rela- 
 tives besides, into our hands. At the time 
 he had the grace to conceal, by appear- 
 ances, the characters he drew ; but the veil 
 was thin, and nothing is now left of it. 
 His strong domestic feeling, his love for 
 the things of home, enhance the humanity 
 of the portrayal, and each picture is seen 
 beyond the contrasting foreground of " the 
 lonely hearth" where he sits writing; 
 "the old familiar faces" are illumined 
 there, in the later years, with as tender a 
 melancholy as in the poem of his youth. 
 Scenes from his own life make up no small 
 portion of what is substantial in his book ; 
 and the humor is always softened by the 
 atmosphere of mingled affection and sen-
 
 114 CHARLES LAMB; OR ELIA. 
 
 timent in which it woiks. His confessions 
 of childhood are especially touching. No 
 one has revealed the poignancy of chil- 
 dren's sufferings, their helplessness, their 
 solitariness, their hopelessness, the physi- 
 cal nearness of all grief at that age, with a 
 pen so crying out shame. But, as in his 
 description of middle and elderly life 
 there is a predominant strain of misery and 
 triviality, a never-absent pathos, so in 
 what he draws from childhood, where are 
 the cheerfulness, the innocence, the 
 gayety, the wild and thoughtless happi- 
 ness? They were not in his life. Even 
 his child-angel is a sorrowful conception. 
 When he was "at Christ's " — was it such 
 a child's hell? and was that all he knew 
 of chiildhood ? One cannot help such re- 
 flections ; and they underlie, in truth, the 
 melancholy that attended him and the sen- 
 timent that sprang up in him, both of 
 which preserve these Essays equally with 
 their humor. 
 
 Sentiment stood for him, perhaps, in the 
 place of love in his life. The romance, 
 which now is the memory of "Alice 
 
 W ," certainly was cherished, in the 
 
 sphere of sentiment, by him life-long; and
 
 CHARLES LAMS; OR ELI A. 115 
 
 in his musings in imagination upon what 
 might have been, there is much of that 
 mournful fancy, that affection for things 
 unrealized, which betray heart-hunger; 
 even in his attachment to old places and 
 accustomed ways, and to what he called 
 " antiquity " (of which in his own mind 
 he and his belongings were part and par- 
 cel), there is something of the wandering 
 of the else-unsupported vine. His is the 
 sentiment of a melancholy, a suppressed, 
 down-borne, and retarded nature, cabined, 
 cribbed, confined. It was almost his sole 
 good fortune that literature offered him a 
 resource from the deprivations of his life, 
 and gave him freedom of thought and feel- 
 ing in the ideal world; there he found 
 objects worth his constancy, and being 
 gifted with sensibility and discernment, 
 he became a discoverer in " the realms of 
 gold," an antiquarian whose prizes were 
 lyrics and sonnets and snatches of song, 
 
 " And beauty making beautiful old rhyme ; " 
 
 and he forsook the modern days to delight 
 himself with the curious felicity of the 
 Arcadia and Sir Thomas Browne, with 
 single great scenes of the Elizabethans,
 
 116 CHARLES LAMB; OR ELI A. 
 
 and with the breath of Marvell's garden. 
 He escaped into the golden age, into " an- 
 tiquity," — for he meant by that favorite 
 phrase little that was older than Sackville. 
 It is easy to overestimate the service of 
 Lamb and his friends in the revival of the 
 older English literature. It was not begun 
 by them. Throughout the eighteenth cen- 
 tury the rill of Parnassus had been flowing, 
 and now the stream had become broad. 
 Lamb's group was borne on a deeper com- 
 mon current. But he, with Coleridge, 
 Hazlitt, Hunt, and others of the time were 
 agents in the diffusion of the new taste, 
 and their critical appreciation and au- 
 thority gave them a place as supporters 
 of the innovation, sufficient to define a 
 historical moment. Lamb is not to be 
 regarded as the author of the revival of 
 which he was rather a part. He felt it 
 more than he directed it. Leadership^ was 
 not in his bundle of qualities. He re- 
 sponded, however, to the influences of the 
 re-discovered literature with marvelously 
 perfect sympathy. The more recondite 
 and esoteric portions of it were most to 
 his taste. The humorist in him answered 
 the most exigent demands of the occasion ;
 
 CHARLES LAMB; OR ELIA. 117 
 
 and oddities of language and thought, 
 conceits, quaintnesses, even conscious af- 
 fectations, attracted him, just as the same 
 qualities in living human nature called 
 forth his motley-seeking wits. His origi- 
 nality, or native eccentricity, felt some- 
 thing kindred to itself in the old writers ; 
 their queernesses, worn like nature, kept 
 his own in countenance ; their affectations 
 were a model on which his innate whimsi- 
 cality could frame itself. And, possibly, 
 more than all (yet excepting the pure 
 charm of poetry), their sentiment, linger- 
 ing on from days of chivalry and the alle- 
 gorical in literature, fed a fundamental 
 need of the emotional nature in such a life 
 as Lamb's, perforce, was. He became an 
 imitator of antiquated style, a mannerist 
 after his favorites, given to artifice and 
 fantasy as a literary method, and yet he 
 remained himself. The disease of lan- 
 guage does not penetrate to the thought. 
 
 Thus there were mingled in Lamb liter- 
 ary artifice with truth to nature, egotism 
 with humanity, humor with sentiment, — 
 both dashed by something melancholy; 
 and one spark of genius, fusing this blend, 
 has made the book of Elia a treasure to
 
 118 CHARLES LAMB; OR ELIA. 
 
 ra?cnj. It is not a great book, but it is 
 uncommonly interesting. It is human 
 from cover to cover. The subjects may be 
 trivial, the company "low," the incidents 
 farcical; but of such is the kingdom of this 
 world, — at least it was so in London then. 
 Lamb was a good observer; and, as in the 
 sketches of the earlier essayists of Queen 
 Anne literary historians point out the 
 besrinninors of the social novel of the next 
 generation in that century, may not one 
 find a foregleam of Dickens in these pages, 
 of the lot of children, and the look of lives 
 grown threadbare, and the virtues hidden 
 in commonplace people? There is, no 
 doubt, the trace of Smollett; but in addi- 
 tion is there not the spirit of humanity 
 which took possession of our fiction and 
 subdued it to democracy? The exaggera- 
 tion, both of humor and of sentiment, in 
 Dickens, the master of the craft, Lamb 
 was free from; but the curious tracer of 
 literary moods in the century would hardly 
 hesitate to include Lamb in the succession. 
 On other sides Lamb faced the past; but 
 here was his one window on the times he 
 lived in, or else he must be set down as 
 one of those "sports" of the intellect
 
 CHARLES LAMB; OR ELIA. 119 
 
 which have no relation to their generation. 
 In description and in character-drawing 
 he was, of course, as simply personal as in 
 his criticism. He might have smiled or 
 scoffed at the idea that he was a forerunner 
 in fiction as that he was a leader in the 
 romantic movement. He cared nought for 
 such things, as little as for science or 
 music. He worked as an individual only, 
 and told his recollections or described his 
 friends and acquaintances just as he read 
 his folios, because he pleased himself in 
 doing it. But it is hard for a writer, 
 however idiosyncratic, not to be a link 
 between the days. The taste that classes 
 him, in his work as a humorist, is his love 
 of Hogarth, whom he appreciated more in- 
 telligently and full}^ perhaps, than any 
 one between Fielding and Thackeray. 
 When it is objected that the quality of 
 ordinary life as he presents it is "seami- 
 ness," we should recall in what company 
 he exhibits it; and if his humor does not 
 always hide the deformity and avoid the 
 pain of the spectacle, our generation is 
 probably more acutely aware of these 
 things. 
 
 The human interest in the Essays, how-
 
 120 CHAELES LAMB; OR ELIA. 
 
 ever, is not confined to what Lamb saw of 
 the absurd and grotesque, the cruel and 
 pathetic, in otlier lives. He is himself his 
 best character, and best drawn. He was 
 extraordinary self-conscious, and the pages 
 yield little that he did not mean to be told. 
 One must go to the silent part of his biog- 
 raphy to obtain that sobering correction of 
 his whimsies and failings, that knowledge 
 of his manliness in meeting the necessities 
 of his situation, that sense of honesty, in- 
 dustry, and generosity, which he kept out 
 of his books. The side that most men 
 turn to the world he concealed, and he 
 showed that which is commonly kept 
 secret. He had been a poet in youth, and 
 he never lost the habit of wearing his heart 
 upon his sleeve. He was never as a poet 
 to get beyond sentiment, which in a ro- 
 mantic age is but a little way; and in 
 degenerating into prose (as he thought it) 
 he gave no other sign of poetic endowment 
 than this of sentiment that he could not 
 surrender; but to what a length he carried 
 it without exceeding the bounds of true 
 feeling! Sentiment, like humor, needs a 
 delicate craft; but he, though not so pene- 
 trating, was as sure of hand as Burns.
 
 CHARLES LAMB; OR ELIA. 121 
 
 Even under the temptation of an antique 
 style, he does not err: with affectation 
 commanding every turn and cadence, his 
 feeling goes true ; and the heart answers 
 to it through all the gamut, playful, regret- 
 ful, melancholy, wailing. The word is 
 not too strong; turn to The Dream-Chil- 
 dren, — it is the tragedy of sentiment. 
 Other moods too he revealed, and espe- 
 cially the melancholy ground of his nature. 
 He disclaimed the fierce earnestness, the 
 bitter experience, the hopeless despond- 
 ency of The Confessions of a Drunkard, 
 nor should one charge him with the bur- 
 den of so dark a tale ; but that there are 
 elements of autobiography in it, of things 
 foreseen if not experienced, — a vision of 
 the road to its end, — is, unhappily, too 
 plain a matter. I refer to it, not to re- 
 proach or extenuate, but as one sign of 
 several which indicate that, like all natures 
 lacking in the principle of reason and con- 
 trol. Lamb was subject to spells of peni- 
 tence, of bewildered appeal, which were at 
 the roots of that insistent melancholy, and 
 help to explain why, when it comes upon 
 the page, it is never imaginative, but 
 always real.
 
 122 CHARLES LAMB; OR ELIA. 
 
 Yet Lamb, though always, I think, a 
 pathetic figure in men's memories, does 
 not in these Essays give such an impres- 
 sion except at moments, just as he affects 
 us only at intervals with the dreariness of 
 the human life he describes. One reason 
 is that his personality is diffused in vary- 
 ing essays, and is given completely in 
 none; and besides, his reputation as a wit, 
 and what we know of his suppers, and the 
 whole social side of the man, blend with 
 the mode of address, the familiarity, the 
 discursive manner, the frequent whim, 
 the anecdotage, the multifarious interest 
 of the whole. The Essays are pleasant to 
 read, and winning; the predominant, and 
 at first almost engrossing impression is of 
 the companionableness of the writer, — he 
 is excellent company. The style, too, is 
 fitted to secure its effects. We know that 
 he wrote them with great care, and some- 
 times with difficulty; and if the heart of 
 Lamb is always close at hand in the page, 
 his mind is there too. In some of the crit- 
 ical parts especially, there is that kind of 
 reflection which gives substance to a book 
 otherwise meant simply for entertainment. 
 Tlie dramatic sketches also lighten the
 
 CHARLES LAMB; OR ELIA. 123 
 
 whole effect by their apparent imperso- 
 nality. It is only when the more famous 
 papers are thought of by themselves, and 
 those most autobiographical in matter, that 
 Lamb's humor and sentiment, his egotism 
 and humanity, his literary artifice in all, 
 and the narrow limits within which these 
 had their field, become so prominent as to 
 seem to constitute the book as well as the 
 man. These qualities have established 
 the Essays in literature, and their author, 
 Elia, in the affections of kind hearts.
 
 THE POETRY OF AUBREY DE 
 VERE. 
 
 The qualities of Aubrey de Vere's 
 poetry are not far to seek. Lyrical in 
 verse, strong in style, mainly historical in 
 theme, heroic or spiritual in substance, 
 above all placid, it stirs and tranquilizes 
 the soul in the presence of lovely scenes, 
 high actions, and those 
 
 *' Great ideas that man was born to learn ; " 
 
 and its outlook is upon the field of the soul 
 regenerate, where suffering is remembered 
 only through its purification, blessed in 
 issues of sweetness, dignity, and peace. 
 It takes wide range, but is predominantly 
 either Bardic or Christian. The sym- 
 pathy of the poet with the ancient Irish 
 spirit must have been fed with patriotic 
 fervor, akin to renewed inspiration, to 
 permit him to render the old lays of his 
 country with such fidelity to their native 
 genius. Cuchullain once more becomes 
 credible to fancy, — the imagination of a 
 
 124
 
 POETRY OF AUBREY BE VERE. 125 
 
 childhood world; and the songs of Oiseen 
 and Ethell strike with a music as of anvils. 
 The versions of the three monuments of 
 old Irish story — the Sorrows of Song 
 — are our best. The English lines have 
 the definiteness and precision that belong 
 to primitive narrative ; and yet each tale 
 is involved in that atmosphere of "the 
 shore of old romance," of the marvelous, 
 the picturesque, the childlike, which ap- 
 peals to our eyes like the distances of 
 spring — the haze of time lying along the 
 early world. In each of the three mythic 
 poems there are pictures of novel and 
 strange beauty: the boy, Cuchullain, rid- 
 ing laughing home in his car after the 
 deeds of his knighting-day, with the 
 leashed wide-winged birds flying over 
 him, the six leashed stags following the 
 chariot captive, the bandits' heads upon 
 its front; or, the lovers, Naisi and Deir- 
 dr^, hand in hand on the foot-bridge pour- 
 ing forth the lay that hemmed them with 
 the clansmen of Usnach; or, King Lir, 
 "with under-sliding arms," by the bed of 
 the gold- woven bridal veil, lifting the 
 children from its dawn-touched glittering 
 tissue to "the first light from the sky."
 
 126 POETRY OF AUBREY BE VERE. 
 
 These are such pictures as Burne-Jones is 
 too often thought to have invented. 
 
 Of all, Cuchullain is the noblest figure 
 in this old Irish verse; and the poem 
 which relates his deeds — with its epi- 
 sodic tales of his youth, the background 
 of his island-boyhood with the friend he 
 was doomed to slay, and the long duel 
 between them which closes in his lament 
 over the dead man he loved and his retire- 
 ment to the forest — is so inwrought with 
 bravery, pathos, and emotional beauty as 
 to give it the first place, while the hero's 
 Achillean return to the host places it 
 among true epics. The second of the 
 three Sorrows — The Sons of Usnach 
 — is characterized by a strange proces- 
 sional beauty, as of a pageant pilgriming, 
 and by a clear spirit of joyf ulness in the 
 midst of the moving cloud of fate, like 
 "the tempest's heart of calm." But the 
 last — The Children of Lir — touches 
 the heart most deeply. The idea of the 
 poem — the first human effort to extend 
 the bounds of Divine Mercy, to reach 
 through the " dark backward and abysm " 
 of the thousand pagan years, and gather to 
 its fold these children to be the first-fruits
 
 POETRY OF AUBREY BE VERE. 127 
 
 of Christ in their land — is very noble ; but 
 great as is the idea, it is subdued into a 
 simple idyl of childhood. The poem is, 
 indeed, unique, and the handling (Tenny- 
 son treated it less admirably) is exquisite. 
 The children in their home are dear, and 
 in their transformation into swans there is 
 no discord. The swan-nature, already 
 half-human in poetic tradition, blends of 
 itself with the ideal image of childhood; 
 and the nearness of the little exiles to 
 humanity, after their change, is sustained 
 by their mystical night-long singing over- 
 heard by men, and by the tale told their 
 poet listening solitary by the sea in the 
 sixth century of their woe. In their life 
 with nature, too, a new aspect sympa- 
 thetic with childhood emerges ; and lastly, 
 though lost, they still live in a world of 
 their own, as children do. This beautiful 
 tradition of the Irish race must become a 
 part of the child-literature of our language. 
 The Christian element in this last story 
 prepares the way for the poet's more volu- 
 minous and distinctly religious work — 
 and it is with poets of religion that he is 
 to be classed — in which he selects his 
 themes from the saintly legends of the
 
 128 POETRY OF AUBREY BE VERE 
 
 Church, and shows the abundance and 
 power of that life, idealized in holy tra- 
 dition, which converted the nations and 
 revivified the world. The Reformation 
 was a source of great mortality in litera- 
 ture; and the loss which Protestantism 
 sustained in surrendering the Catholic 
 centuries, with their long record of this 
 ideal life among mankind, was a spiritual 
 deprivation to the northern imagination, 
 which the noble lives of three later cen- 
 turies have not yet made good. So com- 
 plete is the gap now, that the times of 
 which these poems reflect the imaginative 
 beauty have the remoteness of a golden 
 age, and in reading the verse a sense of 
 dreaminess invades the mind. This por- 
 tion of the poet's work makes its mass; 
 and its interest, though various, is so even 
 that one could as easily divide the summer 
 landscape as choose and pick amid, its 
 beauty. The subjects are, in the main, 
 from Irish, English, or Roman traditions 
 of the early Church. The tales of St. 
 Patrick, which illustrate the conversion 
 of Ireland, are roughened by the old Bar- 
 dic strength overcome by the new gospel, 
 and masculine vigor is thus infused into
 
 POETRY OF AUBREY BE VERE. 129 
 
 it, while a poetic continuity -with the 
 primitive lays is preserved. Aengus is a 
 representative instance of these legends 
 of the Christian dawn, but milder than 
 the most. The tales of Saxon times, 
 which illustrate the conversion of Eng- 
 land, are almost pastoral in tone; and 
 again, St. Cuthbert's Pentecost, is, like 
 Aengus, only a solitary example. Others 
 of this series, are shown with fine imagina- 
 tive effects, like that of the lonely Julian 
 Tower casting the shadow of Rome on 
 the consecration of Westminster Ab- 
 bey:— 
 
 " On Saxon feasts she fixed a cold gray gaze ; 
 'Mid Christian hymns heard but the old acclaim — 
 ' Consul Romanus ' ; " 
 
 or, with eloquent lines, like those on the 
 Primates of Canterbury ; — 
 
 "From their fronts, 
 Stubborned with marble from St. Peter's Rock, 
 The sunrise of far centuries forth shall flame ; " 
 
 or, with passages of brief pathos, like 
 Bede's words: — 
 
 " Poor youth ! that love which walks in narrow ways 
 Is tragic love, be sure." 
 
 The poem, devoted to Csedmon, is espe-
 
 130 POETRY OF AUBREY BE VERE. 
 
 cially rich in such felicities both of image 
 and phrase. 
 
 So these Christian poems succeed one 
 another, as the poet's memory wanders 
 back to the legends of the Empire on the 
 first establishment of the faith in Roman 
 lands and along Asian shores, or moves 
 through mediaeval times with Joan of Arc 
 and episodes of the Cid that recall Cuchul- 
 lain in their light-hearted performance of 
 natural deeds, now under the Cross. The 
 beauty of these separate stories is equable 
 and full of a softened charm ; but in them, 
 too, as in the Bardic myths, there abides 
 that distance of time, which makes them 
 remote, as if they were not of our own. 
 They are highly pictorial ; and in reading 
 them, each secluded in that silent, old- 
 world air that encompasses it, one feels 
 that here is a modern poet, like those early 
 painters of pious heart who spent th^ir 
 lives in picturing scenes from the life of 
 Christ; and one recalls, perhaps, some 
 Convent of San Marco where each monas- 
 tic cell bears on its quiet walls such scenes 
 from the shining hand of the Florentine 
 on whose face fell heaven's mildest light. 
 These poems of Aubrey de Vere — to char-
 
 POETRY OF AUBREY BE VERE. 131 
 
 acterize them largely — are scenes from 
 the life of Christ in Man; and there is 
 something in them — in their gladness, 
 their luminousness, their peace — which 
 suggests Fra Angelico, the halo of Chris- 
 tian art. 
 
 Yet one reads to little purpose, if he 
 does not discern also an intellectual ele- 
 ment, constant in the poet's work, which 
 gives it mental as well as spiritual char- 
 acter. It is not so much thought, as 
 comprehension, which his poetry most 
 evinces : that comprehension which is the 
 genius of the historian and grasps the gov- 
 erning principles, follows the essential 
 ideas, watches the doubtful issues of the 
 inward world of conviction and illusion, 
 of which alone the fate is significant. 
 This philosophic interest in history is 
 most directly expressed in his two dramas, 
 Alexander the Great and St. Thomas 
 of Canterbury, where social movements, 
 so irresistible as to be rightly called provi- 
 dential principles, were centred in great 
 personalities. In these, his eye sees, not 
 the men merely, but ideas greater than 
 they, of which, indeed, they were servants ; 
 and this is true, also, of such single por-
 
 132 POETRT OF AUBREY DE VERS 
 
 traits as Odin, Constantine, and Hil- 
 debrand. His prefaces disclose a simi- 
 lar distinctly historical aim in his tales, 
 but their character as particular narra- 
 tives renders it less obvious ; the poetical 
 element in them absorbs and conceals the 
 didactic purpose. He has also occasion- 
 ally inwoven in his verse more abstract 
 and purely logical argument, of which 
 The Death of Copernicus is an example. 
 His sonnets and odes show, in addition, 
 occupation with political and other modern 
 questions. In his single contemporary 
 Irish tale. The Sisters — a tale which 
 makes one regret so complete an absorption 
 of his narrative power in other lines — 
 the criticism upon Ireland's history has 
 both edge and weight, and its conversa- 
 tional temper is charming. Together 
 with the gaunt reality of The Year of 
 Sorrow, this story of the actual reveals 
 the heart of a patriot, near to his living 
 land. Indeed, in whatever division of his 
 verse he approaches the subject of Ireland, 
 his style gathers fire, and often, as must 
 be the case, deepens into melancholy pas- 
 sion. This is shown most characteristi- 
 cally in the ideal conception of Ireland,
 
 POETRY OF AUBREY BE VERE. 133 
 
 which he sometimes suggests, as a Sacri- 
 ficial Nation, whose lot is to show forth 
 spiritual virtues under perpetual earthly 
 misfortune, and it is natural to such a 
 mind; but there is difficulty even in its 
 poetical acceptance, so heavy is the weight 
 of a nation's burden. It is a great con- 
 ception, but it is not a political idea. It 
 is the young Richard's refuge — "that 
 sweet way I was in to despair." But 
 throughout the entire range of national 
 and religious themes which in a long life- 
 time the poet has touched, one recognizes 
 a conscientious and keen thoughtfulness 
 as well as the other qualities of warmth, 
 imagination, and delight in natural and 
 moral beauty which are more upon the sur- 
 face of the verse ; and to miss this reflec- 
 tive temperament would be to lose sight 
 of much of the inward significance of these 
 longer poems. 
 
 Of shorter pieces he has written few in 
 comparison with the body of his work. 
 For one who belongs to the generation of 
 Tennyson and was the youthful friend of 
 Wordsworth, the impersonality of his verse 
 is marked. He paid the tribute to Love, 
 which is required of the gentle heart, in
 
 134 POETRY OF AUBREY BE VERE. 
 
 a few musical lyrics, usually with the sad 
 cadence ; he paid also his tribute to human 
 liberty and the general hope of man in 
 some fervid sonnets that spoke from the 
 breast; and, lastly, he paid his tribute to 
 his friends — for he was rich in friend- 
 ships — laying his loyal laurel upon each 
 remembered grave. Finally — to com- 
 press much miscellaneous verse into small 
 space — in Antar and Zara he treated 
 a difficult theme of love with a delicacy 
 and truth of feeling and a melodic power 
 that justified its inscription to Tennyson ; 
 in many odes and sonnets he exhibited the 
 love of nature, the sentiment for landscape 
 and its living creatures, and the sense of 
 the moral power of the external world, 
 which became a true disciple of Words- 
 worth and continuer of his tradition ; and 
 in The Search after Proserpine, and else- 
 where, he is a neighbor to Shelley. < In 
 all this portion of his work, which is more 
 nearly related to his own century, except 
 at rare moments he remains impersonal, 
 and deals with ideas through images, in 
 accordance with the great tradition of 
 poetry from the first, for their own and 
 not for the poet's sake.
 
 POETRY OF AUBREY BE VERE. 135 
 
 Such, in general, is the poet's work. 
 But it possesses some qualities which so 
 highly distinguish it in modern verse and 
 give it peculiar character beyond what has 
 been indicated, that a word more must be 
 said. One constant element is its praise 
 of the life of the lowl}^, in the old Chris- 
 tian sense, as the soil of many virtues, and 
 those the noblest and most endearing. The 
 affinities of his subject-matter, both on the 
 national and the religious side, make this 
 natural ; but its source is rather in a true 
 sympathy with lowly lives and knowledge 
 of them, whether among the poor by fate 
 or those who have renounced by choice the 
 things of fortune; and the ground of this 
 praise — and this is the significant matter 
 — is one that was old when Rousseau was 
 born. So Truth comes into her own 
 again. A second distinguishing element 
 in the verse, as a whole, is its praise of 
 devotion, that loyal surrender to a man or 
 a cause which is one of the ideal passions 
 of Love, and the vital triumph of the soul. 
 To realize what is denoted by this charac- 
 teristic, and how sharply it severs old and 
 new, needs only a thought of the quite 
 different way in which — to take the main
 
 136 POETRY OF AUBREY BE VERE. 
 
 instance — Tennyson presents this virtue, 
 in his greatest poem of man's life — how 
 maimed and impotent in Arthur, Guine- 
 vere, and Lancelot, how doomed to tragic 
 failure in the lesser persons, for Galahad's 
 career is magical, not human ; and the fact 
 that this enfeebling of the principle of 
 devotion is not a trait that, in Tennyson, 
 most strikes a modern reader, measures 
 the distance between the moral ideals that 
 are and those that were. In this, also, 
 Aubrey de Vere returns to the ancient 
 fountains. A third such element in the 
 verse is its purity, which is due, in part, 
 to the fact that the poet is fond of youth, 
 and fills his poems with many fair figures, 
 fresh and ardent and beautiful, and touches 
 with especial delicacy the tenderness of 
 childhood and the grace of boyhood, so 
 that there is a morning air in his world; 
 but something is also due to his. own 
 limpid sincerity and the clarifying power 
 of that spirit which can but represent 
 virtue, however suffering, as joyful. His 
 heroes are always glad. And lastly, to 
 bring these remarks to an end, faith 
 is an element in this verse, not to be 
 passed over in silence. It is faith of the
 
 POETRY OF AUBREY BE VERE. 137 
 
 sort not to be rivaled among our poets by 
 any other than Shelley, — faith in the 
 power of truth to subdue mankind to good- 
 ness. What to Shelley was dream and 
 vision is here that golden age of the tri- 
 umph of Christ over the heathen world, 
 when whole nations heard and were bap- 
 tized. That this is not fanciful paradox 
 a single passage will show, and it affords 
 a striking and useful literary parallel: — • 
 
 " They slept not, on the loud-resounding shore 
 In glory roaming. Many a feud that night 
 Perished ; and vengeful vows, now mockery made, 
 Lay quenched in their own shame. Far shone the 
 
 fires 
 Crowning dark hills with gladness ; soared the song ; 
 And heralds sped from coast to coast to tell 
 How He the Lord of all, no Power Unknown, 
 But like a man rejoicing in his house, 
 Ruled the glad earth. . , . 
 
 With earliest red of dawn 
 Northward once more the wingfed war-ships rushed, 
 Swift as of old to that long hated shore — 
 Not now with ax and torch. His Name they bare 
 Who linked in one the nations." 
 
 This is the feast, the chant, the flame of 
 Laon and Cythna. In this faith, again, 
 there is the fundamental Christian quality, 
 that older spirit, of which the other ele- 
 ments that have just been mentioned are
 
 138 POETRY OF AUBREY BE VERE. 
 
 also branches. Thus, in all this poetry, 
 however its phases be successively turned 
 to the eye, or itself be inwardly searched, 
 there is one light and one breath — the 
 light of the Spirit and the breath thereof. 
 It cannot but have a peculiar, though in 
 its own century almost an exotic, charm. 
 Joy and peace, the first Christian message, 
 spread abroad with its music ; and, heard 
 or unheard, the song of the poet speeds 
 that old evangel.
 
 AUBREY DE YERE ON POETRY. 
 
 It is rare good fortune to find criticism 
 in which the ideas are more excellent than 
 the manner, and the spirit finer than the 
 ideas ; in which it is not the keener sym- 
 pathy of the poet that speaks, or the sure 
 sense of the trained artist for expression, or 
 any siugle faculty, but the whole nature of 
 the man ; in which the judgment rendered 
 does not proceed from any particular part 
 of his mind — the scholarly or moral or aes- 
 thetic element by itself — but is felt to be 
 grounded upon his total convictions. Au- 
 brey de Vere's essays, therefore, are worth 
 more than ordinary attention. He writes 
 principally of Spenser and Wordsworth, and 
 also of Milton, Shelley, and Keats. He 
 considers mainly the doctrine of this poetry. 
 He values it chiefly for its highest office as a 
 teacher of moral wisdom, and a quickener of 
 the spiritual part of our nature. He justly 
 decides that its real subject is man's life ; 
 this is the centre of interest in all great 
 
 139
 
 140 AUBREY BE VEEE ON POETRY. 
 
 thought, and the rest is but ornament and 
 episode. He is a Christian idealist, and he 
 refuses to regard poetry except in the light 
 of those great ideas which belong to the 
 spirit, and, being nobly and beautifully in- 
 terpreted, are the substance of the poets 
 who live by their wisdom as well as by 
 charm. The ethical, the philosophical ele- 
 ment in a large sense, is to him the engross- 
 ing thing ; and criticism of this sort, so in- 
 cited and so aimed, has a reality that does 
 not fall far short of the worth of direct re- 
 flection upon the things of the mind, though 
 it deals with them through the medium of 
 literature instead of in life itself. 
 
 With Spenser, naturally, he has many 
 affinities. The medisevalism, the sentiment 
 of chivalry, the allegorizing spirit, and not 
 less the Puritan elevation of the first of the 
 Elizabethan poets, exercise a special fasci- 
 nation over a Catholic mind for whom, the 
 Ages of Faith, as he likes to call them, have 
 in a peculiar degree the ideality that clothes 
 the past. One no longer looks for original 
 criticism of the father of English verse, 
 who, more than Chaucer, may claim the pa- 
 ternity of great poets in later days ; but to 
 remind us of his excellence has become, in
 
 AUBREY DE VEBE ON POETRY. 141 
 
 the lapse of time and the decline of poetic 
 taste, almost as desirable an office as it once 
 was to unfold its secret. Spenser is a poet 
 who requires no common critic to speak 
 justly of him. His position was a unique 
 one, and by some infelicity of his stars he 
 failed to rise to the greatness which seems to 
 have been possible to him. Aubrey de Vera 
 remarks that the great romantic poem of the 
 Middle Ages, one that should sum them up 
 on the human as Dante did upon the divine 
 side, was never written ; and, looking back, 
 it appears to us that Spenser was the choice 
 spirit that missed this destiny. His pure 
 poetic quality, that sensibility to beauty and 
 delight in it as in his element, was perfect 
 to such a degree that Milton and Keats, who 
 possessed it in something of the same meas- 
 ure, seem almost to have derived it from 
 him, whose poems nourished it in them. The 
 sweetness and noble ease of his expression 
 reveal the presence of a marvelous literary 
 faculty. His responsiveness to the histor- 
 ical and legendary elements in the past, his 
 power of abstracting and idealizing them 
 for poetic use, and his profound interest in 
 human life, were great endowments, and he 
 possessed in a high degree and a pure form
 
 142 AUBREY DE VEBE ON POETRY. 
 
 that moral reason which is the attribute of 
 genius. But by defects as striking as this 
 gift he made his poem less than we fondly 
 think it might have been. The Elizabethan 
 prolixity, the obscure perception of the na- 
 ture of form in literary work, the artificial- 
 ity incident to the allegorizing temperament, 
 account for much of what he lost ; but, for 
 all that, his poems are marvels of the crea- 
 tive intellect, and it is this intellect that Au- 
 brey de Vere dwells on. Any one can point 
 out Spenser's loveliness, but the great spirit 
 that brooded over his verse is not so easily 
 realized. His aim was " to strengthen man 
 by his own mind," and it is this effort which 
 the critic analyzes, and by so doing tries 
 to show how well he deserved the epithet 
 "grave " as well as " gentle Spenser." 
 
 His work, with its intricate allegory, its 
 machinery of faeryland and chivalry, its 
 ideal landscape, is regarded as remote fpom 
 life ; but just as the creations of art, which 
 also have this unreality, are yet the expres- 
 sion, oftentimes, of the most real human 
 feeling and the most substantial thought of 
 the mind, so the figures of his embroidered 
 poem compose a procession of true life. 
 They are conceived and used in accordance
 
 AUDEEY BE VEEE ON POETRY. 143 
 
 with a comi^reliensive doctrine of the nature 
 of humanity, which Spenser undoubtedly 
 meant to enforce through the medium of the 
 imagination ; this doctrine, in fact, is the 
 stuff they are made of. 
 
 It is not an easy thing to resolve into its 
 moral elements the creations of a poet who 
 blends many strains of truth. His method 
 is not the consecutive process of logical re- 
 flection and explication, but the simultane- 
 ous embodiment of what, however arrived 
 at, he presents as intuitive, needing only to 
 be seen, to be acknoAvledged. In the analy- 
 sis, the distinctive poetic quality is too apt 
 to be dissipated, and the poet is forgotten in 
 the philosopher. Certain broad aspects may 
 be easily made out. Chivalry, with its crowd 
 of faery knights, certainly rests, in Spenser's 
 great work, upon the old conception of the 
 Christian hfe as one militant against the 
 enemies of the soul in the woi-ld ; and quite 
 as clearly he also represents this life as be- 
 ing, within the breast, ideal peace. Peace 
 within and war without : these are two root- 
 ideas out of which the poem flowers on its 
 great double branches. He teaches sj)ecif- 
 ically how to attain self-control, and how to 
 meet attacks from without ; or rather how
 
 144 AUBREY DE VERE ON POETRY. 
 
 to seek those many forms of error which do 
 mischief in the world, and to overcome them 
 for the world's welfare. This is a bald state- 
 ment, but it indicates well enough in what 
 way Spenser employed the knightly ideal of 
 succor on the one hand, and the Christian 
 ideal of moral perfection on the other, in or- 
 der to make a poem which should instruct 
 as well as delight the world. He himself as- 
 serts that his aim was so lofty, and to a man 
 such as he was a lower aim, a merely artistic 
 purpose, would have been impossible. It is 
 fortunate that he was not less endowed with 
 the sense of loveliness than with a serious 
 mind ; for he thus illustrates not only the 
 possible union of the two principal aims of 
 poetry in all times, but also the truth that 
 to a man whose perception of beauty is most 
 perfect the beauty of holiness is the more 
 impressive and authoritative in its com- 
 mands. Aubrey de Vere devotes himself 
 especially to the declaration and the proof 
 that Spenser's poetic character was essen- 
 tially that of a man deeply interested in 
 human life, and he tries to prevent the 
 poet's severely ideal, and sometimes fantas- 
 tic, method from obscuring, as for many 
 minds it does, the real nature of that alle-
 
 AUBREY BE VEEE ON POETRY. 145 
 
 gory, so marvelous for invention, eloquence, 
 and perpetual charm of style, which is sel- 
 dom thought to be more than an intricate 
 and lovely legend of the imagination. The 
 critic is not blind to the great defects of the 
 work, — and no poem of equal rank has 
 more, — nor does he neglect the excellences 
 that are obvious to the least thoughtful 
 reader ; but he succeeds in placing before 
 us its intellectual and moral substance. 
 
 In doing this he reveals his own theory of 
 poetry, and it is one that derives its philoso- 
 phy from the gi'eat historic works of our lit- 
 erature, and is grounded on the practice of 
 the English masters whose fame is secure. 
 Its cardinal principle is that man is the only 
 object of interest to man, all else being sub- 
 ordinate, and valuable only for its relations 
 to this main theme ; and more particularly 
 this subject is the spiritual life, not the ma- 
 terial manifestations of his energies in deeds 
 apart from their meaning. The Italian mas- 
 ters of Spenser too often lost themselves in 
 incident, in romance, in story for its own 
 sake ; they were destitute of that ethical 
 spirit which insists on planting in the deeds 
 their significance, and regarding this as an 
 integral, and indeed the only immortal, part
 
 146 AUBREY BE VEEE ON POETRY. 
 
 of the action. The laws of life, not the 
 chances of individuals, were Spenser's sub- 
 ject, and in this he differs from Ariosto, and 
 leaves his company. Spenser's genius was 
 thus abstract and contemplative, and Pla- 
 tonic in the sense that he used images always 
 with some reference to the general truths 
 that transcend imagination, and are directly 
 apprehended only intellectually. Allegory 
 was therefore his necessary method. Spen- 
 ser never succeeded in harmonizing the dis- 
 parate elements of the material to which he 
 fell heir by literary tradition ; and besides 
 the inconsistencies and incoherencies of the 
 Renaissance culture, which never reached 
 any unity in its own time, there were also 
 special disturbances in his intellectual life 
 because of the political and religious con- 
 flicts in England itself, from entanglement 
 with which he was not free ; and, moreover, 
 he does not seem to have subdued the philo- 
 sophical and poetic impulses of his own na- 
 ture to any true accord. His poem, there- 
 fore, did not take on that perfection, that 
 identity of purpose and execution, which 
 would have placed it in the first rank, and 
 he remains below the supreme poets of the 
 world. The study of his work, as an illus-
 
 AUBREY DE VERE ON POETRY. 147 
 
 tration of the conditions and art of poetry, 
 is most instructive. Its defects teach more 
 than its excellence, but they do not disturb 
 the theory which Aubrey de Vere sets forth ; 
 and he would be but a blind critic who 
 should easily argue that Spenser succeeded 
 when he obeyed the pure artistic impulse, 
 and failed because of the interference of his 
 graver genius with the poetical mind, his 
 thought with his sensibility. 
 
 Aubrey de Vere's contemplative mind, his 
 strong hold on the abstract rather than on 
 the concrete, help him over the poetically 
 dry places in Spenser, and serve him even 
 better in the case of Wordsworth. This is 
 choosing the better of two alternatives ; for, 
 if the landscape of Arcady is incomplete for 
 him unless there is some "swan -flight of 
 Platonic ideas " over it, such as he says is 
 always in Spenser's sky, he has an appreci- 
 ation for beauty as steadfastly as for the 
 higher truths of life, and it is better to suffer 
 with deficiencies in poetic art for the sake of 
 the matter than to be content with art alone. 
 
 The great difference between Wordsworth 
 and Spenser is, that Spenser was concerned 
 with the moral virtues and ma.n's acquire- 
 ment of them, while Wordsworth was more
 
 148 AUBREY BE VERE ON POETRY. 
 
 narrowly limited to the influence of nature 
 in forming the soul. Both looked to the 
 same end, — spiritual life ; but Wordsworth 
 had a different starting-point. His mind 
 was more individual, and he assumed that 
 his own history was typical ; he was less rich 
 in the stores of antiquity, and he had less 
 sensibility to beauty in its ideal forms ; but 
 he knew the place that nature held in his 
 own development, and he became specifically 
 the poet of nature, not only as beauty visible 
 to the eye, but also, and mainly, as an invis- 
 ible influence in the lives of men. Much of 
 his verse was a pastoral form of philosophy ; 
 meditation counted for more than beauty in 
 it ; but the scene was the English country, 
 and the characters were rustics. There was, 
 too, something of imaginative untruth in 
 it, no doubt, similar to that inherent in all 
 pastoral poetry. These common men, how- 
 ever, were not individuals, but stood ,for 
 man, and Wordsworth, in delineating their 
 histories, was writing a parable as well as 
 a story. In other portions of his verse he 
 used a more abstract method. As a moral- 
 ist he was much given to maxims ; and in 
 all that concerns the social and political life 
 of man, as well as his personal relations to
 
 AUBREY DE VERE ON POETRY. 149 
 
 virtue, Wordsworth was, as the critic affirms 
 with much emphasis, filled with a certain 
 ardor, which may be called passion if one 
 likes. The lack of passion in the ordinary 
 sense — and it cannot be made out that 
 Wordsworth possessed this quality — only 
 renders more plain the moral endowment of 
 the poet, his absorbing interest in the manly 
 virtues, and the supreme value which he 
 placed on the spiritual life and its ideal rela- 
 tions. He considered these relations most di- 
 rectly as existing toward nature, and having 
 their operation in the emotion which nature 
 excites. He did not altogether escape from 
 the pantheism incident to such a constant 
 preoccupation of the mind with the works 
 and course of nature, and consequently he is 
 less distinctively Christian than Spenser ; 
 but Aubrey de Vere easily makes it out that 
 Wordsworth's philosophy, much as it differed 
 from Spenser's, is concerned with the same 
 topics of moral and spiritual life, and is the 
 substance of his poetry. 
 
 It is not surprising that a writer of Au- 
 brey de Vere's temperament is annoyed by 
 the charge that Wordsworth is destitute of 
 " passion." He has much to say on this 
 point. Wordsworth himself gave as the rea-
 
 150 AUBBEY DE VERE ON FOETBY. 
 
 son why he did not write love-poems the fear 
 that they would be too passionate. Aubrey 
 de Vere makes what defense he can by 
 pointing out the half-dozen idealizations of 
 woman in the shorter lyrics ; but his real 
 apology consists in the counter-assertion that 
 Wordsworth is especially distinguished for 
 " passion." He uses the word, however, 
 with a difference, and means by it the poetic 
 glow, the exaltation of feeling, the lyrical 
 possession, which attends the moment of 
 creation and passes into the verse. Of this 
 sort of passion every form of poetry is as 
 capable as is the amorous : the sceva indig- 
 natio of satire would come under this head 
 as properly as the moral enthusiasm or the 
 patriotic fervor shown in the Ode to Duty 
 or the Sonnets. Wordsworth truly possessed 
 this capability, and it gives to his poems 
 their masculine strength. Whether equal 
 success is to be credited to the critic's glosses 
 upon the more commonplace subjects of 
 Wordsworth's muse, is doubtful ; it seems 
 rather that he makes the mistake which Cole- 
 ridge attributed to Wordsworth himself, of 
 giving a value to the idea which it has in his 
 own mind, but which it does not have in the 
 bare words addressed to the reader. When
 
 AUBREY DE VERE ON POETRY. 151 
 
 the idea and the expression are not identi- 
 cal, every poet suffers from this cause ; in 
 his mind the idea, coming first, dignifies the 
 words, but to the reader the words coming 
 first, too often mutilate the idea. It is a 
 good result of Aubrey de Vere's Words- 
 worthianism that it gives him courage to 
 force into the front of his essay the Orphic 
 Odes, which are among the least known of 
 the poet's work, and contain some of the no- 
 blest of his lines. 
 
 To Milton he seems somewhat unjust. 
 The earlier poems receive his warm appreci- 
 ation, but of the later ones he is hardly so 
 tolerant, and nowhere does he give him his 
 due. This is the passage : — 
 
 " It is not, however, its deficient popu- 
 larity so much as its subject and its form 
 which proves that Milton's great work is not 
 a national poem, high as it ranks among our 
 national triumphs. Some will affirm that 
 he illustrated in that work his age if not his 
 country. His age, however, gave him an 
 impulse rather than materials. Puritanism 
 became transmuted, as it passed through his 
 capacious and ardent mind, into a faith He- 
 braic in its austere spirit — a faith that sym- 
 pathized indeed with the Iconoclastic zeal
 
 152 AUBREY BE VERE ON POETRY, 
 
 which distinguished the anti-Catholic and 
 anti-patristic theology of the age, but held 
 little consort with any of the complex defini- 
 tions at that time insisted on as the symbols 
 of Protestant orthodoxy. Had the Puritan 
 spirit been as genuine a thing as the spirit 
 of liberty which accompanied it ; had it been 
 such as their reverence for Milton makes 
 many suppose it to have been, the mood 
 would not so soon have yielded to the licen- 
 tiousness that followed the Restoration. . . . 
 To him the classic model supplied, not the 
 adornment of his poem, but its structure 
 and form. The soul that wielded that mould 
 was, if not exactly the spirit of Christianity, 
 at least a religious spirit — profound, zeal- 
 ous, and self-reverent — as analogous, per- 
 haps, in its temper to the warlike religion 
 of the Eastern Prophet as to the traditional 
 faith of the Second Dispensation. Such was 
 the mighty fabric which, aloof and in ^lis 
 native land an exile, Milton raised ; not per- 
 fect, not homogeneous, not in any sense a 
 national work, but the greatest of all those 
 works which prove that a noble poem may 
 be produced with little aid from local sym- 
 pathies, and none from national traditions." 
 Some expressions in this passage, and
 
 AUBREY DE VERE ON POETRY. 153 
 
 many others scattered througli these volumes, 
 indicate where the current of sympathy was 
 broken by default of which the critic under- 
 stands Milton imperfectly. Ideal he was, but 
 there is no poet who is more bone and flesh 
 of the English nation in the substance of his 
 genius, or in whom it developed a spirituality 
 more noble ; nor are his defects, in his concep- 
 tion of womanhood for example, such as can- 
 not be easily paralleled from the other poets 
 of highest genius in the line from Spenser. 
 But, on the other hand, the critic is more 
 than just to Keats, and towards Shelley he 
 exhibits a respect, a penetration of the ele- 
 ments of his thoughtful temperament, and a 
 comprehension of the remarkable and inti- 
 mate changes of his incessant growth, that 
 are almost unexampled in authors writing 
 from Aubrey de Vere's standpoint. In writ- 
 ing of the others he has opportunity for still 
 further illustration of the theory of poetry 
 he holds, and he shows that these later poets 
 have their best success the closer they keep 
 to the subject of man, and the more they 
 treat it with a pure, spiritual method ; while 
 on the other hand, they are defective in pro- 
 portion as they fail in this. 
 
 It would be impossible for a critic with
 
 154 AUBREY DE VERE ON POETRY. 
 
 such standards as these to pass iu review the 
 work of the modems, and not to notice tlie 
 general decline in the moral weight and the 
 spirituality of late poetic literature. Mate- 
 rialism, both as respects the objects of man's 
 pursuit and the character of his speculation 
 in philosophy, has been so important and 
 growing a factor of the times, that, if there 
 is any validity in this theory of poetry, it 
 must follow that our poetic work has lost 
 elevation, meaning, and utility. Religion it- 
 self, so far as the general thought of nine- 
 teenth-century civilization is concerned, has 
 suffered a diminution of its authority, and 
 consequently the spiritual life of man has 
 filled a less prominent part in the eyes of 
 these generations. 
 
 In connection with this, room should be 
 made for some original remarks of the wri- 
 ter upon the Pagan element in our modern 
 poetry. He is very well affected tow^ards 
 Platonism, and recognizes it historically as 
 " the chief secondary cause of the diffusion 
 of Christianity, doing for it more than the 
 favor of Constantine could ever have done." 
 He thus affirms for Greek religion and 
 Greek philosophy " an element of greatness 
 and truth." Our poets, in returning to its
 
 AUBREY DE VERE ON POETRY. 155 
 
 life and thought, seem to him to be making 
 a return to the spiritual element which in 
 the revolutionary ages has been obscured 
 and too often lost. Pie speaks in this as a 
 Catholic, but he is more Christian than 
 Catholic, if it may be permitted to say so ; 
 and all religious writers admit and lament 
 the inroad of skepticism and consequent 
 materialism. The turn he gives to these 
 facts is a striking one : — 
 
 " The arts of the Middle Ages soared 
 above Paganism : the imaginative mind of 
 modern times stands for the most part aloof 
 from it ; but it often stands aloof from 
 Christianity also. Secularity is its prevail- 
 ing character, while even in Paganism there 
 is a spiritual element. We may not, without 
 a risk of insincerity and presumption, in- 
 dulge in either an exultation or a regret 
 higher than corresponds with our low posi- 
 tion. Can we with truth say that the por- 
 tion of our modern literature which reverts 
 to ancient mythology is less religious than 
 the rest ? Is it not, in the case of some au- 
 thors, the only portion which has any rela- 
 tions, even through type or symbol, with re- 
 ligious ideas ? Would Dante, would even 
 Milton, have found more to sympathize with
 
 156 AUBEEY DE VEEE ON POETRY. 
 
 in the average of modern literature than in 
 Homer or in Sophocles, in Wordsworth's 
 Laodamia or Keats's Hymn to Pan ? What 
 proportion of our late poetry is Christian 
 either in spirit or in subject — nay, in 
 traditions and associations? Admirable as 
 much of it is, it is not for its spiritual ten- 
 dencies that it can be commended. Com- 
 monly it shares the material character of our 
 age, and smells of the earth ; at other times, 
 recoiling from the sordid, it flies into the 
 fantastic. . . . It is our life which is to be 
 blamed ; our poetry has been but the reflec- 
 tion of that life." 
 
 This is valuable, not only for its sugges- 
 tion, but because it sums up and speaks out 
 plainly the protest which is implicit in all 
 this criticism. The aesthetic lover of beauty, 
 the artist who is satisfied with feats of poetic 
 craft, will not find anything to his liking in 
 Aubrey de Vere's essays. They are presided 
 over by a severe Platonism intellectually, by 
 an exacting and all - including Christianity 
 when the subject touches upon man's life, 
 and they will prove somewhat difficult read- 
 ing, perhaps, because the thought continu- 
 ally reverts to great ideas, to that doctrine 
 of life which the author seeks for in the jjoets,
 
 AUBREY DE VEEE ON FOETRY. 157 
 
 and prizes as the substance of their works. 
 But it is well, in poetic days like these, to 
 be brought back to the more serious muses 
 which inspired the great ideal works o£ our 
 literature, and to converse with them under 
 the guidance of such a spirit as fills these 
 essays with a sense of the continual presence 
 in great literature of the higher interests of 
 man, his life on earth, and his spiritual rela- 
 tion to the universe. These essays contain 
 the fruits of habitual familiarity with poetry, 
 the convictions of a lifetime with regard to 
 those things which are still important sub- 
 jects of thought to thoughtful men ; and 
 there is, mingled with the style, the sweet 
 persuasiveness of a refined and liberal na- 
 ture, which is only too well aware that it 
 must plead its cause, and pleads with 
 strength and charm.
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 
 
 I. THE PERGAMON MARBLES. 
 
 The development of tlie Greek genius in 
 sculpture, after it had passed its first ma- 
 turity in Phidias and his immediate succes- 
 sors, presented the same characteristic signs 
 shown in the history of other modes of artis- 
 tic expression in other nations. A reasoned 
 conception of the ends and means, a trained 
 appreciation of form, a complete mastery of 
 technique, were inherited by the sculptors of 
 Pergamon. The purpose being defined and 
 the tools perfected, no originality was al- 
 lowed them except in style ; and conse- 
 quently their work, like the last dramas 'of 
 Shakespeare, or the creations of Browning 
 or Carlyle, exhibits an excess of subject, 
 an effort to put the utmost of muscular 
 action, of narrative import, of allegorized 
 truth, into their marbles. And yet, in con- 
 nection with this intensity, as it is called, it 
 cannot fail to be observed that their sculp- 
 
 158
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 159 
 
 ture (herein touched with the decadence) 
 breathes the self-glorifying spii'it of trium- 
 phant skill, rather than the overmastering 
 idealism of the earlier patriotic and religious 
 motives. In their pictorial composition and 
 landscape backgrounds, also, one is tempted 
 to discern the harmful influence of that so 
 vaguely known school of painting that flour- 
 ished in the preceding period, and to piece 
 out by conjecture our fragmentary concep- 
 tions of its manner. It is complained that 
 modern sculpture is too pictorial ; almost as 
 soon as the art was recovered in Italy it fell 
 into the same error, particularly in relief 
 work ; but in Greece the profuse use of color 
 on the marble, as ground and also for direct 
 decoration, together with the employment of 
 metals and jewels as additional adornment, 
 must have brought the two arts so closely 
 too:etlier that the transference of modes 
 of treatment was inevitable. The striking- 
 thing is that painting, then as now, seems 
 by its greater compass to overpower its more 
 hampered rival. 
 
 Besides this tendency to overtax the power 
 of expression by the weight of subject, and 
 this pride in mere technique in close associ- 
 ation with a humiliating imitation of a dif-
 
 160 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 
 
 ferent art, these Pergamon sculptures dis- 
 play other marks of being essentially quite 
 modern. Their realism is especially notice- 
 able. The Greeks of the elder time, it must 
 be acknowledged, were remarkably fortu- 
 nate in that their realistic spirit fell in with 
 an actual existence which itself appealed 
 to the imagination in many ways. In the 
 Athenian prime the life that taught Sopho- 
 cles and Agathon was heroic or idyllic, and 
 needed hardly a touch to exalt its elements 
 into the most imaginative idealism. When 
 Plato could not write a dialogue without 
 making a drama, nor Aristophanes compose 
 a comedy without breaking into the sweetest 
 lyric song, nor Phidias chisel a flying fold 
 except for eternity, a presence was upon the 
 earth and a spirit in men that made realism 
 not less trustworthy as a guide to sculptors 
 than is the " Look into thy heart and write " 
 as a maxim for poets like Sidney. But 
 when the barbarians broke in from the north 
 upon Asia Minor, and the luxury of oriental 
 manners and the fantasies of oriental mind 
 stole upon the old order and changed it, to 
 study the real was not necessarily to achieve 
 the beautiful. The barbarians chiseled by 
 the Pergamon sculptors are very different
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM, 161 
 
 from those that once adoniecl the Parthe- 
 non : they are fierce, ugly, portrait-like, stud- 
 ied from the life. The giants, too, by the 
 same artists are not even altogether human, 
 as in the older reliefs, but many are mon- 
 strous : conglomerates of snaky folds and 
 Titanic limbs and ox necks, finny wings, 
 pointed ears, horns, and such Egyptian and 
 Assyrian confusions. For this debasement 
 of the type, few will consider the wonderful 
 finish, the minute and successful imitation 
 of fur, scale, and stuff, a compensation. So, 
 too, the representation of mortal agony is, 
 in these works, carried to an extreme of 
 truthfulness that is upon the verge of the 
 revolting. This new bent of realism which, 
 ceasing to select from the beautiful in life, 
 now takes these three directions, — toward 
 the portraiture of types not noble, toward 
 the close copying of accessories not impor- 
 tant, and toward the reproduction of shock- 
 ing aspects of existence, — this essential dif- 
 ference between the art of Athens and of 
 Pergamon, it would be but too easy to par- 
 allel in more than one province of our own 
 intellectual life. These remarks, although 
 they were not meant to point such a moral, 
 incidentally illustrate how misleading is the
 
 162 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 
 
 the word "ancient" when applied to the 
 Greeks. Wherever approached, they are as 
 level to our own times in thought and deed 
 as any of the so-called moderns ; and though 
 their language, in its former dialect, is dead, 
 its golden words always fall upon our ears 
 as if from the lips of some wiser contempo- 
 rary. In looking on these recovered marble 
 fragments, just as in reading the Antigone 
 or Alcestis, the centuries seem meaningless. 
 
 II. A GREEK TRAIT NOTICED BY DR. WALD- 
 
 STEIN. 
 
 One distinction between the Greeks and 
 ourselves may be expressed by saying that 
 our culture as a people rests upon literature, 
 on the printed word, while that of the Greeks 
 based itself rather upon observation, on the 
 thing seen. The divergence of intellectual 
 mood thus induced between ancient and 
 modern is profound, and affects the whole 
 higher life. In reflecting upon this classical 
 trait, however, something is to be guarded 
 against. It is well known that the illiter- 
 ate, generally speaking, think in images, 
 and that this power or habit of visualization, 
 sometimes thought to be characteristic of the 
 poet, be it observed, usually falls into disuse
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 163 
 
 in proportion to the increase and continuity 
 of exclusively literary culture in the individ- 
 ual, until the point is reached at which a 
 man thinks without having a single image 
 definitely projected upon the mind's eye ; 
 his mental processes are, in fact, as colorless 
 and formless as algebraic calculations. Mr. 
 Galton's experiments in this matter are still 
 fresh in our memories. Now it is not to be 
 inferred that this was always the case, nor 
 indeed that the intellect of highest develop- 
 ment may not in the past, at least, have ha- 
 bitually thought in images, as the unlettered 
 do to-day ; and in Greece it appears that the 
 picture language of the mind, as one may 
 call it, held a place more important than 
 with us, and perhaps equivalent to our own 
 idea language. The Greek, as every one 
 knows, peopled the earth with presiding ge- 
 niuses, of more or less exalted rank, from 
 Oread and Naiad, to the great Zeus of Olym- 
 pus. These forms we call imaginary, and to 
 our thought they are always tenuous ; the 
 point to be remembered is that, when the 
 Greek spoke of Athene, an image came be- 
 fore his mind, and one not hypothetical and 
 consciously symbolical, like Liberty with her 
 cap, but definite, real, and awful, like the
 
 164 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 
 
 statue on tlie pediment or in the temple. 
 The Greek mind leaned on these images ars 
 our mind does on the alphabet in all mental 
 life ; hence the poetry and the art of the 
 age had a certain ease and naturalness, an 
 intimacy with things seen by the eye, not 
 equaled in the work of later times, except 
 possibly in Italy. Dr. Waldstein points out 
 that the most striking expression of this 
 plastic necessity, inherent in Greek think- 
 ing, is the doctrine of Platonic ideas. To 
 the moderns, however tolerant they may be, 
 there seems always a childishness, a gro- 
 tesque quality, the more marked because 
 of Plato's splendid and rich endowment, in 
 the continual insistence in his philosophy on 
 the " ideas " of the table and the flute, — the 
 table without any deflnite number of legs, 
 the flute without any particular quality of 
 sound ; and the case is not much helped, 
 even if one perceives, as Schopenhauer 
 shows, that the doctrine is essentially ac- 
 curate in truth, and wholly intelligible, since 
 it is merely the modern statement of the sub- 
 jectivity of time and space put conversely. 
 Notwithstanding these admissions, our minds 
 still find the Platonic ideas awkward to deal 
 with. But that Plato, at the end of his ab-
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 165 
 
 strusest speculations, and at the threshold of 
 one of the greatest generalizations of the hu- 
 man intellect, fell back upon the image-form- 
 ing faculty, and insisted on particularizing 
 the universal by means of a mystery or fic- 
 tion of thought, is a crowning proof of the 
 pervasiveness and inner mastery of the plas- 
 tic spirit in the culture of his civilization. 
 
 This trait of the Greeks has been dwelt 
 on, in the present instance, less for itself 
 than for its bearing on the idealism of the 
 art of Phidias, of which the marbles of the 
 Parthenon are the great examples. Of 
 course Dr. Waldstein, who knows the value 
 of this supreme achievement of the idealistic 
 temperament in man, is himself an idealist, 
 and when he has occasion to analyze the 
 monuments treats at more or less length of 
 the theory of idealism. He distinguishes at 
 once two kinds of physical representation, 
 the portrait and the type, and affirms an 
 analogous difference in representations of 
 the spirit that animates the stone, — the 
 man as he is, and the man as he ought to be. 
 He observes, too, that the Greeks were fortu- 
 nately supplied with subjects of sculpture in 
 which both the physical and spiritual perfec- 
 tion of man were proper elements, and, in-
 
 166 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 
 
 deed, requisite ; namely, the heroes and the 
 gods. The higher life was the theme of 
 their art in its greatest excellence, not as a 
 possible but as an actual existence. This of 
 itself was a valuable help to them, for cen- 
 tres of imagination were thus determined 
 for them and given a certain external valid- 
 ity ; whereas among the moderns art is felt 
 to be in its essence a mode of subjective cre- 
 ation, having no reality except in thought. 
 The resvilting sense of uncertainty, the weak- 
 ened faith in such emanations of man's 
 brain, almost inevitable for the contemporary 
 poet or artist, is one cause of the recoil of 
 our imagination from the ideal, and of the 
 attraction of realism for our writers, and 
 perhaps of our content with a literature and 
 art that will have fact for its province. 
 " Let us have facts," is the cry ; "of truth 
 — that is, the relation of facts — who can 
 be certain? Let us represent men as ithey 
 are ; of men as they ought to be who has 
 any observation ? " And even within these 
 limits of the new school it is said, further- 
 more, that attention is to be paid to the in- 
 dividual ; not to man as he is, but to this 
 man, taken at random, as he is. The type 
 is too general to be depicted, too far re-
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 167 
 
 moved from actual seeing, too much an ab- 
 straction of the mint]. It is plain that at 
 the root of the difficulty felt by the realists 
 who theorize in this way lies the conviction 
 that the further the literary or any other 
 representative art gets from the special fact, 
 trait, or passion in its particular manifesta- 
 tion, the more vague, doubtful, pale, rubbed- 
 out, — in a word, the more generalized, — it 
 becomes, and hence loses sharpness, vigor, 
 and illusiveness. But with the Gi-eek the 
 case was clearly quite otherwise. There was 
 no loss of individualization in the type, 
 whether of physical or of spiritual perfec- 
 tion. This Theseus or that Hermes is ideal ; 
 both are generalized from men, but they 
 suffer no loss of vitality thereby. The ideal- 
 ism of Athens did not fade out in abstrac- 
 tion, but embodied the permanent elements 
 of harmonious beauty in body and spirit, in 
 forms " more real than livino: man." The 
 habit of thinking in images, or with fixed 
 associations of images, with general notions, 
 was one reason for this success, imdoubt- 
 edly; but before concluding that the liter- 
 ary and rationalizing culture of our day for- 
 bids us to hope for a similar blending of 
 the type with individuality, let us remember
 
 168 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 
 
 that as with Phidias, so with Shakespeare : 
 Hamlet is at once the type and the man. 
 The poet born cannot turn aside, on this 
 hand, into science, as the realists do ; nor 
 on that hand, into philosophy, as the alle- 
 Eforists do. To him that ideal art alone is 
 possible in which the two are united in the 
 expression of permanent and universal truth 
 through selected facts. 
 
 Nevertheless, it may be urged, the Greeks 
 passed rapidly from the idealistic to the re- 
 alistic stage. And in connection with this 
 one observes the happiness with which Dr. 
 Waldstein identifies the elements of likeness 
 between the Greeks and the moderns, just 
 as he opposes their differences to each other. 
 The most admirable example is an inquiry 
 into the sesthetical qualities of the Hermes 
 of Praxiteles, and in the course of it he de- 
 lineates the characteristics of the age of 
 Praxiteles, and parallels them with the traits 
 of the time just subsequent to the French 
 Revolution. In doing this he incidentally 
 describes the common spirit in Shelley, 
 Musset, and other representatives of an art, 
 not of the noblest, but not of the worst 
 either, of the interval after the great age, 
 yet before the marked decadence. It may
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 169 
 
 be said that the English never had an age 
 of the Phidian kind ; in European culture 
 that is to be sought, if at all, in mediaeval 
 art. The Praxitelean age, however, was re- 
 produced in essence in the first generation 
 of our romantic period. A certain pathos, 
 felt in view both of the world and of one's 
 self, is perhaps its dominant quality, and 
 with it go a sophistication, a self-conscious- 
 ness, a reflectiveness, a slight yet not com- 
 plete abstraction of the spirit from the ob- 
 ject before it, illustrated by the expression 
 of the head of Hermes in relation to the 
 infant Dionysus on his arm. It is the mood 
 of one whose spontaneous joy has been dis- 
 turbed forever by thought. In such woi^k 
 one sees that the objective character of art, 
 as it was in Phidias, is yielding to a new 
 impulse ; that the hold of the imagination 
 on the divine and the eternal is slowly relax- 
 ing. At last, idealism went out in Greece, 
 and, either in the shape of the portrait stat- 
 ues, or of such sculptures as those of Per- 
 gamon, realism came in to be the be-all and 
 also the end-all of art. 
 
 Why was it, one asks, that the plastic na- 
 ture of the Greeks did not preserve them, if 
 the image-making faculty did in fact count
 
 170 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 
 
 SO much in their development? How did 
 they come to lose the ideal forms that sprang* 
 in the mind of Phidias when he thought of 
 beauty and virtue? One cannot say that 
 idealism failed, for its triumph in the Par- 
 thenon marbles marks the highest point ever 
 reached by the human imagination in embod- 
 ying its vision. It died out, and one says 
 in explanation that the attention given to 
 technique at last led to a disregard of the 
 idea ; or that the mere ability to reproduce 
 details exactly was a temptation to apply 
 art to deceptive imitation of the seen instead 
 of to an illusive expression of the unseen ; 
 or that the age had lost the great ideas 
 themselves, the perception of beauty and 
 virtue, the belief in them and honor for 
 them, and hence necessarily declined upon 
 the things of this world, — that is, upon 
 what is seen by the bodily eye rather than 
 in the realm of thought and spiritual ifi- 
 sight : and of these explanations perhaps 
 one is as true as another, for they ai-e all 
 descriptions, from different standpoints, of 
 what actually occurred. It is impossible, 
 however, that in view of this history, and of 
 the similar course in the development of 
 medijEval painting, one should not ask him-
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 171 
 
 self whether the rise and defense of realism 
 among us mean that literature is to follow 
 in the same track, and die, as sculpture and 
 painting died, until a new age shall set the 
 wheel turning again ; for if the history of 
 the arts teaches anything, it is that the ages 
 of idealism are the ages of power, and those 
 of realism the premonition and stiffening of 
 death. 
 
 III. MR. PATER ON IDEAL ^STHETICISM. 
 
 The heart of Mr. Pater's Marius lies 
 in his thought about the ideal, and it is in 
 the nature of all such thought to make a 
 peculiar demand upon the reader. Its wis- 
 dom is felt to be, as it were, sacerdotal, and 
 requires a conscious preparation of mind in 
 him who would know of it ; its vision is 
 supernal, and disclosed only when some spir- 
 itual illumination has been sent before. So 
 runs a Platonic doctrine of election and 
 grace that has been held as rigorously in lit- 
 erature as in theology. This aristocracy of 
 idealism — its exclusiveness, its jealousy of 
 any intrusion of the common and worldly 
 within the company it keeps, its sense of a 
 preciousness, as of sacred things, within it- 
 self — is incorporate in every fibre of Mr.
 
 172 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 
 
 Pater's work ; and he makes the demand 
 natural to it, not only implicitly by an unre- 
 laxing use of such aesthetic and intellectual 
 elements as appeal exclusively to the subtlest 
 faculties of appreciation in their highest de- 
 velopment, but explicitly also by the charac- 
 ter of his hero. Marius, before he became 
 an Epicurean, was moulded for his fate ; his 
 creator demanded an exceptional nature for 
 the aesthetic ideal to react upon in a noble 
 way, and so Marius was born in the upland 
 farm among the fair mountains to the north 
 of Pisa, and was possessed from bojdiood of 
 the devout seriousness, the mood of trustful 
 waiting for the god's coming, which is ex- 
 acted in all profound idealism. " J^avete 
 Unguis ! With the lad Marius there was a 
 devout effort to complete this impressive 
 outward silence by that inward tacitness of 
 mind esteemed so important by religious 
 Romans in the performance of their sacre,d 
 functions." Marius was born one of the 
 choice natures in whom the heavenly powers 
 are well pleased ; and emphasis must be 
 oiven to this circumstance because it follows 
 that the ideal life which he lived, deeply 
 meditated though it is, is really an individ- 
 ual one. Marius is not typical, nor even
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 173 
 
 illustrative in any broad way of the practice 
 of gesthetic morals ; and yet, since he is not 
 national, nor local, nor historic, in his essen- 
 tial self, since he is more than an enlight- 
 ened philosopher, and yet less than the en- 
 lightened Christian, since his personality 
 approaches the elect souls of other ages, 
 other sentiments and devotions, and yet is 
 without any real contact with them, he is 
 typical and illustrative perhaps of something 
 that might be. This confusedness of impres- 
 sion springs from the fact that Mr. Pater, 
 while he imagines in Italy, always thinks in 
 London ; he has modernized his hero, has 
 Anirlicized him, indeed, and nevertheless has 
 not really taken him out of the second cen- 
 tury. It was a bold thing to attempt. It 
 was necessary for his purposes as an evange- 
 list of ideal living, and perhaps within the 
 range of moral teaching it is successful ; but 
 the way in which it was done is a main point 
 of interest. 
 
 A Koman Epicurean, one suspects, was 
 not unlike the proverbial Italianated Eng- 
 lishman. The native incompatibility be- 
 tween the distinctive Roman temperament 
 and the light-hearted gayety of Greek sen- 
 suousuess was similiar to that between the
 
 174 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 
 
 English and the Italian character in the 
 later times ; the perfection of Marius by 
 means of a Greek ideal may run parallel 
 with English culture under southern influ- 
 ences. There was, too, in Roman character 
 a trait or two which brings it near to quali- 
 ties that lie at the base of our own stock. 
 Even in the Italian landscape there are 
 Northern notes such as Mr. Pater mentions 
 when Marius, in his walks to the coast, sees 
 " the marsh with the dwarf roses and wild 
 lavender, the abandoned boat, the ruined 
 floodgates, the flock of wild birds." We are 
 told, also, that " poetic souls in old Italy 
 felt, hardly less strongly than the English, 
 the pleasures of winter, of the hearth, with 
 the very dead warm in its generous heat, 
 keeping the young myrtles in flower, though 
 the hail is beating hard without." This 
 note of Marius's home-life and the love he 
 had for it, with his 2:»articular regard fpr 
 "Domiduca, the goddess who watches over 
 one's safe coming home," and with the ideal 
 of maternity that grew uji in his memory 
 of home, — this peculiarly English note is 
 struck in the opening and is dominant at the 
 end. Certain other characteristics ally this 
 Etrurian boy with that nobler strain of
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 175 
 
 Eno-lish blood, the Puritan strain as it was 
 in Spenser. His instinctive seriousness, his 
 scrupulosity of conscience, his inheritance of 
 a certain sombreness from the stock that 
 adorned the Etruscan funeral urns, his at- 
 tachment to places and awe of some of them 
 as sacred by the touch of a divine power, 
 his sense of invisible enemies about his path, 
 his rigorous self -discipline in preparation for 
 certain hereditary sacred offices, a deadly 
 earnestness at times, — as when he gazes so 
 fixedly on the rigid corpse of his friend Fla- 
 vian, — such are some of the traits that de- 
 fine his natui'e as essentially rather North- 
 ern than Southern, and provide a ground of 
 special sympathy and understanding for us. 
 The second device by which Marius is 
 modernized is by giving to him a power 
 which, for one who runs as he reads, makes 
 the character incredible. He is said to be 
 affected sometimes in a way the opposite of 
 the experience which many have who, on 
 seeing a new place, seem to have been there 
 before : Marius feels, in the most marked 
 of his experiences, something that shall be, 
 — he has always a prescience. Thus, in 
 the cadence of Flavian's verses he hears the 
 music of the Latin hymnology ; in the sight
 
 176 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 
 
 of his second friend, Cornelius, who displays 
 and puts on his armor of a Roman knight 
 in the dusty sunshine of the shuttered coun- 
 try-house, he foresees the Christian chiv- 
 alry ; in the faces and groups of the worship- 
 ers in Cecilia's house he discerns the serene 
 light and streaming joy of Giotto's and of 
 Dante's vision, and looks on the Madonna 
 and the Child that Raphael first painted. 
 In all this there seems an unreality ; in 
 the Puritan Roman, the Cyrenaic Christian, 
 there is a sense almost of conscious artifice, 
 as if one were being befooled. And yet, as 
 for those Northern notes of landscape, cus- 
 tom, and character, scholarship can give 
 chapter and verse for them ; and as for the 
 gift of prescience, — well, if it were impos- 
 sible for Marius to have it, in a sufficient 
 measure at least, then the theory of ideal 
 livins: which he held to was at fault. And 
 this Marius, so constituted, his creator plaqes 
 in an Italy over which the romantic desola- 
 tion, which we know, was laying its charm of 
 dreamful decay, and in a Rome which, then 
 as now, was the huddled deposit of religions. 
 The intellectual conviction on which Ma- 
 rius conducted his life was simple and com- 
 mon enough, as must be the case with every
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 177 
 
 theory capable of being made a principle of 
 living. The world is what we think it, and 
 our part in existence is the fleeting moment 
 of present consciousness. What shall be 
 done with this moment ? Economize it, said 
 Marius, in dissent from the Stoic who said, 
 " Contemn it." Economize it ; make the 
 most of the phenomena that arise in it, and 
 see, so far as it depends on you, that these 
 phenomena, both of sensation and idea, as 
 they arise, are the most valuable possible to 
 the moment ; and so your experience — in 
 other words, your life — will be the fullest 
 and most refined. Above all, do not forget 
 the main thing in this doctrine of economy, 
 which is that the worth of experience de- 
 pends, not on what it is at the moment in its 
 detached and transitory phase, but on what 
 it will prove in memory when it takes its 
 place permanently and in relation to the 
 whole of life. In such a scheme, recejativity, 
 the most alert and varied powers of taking 
 in impressions, is the one aim of cultivation. 
 Here, too, much depended on the nature of 
 Marius, this time on the side of his Southern 
 endowment. An impressibility through sen- 
 sation was his gift, his talent ; and especially 
 he was susceptible to what the eye observes :
 
 178 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 
 
 he was one of those who are " made perfect 
 by the love of visible beauty." This is the 
 point of union of his life with the aesthetic 
 ideal, and makes the story of it a path- 
 way through scenes of loveliness not unlike, 
 in a certain mild beauty, the frescoes on an- 
 cient walls. The narrative is pictorial, al- 
 most to the point of decoration, and moves 
 always with an outlook on some fair sight. 
 From the landscape of the villa where Ma- 
 rius was born — among those delightful 
 Etrurian hills whence one looks to the mar- 
 bled rifts of Carrara gleaming above olive 
 and chestnut slopes, and gazes off through 
 the purple sea-valley of Venus's Port, the no- 
 blest gateway of the descending sun — to the 
 last throttling earthquake morning, a beau- 
 tiful visible world is about us, and exercises 
 its attractiveness both in nature and in hu- 
 manity. The one end of Marius was to ap- 
 propriate all this, to choose the best of sen- 
 sation and its most nearly connected emo- 
 tions, and to live in that. To do this in- 
 volves a secondary talent, a gift of insight, 
 a power to perceive relative values, which 
 in reality means a faculty of moral discrim- 
 ination ; and just here one may easily fail 
 to see whence Marius derived this.
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 179 
 
 Why was it, for example, that he, Leing 
 so attached to sensation and the emotions 
 that cling closest to it, rejected voluptuous- 
 ness, with all its forms of beauty and joyful- 
 ness, as a thing essentially not beautiful nor 
 joyful ? What was it that kept him, the 
 comrade of Flavian, who represents the pa- 
 gan surrender to this life, pure, — so pure, 
 indeed, that with his visionary sense he fore- 
 saw in chastity an ideal that was to be, and 
 foreknew its coming beauty ? A mere inter- 
 preter of character, an analyst, would say, 
 that Marius obeyed in these choices his own 
 nature, — that Puritan nature whose com- 
 pulsion is always strong. He venerated his 
 own soul and cherished its early instincts, 
 and this was his salvation. But one might 
 also give another explanation, which would 
 seem more harmonious with the purpose of 
 the author ; one might say that what is moral 
 is in its outward manifestation so clothed 
 with beauty, visible beauty, that the man who 
 looks for beauty only, the noblest, the ideal 
 beauty, will find therewith the highest, the 
 ideal good. It is essential to such a seeker 
 that he shall look with his own eyes and 
 be frank with himself ; shall " look straight 
 out " and acknowledge what he sees ; and
 
 180 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 
 
 this Mariiis does, thereby prefiguring in a 
 way and piactically making that " return to 
 nature " which is the continually recurring 
 necessity of all sincerity. If virtue does in 
 fact wear this outward loveliness — and who 
 would deny it ? — why may not the lover of 
 beauty have truly seen the new and spring- 
 ing forms of goodness, recognized them, and 
 taken their promise into his life ? In other 
 words, was not that prescience of Marius 
 merely a power of clear and honest seeing 
 of the elements of beauty and ugliness there 
 before him ? 
 
 That this is Mr. Pater's view of the mat- 
 ter is indicated most definitely by the con- 
 trast which he continually insists on between 
 Mai'cus Aurelius and Marius, and which he 
 brings out clearly in the attitude of these 
 two toward the gladiatorial shows. In the 
 amphitheatre Marius is conscious of the Em- 
 peror, the strenuous Stoic, as " eternally his 
 inferior on the question of righteousness." 
 The young E])icurean has a " decisive con- 
 science on sight " which is indubitable, — 
 that conscience which, in its condemnation of 
 the great sin of an age, is the touchstone of 
 the select few in it, and makes them on the 
 side of the future and aware of its excellence
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 181 
 
 to be, when " not to have been, by iustmctive 
 election, on the right side was to have failed 
 in life." Aurelius, we are told, made the 
 great mistake : Vale, anitna infelicissima ! 
 is the last word of our author to him on the 
 eve of the persecutions. And the reason is, 
 that the Stoic was truly blind ; he had pal- 
 tered with his senses until they lied to him, 
 or spoke not at all. Marius saw the de- 
 formity of the evil, and, while rejecting it as 
 something he might not see and live, chose 
 the good by its beauty, and so selected in 
 the midst of that Roman corruption the 
 Christian elements in whose excellence the 
 Church would triumph and be made fair. 
 
 There may be some surprise in perceiving 
 in the evangel of aestheticism a morality of 
 this height, a concentration of attention on 
 the beauty of austerity, an exaltation of a 
 noble Puritanism toward which the Cyrenaic 
 ideal may lead. When this is understood, 
 however, one finds it natural enough that 
 the pervading tone of this history of an ideal 
 life is really religious ; idealism, w^hen it is 
 living, cannot be otherwise than essentially 
 religious. Nevertheless, it is a bold thing 
 to put the question, as Mr. Pater implicitly 
 does, whether an attention to the beautiful,
 
 182 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 
 
 to visible beauty, may not only be equivalent 
 to moral discrimination and a safeguard of 
 virtue, but also a mode of solving the ulti- 
 mate religious questions of deity and man's 
 relation to it. Marius does arrive at an in- 
 timation, perhaps a faith, that a protective 
 divine companionship goes beside him, and 
 at an emotion of gratitude to that unseen 
 presence. 
 
 Two points only, in this wide branch of 
 the speculation, can be dwelt on now. He 
 says toward the end that he thinks he has 
 failed in love ; and here he touches on one 
 weakness of his ideal, for it is only by love, 
 as he perceives, that any reconciliation be- 
 tween the lover of beauty and the multitu- 
 dinous pitiful pain which is so large a part 
 of the objective universe can be obtained. 
 The second weakness is perhaps greater. In 
 his ideal there is both doubt and isolation ; 
 the subjective element in his knowledge, the 
 exclusive reliance on his own impressions, 
 the fact that in metaphysical belief the 
 world is only his world, and in actual living 
 the experience is individual, — all this holds 
 in it a basis of ultimate incertitude. True 
 and real for him it no doubt is, but is that, 
 indeed, the necessary limit of knowledge and
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 183 
 
 life ? In effect, too, his creed is Protestant ; 
 independently of the necessary element of 
 doubt in it, it has the isolating force inev- 
 itable to the believer who will accept only 
 the results of his own examination by exer- 
 cise of private judgment. This position is 
 unsatisfactory; and it seems to allow the 
 rationality of that principle of authority by 
 which an individual life obtains correction 
 for its idiosyncrasies, cancels the personal 
 error, and at the same time lets in upon it- 
 self the flood of the total experience of hu- 
 manity summed up and defined in the whole 
 body of the elect. Though stated here in 
 terms of the Stoical philosophy, this is the 
 Catholic conclusion. Or, if Marius does not 
 quite assent to this, he does accept it in a 
 half-hearted way as an hypothesis which is 
 worth making since it reunites him to man- 
 kind. There is, it may be observed, a ten- 
 dency toward Catholicism throughout the 
 religious speculation. Another note of it, 
 for example, is the attraction felt by Marius 
 in the ritual of worship, as the perfection of 
 that ceremonialism to which, in his boyish 
 worship of the old gods, he was devoutly 
 trained. 
 
 After all, at the end one still states the
 
 184 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 
 
 promises of this jestlietic ideal, even when 
 working on so unusual a nature as Marius's, 
 interrogatively. Marius's life does not set 
 it forth with convincing power. For one 
 thing, it is not a vital life, but a painted 
 one ; and there is an inconsequence in the 
 series of pictures, — they do not seem to fol- 
 low one another by any iron necessity. It 
 would be foolish to complain that a life 
 avowedly only receptive and contemplative 
 of the beautiful is inactive. Marius does 
 nothing except at the end. Yet, within such 
 limits, one never sees how beauty affected 
 Marius or developed his soul, and though he 
 is said to have got much from companionship, 
 one sees love operant in him very seldom, 
 and then it is a very silent and unexpressed 
 love. He repeats his own epitaph, — tristem 
 neminem fecit., — and it was true ; but all 
 his life seems negative, and continually one 
 asks, How did he really live ? and gets no 
 answer. His whole life was a meditatio 
 mortis, — that is all that is told us. 
 
 A sense of failure, or rather of incomplete- 
 ness, oppresses one at the end of the narra- 
 tive. Even granting that the success Ma- 
 rius is said to have achieved — one is never 
 quite sure that he did — by that exquisite
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 185 
 
 appreciation of beauty and impassioned con- 
 templation of its ideal forms, was, in fact, 
 his ; yet of what worth was it, — what did 
 it mean to either God or man ? The North- 
 ern idealist, the Puritan, cannot dispense 
 with some serviceableness as essential to 
 any high living. One should not push the 
 point too far, however. Independently of 
 all that has been said, any one who cares to 
 think on counsels of perfection for man's 
 life will find profound and original thought 
 about the ideal elements still at hand in 
 modern days for use, and many wise reflec- 
 tions, sown in this history. It is a rare 
 work, and not carelessly to be read. Some 
 exquisiteness of taste, some delight in schol- 
 arship, some knowledge of what is best 
 worth knowing in the historic expressions of 
 man's aspiration, and, above all, that " in- 
 ward tacitness of mind " the reader must 
 bring to its perusal. What of it? Have 
 we not the highest authority for casting our 
 pearls where Circe's herd cannot come ?
 
 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 
 
 I. HIS CAREER. 
 
 The natural charm by which Shelley fas- 
 cinated his familiar friends lives after him, 
 and has gathered about him for his defense 
 a group of men whose affection for him 
 seems no whit lessened because they never 
 knew him face to face. The one common 
 characteristic prominent in all who have 
 written of him with sympathy, however mea- 
 gre or valuable their individual contributions 
 of praise, criticism, or information, is this 
 sentiment of direct, intimate, intense per- 
 sonal loyalty which he has inspired in them 
 to a degree rare, if not unparalleled, in lit- 
 erary annals. Under the impulse of this 
 strong love, they have championed his cause, 
 until his fame, overshadowed in his own 
 generation by the vigorous worldliness of 
 Byron, and slightly esteemed by nearly all 
 of his craft, has grown world-wide. With 
 the enthusiasts, however, who have aided in 
 brinfrino; about this result, admiration for 
 
 166 
 
 I
 
 EEMARKS ON SHELLEY. 187 
 
 Shelley's work is a secondary thing ; its vir- 
 tue is blended with and transfused into the 
 nature of Shelley himself, who is the centre 
 of their worship. To reveal the fineness 
 and lustre of his character, his essential 
 worth throughout that romantic and dark- 
 ened career of thirty years, is their chief 
 pleasure, and in this, too, they have now won 
 some success, and have partially reversed 
 the popular estimate of the poet as merely 
 an immoral atheist ; yet, although some 
 amends have been made for harsh contem- 
 porary criticism, Shelley's name is still for 
 orthodoxy a shibboleth of pious terror and 
 of insult to God. It is still too early to de- 
 cide whether the modification of the harsh 
 criticism once almost universally bestowed 
 upon Shelley will go on permanently, or 
 whether it is not in some measure due to 
 peculiar results of culture in our own time. 
 Without attempting to prejudge this ques- 
 tion, especially in regard to poetic fame, 
 there seems to be, as the cause passes out of 
 the hands of those who knew Shelley per- 
 sonally into the guardianship of the new 
 generation, a tendency toward greater unity 
 of judgment in regard to the larger phases 
 of his character and conduct.
 
 188 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 
 
 Shelley, as Swinburne said of William 
 Blake, was born into the church of rebels ; 
 he was born, also, gentle, loving, and fear- 
 less. The dangers to which such a natu- 
 ral endowment would inevitably expose him 
 were aggravated by a misguided education, 
 and by the temper of that feverish and ill- 
 regulated age in which modern reform be- 
 gan. He was in early years first of all a 
 revolter; he would do only what seemed to 
 him best, and in the way which seemed to 
 him best ; he took nothing upon authority, 
 he acknowledged no validity in the customs 
 and beliefs which past experience had be- 
 queathed to men ; he must examine every 
 conclusion anew, and accept or reject it by 
 the light of his own limited thought and ob- 
 servation ; he carried the Protestant spirit 
 to its ultimate extreme — all legal and in- 
 tellectual results embodied in institutions or 
 in accepted beliefs must show cause to him 
 why they should exist. He was, moreover, 
 in haste ; he could not rest in a doubt, he 
 could not suspend his judgment, he could 
 not wait for fuller knowledge. Finding 
 only incomplete or incompetent answers to 
 his questioning, he leaped to the conclusion 
 that there was no answer. Had he been
 
 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 189 
 
 contented with allowing this spirit to influ- 
 ence only his own private creed and conduct, 
 mischief enough was sure to be wrought for 
 him, error and suffering were in store for 
 him in no common degree. But he was not 
 merely building an ideal of life and formu- 
 lating a rule of living for himself ; he had, 
 as he afterward confessed, a passion for re- 
 forming the world. He was early in print, 
 and aspired to teach the world before he 
 was well out of his teens, — took in his 
 hands, indeed, the regeneration of Ireland 
 through pamphlets, and public eloquence, 
 and personal agitation and supervision. It 
 is easy to dismiss this as the foolish conceit 
 of a boy of talent much given to dreaming. 
 It is easy, too, to dismiss his exile from his 
 home and his expulsion from Oxford as 
 childish obstinacy, disobedience, ingratitude, 
 and presumption ; but if there was anything 
 of these faults in him there was also much 
 more made evident in these first trials of his 
 character : there was the capacity for sacri- 
 fice, the resolution to be faithful to the truth 
 as he saw it. The beginning of manhood 
 found him in the full sway of immature 
 conviction, and already suffering the penalty. 
 It is not necessary to follow out in detail
 
 190 EEMABES ON SHELLEY. 
 
 the development of a life so entered upon. 
 It led him to attack Christianity and to dis- 
 regard the law of marriage, and this is the 
 sum and substance of his offense. Yet no 
 sign, perhaps, is so indicative of the in- 
 creased liberality of religion in our time as 
 the attempt which has been made to show 
 that Shelley was essentially Christian, an 
 attempt so common and vigorous that Tre- 
 lawney felt called upon to protest against 
 it. In this spirit Mr. Symonds writes from 
 one extreme : " It is certain that as Chris- 
 tianity passes beyond its mediaeval phase, 
 and casts aside the husk of outworn dogmas, 
 it will more and more approximate to Shel- 
 ley's exposition. Here, and here only, is a 
 vital faith adapted to the conditions of mod- 
 ern thought, indestructible because essential, 
 and fitted to unite instead of separating 
 minds of divers quality " ; and Kev. F. W. 
 Robertson, from the other extreme, writes : 
 "I cannot help feeling that there was a 
 spirit in poor Shelley's mind which might 
 have assimilated with the spirit of his Re- 
 deemer, — nay, which I will dare to say was 
 kindred with that spirit, if only his Re- 
 deemer had been differently imaged to him. 
 ... I will not say that a man who by his
 
 REMAEKS ON SHELLEY. 191 
 
 opposition to God means opposition to a de- 
 mon, to whom the name of God in his mind 
 is appended, is an enemy of God ; . . . 
 change the name and I will bid that char- 
 acter defiance with you ! " A candid exami- 
 nation must show, however, that Trelawney 
 is right ; there is no doubt that Shelley re- 
 jected altogether what is properly known as 
 Christianity, in youth violently and with ha- 
 tred, while in later years he came to care 
 less about it. At the same time it is to be 
 remembered that he had seen Christianity 
 only in those forms whose most prominent 
 characteristic is defect in charity and love, 
 which Shelley believed to be the central 
 virtues. Probably he never dissociated the 
 Christian God from the Jewish Jehovah, 
 and his feeling towards him is well illus- 
 trated in the terrible indictment he makes 
 against him in reference to Milton's delinea- 
 tion of Satan as one " who, in the cold secu- 
 rity of undoubted triumph, inflicts upon his 
 fallen enemy the most horrible punishment, 
 not from any mistaken hope of thereby re- 
 forming him, but with the avowed purpose 
 of exasperating him to deserve new tor- 
 ments." It is, therefore, impossible to deny 
 Shelley's atheis.ra ; the most that can be con-
 
 192 REMAEKS ON SHELLEY. 
 
 tended for is that In natural piety, in purity 
 of life and motive, in conscientious and un- 
 selfish action, Shelley was exceptionally con- 
 spicuous. 
 
 It is here that the second charge against 
 Shelley has its place. How, it is indignantly 
 asked, was he unselfish, loving, and con- 
 scientious, when he left his youthful wife to 
 circumstances which resulted in her suicide, 
 and transferred his devotion to another? 
 Nothing more can be done than to point out 
 the fact that Shelley acted in harmony with 
 his convictions of social duty ; that the first 
 marriage was the result of knight-errantry 
 rather than affection, and had become des- 
 titute of any pleasure ; that Shelley did not 
 desert his wife in such a way as to make 
 her suicide chargeable to him. These con- 
 siderations do not, it is true, relieve him of 
 condemnation, or remove the really great de- 
 fect in his moral perception of the responsi- 
 bility which rested upon him in consequence 
 of a thoughtless and foolish marriage. Yet 
 it is not doubtful that in his life he atoned 
 for his error, if suffering is atonement ; from 
 that time a shadow fell upon him which 
 never was removed. It is hard to find heart 
 for reproach when one, whose whole gospel
 
 EEMARKS ON SHELLEY. 193 
 
 was love, is so cruelly entangled in the un- 
 foreseen consequences of his acts that he 
 seems to have wrought the work of hatred. 
 
 What, then, under this presentation of 
 the case, remains to be said for that ideal 
 character which those who love Shelley be- 
 lieve to have been his possession? That, 
 beginning life with a theory which left every 
 desire and impulse free course, which im- 
 posed no restrictions except those of his 
 own honor and self-respect, which acknow- 
 ledged no command not proceeding from his 
 own reason, he yet served the truth he saw 
 with entire loyalty and sincerity of heart ; 
 that, making many errors throughout a dark- 
 ened life, he did not strive by lightness of 
 heart or logical sophistication to avoid their 
 penalties of misery and remorse, but kept 
 them in memory and bore his burden of sor- 
 row courageously ; that by intense thought 
 and bitter experience he came at last to 
 find the laws of life and to obey them. He 
 found how impossible it is for the individ- 
 ual to solve the problems put before him, so 
 that he himself grew content to leave many 
 of these in doubt ; found how ignorant it 
 was in him to make his own experience the 
 measure of the conditions of general human
 
 194 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 
 
 life, and attempt to reform the world's mo- 
 tives and standards by reference to that 
 experience alone ; found how little the indi- 
 vidual counts for in life, so that the youth, 
 who with fervid hope took up the regenera- 
 tion of a whole nation in confidence, came to 
 doubt whether it was worth while for him 
 to write at all, and rated himself far below 
 his friend Byron. These characteristics are 
 the evidence of his strength, sincerity, and 
 rightness of purpose ; and through these he 
 worked out an ideal of life and rule of liv- 
 ing, which differed much from those of his 
 early days. No ideal intrinsically more 
 powerful in influence or more exalted in vir- 
 tue has been worked out by men who, like 
 himself, found the old familiar standards 
 rationally inadequate and morally weak. 
 These are the essential elements in Shelley's 
 career, and to them his personal qualities 
 and his daily life give form and color. This', 
 too, is the work of a man framed for self- 
 destruction, against whom circumstances did 
 their worst throughout. The marvel is, not 
 that his life was so broken in private happi- 
 ness, and his public work so unequal in the 
 worth of its results, but, taking all into ac- 
 count, that he saved so much of his life and
 
 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 195 
 
 work through his perception of the valuable 
 objects of living, and his clinging to them. 
 
 This, too, was the result of the imperfect 
 years of preparation. He had given him 
 only the traditional thirty years which be- 
 long to every genius for trial and training 
 before the finished work can be required. 
 He had just recognized the conditions to 
 which he must conform, and was only ready 
 to begin when he died. 
 
 II. HIS ACQUAINTANCES. 
 
 It is impossible to condense Shelley's Life 
 in a clear way. One turns the pages, and 
 owns for the thousandth time the fascination 
 of Shelley, from the first glimpse of the boy, 
 pressing his face against the window-pane to 
 kiss his sister, to the hot July afternoon 
 when he made his last embarkation, and the 
 summer storm swept the gleaming mountains 
 from his sight ; but no art transmits the 
 spell, and the story, clasped between these 
 periods, must be left in its integrity. Shel- 
 ley lived in solitude, and died before he was 
 thirty years old ; but his career involved such 
 variety of scenes, persons, and Incidents, was 
 so thick -strewn with interesting episodes, 
 and contained so many perplexed passages,
 
 196 BEMAEKS ON SUELLEY. 
 
 that it is a study by itself, and requires 
 for its mastery an acquaintance witli an ex- 
 tensive literature of its own. It were useless 
 to attempt a criticism, or to describe Shelley 
 anew, but some unstudied remarks upon his 
 fortunes in life may be ventured upon. 
 
 Must one incur the charge of being super- 
 cilious and aristocratic if he acknowledges 
 at once a feeling, after reading Shelley's life, 
 of having been in very disagreeable com- 
 pany ? Assuredly no one can rise from the 
 perusal with a heightened respect for human 
 nature, apart from Shelley. He was born a 
 gentleman ; his innate courtesy clothes him 
 with attractiveness, and distinguishes him 
 among his associates as a person of a differ- 
 ent kind from them, in his actions and bear- 
 ing ; and the deference which Byron showed 
 to him, it is not unlikely, sprang from a 
 perception of this strain of breeding in him 
 rather than from appreciation of his genius 
 or his nature. In his earliest fellowship with 
 school - friends, for whom he had a kindly 
 regard at Eton and after they went down 
 together to Oxford, though Hogg plainly ob- 
 scures it, there is a gleam here and there of 
 natural and equal companionship ; but this 
 morning ray soon dies out. He was, after-
 
 BEMABES ON SHELLEY. 197 
 
 wards, almost uniformly unfortunate in his 
 acquaintances. His life was truly one long 
 and sorrowful disillusion ; and in it not the 
 least part was the discovery of how he had 
 been deceived in his judgment of persons. 
 
 Hogg was his first example. Shelley be- 
 came familiar with him at Oxford, and, not 
 content with having him for a bosom friend, 
 wished to make him his brother-in-law. At 
 that time Shelley was in the first crude fer- 
 ment of his intellectual life, eagerly absorb- 
 ing the new knowledge which came to him 
 from his indiscriminate reading, and disput- 
 ing on all the usual topics with vehement 
 and unwearied earnestness, insatiable curi- 
 osity, and the delight of a youth who has 
 just made the discovery that he has a mind 
 of his own. His thoughts and letters were 
 mostly polemical; ideal elements of moral- 
 ity were growing up in him, and radical 
 views of conduct getting a hold in his 
 convictions. He was willful, precipitate, 
 and heedless through inexperience ; he was 
 thrown the more upon himself, and given a 
 violent turn toward rebellion, to which he 
 was prone enough, by his expulsion from 
 Oxford, and the senseless attempt of his 
 family to make him suppress his mental and
 
 198 BEMABES ON SRELLEX. 
 
 moral life by denying his first dear conclu- 
 sions. In this state, partly from adventure 
 and restlessness, perhaps, but also from a 
 sense of obligation, the desire to spread his 
 gospel, and by the mere favor of circum- 
 stances, he married his first wife, though he 
 knew that his sympathies were more engaged 
 than his heart. 
 
 At Edinburgh, whither the pair had gone, 
 Hogg joined them, and with him they re- 
 turned to York, where Shelley left his wife 
 in his friend's care during a brief necessary 
 absence. Hogg, who appears to have been 
 not so pure as might be wished in his uni- 
 versity days, tried to seduce her ; and when 
 Shelley came back he learned the facts. He 
 loved Hogg ; he was ashamed, he wrote, to 
 tell him how much he loved him ; he was 
 grateful to him for having stood by him and 
 shared his expulsion from the college ; and 
 he placed the most extravagant estimate 
 upon his abilities. What followed upon the 
 disclosure Shelley himself tells in a letter 
 written at the time : — 
 
 "We walked to the fields beyond York. 
 I desired to know fully the account of this 
 affair. I heard \tfroni him^ and I believe he 
 was sincere. All I can recollect of that ter-
 
 EEMABKS ON SHELLEY. 199 
 
 rible day was that I pardoned him, — fully, 
 freely pardoned him ; that I would still be 
 a friend to him, and hoped soon to convince 
 him how lovely virtue was ; that his crime, 
 not himself, was the object of my detesta- 
 tion ; that I value a human being not for 
 what it has been, but for what it is ; that I 
 hoped the time would come when he would 
 regard his horrible error with as much dis- 
 gust as I did. He said little ; he was pale, 
 terror-struck, remorseful." 
 
 One may smile at this episode, if he be 
 cynical, and has left youth far enough be- 
 hind ; but for all that, there is something 
 pathetic in these sentences of boyish good- 
 ness, this simple belief in the moral princi- 
 ples which Shelley had found in his first 
 search, and to which he had given the alle- 
 giance of his unworn heart ; and in this 
 scene of forgiveness, still confused with the 
 emotions of first friendship betrayed, one 
 perceives the Shelley we know, though he 
 was not yet out of his teens. Some time 
 elapsed before Shelley realized all the inci- 
 dent meant ; then he wrote, " I leave him to 
 his fate ; " and when they met again in Lon- 
 don, the old footing was gone forever. 
 
 Godwin, too, affords a capital example of
 
 200 EEMAEKS ON SHELLEY. 
 
 a shattered ideal. He was the Socrates of the 
 young poet, and Shelley, who derived the 
 main articles of his political and social creed 
 from the radical philosopher's great book, 
 was already adoring him as one in the pan- 
 theon of the immortal dead, when he learned 
 from Southey that his master and emanci- 
 pator still walked the earth. He sat down 
 at once and wrote a characteristic epistle, in 
 which he expressed himself with the enthu- 
 siasm of a disciple not yet twenty, and re- 
 spectfully but earnestly besought the living 
 friendship and advice of him whom he re- 
 garded as the light of the new age. God- 
 win was interested, and long and frequent 
 letters, admirable in tone upon both sides, 
 passed between them. The elder endeav- 
 ored to cheek the irrepressible activity and 
 eager plans of the young reformer, who had 
 no notion of waiting until he should grow 
 old before setting to work to remake society ; 
 and the youth, on his part, exhibited a defer- 
 ence and willingness to be guided such as 
 he never showed before or afterwards. The 
 first modification of Shelley's idea of God- 
 win came in consequence of their personal 
 acquaintance, as was natural ; but in dis- 
 covering that Godwin was really an idiosyn-
 
 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 201 
 
 cratic mortal, as well as an illuminating in- 
 tellect, Shelley did not yield his admiration 
 for the sage. One can still see the un- 
 bounded astonishment of the poet, which 
 Mary Godwin describes, when she told him 
 her father was annoyed by his addressing 
 him as " Mr." instead of " Esq.," in direct- 
 ing his letters. They got on very well to- 
 gether, however, until Shelley ran away with 
 Mary, — a practical exposition of Godwin's 
 doctrines, which he, having now grown re- 
 spectable and socially cautious, did not at 
 all relish. Shelley had before this aided 
 Godwin somewhat in financial embarrass- 
 ments. That philosopher was always in 
 debt ; and the young disciple, who, though 
 the heir to a great property, had no way of 
 realizing anything from it except by selling 
 post-obit bonds, agreed with his master that 
 philosophers have a paramount claim on any 
 money their friends might own. He was 
 willing to discharge his duty by getting 
 Godwin out of debt, or assisting him as far 
 as he could in the matter. When he re- 
 turned to England with Mary he found that 
 the philosopher would not see or forgive 
 him, and positively declined to correspond 
 except upon the subject of how much money
 
 202 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 
 
 Shelley could give him. Shelley had no 
 thought of not doing his own duty, because 
 of the conduct of other people ; and while 
 he felt Godwin's hardness and inconsistency, 
 nevertheless he would relieve that great mind 
 from the little annoyances consequent on 
 borrowing money without providing means 
 of repayment. He, however, was not blind ; 
 and what he learned of Godwin in the course 
 of these transactions had a destroying influ- 
 ence upon that ideal of the man which he 
 had formed in his first days of revolutionary 
 hope. In the second year of his life with 
 Mary he told the philosopher what he 
 thought of the whole matter in a letter which 
 one may be excused for reading with pecu- 
 liar satisfaction : — 
 
 " It has perpetually appeared to me to 
 have been your especial duty to see that, so 
 far as mankind value your good opinion, we 
 were dealt justly by, and that a young fam« 
 ily, innocent and benevolent and united, 
 should not be confounded with prostitutes 
 and seducers. My astonishment, and, I will 
 confess, when I have been treated with most 
 harshness and cruelty by you, my indigna- 
 tion, has been extreme, that, knowing as you 
 do my nature, any considerations should
 
 EEMAEES ON SHELLEY. 203 
 
 have prevailed on 3'ou to have been thus 
 harsh and cruel. I lamented also over my 
 ruined hopes of all that your genius once 
 taught me to expect from your virtue, when 
 I found that for yourself, your family, and 
 your creditors you would submit to that 
 communication with me which you once re- 
 jected and abhorred, and which no pity for 
 my poverty or sufferings, assumed willingly 
 for you, could avail to extort. Do not talk of 
 forgiveness again to me, for my blood boils 
 in my veins, and my gall rises against all 
 that bears the human form, when I think of 
 what 1, their benefactor and ardent lover, 
 have endured of enmity and contempt from 
 you and from all mankind." 
 
 The v/riter was that youth of twenty-three 
 years, of whom Godwin remarks that he 
 knew "that Shelley's temper was occasion- 
 ally fiery, resentful, and indignant." It is 
 true that it was so, and one is pleased to 
 find upon what fit occasions it broke out. 
 Shelley, however, had undertaken a hopeless 
 and endless task in trying to extricate God- 
 win from debt, and he spent much money, 
 raised at a great sacrifice, in the vain at- 
 tempt. What he thought of these transac- 
 tions, when his judgment had matured, we
 
 204- REMAEKS ON SHELLEY. 
 
 know from another delightfully plain-spoken 
 letter, written five years later, in answer to 
 renewed importunities : — 
 
 " I have given you the amount of a con- 
 siderable fortune, and have destituted my- 
 self, for the purpose of realizing it, of nearly 
 four times the amount. Except for the 
 good-will which this transaction seems to 
 have produced between you and me, this 
 money, for any advantage it ever conferred 
 on you, might as well have been thrown into 
 the sea. Had I kept in my own hands this 
 X4,000 or X5,000, and administered it in 
 trust for your permanent advantage, I should 
 indeed have been your benefactor. The 
 error, however, was greater in the man of 
 mature age, extensive experience, and pene- 
 trating; intellect than in the crude and im- 
 petuous boy. Such an error is seldom com- 
 mitted twice." 
 
 But long before this, Shelley, though his 
 estimate of Godwin's powers, in common 
 with that of the people of the time, remained 
 extravagant, had found out the difference 
 between the author of Political Justice and 
 Plato and Bacon. 
 
 If any one wonders at the extent to which 
 Shelley let himself be fleeced by the philo-
 
 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 205 
 
 sophical radical of Skinner Street, he should 
 reserve some astonishment for the remainder 
 of the shearers. Shelle}'^, it is to be remem- 
 bered, was never in possession of his prop- 
 erty, and had only a small allowance at first, 
 and a thousand pounds a year after he was 
 twenty -four years old ; he was extravagant 
 in his generosity, and gave money with a 
 free hand, whenever he had any, to the poor 
 about him, to his needy friends, and to 
 causes of one kind and another which ex- 
 cited in him his passion for philanthropy. 
 He was, consequently, in his early days, 
 commonly in debt for his own expenses, and 
 often in danger of arrest and imprisonment. 
 When he mentioned his days of poverty, in 
 that letter to Godwin, it was not a mere 
 phrase ; and though a settlement was at last 
 made which provided for him sufficiently, 
 he was never ahead in his savings. Under 
 these circumstances, his biography at times 
 reminds one of the old comedy, with its mob 
 of parasites and legacy - hunters. He was 
 simply victimized by those who could estab- 
 lish any claim on his benevolence. No doubt 
 he gave willingly, with all his heart, to Pea- 
 cock and Leigh Hunt and the rest, as he did 
 %o Godwin, and thought it was his duty as
 
 206 BEMABKS ON SHELLEY. 
 
 well as his pleasure ; but his generosity does 
 not alter the fact that his acquaintances 
 were very dull of conscience in money mat- 
 ters. One begins to relent a little toward 
 Hogg, remembering that he did actually 
 share his own funds with Shelley just after 
 the expulsion from Oxford, when the latter 
 could get no money, owing to his father's 
 displeasure ; and for Horace Smith, the 
 banker, who sometimes advanced money to 
 Shelley, and not too much, one has a feeling 
 of amazed respect. 
 
 The worst misfortune of Shelley, however, 
 in the friends he made, was to have met and 
 married Harriet Westbrook. The circum- 
 stances of their union and its unlucky course 
 and tragical close have lately been for the 
 first time fully set forth. The marriage on 
 Shelley's side was not originally one of love, 
 but it became one of affection. For two 
 years life went on without the discovery of 
 anything to break the happiness of the pair ; 
 but after the birth of their first child trouble 
 arose, and rapidly culminated. It is most 
 likely that the sister-in-law, Eliza, who lived 
 with them, was the source of the original 
 dissension by her interference, arbitrariness, 
 and control of Harriet ; but, as Shelley had
 
 BEMAEES ON SHELLEY. 207 
 
 grown in mind and cliaracter, the difference 
 between him and his wife in endowment and 
 in taste was bound to make itself felt, and 
 to put an end to the unity of study and 
 spiiit of which he had dreamed ; and it is 
 clear enough that she had tired of the stud- 
 ies and the purposes in which Shelley's life 
 consisted, and that though overborne for a 
 time, by his influence, she was now showing 
 herself worldly, frivolous, and weak. She 
 had married the heir to a baronetcy and a 
 fortune, and desired to profit by it. In one 
 way and another she had become hard and 
 unyielding toward Shelley, had made him 
 thoroughly miserable, and, in the earlier 
 months of 1814, was living away from him ; 
 and he, on his side, as late as May in that 
 year, as appears from stanzas now first 
 printed, was trjang to soften her. While 
 affairs were in this condition he first met 
 Mary Godwin, and he fell passionately in 
 love with her, all the more because of the 
 long strain of dejection and loneliness ; and 
 in addition to the story of the dissensions 
 that had arisen in his family, and the dif- 
 ference of character and temperament wdiich 
 had declared itself between his wife and 
 himself, Shelley is said to have told Mary
 
 208 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 
 
 that Harriet had been unfaithful to him. 
 If he did not tell her then, he did after- 
 wards. On what evidence he relied we do 
 not know; nor is there any confirmatory 
 proof from other quarters except a letter of 
 Godwin's written after Harriet's suicide, in 
 which he states the same fact as coming 
 from unquestionable authority unconnected 
 with Shelley. Not long before his death 
 Shelley renewed the charge, though in a 
 veiled and inferential way, in a letter to 
 Southey, in which he defends himself for his 
 conduct in this matter, declares his inno- 
 cence of any harm done or intended, refuses 
 to be held responsible for the suicide of Har- 
 riet, and practically asserts that he had 
 grounds for divorce, had he chosen to free 
 himself in that way. There is no need to 
 prove that Shelley was right in his belief of 
 his wife's infidelity ; but if it be thought 
 that Shelley did in truth believe her guilty, 
 that has much to do with our estimate of 
 his action. He was twenty-two years old, 
 or nearly that, and he held radical views 
 as to the permanence and sacredness of the 
 marriage bond, as also did Mary, who in- 
 herited them from her mother. Their de- 
 Qisiou to unite their lives, under these cir-
 
 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 209 
 
 cum stances, was a practical admission that 
 Shelley's home was in fact broken up, and 
 that he was free to offer, and Mary to accept, 
 not legal union, but a common home, with 
 the expectation and purpose of complete 
 devotion one to the other, in a pure spirit 
 and for the ordinary ends of marriage. 
 
 Shelley did not proceed secretly. He sum- 
 moned Harriet, who had not thought of such 
 serious results of her action, to London, and 
 told her what he was going to do. She did 
 not consent to the separation, nor does she 
 seem to have regarded it as final. Shelley 
 had a settlement made for her by the law- 
 yers, provided credit for her, and two weeks 
 after the interview left England with Mary. 
 He wrote to Harriet on the journey, assured 
 her of his affection and his care for her, and 
 indulged a plan that she should live near 
 them, which is, perhaps, the most surprising 
 instance of Shelley's purity of mind, and of 
 the unworldliness or unreality, as one chooses 
 to call it, of his conception of how human 
 life might be lived. On his return he saw 
 her, and agreed to leave the children with 
 her ; and when his allowance was fixed at a 
 thousand pounds, he gave orders to honor 
 her drafts for two hundred pounds annually.
 
 210 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 
 
 She had an equal amount from her own 
 family, which had been paid since the be- 
 ginning of their married life. When Shel- 
 ley left England the second time, she was 
 thus provided for, one would think, suffi- 
 ciently. On his return he lost sight of her, 
 and was anxiously inquiring for her, when 
 the news of her suicide reached him. She 
 had put the children, of whom the eldest 
 was three years old, out to board, at a time 
 when he was ill ; she had not been permit- 
 ted to see her father ; but the circumstances 
 immediately surrounding her death are not 
 known. Shelley, though he bore his share of 
 natural sorrow for the death of one to whom 
 he had been tenderly attached, did not hold 
 himself guilty of any wrong. 
 
 It is no wonder that in the last few years 
 of his life Shelley would not talk of his 
 earlier days, and had a kind of shame in re- 
 membering in what ruin his hopes and pur- 
 poses and the enthusiasm of his youth had 
 fallen ; he felt it as an indignity to the 
 nobleness of spirit which, in spite of all his 
 failures, he knew had been his throughout. 
 As we see those years, it is only for himself 
 that we prize them ; and it is a pleasure to 
 be enabled to look on them free from that
 
 BEMABKS ON SUELLEY. 211 
 
 saddening retrospect of his own mind, and 
 observe liow natural and simple he really 
 was. No one has ever had the days of his 
 youth so laid ojDen to the common gaze, and 
 this is one charm of his personality, that we 
 know him as a brother or a friend. The 
 pages afford many happy anecdotes ; but 
 one -can linger here only to mark the con- 
 stant playfulness of Shelley, which was a 
 bright element in his earlier career and not 
 altogether absent in his Italian life. The 
 passion for floating paper -boats, which he 
 indulged unweariedly, is well known ; but 
 at all times he was ready for sport, and 
 could even trifle with his dearest plans, as 
 in the flotilla of bottles and aerial navy of 
 fire-balloons, all loaded with revolutionary 
 pamphlets, which he sent forth on the Dev- 
 onshire coast. His running about the little 
 garden, hand in hand with Harriet ; his im- 
 personating fabulous monsters with Leigh 
 Hunt's children, who begged him " not to do 
 the horn ; " and his favorite sport with his 
 little temporarily adopted Marlow girl, of 
 placing her on the dining-table, and rush- 
 ing with it across the long room, are in- 
 stances that readily recur to mind, and 
 illustrate the gayety and high spirits which
 
 212 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 
 
 really belonged to him, and which perhaps 
 the Serchio last knew when it bore him and 
 his boat on his summer-day voyages. This 
 side of his nature ought to be remembered, 
 as well as that " occasionally fiery, resentful, 
 and indignant " quality which Godwin ob- 
 served, and the intense and restless practi- 
 cality of the impatient reformer, when • one 
 thinks of Shelley (as he has been too often 
 represented) as only a morbid, sensitive, 
 idealizing poet, of a rather feminine spirit. 
 That portrait of him is untruthful, for he 
 was of a most masculine, active, and natu- 
 rally joyful nature. 
 
 After he left England for the last time, 
 and took up his abode in Italy, principally, 
 it would seem, because of the social re- 
 proach and public stigma under which he 
 lived, and by which he felt deeply wronged, 
 he was not really much more fortunate in 
 his company. The immediate reason for 
 the journey was to take Byron's natural 
 daughter, Allegra, to her father at Venice ; 
 the mother. Miss Clairmont, went with them, 
 and, as it turned out, continued to be a 
 member of Shelley's family, as she had been 
 since his union with Mary. It is now known 
 that the Shelleys were ignorant of the lia-
 
 EEMABKS ON SHELLEY. 213 
 
 ison, both when it began in London, and 
 afterward when they first met Byron at 
 Geneva ; but Shelley had a warm affection 
 for Miss Clairmont, whose friendlessness 
 appealed to his sympathy, and he spent 
 much time in Italy in trying to make Byron 
 do his duty toward Allegra, and to soften 
 the ill-nature of her parents toward each 
 other. Byron's conduct in this matter was 
 a powerful element in generating in Shelley 
 that thorough contempt he expressed for the 
 former as a man. But though Shelley's 
 most winning qualities are to be observed, 
 and his tact was conspicuously called forth 
 by their negotiations in regard to the child, 
 yet the connection with Miss Clairmont was 
 unfortunate. That it repeatedly drew scan- 
 dal upon him was a minor matter ; it was of 
 more consequence that in his family she was 
 a disturbing element, and Mary, who had 
 disliked to have her as an inmate almost 
 from the first, finally insisted on her with- 
 drawal, but not until frequent disagreements 
 had sadly marred the peace of Shelley's 
 home. Mary, indeed, was not perfect, any 
 more than other very young wives ; and by 
 her jealousies, and yet more, it seems, by 
 her attempts to make Shelley conform to the
 
 214 EEMAEES ON SHELLEY. 
 
 world, especially in the last year or two, she 
 tried and harassed him ; and so it came 
 about that his love took the form of tender- 
 ness for her welfare and feelings, and often 
 of despondency for himself. Miss Clair- 
 mont was a source of continual trouble for 
 him in many ways : she was of an unhappy 
 temperament and hard to live with ; but with 
 his long-enduring and charitable disposition, 
 and his extraordinary tenacity in attachment, 
 and perfect readiness to admit the least ob- 
 ligation upon him, proceeding from any one 
 in trouble, he never wavered in his devotion 
 to her interests and care for her happiness. 
 It is a curious fact that Miss Clairmont, 
 who lived to be very old, manipulated the 
 written records of this portion of her life, 
 so that her evidence is of very questionable 
 worth, though better, one hopes, than that 
 of her mother, the second Mrs. Godwin, 
 whose lying about the Shelleys was of the 
 most wholesale and conscienceless kind. 
 
 As with Miss Clairmont, so in a less de- 
 gree with others of the Italian circle. But 
 enough has been said of the character of the 
 people whom Shelley knew. It cannot be 
 that they cut so poor a figure because of 
 Shelley's presence, hard as the contrast of
 
 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 215 
 
 common human nature must be with him. 
 It is observable, and it is in some sort a test, 
 that he did not overvalue them. Hogg, Pea- 
 cock, and Medwin were all deceived, if they 
 thought he trusted them or held them closer 
 than mere friendly acquaintances ; there is 
 no evidence that he felt for Williams or 
 Trelawney any more than an affectionate 
 good will ; toward Leigh Hunt he had the 
 kindest feeling of gratitude and of respect, 
 and for Gisborne and Reveley a warm cor- 
 diality, but nothing more. Mary he loved, 
 though with full knowledge of her weak- 
 nesses, in a manly way ; for Miss Clairmont 
 he had a true affection ; and he recognized 
 poetically a womanly attractiveness in Mrs. 
 Williams, who seems to have represented to 
 him the spirit of restfulness and peace, in 
 the last months of his life. But at the end, 
 his errors respecting men and things being 
 swept away, his ideals removed into the 
 eternal world, and his disillusion complete, 
 the most abiding impression is of the loneli- 
 ness in which he found himself ; and remem- 
 bering this, one forgets the companions he 
 had upon his journey, and fastens attention 
 more closely upon the man through whose 
 genius that journey has become one of un- 
 dying memory.
 
 216 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 
 
 There Is no thought of eulogizing him in 
 saying that he represents the ideal of per- 
 sonal and social aspiration, of the love of 
 beauty and of virtue equally, and of the hope 
 of eradicating misery from the world ; hence 
 springs in large measure his hold on young 
 hearts, on those who value the spirit above 
 all else and do not confine their recognition 
 of it within too narrow bounds, and on all 
 who are believers in the reform of the world 
 by human agencies. He represents this 
 ideal of aspiration in its most impassioned 
 form ; and in his life one reads the saddest 
 history of disillusion. It is because, in the 
 course of this, he abated no whit of his life- 
 long hope, did not change his practice of 
 virtue, and never yielded his perfect faith in 
 the supreme power of love, both in human 
 life and in the universe, that his name has 
 become above all price to those over whom 
 his influence extends. It is, perhaps, more 
 as a man than as a poet merely that he is 
 beloved ; the shadows upon his reputation, 
 as one approaches nearer, are burnt away in 
 light ; and he is the more honored, the more 
 he is known. For it would be wrong to 
 close even these informal remarks without 
 expressing dissent from the assumption that
 
 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 217 
 
 Shelley's intellectual and moral life was one 
 long mistake. Disillusion it was, and the 
 nature of it has been indicated by the single 
 point of his acquaintances ; but a life of dis- 
 illusion and one of mere mistake are not 
 to be confounded together. Better fortune 
 cannot be asked for a youth than that he 
 should conceive life nobly, and, in finding 
 wherein it falls short, should yet not fall 
 short himself of his ideal beyond what may 
 be forgiven to human frailty. Shelley's 
 misconceptions were the conditions of his 
 living the ideal life at all, and differed from 
 those of other youths in face of an untried 
 world only by their moral elevation, passion, 
 and essential nobleness ; he matured as other 
 men do by time and growth and experience, 
 and he suffered much by the peculiar cir- 
 cumstances of his fate ; but in the issue the 
 substance of error in his life was less than 
 it seems. Shelley, at least, never admitted 
 he had been wrong in the essential doctrines 
 of his creed and the motives of his acts, 
 though he had been deceived in regard to 
 human nature and what was possible to it 
 in society.
 
 218 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 
 
 III. HIS ITALIAN LETTERS. 
 
 The prose work of Shelley has remained 
 in the obscurity which it once shared with 
 his poetry. The formal essays, which con- 
 cern the transitory affairs of the world or 
 themes of thought remote through their 
 generality, are valued, even by admirers 
 of Shelley, mainly as media of his spirit ; 
 the familiar letters, scattered in old books, 
 or collected only in a costly edition, and de- 
 prived of literary effectiveness because those 
 of high and enduring interest have never 
 been selected and massed until recently, have 
 escaped any wide public attention ; even the 
 translations have been neglected. All this 
 really large body of prose, however exalted 
 by its informing enthusiasm, however exqui- 
 site in language, and melodious, lies outside 
 the open pathways of literature. It is this 
 fact which gave the element of surprise to 
 what Mr. Arnold called his doubt " whether 
 Shelley's delightful Essays and Letters, 
 which deserve to be far more read than they 
 are now, will not resist the wear and tear of 
 time better, and finally come to stand higher, 
 than his poetry," — a judgment which well 
 deserved Dr. Garnett's quiet rejoinder that
 
 BEMARKS ON SHELLEY. 219 
 
 " this deliverance will be weighed by those 
 to whose lot it may fall to determine Mr. 
 Arnold's own place as a critic." Dr. Gar- 
 nett adds that, in an age when all letters 
 approximate to the ideal set by men of busi- 
 ness, Shelley's alone, among those of his 
 time, rank with Gray's, Pope's, Cowper's, or 
 Walpole's in possessing a certain classical 
 impress similar to that of deliberate artistic 
 work ; and, secondly, that they exhibit the 
 mind of the poet as clearly as Marlborough's 
 do the mind of the general, or Macaulay's 
 the mind of the man of letters. Their two 
 prime qualities are beauty of form and trans- 
 parency. 
 
 The sense of form has usually been denied 
 to SheUey, and if by it is meant the purely 
 critical impulse to remodel, revise, and polish 
 for the sake of that finish which the schools 
 prize, Shelley neither possessed it nor sought 
 for it with any strong desire, but rather re- 
 jected it as dangerously submitting the mind 
 to system, against which he was prejudiced. 
 But if by the sense of form is meant the in- 
 stinct for proportion, for regulated combi- 
 nation, for natural development of sensation 
 into idea, idea into passion, so that the poem 
 issues in a single harmony in the mind and
 
 220 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 
 
 heart ; if, in other words, by that loose 
 phrase is meant, not the corrective power of 
 the critical, but the shaping power of the 
 creative faculty working out ideal beauty 
 directly, then both in his brief and in much 
 of his longer poems Shelley was singularly 
 distinguished by it. This spontaneous beauty 
 of form, if we may so phrase it, is the only 
 species that is found in these letters : fitness 
 of words, sweetness of cadence, modulation 
 of feeling in immediate response to thought 
 and image, all conspiring to make up per- 
 fection of utterance, are continually present, 
 but not through erasure and elaboration. 
 Shelley's self-training in literature, almost 
 unrivaled as an apprenticeship in its length 
 and continuity,' more comprehensive, pro- 
 found, and ardent than Pope's, more vital 
 than Milton's, had made such literary lucid- 
 ity and grace the habit of his pen, and he 
 was fortunate in employing his gift upon 
 subjects intrinsically most interesting to cul- 
 tivated men : upon the art and landscape of 
 Italy, or his own always high human rela- 
 tions, or his poetic moods. 
 
 In what he says of statues and paintings 
 he shows but slight knowledge of art. The 
 keenness of his perceptions and the warmth
 
 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 221 
 
 of his feelings made him particularly open 
 to sensuous effects, so that in general he 
 worships the later schools. In painting, 
 especially, he can hardly be considered a safe 
 guide for others, because his praise or cen- 
 sure is largely dependent on his tempera- 
 ment for its justification : a picture which is 
 consonant with his own imagination, and 
 stirs it, is thereby raised and glorified, but 
 one whose theme would have been differ- 
 ently developed by himself is at once made 
 pale by contrast with the quick visions of 
 his own vividly pictorial mind. Here is a 
 portion of his description of a Christ Beati- 
 fied:— 
 
 " The countenance is heavy, as it were, 
 with the rapture of the spirit; the lips 
 parted, but scarcely parted, with the breath 
 of intense but regulated passion ; the eyes 
 are calm and benignant ; the whole features 
 harmonized in majesty and sweetness." 
 
 One cannot but feel that the face which 
 Shelley thus summons up before ns bears 
 the same relation to the original as what the 
 dull-minded call his plagiarisms from Lodge 
 do to that poet's lyrics. Shelley often paints 
 the picture over upon the outlines of the old 
 canvas ; but this transforming or penetrat-
 
 222 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 
 
 ing power, as it will be differently named 
 just as one believes the given picture to lack 
 or possess what Shelley saw in it, lends such 
 passages not only surpassing beauty, but a 
 real value as interpretations of art. Much 
 as Ruskin would differ from Shelley's judg- 
 ments, the two are essentially similar in their 
 mode of treatment, and in their faculty of 
 giving the equivalent of form and color in 
 eloquence. 
 
 The description of landscape, which is an- 
 other principal topic, possesses even more 
 plainly classic beauty. Whether Shelley 
 writes of nature in her wild and picturesque 
 scenes, or where the presence of man has 
 added pathos or dignity to her loveliness ; 
 whether he flashes the view upon us in one 
 perfect line, or unfolds it slowly in uncon- 
 fused detail, he displays the highest power 
 in this field of literature. This view from 
 the Forum of Pompeii, which, instead of ,be- 
 ing robed with " the gray veil of his own 
 words," seems filled with " the purple noon's 
 transparent light," cannot be surpassed as 
 speech at once familiar and noble : — 
 
 " At the upper end, suppoi'ted on an ele- 
 vated platform, stands the temple of Jupi- 
 ter. Under the colonnade of its portico we
 
 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 223 
 
 sate, and pulled out our oranges, and figs, and 
 bread, and raedlars, — sorry fare, you will 
 say, — and rested to eat. Here was a mag- 
 nificent spectacle. Above and between the 
 multitudinous shafts of the sun-shinins: col- 
 umns was seen the sea, reflecting the purple 
 noon of heaven above it, and supporting, as 
 it were, on its line the dark, lofty mountains 
 of Sorrento, of a blue inexpressibly deep, 
 and tinged toward their summits with 
 streaks of new-fallen snow. Between was 
 one small green island. To the right was 
 Caprese, Inarime, Prochyta, and Misenum. 
 Behind was the single summit of Vesuvius, 
 rolling forth volumes of thick white smoke, 
 whose foam-like column was sometimes darted 
 into the clear dark sky, and fell in little 
 streaks along the wind. Between Vesuvius 
 and the nearer mountains, as through a 
 chasm, was seen the main line of the lof- 
 tiest Apennines to the east. The day was 
 radiant and warm. Every now and then 
 we heard subterranean thunder of Vesuvius ; 
 its distant, deep peals seemed to shake the 
 very air and light of day, which interpene- 
 trated our frames with the sullen and tre- 
 mendous sound." 
 
 Thus he wrote when merely passive to
 
 224 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 
 
 nature's influences ; but when he begins to 
 think he irradiates the scene ; he lifts it 
 with his aspiration and softens it with his 
 regret; he brings it near by reminiscences 
 of the English fields and cliffs and streams ; 
 he informs it with the large interests of the 
 intellectual life ; and not infrequently he 
 concludes with a passage which, in the ar- 
 rangement of its images, the sequence of its 
 thought and feeling, the unity of its effect, 
 in all except metrical structure, is a poem. 
 Many paragraphs might be cited which 
 show the character of his genius as directly 
 as do his verses, and which justify the claim 
 advanced for them as having the permanent 
 interest of ideal beauty. 
 
 The principal charm of these letters, how- 
 ever, as Dr. Garnett says, is not artistic, 
 but moral. It is not meant to refer by this 
 term to the practical morality of Shelley's 
 deeds, or to his conscientiousness, humanity, 
 self-sacrifice, or other such qualities as they 
 are here displayed ; of these there is no 
 longer need to speak. Nor is it meant sim- 
 ply to express the gratification one feels at 
 finding that Shelley, unlike many men of 
 letters who disappoint us by being only 
 common mortals in private life, never falls
 
 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 225 
 
 below our conception of him, indicative as it 
 is of his purity that his " unpremeditated 
 song " does not fail to reach the height of 
 his great argument. What impresses one 
 most is rather the character of the life it- 
 self, of the mind to which " trust in all 
 things high came natural," that moved with 
 equal ease among the things of beauty, on 
 the heights of thought, or amid the common 
 and trivial cares of household life and in 
 the offices of friendship, and knew no dif- 
 ference in the level of his life, so single was 
 his nature and so completely expressed in 
 all he did. In the most ideal passages, in 
 those most impersonal, one does not lose the 
 sense of friendliness in them, of the sweet 
 human relationship which underlies the tell- 
 ing of what he has to say, and keeps the 
 letters in their appropriate sphere. They 
 are not rhapsodies, or soliloquies, or dis- 
 quisitions ; in other words, the visitations of 
 the spirit that came to Shelley, and left 
 record of themselves in this beauty and elo- 
 quence and imaginative passion, did not iso- 
 late him even momentarily, and could not 
 sever him from his friends. Who these 
 were, we know well enough : Miss Hitche- 
 ner, the blue-stocking ; Hogg, the betrayer ;
 
 22f) REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 
 
 the Willi amses and Gisbornes, who seem to 
 have belonged to the class of people known 
 as satisfying ; Peacock, who, with all his 
 nympholepsy, was a born beef-eater ; Smith, 
 the obliging ; Hunt, the " wren," and Byron, 
 the " eagle," in Sl*elley's nomenclature, — 
 the too fortunate people who knew Shelley 
 and whom he loved. They formed the en- 
 vironment, which needs to be kept in mind 
 by any who would estimate Shelley's moral 
 power ; amid them he lived his high life and 
 made it theirs, in the case of the most, dur- 
 ing: their communion with him. In a vas^ue 
 analogical way he sometimes brings to mind 
 the Greek gods, who, with all their divine 
 attributes of beauty, power, dignity, were 
 singular among deities for their companion- 
 ableness ; Shelley had that divine quality of 
 being familiar and retaining his original 
 brightness. Toward Byron alone does he 
 show any repulsion ; he recognized Byron's 
 admirable qualities, but he was alienated 
 by the latter's selfishness, worldliness, and 
 earthliness, even while he kept terms of 
 amity. Shelley's sentence on Byron is most 
 serious evidence against him, and it is now 
 supported by much that Shelley could not
 
 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 227 
 
 have known ; but it need not be discussed 
 here. 
 
 It is especially fortunate that the letters 
 exhibit him after his boyhood, with its false 
 starts, its follies and prejudices, its narrow- 
 ness and confusion, was passed ; of that time 
 we get only a noble echo in his sad remem- 
 brance, amid his seeming failure, of the lofty 
 purpose with which he had entered life, 
 while we see the depth unconf used by the 
 tumult of his soul. In these last years, it is 
 true, the thwarting of his practical instinct 
 was ending in hopelessness ; but if the 
 earthly paradise that was the faith of his 
 youth was now fading away, he was lifting 
 his eyes to the city in the heavens, and had 
 acknowledged the vanity of seeking the ideal 
 he knew, except in the eternal ; he had 
 worked out his salvation. Perhaps after all 
 we do wrong to lament his death ; with that 
 tragedy, in which every thought of Shelley 
 involuntarily concludes, his work as a quick- 
 ener of the spirit was accomplished. More 
 finished works of art he might have given to 
 us ; he could not have left a nobler or more 
 enkindling memory. These letters help in 
 the still necessary labor of clearing away
 
 228 BEMAEES ON SHELLEY. 
 
 the misconceptions concerning him. In 
 them one sees him only in the quiet of his 
 soul, and will come to a better knowledge 
 and perhaps a higher truth concerning him 
 than is possible by reading his changeful 
 poems alone.
 
 SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS OF 
 OTHELLO, lAGO, AND SHY- 
 LOCK. 
 
 An actor of genius, at the moment of im- 
 personating (either in imagination or in 
 fact) a character of Shakespeare's, is prob- 
 ably nearer to the dramatist's creative mood 
 than any one else can get, except possibly 
 the poet born. He may, to use a phrase of 
 Booth's, in speaking of this mode of coming 
 to an understanding of Shakespeare, " hit 
 it " by the mere force within that bears him 
 naturally on. Or, to take the case in which 
 his sympathy with the role is imperfect, he 
 may perceive wherein he is defective more 
 clearly by his conscious failure than by any 
 analysis. Again, the difficulties that arise 
 from not knowing how Shakespeare put the 
 play on the stage may not be solved rightly, 
 it is true, by the moderns ; but the conclu- 
 sions of the acting fraternity on these mat- 
 ters are much more worthy of weight than 
 those of men unacquainted with the prac- 
 
 ;i2g
 
 230 SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 
 
 tical working of that " business " which is 
 a sort of cement for the scenes. Support 
 could be found from many quarters for what 
 Dr. Furness says in behalf of actors as use- 
 ful critics ; but without further reasoning, 
 one may invite attention to some considera- 
 tions in regard to Othello suggested by quo- 
 tations from memoirs of the profession and 
 other records, and especially from Booth's 
 annotated acting-copy, extracts from which, 
 although not made with any view to publica- 
 tion, may be found in the Variorum edition 
 of the play. 
 
 Mr. White, in his satirical essay upon 
 The Acting of I ago, expresses the opinion 
 that all the modern impersonations are in- 
 adequate, and that the fault springs from 
 a radical misconception of the character. 
 Theatrical companies are made up, every 
 one knows, with an actor for each of the 
 varieties of human nature which are usual 
 in a play ; so far as character is concerned, 
 they enact types. lago, of course, falls to 
 the lot of the " heavy villain," whose aim, 
 in stage life, is to do his wickedest always, 
 everywhere, and in as many guises as pos- 
 sible ; he is continually pointing to the mark 
 of Cain on his forehead, so that there shall
 
 SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 231 
 
 be no mistake about his identity. " I think," 
 says Booth, — and the criticism holds all 
 the meat of Mr. White's essay in a nutshell, 
 — " the light comedian should play the vil- 
 lain's part, not the ' heavy man ; ' I mean 
 the Shakespearean villains." In consonance 
 with this is his reiterated advice to his lago 
 to think evil all the time, but not to show 
 it ; to be the prince of good fellows, inex- 
 haustible in honhomie, genial, jovial, gentle- 
 manly, — the friend and pleasant companion 
 whom every one liked, whom Desdemona 
 trifled with, and Cassio respected for his 
 soldiership, and Othello trusted as a man as 
 faithful in love as he was wise in the world. 
 " A certain bluffness," Booth says " (which 
 my temperament does not afford), should 
 be added to preserve the military flavor of 
 the character : in this particular I fail ut- 
 terly ; my lago lacks the soldierly quality." 
 So far, certainly, Booth does not differ from 
 Mr. White in his conception of the bearing, 
 the outward manner and sensible aspect, of 
 the Venetian liar. Let us look at it from 
 Mr. White's point of view : " Edwin Booth's 
 lago is not externally a mere hardened vil- 
 lain, but a super-subtle Venetian, who works 
 out his devilish plans with a dexterous light-
 
 232 SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 
 
 ness of touch and smooth sinuosity of move- 
 ment that suggest the transmigration of a 
 serpent into human form. And in his vis- 
 age, and, above all, in his eye, burns the 
 venom of his soul. . . . But even Edwin 
 Booth's lago, although much finer and more 
 nearly consistent with itself and with the 
 facts of the tragedy than any other that is 
 known to the annals of the stage, is not the 
 lago that Shakespeare drew." But what is 
 it that is lacking ? Mr. White paints lago 
 as the popular flatterer, the sympathetic 
 sycophant, the gay, easy-going, pleased, and 
 pleasing fellow ; and, so far as the side 
 shown to the world is concerned, this is 
 Booth's conception, and (allowing for the 
 defect of soldier -like frankness which he 
 feels in himself) it is his impersonation. 
 Why is it not, then, Shakespeare's lago ? 
 Mr. White is ready with his answer : Be- 
 cause Shakespeare's lago would do no harm, 
 except to advance his fortunes ; he had no 
 malice ; he was merely selfish, utterly un- 
 scrupulous as to his means of obtaining what 
 he sought, ready to win his gain at any ruin. 
 Now, it is clear that the evil which Mr. 
 White has just said burns in the actor's eye 
 is not mere selfishness, not the cold light of
 
 SOME ACTORS' CBITICISMS. 233 
 
 calculation simply, with no more rooted pas- 
 sion ; it is just what Mr. White says lago 
 did not have, — it is malice. So one gets the 
 hint ; and on searching the remarks of Booth 
 to see what indications there are of his con- 
 ception of the essence of lago's soul, the 
 spring of his motive, the changing emotions 
 that enveloped his thoughts at their birth, 
 one perceives at once that, while Booth 
 would have lago outwardly amiable, he has 
 not the least idea of reducing the dye of 
 villainy in which the character has been 
 steeped by those of old time. Inside, Booth 
 has no doubt, lago was a spirit of hate, and 
 he knows at what moments of anxious in- 
 terest, at what crises of the temptation and 
 the plotting, this will gleam out in the ex- 
 pression of the eye, or in those slight tell- 
 tale changes which are natural to the most 
 self-possessed man, and are significant to us 
 only because we are on the watch for them. 
 By observing, consequently, with what pas- 
 sages he connects this devilish malignancy 
 of nature in lago, one can judge, as between 
 him and Mr. White, what justification he 
 has for making lago cruel as well as self- 
 ish, and revengeful as well as ambitious. 
 Mr. White's theory is that lago wished to
 
 234 SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 
 
 supplant Cassio, and ruined Desdemona in 
 order to accomplish this end ; that he used 
 his suspicion of Othello's intimacy with his 
 wife almost as an after-thought, to bolster 
 up his purpose with an excuse ; and that, 
 having chosen his method with perfect in- 
 difference to its morality or its humanity, he 
 overreached himself and failed. This view 
 may gain upon one by its plausible and em- 
 phatic setting forth, just as pleas for Judas 
 Iscariot or any other client of a clever devil's 
 advocate may do, but only momentarily ; for 
 when one attempts to adjust the speeches 
 of lago, word by word and line by line, to 
 this conception, especially with such notes 
 of direction and caution as these of Booth's 
 to the actor, echoing the text, as they do, 
 through all modulations of suspicion, sus- 
 pense, and suppressed passion, the idea of 
 an lago without malice simply dissolves, and 
 leaves not a rack behind. In reality, .this 
 new notion of Mr. White's is only the old 
 story that lago is motiveless, which has dis- 
 turbed so many critics, and given occasion 
 to such marvelous explanations of his vil- 
 lainy. The disparity between the moral 
 causes and the mortal results, between the 
 errors and the penalties of the victims, has 
 
 (
 
 SOME ACTORS' CEITICISMS. 235 
 
 been widely felt ; the attempt is consequently- 
 made to ascribe a cause for the catastrophe 
 that shall justify it to the reason ; and nat- 
 urally one writer has over-accented and ex- 
 aggerated one element in the play, and a 
 second writer another element, and so on ; 
 but Mr. White bears away the palm from 
 all in his assertion that lago did all the mis- 
 chief just to get on in the world, and that 
 the only reason it was so great was because 
 of the unlimited power for harm in the union 
 of ability to flatter with utter unscrupulous- 
 ness in a man's make-up. Shakespeare gives 
 the key-note of the action in the very first 
 words lago utters, unheard except by his 
 own bosom. What was the first thought on 
 his lips then ? "I hate the Moor." And 
 perhaps in that most difficult moment of the 
 role, the climax of lago's fate, the elder 
 Booth was right in making the expression of 
 this intense enmity dominant in " the Par- 
 thian look which lago, as he was borne off, 
 wounded and in bonds, gave Othello, — a 
 Gorgon stare, in which hate seemed both 
 petrified and petrifying." In this matter 
 the actors seem to carry it over the editor, 
 who, indeed, was in that essay a better social 
 satirist than Shakespearean scholar ; and, to
 
 236 SOME ACTOBS' CRITICISMS. 
 
 our mind, tlie conception of Mr. White is 
 too inharmonious, also, with the intellectual 
 power and the delight in its exercise so 
 marked in Shakespeare's and in Booth's 
 lago. 
 
 There is more scope for different inter- 
 pi-etations in Othello's case than in lago's. 
 Othello, it is obvious to any one of the least 
 insight, is a character in whom temperament 
 counts for so much more than anything else 
 as practically to possess the whole man ; his 
 actions proceed directly from his nature ; 
 his doubts and suspicions act at once upon 
 his heart, and are converted into emotion of 
 the most simple and primitive type almost 
 instantaneously; his mental agony itself 
 tends to become blind physical suffering ; he 
 does not think, — he feels. It is in the 
 expression of temperament that the actor is 
 left most free by the dramatist, is least 
 shackled by words, and oftenest relies upon 
 other modes of utterance, among which (we 
 too easily forget) language is only one. 
 
 In Othello, consequently, who is the crea- 
 ture of his temperament, the actor influences 
 the character to an unusual degree ; and as 
 the range of feeling is from the lowest notes
 
 SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 237 
 
 of tender happiness to the explosions of un- 
 limited despair, the way in which the actor 
 conceives of feeling, his ideas of what makes 
 it noble, and of the manner in which a grand 
 nature would express it, affect the play pro- 
 foundly. A certain bent has been given to 
 the stage interpretation and also to criticism, 
 by the notion that Shakespeare meant to 
 exhibit in Othello a barbaric passion, the 
 boiling up of a savage nature, the Oriental 
 fervor and rashness, the daemon of the Moor- 
 ish race. Yet nothing is plainer in Shake- 
 speare than his utter disregard of historical 
 accuracy ; he never depicted a race type, ex- 
 cept the Jewish. If Theseus is an Athenian, 
 or Coriolanus or Csssar himself a Roman, 
 then Othello may be a Moor ; but it is most 
 conformable to the facts to regard them all 
 as simply ideal men, who take from their 
 circumstances a color of nationality and a 
 place in time, but who are essentially all of 
 one race. The view of those actors who 
 give Othello a ferocity of emotion because 
 he is a Moor, or of those critics who discern 
 in the violence and brute unreason of some 
 players in this part something to praise on 
 the score of Othello's birth under a hot 
 Mauritanian sun deserves no sympathy. The
 
 238 SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 
 
 Oriental touch in the impersonation ought 
 not to go beyond such slight signs and 
 tokens as the crescent scimiter, — of which 
 Booth says, " It is harmless," — if we are to 
 keep to Shakespeare's art as something bet- 
 ter than a costumer's. Othello does not ex- 
 hibit one extravagance that requires to be 
 excused by the reflection that it is natural 
 to an alien race, though not to the English. 
 But within the limits of the character con- 
 ceived as merely ideal, there is a fine op- 
 portunity for difference among actors, and 
 they have availed themselves of it. To in- 
 dicate it by a word, Othello's passion seems 
 to have been the cardinal thought of Kean, 
 irresistible, compulsive as "the Pontick Sea," 
 impressive by its main force and elemental 
 sweep ; Fechter, whose conception of noble- 
 ness of nature was a poor one, sank all the 
 heroic in the melodrama to which the situa- 
 tions lent themselves ; and Booth, giving far 
 more distinctness to Othello's suffering, go 
 that his revenge becomes hardly moi-e than 
 an incident in the course of his own soul's 
 torture, reveals the scene of the tragedy at 
 once as in Othello's breast, where the spirit 
 of evil is feeding on a mighty but guileless 
 heart. It is not Desdemona's death that
 
 SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 239 
 
 is the climax, — that is mere pity ; but 
 the tragic element finds its conclusion in 
 Othello's last speech and stroke. The in- 
 tensity of Kean or the ideality of Booth, 
 working upon the tragic temperament in 
 each, must produce Othello with a differ- 
 ence : one tempts to excess in ferocity, the 
 other in pathos ; but either is consistent with 
 the text. After all, it is with great actors 
 as with poets, — their creations partake of 
 their own nature, in all heroic and ideal 
 parts ; but if, as is thought, sympathy is the 
 best revealer of the inner meaning of works 
 of the imagination, certainly the disciplined 
 and habitual enacting of great roles by ac- 
 tors of genius ought to be a source of light 
 and knowledge regarding them, notwith- 
 standing the allowance that is to be made 
 for the " personal error " of individuality. 
 
 It is a striking quality in the immortality 
 of The Merchant of Venice that it has sur- 
 vived a change in the public mind in its at- 
 titude toward the Jewish people. To the 
 Elizabethans, and Shakespeare among them, 
 the Jew was hateful. It may well be ques- 
 tioned to what extent Shakespeare himself, 
 with all the tolerance that his understanding
 
 240 SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 
 
 of the springs of human nature gave him, 
 felt the pity in the dramatic situation of 
 Shylock that a modern audience must feel. 
 Booth's conception of Shakespeare's creation 
 is too direct and natural not to justify itself 
 to the student, — " ' an inhuman wretch, in- 
 capable of pity, void and empty from any 
 dram of mercy.' It has been said that he 
 was an affectionate father and a faithful 
 friend. When, where, and how does he 
 manifest the least claim to such commenda- 
 tion ? Tell me that, and unyoke ! 'T was 
 the money value of Leah's ring that he 
 grieved over, not its association with her, 
 else he would have shown some affection for 
 her daughter, which he did not or she would 
 not have called her home ' a hell,' robbed 
 and left him. Shakespeare makes her do 
 these un- Hebrew things to intensify the 
 baseness of Shylock's nature. If we side 
 with him in his self-defense, 't is because we 
 have charity, which he had not ; if we pity 
 him under the burden of his merited pun- 
 ishment, 't is because we are human, which 
 he is not, except in shape, and even that, I 
 think, should indicate the crookedness of his 
 nature." Booth goes on to justify this tra- 
 ditional conception by an easy argument
 
 SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. £41 
 
 against the notion of " the heroic Hebrew," 
 the type of the vengeance of a persecuted 
 race, whose wrongs justify its acts. He re- 
 fers to the " dangerous ' bit of business ' " 
 when Shylock whets his knife. " Would 
 the heroic Hebrew have stooped to such a 
 paltry action ? No, never, in the very white- 
 heat of his pursuit of vengeance ! But ven- 
 geance is foreign to Shylock's thought ; 't is 
 revenge he seeks, and he gets just what all 
 who seek it get, — ' sooner or later,' as the 
 saying is." 
 
 This characterization is not too vigorous, 
 nor does it go too far. We may find it not 
 only in Shylock as Shakespeare drew him, 
 but reflected also from Antonio. It is in 
 Antonio personally that the attitude of the 
 mediaeval Christian toward the Jew is found. 
 The unexplained melancholy of Antonio, his 
 fidelity in high-minded friendship, and the 
 dignity of his bearing under the cruelty to 
 which he is exposed have obscured to us the 
 other side of his character as the Rialto 
 merchant. We see more of Bassanio's An- 
 tonio than of Shylock's : the man who had 
 interfered with the usurer in every way and 
 personally maltreated him, and was as like 
 to do the same again ; the proud, hard-
 
 242 SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 
 
 hearted, and insulting magnifico whom Shy- 
 lock hated for himself. Antonio is every 
 whit as heartless to the Jew in the hour of 
 his triumph as Shylock was to him when the 
 balance leaned the other way. His cruelty 
 is lacking only in the physical element ; it 
 is not bloody, but it goes to the bone and 
 marrow of Shylock's nature none the less. 
 There is no sign that Shakespeare saw any 
 wrong in all this. It was thus that the 
 Christians looked upon the Jews, and they 
 thought such treatment right. Shakespeare 
 differed from others — from Marlowe, for 
 example, in his delineation of the Jew of 
 Malta — in one point only : he was able to 
 take Shylock's point of view, to understand 
 his motives, to assign the reasons with which 
 revenge justified its own motions ; in a word, 
 to represent Shylock's humanity. The 
 speeches he puts into the Jew's mouth are 
 intense and eloquent expressions of the rea- 
 soning of that " lodged hate " in his bosom ; 
 they are true to fact and to nature ; on our 
 ears they come with overwhelming force, 
 and it is impossible to our thoughts that 
 Shakespeare could have written them with- 
 out sympathy for the wrongs that they set 
 forth with such fiery heat. But when from
 
 SOME ACTOES' CEITICISMS. 243 
 
 this it is argued that Shakespeare, in writing 
 this play, made a deliberate plea for tolera- 
 tion, and carried it as far as the necessities 
 of his plot and the temper of his times per- 
 mitted, then it is needful to remind ourselves 
 of what Booth calls " the baseness of Shy- 
 lock's nature." Shakespeare did represent 
 him as base, with avarice, cunning, and re- 
 venge for the constituent elements of his 
 character ; he did not hesitate to let the 
 exhibition of these low qualities approach 
 the farcical, as he would never have done 
 had he thought of the Jew as in any sense 
 heroic. Shylock had suffered insult and 
 wrong, but there was nothing in him indi- 
 vidually to excite commiseration. From be- 
 ginning to end he shows no noble quality. 
 Modern sympathy with him, apart from the 
 pity that tragedy necessarily stirs, is social 
 sympathy, not personal ; it is because he is 
 an outcast and belongs to an outcast race, 
 because every man's hand is against him and 
 against all his people, that the audience of 
 this century perceives an injustice inherent 
 in his position itself, antecedent to, and in- 
 dependent of, any of his acts ; and this in- 
 justice is ignored in the play. The feeling 
 which Shylock, as a person, excites, and
 
 244 SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 
 
 should excite, is nearer that which Lady 
 Martin describes as her experience : " I have 
 always felt in the acting that my desire to 
 find extenuations for Shylock's race and for 
 himself leaves me, and my heart grows al- 
 most as stony as his own. I see his fiendish 
 nature fully revealed, I have seen the knife 
 sharpened to cut quickly through the flesh, 
 the scales brought forward to weigh it ; have 
 watched the cruel, eager eyes, all strained 
 and yearning to see the gushing blood well- 
 ing from the side ' nearest the heart,' and 
 gloating over the fancied agonies and death- 
 pangs of his bitter foe. This man-monster, 
 this pitiless, savage nature, is beyond the 
 pale of humanity ; it must be made power- 
 less to hurt. I have felt that with him the 
 wrongs of his race are really as nothing 
 compared with his own remorseless hate. 
 He is no longer the wronged and suffering 
 man ; and I longed to pour down on his 
 head the ' justice ' he has clamored for, and 
 will exact without pity." Upon this matter 
 Spedding admits of no reply. " The best 
 contribution," he says, " which I can offer 
 to this discussion is the expression of an old 
 man's difficulty in accepting these new dis- 
 coveries of profound moral and political de«
 
 SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 245 
 
 signs underlying Shakespeare's choice and 
 treatment of his subjects. I believe he was 
 a man of business, — that his principal busi- 
 ness Was to produce plays which would 
 draw. . . . But if, instead of looking about 
 for a story to ' please ' the Globe audience, 
 he had been in search of a subject under 
 cover of which he might steal into their 
 minds ' a more tolerant feeling toward the 
 Hebrew race,' I cannot think he would have 
 selected for his hero a rich Jewish merchant 
 plotting the murder of a Christian rival by 
 means of a fraudulent contract, which made 
 death the penalty of non-payment at the 
 day, and insisting on the exaction of it. In 
 a modern Christian audience it seems to be 
 possible for a skillful actor to work on the 
 feelings of an audience so far as to make 
 a man engaged in such a business an object 
 of respectful sympathy. But can anybody 
 believe that in times when this would have 
 been much more difficult, Shakespeare would 
 have chosen such a case as a favorable one 
 to suggest toleration to a public prejudiced 
 against Jews ? " 
 
 The omnipresent devil's advocate has sev- 
 eral times come to Shylock's defense with a 
 legal plea. Those who could find something
 
 246 SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 
 
 to urge in extenuation of Judas Iscariot had 
 an easy task in showing that the Jew of 
 Venice was more sinned against than sin- 
 ning. The decisions of the young doctor 
 who came armed with the recommendation 
 of the learned Bellario have been overruled 
 in every court of appeal. The bond itself 
 is declared invalid, inasmuch as it contained 
 an immoral proviso in the article that sought 
 Antonio's death; the attempt to defeat it, 
 its validity having once been granted, by de- 
 nying the right to draw blood and requiring 
 the exact amount of a pound of flesh to be 
 cut out, is characterized as a wretched quib- 
 ble, and set aside on the ground that a right 
 once allowed carries with it the minor rights 
 to make it effectual ; the denial of the orig- 
 inal debt for the reason that it had been ten- 
 dered and refused in open court is declared 
 a gross error, such tender having no other 
 result than to destroy any claim for interest 
 subsequently. But not to mention all the 
 grave reasons alleged to break down the 
 reputation of the Court of Venice and show 
 the illegality of its judgments, it is clear 
 that on legal grounds the case was very 
 badly managed, and in the event the Jew 
 met with no better fortune than was the lot
 
 SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 247 
 
 of his race before an unscrupulous and hos- 
 tile tribunal everywhere. Nevertheless, the 
 disputants upon the other side, who allege the 
 substantial justice of the decisions rendered, 
 do well to remove the discussion out of the 
 plane of legality. There is much that is 
 weighty in their argument. Shyloek must 
 be regarded as standing, after the nature of 
 Judaism, for the law as a thing of the letter ; 
 this is the justice which he demands, not 
 real, but literal ; and if, by a still more 
 strict interpretation of the letter of the bond 
 than he had thought of, his claim was de- 
 feated, the audience will acknowledge the 
 relevancy of the new point that is made, 
 and will enjoy the spectacle of the Biter 
 Bit, in which there is always an element of 
 comic justice. As to the quibble involved, 
 that belonsTS to the nature of literal inter- 
 pretation always. Thus the matter is not 
 without defense even on this level. But 
 what really pleases the audience is not the 
 method, but the fact, of the Jew's defeat; 
 and in the fact, however brought about, lies 
 the ethical element, the victory of real over 
 illusory justice, of equity over legality, of 
 the right over the pretense of right. Shake- 
 speare was not exjiressly philosophical ; but
 
 248 SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 
 
 there is little straining of the facts of the 
 case in the view that in the discomfiture of 
 that " law " which the Jew invoked, in the 
 signal defeat inflicted on the letter of the 
 bond, there is a suggestion of the conflict 
 between Judaism and Christianity, the lit- 
 eral and the spiritual, the law and that jus- 
 tice with its elements of mercy into which 
 the law develops, which is one of the great 
 phases of historical civilization. Whether 
 Shakespeare put it there is immaterial ; but 
 that a modern audience finds it there, and 
 that it was at least dimly present to an 
 Elizabethan audience, is hardly to be ques- 
 tioned. The idea is a simple and ancient 
 one ; and in it is to be found whatever eth- 
 ical meaning the play may have. 
 
 But it ought to be always remembered 
 that the primary endowment of Shakesj)eare 
 was the artistic temperament : he was a poet 
 first, and everything else afterwards. To 
 say this is the same thing with saying — 
 though it must be stated briefly — that the 
 ethical principle in him was a necessity of 
 the imagination, not of the understanding ; 
 was vision rather than inference ; was a part 
 and not the whole. One can no more im- 
 agine life truly without ethics than he can
 
 SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 249 
 
 imagine mass without cohesion ; a creative 
 genius, consequently, a man of imagination 
 all compact, does not necessarily start from 
 ethics in moulding his works, but it is more 
 likely that the moral principle which his 
 works must contain as a part of their real- 
 ity will be secondary and derivative. Shake- 
 speare is ethical because he imagined life 
 truly ; he did not imagine life truly because 
 he had thought out, in Lord Bacon's man- 
 ner, the general principles of morals.
 
 SIR GEORGE BEAUMONT, COLE- 
 RIDGE, AND WORDSWORTH. 
 
 Sir George Beaumont appears to have 
 been one of the most agreeable of men. 
 He had not merely high breeding, but hu- 
 manity of disposition, delightful compan- 
 ionableness, and the refinement that springs 
 from artistic pursuits. Haydon accuses his 
 manners of a want of moral courage. " What 
 bis taste dictated to be right, he would 
 shrink from asserting if it shocked the pre- 
 judices of others or put himself to a mo- 
 ment's inconvenience," was the fault that 
 this critic had in mind ; but this is only to 
 class him with the men who do not think 
 that the truth is always to be spoken in so- 
 ciety, and prefer tact to an aggressive .ego- 
 tism. Sir Humphry Davy notices espe- 
 cially that he was a " remarkably sensible 
 man, which I mention because it is some- 
 what remarkable in a painter of genius who 
 is at the same time a man of rank and an 
 
 exceedingly amusing companion." Southey 
 
 263
 
 BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 251 
 
 was struck by the apparent happiness of his 
 life, and the absence of any reference to 
 afflictions or anxieties that he might have 
 experienced, and says that he " had as little 
 liking for country sports as for public busi- 
 ness of any kind," being absorbed by art 
 and nature ; and, to add Scott's kind words 
 of him in his diary, that excellent judge 
 writes, " Sir George Beaumont 's dead ; by 
 far the most sensible and pleasing man I 
 ever knew. Kind, too, in his nature, and 
 generous, — gentle in society, and of those 
 mild manners which tend to soften the caus- 
 ticity of the general London tone of persi- 
 flage and personal satire. I am very sorry 
 — as much as it is in my nature to be — for 
 one whom I could see but seldom." This is 
 a concert of praise which it is a pleasure to 
 associate with the name of the man who 
 was, chiefly, the founder of the National 
 Gallery in Trafalgar Square. 
 
 He was a friend of the artists of his time, 
 and a patron of Wilkie and Haydon when 
 they needed aid. In the latter's autobiog- 
 raphy there is a bright account of a fort- 
 night's visit paid by these two to Coleorton, 
 Sir George's country-seat, which brings the 
 interior life there vividly to the eye, though
 
 252 BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 
 
 it borrows sometliing from the unconscious 
 humor of the narrator, who always fills the 
 scene with himself in the leading part. One 
 pauses to note a characteristic sentence of 
 the incorrigible beggar in which he breaks 
 out with the indignant remark, " All my 
 friends were always advising me what to do 
 instead of advising the Government what to 
 do for me." Sir George, however, had other 
 friends, and most noteworthy of all, Words- 
 worth, of whom he first heard from Cole- 
 ridge. Before meeting him, understanding 
 that the two friends wished to live in the 
 same neighborhood, he bought and presented 
 to Wordsworth the little property of Apple- 
 thwaite near Greta Hall, Coleridge's abode. 
 Wordsworth never used the ground for the 
 purpose for which it was given, but it re- 
 mained in his possession. From this time, 
 1803, a close friendship grew up between 
 his family at Grasmere and the one at Cole- 
 orton, grounded upon common interests and 
 cemented with mutual exchano^es of kind- 
 ness and regard, so that it survived until 
 the death of Sir George and Lady Beau- 
 mont, herself an excellent woman, of whom 
 Crabb Robinson wrote, " She is a gentle- 
 woman of great sweetness and dignity, I
 
 BEAUMONT, COLEEIDGE, ETC. 253 
 
 should tliink among the most interesting 
 persons in the country." 
 
 Of the two poets Coleridge was at first 
 more intimate with the Beaumonts. This 
 was in 1803, the period of his illness, just 
 previous to the voyage to Malta. The let- 
 ters he wrote are very painful to read. The 
 subject is usually the ego ; and in reading 
 the apologies of the writer for treating of 
 this ever-present theme, and his observa- 
 tions on his own lack of vanity and the 
 danger he is in of undervaluing his powers 
 and works, one can scarcely fail to be stnick 
 by the identity in many respects of the ego- 
 tism of the overweening and of the self- 
 depreciating kinds. The aspects are differ- 
 ent, but the weakness has the same root. In 
 Coleridge it was, perhaps, no more than a 
 question of the state of his stomach whether 
 his assiduous interest in himself should re- 
 sidt in intellectual pride or in self-abase- 
 ment ; but without giving too severe a touch, 
 it is clear enough that his eye, when fixed 
 on himself, was on the wrong object. 
 
 The letters to the Beaumonts are charac- 
 terized by this complaining and absorbing 
 egotism of the invalid, unfortified by pa- 
 tience, resolution, or even self-respect. The
 
 254 BEAUMONT, COLEBIDGE, ETC. 
 
 ravages of disease in its physical aspects, the 
 laying bare of bodily conditious and symp- 
 toms of decay, would be in themselves intol- 
 erably disagreeable, but it is much worse to 
 be obliged to attend at the sick-bed of the 
 mind ; and in Coleridge's case the internal 
 weakness of the spirit excites the greatest 
 pity, and this feeling nearly passes involun- 
 tarily into disgust. The sensibility of his 
 nervous organization was acute. He speaks 
 of times when, as he was accusing himself 
 of insensibility through incapacity to feel, his 
 " whole frame has gone crash, as it were." 
 Under the excitement of his emotions, he 
 dissolves in weakness ; the spectacle is not 
 a pleasant one ; there is sometliing almost 
 ignoble in such loss of self-control. When 
 Wordsworth recited to him, if one can fancy 
 such a thing, the entire thirteen books on 
 the growth of his own mind, in 1807, Cole- 
 ridge composed a poem, not very coherent or 
 noble, though with personal pathos, in which 
 he says that when he rose from his seat, he 
 " found himself in prayer." It was appar- 
 ently not an unusual termination to the ac- 
 cess of emotion, and it occurred more than 
 once in his relations with the Beaumonts. 
 The mention of it, however, in his corre-
 
 BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 255 
 
 spondence with them, offends one, not in it- 
 self, but by the manner of it ; indeed, the 
 manner of his earlier letters is indescriba- 
 ble. Their sentiment is so tremulous and 
 overwrought with fever that they resemble 
 maundering ; they are " sicklied o'er " with 
 mental disease, and belong to the pathology 
 of genius. 
 
 One long epistle, in which he devotes him- 
 self to an analysis of his mental condition 
 at the time when he was what is now known 
 as a Social Democrat, shows by an eminent 
 example in what ways the minds of young 
 men of enthusiasm, who have caught the 
 contagion of new ideas, commonly act, and 
 how their tongues are kept going. Cole- 
 ridge and Southey were rampant young 
 radicals for about ten months, and might 
 many times have been justly thrown into 
 jail for the use of unlawful language and 
 seditiously fomenting the passions of the 
 people. Coleridge ascribes the beginning 
 of his ramblings from the true path of re- 
 spectable politics partly to his intellectual 
 isolation among his relatives and virtuous 
 acquaintances generally, who thought that 
 his " opinions were the drivel of a babe, but 
 the guilt attached to them, — this was the
 
 256 BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 
 
 gray hair and rigid muscle of inveterate 
 depravity ; " and partly, he declares, it was 
 due to the thirst for kindness planted in 
 himself, in that " me, who," he says, " from 
 my childhood have had no avarice, no ambi- 
 tion, whose very vanity in my vainest mo- 
 ments was nine tenths of it the desire and 
 delight and necessity of loving and of being 
 beloved," — needs which he found satisfied 
 in the welcome and company of '^' the Dem- 
 ocrats." So he fell among evil companions. 
 On becoming an agitator upon the platform 
 he succumbed to the temptations of the 
 fluent speaker, gifted "with an ebullient 
 fancy, a flowing utterance, a light and dan- 
 cing heart, and a disposition to catch time 
 by the very rapidity of my own motion, and 
 to speak vehemently from mere verbal asso- 
 ciations ; choosing sentences and sentiments 
 for the very reason which would have made 
 me recoil with a dying away of the heart 
 and unutterable horror from the actions ex- 
 pressed in such sentiments and sentences, 
 namely, because they were wild and original, 
 and vehement and fantastic." Here is a 
 choice specimen of his eloquence, on the oc- 
 casion of a supper by some Lord, to com- 
 memorate an Austrian victory : " This is a
 
 BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 257 
 
 true Lord's Supper in the communion of 
 darkness ! This is a Eucharist of Hell ! a 
 sacrament of misery ! over each morsel and 
 each drop of which the spirit of some mur- 
 dered innocent cries aloud to God, This is 
 my body ! and this is my blood ! " There is 
 one sin against society, however, which he 
 declined to commit, and he took great credit 
 to himself for his obstinate refusal. He 
 joined no party, club, or any of the radical 
 societies, which he characterizes as " asca- 
 rides in the bowels of the state, subsisting 
 on the weakness and diseasedness, and hav- 
 ing for their final object the death of that 
 state, whose life had been their birth and 
 growth, and continued to be their sole nour- 
 ishment." He remained outside of these 
 entangling alliances, a free-lance speechifier, 
 in the condition of mind of the willing mar- 
 tyr : " The very clank of the chains that 
 were to be put about my limbs would not at 
 that time have deterred me from a strong 
 phrase or striking metaphor, although I had 
 had no other inducement to the use of the 
 same except the wantonness of luxuriant im- 
 gination, and my aversion to abstain from 
 anything simply because it was dangerous." 
 Such was Coleridge at twenty -four years, —
 
 258 BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 
 
 the age at which Emmett was executed; 
 whose death called out this long letter of rem- 
 iniscences concerning his own career as an 
 agitator, and of reflections upon the impulses 
 and justification of revolutionary orators, 
 their tempations, errors, and illusions. He 
 understood the fate of Emmett with greater 
 clearness because of this little episode in his 
 own life, and it is noticeable that he has the 
 grace not to think that the young patriot's 
 career bore too much resemblance to his 
 own ; but this confession of his foolishness 
 in general, spread out somewhat magnilo- 
 quently before the eyes of his aristocratic 
 correspondent, is a lesson in human nature 
 well worth a moment's attention from con- 
 servative and orderly people. 
 
 Coleridge's career — if a brief digression 
 may be pardoned here — was only too much 
 in keeping with the temperament of these 
 letters to the Beaumonts. Wherever one 
 comes upon it in the memoirs of the tim-e, 
 the story is the same. Soften it as we may, 
 that career was one of those, too frequent 
 among men of letters, that can never be 
 told, so marred by disease and by moral 
 feebleness, so full of shame and supineness 
 and waste, that it must be kept out of sight.
 
 BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 259 
 
 During the years of his maturity he was a 
 broken man, and knew himself to be such ; 
 from the time that, in becoming the victim 
 of opium, he lost what little will-power was 
 originally his, he felt that the spirit of im- 
 agination had left his house of life, and in 
 its place was henceforward 
 
 *' Sense of past youth, and manhood come m vain, 
 And genius given, and knowledge won in vain ; " 
 
 and in this mood of pervading despondency 
 he seems always in fancy to be haunting the 
 grave of his dead self. This consciousness 
 of his loss, though it had more of the stupor 
 of despair than of the sharpness of peni- 
 tence, lends some impressiveness to his 
 story ; but this pain was not searching 
 enough to save him for himseK, nor of a 
 kind to make men oblivious of those violent 
 contrasts in his life which offend our sense 
 of rightness. It is a morally confusing spec- 
 tacle to see genius professing the highest 
 knowledge of the secret things of God, but 
 itself wrecked ; and it requires something 
 more than the poet's sorrow at the wither- 
 ing of his wreath to reconcile such an an- 
 tithesis. 
 
 Then, too, although Coleridge's poetic im- 
 agination undoubtedly was quenched at once,
 
 260 BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 
 
 or gave out only brief and random flashes 
 in his manhood, it may well be questioned 
 whether the waste of his faculties was not 
 due quite as much to mismanagement of 
 the mind as to the palsying of his powers 
 of effort, purpose, or orderly reduction of 
 thought. He lived in the period of univer- 
 sal philosophers, and in his study of meta- 
 physics and theology in Germany he must 
 have fixed in his mind the habit of includ- 
 ing the omne scibile in his system. This 
 was the more easy for him, as he had in un- 
 usual proportion that false comprehensive- 
 ness which seizes on knowledge, not by all its 
 relations as it stands in the body of science, 
 but by some particular relation which it may 
 seem to bear, truly or untruly, to some pre- 
 conceived idea that has been taken as the 
 organizing principle of the new scheme. It 
 is because of their common participation in 
 this method that poetry and philosophy, in 
 the old sense, approach so much nearer each 
 other than either does to science. It is plain 
 to any one who reads the topics of Cole- 
 ridge's discourses that his mind ranged 
 through a vast circuit of knowledge habitu- 
 ally, but also that it touched the facts only 
 at single points and superficially ; in other
 
 BEAUMONT, COLEBIBGE, ETC. 261 
 
 words, he displays compass rather than 
 grasp. In dealing with the mass of his 
 learning, he showed no lack of systematiz- 
 ing power, though it may easily be believed 
 that in conversation with chance visitors the 
 fine filaments of logical connection escaped 
 their sight. The trouble was in the original 
 mode of elaborating the system — the old 
 Greek way of philosophizing by subtle ma-, 
 nipulation of analogies, convenient facts^ 
 half-understood harmonies of this with that, 
 arbitrary constructions, with now and then 
 a dead plunge into the unfathomable. To 
 borrow Coleridge's own distinction, this pro- 
 cedure is to logic what fancy is to the im- 
 agination — a freak of the mind partly out 
 of relation to the truth of things. It is a 
 modern form of scholasticism. 
 
 Coleridge, however, whose speculative pow- 
 ers were thus employed, is believed to have 
 been a great light to those who had eyes to 
 see. What particular truth Maurice and 
 others derived from him is, nevertheless, not 
 evident. He shared the awakening power 
 that idealists possess, generally in propor- 
 tion to their consistency and the intensity of 
 their personal conviction. Idealism, by the 
 very fact that it is an enfranchisement from
 
 262 BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 
 
 sense, is a tonic to the mind ; it quickens 
 the activity of thought and facilitates its 
 processes because it assumes the mastery of 
 the universe, and makes reality pliable to its 
 hand. This may or may not be lawful, but 
 it generates a feeling of command and of 
 liberty highly favorable to spiritual develop- 
 ment. To some men impressionable on that 
 side of their nature Coleridge was the giver 
 of this freedom, and this has been the case 
 especially with members of the clergy who 
 are closely attached to theological dogma. 
 Such persons foimd in Coleridge's mind the 
 rare and curious coexistence of fixed dogma 
 with incessant speculation : he afforded the 
 sense of uutrammeled investigation without 
 once disturbing the certainty of the pre- 
 judged cause. This phantom of liberalism 
 was a very quieting tutelar genius to some 
 educated men, who thus kept up a semblance 
 of thinking ; but influence of this sort is 
 necessarily transitory. His Scriptural ren- 
 derings of philosophy give place to those of 
 other theologians, who rationalize on new 
 grounds of scientific knowledge instead of 
 German metaphysics, while the stimulation 
 that was furnished by his idealism may be 
 more simply and directly derived from less
 
 BEAUMONT, COLEBIDGE, ETC. 263 
 
 involved and abstruse thinkers. His theol- 
 ogy and metaphysics, in pursuit of which 
 he wasted his powers, are already seen to be 
 transient. On the other hand, his criticism 
 has articulated the works of minor authors 
 who have themselves written in a formal 
 style, nor has its influence been harmed by 
 its frequent over - refinement and fanciful- 
 ness ; and his poetry has remained untouched 
 by time. It belongs to the period of his 
 early enthusiasm, before he had become too 
 dulled for the breath of inspiration to kindle 
 him ; and fortunately one can read nearly 
 all the best of it without a thought of the 
 dreary after-life of the poet, which has no 
 vital interest to any one except as an illustra- 
 tion of prolonged failure due to many causes, 
 but not less to a lack of mental than of moral 
 self-government. He infiltrated a peculiar 
 intellectual life into the clergy of his time, 
 but in them it came to nothing more tan- 
 gible and permanent than in himself. Will 
 it be long before Carlyle's picture of the 
 Seer at Highgate will be the only supple- 
 ment to The Ancient Mariner, so far as the 
 general knowledge of Coleridge is concerned, 
 and all between nothing but the weariness of 
 the opium-eater's hiding ?
 
 264 BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 
 
 Perhaps the serenity of Wordsworth's 
 home at Grasmere gains by the miserable 
 contrast. Thither Coleridge came for in- 
 vigoration ; thither, when he finally sepa- 
 rated from his wife, he brought or sent the 
 children ; and when he could not or would 
 not retire to the hospitality and pleasant 
 companionship of the household where he 
 found the feminine sympathy which he had 
 failed of in his own marriage, Wordsworth 
 would set out to visit him with moral 
 support and cheer. A different interest 
 united Wordsworth and Sir George Beau- 
 mont ; it was the love of nature. Landscape 
 was the subject of their thoughts. Sir 
 George painted it, Wordsworth poetized it ; 
 in the life of both it was a permanent re- 
 source to which they constantly resorted, 
 and they liked to blend their work in this 
 solvent — the pictures of the one becoming 
 a text 'for the poems of the other, and vice 
 versa. The interest Wordsworth felt in 
 landscape gardening, in modifying wild na- 
 ture, and his ideas regarding the methods 
 and aims of the art, are brought out by the 
 part he had in planning the grounds at Cole- 
 orton. Sir George rebuilt these, and, in 
 laying out the winter garden in particular,
 
 BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 265 
 
 he had frequent recourse to the taste of his 
 friend; and as Wordsworth was that year 
 occupying the old farmhouse on the estate, 
 the business of thinking out and overseeing 
 this work was at once diversion and restful 
 employment amid his poetic labors. He 
 wrote at great length on the subject to Lady 
 Beaumont, and laid before her an elaborate 
 plain full of ivy, holly, juniper, yews, open 
 sunshine glades, flower-borders, an alley, a 
 bower, a spray-fountain, a quarry, a distant 
 spire, a pool with two gold-fish, a vine-clad 
 old cottage, and other things which are arti- 
 ficial enough in the reading, but in reality 
 seem remarkably well fitted to mingle the 
 charm of cultivation with the wildness of 
 the evergreens, and make a sheltering re- 
 treat where the life of nature would linger 
 longest in autumn and revive earliest in the 
 warm sun. 
 
 "Painters and poets," he wrote, "have 
 had the credit of being reckoned the fathers 
 of English gardening," and he felt thus in 
 the line of succession in the art. It is most 
 interesting to observe how he obtains sug- 
 gestions from the poets, and makes their 
 Pegasus plough his field. He was, of course, 
 opposed to undue interference with nature
 
 266 BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 
 
 and the deformity it occasions, and also to 
 the ostentation of the wealth or station of 
 the owner. " It is a substitution of little 
 things for great when we would put a whole 
 country into a nobleman's livery," he says 
 with spirit, and, declaring that the laying 
 out of grounds is a liberal art not unlike 
 poetry and painting, he goes on to pro- 
 test against the monopoly of nature by the 
 great ones of the earth, upon high aesthetic 
 grounds. " No liberal art," he says, " aims 
 merely at the gratification of an individual 
 or a class ; the painter or poet is degraded 
 in proportion as he does so. . . . If this 
 be so when we are merely putting together 
 words or colors, how much more ought the 
 feeling to prevail when we are in the midst 
 of the realities of things. . . . What, then, 
 shall we say of many great mansions with 
 their unqualified expulsion of human crea- 
 tures from their neighborhood, happy or 
 not — houses which do what is fabled of 
 the upas tree — that they breathe out death 
 and desolation?" These strictures on the 
 aristocratic handling of land he continues 
 for some pages in an interesting advocacy 
 of aesthetic communism — still a suggestive 
 topic. This sense of the beauty and gran-
 
 BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 267 
 
 deur of nature as a universal boon, the desire 
 to humanize the landscape without robbing 
 it of its own essential character or of the 
 minor charms of its native wildness, and a 
 great delight in his own practical work of 
 improving rubbish heaps, old walls, and 
 broken ground into a winter retreat of sun- 
 shine and evergreens and red-berried vines, 
 with nooks and views fit for a poet's walk, 
 are the qualities that still give interest to 
 those half dozen letters about planting a 
 waste acre of land. On the other hand, his 
 genius, in which susceptibility to nature was 
 so dominating a principle, seldom finds ex- 
 pression in the prose of his letters with 
 nearly the same clearness and purity as in 
 his poems. There is one extract, however, 
 which must be given, of a city scene from 
 the country poet : — 
 
 " I left Coleridge at seven o'clock on Sun- 
 day morning and walked towards the city 
 in a very thoughtful and melancholy state 
 of mind. I had passed through Temple Bar 
 and by St. Dunstan's, noticing nothing, and 
 entirely occupied with my own thoughts, 
 when, looking up, I saw before me the ave- 
 nue of Fleet Street, silent, empty, and pure 
 white, with a sprinkling of new-fallen snow,
 
 268 BEAUMONT, COLEBIDGE, ETC. 
 
 not a cart or a carriage to obstruct the view, 
 no noise, only a few soundless and dusky 
 foot-passengers here and there. You re- 
 member the elegant line of the curve of 
 Ludgate Hill in which the avenue would 
 terminate, and beyond, and towering above 
 it, was the huge and majestic form of St. 
 Paul's, solemnized by a thin veil of falling 
 snow. I cannot say how much I was aif ected 
 at this unthought-of sight in such a place, 
 and what a blessing I felt there is in habits 
 of exalted imagination. My sorrow was con- 
 trolled, and my uneasiness of mind — not 
 quieted and relieved altogether — seemed at 
 once to receive the gift of an anchor of se- 
 curity." 
 
 This is not poetry, but it is from the same 
 pen as the sonnet on Westminster Bridge. 
 
 Besides this taste for landscape, a special 
 interest was taken by both friends in what 
 poetry Wordsworth was composing from 
 time to time. Wordsworth again expati- 
 ates on the " awful truth that there neither 
 is, nor can be, any genuine enjoyment of po- 
 etry among nineteen out of twenty of those 
 persons who live, or wish to live, in the 
 broad light of the world," that is, in society ; 
 and again defines his aims, " to console the
 
 BEAUMONT, COLEBIDGE, ETC. 269 
 
 afflicted ; to add sunshine to daylight, by 
 making the happy happier ; to teach the 
 young and the gracious of every age to see, 
 to think, and feel, and therefore become, 
 more actively and securely virtuous," etc. 
 Here, too, are the calm and patient con- 
 fidence in his own immortality, a serene 
 foreknowledge of how the matter would end, 
 though there are some dark spots in his pre- 
 vision, as when he says that "the people 
 would love Peter Bell " if only the critics 
 would let them. It appears, too, that these 
 poets were discreet in their confidential criti- 
 cism of each other, and by no means blind to 
 faults. Wordsworth notices that in South- 
 ey's verse, notwithstanding picturesqueness 
 and romance and a minor touch or two, 
 " there is nothing that shows the hand of 
 the great master ; " and Coleridge, with all 
 his adoration for Wordsworth, even when 
 declaring that he regarded the tale of the 
 ruined cottage in the Excursion as "the 
 finest poem in our language, comparing it 
 with any of the same or similar length," 
 could yet put his finger on the very centre 
 of weakness in Wordsworth. " I have some- 
 times fancied," he says, " that, having by the 
 conjoint operation of his own experiences,
 
 270 BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 
 
 feelings, and reason himself convinced him- 
 self of truths which the generality of peo- 
 ple have either taken for granted from their 
 infancy, or at least adopted in early life, he 
 has attached all their own depth and weight 
 to doctrines and words which come almost 
 as truisms or commonplace to others." 
 
 Wordsworth's last words are a farewell ; 
 they illustrate how the love of nature and 
 enjoyment of it, unlike most of youthful 
 emotions, gain an increasing glow with years, 
 and they express his faith and life in the 
 most elementary terms : "I never had a 
 higher relish for the beauties of nature than 
 during this spring, nor enjoyed myself more. 
 What manifold reason, my dear George, 
 have you and I had to be thankful to Provi- 
 dence ! Theologians may puzzle their heads 
 about dogmas as they will ; the religion of 
 gratitude cannot mislead us. Of that we 
 are sure, and gratitude is the handmaid to 
 hope, and hope the harbinger of faith. I 
 look abroad upon nature, I think of the best 
 part of our species, I lean upon my friends, 
 and I meditate upon the Scriptures, espe- 
 cially the Gospel of St. John ; and my creed 
 rises up of itself with the ease of an exhala- 
 tion, yet a fabric of adamant. God bless 
 you, my ever dear friend."
 
 THREE MEN OF PIETY 
 
 I. BUNYAN. 
 
 The word genius is often used to conceal 
 a puzzle which the critic, through defects of 
 analytic power or sympathetic insight, is un- 
 able to solve ; but perhaps this short and easy 
 method was never more feebly resorted to 
 than when a writer, with a strong prejudice 
 in favor of sweetness and light, described 
 Bunyan as a " Philistine of genius." In this 
 designation there is much darkness and some 
 acerbity. The wonderful thing about this 
 man was not so much his gifts as the strange 
 combination of them. There must be, of 
 course, something extraordinary in any com- 
 mon man who becomes a leader in the higher 
 life of the race. The history of the Church, 
 however, is starred with the names of the 
 ignorant and the humble who, since the fish- 
 ermen were called from their nets by Gali- 
 lee, have been chosen to be shepherds of the 
 flock and evangelists of the faith. Bunyan 
 was visited with the experience of Protes- 
 
 271
 
 272 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 
 
 tant Christendom, of which the successive 
 terras are an outraged conscience, an of- 
 fended God, and a miraculous pardon, and 
 when he came to his peace he spread the 
 glad news, acceptably to the pious, and con- 
 vincingly to the impenitent ; but tens of 
 thousands in Christian lands have passed 
 through that same strait gate, and hundreds 
 of them have discovered that they possessed 
 the gift of tongues. Had Bunyan done no 
 more his sermons would have turned to yel- 
 low dust long ago, and his memory would be 
 treasured only by a sect, for, eloquent as he 
 was, he was not one of the missionaries who 
 are world-famous. He wrote a book; and 
 it turned out that this book of an unedu- 
 cated man was a great literary classic. Had 
 he written an epic it would have seemed less 
 marvelous, because there is a popular super- 
 stition that nature makes poets, but in prose 
 does not enter into competition with the 
 common school. Bunyan wrote verses, it is 
 true, and the man who set the delectable 
 mountains on the rim of earth had the mag- 
 ical sight ; but just as surely his doggerel 
 shows that he had not the singing voice. 
 He was a master of prose, and wrote a book 
 that neighbors the Bible in our religious 
 homes.
 
 TUBEE MEN OF PIETY. 273 
 
 Two things are, of course, indispensable 
 to a boy of genius, — imagination and the 
 gift of expression. Now Bunyan was fond 
 of representing himself as very wicked in 
 youth ; and so he was, from his own point 
 of view. The worst he can say for himself 
 is, that he lied and swore, without malice or 
 injury to others, but because he had a talent 
 for tales and oaths. It is not trifling to re- 
 mark that his powers of invention and forci- 
 ble Saxon speech appear to have found their 
 first channel in this sort of mental activity. 
 The possible openings for the development 
 of genius in the tinker's cottage at Bedford 
 were few. It is plain that the mind of the 
 young man was one of intense life, and, in 
 the lack of guidance and knowledge, wan- 
 dered at random or turned to feed upon it- 
 self. The only intellectual or moral ideas 
 that came to him were conveyed from the 
 Bible, mostly through the medium of the 
 parish church in the years of the Puritan 
 ascendency. The commonplace that the Bi- 
 ble affords a good education, especially on 
 the imaginative and moral sides, is true, and 
 the theology that attaches to it has devel- 
 oped strong intellects ; it was, in the end, 
 the total book-culture of Bunyan, — all that
 
 274 THEEE MEN OF PIETY. 
 
 he knew of that vast and various world. 
 But in the primary classes it is not a simple 
 text-book of life, especially for a boy of ge- 
 nius who is all sense, all spirit. Bunyan in 
 after years did not regret his first lessons ; 
 he preached that children should be taught 
 the terrors of the law. Certainly his own 
 mind laid hold of the easily apprehended 
 images of threatened vengeance, and was 
 filled with vague alarm and driven to a tor- 
 turing scrutiny of his own spirit. The ex- 
 perience of conversion repeats in the indi- 
 vidual the religious history of the race in 
 the same order in which it is developed in 
 the evolution of Biblical thought itself, and 
 Bunyan's case was not substantially differ- 
 ent from that of others, Puritan or Catholic, 
 to whom there is no Calvary without a Sinai. 
 The peculiarity lay in the soil into which 
 this fiery seed was sown. His imagination 
 ceased its childish fabling and became vis- 
 ionary; he saw, as the eye sometimes will, 
 his mind-pictures, and this the more readily 
 because his uneducated mind was accus- 
 tomed to move through concrete ideas, and 
 hence would be characterized by a high vis- 
 ualizing power. That this was a marked 
 trait of his mental habit is shown by the
 
 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 275 
 
 fact that all his stories about himself are 
 localized in a distinctly remembered place. 
 
 At this stage his mind approached the 
 danger - line of religions madness : his de- 
 scriptions of his moods, of his despairs, and 
 of his struggles with fancies, whose impor- 
 tance to his intellectual life arose from the 
 fewness of his ideas and the limited field of 
 their play, show that he had no power over 
 his thoughts, that he had not learned to use 
 his will in thinking. This objectivity of his 
 religious experience and his powerlessness 
 before it, which have been recorded of other 
 intense lives likewise, gave him a strong 
 sense of the reality of spiritual things ; and 
 when he at last had laid his doubts and 
 come into the calm, he kept this conviction 
 to such a degree that earthly matters, even 
 when religion was largely interested in poli- 
 tics, seemed of no consequence : this world 
 was the dream, and the next world the truth. 
 To our days the account of this conversion 
 seems to indicate a lack of sanity, a spirit 
 touched with the fever that ends in fanat- 
 icism ; but we may be sure that to his hear- 
 ers there was nothing incredible in it, noth- 
 ing that could not be paralleled out of what 
 they had known in themselves or heard from
 
 276 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 
 
 their neighbors. So, early in life, the plot 
 of his career was brought to its crisis. In 
 this faith in the reality of eternal things 
 his mind reached its growth, and afterward 
 knew no change. 
 
 But with this sure hold on the spirit and 
 its high concerns there went a perfect real- 
 ism. Bunyan was the opposite of a mystic. 
 His common sense in his sermons of advice 
 is extraordinarily close -packed and hard, 
 and exhibits acute observation of the ways 
 of human nature in practical life. He wrote 
 once what was almost a novel, a history of 
 one Mr. Badman, which is probably truer 
 to contemporary life than the adventures of 
 Jonathan Wild in the next century. If he 
 did not weaken his eyesight over books, he 
 sharpened it on men and women. All his 
 volumes abound with anecdotes and inci- 
 dents which he had evidently seen in the 
 town streets or by the roadside, and with 
 phrases and proverbial sayings close to the 
 soil. Not the least agreeable of the signs 
 of this realism, this sight for the bare fact 
 in sense alone, are those descriptions of the 
 country, of the birds, and flowers, and fields, 
 and the simple cheerfulness of them to the 
 country-born boy, which strew his pages from
 
 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 277 
 
 cover to cover. So, when he came to write 
 his great book, he united in a perfectly nat- 
 ural way, and without forethought, the real- 
 ity of a journey on earth with that of the 
 search for heaven. The success with which, 
 in a literary work, truth is fused with fact, 
 is a measure of genius. It is, perhaps, more 
 striking in this case because the work is an 
 allegory, which is usually so drearily pale a 
 kind of composition. The characters and 
 action of the Pilgrim's Progress, on the con- 
 trary, are a transcript of life, so vivid that 
 it cannot wear out. It is not more real- 
 istic, however, than other portions of Bun- 
 yan's voluminous writings, in which one 
 may get an idea of English provincial char- 
 acter of high historical value and human 
 interest. How close, how truthful to his 
 surroundings he was as a literary workman, 
 is brought home with great force, though 
 perhaps unconsciously, by the view which 
 his biography gives of Bedford things and 
 people. 
 
 From it one may reconstruct the religious 
 state of the poor people of the Lincoln dio- 
 cese in Bunyan's time, and bring very near 
 the look of the lowly life which was the orig- 
 inal soil of Eno-lish dissent and the field
 
 278 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 
 
 of the tinker - preacher's labors. In read- 
 ing terse extracts from the old documents — 
 " short and simple annals of the poor," truly 
 — of prayers in the barn and fines in the 
 court - house, of levies on workmen's tools 
 and old women's chattels, of these families 
 of " the meanest sort," as the Bishop's sched- 
 ule calls them, whose petty share of poverty 
 was confiscated for the security of a Stuart 
 throne and an Anglican prayer-book, — in 
 reading of these things, a chapter of the his- 
 tory of the English people comes out which 
 has been too closely written over with the 
 wit and frolic of Charles's court ; and the 
 query as to what became of the Common- 
 wealth when Cromwell died does not seem so 
 wholly unanswerable as the silence of stand- 
 ard history on the point would indicate. 
 
 After all, one is almost inclined to say 
 that no man ever owed more than Bunyan to 
 his limitations. Within his bounds, he used 
 all his spiritual and earthly experience, and, 
 aided by a native gift of imagination and of 
 fluency in the people's speech, blended them, 
 and poured the full fountain of his life 
 through his books. Had his youth included 
 other powerful elements of emotion and 
 knowledge besides his conversion, had theol-
 
 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 279 
 
 ogy, or learning, or wider duties removed 
 him somewhat more from the life of his 
 neighbors and friends and the folk of the 
 diocese, of which he was jestingly called the 
 " bishop," he might have found so complete 
 self-expression a more difficult task. As it 
 was, he told all he had to tell, — told the 
 highest truth in the commonest words and 
 made it current. It is curious to observe 
 that he exhibits no consciousness that he is 
 writing a great work ; he speaks of a rush 
 of thought and fancy, and an attractiveness 
 in the subject, but he does not seem to think 
 that he is doing more than adding another 
 to the two-score publications he has already 
 sent out. It is noticeable, too, that he did 
 not meditate upon it for years beforehand, 
 nor spend more than a few months in its 
 composition. Some passages were added at 
 a later time, but as a whole it was a spon- 
 taneous and rapid composition. The reason 
 is that he was ripe for it. Without know- 
 ing it, he had been working up to this 
 crowning book, both in thought, treatment, 
 and style, through many years of sincere 
 and straightforward, face-to-face conversa- 
 tion with men and women whom he was en- 
 deavoring to guide in the way which he
 
 280 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 
 
 had traveled. Pilgrim's Progress has been 
 called the last book that was written without 
 the fear of the reviewer ; it is of more conse- 
 quence that it is one of the few works that 
 have been composed without ambition. 
 
 Bunyan's memory is singularly agreeable. 
 Personally he was free from the defects of 
 assumption, dogmatism, and spiritual pride, 
 which entered largely into the religious char- 
 acter of his epoch, and his sensitive con- 
 science seems to have kept him humble after 
 he had won a name. The two great ele- 
 ments of his work — the homely quality and 
 the Christian quality — were deep-seated in 
 his nature, and give him charm. In an age 
 of sectaries he was not a narrow bigot, and 
 did not stickle for meaningless things ; and 
 in a time of political strife, growing out of 
 religious diiferences, and though himself a 
 sufferer by twelve years' imprisonment in 
 early manhood, he did not confuse heaven 
 with any fantastic monarchy or common- 
 wealth of Christ in London, nor show any 
 rancor or revengeful spirit as a subject. It 
 is worth remembering that out of Puritan- 
 ism, which is regarded as a narrow creed 
 and life, came the only book since the Ref- 
 ormation which has been acceptable to the
 
 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 281 
 
 whole of Christendom, and is still regarded 
 as the substantial truth of the Christian life 
 in all tlie churches that preach it under any 
 creed of orthodoxy. The life of the man 
 who could evolve such a story must have 
 been very simply typical of the Christian 
 life itself. " A Philistine of genius " — is 
 there no light nor sweetness in this ? 
 
 II. COWPER. 
 
 The career of Cowper, as all the world 
 knows, was one to fill the pessimist with 
 perennial gladness ; and, in fact, if it were 
 possible to look at the natural order of 
 things only as Cowper was affected thereby, 
 it might seem that nothing short of malignity 
 in the overruling powers could account for 
 the fiat that gave up so pure, simple, and 
 cordial a nature to be the prey of the seven 
 devils, and rendered so many delightful 
 traits of character futile to achieve the hap- 
 piness of their unfortunate possessor. In his 
 letters, flowing on in the old, sweet, fresh 
 English, one perceives the rare literary fac- 
 ulty, the shy humor, the discrimination, the 
 sound sense, all the many graces of style 
 and many virtues of intrinsic worth, that 
 have long been familiar to scholars ; and,
 
 282 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 
 
 more than that, one gladly recognizes again 
 the companionable, soft-hearted, pathetic man 
 whose pastimes, whether in gardening, or 
 poetry, or caring for his pets, were a refuge 
 from the most poignant anguish ; who played 
 only to escape his terror, and at last failed 
 even in that. The piety of Cowper's life, 
 however, although it contributes to his poetic 
 attractiveness, is only a small part of what 
 must be dealt with by the observer of that 
 life as it appears in his familiar letters. 
 These, as a body, it is needless to say, hold 
 a place from which they are not likely to be 
 dislodged. Nevertheless, letters at the best 
 are not a high form of literature ; even 
 when, as in the present case, their workman- 
 ship entitles them to rank as classics, their 
 interest must finally reside in their being 
 unconscious autobiography rather than in 
 their artistic perfection. Hence, instead of 
 regarding this correspondence as an object 
 of literary virtu, it may be well for once ' to 
 consider it with a more direct reference to 
 the sober facts it chronicles and the spirit it 
 reveals. 
 
 Few persons experienced in the world 
 would be likely to hold up the routine of 
 Cowper's days as worthy of imitation. So
 
 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 283 
 
 far as earthly matters were involved, it was 
 a life o£ very small things ; its mundane in- 
 terests were few and trivial, and sprang for 
 the most part out of pursuits that belong 
 usually either to the domain of childhood or 
 of invalidism. This is not said disparag- 
 ingly, but with due regard to the fact that 
 for the larger part of his career Cowper's 
 condition was such that his attention had to 
 be distracted and his mind amused, as is the 
 case with children or invalids. In his later 
 years the composition of verses became one 
 mode of such diversion, and was undertaken 
 practically as a sanitary measure ; and thus 
 his larger interests, involving conceptions of 
 the eternal world and sympathy with his fel- 
 low-men, were extended to his hours of re- 
 creation. These larger interests, as they 
 must be called, were from the first peculiar. 
 When he was not attending to his hares or 
 his vegetables, or versifying, or taking rural 
 walks, he was engaged in devotional exer- 
 cises of one kind or another. In 1766, for 
 example, every day the time from breakfast 
 until eleven o'clock was spent in reading the 
 Bible or sermons, or in religious conversa- 
 tion ; the hour from eleven to twelve was 
 passed in church at service ; in the course of
 
 284 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 
 
 the afternoon there was a second period of 
 religious conversation or hymn-singing; at 
 niglit there was commonly another sermon 
 and more psalms, and after that family 
 prayers. In other words, it appears that 
 Cowper's life, at that time at least (and it 
 is a fair sample of the whole), consisted of 
 an almost monastic religious routine, re- 
 lieved by the diversion of country pursuits 
 on a small scale, and, later, of literary pur- 
 suits in addition. At present, as has been 
 said, few qualified judges would consider this 
 a life of high order, either in the way of 
 wisdom or utility ; but in Cowper's case, the 
 peculiarity of his mental condition and the 
 charm of his nature, revealed at its happy 
 moments in pleasant letters, blind the reader 
 to the monotony and vapidity of this exist- 
 ence, for such were its characteristics, except 
 in so far as the healing influences of natural 
 scenes, to which Cowper was very sensitive, 
 and the kindness of his household friends, 
 gave it variety and substance. 
 
 Now, it is a very striking fact that while 
 Cowper spent the larger part of his time 
 in religious reading and conversation, and 
 besides meditated in private on the same 
 themes, his letters do not show in any degree
 
 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 285 
 
 that insight into spiritual things which would 
 naturally be looked for from real genius 
 occupied with such subjects. Spirituality 
 should have been his trait if religion was 
 his life, but, in fact, these letters are in this 
 regard barren. The anomalous nature of 
 his poetic life — the fact that he used his 
 powers, not to express his deepest emotions, 
 but to escape from them — may be pleaded 
 in extenuation of what seems at first a sur- 
 prising defect ; but a more likely explana- 
 tion lies in another direction. It was ser- 
 jiions that he read, theology that he talked 
 about, a theory of grace and salvation that 
 he meditated upon in secret ; his religion 
 occupied his thoughts rather than his acts, 
 touched his future rather than his present, 
 — in a word, it was a system rather than a 
 life, the source of doubt instead of inspira- 
 tion. To put it in the simplest form, he 
 derived his light, not from his own inner ex- 
 perience, but from the creed. In his case 
 the light was the darkness of insanity ; but 
 his own conviction in the matter is shown 
 in his characterization of Beattie, — "a man 
 whose faculties have now and then a glimpse 
 from Heaven upon them, a man not indeed 
 in possession of much evangelical light, but
 
 286 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 
 
 faitliful to what he has, and never neglect- 
 ing an opportunity to use it." A poet who 
 identifies " evangelical light " with " the vis- 
 ion and the faculty divine " may write The 
 Castaway, but one is not likely to find in 
 his works those intimate revelations of truth 
 that flash in convincing beauty from the 
 lines of the true spiritualists, such as Words- 
 worth, Shelley, or Emerson. Cowper's mis- 
 fortune, both as a man and a poet, was this 
 substitution of dogma for instinct, which, 
 operating in so sensitive and feeble a nature, 
 made religion, which was his vital interest, 
 not a life but a disease, and gave to the 
 activities of his higher powers the character 
 of mania. It is misleading, therefore, to 
 think of these letters as the fruit of a deeply 
 religious mind ; they are the record of the 
 efforts of a creed-believing mind to get rid 
 of itself, and their virtues — their amiability, 
 their delight in small adventures, their in- 
 terest in literature and humanity — exist not 
 in consequence of but in spite of the reli- 
 aious bent of their author. 
 
 Cowper was deficient, too, aesthetically as 
 well as spiritually, and the character of his 
 limitations was much the same in both re- 
 spects. His sense of beauty was practically
 
 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 287 
 
 confined to landscape and small animals. 
 The cramping influences amid which he 
 lived are well indicated by his remarks upon 
 a clergyman who, it should be said, richly 
 deserved censure : — 
 
 "He seems, together with others of our 
 acquaintance, to have suffered considerably 
 in his spiritual character by his attachment 
 to music. The lawfulness of it, when used 
 with moderation, and in its proper place, is 
 unquestionable ; but I believe that wine it- 
 self, though a man be guilty of habitual in- 
 toxication, does not more debauch and befool 
 the natural understanding than music — al- 
 ways music, music in season and out of sea- 
 son — weakens and destroys the spiritual 
 discernment. If it is not used with an un- 
 feigned reference to the worship of God, 
 and with a design to assist the soul in the 
 performance of it, which cannot be the case 
 when it is the only occupation, it degener- 
 ates into a sensual delight, and becomes a 
 most powerful advocate for the admission of 
 other pleasures, grosser, perhaps, in degree, 
 but in their kind the same." 
 
 Whatever truth there may be in this es- 
 timate of the influence of music, the limita- 
 tion of its use to church choirs and organs
 
 288 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 
 
 is an expression of Puritan iconoclasm which 
 acquaints the reader at once with Cowper's 
 provincialism. The passage is English to 
 the core, and not only does it suggest the 
 jEsthetic deficiencies of the poet and his life, 
 but it also brings up once more the charac- 
 teristic English picture of the family sing- 
 ing psalms and reading sermons, year in, 
 year out, with which the letters begin. This 
 correspondence has made that group of in- 
 terest to the world; but in answer to the 
 question, What was its life and its spirit, 
 can one help feeling that trivial, not to 
 say belittling, occupations, and a nar-^owing 
 theology, were principal elements? Cow- 
 per's work, in the main, has only the slug- 
 gish vitality of this life ; in his letters more 
 than in his verses, speaking generally, there 
 is literary grace and personal charm ; but in 
 both they seem a sort of salvage. A vision 
 of quiet green fields, inhabited by respec- 
 table gentlefolk who led an existence of 
 humble routine in a neighboi'ly way, made 
 up Cowper's world ; he lived in it over- 
 shadowed by the ever present fear of dam- 
 nation, and at last, sunk in despair, he died 
 in it. Out of such a world no great poet 
 either of the soul or of nature could come.
 
 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 289 
 
 Cowper's virtue was in his simplicity and 
 genuineness, rare qualities then ; his good 
 fortune was in never belonging to the liter- 
 ary set or bowing to the town taste ; hence 
 in a time the most barren in English litera- 
 ture, he gave us a half dozen fine poems that 
 stand far beyond all contemporary rivalry, 
 and some private letters of the best style 
 and temper. When, however, the question 
 comes as to the intrinsic value of these let- 
 ters, it must be confessed that though they 
 please the taste they do not interest the mind 
 except in a curious and diverting way. They 
 are less the letters of a poet than of a village 
 original, a sort of schoolmaster or clergyman 
 maiiqiie^ of sound sense, tender heart, and 
 humane perception, but the creature of a 
 narrow sphere. 
 
 III. CHANNING. 
 
 Channing was the chief ornament of the 
 American pulpit in his day. Like nearly 
 all men illustrious in the religious life, he 
 has won a kindlier and wider regard by his 
 character than by his opinions, because the 
 moods of devotion are simple and are uni- 
 versal in human nature, while opinion in 
 theology is more variable and eccentric, and
 
 290 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 
 
 in some degree more accidental, than in any 
 other branch of speculation. The deepest 
 interest of his life lies not so much in the 
 fruit of his genius as in the light of his 
 spirit. Indeed, this acknowledgment is 
 wrapped up in the indiscriminate eulogy by 
 which his admirers have injured his fame, 
 for they have presented him as a saint rather 
 than as a thinker, as an example of ideal 
 living rather than as a finder of truth. To 
 put a man in the catalogue of saints is 
 merely to write his epitaph ; his life is the 
 main thing, and Channing, although his 
 biography records no great deeds in the 
 world and no great crises of inner expe- 
 rience, is not alone in being far more inter- 
 esting in his humanity than in his canoniza- 
 tion. A refined and sensitive childhood, 
 shadowed in some partially explained way, 
 so that he never remembered it as a period 
 of joyfulness, was followed by a spirited and 
 dreaming youth, caught by the fervors of 
 French revolutionary ideas and exalted by 
 its own noble motives. In those early years, 
 as well as in his late maturity, he expe- 
 rienced, on the beach at Newport and under 
 the willows at Cambridge, moments of in- 
 sight and impulse which stood out ever after
 
 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 291 
 
 in his memory as new births of the spirit 
 prophetic of the future. His career was es- 
 pecially determined, however, by the twenty- 
 one months which he passed at Richmond 
 as a private tutor, immediately after leaving 
 college. There, in loneliness and poverty, 
 in stoical disregard of health and courting 
 privation, in Christian conscientiousness of 
 motive, led on by glowing reveries in which 
 visionary objects seemed realities within 
 reach, he devoted himself in written words 
 to the service of mankind by the instrumen- 
 talities of religion. It is painful to read the 
 narrative of this intense personal life in the 
 years most susceptible to enthusiasm for re- 
 mote and ideal ends ; there can be no won- 
 der that after such experience he returned 
 home with the seal of the religious life set 
 upon his soul, and with a body inexorably 
 condemned to life-long disease. He entered 
 upon his ministry in the field where he could 
 best do good and find peace in doing it; 
 morally the child of the New England re- 
 ligious spirit, and intellectually the disciple 
 of those ideas of the nature of humanity and 
 the right course of its development which 
 the French Revolution had disseminated. 
 Throughout his life he was governed mainlj^
 
 292 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 
 
 by a deep sense of tlie dignity of manhood, 
 under whatever form, and by an abiding 
 conviction of the aid which Christianity 
 gives to the imagination and heart in obey- 
 ing the rule of love and obtaining perma- 
 nent peace of mind. 
 
 The most acute criticism ever passed upon 
 Channing's character was by that unnamed 
 critic who said, " He was kept from the 
 highest goodness by his love of rectitude." 
 The love of rectitude was his predominant 
 trait ; he was enslaved by it. He exacted 
 more of himself, however, than of others. 
 Right he must be, at all hazards, in motive, 
 opinion, and action. It is melancholy to 
 read page after page of his self-examination, 
 so minute, intricate, and painful, so fre- 
 quent and long continued. It almost awak- 
 ens a doubt of the value of noble character 
 to find it so unsure of itself, to see its pos- 
 sessor so absorbed in hunting his own shadow 
 within the innermost retreats of thought and 
 feeling. Channing seems to have preached 
 more sermons to himself than to the world. 
 His love of rectitude led him to this exces- 
 sive conscientiousness, but it brought him 
 great good in other directions. It gave him 
 a respect for the opinions of other men as
 
 THEEE MEN OF PIETY. 293 
 
 catholic as it was humble. He did not 
 practice toleration toward them, for that ex- 
 pression implied to his mind a misplaced 
 self-confidence ; but he practiced charity, as 
 toward men who felt equally with himself 
 the binding force of the obligation to be 
 right, and who had an equal chance of find- 
 ing truth. His conviction of the universal- 
 ity of this obligation and his perception 
 that it necessitates the independent exercise 
 of individual powers encouraged in him a 
 remarkable admiration for individuality, for 
 the unhampered exercise of thought and un- 
 questioned obedience to motive in which the 
 richness of individual life consists. 
 
 His second great quality, as pervasive and 
 controlling as his desire to be right, was 
 sensibility. It was revealed in the sym- 
 pathies and affections of private life, which 
 are known to the world only by the report 
 of friends ; but it may be seen with equal 
 clearness in the intensity of his delight in 
 nature, and in the ardent feeling by which 
 he realized ideal ends and gave them a liv- 
 ing presence in his own life as objects of 
 continuous effort. His sensitiveness to nat- 
 ural beauty was so keen that in moments of 
 physical weakness it caused pain. "There
 
 294 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 
 
 are times," he wrote, " when I have been so 
 feeble that a glance at the natural land- 
 scape, or even the sight of a beautiful flower, 
 gave me a bodily pain from which I shrank." 
 As life drew on to its end, the indestructible 
 loveliness of nature became to him a source 
 of joy and peace ever more prized. " The 
 world grows younger with age ! " he ex- 
 claimed more than once. In emotional sus- 
 ceptibility to ideas he resembled Shelley, 
 and probably it was this likeness of feeling 
 which led him to call Shelley, in ministerial 
 language, but with extraordinary charity for 
 that age, " a seraph gone astray." He re- 
 tained through life the intellectual sympa- 
 thies of his youth, and in his last days still 
 had an inclination toward community of 
 property as the solution of the social prob- 
 lem ; like Wordsworth and Southey he re- 
 coiled from the excesses of the French, but 
 he never gave up the tricolor for the white 
 cockade. In his generation nearly all men 
 were hopeful of the accomplishment of be- 
 neficent reforms ; but Channing was filled 
 with an enthusiasm of hope which was al- 
 most the fervor of conviction. He was 
 without that practical enthusiasm which is 
 aroused by the presence of great deeds im-
 
 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 295 
 
 mediately to be done ; the objects for which 
 he worked were far in the distance, scarcely 
 discernible except from the mount of vision ; 
 but he was possessed by the enthusiasm 
 which is kindled by the heat of thought 
 and is wrapped in its own solitary flames, 
 and he lived under the bright zenith of 
 that mood of which Carlyle has shown the 
 dark nadir and Teufelsdroch standing in its 
 shadow gazing out over the sleeping city. 
 These three principles — rectitude, sensibil- 
 ity, enthusiasm — were elemental in Chan- 
 ning's nature ; and because they are moral, 
 and not intellectual, he lived a spiritual 
 rather than a mental life ; he gained in 
 depth rather than in breadth, and worked 
 out his development by contemplation and 
 prayer rather than by thought and act. 
 
 It appears strange, at first, that a man 
 with these endowments should have been 
 so conservative in opinion, and so little in- 
 clined to force upon the world what ad- 
 vanced opinions he did hold. A lover of 
 truth unwilling to make proselytes, an en- 
 thusiast unwilling to act, seems an anom- 
 aly ; but such was Channing's position. One 
 cause of his aversion to pushing Unitarian- 
 ism to its conclusion is found in the history
 
 296 TEREE MEN OF PIETY. 
 
 of his own conversion and in the character 
 of his attachment to the new faith ; he was 
 a revolter of the heart ; he was liberalized 
 by his feelings. " My inquiries," he said, 
 " grew out of the shock given to my moral 
 nature by the popular system of faith." 
 He was moved by sentiment in his rejec- 
 tion of Calvinism, and he was kept by 
 sentiment from giving up the theory of the 
 mysterious character and mission of Christ. 
 The strength of his feelings ojjerated to 
 render him conservative, and the low es- 
 timate he apparently placed upon logical 
 processes contributed to the same end. " It 
 is a good plan," he wrote, " ever and anon 
 to make a clean sweep of that to which we 
 have arrived by logical thought, and take a 
 new view ; for the mind needs the baptism 
 of wonder and hope to keep it vigorous and 
 healthy for intuition." Either this distrust 
 of the understanding working by logical 
 processes, or else a native inaptitude for 
 theological reasoning, prevented him from 
 following out his principles to their conclu- 
 sion. If he had framed a system, he would 
 have held his views with greater certainty ; 
 as it was, he not only allowed the greatest 
 liberty to individual opinion, but he dis-
 
 THESE MEN OF PIETY. 297 
 
 trusted himself. " You young thinkers," he 
 said, " have the advantage of us in coming 
 without superstitious preoccupation to the 
 words of Scripture, and are more likely to 
 get the obvious meaning. We shall walk in 
 shadows to our graves," The strength of in- 
 bred sentiment could not be overpowered by 
 such feeble intellectual conviction. He was a 
 moral, not an intellectual, reformer ; his work 
 was not the destruction of a theology, but the 
 spread of charity. He felt more than he rea- 
 soned, and hence his rationalism was bounded, 
 not by the unknown, but by the mystical. He 
 was satisfied with this, and does not seem to 
 have wished to make a definite statement of 
 his beliefs. The whole matter is summed 
 up by Miss Peabody when she says, " The 
 Christianity which Dr. Channing believed 
 . . . was a spirit, not a form of thought." 
 A spirit of devotion toward the divine, a 
 spirit of love toward the human, Channing 
 preached to the world and illustrated by his 
 life ; but a new form of thought which shows 
 the intellectual advance that alone is fatal 
 to conservatism, — this was no part of his 
 gift to men. 
 
 In the antislavery cause his conservatism 
 appears in a less pleasing light. Here he
 
 298 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 
 
 exhibited the scholar's rekictance to initiate 
 reform, the scholar's perplexity before the 
 practical barriers in the way of action. He 
 was displeased by the rude voices about him, 
 and frightened by the violence of determi- 
 nation which the reformers displayed. He 
 looked to find the peace of the pulpit in the 
 arena, and was bewildered by the alarms of 
 the active strife. He did not choose his side 
 until the last moment, and even then he de- 
 layed until he called down the just rebuke of 
 May and the just defense that reformer made 
 for his comrades : " The children of Abra- 
 ham held their peace until at last the very 
 stones have cried out, and you must expect 
 them to cry out like the stones." Then, in- 
 deed, Channing showed that he was a Falk- 
 land on Cromwell's side, not acting without 
 a doubt, but taking his place, nevertheless, 
 openly and manfully beside the friend whom 
 he had left alone too long. Yet he never lost, 
 even in that stirring cause, the timidity of 
 culture. He was of the generation of those 
 cultivated men who earned for Boston the 
 reputation for intellectual preeminence ; but 
 the political future of the country did not 
 belong to him nor to his companions ; it be- 
 longed to Garrison and Lincoln. Here it
 
 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 299 
 
 is that Father Taylor's keen criticism strikes 
 home : " What a beautiful beiug Dr. Chan- 
 ning is ! If he only had had any educa- 
 tion ! " Channing's education had been of 
 the lamp, and not of the sword ; it seemed 
 to Father Taylor pitifully narrow and palsy- 
 stricken beside his own experience of the 
 world's misery. Channing's life affords one 
 more illustration of the difficulty the culti- 
 vated man finds in understanding and for- 
 warding reform in its beginning ; but he 
 deserves the credit of having rid himself of 
 the prejudices and influences that marked 
 the society in which he moved, to a greater 
 degree, perhaps, than any other of his circle. 
 The value of Channing's work in religion 
 and in reform will be differently rated by 
 men, for his service was of a kind which is 
 too apt to be forgotten. The intrinsic worth 
 of his writings remains to be tested by time ; 
 but their historic worth, as a means of lib- 
 eralizing the New England of his day, was 
 great and memorable. He gave his right 
 hand to Emerson and his left hand to Par- 
 ker ; and, although he could not accompany 
 them on the way, he bade them Godspeed. 
 It was, perhaps, mainly through his influ- 
 ence that they found the field prepared for
 
 300 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 
 
 them and the harvest ready, although he 
 would not put his sickle in. It was largely 
 due to him, also, that Boston became the 
 philanthropic centre of the country. Dur- 
 ing his lifetime he won a remarkable respect 
 and admiration. An exaggerated estimate 
 of his eloquence, powers, and influence will 
 continue to be held so long as any remain 
 alive who heard his voice and remember its 
 accents ; in later times a truer judgment 
 may be reached. Personally he was amia- 
 ble, kindly, and courteous, notwithstanding 
 the distance at which he seems to have kept 
 all men. Dr. Walker said that conversa- 
 tion was always constrained in his study. 
 In his nephew's narrative, it is said that the 
 interview with him was " solemn as the visit 
 to the shrine of an oracle." He himself 
 told Miss Peabody after their friendship 
 had lasted several years, that she had " the 
 awe of the preacher " upon her. Finally, 
 v/e read that no man ever freely laid his 
 hand upon Channing's shoulder; and we won- 
 der whether he ever remembered that St. 
 John had " handled the Word made flesh." 
 This self-seclusion, this isolation of sanctity, 
 as it were, did not proceed from any value 
 he set upon himself above his fellows ; it
 
 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 301 
 
 was the natural failing of a man who lived 
 much within himself, and who always medi- 
 tated the loftiest of unworldly themes. He 
 was a faithful and well-beloved friend ; and 
 if in this, as in other directions, he " failed 
 of the highest goodness," there are few in 
 the same walk of life who attain to equal 
 sincerity, charity, and purity, or equal ser- 
 viceableness to the world.
 
 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 
 
 The time has come to pay tribute of 
 farewell upon the occasion of the death of 
 Whittier. The popular instinct which 
 long ago adopted him as the poet of New 
 England is one of those sure arbiters, 
 superior to all academic judgments upon 
 the literary works of a man, which confer 
 a rightful fame in life, and justify the ex- 
 pectation of a long remembrance. Whit- 
 tier was distinctly a local poet, a New 
 Englander; but to acknowledge this does 
 not diminish his honor, nor is he thereby 
 set in a secondary place. His locality, 
 if one may use the expression, was a 
 country by itself; its inhabitants were a 
 peculiar people, with a strongly marked 
 social and moral character, with a landt- 
 scape and an atmosphere, with historical 
 traditions, legends often romantic, and with 
 strong vitalizing ideas. There was some- 
 thing more than a literary fancy in the 
 naturalness with which Whittier sought a 
 kind of fellowship with Burns ; there was 
 
 302
 
 JOHN GREENLEAF WEITTIER. 303 
 
 a true resemblance in their situation as 
 the poets of their own kin and soil, in 
 their reliance upon the strength of the 
 people of whom they were born, and in 
 their cherished attachment to the places 
 and scenes where they grew. New Eng- 
 land, moreover, had this advantage, that it 
 was destined to set the stamp of its char- 
 acter upon the larger nation in which it 
 was an element; so that if Whittier be 
 regarded, as he sometimes is, as a repre- 
 sentative American poet, it is not without 
 justice. He is really national so far as 
 the spirit of New England has passed into 
 the nation at large ; and that vast body of 
 Western settlers who bore New England 
 to the frontier, and yet look back to the old 
 homestead, find in him the sentiment of 
 their past. There can be little question, 
 too, that he is representative of a far larger 
 portion of the American people than any 
 other of the elder poets. His lack of the 
 culture of the schools has here been in his 
 favor, and has brought him closer to the 
 common life; he is more democratic than 
 he otherwise might have been; and the 
 people, recognizing in him their own 
 strain, have accepted him with a judgment
 
 304 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 
 
 as valid as that with which cultivated 
 critics accept the work of the man of 
 genius who is also an artist. One calls 
 him a local poet rather to define his quali- 
 ties than to characterize his range. 
 
 The New England which Whittier repre- 
 sents has now become historical. The 
 length of his life carried him beyond his 
 times. It is plainer now than it was at 
 an earlier day that his poems are one of 
 the living records of a past which will be 
 of perennial interest and ever held in 
 honor. That his early poetic career fell 
 in with the anti-slavery movement was not 
 a misfortune for his Muse; the man fed 
 upon it, and drew therefrom an iron 
 strength for the moral nature which was 
 the better half of his endowment. He 
 was, too, one who was destined to develop, 
 to reach his powers, more by exercising 
 than by cultivating his poetic gift; and 
 in the events of the agitation for the abo- 
 lition of slavery he had subjects that drew 
 out his moral emotions with most eloquent 
 heat, and exalted his spirit to its utmost 
 of sympathy, indignation, and heroic trust. 
 The anti-slavery movement was his educa- 
 tion, — in a true sense, the gymnastic of
 
 JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIER. 305 
 
 his genius ; but in the whole body of his 
 work it was no more than an incident, 
 although the most stirring and most noble, 
 in his literary career, just as it was no 
 more in the career of New England. 
 
 The great events with which a man 
 deals, and part of which he is, obscure the 
 other portions of his life; but it should 
 not be forgotten that Whittier began as a 
 poet, and not as a reformer, and it may be 
 added that the poet in him was, in the 
 long run, more than the reformer. He did 
 not resort to verse as an expedient in 
 propagandism ; rather, wearing the laurel, 
 — to use the good old phrase, — he de- 
 scended into the field just as he was. He 
 had begun with those old Indian legends 
 in lines which still echoed with Byron's 
 tales, and he had with them much the 
 same success that attended other aborigi- 
 nal poetry. It seems, as one reads the 
 hundred weary epics, from which Whit- 
 tier's are hardly to be distinguished, that 
 the curse of extinction resting on the 
 doomed race clung also to the Muse that 
 so vainly attempted to recompense it with 
 immortality in the white man's verse. 
 These were Whittier's juvenile trials.
 
 306 JOHN GEEENLEAF WIIITTIEU. 
 
 He came early, nevertheless, to his mature 
 form in the ballad and the occasional 
 piece ; his versification was fixed, his 
 manner determined, and thenceforth there 
 was no radical change. 
 
 This is less remarkable inasmuch as it 
 is a commonplace to say that he owed 
 nothing to art ; the strength of his native 
 genius was all his secret, and when he had 
 freed a way for its expression the task of 
 his novitiate was done. He had now a 
 mould in which to run his metal, and it 
 satisfied him because he was not exacting 
 of perfect form or high finish ; probably he 
 had no sense for them. This indifference 
 to the artistic workmanship, which a later 
 day prizes so much as to require it, 
 allowed him to indulge his natural facility, 
 and the very simplicity of his metres was 
 in itself a temptation to diffuseness. The 
 consequence was that he wrote much, and 
 not always well, unevenness being usually 
 characteristic of poets who rely on the 
 energy of their genius for the excellence 
 of their work. To the artist his art serves 
 often as a conscience, and forces him to 
 a standard below which he is not content 
 to fall, Whittier, however, experienced
 
 JOHN GREENLEAF WRITTIER. 307 
 
 the compensations which are everywhere 
 to be found in life, and gained in fullness, 
 perhaps, more than he lost in other ways. 
 The free flow of his thought, the simplicity 
 of his structure, the willingness not to 
 select with too nice a sense, but to tell the 
 whole, all helped, to that frankness of the 
 man which is the great charm of his works, 
 taken together, and assisted him in making 
 his expression of old New England life 
 complete. No man could have written 
 Snow-Bound who remembered Theocri- 
 tus. In Whittier, Nature reminds us, as 
 she is wont to do from time to time, that 
 the die which she casts exceeds the diploma 
 of the school. Art may lift an inferior 
 talent to higher estimation, but genius 
 makes a very little art go a long way. 
 This was Whittier's case. The poetic 
 spark was inborn in him, living in his life ; 
 and when academic criticism has said its 
 last word, he remains a poet, removed by 
 a broad and not doubtful line from all 
 stringers of couplets and filers of verses. 
 
 Whittier had, in addition to this clear 
 native genius, character; his subject, too, 
 New England, had character; and the 
 worth of the man blending with the worth
 
 308 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 
 
 of the life he portrayed, independent of all 
 considerations of art, has won for him the 
 admiration and affection of the common 
 people, who know the substance of virtue, 
 and always see it shining with its own 
 light. They felt that Whittier wrote as 
 they would have written, had they been 
 gifted with the miraculous tongues; and 
 this feelinor is a true criterion to discover 
 whether a poet has expressed the people 
 rather than himself. They might choose 
 to write like the great artists of letters ; 
 they know they never could do so; but 
 Whittier is one of themselves. 
 
 The secret of his vogue with the plain 
 people is his own plainness. He appeals 
 directly to the heart, as much in his lesser 
 poems as in those which touch the sense of 
 right and wrong in men with stinging 
 keenness, or in those which warm faith to 
 its ardor. He has the popular love of a 
 story, and tells it more nearly in the way 
 of the old ballad-makers. He does not 
 require a tragedy, or a plot, or any unusual 
 action. An incident, if it only have some 
 glamour of fancy, or a touch of pathos, or 
 the likeness of old romance, is enough for 
 him; he will take it and sing it merely as
 
 JOUN GREENLEAF WUITTIER. 309 
 
 something that happened. He was famil- 
 iar with the legendary lore and historical 
 anecdote of his own county of Essex, and 
 he enjoyed these traditions less as history 
 than as poetry; he came to them on their 
 picturesque and human side, and cared for 
 them because of the emotions they could 
 still awake. It is to be acknowledged, 
 too, that the material for these romances 
 was just such as delights the popular 
 imagination. The tales of the witches, 
 notwithstanding the melancholy of the 
 delusion, have something of the eeriness 
 that is inseparable from the thought of the 
 supernatural, and stir the dormant sense 
 of some evil fascination ; and the legends 
 of spectral shapes that haunted every sea- 
 coast in old times, and of which New Eng- 
 land had its share, have a similar quality. 
 Whether they are told by credulous Mather 
 or the make-believing poet, they have the 
 same power to cast a spell. When to this 
 sort of interest Whittier adds, as he often 
 does, the sights of religious persecution, 
 or some Lochinvar love-making, or the 
 expression of his faith in heaven, his suc- 
 cess as a story-teller is assured. In reality, 
 he has managed the ballad form with more
 
 310 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 
 
 > 
 
 skill than other measures ; but it is because 
 he loves a story and tells it for its own 
 sake, with the ease of one who sits by the 
 fireside, and with a childish confidence 
 that it will interest, that he succeeds so 
 well in pleasing. In his sea-stories, and 
 generally in what he writes about the 
 ocean, it is observable that he shows hini-.- 
 self to be an inland-dweller, whose acr 
 quaintance with the waves is by distant 
 glimpses and vacation days. He is not a 
 poet of the sea, but this does not invali- 
 date the human truth of his tales of voy- 
 aging, which is the element he cared for. 
 Perhaps the poetic quality of his genius is 
 most clear in these ballads ; there is a freer 
 fancy ; there are often verses about woman's 
 eyes and hair and cheeks, all with similes 
 from sky and gold and roses, in the old 
 fashion, but not with less naturalness on 
 that account; there is a more absorbing 
 appeal to the imagination both in the 
 characters and the incidents. If these 
 cannot be called his most vigorous work, 
 they are at least most attractive to the 
 purely poetic taste. 
 
 In the ballads, nevertheless, one feels 
 the strong undertow of the moral sense
 
 JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIER. 311 
 
 dragging the mind back to serious realities. 
 It is probably true of all the English stock, 
 as it certainly is of New England people, 
 that they do not object to a moral, in a 
 poem or anywhere else. Whittier's moral 
 hold upon his readers is doubtless greater 
 than his poetic hold. He appeals habitu- 
 ally to that capacity for moral feeling 
 which is the genius of New England in its 
 public life, and the explanation of its 
 extraordinary influence. No one ever 
 appeals to it in vain ; and with such a 
 cause as Whittier took up to champion, he 
 could ring out a challenge that was sure 
 to rank the conscience of his people upon 
 his side. His Quaker blood, of which he 
 was proud, pleaded strongly in his own 
 veins. He was the inheritor of suffering 
 for conscience' sake; he was bred in the 
 faith of equalit}^ of the right of every 
 man to private judgment, and the duty of 
 every man to follow it in public action; 
 and he was well grounded in the doctrines 
 of political liberty which are the founda- 
 tion of the commonwealth. It is more 
 likely, however, that his enthusiasm for 
 the slave did not proceed from that love of 
 freedom which is the breath of New Eng-
 
 312 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIEB. 
 
 land. It arose from his humanity, in the 
 broad sense ; from his belief, sincerely held 
 and practiced, in the brotherhood of men ; 
 from the strong conviction that slavery 
 was wrong. It was a matter of conscience 
 more than of reason, of compassion and 
 sympathy more than of theoretical ideas. 
 These were the sources of his moral feel- 
 ing ; his attitude was the same whether he 
 was dealing with Quaker outrages in the 
 past or with negro wrongs in the present. 
 In expressing himself upon the great topic 
 of his time, he was thus able to make the 
 same direct appeal to the heart that was 
 natural to his temperament. The people 
 either felt as he did, or were so circum- 
 stanced that they would respond from the 
 same springs which had been touched in 
 him, if a way could be found to them. 
 Outside of the reserves of political ex- 
 pediency, the movement for abolition 
 was harmonious with the moral nature of 
 New England. Yet Whittier's occasional 
 verses upon this theme made him only 
 the poet of his party. In themselves they 
 have great vigor of feeling, and frequently 
 force of language ; they have necessarily 
 the defects, judged from the artistic stand-
 
 JOHN GREENLEAF WUITTIER. 313 
 
 point, of poems upon a painful subject, in 
 which it was desirable not to soften, but 
 to bring out the tragedy most harshly. 
 The pain, however, is entirely in the facts 
 presented; the poetry lies in the indigna- 
 tion, the eloquence, the fine appeal. These 
 verses, indeed, are nearer to a prose level 
 than the rest of his work, in the sense of 
 partaking of the character of eloquence 
 rather than of poetry. Their method is 
 less through the imagination than by 
 rhetoric. They are declamatory. But 
 rhetoric of the balanced and concise kind 
 natural to short metrical stanzas is espe- 
 cially well adapted to arrest popular atten- 
 tion and to hold it. Just as he told a 
 story in the ballad with a true popular 
 feeling, so he pleaded the cause of the 
 abolitionists in a rhetoric most effective 
 with the popular taste. In the war time, 
 he rose, under the stress of the great 
 struggle, to finer poetic work; the softer 
 feelings of pity, together with a solemn 
 religious trust, made the verses of those 
 battle-summers different in quality from 
 those of the literary conflict of the earlier 
 years. He never surpassed, on the lower 
 level of rhetoric, the lines which bade fare-
 
 314 JOHN GBEENLEAF WHITTIER. 
 
 well to Webster's greatness, nor did he 
 ever equal in intensity those rally ing- 
 cries of defiance to the South, in which the 
 free spirit of the North seemed to speak 
 before its time. In these he is urging on 
 to the conflict,   — a moral and peaceful one, 
 he thought, but not less real and hard ; in 
 the war pieces, he seems rather to be wait- 
 ing for the decision of Providence, while 
 the fight has rolled on far in the van of 
 where he stands. The power of all these 
 poems, their reality to those times, is un- 
 deniable. Their fitness for declamation 
 perhaps spread his reputation. Longfel- 
 low is distinctly the children's poet; but 
 Whittier had a part of their suffrages, and 
 it was by such stirring occasional verses 
 that he gained them. In those years of 
 patriotism he was to many of them, as he 
 was to me, the first poet whom they knew. 
 At that time his reputation in ways like 
 these became established. If he had not 
 then done his best work, he had at tinies 
 reached the highest level he was to attain, 
 and he had already given full expression 
 to his nature. His place as the poet of 
 the anti-slavery movement was fixed. It 
 is observable that he did not champion
 
 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIEB. 315 
 
 other causes after that of abolition was 
 won, and in this he differed from most of 
 his companions. The only other cause 
 that roused him to the point of poetic ex- 
 pression was that of the Italian patriots. 
 Some of his most indignant and sharpest 
 invective was directed against Pope Pius 
 IX., who stood to Whittier as the very 
 type of that Christian obstructiveness to 
 the work of Christ which in a lesser degree 
 he had seen in his own country, and had 
 seen always only to express the heartfelt 
 scorn which descended to him with his 
 Quaker birthright. 
 
 It would be unfitting to leave this part 
 of the subject without reference to the 
 numerous personal tributes, often full of 
 grace, of tender feeling, and of true honor 
 paid to the humble, which he was accus- 
 tomed to lay as his votive wreath on the 
 graves of his companions. One is struck 
 once more by the reflection how large a 
 part those who are now forgotten had in 
 advancing the cause, how many modest 
 but earnest lives entered into the work, 
 and what a feeling of comradery there was 
 among those engaged in philanthropic ser- 
 vice in all lands. The verses to Garrison
 
 316 JOHN GREENLEAF WEITTIER. 
 
 and Sumner naturally stand first in fervor 
 and range as well as in interest, but nearly 
 all these mementos of the dead have some 
 touch of nobility. 
 
 The victory of the Northern ideas left to 
 Whittier a freer field for the later exercise 
 of his talent. It was natural that he should 
 have been among the first to speak words 
 of conciliation to the defeated South, and 
 to offer to forget. He was a man of peace, 
 of pardons, of all kinds of catholic inclu- 
 sions; and in this temperament with re- 
 gard to the future of the whole country, 
 fortunately, the people agreed with him. 
 With the coming of the years of reconcilia- 
 tion his reputation steadily gained. His 
 representative quality as a New Englander 
 was recognized. It was seen that from the 
 beginning the real spirit of New England 
 had been truly with him, and, the cause 
 being now won and the past a great one, 
 his countrymen were proud of him for 
 having been a part of it. At this happy 
 moment he produced a work free from any 
 entanglement with things disputed, re- 
 markable for its truth to life, and exem- 
 plifying the character of New England at 
 its fireside in the way which comes home
 
 JOHN GBEENLEAF WHITTIER. 317 
 
 to all men. It is not without perfect jus- 
 tice that Snow-Bound takes rank with 
 The Cotter's Saturday Night and The 
 Deserted Village; it belongs in this 
 group as a faithful picture of humble life. 
 It is perfect in its conception and complete 
 in its execution; it is the New England 
 home, entire, with its characteristic scene, 
 its incidents of household life, its Christian 
 virtues. Perhaps many of us look back to 
 it as Horace did to the Sabine farm ; but 
 there are more who can still remember it 
 as a reality, and to them this winter idyl 
 is the poetry of their own lives. It is, in 
 a peculiar sense, the one poem of New 
 England, — so completely indigenous that 
 the soil has fairly created it, so genuine as 
 to be better than history. It is by virtue 
 of this poem that Whittier must be most 
 highly rated, because he is here most im- 
 personal, and has succeeded in expressing 
 the common life with most directness. 
 All his affection for the soil on which he 
 was born went into it; and no one ever 
 felt more deeply that attachment to the 
 region of his birth which is the great 
 spring of patriotism. In his other poems 
 he had told the legends of the country, and
 
 318 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIEB. 
 
 winnowed its history for what was most 
 heroic or romantic; he had often dwelt, 
 with a reiteration which emphasized his 
 fondness, upon its scenery in every season, 
 by all its mountains and capes and lakes 
 and rivers, as if fearful lest he should 
 offend by omission some local divinity of 
 the field or flood; he had shared in the 
 great moral passion of his people in peace 
 and war, and had become its voice and 
 been adopted as one of its memorable 
 leaders ; but here he came to the heart of the 
 matter, and by describing the homestead, 
 which was the unit and centre of New 
 England life, he set the seal upon his 
 work, and entered into all New England 
 homes as a perpetual guest. 
 
 There remains one part of his work, and 
 that, in some respects, the loftiest, which 
 is in no sense local. The Christian faith 
 which he expressed is not to be limited as 
 distinctly characteristic of New England. 
 No one would make the claim. It was 
 descended from the Quaker faith only as 
 Emerson's was derived from that of the 
 Puritan, Whittier belongs with those 
 few who arise in all parts of the Christian 
 world and out of the bosom of all sects,
 
 JOHN GBEENLEAF WHITTIER. 319 
 
 who are lovers of the spirit. They illus- 
 trate the purest teachings of Christ, they 
 express the simplest aspirations of man; 
 and this is their religious life. They do 
 not trouble themselves except to do good, 
 to be sincere, to walk in the sight of the 
 higher powers with humbleness, and if not 
 without doubt, yet with undiminished 
 trust. The optimism of Whittier is one 
 with theirs. It is indissolubly connected 
 with his humanity to men. In his re- 
 ligious as in his moral nature there was 
 the same simplicity, the same entire co- 
 herency. His expression of the religious 
 feeling is always noble and impressive. 
 He is one of the very few whose poems, 
 under the fervor of religious emotion, have 
 taken a higher range and become true 
 hymns. Several of these are already 
 adopted into the books of praise. But 
 independently of these few most complete 
 expressions of trust and worship, wher- 
 ever Whittier touches upon the problems 
 of the spiritual life he evinces the qualities 
 of a great and liberal nature ; indeed, the 
 traits which are most deeply impressed 
 upon us, in his character, are those which 
 are seen most clearly in his religious verse.
 
 320 JOHN GBEENLEAF WIIITTIER. 
 
 It is impossible to think of him and forget 
 that he is a Christian. It is not rash to 
 say that it is probable that his religious 
 poems have reached many more hearts than 
 his anti-slavery pieces, and have had a 
 profounder influence to quiet, to console, 
 and to refine. Yet he was not distinctly 
 a poet of religion, as Herbert was. He 
 was a man in whom religion was vital, just 
 as affection for his home and indignation 
 at wrongdoing were vital. He gave ex- 
 pression to his manhood, and consequently 
 to the religious life he led. There are in 
 these revelations of his nature the same 
 frankness and the same reality as in his 
 most heated polemics with the oppressors 
 of the weak; one cannot avoid feeling that 
 it is less the poet than the man who is 
 speaking, and that in his words he is 
 giving himself to his fellow-men. This 
 sense that Whittier belongs to that class 
 of writers in whom the man is larger than 
 his work is a just one. Over and above 
 his natural genius was his character. At 
 every step of the analysis, it is not with 
 art, but with matter, not with the litera- 
 ture of taste, but with that of life, not with 
 a poet's skill, but with a man's soul, that
 
 JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIER. 321 
 
 we find ourselves dealing ; in a word, it is 
 with character almost solely : and it is this 
 which has made him the poet of his people, 
 as the highest art might have failed to do, 
 because he has put his New England birth 
 and breeding, the common inheritance of 
 her freedom-loving, humane, and religious 
 people which he shared, into plain living, 
 yet on such a level of distinction that his 
 virtues have honored the land. 
 
 The simplicity and dignity of Whittier's 
 later years, and his fine modesty in respect 
 to his literary work, have fitly closed his 
 career. He has received in the fullest 
 measure from the younger generation the 
 rewards of honor which belong to such a 
 life. In his retirement these unsought 
 tributes of an almost affectionate venera- 
 tion have followed him; and in the 
 struggle about us for other prizes than 
 those he aimed at, in the crush for wealth 
 and notoriety, men have been pleased to 
 remember him, the plain citizen, uncheap- 
 ened by riches and unsolicitous for fame, 
 ending his life with the same habits with 
 which he began it, in the same spirit in 
 which he led it, without any compromise 
 with the world. The Quaker aloofness
 
 322 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIEE. 
 
 which has always seemed to characterize 
 him, his difference from other men, has 
 never been sufficient to break the bonds 
 which unite him with the people, but it 
 has helped to secure for him the feeling 
 with which the poet is always regarded as 
 a man apart; the religious element in his 
 nature has had the same effect to win for 
 him a peculiar regard akin to that which 
 was felt in old times for the sacred office ; 
 to the imagination he has been, especially 
 in the years of his age, a man of peace and 
 of God. No one of his contemporaries has 
 been more silently beloved and more sin- 
 cerely honored. If it be true that in him 
 the man was more than the poet, it is hap- 
 pily not true, as in such cases it too often 
 is, that the life was less than it should 
 have been. The life of Whittier affects 
 us rather as singularly fortunate in the 
 completeness with which he was able to 
 do his whole duty, to possess his soul, 
 and to keep himself unspotted from the 
 world. He was fortunate in his humble 
 birth and the virtues which were about his 
 cradle ; he was fortunate in the great cause 
 for which he suffered and labored in his 
 prime, exactly fitted as it was to develop
 
 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 323 
 
 his nature to its highest moral reach, and 
 lift him to real greatness of soul; he was 
 fortunate in his old age, in the mellow- 
 ness of his humanity, the repose of his 
 faith, the fame which, more truly than can 
 usually be said, was "love disguised." 
 Lovers of New England will cherish his 
 memory as that of a man in whom the vir- 
 tues of this soil, both for public and for 
 private life, shine most purely. On the 
 roll of American poets we know not how 
 he may be ranked hereafter, but among the 
 honored names of the New England past 
 his place is secure.
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 Mr. Lowell has written into his works 
 his many titles to public remembrance 
 with singular completeness. One need 
 not go outside of the ten volumes in which 
 the fruits of a long literary and public life 
 are gathered to know what he has been and 
 has done. The sign-manual of the poet, 
 critic, and scholar is set upon the various 
 page; moods of the fields and the home- 
 stead, the permanent attraction of human 
 nature, patriotism profoundly felt are 
 equally found in essay and poem ; and in 
 the admirable addresses there is stored up 
 a lasting memory of the years of his dis- 
 tinguished service abroad. The fullness 
 of this expression of a many-sided career 
 is remarkable; but even more striking is 
 the harmony of all these phases of life, one 
 with another. There is no dividing line 
 which sets off one part of his activity from 
 its neighbor part; in his poetry there is 
 politics, in his learning there is the vivi- 
 fying touch of humor, in his reflection 
 
 324
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 325 
 
 there is emotion, in the levels of his most 
 familiar prose there is, at inconstant inter- 
 vals, the sudden lift of a noble thought; 
 and hence his works are at once too diverse 
 and too similar — diverse in their mat- 
 ter and similar in the personality through 
 which they are given out — to be easily 
 summed or described by the methods of 
 criticism. If there is a clew that may be 
 used, it is to be sought in his individu- 
 ality, in the fact that his ten talents have 
 somehow been melted and fused into one, 
 and that the greatest — the talent of being 
 a man first and everything else afterward. 
 It goes with this that one looks in vain for 
 any separation of his work into marked 
 periods, such as may be observed in those 
 writers who are absorbed by successive 
 moods of the age or by new foreign influ- 
 ences in thought or literary forms, or gen- 
 erally are determined in their character by 
 external forces. Mr. Lowell, with all his 
 free curiosity, alertness of attention, and 
 openness to the world of the present and 
 of the past, has exercised a power of reac- 
 tion equal to that of his receptivity, and 
 illustrates the slow native growth of a self- 
 assured mind. From the first to the last
 
 326 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 of his pages the unity of mind is such that, 
 unhelped by the context, one could rarely 
 say with certainty whether a particular 
 passage was from earlier or later years. 
 Neither the style nor the way of thinking 
 materially changes ; the same person 
 speaks with the same voice throughout. 
 This singleness of Mr. Lowell's person- 
 ality, by virtue of which he has held the 
 same course from youth to age, as it is 
 most obvious, is a cardinal matter. It 
 were impossible to condense into the brief 
 critical sketch for which only there is now 
 occasion, all that criticism must find to 
 say upon his writings throughout their 
 reach ; but in the absence of such a com- 
 plete and careful survey, something may 
 be arrived at, possibly, by attending to 
 this stamp of individuality which gives 
 likeness to all his works and imparts to 
 them that quality of the living voice which 
 most interests and best holds men, and is 
 besides the invariable accompaniment of 
 an original mind in literature. 
 
 It is commonly a disadvantage to a poet 
 to be reputed a scholar. Belief in the 
 spontaneity of genius is deeply implanted 
 in men's mind, and culture is set over
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 327 
 
 against the simple primitive powers of 
 feeling and thought as something by nature 
 opposite. In this popular opinion there 
 is a share of truth. Instinct is the method 
 of genius, but culture, until it has been 
 absorbed into character and temperament, 
 works by afterthought. The conflict which 
 is indicated by this widely diffused im- 
 pression of the incompatibility of learning 
 and inspiration is often felt by a poet him- 
 self in his own experience. Mr. Lowell, 
 who more than any other writer of his 
 time expresses the moods of that border- 
 land which lies between instinct and re- 
 flection, speaks more than once of the 
 intrusion of thought upon the natural way 
 of living, and shows the old annoyance, 
 that poetical regret for a simpler habit of 
 life, which underlies the dream of the 
 golden age and is the source of the charm 
 of all pastoral. In a considerable portion 
 of his nature-verse he accepts the Words- 
 worthian doctrine and goes to the fields as 
 an escape from books, lays thought down 
 like a burden and plays it is holiday with 
 him, and in coming back to the study 
 seems to make an unwelcome return to 
 himself. Yet he is not slow to acknowl-
 
 328 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 edge that the true poet has a pedigree that 
 goes far into the past of men as well as a 
 kinship of the day and hour with sky and 
 birds and trees, the soft air and the warm 
 landscape. If he seeks impulses in nature, 
 he must find art in books ; and from his 
 earlier poems it is plain to see what sources 
 in literature he most haunted. Imitative- 
 ness in youthful verse is a measure of sus- 
 ceptibility, and is rather a sign of strength 
 than of weakness. The test of originality, 
 or of the native force of the poetical en- 
 dowment, lies in the spontaneity of the 
 imitation and in the quickness with which 
 one type shifts with another. It is notice- 
 able that Mr, Lowell reproduced kinds of 
 poetry rather than particular authors, style 
 rather than moods, the cast of the words, 
 not ideas ; and the sign of culture in these 
 beginnings is shown in the number of types 
 which attracted him. So a similar literary 
 scholarship, an acquaintance with what 
 the poets of many lands had written, gave 
 to Longfellow in his mature life, as well 
 as at the outset, models of style which he 
 made his own rather by graceful use of 
 them than by informing them with origi- 
 nal genius. In Mr. Lowell's case, per-
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 329 
 
 haps, the single peculiarity is the taste he 
 early showed for certain of the English 
 poets of the seventeenth century whose 
 defects of oddity and unevenness could not 
 destroy the largeness of their phrase and 
 the purity and elevation of their continu- 
 ous style at its best. One need not read 
 Mr. Lowell's criticism to discover what 
 value he placed upon Donne and Vaughan, 
 for example, and those who neighbor them 
 in the "well-languaged" manner. Cul- 
 ture of this sort, which is no more than 
 the fruit of delight in j^oetry, has been the 
 possession of many of those poets who are 
 most thought inspired, and genius has 
 thrived upon it; but usually the greatest 
 of them have felt the gap between such 
 poetry of the past and the nature they 
 stood in presence of, and each in turn has 
 reconciled his genius with his own age in 
 some original way. 
 
 Mr. Lowell soon developed several styles 
 in which he wrote poems of many kinds, 
 and gave literary expression to sentiment, 
 thought, and emotion; but he was later 
 preeminently distinguished by three forms 
 of verse. The most popular of these, ap- 
 parently, and certainly the most original.
 
 830 JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 is that in which he employed the native 
 Yankee speech. It was fairly by accident, 
 he says, that he discovered the power of 
 this New England lingo to express the 
 character of the breed of men who used it 
 and its fitness for the purpose in dealing 
 with the subjects to which he applied it. 
 Nevertheless, chance has as little place in 
 literature as in other affairs of life. One 
 finds only those things to which his faith 
 has led him. There are reasons in plenty 
 why Mr. Lowell, and not any of his con- 
 temporaries in letters, made the happy 
 discovery of the Yankee idyl. His own 
 roots go deep into the native soil ; he loves 
 that from which he sprang, and the past 
 was realized to his apprehension most 
 directly through the old time, which still 
 lingered about the Cambridge of his grow- 
 ing years, and through its concrete charac- 
 ters of diverse types from clerical to rural 
 which interested his human sympathy, 
 struck his humorous sense, and embodied 
 for him the long tradition of a dying age 
 showing its results in man. This strong 
 attachment to the paternal acres because of 
 old associations is a trait common to New 
 England; but none of the poets of the
 
 JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL. 331 
 
 land have given more frequent and free 
 expression to the feeling or shown its 
 power in an individual more constantly. 
 The old New England character appealed 
 to him in the same way that the Scotch 
 type drew Sir Walter Scott's heart out; 
 each found in the ancient habit of life of 
 "sixty years since " a literary opportunity, 
 but not by thought prepense ; in both the 
 old ways, crystallized in human nature, 
 were loved for their own sake with a kind 
 of natural affection, and were besides dig- 
 nified by a true respect for their moral 
 quality felt through all their humorous 
 peculiarities. Scotland had more of his- 
 tory, of romance, and picturesqueness to 
 mingle with the human element of com- 
 mon lives ; in New England there was less 
 of circumstance, but there was a core of 
 character equally sound, a way of think- 
 ing and a freshness of expression, marked 
 and peculiar, characterizing a people. 
 The attractiveness of such survivals from 
 the old days as Mr. Lowell either knew in 
 the beginning of life or met with from 
 time to time in the still uninvaded coun- 
 try districts was enhanced further by the 
 fact that they stood for that simpler mode
 
 332 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 of existence, already referred to, which the 
 poet is fain to think of as the better way 
 of living, could he make the impossible 
 escape from his own bonds; and it was 
 entirely natural that the two moods should 
 blend and the keen air of New England 
 suffer the pastoral change with the least 
 artifice in the world. In the poem in 
 which he describes his day under the wil- 
 lows Mr. Lowell reveals in most phases 
 the feeling habitual to his mind, of the 
 sense of nature as a refuge, of the strength 
 of associations with a familiar landscape, 
 of the welcome he would give to the rude 
 moulds of man, and, in a word, shows the 
 attitude of the poet, who is also a man of 
 thought, toward nature and human nature 
 met face to face; and in this reflective 
 reverie, full of personal expression, the 
 elements are the same as in pastoral verse 
 though seen under a different aspect. 
 When he came to imaginative expression 
 through the medium of old New England, 
 he escaped at once from the literary atmos- 
 phere, finding both a subject and a lan- 
 guage wholly unworn by use in books ; 
 and what he was to express was just that 
 type of character in which human nature
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 333 
 
 was most fresh, sincere, and genuine to 
 his senses and could be entered into most 
 completely by virtue of native sympathies 
 long active in his blood, while the medium 
 of speech was the tongue of the country 
 people as they themselves had fashioned 
 it for their own uses. Not since Theocritus 
 wrote the Sicilian idyls has the pastoral 
 come so near to real life or been not merely 
 so free from artificiality but so slightly 
 transformed in the change from life into 
 art. Mr. Lowell did not attempt the use- 
 less task of saying what the average up- 
 country man would have said if left to 
 himself; but, in expressing the true genius 
 of the New England character with a preci- 
 sion and range impossible excejDt to a man 
 of his own faculty, he succeeded in keep- 
 ing both thought and language within the 
 limit of the character through which he 
 spoke. He permitted himself to use ele- 
 vation or pathos or the beauty of natural 
 scenes, which both true art and the im- 
 pulse of his own awakened powers re- 
 quired; but he has managed all with so 
 sure a hand, such discernment and sensi- 
 tiveness in his feeling for the form used, 
 ttat all is as definitely objective as di-ama
 
 334 JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 or novel, and the sense of reality is height- 
 ened, and the expression of the old spirit 
 made more complete, by the curious prose 
 of the pulpit in which the poems are set. 
 It remains only to add that in taking pub- 
 lic affairs for the main body of the matter 
 of the verse Mr. Lowell chose the subject 
 that fitted the mind of New England as 
 perfectly as the country language fitted 
 its lips. 
 
 The second form of verse in which Mr. 
 Lowell has most excelled is next of kin 
 to the Yankee poems. He was not only 
 the son of New England, but he was born 
 also to the wider inheritance of his fellow- 
 countrymen everywhere, and could lay 
 aside the provincialism of his eastern ac- 
 cent and phrase for the ampler English of 
 the nation's speech. Love of home is the 
 seed-plant of patriotism, and it was in- 
 evitable that faith to New England should 
 grow to the larger compass of faith in 
 America; and if in attachment to the 
 native soil itself, such as Mr. Lowell ex- 
 presses, there may be a certain closeness 
 and peculiar warmth of the hearthstone, 
 in his love of country there is more of 
 what is purely ideal. When he first col-
 
 JAMES BUS SELL LOWELL. 335 
 
 lected his political papers, there was some 
 surprise at the amount and value of his 
 writings upon the public topics of the 
 time; but though this work in prose had 
 been forgotten, it would still have been 
 plain enough from his poems that he was 
 ever in a true sense the citizen. In think- 
 ing of his patriotic verse attention is com- 
 monly too exclusively given to the group 
 of odes which were rather the last and 
 crowning work of a lifelong labor than iso- 
 lated productions. In the very start he 
 gave his country the ringing stanzas of 
 The Present Crisis, with the one indelible 
 line, and that sonnet to Phillips which 
 still stirs the blood ; and, as time went on, 
 in the first series of The Biglow Papers 
 he dealt with a great political question of 
 the period, and coming to the strong pas- 
 sions and immeasurable issues of the 
 civil war he could scarce write of anything 
 else. It was only after the peace, and 
 in the assured triumph of the centennial 
 anniversaries of the united country, that 
 he closed the extensive series of poems, 
 inspired by public spirit in the widest 
 meaning of that phrase, with the long odes 
 which by their solemn movement, their
 
 336 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 gravity, and the loftiness of their finer 
 passages have that stateliness which makes 
 them seem to dwarf liis less impressive 
 poems in this kind. He had been the 
 true citizen-poet for almost a lifetime 
 before he was called to this ceremonial 
 laureateship, and had used the lighter in- 
 strumentalities of humor, satire, and wit, 
 the edge of epigram and poignancy of 
 pathos, as occasion arose; so that one may 
 fairly say that first and last he employed 
 well-nigh all the resources of his mind in 
 the service of his country. To think of 
 the odes mainly as Mr. Lowell's patriotic 
 verse would be a grave injustice both to 
 the man and the poet, for passages may be 
 found in the earlier verse equal, at least, 
 to anything except the best in this last 
 group. The distinction of the odes, and 
 one reason why they have affected the 
 public disproportionately in comparison 
 with the best of the other poems, is their 
 style. It is a style which Mr. Lowell l^as 
 developed for himself, and is to be met 
 with here and there in detached passages 
 of his earlier poetry, but nowhere else is it 
 so even and continuous as in the odes. 
 It is characterized by a breadth and undu-
 
 JAMES BUS SELL LOWELL. 337 
 
 lation of tone and a purity hard to describe, 
 but these traits are not of consequence in 
 comparison with the certainty with which, 
 no matter how finally resonant the wave 
 of sound may be, the thought absorbs it 
 and becomes itself vocal and musical. 
 The diction itself and the cast of phrase 
 metrically seem to derive from that period 
 of English subsequent to the Elizabethan 
 ferment when the language retained free- 
 dom and spirit and a certain amplitude 
 from the past age, but had not yet subsided 
 into the formalism, however excellent in 
 itself, of the great age of prose ; but if Mr. 
 Lowell found the elements of this grave 
 and full style in that period, he has so 
 recombined them in his own manner that 
 to trace out the source is at most only to 
 hazard a guess. It is, however, this felici- 
 tous and well-commanded style which is 
 the noticeable literary quality of the odes, 
 and of the finer stanzas of other poems, 
 such as The Washing of the Shroud, to 
 name one of the first ; to have elaborated it 
 is, possibly, the highest distinction of Mr. 
 Lowell as a writer, in the strict sense, on 
 the purely original side of his literary 
 craftsmanship.
 
 338 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 It is, however, almost a diversion to 
 direct attention to the literary quality of 
 these poems. What is most to be remarked 
 in them, aside from their earnest intention 
 and the emotion that is sometimes the 
 welling-up of a deep passion, is the purity 
 of the democratic feeling in them, the 
 soundness of their Americanism. Mr. 
 Lowell in one of his earlier volumes laid 
 his wreath on the grave of Hood, and there 
 are a few of his poems that express the sym- 
 pathy of philanthropy with the poor and 
 outcast ; but this is a comparatively crude 
 form of the democratic idea and hardly 
 exceeds charity. It is easy to pity suf- 
 fering in any shape and to believe in the 
 virtues that poverty is commonly thought 
 to favor; it is a harder matter to put faith 
 in man. But that rooted interest in 
 human nature, which has already been 
 spoken of as cardinal in Mr. Lowell's 
 habit of mind, as it helped him to recon- 
 cile poetry with the life of rural New Eng- 
 land, aided also in the generation of his 
 democratic faith, for when a man is once 
 interested in his fellows he is already half- 
 way to being friends with them and thus 
 coming to know how human they are. To
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 339 
 
 accustom one's self to disregard the acci- 
 dents of manner and station sufficiently to 
 see the man as he is, to have a clear sight 
 for genuine character under any of the 
 disguises of unfamiliarity and prejudice, 
 to know how simple and how common are 
 the elements that go to the making of man- 
 hood, are the paths to belief in democracy ; 
 and to do this, it is enough to live out of 
 doors. Culture that lives in the library 
 may easily miss its way. The Biglow 
 Papers by themselves would be sufficient 
 proof of such democracy as goes to make a 
 town-meeting; but the American idea is a 
 larger thing. The better proof which Mr. 
 Lowell gave of his quality was in the 
 recognition he gave to Lincoln. He was 
 the first of our writers to see what name 
 led all the rest, and the truth which he 
 intimated in Blondel, and spoke more 
 plainly in prose, he made at last shine out 
 in the most famous passage of his great- 
 est ode. One could not be so early to 
 perceive this unsuspected fame before it 
 filled the world and while it was yet in the 
 clouds through which it broke, unless faith 
 in man came natural to him. It was so in 
 this case, and Mr. Lowell understood the
 
 340 JAMES BUS SELL LOWELL. 
 
 "new birth of our new soil" not only in 
 the fact that another name .was given to 
 immortal memory, but also in the pro- 
 founder truth that the soil which had borne 
 such a son was the heir of a new age. 
 With all the faith he had in his own people 
 of the past, the poet looked forward to the 
 new race which is yet forming in our 
 womb; and nowhere in our literature is 
 there more direct expression of the national 
 faith in mere manhood than in a few great 
 lines of these patriotic poems, or more 
 soberly and explicitly in the essay upon 
 Democracy. It may seem little that a man 
 should believe in what his country believes 
 in ; but it may fairly be thought that Mr. 
 Lowell, from his place in conservative 
 thought, is as much beforehand in his 
 recognition of democracy in the larger sense 
 as he was earlier than others in his recog- 
 nition of Lincoln. 
 
 Besides the New England and the na- 
 tional poems, Mr. Lowell has written a thii'd 
 sort that stand in a class apart and have a 
 distinction, if not so unshared as these, 
 shared certainly by no other poet of this 
 country. They are what would ordinarily 
 be called poems of culture, the verse of a
 
 JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL. 341 
 
 man deeply imbued with the literature of 
 the past. This definition rests on their 
 form rather than their subject-matter. 
 They are run in the moulds that have been 
 handed down in the tradition of literature 
 and belong to the gild. Mr. Lowell, who 
 has shown a disposition to experiment in 
 verse and try many kinds, has used a 
 variety of these set measures, but in two 
 sorts he has shown a hand of unrivaled 
 mastery. In the verses Credidimus 
 Jovem Regnare there is, perhaps, the best 
 example of one sort, in which the intel- 
 lect finds crystalline expression; modern 
 as it is in substance and strongly personal 
 in quality, this poem is at once recognized 
 as being composed in a classic style which 
 is neither a revival nor archaic, but, though 
 written yesterday, has the look of century- 
 old verse still fresh. Another instance is 
 the poem upon the goldfishes, one of the 
 best from his pen. The second sort in 
 which this perfection of style is equally 
 found is illustrated by the letter to Curtis 
 as aptly as by any single piece ; the terse- 
 ness, ease, and finish of these lines, in 
 which compliment blends with the wisdom 
 of life and the whole is subdued within
 
 342 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 the range of personal talk from friend to 
 friend, are qualities unique in our poetry 
 and recall the habits and modes of utter- 
 ance of a more polished lettered age, when 
 intellect and manners held their own 
 beside emotion, and the literary life was 
 more complete in manly powers. In both 
 these sorts of pedestrian poetry, if the 
 devotees of inspiration will insist on the 
 distinction, it is rather the man of cultiva- 
 tion conversing with others than the man 
 of genius expressing his soul whom we 
 find; but the classic literature of the 
 world owes much to the poets who have 
 put into just such verse the mind and 
 morals of their time undisturbed by the 
 strong emotion which has latterly ruled so 
 supreme. Mr. Lowell has certainly 
 strengthened his work by varying it with 
 this element of the prose of verse both in 
 the octosyllabic and the pentameter forms. 
 It was necessary, too, for the complete ex- 
 pression of himself that he should give otit 
 his literary culture in art, and also find 
 fit channels for that power of pure think- 
 ing which divides with the poetic impulse 
 his allegiance to literature. For, when 
 the end is reached and one looks back over
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 343 
 
 the range of Mr. Lowell's poetical works 
 entire, the one thing that binds them all 
 together and runs through them, besides 
 that unresting interest in man which is 
 their blood, is the equally single and 
 widely diffused presence of thought, which 
 is their spirit. In no poet of our land, at 
 least, is there to be found so large a num- 
 ber of single thoughts, to apply but one 
 test, as in these poems; and there is so 
 little need to say that in none other is 
 there continuous reflection to the same 
 degree, that Mr. Lowell is reputed rather 
 for an excess of thought. To examine the 
 matter further, to consider such a poem 
 as The Cathedral, for instance, would 
 force this sketch beyond its limits; but 
 the poems of pure reflection should be at 
 least referred to. So, too, the type of 
 which Endymion is the most eminent 
 example should be named, and the poems 
 in which Mr. Lowell has sought for musi- 
 cal effects — a most interesting group to 
 the student of poetry, of which, perhaps. 
 The Fountain of Youth is the most re- 
 markable — should not be left unmen- 
 tioned even in the briefest account of his 
 work. It is not within the scope of this
 
 344 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 paper, however, to enter upon the criti- 
 cism of Mr. Lowell's poetry further than 
 to indicate such cardinal qualities as can 
 be brought out by a broad treatment of it 
 in the mass; and if the three kinds of 
 verse in which he seems most to excel, — 
 the pastoral of his own people in their 
 special language, the poems of patriotism 
 of several sorts, but particularly those in 
 which he employs his peculiar grave and 
 noble style, and the poems distinguished 
 by classic perfection of manner, — if these 
 have been discriminated, and in the course 
 of such remarks the poet's primary in- 
 stincts of love of human nature, patriotic 
 passion and faith, and devotion to the 
 worth and charm of literature in both its 
 phases of thought and art, have been made 
 obvious, the little that was aimed at has 
 been accomplished; for it must then appear 
 that in his poetry Mr. Lowell has really 
 expressed himself with directness and 
 fullness, and in the best of his work with 
 no more intrusion of the self-consciousness 
 of culture to the prejudice of the native 
 gift than was necessary to make his poetry 
 square all round with himself. The fact 
 that so much of his verse of all sorts has
 
 JAMES BUS SELL LOWELL. 345 
 
 the quality of improvisation is of itself 
 proof of the immediacy of his method, the 
 genuineness of the impulse, the truth of 
 his statement somewhere that he has ever 
 waited for poetry to jEind him and make 
 itself out of his life. It results from this 
 that his poetical works are the true record 
 of that life, — the voice, as has been said, 
 of the man, and immeasurably more com- 
 plete as an expression of individuality 
 than the larger body of prose. 
 
 If one must pack the description of that 
 body of prose into a phrase, — and little 
 more is possible here, — it might fairly be 
 said that (to leave the journals out of ac- 
 count) the essays and addresses of various 
 kinds, storing the results of scholarship 
 and reflection, express distinctively the au- 
 thor's mind. Interesting as the political 
 papers are, both by their topics and the 
 special contribution of the author to 
 thought necessarily more or less gener- 
 ally shared, they remain subordinate to 
 his critical work on great authors. It 
 is in the literar}^ papers proper that Mr. 
 Lowell has hived what he has gathered 
 of wisdom in his wide range through lit- 
 erature; and though he does not speak
 
 346 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 more directly in them than in his speeches 
 or poems, he communicates more and does 
 it in a more exceptional way. Political 
 thoughtfulness characterizes many Ameri- 
 cans, but one would hesitate if asked to 
 name Mr. Lowell's equals, in his time, in 
 acquaintance with literature; hardly any 
 name but Longfellow's would be offered 
 in scholarly rivalry with his own on this 
 ground ; and he excels Longfellow by virtue 
 of the extraordinary critical power which 
 he brings to bear upon literature. He is, 
 indeed, the only critic of high rank that 
 our literature owns, and the fineness of 
 his quality is obscured by the very single- 
 ness of his position, since there are none 
 to compare him with; nor, if one goes to 
 England for such comparison, is the case 
 much bettered, for he surpasses his fellows 
 there with equal ease. The critical fac- 
 ulty is so rare that criticism as an art 
 suffers in repute thereby, and its results 
 are undervalued; but if one is willing to 
 learn, there is in the body of Mr. Lowell's 
 literary papers a canon of pure literature 
 so defined in intellectual principles and 
 applied with such variety and fruitfulness 
 as to sufiice for an education in literary
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 347 
 
 taste; and this education is of the best sort 
 since it teaches how to see rather than how 
 to analyze, is intuitive instead of scien- 
 tific, and thus follows the method native 
 to literature and logically belonging to it. 
 The results of this method in what Mr. 
 Lowell says about great works of genius 
 are, nevertheless, the main thing, and the 
 value of them is sufficiently appreciated 
 by students of literature. It ought to be 
 observed, perhaps, that the wealth of 
 single thought which has already been 
 noticed as characterizing his poetry is as 
 strikingly found in these prose works of 
 every sort. Here, too, no writer of the 
 time equals him except Emerson ; and in 
 Mr. Lowell's work there is none of that 
 Delphic quality which sometimes renders 
 Emerson's most impressive phrases only 
 an appearance of thought. Just as in all 
 of Mr. Lowell's writings one always seems 
 in direct contact with the man speaking, 
 so his words are always weighted with that 
 sense and common judgment which make 
 them shells so impalpable that one touches 
 the mind through them. In his poetry he 
 gives himself, and in his prose he yields 
 up his wisdom; to do this so immediately
 
 348 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 that the intervention of the printed page 
 is not felt is the last victory of the faculty 
 of expression in literature, whether it be 
 achieved with the simplicity of genius or 
 by the perfection of art through culture, 
 — nor are the two ways incompatible. 
 
 Such, briefly stated, is the impression 
 made by a broad view of Mr. Lowell's 
 various contributions to our literature. 
 Notwithstanding his acquirements in gen- 
 eral and the special perfection of his lit- 
 erary culture, which are felt throughout 
 his writings in their mass, it would appear 
 that his self-expression, whether on the 
 more scholarly, or the civic, or the simplest 
 human side, has been more spontaneous 
 than is commonly thought. It is true that 
 the spontaneity of a complex mind wears 
 a different aspect from that of a simpler 
 nature, but essentially it is the same, and 
 brings with it the same reality of life, the 
 same genuineness and sincerity, on ac- 
 count of which it is justly thought to be 
 a primary element in the genius of great 
 writers and true poets. The intrinsic 
 worth of Mr. Lowell's works has been 
 purposely subordinated here; but that 
 part of criticism of them is not in any
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 349 
 
 risk of misapprehension or forgetfulness. 
 The simplicity of his nature, as shown in 
 his works, beneath the diversity of his 
 interests and the subtle refinements of his 
 intellectual part, the unity of his life as 
 poet, citizen, and thinker, and the har- 
 monious interplay of his faculties one with 
 another, and especially the directness of 
 his expression in every mode of writing, 
 have not been hitherto so much recognized 
 as was right; and only by attending to 
 these primary traits can one be just to a 
 great writer.
 
 DAEWIN'S LIFE. 
 
 There is nothing more useful to observe 
 in the life of Darwin than its simplicity. He 
 was the man of science as Marlborough was 
 the soldier, and he was only that. From 
 boyhood he refused all other ways of life 
 and knowledge as by instinct, and in his 
 maturity the ill health which ends the career 
 of ordinary men only confirmed him in his 
 own ; he was always the collector, the inves- 
 tigator, or the theorizer. A second quality, 
 which is general enough to be constantly at- 
 tracting attention, is the thoroughly English 
 character of his life. The stock from which 
 he sprang was rich in old English qualities 
 of vigor, sense, and originality ; the house 
 in which he was reared offers an excellent 
 type of English family life, and was as good 
 a place to be born in as could be desired for 
 any son; his father's strong character, the 
 influences of his older relatives, the ordinary 
 schools he attended, the smallest incidents 
 of his childhood, even the jokes of his play- 
 
 350
 
 DARWIN'S LIFE. 351 
 
 fellows, belong to the moral climate of the 
 old country ; and it does not need the grouse- 
 shooting, the Cambridge undergraduate sup- 
 pers, and the proposition that he should 
 choose the Church for a profession to tell us 
 where we are. Indeed, Darwin in his youth, 
 spirited, cordial, and overflowing with health, 
 in his early surroundings of English strength 
 and kindness, was quite as attractive as in 
 his quieter, and in some respects narrower, 
 working life. 
 
 He certainly won upon the men whom he 
 met at the outset of his career. " Looking 
 back," he says, " I infer that there must 
 have been something in me a little superior 
 to the common i-un of youths ; otherwise the 
 above-mentioned men, so much older than 
 me and higher in academical position, would 
 never have allowed me to associate with 
 them. Certainly I was not aware of any 
 such superiority ; and I remember one of 
 my sporting friends. Turner, who saw me at 
 work with my beetles, saying that I should 
 some day be a Fellow of the Royal Society, 
 and the notion seemed to me preposterous." 
 Of these men Henslow was the most at- 
 tached to him and interested in his success. 
 He had not done much more than work at
 
 352 DARWIN'S LIFE. 
 
 " his beetles," but his scientific taste was al- 
 ready the ruling genius of his life. It is 
 surprising to see how completely he remained 
 untouched by the ordinary influences of a 
 university training; he thought in later 
 years that his scholastic education had been 
 a waste of time, and he seems justified when 
 one perceives how little good he got from 
 it. His was a mind that belonged to him- 
 self, self-fed, almost self-made ; he lived his 
 own life, and not another's, from the start ; 
 though his taste for collecting was heredi- 
 tary, the persistence with which he gave 
 himself up to following it, the completeness 
 of his surrender to his one predominant tal- 
 ent, was his own. He was, nevertheless, 
 better furnished with intellectual power than 
 he appears to have believed. " From my 
 earliest youth," he writes, " I have had the 
 strongest desire to understand or explain 
 whatever I observed, that is, to group all 
 facts under some general laws." It is true 
 that he started from some specific facts, had 
 a definite, tangible problem to solve ; but he 
 felt the necessity to solve it. He differed 
 from the collector in this, that his curiosity 
 was not exhausted in gathering materials, 
 but he must also order his materials ; or to
 
 DARWIN'S LIFE. 353 
 
 put it exactly, must organize his knowledge. 
 This shows the great vitality of his reason- 
 ing faculty, which within its special range 
 was really precocious. The native strength 
 of his mind in this direction is also illus- 
 trated by the great pleasure he derived from 
 reading Paley's Evidences. " The logic of 
 this book," he declares, " and, as I may add, 
 of his Natural Theology, gave me as much 
 delight as did Euclid. The careful study 
 of these works, without attempting to learn 
 any part by rote, was the only part of the 
 academical course which, as I then felt and 
 as I still believe, was of the least use to me 
 in the education of my mind. I did not 
 at that time trouble myself about Paley's 
 premises ; and taking these in trust, I was 
 charmed and convinced by the long line of 
 argumentation." He acknowledges his in- 
 ability in later life to follow trains of ab- 
 stract reasoning, such as make the matter of 
 metaphysics ; but he was quite aware of his 
 aptitude for inductive reasoning, and does 
 not overestimate its influence in the com- 
 position of his great work. " Some of my 
 critics have said, ' Oh, he is a good observer, 
 but he has no power of reasoning ! ' I do 
 not think that this can be true, for the Ori-
 
 354 DARWIN'S LIFE. 
 
 gin of Species is one long argument from 
 the beginning to the end, and it has con- 
 vinced not a few able men." His taste for 
 collecting was a sine qua non, but it was 
 this power of reasoning, however limited in 
 range, that made him great ; and it is as 
 clearly to be seen in operation in his forma- 
 tive years as was the passion for collecting 
 which was to feed it with material to work 
 upon. His vivacity and energy no doubt 
 counted much in winning for him the friend- 
 ship of elder men, and he possessed that in- 
 definable but potent quality of personal at- 
 tractiveness ; but Henslow in the beginning, 
 as Lyell later, must have seen in him that 
 happy conjunction of tastes and faculties 
 which made his genius for science, or at 
 least they must have perceived the promise 
 of it. 
 
 All the circumstances of his life seem to 
 have conspired to favor this special endow- 
 ment. The very fact that the classics did 
 nothing for him helped him : he was relieved 
 from the confusion caused by complex and 
 disturbing elements in a varied education ; 
 he had no difficulty in making his choice ; 
 he was not afterward drawn aside by the 
 existence of other unsatisfied tastes, artifi-
 
 DARWIN'S LIFE. 355 
 
 cially cultivated ; he had no ambition for 
 that roundness of develojiment which is a 
 fetich of modern times ; he did not fritter 
 away his time and energy in directions in 
 which he could not excel. It is not meant 
 to hold up his luck in this respect as exem- 
 plary good fortune, but only to emphasize 
 the way in which it told on his success. He 
 was not less happy in the exterior circum- 
 stances of his life, and in those things which 
 come by a kind of hazard. His appoint- 
 ment to the Beagle was a Napoleonic oppor- 
 tunity, and in looking back he realized its 
 value to the full : " The voyage of the Bea- 
 gle has been by far the most important 
 event in my life, and has determined my 
 whole career ; yet it depended on so small 
 a circumstance as my uncle offering to drive 
 me thirty miles to Shrewsbury, which few 
 uncles would have done, and on such a trifle 
 as the shape of my nose." But one ought 
 not to exaggerate the element of chance ; 
 and though Captain Fitz-roy had continued 
 to disapprove of Darwin's nose, and his un- 
 cle had not interfered to overcome the elder 
 Darwin's objection to the voyage on the 
 score that it would be an unbecoming ad- 
 venture for a prospective clergyman, and on
 
 356 DARWIN'S LIFE. 
 
 other equally good or better grounds, yet we 
 might have had our great naturalist. The 
 voyage of the Beagle, nevertheless, was the 
 turning-point of Darwin's life. He obtained 
 in the course of it the first real training: of 
 his mind ; it brought before him several de- 
 partments of science in such a way that he 
 approached them with active and original 
 thoughts, and was constantly forced into an 
 inquiring and bold attitude toward the novel 
 material he found ; it gave him five years 
 alone with science, and free from any near 
 master to whom he might have formed the 
 habit of deferring. Huxley does not over- 
 state the material advantages that this train- 
 ing brought with it : " In Physical Geogra- 
 phy, in Geology proper, in Geographical 
 Distribution, and in Palaeontology, he had 
 acquired an extensive practical training dur- 
 ing the voyage of the Beagle. He knew of 
 his own knowledge the way in which the 
 raw materials of these branches of science 
 are acquired, and was therefore a most com- 
 petent judge of the speculative strain they 
 would bear. That which he needed, after 
 his return to England, was a corresponding 
 acquaintance with Anatomy and Develop- 
 ment, and their relations to Taxonomy, and
 
 DARWIN'S LIFE. 357 
 
 he acquired this by his Cirripede work." It 
 is to be noticed that during his voyage in 
 the Beagle he became convinced of the 
 " wonderful superiority of Lyell's manner 
 of treating geology" over every other au- 
 thor's. This is an illustration, like that 
 drawn from Paley, of the character of his 
 mind as primarily a reasoning mind ; for 
 what he recognized in Lyell was a method. 
 It was on this voyage, too, that he became 
 ambitious ; he began to believe that he might 
 add to the stock of human knowledge, and 
 the stimulation of the welcome his success 
 was meeting in England was evidently 
 keenly felt. He put his whole heart into 
 the work, and few passages are more stir- 
 ring than those which describe his zeal in 
 his first really scientific enthusiasm, after 
 he had given up his gun as of less use than 
 his eye, and had found sport, even with his 
 fond love of it, an inferior pleasure to the 
 pursuit of knowledge ; then, alone in the 
 Andes and the Southern Ocean, he came to 
 his majority. 
 
 Mr. Huxley, in the passage cited, has 
 noted the need Darwin had for further 
 training, particularly as a naturalist. He 
 obtained this by his work on the Cirripedes,
 
 358 DARWIN'S LIFE. 
 
 an eight years' labor. This concluded his 
 education. Of the value of it merely as 
 training and to himself, Sir Joseph Hooker 
 says : " Your father recognized three stages 
 in his career as a biologist : the mere col- 
 lector at Cambridge ; the collector and ob- 
 server in the Beagle, and for some years 
 afterwards ; and the trained naturalist after, 
 and only after, the Cirripede work. That 
 he was a thinker all along is true enough." 
 Huxley says that Darwin never did a wiser 
 thing than when he devoted himself to these 
 years of patient toil. Darwin himself does 
 not indicate that he purposely chose to do 
 this monograph in order to educate himself, 
 and he doubts whether it was worth the 
 time. He seems to have been gradually 
 drawn into it, and to have finished it be- 
 cause he had gone so far. When he had 
 done with it, at any rate, if not before, he 
 was a thoroughly furnished man for such in- 
 vestigation as was to be his title to lasting 
 fame. He had come to be thus equipped 
 by the mere course of his life ; by beetles 
 at Cambridge, and the Beagle, and the Cir- 
 ripedes. Yet if he had planned his educa- 
 tion from the start for the express purpose 
 of dealing in the most masterly way with
 
 DAEWIN'S LIFE. 359 
 
 the mass of diversified details out of which 
 the Origin of Species and the other deriva- 
 tive coordinate works grew, it is hard to see 
 in what way his course could have been 
 improved. The ill-health which seized him 
 so soon was almost a blessing in disguise, 
 since it isolated him from the distractions 
 of modern London, made him value his life 
 and his time, and possibly, by the economy 
 of his strength which it necessitated, aided 
 as much as it hindered him. 
 
 One need not follow him through the 
 composition of his books, or even through 
 the elaboration of the theory of natural se- 
 lection, during the many years that it was 
 growing in his laboratory of notes. For 
 him the formulating of that theory was in- 
 evitable : it seems, as one observes him, nat- 
 ural enough to have been foretold of him ; 
 but it followed, not from his position, which 
 another man might have occupied, but from 
 his genius. The qualities of mind which it 
 required were not many, and one under- 
 stands readily why it is so commonly said 
 that all is explained by his power of obser- 
 vation and its vast range ; but it did require 
 one high faculty of the mind, and a rare 
 one, which Darwin had preeminently among
 
 360 DARWIN'S LIFE. 
 
 tlie men o£ his time, — the faculty, namely, 
 of discerning the lines of inquiry in a mass 
 of as yet nnrelated facts. He somewhere 
 says that he had found it harder, perhaps, 
 to put the question than it was to reach the 
 answer. This power is the great economizer 
 of mental energy, in any branch of investi- 
 gation ; it is, to the man who has it, equiv- 
 alent to a compass ; and to Darwin it was 
 the one talent without which his stores of 
 knowledge would have been no more than a 
 heap of unclassified specimens in a museum 
 cellar. Moral and physical qualities he had, 
 besides ; his patience and his practiced vis- 
 ion were invaluable ; but it was the intel- 
 lectual part that penetrated the secrets of 
 nature. This sense of the problem, this eye 
 for the question, was most serviceable to his 
 success. His acuteness in perceiving the 
 importance of the infinitely little, which is 
 often mentioned as one of his distinguishing 
 traits, was only an incident of this larger 
 endowment ; and his power to make other 
 men useful to him, specialists in horticulture 
 or physiology, or even common observing 
 men, was only the knowledge of how to put 
 practical questions. The point is worth em- 
 phasizing, because in this age of the accu-
 
 DARWIN'S LIFE. 361 
 
 mulation of scientific detail it is too apt to 
 be forgotten that the thinking mind is as 
 rare in science as in other departments, 
 and is, nevertheless, the indispensable thing 
 which makes a man great. 
 
 Here it is worth while to advert to that 
 persistent discussion respecting the nature 
 of a modern education, which Darwin's ex- 
 perience is bound to bring forward with 
 renewed vigor. His testimony, both in the 
 chart of himself which he gave Mr. Galton 
 and in the account he wrote for his children, 
 is unequivocal. He says he was self-taught ; 
 that his training at the university was of no 
 use to him, speaking generally ; and that the 
 classics in particular were barren. He seems 
 to be quite correct in his statement ; the 
 claim that his powers of observation and 
 comparison were really developed by school- 
 boy attention to Latin and Greek termina- 
 tions is purely pedagogical ; nor is there any 
 reason to question that men of genius can 
 be successful, achieve eminent greatness for 
 themselves, and do work of the highest value 
 to societv without immediate oblisjation to 
 those studies usually called the humanities. 
 This is nothing new. Instances of self-edu- 
 cation for special careers are to be found in
 
 362 DARWIN'S LIFE. 
 
 other walks than those of science : in war, 
 in administration, and generally in active 
 life, and not infrequently in literature itself. 
 But it is worth observing what testimony 
 these volumes bear to the wonderful vital- 
 ity of the Greek intelligence. Speaking of 
 the theory of Pangenesis, Darwin writes to 
 a correspondent that the views of Hippoc- 
 rates " seem almost identical with mine, — 
 merely a change of terms, and an applica- 
 tion of them to classes of facts necessarily 
 unknown to the old philosopher." Again, 
 he writes of Aristotle : " From quotations 
 which I had seen I had a high notion of 
 Aristotle's merits, but I had not the most 
 remote notion what a wonderful man he 
 was. Linnseus and Cuvier have been my 
 two gods, though in very different ways, but 
 they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle. 
 ... I never realized, before reading your 
 book, to what an enormous consummation 
 of labor we owe even our common know- 
 ledge." A more striking passage is that of 
 Huxley's, where he says : " The oldest of all 
 philosophies, that of evolution, was bound 
 hand and foot and cast into utter darkness 
 during the millennium of theological scho- 
 lasticism. But Darwin poured new life-
 
 DAEWIN'S LIFE. 363 
 
 blood into the ancient frame ; the bonds 
 burst, and the revivified thought of ancient 
 Greece has proved itself to be a more ade- 
 quate expression of the universal order of 
 things than any of the schemes which have 
 been accepted by the credulity and welcomed 
 by the superstition of seventy later genera- 
 tions of men." Rediscovery, however, is 
 not obligation ; and, perhaps, if Darwin had 
 been thoroughly imbued with the Greek 
 mode of looking upon the universe, he would 
 not have been really indebted to it for his 
 own views ; for he went upon different 
 grounds in forming his conceptions. The 
 real question is, not whether Darwin suc- 
 ceeded without Greek influences, but whether 
 he lost anything because of his failure to 
 assimilate them. The answer seems plain. 
 It is written all over these pages, and is ex- 
 pressly given by Darwin in more than one 
 passage. 
 
 No words can be too strong to express the 
 lovableness of Darwin's personality, or the 
 moral beauty of his character. In his biog- 
 raphy, it is true, he is presented as the man 
 of science ; but he is seen occasionally in 
 other aspects. He was a dutiful, respect- 
 ful, and affectionate son, at the outset of his
 
 364 DARWIN'S LIFE. 
 
 life. He thought his father was sometimes 
 unjust, but he always spoke of him as " the 
 wisest man he ever knew ; " and there is a 
 touching passage in one of his letters home, 
 when his father had sent him a note : " I al- 
 most cried for pleasure at receiving it ; it 
 was very kind, thinking of writing to me." 
 He was also, in his turn, an admirable fa- 
 ther, considerate, patient, and very tender. 
 One of his sons tells a most significant anec- 
 dote of once having drawn on himself some 
 indignant exclamation, "almost with fury," 
 and the end of it being that " next morning, 
 at seven o'clock or so, he came into my bed- 
 room and sat on my bed, and said he had 
 not been able to sleep, from the thought that 
 he had been so angry with me, and after 
 a few more kind words he left me." His 
 description of his little daughter who died is 
 of itself enough to show the extraordinarily 
 fine quality of his affections ; and in general 
 his relations with his children are almost 
 ideal in gentleness, kindness, and comjian- 
 ionableness. He was also a good friend 
 and acquaintance. In a word, in his private 
 social relations he was exemplary, judged 
 by the standard of a high civilization. He 
 was not without a sense, too, of public duty.
 
 DAB WIN'S LIFE. 365 
 
 He felt strongly only upon the subject of 
 slavery, and this was largely because of his 
 travels in slave countries. He was inter- 
 ested in philanthropic efforts to some de- 
 gree, and especially in furthering the in- 
 crease of kindness to animals. But he was 
 remote from public affairs, and led even in 
 his sympathies a life somewhat narrowly 
 confined to his own circle and his work in 
 science. In other parts of his character 
 there is nothing to displease. He was mod- 
 est and just, and free from envy, conscien- 
 tious to an extreme, and as ready to give as 
 to receive help in all ways. He was more 
 pleased with his fame than he acknow- 
 ledged; he cared deeply for the success of 
 his theory, and was well aware of its in- 
 fluence on his ov/n reputation as one to be 
 classed with Newton's ; he liked praise and 
 distinction, though he limited his desire to 
 the commendation and respect of natural- 
 ists ; but this is only to wish to be approved 
 by the most competent judges. He was fair 
 to Wallace, and exhibited the best of tem- 
 pers toward him ; but between the lines one 
 reads that he was nettled and annoyed by 
 the incident, and it must be concluded that 
 as he was ambitious in youth, he was de-
 
 366 DAB WIN'S LIFE. 
 
 sirous of having Ms due in manhood, and 
 valued fame. 
 
 This was a character which might well 
 sjiare the humanities. The fact remains that 
 he did spare them. What he lost was cul- 
 ture. The confession that he makes of the 
 gradual atrophy of his aesthetic tastes will 
 be long quoted as one of the most remark- 
 able facts of his life. He began with a sus- 
 ceptibility to music, which by his son's ac- 
 count he did not lose; with a liking for 
 poetry, such that he read The Excursion 
 twice, and he would not have read it except 
 for pleasure ; and he used to take Milton 
 with him in his pocket. In art he went 
 but a little way, if, indeed, he ever really 
 had any eye for it. He was religious, as an 
 English boy usually is ; but his interest in 
 belief regarding religious subjects died out, 
 and, what is of more consequence, the emo- 
 tions which were called out by it in early 
 life ceased to be exercised. There was a 
 deadening, in other words, of all his nat- 
 ure, except so far as it was fed by his work, 
 his family, and his friends in its intellect- 
 ual and social parts. So complete was this 
 change that it affected even his appreciation 
 of beautiful scenery, which had evidently
 
 DARWIN'S LIFE. 367 
 
 given him keen delight in his youth and 
 travels. He dates this change from just 
 after his thirtieth year, when he became ab- 
 sorbed in scientific pursuits as his profession. 
 Something, no doubt, and perhaps much, is 
 to be set down to the effect of his ill-health, 
 which left him with diminished energies for 
 any recreation ; his strength was exhausted 
 in his few hours of work. He was himself 
 so convinced that his life had been narrowed 
 in these ways, that he says if he had it to 
 live over he would have planned to give a 
 certain time habitually to poetry. 
 
 It would be too much to say that the fail- 
 ure of Darwin to appropriate the humane 
 elements in his university education accounts 
 in any perceptible degree for these defects. 
 In culture, as in science, the self-making 
 power of the man counts heavily ; and there 
 is such inefficiency in those whose duty it is 
 to give youth a liberal education from clas- 
 sical sources, there are such wrong methods 
 and unintelligent aims in the universities, 
 that it might easily prove to be the case that 
 a student with the most coi-dial tempera- 
 ment toward the humanities would profit 
 only imperfectly by his residence at seats of 
 learning. In spite of these reservations
 
 368 DABWIN'S LIFE. 
 
 however, the Greek culture is the historical 
 source of what are traditionally the higher 
 elements in our intellectual life, and has 
 been for most cultivated men the practical 
 discipline of their minds. But it is to be 
 further observed that the example of Dar- 
 win, if it should be set up as showing that 
 Greek culture is unnecessary in modern 
 days, goes just as directly and completely to 
 prove that all literary education, as well by 
 modern as by ancient authors, is superfluous. 
 It is enough to indicate to what a length the 
 argument must be carried, if it is at all ad- 
 mitted. The important matter is rather the 
 question, How much was Darwin's life in- 
 jured for himself by his loss of culture, in 
 the fact that some of those sources of intel- 
 lectual delight which are reputed the most 
 precious for civilized man were closed to 
 him? 
 
 The blank page in this charming biogra- 
 phy is the page of spiritual life. There is 
 nothing written there. The entire absence 
 of an element which enters commonly into 
 all men's lives in some degree is a circum- 
 stance as significant as it is astonishing. 
 Never was a man more alive to what is 
 visible and tangible, or in any way matter of
 
 DARWIN'S LIFE. 369 
 
 sensation ; on the sides of his nature where 
 an appeal could be made, never was a man 
 more responsive ; but there were parts in 
 which he was blind and dull. Just as the 
 boy failed to be interested in many things, 
 the man failed too ; and he disregarded 
 what did not interest him with the same 
 ease at sixty as at twenty. What did in- 
 terest him was the immediately present, and 
 he dealt with it admirably, both in the in- 
 tellectual and the moral world ; but what 
 was remote was as if it were not. The spir- 
 itual element in life is not remote, but it is 
 not matter of sensation, and Darwin lived as 
 if there were no such thing ; it belongs to the 
 region of emotion and imagination, and those 
 perceptions which deal with the nature of 
 man in its contrast with the material world. 
 Poetry, art, music, the emotional influences 
 of nature, the idealizations of moral life, are 
 the means by which men take possession of 
 this inner world of man ; to which, for man 
 at least, nature in all its immensity is sub- 
 sidiary. Darwin's insensibility to the higher 
 life — for so men agree to call it — was 
 partly, if not wholly, induced by his absorp- 
 tion in scientific pursuits in the spirit of ma- 
 terialism. We praise him for his achieve-
 
 370 DAE WIN'S LIFE. 
 
 ments, we admire his character, and we feel 
 the full charm of his temperament; he de- 
 lights us in every active manifestation of his 
 nature. We do not now learn for the first 
 time that a man may be good without being 
 religious, and successful without being liber- 
 ally educated, and worthy of honor without 
 being spiritual ; but a man may be all this 
 and yet be incomplete. Great as Darwin 
 was as a thinker, and winning as he remains 
 as a man, those elements in which he was 
 deficient are the noblest part of our nature.
 
 BYRON'S CENTENARY. 
 
 The absence of any widespread interest 
 in the centenary of Lord Byron is a mar- 
 velous illustration of the vicissitudes of lit- 
 erary reputation. Only in Greece was pub- 
 lic notice taken of it. The brilliancy with 
 which his fame burst forth, the unexampled 
 rapidity with which it spread through Eu- 
 rope, the powerful influence it continued to 
 exert on the youth of the next age, were to 
 the men who witnessed them sure sifrns of 
 the magnitude of his future renown. The 
 decadence into which it has fallen would 
 have been incredible to them. It was By- 
 ron's distinction to have been the first man 
 of letters who enjoyed an international rep- 
 utation at once ; and one can hardly credit 
 the fact that he has shrunk so wonderfully. 
 In the month of his death Sir Walter Scott, 
 in a brief article which attracted wide atten- 
 tion, said that it seemed almost as if the sun 
 in heaven had been extinguished ; and when 
 Scott soon followed him, Landor, writing to 
 
 371
 
 372 BYRON'S CENTENARY. 
 
 Crabb Robinson, remarked that the death of 
 these two had " put the fashionable world 
 into deep mourning," and drew gloomy pre- 
 dictions, in the well-known manner of con- 
 temporaries, because the great men were 
 leaving no successors. 
 
 Something of the shock of Byron's death 
 and of the exaltation of his genius at the 
 moment was due to the manner in which he 
 met his end ; he had fallen like one of his 
 own heroes, died in a cause, and appealed to 
 the romantic feeling of the age. Even then, 
 however, to admire him was found to be a 
 different thing from approving him. When 
 the thirty-seven guns had been fired at Mis- 
 solonghi, and the Turks had responded with 
 " an exultant volley," and the ship had 
 brought home the remains, the Abbey was 
 refused, and he was buried in the common 
 soil of England. Two incidents of the fu- 
 neral bring him very near to us. Lady Car- 
 oline Lamb met the cortege as she was driv- 
 ing, and, on being told, in answer to her 
 question, that it was Byron's, fainted in her 
 carriage ; and Mary Shelley, as she saw the 
 procession winding down, reflected on the 
 short-sightedness of human life, asking who 
 could have foretold at Lerici such changes 
 as she had witnessed in two little years.
 
 BYEON'S CENTENARY. 373 
 
 Hobhouse, with all his efforts, could raise 
 only a thousand pounds for a memorial, but 
 with this he got Thorwaldsen to make a 
 statue which was sent to England in 1834. 
 The Abbey was again refused, and, to the 
 discredit of the nation, this work was al- 
 lowed to remain stored away in the Custom- 
 house eleven years, because no fit place could 
 be got to put it in. At last, in 1845, Dr. 
 Whewell gave permission to set it up in the 
 Library of Trinity, which it still adorns. 
 Thirty years later came the miserable fiasco 
 of Beaconsfield's Committee, which, far from 
 making Newstead Abbey a national posses- 
 sion and gathering there the relics of Byron, 
 placed in Hamilton Park (other sites being- 
 refused) that statue of the poet leaning on 
 the rocks, with his dog Boatswain beside 
 him, which can only be described as popu- 
 lar melodrama in stone, beautiful only for 
 the mass of red marble which the Greek 
 Government gave for its base. It is to be 
 remarked, also, that at this time the Abbey 
 was a third time practically refused, as Dean 
 Stanley, out of respect to the action of his 
 two predecessors, but not apparently for any 
 other reason, precluded application for erect- 
 ing a tablet there by a letter in which he
 
 374 BYRON'S CENTENARY. 
 
 said he preferred the subject should not be 
 brought before him. 
 
 The history of monuments, however, is not 
 necessarily proof of fame. Others of Eng- 
 land's greatest do not sleep in the Abbey, 
 and the hero not infrequently waits for his 
 statue a long age. The place of fame is on 
 the lips of men, and Macaulay, when Moore's 
 Life came out, could speak of Byron as " the 
 most celebrated man in Europe." The de- 
 cline of his vogue was nevertheless rapid 
 and unmistakable. We all remember Car- 
 lyle's oracle : " Close thy Byron ; open thy 
 Goethe." This must have been about 1840. 
 But, unfortunately, as one writer observes, 
 to open Goethe is to return to Byron's great- 
 ness. Did not Goethe tell Eckermann that 
 a man of Byron's eminence would not come 
 again, nor such a tragedy as Cain ? He 
 thought him greater than Milton — " vast 
 and widely varied," whereas the latter was 
 only simple and stately. Perhaps, as we 
 have been told, Goethe was flattered' by 
 Byron's imitation. 
 
 Whatever was the reason, the critical 
 judgment of Goethe is one to be weighed 
 with regard to Byron, and to himself also, 
 for that matter. What part Goethe's praise
 
 BYRON'S CENTENARY. 375 
 
 may have had in making Byron the hero 
 of " Young- Germany " we have no means 
 of determining, but his works were vital in 
 the new age there, and still his hold seems 
 greater on the Germans, if we may judge by 
 the test of translations and biography, than 
 it is elsewhere on the Continent. Heine 
 was more than touched by him, though he 
 was far from being his duplicate, and could 
 see the humorous side of those young Pa- 
 risians — Musset the foremost — who were 
 melancholy in the full glow of first man- 
 hood, and went about in despair dining 
 sumptuously every day. One pities Musset, 
 for Byron was, as much as another man can 
 be, the secret of his fate. Lamartine caught 
 only the sentimentality of Byron, but Mus- 
 set assimilated his darker spirit, his reckless- 
 ness, and license, and skepticism, and trans- 
 muted his very coarseness into a Parisian 
 vulgarity. Stendhal and Sainte-Beuve paid 
 tribute to him ; and, to cut the subject short, 
 Mazzini thanked him in the name of Italy, in 
 Spain Espronceda drew his inspiration from 
 him, and Castelar, in the later time, eulo- 
 gized him for his liberating influences in the 
 peninsula with Spanish amplitude of phrase. 
 Karl Elze thinks that the Russian poet,
 
 376 BYRON'S CENTENARY. 
 
 Pushkin, was his child ; if it were so, Byron 
 might well be proud of what such an in- 
 fluence was the beginning of in Russia. 
 This rapid survey, with its brilliant names, 
 impresses the mind with the range and 
 dominance of this man, although Landor's 
 sneer, when he hoped that " the mercies 
 which have begun with man's forgetfulness 
 may be crowned with God's forgiveness," 
 does not now seem so absurd as formerly. 
 
 To look at the matter from this point of 
 view, however, is to confuse Byron with By- 
 ronism. There was a European mood, a 
 temperament of the revolutionary time, that 
 fed on Byron, but he was not its creator, 
 and to regard him as more than a single in- 
 fluence of many that moulded the young 
 men of the next generation is to give him 
 vastly more than his due. This is the se- 
 cret of his vogue in Europe, not that he 
 liberated their minds, but that he set the 
 fashion for minds expanding in a new age 
 of intellectual pride and moral irrespousi- 
 bilit}^ helped to form their attitude, and was 
 a rallving name for the faction. He was 
 licentious, but he was neither democratical 
 nor atheistical ; he had no body of opinions 
 properly thought out and correlated with so-
 
 BYEON'S CENTENARY. 377 
 
 cial facts, either in politics or religion ; he 
 had no sti'ong convictions even ; but, with 
 prejudices of rank and reminiscences of 
 Scottish theology from which he could not 
 free himself, he was an impulsive and there- 
 fore uneven revolter from the old regime, 
 and never quite at home in the new camp. 
 He preferred, he said, to be beheaded by 
 the King and not by the mob ; and the 
 whole aristocrat spoke in the saying. Shel- 
 ley wrote of him, " The canker of aristoc- 
 racy needs to be cut out ; " and he hits off 
 Byron's inconsequence in religion where he 
 speaks of him under the name of Maddalo, 
 and contrasts him with himself. Maddalo, 
 he says, took a wicked pleasure In drawing 
 out his taunts against religion ; but, he adds, 
 " What Maddalo thinks on these matters is 
 not exactly known." Byron is believed to 
 have talked with Shelley more seriously 
 than with any other man. He did not him- 
 self know what he thought ; and his state 
 of mind was well expressed by his remark 
 to Lady Byron, " The trouble is, I do be- 
 lieve." In substance, therefore, unlike Shel- 
 ley, who was democratical and atheistical 
 on principle, Byron was far from being the 
 ideal of the various " young " nationalitie-s,
 
 378 BYEON'S CENTENARY. 
 
 France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, in the 
 principal tenets dear to the age. It was 
 rather his personality, and what they trans- 
 formed him into by their worship, that had 
 power over them in their search for " lib- 
 erty ; " and truly, though his ideas were in- 
 complete and fragmentary, and inextricably 
 blended, even in their formation, with his 
 impulses and the accidents of his position 
 as a pariah of genius, yet there was a con- 
 tagion in his spirit, a dash of energy and of 
 abandon, that told as blood tells more than 
 thought. 
 
 One advantage, too, Byron had with for- 
 eign nations that with his own counts as a 
 defect. He had no form, no art, no finish ; 
 and the poet who failed in these things can 
 be read in our day only by a kind of suffer- 
 ance, and with continual friction with what 
 has come to be our mastering literary taste 
 for perfection in the manner. It has been 
 said that he consequently bore translation 
 better than he otherwise would. His quality 
 is power, not charm ; the mood and the situ- 
 ation and the thought are the elements that 
 count in his poetry, while the words are at 
 the best eloquent or witty, but not " the liv- 
 ing garment of light." The result was, that
 
 BYEON'S CENTENARY. 379 
 
 he could be given almost completely in a for- 
 eign language. This consideration may go 
 far to explain the relative estimate of him 
 by foreign writers in comparison with other 
 English poets ; for these others who have 
 the charm that cannot be transfused, the art 
 that will obey no master but its own Pros- 
 pero, are seen, as one may say, without their 
 singing robes ; and their poetry, made prose, 
 loses half its excellence. This, together with 
 the German element in one portion of his 
 work and the strong Italian influence in a 
 larger portion, especially in Don Juan, must 
 be taken into account in any attempt to un- 
 derstand why he was the best known English 
 poet on the Continent, and perhaps, with the 
 exception of Shakespeare, still is. 
 
 In England, Byron's reputation met with 
 rapid decline from natural causes. It is 
 not likely that his misconduct in morals was 
 much against him, and Beaconsfield was 
 wholly on the wrong track when he reminded 
 the Byron meeting that, after half a century, 
 a man's private life scarcely enters into the 
 estimate of his literary genius. It seems 
 rather Byron's lack of orthodoxy that Eng- 
 land most reseuted. Society put up with 
 much libertinism in those days in high quar-
 
 380 BYEOX'S CENTENARY. 
 
 ters ; but Byron had attacked the faith, or 
 at least elements of it, which the Church 
 shared in common with Calvinism, and this 
 was too shocking a matter for a society 
 which found hardly more than matter for 
 gossip in natural sons and daughters. This 
 was the reason which a bishop alleged in 
 the House of Lords in answer to Brougham, 
 in the debate on the second refusal of the 
 Abbey. Byron had attacked Christianity, 
 and he should not be interred " in the Tem- 
 ple of our God." The middle classes have 
 always rejected Byron, in like manner, be- 
 cause he scoffed, though, no doubt, his life 
 and the licentious portions of his poetry also 
 offended them. From the first his skejati- 
 cism was heavily against him, and probably 
 it still remains the strongest objection to his 
 works in the minds of Englishmen gener- 
 ally. In Landor's bitter attack (he had of- 
 fended Landor by rhyming his name with 
 gander) this charge is made the climax, and 
 the passage is brief enough to quote as the 
 best word of Byron's enemies : — 
 
 " Afterwards, whenever he wrote a bad 
 poem, he supported his sinking fame by 
 some signal act of profligacy : an elegy by 
 a seduction, a heroic by an adultery, a trag-
 
 BYEON'S CENTENARY. 381 
 
 edy by a divorce. On the remark of a 
 learned man that irregularity is no indi- 
 cation of genius, he began to lose ground 
 rapidly, when, on a sudden, he cried out at 
 the Haymarket, There is no God. It was 
 then surmised more generally and more 
 gravely that there was something in him, 
 and he stood upon his legs almost to the 
 last. Say what you will, once whispered 
 a friend of mine, there are things in him 
 strong as poison and original as sin." This, 
 with all its excess, is no inapt character of 
 Byron, as English prejudice drew him. 
 
 On the other hand, much that was in 
 his favor at first was necessarily temporary. 
 The man had a story. He was one of the 
 picturesque characters of the age, and while 
 he lived he was interesting to his time 
 merely for his personal fortunes. It was 
 to his gain, too, that he identified his own 
 romance with that which he early invented, 
 appealing to the adventurous in men and to 
 the pity and admiration of women. His he- 
 roes are strong, and strength succeeds with 
 the sex in fiction as well as in life ; and they 
 are, besides, usually faithful in love, while 
 their crimes are taken out of the moral re« 
 gion of deliberate choice by a kind of emo-
 
 382 BYRON'S CENTENARY. 
 
 tional sophistry, and somehow are charged 
 to their circumstances, so that the unwary 
 and innocent reader commiserates their vil- 
 lainies instead of being revolted by them. 
 These tales (and no part of his work was 
 more popular) are hard to read to-day, but 
 we forget too readily what raw and bloody 
 fiction the world had in the first score years 
 of this century ; we cannot conceive how 
 London ran after stories of blighted brig- 
 ands and sentimental corsairs, in the verv 
 thunder of Waterloo. But so it was, and 
 Byron was more interesting in that he was 
 the unhappy and noble original from which 
 the pirates of his imagination were drawn. 
 If he changed the scene and wandered over 
 Europe as Childe Harold, he gained in sen- 
 timent ; if he wore the mask of Manfred, he 
 gained in tragedy ; and if he sneered in Don 
 Juan, there was the jaded man of the world, 
 perhaps more interesting. He was, more- 
 over, a peer; but a dead peer certainly is 
 no better than a dead lion, and when » he 
 died, why, — the fashion in collars changed. 
 Other living personalities occupied the stage ; 
 England gi^ew steadily more sincere in re- 
 ligion, more strict in the standard of pri- 
 vate morals, more exacting of seriousness in
 
 BYEON'S CENTENARY. 383 
 
 thought and o£ perfection in literary form ; 
 and all these influences were adverse to 
 Byron, who made no offsetting gain in his 
 own counti-y from the revolutionary fervor 
 that helped him on the Continent. 
 
 What is there left ? Some stirring pas- 
 sages of adventure, some eloquent descrip- 
 tions of nature, some personal lyrics of true 
 poetic feeling, dramas which, it is to he 
 hoped, have finally damned " the unities," 
 and one great poem of the modern spirit, 
 Don Juan. And what remains of that mel- 
 odramatic Byron of women's fancies ? His 
 character has come out plain, and we are 
 really amazed at it, — proud, sensual, self- 
 ish, and, it must be added, mean. Ignoble 
 he was, in many ways, but, for all that, the 
 energy of his passions, his vitalit}^, his mas- 
 terly egotism, and the splendid force of his 
 genius, made him a commanding name and 
 stamped him upon the succeeding European 
 time. He cannot be neglected by history, 
 but men certainly appear to pass him by. 
 Arnold has endeavored to bring him back 
 by a collection ; but Arnold's critical views 
 on poetry seem to be justifications in age for 
 the tastes he had when he was young, — 
 reasons after the act. A late biographer
 
 38i BYEON'S CENTENARY. 
 
 thinks tliat the decadence of his fame is due 
 to the conservatism of the last half -cen- 
 tury, and that in the revolutionary age that 
 ought soon to be beginning, he will retrieve 
 himself. But can this be hoped of a " revo- 
 lutionary " poet whom Swinburne has cast 
 aside ? The prediction does not convince us. 
 Byronism has gone by, and the age of the 
 " enlightenment " in Germany and France ; 
 such a mood is not repeated. Goethe out- 
 lived Wertherism, but had Byron such good 
 fortune? In his own character there are 
 such defects as forbid admiration in the 
 light of our moral ideas ; and in his poems, 
 taken apart from their time, there are other 
 defects, both in their substance, and, unques- 
 tionably, in their form, which forbid the sort 
 of approval that would make them in a true 
 sense classic, as a whole, though the quali- 
 ties that make Childe Harold and Don Juan 
 great, and preserve here and there passages 
 in other j)oems, are those that confer immor- 
 tality. He was a poet ; he was a force, also, 
 that spent itself partly in creating a world- 
 wide affectation, and partly in rousing and 
 reinforcing the impulse of individual liberty 
 on the Continent ; but he is a poet no one
 
 hyron's centenahy. 385 
 
 can love, and lie left a memory that no 
 one can admire, and there is none of his 
 works that receives the meed of perfect 
 praise.
 
 ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 
 
 The death of Browning brings one stage 
 nearer the too plainly ajjproaching end of 
 a literary age which will long be full of cu- 
 rious interest to the student of the moods of 
 the mind of man. Time has linked his name 
 with that of Tennyson, and the conjunction 
 gives to England another of those double 
 stars of genius in which her years are rich, 
 and by which the spirit of an age has a two- 
 fold expression. The old opposition, the 
 polarity of mind, by virtue of which the 
 Platonist differs from the Aristotelian, the 
 artist from the thinker, Shakespeare from 
 Jonson, shows its efficacy here, too, in the 
 last modern age, and divides the poets and 
 their admirers by innate preferences. It is 
 needful to remember this contrast, though 
 not to insist upon it unduly, in order to ap- 
 proach the work of Browning rightly, to be 
 just to those who idolize him without of- 
 fense to those who are repelled by him. The 
 analysis of his powers, the charting of his 
 
 386
 
 ON BBOWNING'S DEATH. 387 
 
 life and work, are not difficult ; but the 
 value of his real achievement is more uncer- 
 tain. Interest centres entirely in his poetry, 
 for his career has been without notable inci- 
 dent, and is told when it is said that he has 
 lived the life of a scholar and man of letters 
 in England and Italy amid the social cul- 
 ture of his time. For the world, his career 
 is the succession of books he has put forth, 
 and this is as he would have it ; publicity 
 beyond this he did not seek, but refused 
 with violence and acrimony. 
 
 In his earliest poem, youthful in its self- 
 portraiture, its literary touch, and its fragmen- 
 tary plan, the one striking quality is the flow 
 of language. Here was a writer who would 
 never lack for words ; fluent, as if inexhaus- 
 tible, the merely verbal element in Pauline 
 shows no struggle with the medium of the 
 poet's art. This gift of facility was, as is 
 usual, first to show itself. In Paracelsus 
 the second primary quality of Browning was 
 equally conspicuous, — the power of reason- 
 ing in verse. These two traits have for a 
 poet as much weakness as strength, and they 
 lie at the source of Browning's defects as 
 a master of poetic art. His facility allowed 
 him to be diffuse in language, and his rea-
 
 388 ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 
 
 sonino' habit led him often to be diffuse in 
 matter. In Sordello the two produced a 
 monstrosity, both in construction and ex- 
 pression, not to be rivaled in literature. 
 Picturesque detail, intellectual interest, moral 
 meaning, struggle in vain in that tale to 
 make themselves felt and discerned through 
 the tangle of words and the labyrinth of act 
 and reflection. But already in these poems 
 Browning had shown, to himself, if not to 
 the world, that he had come to certain con- 
 clusions, to a conception of human life and 
 a decision as to the use of his art in regard 
 to it, which were to give him substantial 
 power. He defined it by his absorption in 
 Paracelsus with the broad ideas of infinite 
 power and infinite love, which in his last 
 poem still maintain their place in his sys- 
 tem as the highest solvents of experience 
 and speculation ; and in Sordello he stated 
 the end of art, which he continued to seek, 
 in his maxim that little else is worth study 
 except the " history of a soul." His entire 
 poetic work, broadly speaking, is the illus- 
 tration of this short sentence. Such prepos- 
 sessions with the spiritual meaning of life 
 as these poems show made sure the predom- 
 inance in his work of the higher interests of
 
 ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 389 
 
 man ; and he won his audience finally by 
 this fact, that he had something to say that 
 was ethical and religious. The develop- 
 ment, however, of both the theory and prac- 
 tice of his mind had to be realized in far 
 more definite and striking forms than the 
 earlier poems before the attention of the 
 world could be secured. 
 
 It would seem natural that a man with 
 such convictions as Browning acknowledged, 
 should be preeminently an idealist, and that 
 his point of weakness should prove to be the 
 tendency to metaphysical and vague matter 
 not easily putting on poetical form. But he 
 was, in fact, a realist, — one who is primarily 
 concerned with things, and uses the method 
 of observation. His sense for actual fact is 
 always keen. In that poem of Paracelsus, 
 which is a discussion in the air if ever 
 a poem was, it is significant to find him 
 emphasizing the circumstance that he had 
 taken very few liberties with his subject, 
 and bringing books to show evidence of his- 
 torical fidelity. But, little of the dramatic 
 spirit as there is in Paracelsus, there was 
 much in Browning when it should come to 
 be released, and it belongs to the dramatist 
 to be interested in the facts of life, the flesh
 
 390 ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 
 
 and blood reality, in which he may or may 
 not (according to his greatness) find a soul. 
 Browning was thus a realist, and he chose 
 habitually the objective method of art — but 
 to set forth " the history of a soul." Had 
 he been an idealist, his subject would have 
 been " the history of the soul ; " his method 
 mififht or misht not have been different. 
 This change of the particle is a slight one, 
 but it involves that polarity of mind which 
 sets Browning opposite to Tennyson. He 
 deals with individuals, takes in imagination 
 their point of view, assumes for the time be- 
 ing their circumstances and emotions ; and 
 one who does this in our time, with a pre- 
 occupation with the soul in the individual, 
 cannot escape from one overpowering im- 
 pression, repeated from every side of the 
 modern age, — the impression, namely, of 
 the relativity of human life. 
 
 This is the lesson which is spread over 
 Browning's pages, with line on line and pre- 
 cept on precept. By it he comes into har- 
 mony with the very spirit of the century on 
 its intellectual side, and represents it. The 
 " history of a soul " differs very greatly ac- 
 cording to circumstance, native impulses, the 
 needs of life at different stages of growth,
 
 ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 391 
 
 the balance of faculties and desires in it, the 
 temperament of its historical period, the 
 access to it of art or music or thought, and 
 in a thousand ways ; and Browning devotes 
 himself oftentimes to the exposition of all 
 this web of circumstance, in order that we 
 may see the soul as it was under its con- 
 ditions, instead of leaping to a conclusion 
 by a hard-and-fast morality based upon the 
 similarity of the soul in all men. The task 
 happily falls in with his fine gift of reason- 
 ing, and increases by practice the supple- 
 ness and subtlety of this faculty of his. One 
 might say, indeed, without close computa- 
 tion, that the larger part of his entire poetic 
 work is occupied with such reasoning upon 
 psychological cases, in the manner of a law- 
 yer who educes a client's justification from 
 the details of his temptation. Many of the 
 longer poems are only instances of special 
 pleading, and have all the faults that belong 
 to that form of thought. The Ring and the 
 Book is such an interminable argument, mar- 
 velous for intellectual resource, for skill in 
 dialectic, for plausibility. Bishop Blougram, 
 Mr. Sludge, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, 
 and others, readily occur to mind as being 
 in the same way " apologies ; " and in these
 
 392 ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 
 
 one feels that, while It is well to know what 
 the prisoner urges on his own behalf, it is 
 the shabby, the cowardly, the criminal, the 
 base, the detestable, that is masking under 
 a too well - woven cloak of words, and that 
 the special pleader is pursuing his game at 
 the risk of a higher honesty than consists 
 in the mere understanding of the mechan- 
 ism of motive and act. Yet this catholicity, 
 which seems to have for its motto, " Who 
 understands all, forgives all," is a natural 
 consequence in a mind so impressed with 
 the doctrine of the relativity of human life 
 as was Browning's. The tendency of the 
 doctrine is to efface moral judgment, and to 
 substitute for it intellectual comprehension ; 
 and usually this results in a practical fa- 
 talism, acquiesced in if not actively held. 
 Here, too, Browning's mental temperament 
 has another point of contact with the gen- 
 eral spirit of the age, and allows him to 
 take up into his genius the humanitarian 
 instinct so powerful in his contemporaries. 
 For the perception of the excuses for men's 
 action in those of low or morbid or deformed 
 development liberalizes the mind, and the 
 finding of the spark of soul in such indi- 
 viduals does mean to the Christian the find-
 
 ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 393 
 
 ing of that immortal part which equalizes all 
 in an equal destiny, however the ditferenee 
 may look between men while the process 
 of life is going on. Browning came very 
 early to this conviction, that in all men, 
 however weak or grossly set this spark may 
 he, it is to be sought for. In this he is 
 consistently philanthropic and democratic, 
 Christian in spirit and practice, comprehen- 
 sive in tolerance, large in charity, intellec- 
 tually (but not emotionally) sympathetic. 
 It is perhaps unnecessary to add that his 
 love of righteousness is not so striking a 
 trait. 
 
 But what in all this view of life is most 
 original in Browning is something that pos- 
 sibly perplexes even his devoted admirers. 
 Life, he says, no matter what it may be in " 
 its accidents of time, or place, or action, is 
 the stuff to make the soul of. In the hum- 
 blest as the noblest, in Caliban as in Pros- 
 pero, the life vouchsafed is the means (ade- 
 quate, he seems to say, in all cases) of which 
 the soul makes use to grow in. He thus 
 avoids the deadening conclusions to which 
 his doctrine of relativity might lead, by as- 
 serting the equal and identical opportunity 
 in all to develop the soul. He unites with
 
 394 ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 
 
 this the original theory — at least one that 
 he has made his own — that whatever the 
 soul seeks it should seek with all its might ; 
 and, pushing to the extreme, he urges that 
 if a man sin, let him sin to the uttermost of 
 his desire. This is the moral of the typical 
 poem of this class, The Statue and the Bust, 
 and he means more by this than that the 
 intention, sinning in thought, is equivalent 
 to sinning in act, — he means that a man 
 should have his will. No doubt this is 
 directly in accord with the great value he 
 places on strength of character, vitality in 
 life, on resolution, courage, and the braving 
 of consequences. But the ignoring of the 
 immense value of restraint as an element in 
 character is complete ; and in the case of 
 many whose choice is slowly and doubtfully 
 made in those younger years when the desire 
 for life in its fullness of experience is strong- 
 est, and the wisdom of knowledge of life in 
 its effects is weakest, the advice to obey im- 
 pulse at all costs, to throw doubt and au- 
 thority to the winds, and " live my life and 
 have my day," is of dubious utility. Over 
 and over again in Browning's poetry one 
 meets with this insistence on the value of 
 moments of high excitement, of intense liv-
 
 ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 395 
 
 ing, of full experience of pleasure, even 
 though such moments be of the essence of 
 evil and fruitful in all dark consequences. 
 It is probable that a deep optimism under- 
 lies all this ; that Browning believed that 
 the soul does not perish in its wrong-doing, 
 but that through this experience, too, as 
 through good, it develops finally its im- 
 mortal nature, and that, as in his view the 
 life of the soul is in its energy of action, the 
 man must act even evil if he is to grow 
 at all. Optimism, certainly, of the most 
 thorough-going kind this is ; but Browning 
 is so consistent an optimist in other parts of 
 his philosophy that this defense may be 
 made for him on a i^oint where the common 
 thought and deepest conviction of the race, 
 in its noblest thinkers and purest artists, are 
 opposed to him, refusing to believe that the 
 doing of evil is to be urged in the interest 
 of true manliness. 
 
 The discussion of Browning's attitude to- 
 wards life in the actual world of men has 
 led away from the direct consideration of 
 the work in which he embodied his convic- 
 tions. The important portion of it came in 
 middle life, when he obtained mastery of the 
 form of poetic art known as the dramatic
 
 396 ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 
 
 monologue. A realist, i£ he be a poet, must 
 resort to the drama. It was inevitable in 
 Browning's ease. Yet the drama, as a form, 
 offered as much unfitness for Browning's 
 genius as it did fitness. The drama requires 
 energy, it is true, and interest in men as in- 
 dividuals ; and these Browning had. It also 
 requires concentration, economy of material, 
 and constructive power ; and these were dif- 
 ficult to Browning. He did not succeed in 
 his attempts to write drama in its perfect 
 form. He could make fragments of intense 
 power in passion ; he could reveal a single 
 character at one critical moment of its ca- 
 reer ; he could sum up a life history in a 
 long soliloquy ; but he could not do more 
 than this and keep the same level of per- 
 formance. Why he failed is a curious ques- 
 tion, and will doubtless be critically debated 
 with a plentiful lack of results. His growth 
 in dramatic faculty, in apprehension of the 
 salient points of character and grasp in pre- 
 senting them, in perception of the valjue of 
 situation and power to use it to the full, can 
 readily be traced ; but there comes a point 
 where the growth stops. Superior as his 
 mature work is to that of his youth in all 
 these qualities, it falls short of that perfect
 
 ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 397 
 
 and complex design and that informing life 
 which mark the developed dramatist. In 
 the monologues he deals with incidents in 
 a life, with moods of a personality, with the 
 consciousness which a man has of his own 
 character at the end of his career ; but he 
 seizes these singly, and at one moment. His 
 characters do not develop before the eye ; 
 he does not catch the soul in the very act ; 
 he does not present life so much as the re- 
 sults of life. He frequently works by the 
 method of retrospect, he tells the story, but 
 does not enact it. In all these he displays 
 the governing motive of his art, which is to 
 reveal the soul ; but if the soul reveals itself 
 in his verses, it is commonly by confession, 
 not presentation. He has, in fact, that 
 malady of thovxght which interferes with the 
 dramatist's control of his hand ; he is think- 
 ing abovt his characters, and only indirectly 
 in them, and he is most anxious to convey 
 his reflections upon the psychical phenom- 
 enon which he is attending to. In other 
 words, he is, primarily, a moralist ; he rea- 
 sons, and he is fluent in words and fertile in 
 thoughts, and so he loses the object itself, 
 becomes indirect, full of afterthought and 
 parenthesis, and im])airs the dramatic effect.
 
 398 ON BEOWNING'S DEATH. 
 
 These traits may be observed, in different 
 degrees, in many of the poems, even in the 
 best. In the dramas themselves the lack of 
 constructive power is absolute. Pippa Passes 
 is only a succession of dramatic fragments 
 artificially bound together, and in the others 
 the lack of body and interdependent life be- 
 tween the parts is patent to all. In a Bal- 
 cony, certainly one of his finest wrought 
 poems, is only an incident. He is at his 
 best when his field is most narrow — in such 
 a poem as The Laboratory. 
 
 There is a compensation for these defi- 
 ciencies of power in that the preference of 
 his mind for a single passion or mood or 
 crisis at its main moment opens to him the 
 plain and unobstructed way to lyrical ex- 
 pression. His dramatic feeling of the pas- 
 sion and the situation supplies an intensity 
 which finds its natural course in lyrical ex- 
 altation. It may well be thought, if it were 
 deemed necessary to decide upon the best 
 in Browning's work, that his genius is most 
 nobly manifest in those lyrics and romances 
 which he called dramatic. The scale rises 
 from his argumentative and moralizing verse, 
 however employed, through those monologues 
 which obey the necessity for greater concen-
 
 ON BBOWNING'S DEATH. 399 
 
 tration as the dramatic element enters into 
 them, up to those most powerful and direct 
 poems in which the intensity of feeling en- 
 forces a lyrical movement and lift ; and 
 akin to these last are the songs of love or he- 
 roism into which the dramatic element does 
 not enter. Indeed, Browning's lyrical gift 
 was more perfect than his dramatic gift ; 
 he knew the secret of a music which has 
 witchery in it independent of what the words 
 may say, and when his hand fell on that 
 chord, he mastered the heart with real poetic 
 charm. It was seldom, however, that this 
 happy moment came to him, ennobling his 
 language and giving wing to his emotion ; 
 and, such poems being rare, it remains true 
 that the best of his work is to be sought in 
 those pieces, comprehending more of life, 
 where his dramatic power takes on a lyrical 
 measure. Such work became more infre- 
 quent as years went on, and he declined 
 again into that earlier style of wordy ratioci- 
 nation, of tedious pleading as of a lawsuit, 
 of mere intellectuality as of the old hair- 
 splitting schoolmen, though he retained the 
 strength and definiteness of mind which mere 
 growth had brought to him, and he occasion- 
 ally produced a poem which was only less
 
 400 ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 
 
 good than the best of his middle age. The 
 translations from the Greek with which he 
 employed his age stand in a different class 
 from his original poems, and were a fortunate 
 resort for his vigorous but now feebly crea- 
 tive mind. At the end he still applied him- 
 self to the interpretation of individual lives, 
 but in choosing them he was attracted even 
 more uniformly by something exceptional, 
 often grotesque, in them, and hence they are 
 more curious and less instructive than the 
 earlier work of the same kind. 
 
 The mass of Browning's writings which 
 has been glanced at as the expression of the 
 reasoning, the dramatic, or the lyrical im- 
 pulse in his genius has attracted attention 
 as wide as the English language, and it has 
 been intimated that this success has been 
 won in some degree on other than poetic 
 grounds. It is fair to say, in view of the 
 facts, that many who have felt his appeal to 
 them have found a teacher rather than a 
 poet. Two points in which he reflects his 
 age have been mentioned, but there is a 
 third point which has perhaps been more 
 efficacious than his sense of the relati\aty of 
 human life or his conviction of the worth of 
 every human soul : he adds to these cardinal
 
 ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 401 
 
 doctrines a firm and loudly asseverated re- 
 ligious belief. It is the more noteworthy 
 because his reasoning faculty might in his 
 time have led him almost anywhere rather 
 than to the supreme validity of truth arrived 
 at by intuition. This makes his character 
 the more interesting, for the rationalizing 
 mind which submits itself to intuitive faith 
 exactly parallels in Browning the realist 
 with a predominating interest in the soul. 
 There is no true contradiction in this, no in- 
 consistency ; but the combination is unusual. 
 It is natural that, in a time of decreasing 
 authority in formal religion, a poet in Brown- 
 ing's position should wield an immense at- 
 traction, and owe something, as Carljde did, 
 to the wish of his audience to be reassured 
 in their religious faith. Browning had be- 
 gun with that resolution of the universe into 
 infinite power and infinite love of which 
 something has already been said, and he 
 continued to teach that through nature we 
 arrive at the conception of omnipotence, and 
 through the soul at the conception of love, 
 and he apparently finds the act of faith in 
 the belief that infinite power will finally be 
 discerned as the instrument and expression 
 of infinite love. This is pure optimism ; and
 
 402 ON BEOWNING'S DEATH. 
 
 in accordance with it he preaches his gospel, 
 which is that each soul should grow to its 
 utmost in power and in love, and in the face 
 of difficulties — of mysteries in experience 
 or thought — should repose with entire trust 
 on the doctrine that God has ordered life 
 beneficently, and that we who live should 
 wait with patience, even in the wreck of our 
 own or others' lives, for the disclosure here- 
 after which shall reconcile to our eyes and 
 hearts the jar with justice and goodness of 
 all that has gone before. This is a system 
 simple enough and complete enough to live 
 by, if it be truly accepted. It is probable, 
 however, that Browning wins less by these 
 doctrines, which .are old and commonplace, 
 than by the vigor with which he dogmatizes 
 upon them ; the certainty with which he 
 speaks of such high matters ; the fervor, and 
 sometimes the eloquence, with which, touch- 
 ing on the deepest and most secret chords of 
 the heart's desire, he strikes out the notes of 
 courage, of hope and vision, and of the fore- 
 tasted triumph. The energy of his own faith 
 carries others along with it ; the manliness 
 of his own soul infects others with its cheer 
 r.ud its delight in the struggle of spiritual 
 life on earth : and all this the more because
 
 ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 403 
 
 he is learned in the wisdom of the Rabbis, 
 is conversant with modern life and know- 
 ledge in all its range, is gifted with intel- 
 lectual genius, and yet displays a faith the 
 more robust because it is not cloistered, the 
 more credible because it is not professional. 
 The character of Browning's genius, his 
 individual traits, the general substance of 
 his thought, do not admit of material mis- 
 conception. It is when the question is raised 
 upon the permanent value of his work that 
 the opportunity for wide divergence arises. 
 That there are dreary wastes in it cannot be 
 gainsaid. Much is now unreadable that 
 was excused in a contemporary book ; much 
 never was readable at all ; and of the re- 
 mainder how much will the next age in its 
 turn cast aside ? Its serious claim to our 
 attention on ethical, religious, or intellectual 
 grounds may be admitted, without pledging 
 the twentieth century, which will have its 
 own special phases of thought, and thinkers 
 to illustrate them. Browning must live, as 
 the other immortals do, by the poetry in 
 him. It is true he has enlarged the field of 
 poetry by annexing the experience that be- 
 longs to the artist and the musician, and has 
 made some of his finest and most original
 
 404 ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 
 
 poems out of such motives ; and his wide 
 knowledge has served him in other ways, 
 though it has stiffened many a page with 
 pedantry and antiquarianism. It is true 
 that there is a grotesque quality in some of 
 his work, but his humor in this kind is really 
 a pretense ; no one laughs at it ; it arouses 
 only an amazed wonder, like the stone masks 
 of some medieval church. In all that he 
 derived from learning and scholarship there 
 is the alloy of mortality ; in all his moraliz- 
 ing and special pleading and superfine rea- 
 soning there enters the chance that the world 
 may lose interest in his treatment of the 
 subject ; in all, except where he sings from 
 the heart itself or pictures life directly and 
 without comment save of the briefest, there 
 is some opportunity for time to breed decay. 
 The faith he preached was the poetical com- 
 plement of Carlyle's prose, and proceeded 
 from much the same grounds and by the 
 same steps : believe in God, and act like a 
 man — that was the substance of it. But 
 Carlyle himself already grows old and harsh. 
 The class of mind to which Browning be- 
 longs depends on its matter for its life ; un- 
 less he has transformed it into poetry, time 
 will deal hardly with it.
 
 ON BROyVNING'S DEATH. 405 
 
 To come to the question which cannot be 
 honestly set aside, although it is no longer 
 profitable to discuss it, Browning has not 
 cared for that poetic form which bestows 
 perennial charm, or else he was incapable of 
 it. He fails in beauty, in concentration of 
 interest, in economy of language, in selec- 
 tion of the best from the common treasure 
 of experience. In those works where he has 
 been most indifferent, as in the Red Cotton 
 Night -Cap Country, he has been merely 
 whimsical and dull ; in those works where 
 the genius he possessed is most felt, as in 
 Saul, A Toccata of Galuppi's, Rabbi Ben 
 Ezra, The Flight of the Duchess, The 
 Bishop Orders his Tomb in St. Praxed's 
 Church, Herve Kiel, Cavalier Tunes, Time's 
 Revenges, and many more, he achieves 
 beauty or nobility or fitness of phrase such 
 as only a poet is capable of. It is in these 
 last pieces and their like that his fame lies 
 for the future. It was his lot to be strong 
 as the thinker, the moralist with " the ac- 
 complishment of verse," the scholar inter- 
 ested to rebuild the past of experience, the 
 teacher with an explicit dogma to enforce 
 in an intellectual form with examples from 
 life, the anatomist of human passions, in-
 
 406 ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 
 
 stincts, and impulses in all their gamut, tlie 
 commentator on his own age ; he was weak 
 as the artist, and indulged, often unneces- 
 sarily and by choice, in the repulsive form 
 — in the awkward, the obscure, the ugly. 
 He belongs with Jonson, with Dryden, with 
 the heirs of the masculine intellect, the men 
 of power not unvisited by grace, but in 
 whom mind is predominant. Upon the 
 work of such poets time hesitates, conscious 
 of their mental greatness, but also of their 
 imperfect art, their heterogeneous matter; 
 at last the good is sifted from that whence 
 worth has departed.
 
 SHELLEY'S WORK. 
 
 The centenary of Shelley's birth will 
 be duly observed with public ceremonies 
 in England and Italy — the land that bore 
 him and drove him forth, and the land tliat 
 sheltered him and now guards his grave, 
 both equally his home in the eyes of the 
 world ; but in the private thoughts of many 
 single lives the day of his birth will be 
 silently remembered with tenderness, with 
 gratitude, and with a renewal of faith in 
 the things in which he believed. Personal 
 devotion must naturally enter into these 
 feelings, for such days are to commemorate 
 a life, and they bring the man back with 
 peculiar power. To win unknown friends, 
 age after age, is a privilege of the poet; it 
 is his reward — the greater because it can 
 touch him no more — for the open trust in 
 mankind with which he confides, to who- 
 soever will, the secret things of his spirit. 
 Yet, to make a poet's personality the main 
 element in his memory, if he be really 
 great, confines his fame too narrowly. At- 
 
 407
 
 408 SHELLEY'S WORK. 
 
 tractive as Shelley was, his worth did not 
 lie wholly in his charm. Interest in his 
 life may become degraded into ignoble 
 curiosity, and, in time's balance, love's 
 gift is less weighty than reason's award. 
 Recognition of noble human traits is an 
 important part of justice done to the dead ; 
 but it is not thus that Shelley would wish 
 to be judged. Chaucer's question, "How 
 shall the world be served?" was the alpha 
 and omega of his life. It inspired his 
 youthful prose; as his faculties grew and 
 the poet emerged from the thinker, it gov- 
 erned the most intense expression of his 
 soul in manhood; it absorbed him, as he 
 himself said, with that passion for reform- 
 ing the world which was elemental in his 
 genius. It is true that the artistic and 
 the practical instincts in him worked 
 together imperfectly, and that at times of 
 despair he fell back upon himself, pure 
 poet, pouring his heart out in lyrical effu- 
 sion, with cadences of pain that fill dur 
 eyes with tears. But he took heart again, 
 and returned, though always more wearied, 
 to the large interests of the race. He be- 
 lieved that man is the poet's muse ; at the 
 height of his aspiration, singing with the
 
 SHELLEY'S WORK. 409 
 
 skylark, he still remembered that the poet's 
 " unbidden hymns " are the means by which 
 the world shall be wrought to sympathies 
 with unheeded hopes and fears; in the 
 depth of his dejection he still prayed that 
 the wind might blow abroad the poet's 
 words, "as from an unextinguished hearth 
 ashes and sparks," to be an enkindling 
 prophecy thi'oughout the world — "my 
 words among mankind." What he be- 
 lieved true poets are he told in a familiar 
 passage of his prose — " the hierophants of 
 an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors 
 of the gigantic shadows which futurity 
 casts upon the present; the words which 
 express what they understand not; the 
 trumpets that sing to battle and feel not 
 what they inspire; the influence which is 
 moved not, but moves." 
 
 One hundred years have passed since he 
 was born, and two generations have been 
 buried since his ashes were laid by the 
 Roman wall. It is reasonable to ask 
 whether he had any share in this prophetic 
 power, brooding on things to come, which 
 is the mystical endowment of poetic 
 genius ; whether he anticipated time in 
 those far thoughts forecasting hope, which
 
 410 SHELLEY'S WORK. 
 
 he declared to be the substance of poetic 
 intuition ; whether he be one of those who, 
 in his own phrase, rule our spirits from 
 their urns, with power still vital in the 
 chaotic thought and striving of mankind. 
 "Poets," he said, concluding the impas- 
 sioned words just quoted, "are the unac- 
 knowledged legislators of the world." If 
 the phrase seems the mere enthusiasm of 
 eloquence, yet so opposite a mind as John- 
 son's ratifies it. " He," said the old doctor 
 concerning the poet, "must write as the 
 interpreter of nature and the legislator of 
 mankind, and consider himself as presiding 
 over the thoughts and manners of future 
 generations." To leave, then, Shelley's 
 charm, his character, and all his private 
 life, which the world well knows ; to leave 
 analysis and criticism, since any occasion 
 will serve for such examination of the pro- 
 priety of his moral method in poetry, and 
 its beneficial or injurious effects upon his 
 work, of the truth of his imagination and 
 of its nearness or remoteness in human in- 
 terest and reality, of his art, the speed and 
 exaltation of his luminous eloquence, the 
 piercing tone of his lyrical song — to leave 
 such matters, I say, of merely personal or
 
 SHELLEY'S WORK. 411 
 
 literary concern, wliat has the century- 
 past disclosed in regard to Shelley's sym- 
 pathies with the next ages, and the vitality 
 of his energy in the forces that advance 
 mankind? The influences that blend in 
 progress are many and various ; the fore- 
 knowledge of the most clear-sighted is 
 vague and doubtful, and the wisest con- 
 tributes only his portion to the great re- 
 sult. But, this being allowed, in what 
 sense and how far was Shelley prophetic 
 of the time to come, and an element in its 
 coming? 
 
 The spirit of discontent has been a pre- 
 siding genius in literature since the 
 reflective life of man began. The imagina- 
 tive creation of ideal commonwealths 
 marks its conquest of political thought, - 
 and the dream of the golden age its victory 
 in poetry. So long is it since the inspira- 
 tion that governed Shelley has been active 
 in minds like his own. The Republic of 
 Plato, however, and that eclogue of the 
 young Vergil which won for him a place 
 among the prophets of Christ, though they 
 are the highest reach of literature in such 
 expression, are negative; they condemn
 
 412 SHELLEY'S WORK. 
 
 what is, by a poetic escape into a world 
 that should be. With the rise of democ- 
 racy the positive expression of discontent, 
 in those parts of literature which reflect 
 the life of society as distinguished from 
 individual life, has become more direct, 
 comprehensive, and telling. In the last 
 century, in particular, the world was com- 
 ing to a consciousness of its own misery. 
 The state of man was never more bitterly 
 set forth than by Swift, nor more drearily 
 than by Johnson. Comfortable and self- 
 satisfied as that century is often described, 
 it was the dark soil in which the seeds of 
 time were germinating. It ended in dry 
 skepticism, cold rationalism, and finally 
 in that utilitarian preoccupation of the 
 mind which was a European mood. 
 
 The first effort toward better things, as 
 is apt to be the case, was political. The 
 Revolution broke. The hopefulness of 
 that time, when in the year of Shelley's 
 birth Wordsworth said, " 'Twas bliss to be 
 alive, but to be young was very heaven," 
 is perhaps that one of its phases which is 
 now realized with most difficulty. It 
 reminds one of the faitli of the early 
 Church in the immediate coming of the
 
 SHELLEY'S WORK. 413 
 
 reign of Christ on earth. When Shelley 
 began to think and feel, and became a 
 living soul, the first flush of dawn had 
 gone by ; but the same hopefulness sprang 
 up in him, it was invincible, and it made 
 him the poet of the J!le volution, of which 
 he was the child. So far as tlie Revolu- 
 tion was speculative or moral, he reflected 
 it completely. Its commonplaces were 
 burning truths in his heart; its ferment 
 was his own intellectual life; its confu- 
 sions, its simplicities, its misapprehen- 
 sions of the laws of social change, were a 
 part of himself. It would be wrong to 
 ascribe the crudities of Shelley's thought 
 merely to his immature and boyish devel- 
 opment : they belonged quite as much to 
 the youth of the cause ; he received what 
 he was taught in the form in which his 
 masters held it. The ease with which 
 genius thrives upon any food, and turns 
 all to use, might be astonishing were it 
 not so commonly to be observed ; but its 
 transformations are sometimes bewilder- 
 ing. Like fire from heaven Shelley's 
 genius fell upon the dry bones of rational- 
 ism, and they rose up, a spirit of beauty 
 and of power. It was the same change
 
 414 SHELLEY'S WORK. 
 
 that took place when philosophy went out 
 into the streets of Paris, and in the twink- 
 ling of an eye was made a flaming msenad. 
 It was the wand of the Revolution touch- 
 ing the soul of man. Shelley was, in 
 truth, in the whirl of forces which he only 
 half understood, vaster than he knew, 
 with destinies dimly adumbrated in his 
 own spirit, like the poet of his own elo- 
 quent description. The Revolution was, 
 in Gray's phrase, "the Mighty Mother" of 
 this child; she showed him the world-old 
 vision of the Saturnian reign that has ever 
 hung over Italy, yet more fair than the 
 fairest of all our lands ; she set him in the 
 footprints of Plato ; and she filled his heart 
 with many hatreds. 
 
 The principles and remedies which Shel- 
 ley adopted were of the utmost simplicity. 
 Principles and remedies must be simple 
 in order to be capable of wide application 
 in the reform of society. He was not an 
 original thinker. He had the enormous 
 receptive and assimilative power which 
 characterizes high genius, and he made it 
 his function to give lofty and winning ex- 
 pression to the ideas that he felt to be of 
 ennobling and beneficent power over men.
 
 SHELLEY'S WORK. 415 
 
 He had also a strongly practical tempera- 
 ment; and he wished to apply ideas as 
 well as to express them, and in his own 
 life he was always restlessly doing what 
 he thought, linking the word with an act, 
 carrying conviction to the extreme issue 
 of duty performed. It was this union of 
 the practical and speculative instincts, 
 each highly developed, which, under the 
 breath of his poetic nature, made his sym- 
 pathies with reform so intense that he 
 might well describe them as a passion. 
 Yet his political, social, and religious 
 beliefs were nothing unusual. They have 
 been called superficial ; but they were so, 
 in the main, in no other sense than are 
 the principles of democracy, philanthropy, 
 and intellectual liberty. They were the 
 simple truths whose acceptance by the 
 world goes on so slowly. He adopted 
 the right of private judgment, and with 
 it the right of the individual to put his 
 beliefs in action ; the first discredited for 
 him the excellence of the existing order, 
 and brought him quickly into conflict with 
 prevailing opinion; the second, in its 
 turn, occasioned a more serious collision 
 with that existing order itself, which met
 
 416 SHELLEY'S WORK. 
 
 him in the form of custom, intolerance, 
 and force. These three things he hated, 
 because he hated most of all injustice, of 
 which they were the triple heads. In all 
 this he had the ordinary fortune of the 
 revolutionist. He was face to face with 
 the enemy. The power of custom in 
 society, which Wordsworth had described, 
 " heavy as frost and deep almost as life " ; 
 the venom of intolerance, the foe against 
 which Locke had armed him ; the suprem- 
 acy of force, if it be invoked, in which the 
 long history of tyranny had instructed him 
 — these stood in his way, and only his own 
 indignant verse can express the violence 
 of the hatred and contempt they excited 
 in his breast. 
 
 What were the tenets that had so in- 
 volved him in opposition to the social 
 opinion of his own country that he went 
 into voluntary exile? His atheisjn stands 
 first because it caused his expulsion horp. 
 Oxford. What was this atheism in sub- 
 stance? He had conceived the divine 
 power in terms of the historic Jehovah, 
 and its relation to man under the Chris- 
 tian dispensation in terms of the legal 
 definitions of an obsolescent theology; nor
 
 SHELLEY'S WORK. 417 
 
 can it be gainsaid that these notions coin- 
 cided with the ideas then prevalent, but 
 not realized with the same distinctness in 
 the moral consciousness of those who held 
 them as in Shelley's. When he began to 
 think, this conception was antagonized in 
 two ways. In the first instance he ac- 
 quired some rudimentary metaphysics, and 
 it became necessary to reconcile an anthro- 
 pomorphic conception of deity with a philo- 
 sophical definition. In the second instance 
 he developed an ideal of goodness, and it 
 became necessary to reconcile the divine 
 virtue, as shown in the same historic con- 
 ception of deity, with the voice of his own 
 conscience. He took the short and easy, 
 but natural method, and denied the truth 
 of the original conception. The meta- 
 physical difficulty, however little it may 
 vex mature minds, was a real one to him ; 
 and in connection with it Newman's state- 
 ment may profitably be recalled, that no 
 question is hedged about with more diffi- 
 culties than the being of God. The moral 
 difficulty, also, was a real one; and Rob- 
 ertson, whose Christian faith and sincerity 
 none can doubt, was right in defending 
 Shelley's decision and saying, "Change
 
 418 SHELLEY'S WOBK. 
 
 the name, and I will bid that character 
 defiance with you." This was Shelley's 
 atheism — on the one hand, a philosophical 
 definition, and on the other, the humaniz- 
 ing of a pre-Christian and mediaeval idea 
 of God in accordance with that moral en- 
 lightenment which Christianity itself has 
 spread through the world. Shelley ex- 
 pressed his denial in terms of blasphemy, 
 as the words were then understood; but 
 the "almighty fiend" whom he denounced 
 was as much an idol as Dagon or Moloch. 
 What has the issue been? The concep- 
 tion which Shelley attacked with such 
 vehemence no longer finds a voice in pub- 
 lic discussion. It is as dumb as the ideas 
 which once suggested such picturesquely 
 lurid titles to the sermons under which our 
 fathers trembled and transgressed. To- 
 day the philosophical definition would be 
 less difficult to frame, and it would awake 
 no serious hostility; the moral ideal, too, 
 is enthroned in religious conceptions as 
 securely as in the conscience of man. It 
 would be idle to say that advance has not 
 been made, or to deny that it has pursued 
 the lines of Shelley's instincts, his intel- 
 lectual questioning, and his moral sympa-
 
 SHELLEY'S WOEK. 419 
 
 thies. Merely as a polemical writer he 
 stood in the necessary path of progress; 
 but as a poet, he vastly strengthened that 
 moral enthusiasm which after his death 
 regenerated religion as it had before in- 
 spired politics. He impressed his own 
 moral ideal on those whom he influenced, 
 and the old conception became as impossi- 
 ble for them as for him. Other forces 
 united in the general tendency, for all 
 things spiritual drew that way; nor is it 
 possible to distinguish his share in the 
 change that has passed over English the- 
 ology in this country. But some sentences 
 of the Rev. Stopford Brooke are apposite, 
 and the opinion of such an observer may 
 be allowed weight upon the question of 
 Shelley's place in this field. "He indi- 
 rectly made," says this writer, "as time 
 went on, an ever-increasing number of men 
 feel that the will of God could not be in 
 antagonism to the universal ideas concern- 
 ing man, that His character could not be 
 in contradiction to the moralities of the 
 heart, and that the destiny He willed for 
 mankind must be as universal and as just 
 and loving as Himself. There are more 
 clergymen and more religious laymen than
 
 420 SHELLEY'S WOBK. 
 
 we imagine who trace to the emotion Shel- 
 ley awakened in them when they were 
 young their wider and better views of 
 God." Whether this be true to the extent 
 indicated is immaterial. It is enough if 
 it becomes clear that Shelley's "atheism" 
 was, by its revolt, the sign and promise of 
 that liberalized thought and more humane 
 feeling in respect to the divine dealing 
 with men which characterized the religious 
 progress of the time; that his denial has 
 been sustained by the common conscience 
 of mankind; and that the affirmations of 
 the moral ideal which he made have been 
 strengthened by years as they passed by, 
 and have spread and been accepted as noble 
 expressions of the conviction and aspira- 
 tion of the men who came after him. 
 Whether Shelley intended these results 
 in the precise form that they took is also 
 immaterial. It probably never entered 
 his mind that clergymen would thank him 
 for a liberalized orthodoxy, any more than 
 that Owenites would use Queen Mab as an 
 instrument in their propaganda, and thus 
 give the widest circulation to that one of 
 his poems which he would have suppressed. 
 Certainly he had a conscious purpose to
 
 SHELLEY'S WOSK. 421 
 
 destroy old religious conceptions and to 
 quicken the hearts of men with new ideals, 
 not religious, but moral. If botli results 
 came about, under the favor of time, and 
 were such as the poet meant them to be, 
 as in some measure was the case, and yet 
 the influence also operated in an unex- 
 pected way by the reaction of the awakened 
 conscience on the narrower faith to its lib- 
 eralization instead of its destruction, this 
 does not affect the reality of Shelley's 
 work ; it affords rather an example of that 
 element in the poet through which, as 
 Shelley said, he is an instrument as well as 
 a power, and in neither capacity is wholly 
 conscious of his significance. 
 
 The second tenet which immediately 
 drew upon him scandal and obloquy was 
 his belief that legal marriage was not a 
 proper social institution. He had derived 
 the opinion from his teachers, and held it 
 in common with other reformers of the age. 
 It is a view that from time to time arises 
 in minds of an entirely pure and virtuous 
 disposition under the stress of a rigorous 
 and undiscriminating law. The state of 
 women under English law was then one 
 of practical servitude, and in the case of
 
 422 Shelley's work. 
 
 unfit marriages might become, and some- 
 times was, deplorable. The continuance 
 of forced union, on the side of either man 
 or woman, after affection or respect ceased, 
 was revolting to Shelley, the more so in 
 proportion to the refinement and purity of 
 his own poetic idealization of the relation 
 of love. The helpless condition of woman 
 under such circumstances appealed to him 
 as a violation of justice and of liberty as 
 well as a degradation of love. If since his 
 time the rights of married women have 
 been recognized by important and really 
 sweeping changes in their legal status, and 
 if the bonds of the legal tie have been re- 
 laxed, in both instances it was an acknowl- 
 edgment of the reality of the social wrongs 
 which were the basis of his conviction. If 
 there is less tendency among reformers to 
 attack the institution of marriage, and the 
 subject has ceased to be conspicuous, 
 though still occasionally manifest, it is 
 because the removal of the more oppressive 
 and tyrannic elements in the difficulty has 
 relieved the situation. The belief of 
 Shelley in love without marriage was an 
 extreme way of stating his disbelief in 
 marriage without love, as the law of Eng-
 
 SHELLEY'S WORK. 423 
 
 land then was. There was, too, a positive 
 as well as a negative side to his convic- 
 tion, but in this he merely repeated the 
 dream of the golden age, and asserted that 
 in the ideal commonwealth love and mar- 
 riage would be one ; and this has been the 
 common theme of Utopians, whether poets 
 or thinkers, in all ages. In other words, 
 it may reasonably be held that, in this 
 case as in that of his atheism, an extreme 
 view was taken; but in relation to the 
 time and to the reforms made since then, 
 his ideas of marriage held in them the sub- 
 stantial injustice of a state of facts then 
 existing and the lines of tendency along 
 which advance was subsequently made. 
 He reflected the age, and he foreshadowed 
 the future; though the results, just as in 
 the case of religion, consist in a modifica- 
 tion, and not in demolition, of the ideas 
 which he antagonized. 
 
 Shelley's atheism, however, and his 
 views of legal marriage, have had a dispro- 
 portionate attention directed to them be- 
 cause of their close relation to the events 
 of his own life. These were not the things 
 in his philosophy for which he most cared. 
 In the matter of marriage, though he acted
 
 424 SHELLEY'S WORK. 
 
 on his belief in taking his second wife 
 without a divorce from his first, in both 
 unions he went through the form of mar- 
 riage. He would never have so compro- 
 mised with the world in an opinion which 
 was a point of conscience with him. If it 
 had been a question of the freedom of the 
 press, or of the welfare of the masses, he 
 would have stood by his conviction though 
 they sent him to prison or the scaffold. 
 The affairs which he took an active inter- 
 est in, and endeavored to make practical, 
 were political. At first the freedom of 
 the press was nearest to him, and he helped 
 with sympathy or money those whom he 
 knew to be singled out for persecution by 
 the Government ; then the state of Ireland, 
 Catholic emancipation, the putting of re- 
 form to the vote, the condition of the poor, 
 exercised his mind and called out such 
 labors as were open to him ; at a still later 
 time the Manchester riots, the revolutions 
 on the Continent, and such larger matters 
 engaged his enthusiasm. He was the most 
 contemporary of all poets. His keen in- 
 terest in what was going on was charac- 
 teristic; he lost no occasion which gave 
 him opportunity to use tlie question of the
 
 SBELLEY'S WORK. 425 
 
 moment to spread his general principles. 
 His immediate response to the hour is 
 noticeable from the time, for example, of 
 the death of the Princess Charlotte, on 
 which he wrote a pamphlet, to that of the 
 Greek rising, on which he composed a 
 lyric drama. What poet before ever had 
 occasion, as he did in the preface to Hel- 
 las, to beg " the forgiveness of my readers 
 for the display of newspaper erudition to 
 which I have been reduced " ? The words 
 are most significant of the spirit of his life. 
 It is also not useless to observe that a share 
 of Shelley's violence, especially in early 
 years, is due to the fact that he was actu- 
 ally in the arena and taking blows in his 
 own person. Such a man does not, be- 
 tween the ages of seventeen and twenty- 
 four, write with the same equable restraint 
 as a student in his library; he is not 
 likely to hold opinions in temperate forms ; 
 and if, like Shelley, he is by nature sen- 
 sitive to injury and resentful of it, his 
 language takes heat and may become ex- 
 travagant. What he struggled with was 
 not only thought, but fact. It was to his 
 advantage, doubtless, that he removed to 
 Italy, where, being less irritated, he was
 
 426 SHELLEY'S WORK. 
 
 able to express his abstract ideas in the 
 quiet and undisturbed atmosphere of im- 
 aginative poetry. 
 
 These abstract ideas, his scheme of so- 
 ciety, were acquired in his youth, and 
 they were, as has been said, of the utmost 
 simplicity. He adopted the doctrine 
 known as that of the perfectibility of man. 
 It is especially associated with the name 
 of Condorcet. Shelley believed that so- 
 ciety could be made over in such a way 
 that virtue would prevail and happiness 
 be secured. He thought that institutions 
 should be abolished and a new rule of life 
 substituted. He did not enter upon de- 
 tails. The present was wrong; let it 
 cease: that was the whole of the matter. 
 It was a form of what is now called nihil- 
 ism. The state of society that existed 
 seemed to him real anarchy. "Anarchs" 
 was a favorite word with him for kings 
 and all persons in power. His hatred 
 was consequently centred on the estab- 
 lished order. It was a government of 
 force, and therefore he hated force; kings 
 and priests were its depositaries, he hated 
 them ; war was its method, he hated war. 
 The word is not too strong. Gall flows
 
 SHELLEY'S WORK. 427 
 
 from his pen when he mentions any of 
 these things. Their very names are to 
 him embodied curses. If the system he 
 saw prevailing in Europe bred in him such 
 hatred, its results in practice filled him 
 with pity. He was susceptible to the 
 sight of suffering and misery, and almost 
 from boyhood the effort to relieve wretched- 
 ness by personal action characterized him. 
 He could endure the sight of pain as little 
 as the sight of wrong. The lot of the 
 poor, wherever he came upon it in experi- 
 ence or in description, stirred his com- 
 miseration to the depth of his heart. He 
 was one of those born to bear the suffer- 
 ings of the world, in a real and not a sen- 
 timental or metaphorical sense. He had 
 seen the marks of the devastation of war 
 in France ; he knew the state of the people 
 under tyrannical rule; he was as well 
 aware of the degradation of the English 
 masses as of the stagnation of Ital3\ 
 Wherever he looked, the fruits of govern- 
 ment were poverty, ignorance, hopeless- 
 ness, in vast bodies of mankind. There 
 was nothing for it but the Revolution, and 
 heart and soul he was pledged to that 
 cause.
 
 428 SHELLEY'S WOBK. 
 
 But his hopes went far beyond the pur- 
 poses of a change to be brought about by 
 force for limited political ends; such an 
 event involved the destruction of forms 
 of power which he wished to see destroyed, 
 and might result in amelioration, since 
 force become popular was better than force 
 that remained aristocratic; but his heart 
 was set upon a change of a far different 
 nature, more penetrating, more universal, 
 more permanent — nothing less than that 
 "divine result to which the whole creation 
 moves." Since Shelley, in common with 
 the thinkers of his time, believed that the 
 world's wretchedness was due to political 
 misrule, and could be obviated by a change 
 of institutions, he was on his practical side 
 in alliance with every expression of revo- 
 lutionary force ; but he had an ideal side, 
 and in his poetry it was this that found 
 expression. He sang the golden age ; time 
 and again he returned to the theme, of 
 which he could not weary, from the hdnv 
 of youth when he poured forth the story 
 of man's perfect state in eloquence still 
 burning with first enthusiasm, to the im- 
 passioned moment when he created the 
 titanic forms of his highest lyrical drama,
 
 SHELLEY'S WOEK. 429 
 
 and bade the planetary spirits discourse in 
 spheral music the paean of peace on earth, 
 good will to men. The paradise of The 
 Revolt of Islam, the isle of seclusion in 
 Epipsychidion, the echoes of the Vergilian 
 song in Hellas, like Queen Mab and Pro- 
 metheus Unbound, show the permanence 
 before his rapt eyes of that vision of 
 heaven descended upon earth which has 
 fascinated the poets of all times. Yet 
 how transform this " world's woe " into 
 that harmony? Shelley's command was 
 as simple, as direct, as Christ's — " Love 
 thy neighbor." No; there was nothing 
 novel in it, nothing profound or original. 
 It is so long now since man's knowledge 
 of what is right has outrun his will to 
 embody it in individual life and the insti- 
 tutions of society, that new gospels, were 
 they possible, are quite superfluous. 
 What Shelley had that other men seldom 
 have was faith in this doctrine, the will 
 to practice it, the passion to spread it. 
 There may be to our eyes something pa- 
 thetic in such simplicity, as the belief of 
 boyhood in goodness is pathetic in the 
 sight of the man ; something innocent, as 
 we say, in such unworldliness, and again
 
 430 SHELLEY'S WORK. 
 
 we intimate the eternal child in the poet's 
 heart; but it is the simj3licity and inno- 
 cence — the pathos it may be — of what 
 Christ taught. That Shelley believed 
 what he said cannot be doubted. He 
 thought that men might, if they would, 
 love their fellow-men, and then injustice 
 would of itself cease, being dried at its 
 source, and that reign of mutual helpful- 
 ness, of the common sharing of the abun- 
 dance of the earth's harvest, of man's 
 enfranchisement from slavery to another's 
 luxurious wants, would begin; war, pov- 
 erty, and tyranny, force and fraud, greed, 
 indulgence, and crime would be abolished. 
 It was too obvious to need consideration; 
 man was capable of perfection, and the 
 method to attain to it was love, and this 
 way once adopted, as it could be, by the 
 fiat of each individual will, would enthrone 
 justice and spread virtue throughout the 
 world. It was not reason that withstood 
 this doctrine, but custom, tradition, inter- 
 ested individuals and classes, the active 
 and law-intrenched power of institutions 
 established for the security and profit of 
 the few — a whole order of society resting 
 upon a principle opposite to love, the prin-
 
 SHELLEY'S WORK. 431 
 
 ciple of organized force. If this time- 
 incrustecl evil, this blind and deaf and 
 dumb authority of wrong long prevalent, 
 this sorry scheme of accepted lies, could 
 be destroyed at a stroke, a simple resolve 
 in each breast would bring heaven on 
 earth. 
 
 This was Shelley's creed. It may be 
 false, impracticable, and chimerical; it 
 may be a doctrinaire's philosophy, an en- 
 thusiast's programme, a poet's dream: but 
 that it has points of contact and coinci- 
 dence with gospel truth is plain to see; 
 and in fact Shelley's whole effort may be 
 truly described as an incident in that slow 
 spread of Christian ideas whose assimila- 
 tion by mankind is so partial, uneven, 
 imperfect, so hesitating, so full of com- 
 promise, so hopeless in delay. He had 
 disenwagred once more from the ritual of 
 Pharisees and the things of Caesar the 
 original primitive commands, and made 
 them as simple as conscience; he may have 
 been wrong in the sense that these things 
 are impossible to man in society; but if he 
 was in error, he erred with a greater than 
 Plato. 
 
 But it is not necessary to carry the
 
 432 SHELLEY'S WORK. 
 
 matter so far. Shelley was a moralist, but 
 he used the poet's methods. He declared 
 the great commands, and he denounced 
 wrong with anathemas ; but he also gave 
 a voice to the lament of the soul, to its 
 aspirations and its ineradicable, if mis- 
 taken, faith in the results of time; and 
 the ideas which he uttered with such afflu- 
 ence of expression, such poignancy of sym- 
 pathy, such a thrill of prophetic triumph, 
 are absorbed in the spirit which poured 
 them forth — in its indignation at injus- 
 tice, its hopefulness of progress, its com- 
 plete conviction of the righteousness of its 
 cause. He has this kindling power in 
 men's hearts. They may not believe in 
 the perfectibility of man under the con- 
 ditions of mortal life, but they do believe 
 in his greater perfection; and Shelley's 
 words strengthen them in effort. No 
 cause that he had greatly at heart has 
 retreated since his day. There are thou- 
 sands now, where there were hundreds 
 then, who hold his beliefs. The Revolu- 
 tion has gone on, and is still in progress, 
 though it has yet far to go. What part he 
 has had in the increase of the mastering 
 ideas of the century is indeterminable.
 
 SHELLEY'S WORK. 433 
 
 He was dead when his apostolic work 
 began. His earliest and unripe poem, 
 Queen Mab, was the first to be caught up 
 by the spirit of the times, and was scat- 
 tered broadcast; and wherever it fell it 
 served, beyond doubt, to unsettle the minds 
 that felt it. Crude as it was, it was ve- 
 hement and eloquent; and the crudities 
 which have most offense in them are of 
 the sort that make the entrance of such 
 ideas into uneducated minds more easy. 
 It was nearer intellectually to these minds 
 than a better poem would have been. 
 Rude thoughts not too carefully discrimi- 
 nated are more powerful revolutionary in- 
 struments than more exact truths in finer 
 phrases. Queen Mab was certainly the 
 poem by which he was long best known. 
 The first revival of his works came just 
 before the time of the Reform Bill, and 
 they were an element in the agitation of 
 men's minds ; but his permanent influence 
 began with the second revival, ten years 
 later, when his collected works were issued 
 by his widow. Since then edition has 
 followed edition, and with every fall of his 
 poems from the presses of England and 
 America new readers feel the impulse of
 
 434 SHELLEY'S WORK. 
 
 his passion, blending naturally with the 
 moral and political inspiration of an age 
 which has exhausted its spiritual force in 
 pursuit of the objects that he bade men 
 seek. Democracy, of which philanthropy 
 is the shadow, has made enormous gains; 
 the cause is older and social analysis has 
 gone farther than in his day ; his denuncia- 
 tion of kings and priests seems antiquated 
 only because the attack is now directed on 
 the general conditions of society Avhich 
 make tyrannical power and legalized privi- 
 lege possible under any political organiza- 
 tion, and in industrial and commercial as 
 well as military civilizations ; his objects 
 of detestation seem vague and unreal only 
 because a hundred definite propositions, 
 developed by socialistic thought, — any 
 one of which was more rife with danger 
 than his own elementary principles, — 
 have been put forth without any such pen- 
 alty being visited upon their authors as 
 was fixed upon him. This advance, ctnd 
 more, has been made. The consciousness 
 of the masses, both in respect to their mate- 
 rial position and their power to remedy it, 
 has increased indefinitely in extent and in 
 intensity in all countries affected by Euro-
 
 SHELLEY'S WORK, 435 
 
 pean thought; socialism, anarchism, nihil- 
 ism are names upon every lip, and they 
 measure the active discontent of those 
 strata of society last to be reached by 
 thought except the bourgeoisie. Whatever 
 revolutionary excess may unite with the 
 movement, the stream flows in the direct 
 course of Shelley's thought with an un- 
 dreamt vehemence and mass. That he 
 still implants in others that passion of 
 his for reforming the world is not ques- 
 tioned; his works have been a perennial 
 fountain of the democratic spirit with its 
 philanthropic ardor. As in the other 
 phases of his influence, so in this its grand 
 phase, his work has been in modification 
 instead of demolition of the social order; 
 it has been only one individual element 
 in a world-movement issuing from many 
 causes and sustained from many sources ; 
 but here too he fulfills his own characteri- 
 zation of the poet, imperfectly conscious 
 of his own meanings, dimly prophetic of 
 what shall be, belonging to the future 
 whose ideas come into being through his 
 intuitions, sympathies, and longings. 
 
 Shelley's genius, then, it must be ac- 
 knowledged, had this prescience by which
 
 436 SHELLEY'S WORK. 
 
 it seized the elements of the future yet 
 inchoate, and glorified them, and won the 
 hearts of men to worship them as an 
 imagined hope, and fervently to desire 
 their coming. If one thing were to be 
 sought for as the secret of his power on 
 man, I should say it was his belief in the 
 soul. No poet ever put such unreserved 
 trust in the human spirit. He laid upon 
 it the most noble of all ideal tasks, and 
 inspired it with faith in its own passion. 
 "Save thyself," he said, and showed at the 
 same time the death in which it lay, the 
 life of beauty, love, and justice to which it 
 was born as to a destiny. Virtue in her 
 shape how lovely, humanity throughout 
 the world how miserable, were the two 
 visions on which he bade men look; and 
 he refused to accept this antithesis of what 
 is and what ought to be as inevitable in 
 man's nature or divine providence; it re- 
 mained with man, he said, to heal him- 
 self. He was helped, perhaps, in his faith 
 in the human spirit by the early denial he 
 made of religion as interpreted by the the- 
 ology of his period; for him salvation 
 rested Avith man, or nowhere. In later 
 years he made love the principle, not only
 
 suelley's wore. 437 
 
 of human society, but of the government of 
 the universe; it was his only conception 
 of divine power; but he never reconciled 
 in thought this mystical belief with the 
 apparent absence of this divine element 
 from its lost provinces in human life. He 
 promised men in their effort no other aid 
 than the mere existence, in the universe, 
 of beneficent laws of which mankind could 
 avail itself by submitting thereto. The 
 doctrine of the power of the human spirit 
 to perfect itself, and the necessity of the 
 exercise of this power as the sole means of 
 progress, remained in unaffected integrity. 
 This fundamental conviction is one that 
 has spread equally with the democratic 
 idea or the philanthropic impulse. The 
 immediacy of the soul as the medium of 
 even revealed truth is a conception that 
 clarifies with each decade, and it is in 
 harmony with Shelley's most intimate 
 convictions, with those tendencies and 
 dispositions of his temperament so natural 
 to him that they were felt rather than 
 thought. But in such analysis one may 
 refine too much. It is meant only to 
 illustrate how completely, in the recesses 
 of his nature as well as in definite mani-
 
 438 SHELLEY'S WOEK. 
 
 festation of his thought, he was the child, 
 intellectually and morally, of the conquer- 
 ing influences implicit in his age, so 
 readily apprehensive of them that he an- 
 ticipated their power in the world, so 
 intensely sympathetic that he embodied 
 them in imagination before the fullness of 
 time, so compelled to express them that 
 he was their prophet and leader in the 
 next ages. 
 
 By his own judgment, therefore, of what 
 great poets are, he must be placed among 
 them, and the office of genius, as he defined 
 it, must be declared to be his. The mil- 
 lennium has not come, any more than it 
 came in the first century. The cause Shel- 
 ley served is still in its struggle ; but those 
 to whom social justice is a watchword, and 
 the development of the individual every- 
 where in liberty, intelligence, and virtue 
 is a cherished hope, must be thankful that 
 Shelley lived, that the substance of his 
 work is so vital, and his influence, inspir- 
 ing as it is beyond that of any of our poets 
 in these ways, was, and is, so completely 
 on the side of the century's advance. His 
 words are sung by marching thousands in 
 the streets of London. No poet of our
 
 SHELLEY'S WORK. 439 
 
 time has touched the cause of progress in 
 the living breath and heart-throb of men 
 so close as that. Yet, remote as the poet's 
 dream always seems, it is rather that life- 
 long singing of the golden age, in poem 
 after poem, which most restores and in- 
 flames those who, whether tliey be rude or 
 refined, are the choicer spirits of mankind, 
 and bring, with revolutionary violence or 
 ideal imagination, the times to come. 
 They hate the things he hated ; like him 
 they love, above all things, justice; they 
 share the passion of his faith in mankind. 
 Thus, were his own life as dark as Shake- 
 speare's, and had he left unwritten those 
 personal lyrics which some who conceive 
 the poet's art less nobly would exalt above 
 his grander poems, he would stand pre- 
 eminent and almost solitary for his service 
 to the struggling world, for what he did 
 as a quickener of men's hearts by his pas- 
 sion for supreme and simple truths. If 
 these have more hold in society now than 
 when he died, and if his influence has con- 
 tributed its share, however blended with 
 the large forces of civilization, he has in 
 this sense given law to the world and 
 equaled the height of the loftiest concep-
 
 440 SHELLEY'S WORK. 
 
 tion of the poet's significance in the spir- 
 itual life of man. Such, taken in large 
 lines and in its true relations, seems to 
 me the work for which men should praise 
 Shelley on this anniversary, leaving mere 
 poetic enjoyment, however delightful, and 
 personal charm, however winning, to other 
 occasions.
 
 HEART OF MAN 
 
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