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 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
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 €::> 
 
 ^-^O. //f^.
 
 LITEEARY ESSAYS
 
 First Edition, Svo (Strahan), 1S71. 
 
 •cotid Edition, Svo (Daldy and Isbister), n 
 ( Trans/e}-red to Maanillan and Co. liSo) 
 
 Third Edition, Revised, Globe Svo, 1888.
 
 LITEEAEY ESSAYS 
 
 BY 
 
 EICHAED HOLT HUTTON 
 
 M,A. (London) 
 
 THIRD EDITION— REVISED AND ENLARGED 
 
 EonOon 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 AND NEW YORK 
 1888 
 
 A II rjghts reserved
 
 AB VER TISEMENT 
 
 I HAVE recast the essay on " Shelley and his Poetry " and the 
 
 essay on "Mr. Browning," so as to include the newer works 
 
 which have thrown a fresh light upon their genius. Otherwise 
 
 these essays remain practically in the same form in which they 
 
 appeared in the second edition. 
 
 R. H. H.
 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 / I 
 
 / PAGE 
 
 Y Goethe and his Influence 1 
 
 II 
 
 The Genius of Wordsworth 90 
 
 III 
 
 Shelley and his Poetry 133 
 
 IV 
 
 \i Mr. Browning 188 
 
 V 
 
 ^ The Poetry of the Old Testament . . . ; 244 
 
 VI 
 
 Arthur Hugh Clough 286 
 
 849914
 
 VI CONTENTS 
 
 VII 
 
 PAOE 
 
 \J The Poetry of Matthew Arnold . . . . 310 
 
 VIII 
 
 V Tennyson 361 
 
 « 
 
 IX 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne . . . . ' . . 437
 
 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE^ 
 
 Goethe tells us in his Autobiography, that while 
 his mind was wandering about in search of a religious 
 system, and thus passing over the intermediate areas 
 between the various regions of theological belief, he 
 met with a certain phenomenon which seemed to him 
 to belong to none of them, and which he used to call 
 therefore dcemonic influence. " It was not divine, for 
 it seemed unintellectu.al ; nor human, for it was no 
 result of understanding ; nor diabolic, for it was of 
 beneficent tendency ; nor angelic, for you could often 
 notice in it a certain mischievousness. It resembled 
 chance, inasmuch as it demonstrated nothing ; but 
 was like providence, inasmuch as it showed symp- 
 toms of continuity. Everything which fetters human 
 agency seemed to yield before it ; it seemed to dis- 
 pose arbitrarily of the necessary elements of our 
 existence." It is not always, says this great observer 
 
 ^ The Life and Works of Goethe ; with Sketches of his Age 
 and Contemporaries, from published and unpublished sources. 
 By G. H. Lewes. 2 vols. Nutt, 1855. 
 
 " Freundschaftliche Briefe von Goethe und seiner Frau an 
 Nicolans Meyer, aus den Jahren 1800-1831." Leipzig, Hartung, 
 1856. (" Friendly Letters from Goethe and his AVife to Nicolas 
 Meyer, between the years 1800 and 1831." Leipzig, 1856). 
 h B
 
 2 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE I 
 
 of life, " the first and best, either in moral nature or 
 in abilities," who possess this magnetic influence, and 
 it is but rarely " that they recommend themselves by 
 goodness of heart ; but a gigantic force goes out of 
 them, and they exercise an incredible power over all 
 creatures, nay, even over the elements themselves ; 
 and who can say how far this influence may reach ? 
 All moral forces united are powerless against them. 
 The masses are fascinated by them. They are only 
 to be conquered by the universe itself," when they 
 enter into conflict "sWth it. Of course Goethe was 
 thinking mainly of Napoleon, and men like him, as 
 he afterwards told Eckermann, when he wrote this 
 passage. Such men put forth, he says, a power, " if 
 not exactly opjmsite to, yet at least crossing, that of 
 the general moral order of the world; so that the 
 one might be regarded as the woof, the other as the 
 warp." He adds, that his lifelong friend and patron, 
 the Duke of Weimar, had this magnetic influence to 
 such a degree that nobody could resist him, and no 
 work of art ever failed in the poet's hands which the 
 duke had suggested or approved. "He would have 
 been enviable indeed if he could have possessed him- 
 self of my ideas and higher strivings ; for when the 
 daemon forsook him, and only the human was left, he 
 knew not how to set to work, and was much troubled 
 at it. In Byron this element was probably very 
 active, giving him such powers of fascination, espe- 
 cially with women." Eckermann, \\ath his usual de- 
 lightfully childlike simplicity, anxiously asks, " Has 
 not Mephistopheles traits of this nature?" "No," 
 replies Goethe, "Mephistopheles is too negative a 
 being. The daemonic manifests itself in positive 
 active power among artists. It is found often in 
 musicians, more rarely among painters. In Paga-
 
 I GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 3 
 
 nini it shows itself to a high degree, and it is by- 
 means of it that he produces such great effects." 
 Of himself he says, " it does not lie in my nature, 
 but I am subject to its influence " ; by which Goethe 
 probal^ly meant modestly to disclaim having any 
 personal fascination of this kind over other men, but 
 to indicate, what we know from other conversations 
 he really held to be true, that apparently arbitrary 
 and quite inexplicable impulses had often exercised 
 the most decisive and frequently fortunate influence 
 on his own career. But it is quite clear that Goethe 
 did possess in no common degree this capacity for, 
 in a certain sense, fascinating men by his presence, 
 as well as by his writings. If Byron had more of it 
 as a man, Goethe succeeded in imparting far more of 
 it to his works, and neither his life nor works can be 
 properly judged without reference to its influence. 
 |It is something quite distinct from mere beauty, 
 jpower, or general merit, either of personal character 
 lor of literary creation. It is a power which goes 
 out from the individual man, and which can imprint 
 itself only on such writings as carry with them the 
 stamp of individual character ; and not always even 
 on those, if, as for examjjle in the case of Byron's 
 earlier works, the play of character is a good deal 
 merged in some exaggerated mood of sentiment. It 
 is not intensity : numbers of writers have surpassed 
 Goethe in the intensity both of literary and personal 
 characteristics. Schiller was a man of far keener 
 and intenser, though narrower nature, and yet he 
 could not help going into utter captivity to the calm 
 and somewhat limply-constituted mind of his Weimar 
 friend. It is not even in itself independence or 
 strength of will ; for though Goethe had this in a 
 remarkable degree, many others, as probably Schiller,
 
 4 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE i 
 
 possessed it in as high a degree, who were quite 
 destitute of his fascinating talent. If it be expressible 
 in one phrase at all (which it is not), it might be 
 called presence of mind in combination with a keen 
 knowledge of men ; — I mean that absolute and com- 
 plete adequacy to every emergency which gave 
 Napoleon his sang froid at the very turning-point of 
 his great battles, and which in the literary world has 
 secured for Johnson his Boswell, and for Goethe his 
 Eckermann. Johnson, indeed, was immeasurably 
 Goethe's inferior in the range of his experience, and, 
 what is of more importance, in his knowledge of 
 man ; but he was perhaps his superior in mere pre- 
 sence of mind, and hence was greater in conversation, 
 but less in fascination. The Duke of Wellington 
 had nearly as much presence of mind as Napoleon 
 himself ; but he had immeasurably less of the other 
 element of fascination — instinctive knowledge of men, 
 and knowledge how to use them. 
 
 Goethe is almost unrivalled in the literary world 
 in the degree in which he combines these qualities. 
 Shakespeare may have had them equally, but his 
 dramas are too impersonal to tell us clearly what 
 kind of individual influence he put forth. - 1 should 
 conjecture that his sympathy with men was too vivid 
 to have enabled him to keep, as was the case with 
 Goethe, a part of himself as a permanent reserve- 
 force outside the actual field of action, and ready to 
 turn the flank of any new emergency. Shakespeare 
 can scarcely have been so uniformly able to detach 
 himself, if he would, from the sympathies and pas- 
 sions of the moment as Goethe certainly was ; for 
 Goethe, like the little three-eyed girl [Dreiduglein) in 
 the German tale, had always an extra organ besides 
 the eyes he slept and Avept with, to take note of his
 
 I GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 5 
 
 own sleep and his own tears, and an extra will, sub- 
 ject to the command of the third eye, ready to rescue 
 the ordinary will from the intricacies of human 
 emotion. Shakespeare's knowledge of life was, I 
 should think, less drawn from constant vigilance and 
 presence of mind in the passing moment (to which I 
 imagine him to have abandoned himself far more 
 completely than Goethe), and more derived from the 
 power of memory and imagination to reproduce past 
 impressions. However this may be, Shakespeare has 
 himself sketched less perhaps this cool presence of 
 mind itself, than the effect which it produces on 
 other men, in his picture of Octavius Caesar. Caesar's 
 cool self-possessed eye for every emergency, and for 
 the right use of human instruments, and its paralysing 
 effect on Antony's more attaching and passionate 
 character, is a striking example of what Goethe 
 would have called the " dsemonic " element in human 
 affairs — the element that fascinates men by at once 
 standing out clear and quite independent of their 
 support, and yet indicating the power to read them 
 off, and detect for them their own needs and uses. 
 There is always in this kind of magnetic power some- 
 thing repulsive at first ; but if the repulsion be over- 
 come, the attraction becomes stronger than ever; 
 there is a resistance while the mind of the disciple 
 is striving to keep its independence and conscious of 
 the spell, — an intense devotion after he has once 
 relinquished it, and consented to be a satellite. So 
 the soothsayer tells Antony, — 
 
 " Thy demon, that's tliy spirit wliicli keeps thee, is • 
 Noble, courageous, high, unmatchable. 
 Where Csesar's is not ; but near him, thy angel 
 Becomes a fear, as being overpowered ; therefore 
 Make space enough between you."
 
 ■?>' 
 
 6 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE i 
 
 And Goethe, who had, as he says, himself experienced 
 the force of this blind fascination in the Duke of 
 Weimar's influence over him, as well as wielded it in 
 no slight degree, tells Eckermann (himself a captive), 
 " The higher a man stands, the more he is liable to 
 this daemonic influence ; and he must take constant 
 care that his guiding will be not diverted by it from 
 the straight way. . . . This is just the difficult 
 point, — for our better nature stoutly to sustain 
 itself, and yield to the daemonic no more than is 
 reasonable." 
 
 In Goethe himself this fascinating power existed 
 as strongly as it is well possible to conceive in a man 
 whose whole intellectual nature was of the sympathetic 
 and contemplative, rather than of the practical cast, 
 — who had no occasion to " use " men except as 
 literary material, — and who, while he stood   out 
 independent of them, and could at will shake off 
 from his feet the dust of long association, yet felt 
 ivlth them as one who understood their nature and 
 had entered into their experience. Goethe's sym- 
 pathetic and genial insight into man would have 
 been a pure embarrassment to a practical cold- 
 tempered tool - seeker like Napoleon, Avho never 
 decipherec^ men through sympathy, but always by an 
 instinctive tat^t for detecting masterly and workman- 
 like instruments. And vice versd, the imperturbable 
 self-possession and Napoleonic sang frokl of judgment 
 that underlay in Goethe all storms of superficial 
 emotion, Avere no little embarrassment to him in 
 many of his literary moods. They prevented him, we 
 think, from ever becoming a great dramatist. He 
 could never lose himself sufficiently in his creations : 
 yet they assuredly secured for him his command of 
 those minutely -accurate observations of life with
 
 I GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 7 
 
 which all his later prose works and his conversations 
 are so thickly studded. 
 
 You can see that men of strong nature did not 
 submit themselves to Goethe's magnetic influence with- 
 out a struggle. Schiller, at first intensely repelled from 
 him, was only gradually subdued, though thoroughly 
 and strangely magnetised into idolatry by personal 
 converse. Herder's keen and caustic nature vibrated 
 to the last between the intense repulsion he felt for 
 Goethe's completely Mwmoral genius, — the poet's 
 impartial sympathy for good and evil alike, — and 
 the irresistible attraction which his personal influ- 
 ence exerted. Only those could thoroughly cling- 
 to Goethe from the first who were not conscious of 
 having any strong intellectual independence to main- 
 tain. Women, who love nothing so much as a com- 
 pletely independent self-sustained nature, especially 
 if joined "with thorough insight into th'^'nselves, were 
 fascinated at once. Wieland, who had no intellectual 
 ground to fight for, surrendered without terms. But 
 no man of eminent al^ility and a diff"erent school of 
 thought seemed to approach him without some sense 
 that, if exposed constantly to his immediate influence, 
 he would have to choose between fascination and 
 aversion. Hence his very few intimate male friends : 
 scarcely any man, at all able to enter into ms mind and 
 share his deeper interests, was likely to be found who 
 could go so completely into captivity to his modes 
 of thought ; and, tolerant as he was, the centrifugal 
 force of his mind threw off", to a certain respectful 
 distance, all that the attractive force was not able to 
 appropriate as part of itself. 
 
 There has been a very similar effect produced by 
 his writings on those even who did not know the 
 man. Novalis fluttered round them, repeatedly ex-
 
 8 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE I 
 
 pressing his aversion, like a moth round a candle. 
 They invariably repel, at first, English readers mth 
 English views of life and duty. As the characteristic 
 atmosphere of the man distils into yoiu- life, you find 
 the magnetic force coming strongly over you ; — you 
 are as a man mesmerised ; — you feel his calm inde- 
 pendence of so much on which you helplessly lean, 
 combined with his thorough insight into that desire 
 of yours to lean, drawing you irresistibly towards the 
 invisible intellectual centre at which such independent 
 strength and such genial Ijreadth of thought were pos- 
 sible. And yet you feel that you would be in many 
 and various ways lowered in your own eyes if you 
 could think completely as he thought and act as he 
 acted. It becomes a difficult problem, in the presence 
 of so much genius, and beneath so fascinating an eye, 
 "for our better nature stoutly to sustain itself and 
 yield to the dajmonic no more than is reasonable." 
 
 Let me attempt to contribute to the solution of 
 this difficulty by some account and criticism of 
 Goethe's life and genius in connection with that per- 
 sonal character which so subtly penetrates all he has 
 written. Carlyle mistook completely when he said 
 that Goethe, like Shakespeare, leaves little trace of 
 himself in his creations. To a careful eye this is not 
 even true of Shakespeare, though Shakespeare leaves 
 no immediate stamp of himself, and critical inference 
 alone can discern him in his works ; but far less is it 
 true of Goethe. A rarified self no doubt it is — 
 a highly -distilled gaseous essence ; but everywhere, 
 penetrating all he writes, there is the ethereal atmo- 
 sphere which travelled about Avith Johann Wolfgang 
 Goethe. 
 
 Mr. Lewes's volumes give us a very able and 
 interesting biograi)hy, — a book, indeed, of permanent
 
 I GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 9 
 
 value ; the incidents illustrating character, though not 
 quite exhausting his materials, are disposed with 
 skill, and the artistic criticism, while thoroughly 
 appreciating Goethe's transcendent poetical genius, is il 
 independent, sensible, and English. From his moral / 
 criticism of Goethe, and sometimes, though not so 
 frequently, from the poetical, I very widely dissent,, 
 and hope to give the grounds of my dissent. Some-^ 
 thing more too might have been done in the way of 
 defining his individual position both as a poet and as 
 a man. But it is impossible to deny Mr. Lewes high 
 merit for the candour of his biography. Where 
 Goethe has been most censured, he gives all the facts 
 without reserve ; and he does not go into any help- 
 less captivity to the poet and artist. He gives his 
 readers the elements for forming their own moral 
 judgments, and he has shaken ofi:' from his feet the 
 ponderous rubbish of the German scholiasts. Herr 
 Diintzer and his colleagues are skilfully used in Mr. 
 Lewes's book ; but they are also skilfully ignored.r/ 
 Mr. Lewes has not submitted himself to Carlyle's 
 somewhat undiscriminating, strained, and lashed-up 
 furor of adoration for every word that the German 
 sage let drop. There is, by the way, nothing more 
 remarkably illustrative of Goethe's " dsemonic " in- 
 fluence than Carlyle's worship of him. Except in his 
 permanent unfailing self-possession, Goethe lacked 
 almost all the personal qualities which usually fas- 
 cinate that great writer's eye. And accordingly there 
 runs through Carlyle's essays on Goethe a tone of 
 arduous admiration, — a helpless desire to fix on some 
 characteristic which he could infinitely admire, — 
 betraying that he was in subjection to the " eyes 
 behind the book," not to the thing which is said in it. 
 There was nothing of the rugged thrusting power of 

 
 10 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE i, 
 
 Johnson, of the imperious practical faith of Cromwell, 
 of the picturesque passion of Danton, of the kingly 
 fanaticism of Mahomet ; nothing, in short, of the 
 intensity of nature which Carlyle always needs behind 
 the sagacity he worships. Mr. Lewes reports a rather 
 affected piece of Carlylese, delivered by the Latter- 
 day oracle in Piccadilly upon one of the injurious 
 attacks that had been directed against Goethe. Car- 
 lyle stopped suddenly, and mth his peculiar look and 
 emphasis said, "Yes, it is the wild cry of amazement 
 on the part of all spooneys that the Titan was not a 
 spooney too ! Here is a godlike intellect, and yet 
 you see he is not an idiot ! not in the least a spooney! " 
 This was hardly true of Goethe ; and we strongly 
 suspect that Mr. Carlyle was resisting a secret feeling 
 that there was a limpness and want of concentration 
 in Goethe's whole nature intellectual and moral, from 
 jjibhe results of which his imperturbable presence of 
 \ mind and great genius barely saved him ; that he 
 did in consequence go sometimes beyond the brink 
 of spooneyishness in early days, and across the verge 
 of very unreal '* high art " in later life. These are 
 just the defects to which Mr. Carlyle is most sensitive. 
 It is true Goethe never was in danger of permanently 
 sinking into either abyss ; for his head was always 
 cool, and his third eye, at least, always vigilant. But 
 it may perhaps account for the unusual failure of our 
 great essayist in delineating Goethe, that the poet's 
 wonderful writings were less the real object of his 
 admiration than the strange fascination of the char- 
 acter behind. Li my very brief sketch of the j^oet's 
 life, I shall, so far as possible, select my illustrations 
 from passages or incidents passed over in Mr. Lewes's 
 volumes, wherever they seem to be equally charac- 
 teristic.
 
 I GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 11 
 
 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, born at noon on the 
 28th August 1749, in Frankfort-on-the-Maine, seems 
 to have inherited his genial, sensitive, sensuous, and 
 joyous temperament from his mother ; and from his 
 father, the pride, self-dependence, and magnificent 
 formality, the nervous orderliness, perseverance, and 
 the microscopic minuteness of eye, by which, at least 
 after the first rush of youth was gone by, he was 
 always distinguished. His mother was but eighteen 
 when he was born. She was a lively girl, full of 
 German sentiment, with warm impulses, by no means 
 much troubled Avith a conscience, exceedingly afraid 
 of her husband, who was near twenty years her 
 senior, and seemingly both willing and skilful in the 
 invention of occasional white lies adapted to screen 
 her children from his minute, fidgety, and rather 
 austere superintendence. She " spoiled " her children 
 on principle, and made no pretence of conducting a 
 systematic training which she abhorred. She said of 
 herself in after years, that she could " educate no 
 child, was quite unfit for it, gave them every Avish so 
 long as they laughed and were good, and whipped 
 them if they cried or made wry faces, without ever 
 looking for any reason why they laughed or cried. "^ 
 Her belief in Providence was warm with German 
 sentiment, and not a little tinged with superstition. 
 She rejoiced greatly when her son published the Con- 
 fessions of a Beautiful Soul, which she loved as a 
 memorial of a lost pietistic friend. Her religion was 
 one of emotion rather than of moral reverence. She 
 was generous and extravagant, and, after her hus- 
 band's death, seems to have spent capital as well as 
 income. She was passionately fond of the theatre ; 
 
 1 Letter to lier grauddaugliter — Dliiitzer's Frauenbilder, p. 
 
 544.
 
 12 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE i 
 
 a taste whicli she transmitted to her son. Her hearty 
 simplicity of nature made her universally loved. Her 
 servants loved and stayed with her to the last. She 
 seems to have had at least as much humour as her 
 son, which, for Germans, was not inconsiderable, and 
 not much more sense of awe. She gave the most 
 detailed o^'ders for her own funeral, and even speci- 
 fied the kin'd of wane and the size of the cracknels 
 with which the mourners were to be regaled ; order- 
 ing the servants not to put too few raisins into the 
 cakes, as she never could endure that in her life, and 
 it would certainly chafe her in her grave. Having 
 been invited to go to a party on the day on Avhich 
 she died, she sent for answer that "Madame Goethe 
 could not come, as she was engaged just then in 
 dying. "^ Yet her sensitiveness was so great, that she 
 always made it a condition with her servants that 
 they should never repeat to her j^ainful news that 
 they had picked up accidentally, as she wished to 
 hear nothing sad without absolute necessity. And 
 during her son's dangerous illness at Weimar, in 
 1805, no one ventured to speak to her of it till it 
 was past, though she affirmed that she had been con- 
 scious all the time of his danger without the heart to 
 mention it. 
 
 .' This latter peculiarity Goethe inherited. Coura- 
 geous to the utmost degree in danger, he could never 
 bear to encounter mental pain which he could any- 
 how escape. He invented soft parajihrases to avoid 
 
 \ speaking of the death of those he had loved, and 
 indeed of all death. Writing to Zelter of his own 
 son's death, he says, "The staying-away (Aeussen- 
 bleiben) of my son has Aveighed dreadfully upon me 
 in many ways." And his feeling was so well-known, 
 ^ Diintzer's Fraucnbilder, p. 583.
 
 I , GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 13 
 
 that his old friend and mistress, the Frau von Stein, 
 who died before him, directed that her funei'al shonld 
 not pass his door, lest it should impress him too pain- 
 fully. No one dared to tell him of Schiller's death ; 
 and so it was also at the death of his wife's sister, 
 and in other cases. Indeed, his constant unwilling- 
 ness manfully to face the secret of his 0"vyTi anguish, 
 was a principal source of a shade of un^ality in al 
 generally very real character. He habitually evaded 
 the task ofc fathoming the meaning and the depth of 
 suffering. He avoided all contact with keen jmin. I 
 He could not bear, although in the neighbourhood, to(| 
 visit his brother-in-law at a time when his sister's 
 child was dying. It was not weakness — it was his 
 principle of action ; and the efi'ect remains in his i 
 works. He writes like a man who had not only/j 
 experienced but explored every reality of human life 
 except that of anguish and remorse. The iron that 
 enters into the soul had found him too ; but instead 
 of fronting it as he fronted all other realities of life, 
 and pondering its teaching to the last letter, he drew 
 back from it with what speed he might. This 
 experience even his Faust wants. Remorse, grief, 
 agony, Goethe gently waived ; and, by averting his 
 thoughts, softened them gradually without mastering 
 their lesson. Hence his passion never reaches the 
 deepest deep of human life. It can glow and melt, 
 but is never a consuming fire. His Werther, Tasso, 
 Ottilie, and Clarchen suffer keenly, but never meet the 
 knife-edge. There is nothing in his poems like the 
 courageous reality of suffering which vibrates through 
 some of Shelley's lyrics ajjd his Cenci. The fascina- 
 tion of pain he can paint, but not the conquest of the 
 will over its deeper aspect of terror. The tempera- 
 ment he inherited from his mother. But to him was 
 
 t
 
 U GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE i 
 
 granted a conspicuously potent will, Avhich should 
 have enabled him to sound this depth also. 
 
 From his father it is far more difficult to say what 
 qualities of mind Goethe inherited. The old man 
 had always worried his family ; and it became fashion- 
 able among the poet's friends, who were enthusiastic 
 about his mother, to ignore or depreciate the old 
 counsellor, and they seem to have regarded it as a 
 " mercy " when " Providence removed him." There 
 are, however, one or two incidents in the Autobio- 
 graphy^ which convey an impression that his affec- 
 tion for his children was as real and deep as even 
 that of his wife. He was a formal man, with strong 
 ideas of strait-laced education, passionately orderly 
 (he thought a good book nothing without a good 
 binding), and never so much excited as by a necessary 
 deviation from the "pre-established harmony" of 
 household rules. He could not submit to the inevit- 
 able. He was the kind of man who is so attached to 
 his rules, that if he cannot shatter the obstacles of 
 circumstance, he thinks it next best to let the ob- 
 stacles of circumstance shatter him. He had none of 
 his son's calm presence of mind. But whatever per- 
 severance of temper Goethe had, he probably gained 
 from his father. The latter could not bear to do 
 anything superficially. He was as thorough (grundlich, 
 as the Germans say) in preparing Wolfgang for the 
 coronation of the emperor by an exhaustive investiga- 
 tion into the authorities for every ceremony to be 
 observed, as in teaching him the civil law. Einlei- 
 tung, Quellen, etc., were all raked carefully up ; for 
 was not the coronation a part of the " Entwickelung 
 der Geschichte " 1 He had the formal notions about 
 everything, considered rhyme the essence of poetry, 
 and believed that pictures, like ynne, improved in
 
 I GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 15 
 
 value by mere keeping. He taught his children him- 
 self, and completely alienated his daughter by his 
 dry and exacting manner. But he was at least in 
 earnest with his task. He began to learn both Eng- 
 lish and drawing at the same time with his children, 
 that his own participation in their efforts might spur 
 them on. He copied all his children's draAving-copies 
 " with an English lead-pencil upon the finest Dutch 
 paper ; and not only observed the greatest clearness 
 of outline, but most accurately imitated the hatching 
 of the copies Avith a light hand. He drew the whole 
 collection, number by number, while we children 
 jumped from one head to another just as we pleased." 
 This is very characteristic of his son's genius in later 
 years, at least in the microscopic detail. After the 
 first outburst of the poet's youthful passion, the lad 
 took a sudden fancy for rude fragmentary drawings 
 from nature, on all sorts of odd gray scraps of paper. 
 And of this time he tells us, " The pedagogism of my 
 father, on this point too, was greatly to be admired. 
 He kindly asked for my attempts, and drew lines 
 round every imperfect sketch. . . . The irregular 
 leaves he cut straight, and thixs made the beginning 
 of a collection in which he wished at some future 
 time to rejoice in the progress of his son." There 
 seems to me real tenderness here. He was a proud 
 man, who had drawn back into himself, at the first 
 repulse, from civic politics ; and was hardly recon- 
 ciled to his son's adhesion to the Weimar Court, 
 because he dreaded lest some ducal caprice should 
 bring mortification to his family pride. 
 
 The poet was born, as he himself records, with 
 that sedate kind of humour in which alone he ex- 
 celled, with a "propitious horoscope." There was 
 clear anticipation in it of the special worship of
 
 16 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE i 
 
 young ladies, and of a general sceptre over earth and 
 air. " The sun stood in the sign of the Virgin, and 
 was culminating for the day." Jupiter and Venus 
 were friendly (little Pallas, undiscovered for another 
 half century, must surely have lent a helping ray) ; 
 Mercury was not adverse ; Mars and Saturn indif- 
 ferent ; " the moon alone, just full, exerted the power 
 of her opposition, all the more as she had reached her 
 planetary hour; she therefore resisted my birth, 
 which could not be accomplished till this hour was 
 passed." 
 
 Frankfort was a busy old-fashioned town, with 
 old walls and new walls, full of lingering traditions 
 and gray customs still surviving, which served as 
 an antique poetic frame for its changing pictures 
 of motley German life. Goethe used to recall his 
 childish exploring expeditions about the old walls, 
 moats, towers, and posterns, with vivid delight. 
 Directly behind his father's house was a large area of 
 gardens, to which the family had no access, stretching 
 away to the walls of the city. The boy used often 
 to gaze on this forbidden Eden in evening hours from 
 a room in the second storey called the garden-room. 
 Even after the lapse of sixty years, the many- 
 coloured picture of these gardens, — the solitary 
 figures of careful neighbours stooping to tend their 
 flowers, the groups of skittle-players, and the bands 
 of merry children, — all blended together in the warm 
 sunset — the floating sounds of many voices, of the 
 rolling balls, and the dropping ninepins — would 
 again beset his imagination, bringing with them 
 many a "tale of visionary hours." 
 
 Mr. Lewes remarks that the child's character 
 frequently presents far more distinctly the gi'ound- 
 plan of the matured man's than the youth's, since
 
 I GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 17 
 
 the 2>i'oportions of the whole are often comjDletely 
 disguised by the temporary caprices of newly -ex- 
 panded passions and newly-gained freedom. This is, 
 at all events, extremely true of Goethe, and is gener- 
 ally true of all casts of character where the permanent 
 influence of a manly conscience does not start forth 
 into life along with the new powers and new freedom 
 it is to control. The sense of responsibility and 
 moral freedom, once awakened, does not again sub- 
 side, and where searching moral convictions have 
 once taken hold on the character, the subsidence of 
 youthful impetuousness does not give back again the 
 characteristic features of childhood ; but in Goethe 
 this element was always faint,' and the difterence be- 
 tween the child's mind and the man's was only a diff'er- 
 ence in maturity of powers ; when the spring-tide of 
 youth fell back, his inward life was as it had been, 
 only that all was stronger and riper. He was a 
 reflective, old-fashioned, calmly -imaginative child, 
 always fascinated by a mystery, but never, properly 
 speaking, awed by it. It kindled his imagination ; 
 it never subdued him. He was full of wonder, and 
 quite without veneration. In the "altar to the 
 Lord " which the child secretly built on a music-stand 
 of his father's at seven years of age, and on which 
 he burnt incense in the shape of a pastil, until he 
 found that he was in danger of injuring his altar, 
 he was innocently playing with a subject which to 
 almost any other child would have been too sacred 
 for imaginative amusement. He was evidently 
 charmed with the pictiu'esqueness of the patriarchal 
 sacrifices, and thought with delight of the blue smoke 
 curling up to heaven beneath the first beam of the 
 rising sun : of the religious feeling, the desire to 
 give uj) anything of his own out of love to God, he 
 
 L C
 
 18 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE i 
 
 had not of course any idea ; — that in a child of seven 
 no one would ex2:)ect. But what is characteristic, is 
 the absence of any resti"aining awe, in thus mingling 
 the thought of God with his play, at an age when he 
 had already begun to think whether it was just in 
 God to send earthquakes and storms. Religion was 
 already to him what it ever continued to be, — not 
 the communion with holiness, but at most a graceful 
 development of human life, a fountain of cool mys- 
 tery playing gratefully over a parched earth. Mr. 
 Lewes has translated a delightful illustration of 
 Goethe's relation to his mother, from Bettina von 
 Arnim's account. That bold young lady's authority 
 is generally more than questionable ; here, however, 
 there is the strongest evidence of internal truth : — 
 
 " This genial, indulgent mother employed her faculty 
 for story-telling to his and lier own delight. ' Air, fire, 
 earth, and water I represented under the forms of prin- 
 cesses ; and to all natural phenomena I gave a meaning, 
 in which I almost believed more fervently than my little 
 hearers. As we thought of paths which led from star to 
 star, and that we should one day inhabit the stars, and 
 thought of the great spirits we should meet there, I was 
 as eager for the hours of story-telling as the children 
 themselves ; I was quite curious about the future course 
 of my own improvisation, and any invitation which inter- 
 riipted these evenings was disagreeable. There I sat, and 
 there Wolfgang held me with his large black eyes ; and 
 when the fate of one of his favourites was not according 
 to his fancy, I saw the angry veins swell on his temples, 
 I saw him repress his tears. He often burst in with, 
 " But, mother, the princess won't maiTy the nasty tailor, 
 even if he does kill the giant." And when I made a 
 pause for the night, promising to contim^e it on the mor- 
 row, I was certain that he would in the meanwhile think 
 it out for himself, and so he often stimiilated my imagina-
 
 I GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 19 
 
 tioii. When I turned the story according to his plan, 
 and told him that he had found out the denouement^ then 
 was he all fire and flame, and one could see his little 
 heart beating underneath his dress ! His grandmother, 
 who made a great pet of him, was the confidant of all his 
 ideas as to how the story would turn out ; and as she 
 repeated these to me, and I turned the story according to 
 these hints, there was a little diplomatic secrecy between 
 us, which we never disclosed. I had the pleasure of 
 continuing my story to the delight and astonishment of 
 my hearers, and Wolfgang saw with glowing eyes the 
 fulfilment of his own conceptions, and listened with 
 enthusiastic applause.' " 
 
 His self-command and self-importance showed 
 themselves early. He once waited resolutely for 
 many minutes till school time was " up," though his 
 schoolfellows were lashing his legs with switches till 
 they bled, before he would defend himself by a single 
 movement ; and then he fell upon them with im- 
 mense success. Like all petted children, he did not 
 like school ; his pride was hurt by the unrespecting 
 self-assertion of the republic around him. His most 
 intimate friends were usually women and younger 
 men. He never could endure to be laughed at. 
 Herder's rather silly pun on his name (Gothe), made 
 in college days, — 
 
 " Thou, the descendant of gods, or of Goths, or of 
 gutters," ^ — 
 
 was perhaps a little annoying ; but it clearly rankled 
 in his mind ; and he mentions it bitterly forty years 
 later, after Herder's death, in the course of a very 
 kindly criticism, as an instance of the sarcasm w^hich 
 rendered Herder often unamiable ; characteristically 
 suggesting this most admirable rationale of true 
 1 In German " Koth," literally "mud." 
 
 \
 
 20 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE i 
 
 politeness in such matters : " The proper name of a 
 man is not like a cloak, which only hangs about him, 
 and at which one may at any rate be allowed to pull 
 and t^vitch, but it is a close-fitting garment, which 
 has grown over and over him, like his skin, and 
 which one cannot scrape and flay without injuring 
 him himself." As a small boy he is said to have 
 walked in an old-fashioned way, in order to distin- 
 guish himself from his schoolfellows, and to have told 
 his mother, "I begin with this. Later on in life I 
 shall distinguish myself in far other ways." One 
 cannot help thinking a little jiidicious whipping and 
 nonchalance at home might at this period have been 
 of some service to him. Yet the "oracular" so 
 entered into his nature, that one could ill spare it 
 now from his essence ; it lends a certain antique 
 grandeur to the light leaves of poetry that are twined 
 round it. 
 
 His minute self-observation early showed itself. 
 The following recollection in his Autuhiography is ex- 
 tremely characteristic : — 
 
 " We boys held a Sunday assembly, where each of us 
 was to produce original verses, and here I was struck by 
 something strange, which long caused me uneasiness. 
 My poems, whatever they might be, always seemed to me 
 the best. But I soon remarked that my competitors, who 
 brought forth very lame affairs, were in the same condi- 
 tion, and thought no less of themselves. Nay, what ap- 
 peared yet more suspicious, a good lad (though in such 
 matters altogether unskilful), whom I liked in other 
 respects, but who had his rhymes made by his tutor, not 
 only regarded these as the best, but was thoroughly per- 
 suaded they were his own, as he always maintained in our 
 confidential intercourse. Now, as this illusion' and error 
 was obvious to me, the question one day forced itself upon
 
 I GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 21 
 
 me, whether I myself might not be in the same state — 
 whether those poems were not really better than mine, 
 and whether I might not justly appear to those boys as 
 mad as they to me ? This disturbed me much and long ; 
 for it was altogether impossible for me to find any external 
 criterion of the truth ; I even ceased from producing, until 
 at length I was quieted by my own light temperament, 
 and the feeling of my own powers." 
 
 He could not see then that what really distin- 
 guished him above his schoolfellows was not near so 
 much, probably, the excellence of his verses, as the 
 power of detecting and applying to his own case the 
 general law of self-deception. 
 
 Goethe was, as he intimates in Wilhelm Meister, in 
 a passage well known to be in fact autobiographical, 
 a very inquisitive child, and as unscrupulous as 
 spoiled children are in gratifying his inquisitiveness. 
 His childish fondness for the " store-room " is rather 
 universal and human than individual and personal. 
 " More than any other of the young ones I Avas in 
 the habit of looking out attentively to see if I could 
 notice any cupboard left open, or key standing in its 
 lock." There are few minuter bits of life in his 
 writings than his description of the predatory excur- 
 sion into the store-room one Sunday morning, when 
 the key had not been withdrawn. " I marked this 
 oversight," he says. He pilfered, however, with less 
 than his usual self-possession ; the cook made a " stir 
 in the kitchen," and even Goethe was flurried. But 
 he seems to have had none of the ordinary childish 
 shame and self-reproach connected with the adven- 
 ture ; — his favourite puppets were always dearei* to 
 him because of the " French-plum " fragrance which 
 they had acquired in the scene of theft. 
 
 His delight in the theatre was the same through
 
 22 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE i 
 
 life. He liked the little mystery. He liked still 
 better to have the key to the mystery. He was as 
 quick as any child at a pantomime to find out "the 
 man in the bear " ; but it did not destroy his plea- 
 sure, especially if he were able to be " the man in the 
 bear " himself ; and besides, his heart was always in 
 his eyes. But what mainly fascinated him in the 
 theatre, I think, was its condensation and concentra- 
 tion of life into one consecutive piece. His imagina- 
 tion was wandering, digressive, microscopic, inco- 
 herent ; he had the greatest difficulty in grasping in 
 one vision a consecutive Avhole. He saw vivid points 
 in succession, and saw the continuity and groAvth ; 
 but his sight was like the passing of a microscope 
 over a surface, — it laid bare the transition, but did 
 not give a connected vision. He saw too intensely 
 and too far at each point to be able to sweep his eye 
 quickly over the whole. The theatre helped to 
 remedy this defect, and he was grateful to it ; but 
 for that very reason he never could write successfully 
 for the theatre. The boy's passion for the theatre 
 had one very bad effect. During the French occupa- 
 tion of Frankfort, he (then a lad of ten to twelve 
 years old) had a free admission to the French theatre, 
 which he used daily, accompanied by no older friend. 
 His mother uuAvisely obtained the reluctant permis- 
 sion of his father that he shoiild go ; and his conse- 
 quent quick progress in French reconciled his father 
 to the habit. The lad had constant access behind the 
 scenes and in the green-room along with his young 
 French companions. And here I have little doubt 
 the natural delicacy of his mind was first rubbed off. 
 Probably he was constitutionally deficient in that 
 element of mind which shame and reverence have in 
 common (aiSws, as the Greeks called it) ; and during
 
 I GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 23 
 
 the French occupation of Frankfort, at a most suscept- 
 ible age, he was subjected to influences that would 
 be likely to have endangered the most delicate of 
 natures. He was too young, his friends imagined, 
 for danger ; but certainly he was not at all too young 
 for that kind of morbid curiosity about evil which is 
 often more tainting than evil itself. Even in the 
 late- written autobiographical recollections of his youth 
 this is distinctly visible. 
 
 At the age of fourteen he was a great tale-com- 
 poser; and one of these tales, "The New Paris," 
 full of the genius of his later years, he has preserved 
 in his Autobiography. It is a most characteristic 
 story, brimming over with the self-importance of the 
 boy, and full also of the fanciful grace, the mys- 
 terious simplicity, and the simple mysteriousness of 
 his older compositions. It is far the most graceful 
 of his short tales, and must, I think, have received 
 some touches from his maturer hand. For my own 
 part, I greatly prefer it to the second part of Faust. 
 But the childlike delight in pixzzling his readers is 
 the same. The scene of the fairy-tale, which is 
 autobiographic, is laid in gardens discovered by him 
 beyond the old wall of the city. The tale ends with 
 the following charming mystery : — 
 
 f " The porter did not speak another word ; but before 
 he let me pass the entrance, he stopped me, and showed 
 nle some objects on the wall over the way, while at the 
 same time he pointed backwards to the door. I under- 
 stood him ; he wished to imprint the objects on my mind, 
 that I might the more certainly find the door which had 
 unexpectedly closed behind me. I now took good notice 
 of what was opposite to me. Above a high wall rose 
 boughs of extremely old nut-trees, which partly covered 
 the cornice at the top. The branches reached down to a
 
 24 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE I 
 
 stone tablet, the ornamental border of whicli I could per- 
 fectly recognise, tbougli I could not read the inscription. 
 It rested on the corbel of a niche, in which a finely- 
 wrought fountain poured water from cup to cup' into a 
 great basin, that formed, as it were, a little pond, and 
 disappeared in the earth. Fountain, inscription, nut- 
 trees, all stood directly one above another ; I would paint 
 it as I saw it. 
 
 "Now, it may well be conceived how I passed this 
 evening and many following days, and how often I re- 
 peated to myself this story, which even I could hardly 
 believe. As soon as it was in any degree possible, I went 
 again to the Bad Wall to refresh my remembrance at 
 least of these signs, and to look at the precious door. 
 But, to my great amazement, I found all changed. Nut- 
 trees, indeed, overtopped the wall, but they did not stand 
 immediately in contact. A tablet also was inserted in 
 the wall, but far to the right of the trees, without orna- 
 ment, and with a legible inscription. A niche with a 
 fountain there was far to the left, but with no resemblance 
 whatever to that which I had seen : so that I almost 
 believed that the second adventure was, like the first, a 
 dream ; for of the door there is not the slightest trace. 
 The only thing that consoles me is the observation, that 
 these three objects seem always to change their places. 
 For in repeated visits to the spot, I think I have noticed 
 that the nut-trees have moved somewhat nearer together, 
 and that the tablet and the fountain seem likewise to 
 approach each other. Probably, when all is brought 
 together again, the door, too, will once more be visible ; 
 and I will do my best to take up the thread of the ad- 
 venture. Whether I shall be able to tell you what 
 further happens, or whether it will be expressly forbidden 
 me, I cannot say. 
 
 "This tale, of the truth of which my playfellows 
 vehemently strove to convince themselves, Avas received 
 with great applause. Each of them visited alone the
 
 I GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 25 
 
 place described, without confiding it to me or the others, 
 and discovered the nut-trees, the tablet, and the spring, 
 though always at a distance from each other, as they at 
 last confessed to me, because it is not easy to conceal a 
 secret at that early age. But here the contest first arose. 
 One asserted that the objects did not stir from the spot, 
 and always maintained the same distance ; a second 
 averred that they did move, and that too away from each 
 other ; a third agreed with the latter as to the first point 
 of their moving, though it seemed to him that the nut- 
 tree, tablet, and fountain rather drew near together ; 
 •while a fourth had something still more wonderful to 
 announce, which w'as, that the nut-trees were in the 
 middle, but that the tablet and the fountain were on sides 
 opposite to those which I had stated. With respect to 
 the traces of the little door they also varied. And thus 
 they furnished me an early instance of the contra- 
 dictory views men can hold and maintain in regard to 
 matters quite simple and easily cleared up. As I ob- 
 stinately refused the continuation of my tale, a repeti- 
 tion of the first part was often desired. I was on my 
 guard, however, not to change the circumstances much, 
 and by the uniformity of the narrative I converted the 
 fable into truth in the minds of my hearers." 
 
 How vividly this reminds one of his mysterious 
 conduct to Eckermann with regard to some portions 
 of the second part of Faust. In that dark com- 
 position Faust asks Mephistopheles to show him 
 Helena ; and Mephistopheles tells him it can only be 
 managed by application " to goddesses who .live sub- 
 lime in loneliness, but not in space, still less in time 
 — of whom to speak is embarrassment" — "the 
 mothers " ; "a glowing tripod " ^ is to assure him 
 
 1 The passage is, it seems to me, a satire upon the Hegelian 
 practice of deducing everything out of "the pure nothing" by 
 what may be called the tripartite cork-screw philosophy, which
 
 26 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE i 
 
 that he has attained the deepest point of all, and by 
 its shining he is to see the mothers. But there is 
 no way there, as there can be no way into the " un- 
 trodden and untreadable," where he is to be sur- 
 rounded by "loneliness." On hearing the "mothers" 
 mentioned, Faust starts back shuddering ; and when 
 asked why, only replies, — 
 
 " Die Miitter ! Mutter ! 's klingt so wimderlich." 
 (" The mothers ! mothers ! it has the strangest ring.") 
 
 Poor Eckermann had been set to read this remarkable 
 scene, and was, naturally, a good deal puzzled. But 
 he shall tell his own story. 
 
 " This afternoon Goethe did me the great pleasure of 
 reading those scenes in which Faust visits the mothers. 
 The novelty and unexpectedness of this subject, with 
 his manner of reading the scene, struck me so forcibly, 
 that I felt myself translated into the situation of Faust, 
 shuddering at the communication from Mephistopheles. 
 Although I had heard and felt the whole, yet so much 
 remained an enigma to me, tliat I felt myself compelled 
 to ask Goethe for some explanation. But he, in his 
 usual manner, wrapped himself up in mystery, looking on 
 me with wide open eyes, and repeating the words, — 
 
 "' Die Miitter t Mutter 1 's klingt so wundcrlkh.'' 
 " ' I can betray to you no more, except that I found 
 in Plutarch that in Ancient Greece the mothers were 
 spoken of as divinities. This is all for which I am in- 
 debted to tradition ; the rest is my own invention. Take 
 the manuscript home with you, study it carefully, and 
 see to what conclusion you come.' " 
 
 The good childlike Eckermann conscientiously 
 tasked himself to find the riddle out quite as 
 
 does everything in logical triplets, but winds itself a little 
 higher at each repetition.
 
 I GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 27 
 
 anxiously as Goethe's boy -audience did with the 
 door in the old wall ; perhaps it was even less worth 
 while. He elaborated a most complex and difficult 
 "view" on the subject of these mothers ; but Goethe 
 let nothing further transpire. Indeed it might fairly 
 wait at least till the nut-trees, the fountain, and the 
 tablet in the old Frankfort wall had drawn to2;ether 
 
 ^O" 
 
 again. 
 
 There is one other slight incident of Goethe's boy- 
 hood so characteristic of the man that it is worths' 
 mentioning. The calm, unabashed, self -fortified boy ap- 
 pears in it the very image of the man. Coming out of \ 
 the theatre, he remarked ponderingly to a companion, 
 with reference to one of the young actors, " How 
 handsomely the boy was dressed, and how well he 
 looked ! Who knows in how tattered a jacket he 
 may sleep to-night ! " The mother of the lad, hap- 
 pening to be beside him in the crowd, took great 
 umbrage, and read Goethe a long lecture. "As I 
 could neither excuse myself nor escape from her, I 
 was really embarrassed ; and when she paused for a 
 moment, said, -without thinking, ' Well, why do you 
 make such a noise about it ? — to-day red, to-morrow 
 dead.' ^ These words seemed to strike the woman 
 dumb. She stared at me, and moved away from me 
 as soon as it was in any degree possible." This was 
 not meant to give pain ; it was only that Goethe 
 habitually cut short what annoyed him, without 
 caring much how. He had the nerve and the 
 presence of mind, and of other consequences he 
 thought little. There is a like tale, referring to 
 later years, of a fanatical admirer bursting into the 
 bedroom of an inn where Goethe was undressing, 
 and throwing himself ecstatically at his feet, pouring 
 ^ " Heute roth, morgen todt" — a German proverb.
 
 28 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE i 
 
 forth at the same time a set speech of adoration. 
 Goethe blew out the candlu and jumped into bed. 
 This was truly a great inspiration ;'^ l)ut the power 
 of calmly warding off anything that did not suit him 
 was exercised quite without reference to the moral 
 I elements of the case. Goethe had at every period 
 of his life a thoroughly kindly nature ; but one, as 
 it seems to me, quite unvisited by any profound 
 affection. The conception of really living for another 
 probably never occurred to him. His attachments 
 to women were numerous and violent, never self- 
 devoting. For his mother and sister he clearly felt 
 Jwarmly, but certainly he was neither a devoted 
 ! brother nor a fond son. After his transition to 
 Weimar, he visited his mother only at very long 
 intervals, and never seems to have hastened to her 
 side in any time of special trouble, though iie always 
 rejoiced to see her and wished to have her Avith him. 
 In the last eleven years of her old age he never 
 once visited Frankfort, his summer holiday always 
 taking him in another direction — to Karlsbad or 
 Marienbad. And his letters were too few to keep 
 her well informed even of his more important move- 
 ments. He was, in short, a kind and hearty, rather 
 than a deeply-attached brother and son. If he never 
 gave himself uj) to an affection, he never demanded 
 or even expected it from another. Never was there 
 a less jealous or exacting man. He seldom inter- 
 fered with his own calm process of self-culture for 
 the sake of another. He never expected another to 
 do it for him. And if this remark properly belongs 
 to a later period of his life, yet the genial but pliant 
 
 ^ I do not know the authority for this anecdote of Goethe. 
 Mr. Emerson used to narrate it, not without keen sympathy for 
 the oppressed lion.
 
 I GOETHE AND lllS INFLUENCE 29 
 
 and self-considering nature of his relation to others 
 is distinctly visible in hij childhood. He was already 
 beginning to accommodate himself to all inevita- 
 bilities, and to ward off, wherever possible, all that 
 was foreign to his nature. The extent of his boyish 
 studies was not less wide than that of his boyish 
 experience of life. To Latin, Greek, Italian, German, 
 English, and Hebrew, together with drawing, music, 
 geography, and Roman law, he had given much 
 time, and apparently made considerable progress in 
 them before he went to college at sixteen. He 
 scattered his studies, and had " alternate fits " of 
 Hebrew and drawing, etc.; but his retentive memory 
 did not easily lose what it had once laid hold of. 
 
 In 1764 Goethe began that habit of falling in 
 love, of which he never broke himself for the next 
 sixty years. Mr. Lewes makes light of his love for 
 Gretchen, and the scholiasts seem never to have 
 traced her history. But boyish as his passion was, 
 the separation clearly caused him no less intense 
 a suffering, and a more inconsolable .despair, than 
 any subsequent adoration. His mind had not yet 
 got the strength to carry him through. His nature 
 was still the dependent nature of a home-bred boy. 
 He had as yet no intellectual passions, no penetrating 
 consciousness of creative power. It is probable that 
 this kind, sisterly Gretchen, was still living in his 
 imagination when he immortalised her name in 
 Faust. 
 
 The night of Joseph II. 's coronation, when he 
 forgot his secret door-key, by means of which, 
 through his mother's connivance, he used to enter 
 long after his father had supposed him to be in bed, 
 was the last of his childhood. With his separation 
 from Gretchen there ^came upon him the moody
 
 30 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE i 
 
 humours, the dark sentimental infinitudes, the con- 
 fusion of energies, the thankless melancholies and 
 boisterous caprices peculiar to that period of life 
 when young men are most agreeable to themselves 
 and most objectionable to mankind. The passion 
 for Gretchen had involved him with a set not quite 
 harmless. And the stiff dignity of his father was 
 sadly wounded by having his son's name mixed inno- 
 cently up in cases of swindling, and even forgery. 
 Goethe was subjected to the companionship of an 
 accommodating tutor ; and a year later, in the 
 autumn of 1765, went forth to see the world as a 
 student of the University of Leipzig. 
 
 Most poets' youth is turbid, and apt to be egotis- 
 tical. Goethe's is not an exception. He seems to 
 have had generally, when in good health, buoyant 
 spirits. But the spiritual abysses are of course un- 
 fathomable. Mr. Lewes has given some very inter- 
 esting letters concerning Goethe at this time from 
 his college friends. At Leipzig Goethe got a good 
 deal of knowledge "without much diligence, and also 
 fell into dissipation. The only pure influence over 
 him that he felt powerfully was that of Gellert, the 
 professor of helles-leUres, and one lady friend, the Avife 
 of a law professor. The latter died during his 
 studentship. Gellert's mild influence became painful 
 and a reproach to him, and he began to avoid it. 
 Perhaps it was not very wisely exerted. Gellert 
 used, says Goethe, " to hold his head down, and ask 
 us Avith his weeping, winning voice, whether we went 
 regularly to church, Avho was oiu- confessor, and 
 whether we attended the holy communion. If Ave 
 passed this examination but ill, Ave Avere dismissed 
 Avith lamentations, Ave Avere more annoyed than 
 edified ; and yet we could not help loving the man
 
 I GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 31 
 
 heartily." Goethe's law-lectures were rather jokes. 
 He natui'ally preferred drawing caricatm-es of the 
 official persons in their official costume, to taking 
 notes. Fritters (very good ones), hot from the fire, 
 came into competition with one of these classes, and 
 were considered the more attractive. Goethe fell 
 deeply in love again at Leipzig ; but he quarrelled 
 with the young lady, and he seems to say that the 
 despair he felt at her loss was the impulse which 
 plunged him into dissipation. 
 
 This aflfection was the origin of the little joastoral 
 piece, " The Lover's Humours," which certainly gives 
 promise of Goethe's future power. Besides contain- 
 ing some fine lines, and one fair living character in 
 profile, it shows that rich fertility of ordinary feeling 
 which must flow freely in order to temper the mind 
 to the higher creative mood. A poet who, like 
 Gray, for instance, has no flow of level feeling, loses 
 the predisposing influences from which the deeper, 
 truer insight can alone come. When the poet has 
 reached, as it were, the ordinary level of genial 
 human emotion, then, and not sooner, do his special 
 characteristics begin to work with effect. If he is 
 not in the first place luxuriant in common feeling, 
 he loses much of the advantage of his higher facul- 
 ties. Goethe, like all great poets, was most luxuriant 
 in common thought and feeling ; and when once 
 fairly afloat in that, his genius began to work. The 
 "Fellow-Sinners," which he also wrote at this same 
 time, has equal ease, but not equal warmth, ^vith the 
 piece just mentioned, and consequently very little 
 trace of his characteristic power. From Leipzig 
 Goethe went home ill, after three years' residence, in 
 1768. His father was irritated by his delicate 
 health, and still more by anything like hypochon-
 
 32 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE i 
 
 driacal conversation. His mother and sister paid 
 him, as is usual in such cases, something like divine 
 honours. They were moped, and delighted to have 
 an invalid to worship. He looked into alchemy, and 
 began to think of Faust. 
 
 In the spring of 1770 he went to the University 
 of Strasburg, where he fell in wath Herder, who 
 first introduced him to The Vicar of JFaJcefidd, the 
 loose awkward machinery of which Goethe (who 
 never had any power of constructing a plot) after- 
 wards partly borrowed in his novel of JFilhelm Meister. 
 The exquisite humour and childlike simplicity of 
 taste in- that book are Goldsmith's own. But in the 
 style of representing nature and life Goethe is not at 
 all unlike Goldsmith. Like him, he does not im- 
 partially paint, but rather vaguely indicates the 
 principal influences of the scene before him. He 
 sketches no outlined picture, at least of men — but 
 gives one or two figures, hovering too close to the 
 eye to be caught completely in any one glance, 
 and which are ^^resented, therefore, in minute yet 
 very significant successive details, to the closest 
 conceivable scrutiny ; and for the rest, he indicates 
 only the most important inlets of accessory influence 
 in a few words of loose and spacious suggestion. 
 As Goldsmith delineates Dr. Primrose and his ■svife 
 by such minute successive touches, that not till you 
 fall back from the story can you see them as a whole, 
 and rej^resents the daughters only by the general 
 streams of influence they diffuse, the rosy and violet 
 light their characters respectively reflect, in the 
 vaguer distance, adding, too, those influences of 
 external nature which most beset the senses, but no 
 clear landscape, — so also Goethe painted in his 
 three novels, JFerther, Meister, and finally^ though
 
 I GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 33 
 
 with more distinctive outline, and with less attempt 
 at indicating a whole character or a whole lantlscape 
 by isolated samples, in the Elective Affinities. We 
 do not wonder that he told Eckermann, in later 
 years, that he found in Sir Walter Scott the sugges- 
 tion of a wholly new school of art. That writer's 
 strong, masterly, often hard outlines, present the 
 most vivid possible contrast to the faint fringes of 
 that luminous nimbus which usually involves his own 
 most carefully finished figures. 
 
 While at Strasburg, Goethe made the acquaintance 
 of the family which seemed to him the counterpart 
 of Dr. Primrose's, and in which he appeared first in 
 the character of Mr. Burchell ; exchanging it, how- 
 ever, not for Sir William Thornhill's, but for his 
 own. Pastor Brion had a little parsonage at 
 Drusenheim, sixteen miles north of Strasburg, into 
 which Goethe was introduced, in the disguise of a 
 poor and dilapidated theological student, by a fellow- 
 student. The latter was attached (or becoming so) 
 to the eldest and most lively daughter, whom Goethe 
 identified as the Olivia of Goldsmith's tale. The 
 second daughter, Frederika, who took benign pity 
 on the shabby theologian, and captivated his fancy 
 by her simplicity and grace, reminded him of Sophia ; 
 but she little knew that instead of giving rise to a 
 novel, she was starting a new epoch in German 
 criticism, and spinning the first thread of a very 
 ponderous "Frederike litteratur," in which an eru- 
 dition as -yet unborn would discuss, "svith prodigious 
 learning and subtlety, after collation of MS. letters, 
 personal examination of the place, and cross-ques- 
 tioning of aged survivors, the precise point where 
 Goethe had crossed the Sesenheim road, the position 
 of Frederika's own arbour, the date of the first 
 h D
 
 34 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE i 
 
 kisses she bestowed, and many other matters of 
 equal weight. To have spurred on heavy -armed 
 German commentators (of the class who discuss a 
 lost iota in fragments of Greek plays) into a cum- 
 brous canter of exegetical sympathy with a little 
 aifair of the heart, must have been about as far 
 removed from Frederika's presentiments, as this 
 apparatus critkits is from the light air of the life 
 it "expounds." Imagine an Anthon's "edition of 
 Tennyson's ' Miller's Daughter,' with critical notes," 
 and you have a faint picture of the "Frederike 
 litteratur."^ Goethe acted his part skilfully, and 
 promised " to supply " occasionally for the pastor on 
 week-day occasions. But, disgusted with his shabby 
 appearance, he fled the next day, only to change one 
 disguise for another. He came back as the inn- 
 keeper's boy, with a "christening cake" and an 
 Alsatian patois; and when this disguise was pene- 
 trated, he took his o'wn character, and began seriously 
 to fall in love. The visit was often repeated, and 
 Frederika's heart completely gained. Goethe now 
 became uneasy. The presence of Frederika pained 
 him, though he "knew of nothing more pleasant 
 than to think of her while absent." He had to free 
 himself from this influence, which threatened to 
 introduce something foreign to his natural develop- 
 ment. He was leaving Strasburg, and once more he 
 
 ^ There is a profoundly learned controversy, for example, as 
 to wlietlier one of Goethe's letters to a friend at this time was 
 or was not written on the ])iece of blue paper in which some 
 comfits, etc., had been sent to him from Strasburg. The 
 question turns, to a considerable extent, on whether he gave 
 the paper-bag Vith the comfits to the young ladies, or only 
 the comfits out of it. It is discussed with laborious good 
 faith.
 
 I GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 35 
 
 visited the " golden children " at Sesenheim, where 
 he found a gray desolate mist settling down over the 
 little parsonage, instead of the fresh l)uoyant air of 
 days gone by. " I reached her (Frederika) my hand 
 from my horse ; the tears stood in her eyes, and I 
 felt very uneasy." He felt more than uneasy. These 
 words copy only the blanched picture that remained 
 in th6 old man's memory. Frederika fell ill ; and 
 Goethe, on his return to Frankfort living in bitter 
 suspense as to the effect on her peace, and yet knowing 
 that he could not comfort her without transforming 
 himself, and exchanging a quiet sentiment for real 
 self-devotion of spirit, became restless and miserable. 
 That his final decision was wrong is far from 
 clear. The thought of devoting himself to her gave 
 him no joy, but seemed to weigh him down. Yet 
 it seems that the reason lay, not in the absence 
 of anything which any other attachment ever gave, 
 but in the reluctance which was now beginning to 
 creep upon him to devote himself and his inward life 
 to anything outside of himself. The idea of self- 
 development, self-idealisation, as the only scope of 
 his conscious life, was beginning to fascinate him, I 
 and to gnaw at the roots of his nature. If he could 
 by one generous act of self-forgetfulness have devoted 
 himself to secure Frederika's happiness, there seems 
 some probability that he would have secured a far 
 happier and clearer life for himself also. It was, 
 perhaps, less the want of love, — for he never seems 
 to have felt more love, — which prevented this, than 
 the want of strength to cast away the miserable 
 dream of keeping the course of his inward develop- 
 ment free from all foreign interference. It was 
 much later than this — when the self-idealising vein 
 had become more prominent — that he WTote to
 
 36 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE i 
 
 Lavater : " The desire to raise the pyramid of my 
 existence — the base of Avhich is ah-eady laid — as 
 high as possible in the air absorbs every other desire, 
 and scarcely ever quits me";^ but the poison Avas 
 already working in him. Goethe never became a 
 selfish man in the coarse sense of the term. He 
 always cultivated benignant unselfish sympathies as 
 the most graceful elements in this same fancy- 
 pyramid of his existence. He was generous by 
 nature, and would give up, from kindly feeling, any- 
 thing that was not of the essence of himself. But 
 it soon became his habit to cultivate disinterested 
 affection only as a subordinate element, needful to 
 the harmony of a universally experienced natiu'e. 
 To have loved the goodness of either God or man 
 more devotedly than he loved its reflex image in his 
 own character, would have done him more good 
 than all the sickly pottering "with the " j)yramid of 
 his existence " with which he was so much occupied. 
 It would be absurd to say all this about Goethe's 
 youthful conduct to Frederika, were it not the type 
 of what was always happening in his after-life when 
 he knew by experience that he very much preferred 
 to be passively hampered by a Avounded heart, to 
 
 ] being actively hampered by an affectionate Avife. 
 
 iThe essence of these tedious tortures was almost 
 always the same. He Avished for love "Avith limited 
 liability " ; he did not Avish to dcA^ote himself to any 
 one except himself. This limited liability did not 
 so Avell meet the views of the young ladies '^ them- 
 
 ^ Lewes's Life of Goethe, vol. ii. chap. i. 
 
 2 A distinct classification of Goethe's loves has not yet been 
 added by the critics to the " chronology of the original " of his 
 writings. It would be a material help to head the ditlerent 
 years with the name or names of the ascendant star, and. some
 
 I GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 37 
 
 selves, who were sometimes, to his infinite embar- 
 rassment, willing even to "go to America" with him, 
 or anywhere else. This was meeting him a gi^eat 
 deal more than half-way. He could not, of course, 
 avail himself of the sacrifice. 
 
 Goethe returned to Frankfort, bringing with him 
 a little harper-lad whom he had picked up at Mann- 
 hein, and mth thoughtless kindness promised to 
 befriend. His mother, at first much perplexed, 
 found the boy lodging and employment out of 
 the house. Gotz von BcrlicMngen was now in 
 Goethe's mind, and, spurred on by his sister's in- 
 . credulity as to his literary perseverance, he completed 
 it in its first form in six weeks. To me it seems far 
 •the most noble as well as the most powerful of 
 Goethe's dramas. I agree with. Mr. Lewes, that in 
 its first shape there are many fine elements which 
 are lost in the later and revised edition. No doubt 
 something is cut away that needed cutting away, and 
 more appearance of unity is given by the condensa- 
 tion of Adelheid's ej^isode. But this is the part on 
 which Goethe's imagination had really worked with 
 finest effect, and the gain to unity is a loss to poetry. 
 It is the only great production of Goethe's in which 
 a really noble, self-forgetful man stands out in the 
 foreground to give us a moral standard by which to 
 measure the meaner characters. It is the only great 
 production in which awful shadows of remorse haunt 
 the selfish and the guilty. One reads in it that 
 
 indication of its apparent brightness. There were about eight 
 A I's, "heiss und leidenschaftlich geliebte," etc.; five, at least, 
 M I's, with whom he stood " im innigsten Verhaltniss der 
 Liebe" ; and, finally, a great number of "hokle Wesen," some 
 of them already obscured by shadows of time, who were re- 
 cipients of a more transient adoration.
 
 38 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE i 
 
 Goethe's mind had as yet by no means finally 
 embraced the calm self-culture view of life — the 
 view Avhich looked upon women's devotion, human 
 life, indeed the whole universe itself, mainly as 
 artistic material to be assimilated by the indi^ddual 
 constitution, and at as little cost to the digestive 
 system as that constitution would allow. Fas- 
 cinating as Egmont is, Egmont himself is the later 
 Goethe, the conscious master-builder condescending 
 to accept from woman, and man, and God, materials 
 for his "pyramid of existence." Gotz is a very 
 different figure ; and among all Goethe's masculine 
 creations he stands alone, — the only one Avho did not 
 use the world, but served it. The play (in its early 
 form) ^Yi\\ be thought gi-oss ; but it has little of that 
 tainting impurity which turns a microscope full upon 
 the subtler workings of physical passion, to the great 
 disfigurement of some of his later works. In another 
 respect Gotz' is exceptional. It is curious that 
 Adelheid in Gotz von Berlichingen is the only feminine 
 character of the proud passionate class that Goethe 
 ever drew ; and that Maria, much more like 
 his other characters in type, is about the faintest 
 and poorest of them. With all his unmistakable 
 wealth and inimitable grace in producing women's 
 characters, each as distinct from the other as Adel- 
 heid is from Maria, they are all, Adelheid only 
 excepted, of the dependent, tender, worshipping 
 class. Mr. Thackeray's Beatrice, in Esmond, is 
 less completely exceptional in his -wTitings than 
 Adelheid is in Goethe's. Thackeray and Goethe 
 are alike in this, as in some other resj^ects — both of 
 them have dra-svn women as living as Shakespeare's. 
 And all three, by one consent, are disposed to make 
 their powerful queen -like women bad. No doubt
 
 I GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 39 
 
 this is according to nature ; but Sir Walter Scott 
 must have seen the exceptions, for his finest female 
 characters (Rebecca, Flora, Die Vernon, etc.) are 
 certainly of the queenly class. Goethe's predilec- 
 tions are explained by the fact that he painted, for 
 the most part, the women who worshipped him, and 
 it may be that he punished Adelheid for not being 
 one of them by robing her in passion and in crime. 
 She is the only woman in his works of whom we 
 find no autobiogi'aphical trace. 
 
 In 1772 Goethe went to Wetzlar, ostensibly to 
 watch chancery suits ; and there culled some poig- 
 nant experiences for his next work, Werther. This 
 he did not write, however, till 1774. The remark- 
 able contrast, both in substance and form, between 
 Gotz and Werther — written within three years of each 
 other — gives, however, some insight into Goethe's 
 dramatic power and want of power. I find it as- 
 serted on all hands — Mr. Lewes vehemently con- 
 curring — that a poet must be a greater artist for en- 
 tirely ignoring all moral partialities, and, as they say, 
 picturing life as it is, not as it ought to be. There 
 is a sense in which it is true (for instance, it is a 
 valuable criticism on Edgeworthian art) : but the 
 sense in which it is put forward as a defence of the 
 utter want of moral perspective in most of Goethe's 
 productions is certainly not that sense. Compare, 
 for instance, Gotz von Berlichingen with JVerther, Wil- 
 lielm Meister, the Elective Affinities, Egmont, and even 
 Faust. In the first there is as much moral evil as any 
 appetite^ however eager for "things as they are," could 
 wish ; but it is thrown into its right relative place 
 by the appearance in the foreground of two noble 
 and simple characters — Gotz and Elizabeth — by 
 which all the others are^naturally measured. Shadows
 
 40 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE i 
 
 are shadows, and light is light. In IVertlier the 
 moral evil introduced is far less — is, indeed, of a 
 quiet, subtle, sentimental kind — the mere heart- 
 eating rust and destructiveness of unmeasured self- 
 indulgence ; but there is nothing noble to contrast 
 with it — nothing but the cold external phantom 
 Albert, and the floating image of Charlotte reflected 
 in such a mist of Wertherism that it has no distinct- 
 ness at all. What is the mere artistic effect on the 
 reader's mind ? Almost universally this, that the 
 picture, powerful as it is, misses its effect from the 
 absence of any fine moral contrasts by which to 
 measure it. It is like the picture of a mist seen 
 from inside. Nothing adds more to the beauty of a 
 landscape than vapours rising round a mountain's 
 brow ; but then you must stand out of the fog, and 
 see the dark bold ridges round which the vapours 
 climb. In JFcrther are painted wreath upon "vvreath 
 of emotion, of blinding doubts and shapeless pas- 
 sions ; no speck of firm land anywhere. This vnW 
 probably be conceded of JFerther, but the moral 
 part of the criticism applies equally to Goethe's 
 other works. We believe the extraordinary want of 
 outline in his characters to be greatly due to this 
 entire absence of any attempt at moral j^roportion 
 in all his later works. Werther is made, in one 
 letter, to say most characteristically, " I scarce know 
 how to express myself, — my power of representing 
 things is so weak, everything swims and wavers so 
 before my mind, that I can catch no outline ; but I 
 fancy somehoAv that, if I had clay or wax, I could 
 succeed in modelling. If it lasts longer, I shall get 
 some clay, and begin kneading, even though it be 
 only cakes after all." Werther's mind is so dissolved, 
 that he can only feel and grope his way in the dark.
 
 I GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 41 
 
 as it were, to grace of forJn. This weakness is 
 partly the expression of an artistic difficulty Goethe 
 really felt in grasping in one glance any extensive 
 outline of thought, — a difficulty due to the micro- 
 scopic nature of his insight, which only travelled 
 very slowly over a large surface of life : he often 
 modelled his groups figure by figure ; the outline of 
 the whole grew up as he felt his way to it. But a 
 part reason of this was, that he had no moral gradua- 
 tion in his groups, — no natural admirations which 
 gave a unity to the whole and determined the line 
 of the shadoAvs. Outline is a result of comparison, 
 — moral outline of moral comparison. You cannot 
 compare without an implied standard. The heroes 
 in JFerther, JFilhelm Meister, Tasso, Faust, are such 
 cloudy, shadowy pictures, because they are essen- 
 tially sketches of moral weakness without any relief 
 in characters of corresponding power. Albert, 
 Jarno, Antonio, are not foils to them — they have not 
 the force which the others want, but are simply de- 
 ficient in the moral qualities which make the former 
 characters problems of some interest. Certainly, 
 the former are soft, the latter hard. But the second 
 set do not give strength as opposed to weakness, but 
 rigidity as opposed to weakness.-^ What is wanted 
 
 ^ Goethe well knew, in physical nature, that soft things 
 should not he contrasted with hard but with firm. He had 
 (I am not speaking ironically) an exquisitely fine sympathy 
 with vegetable life. Consider this picture of a fruit-basket 
 in Alexis and Bora (I quote the graceful version given 
 among the English Hexameter Translations published by Mr. 
 Murray in 1847) : — 
 
 " Silently thou arrayest the fruit in the comeliest order, 
 Laying tlie heavier gold-ball of the orange beneath ; 
 Next the soft-pulpt figs, that the slightest pressure disfigures ; 
 Lastly, the myrtle at top roofing the whole with its green."
 
 42 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE i 
 
 all along is some dim picture in the minds of Werther, 
 Meister, Tasso, and Faust of what they ivoiild be, — 
 what it is which would lift them out of the imbe- 
 cility of their purposeless career. This is the ele- 
 ment never supplied. We are presented Avith a set 
 of contradictions instead of contrasts. Only in 
 Gotz is there any picture of strength Adthout hard- 
 ness ; only in Weislingen is there a picture of fatal 
 irresolution that has a real vision of the career by 
 which he might have been saved. The moral outline 
 which Goethe's youthful remorse put into this picture 
 has raised it, considered merely as a work of art, in 
 many respects high above its fellows. So far from 
 the truth is it that the poet ought to have no moral 
 predilections at heart, that if he has none such his 
 picture becomes feeble, watery, wavering. Impar- 
 tiality in delineation, not impartiality in conception, 
 is Avhat is needed. Shakespeare frequently gives no 
 foil to the character whose weakness he is delineat- 
 ing ; but he always gives it some clear vision of the 
 nobleness and the strength above it. Hamlet knows 
 what he could do, and dare not. Lady Macbeth 
 knows what she should do, and mil not. Antony 
 knows what he would do, and cannot. But Faust 
 has no glimmering of salvation ; Werther has no 
 gleam of what he might be ; Wilhelm is a milksop 
 pure and simple ; and Tasso's character is then, and 
 then only, a fine picture if it be granted that he is 
 supposed insane. It seems to me that no more 
 remarkable breakdown of the theory of the " moral 
 indifference " of art can be suggested than Goethe's 
 writings. His poetry is perfect until it rises to 
 
 If, instead of the orange, Dora liad laid a cocoa-nut under the 
 figs, she would never have made such an impression on the 
 yielding heart of Alexis.
 
 I GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 43 
 
 the dramatic region, where moral . actions are in- 
 volved, and a moi'al faith therefore needed, and then 
 it becomes blank, shadoAvy, feeble. JVilhelm Meister 
 woidd not have been " a menagerie of tame animals," 
 as Niebuhr called it with great truth, if Goethe had 
 not lost the (never strong) moral predilections of 
 younger days, but had piu-ified his eye and heart 
 for their insight into human weakness by reverent 
 study of nobler strength. 
 
 Another criticism which has a real connection 
 with that just made is suggested by the comparison 
 of JFerther and Gotz. Mr. Lewes truly says, that 
 Goethe never gives enough importance to the action, 
 the progress of events. He does not develop the 
 characters essentially through the action, but on occa- 
 sion of the action. You do not feel that Gotz has 
 come in from that last scene ; it is too much a series 
 of pictures, like Hogarth's pictorial biographies ; the 
 art jis much greater, no doubt, if you take them in 
 succession ; but the breath of the past has not passed 
 into the present scene, each is almost intelligible in 
 separation. A very great part of the skill in 
 JFerther consists in the gradual rise of the excite- 
 ment, — the stages of passion ; — still it is a series of 
 pictures ; there is nothing to oblige you to look back 
 to the past and forward to the future. It might 
 begin almost anywhere, and stop almost anywhere, 
 and be intelligible still as a delineation of character. 
 This is so also in Egmont. It is less so in Gotz von 
 Berlkhingen, though it is too much so there, than 
 in any other work. The past action is much more 
 worked into the essence of the following scenes than 
 is the case of Egmont, Meister, Iphigenia, Tasso, or 
 Faust. And the obvious reason is, that the actors 
 have moral characters, and so the sense of what they had
 
 44 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE i 
 
 done or not done hangs vipon them throughout ; they 
 do not turn up as complete in relation to each dis- 
 tinct scene as if they had had no previous life : they 
 have a sense of the i)ast, a presentiment of the 
 future. The presence of an implicit moral estimate of 
 the characters helps art in other ways than by adding 
 outline ; for moral responsibility forges many a strong 
 link between the past, present, and future, which is 
 otherwise wanting. Is it not, indeed, the strongest of 
 all links between the past and the future in actual 
 life ? Werther's uneasiness grows organically ; but 
 it grows as a tree puts out its branches, without 
 memory or reference to its past stages. Egmont 
 does not grow at all. Faust does not grow. Tasso 
 undergoes changes ; but only those of a sensitive- 
 I^lant, drawing in with every touch, expanding at 
 every sunbeam. All Goethe's feminine creations 
 grow ; but usually it is the growth of affection only. 
 The only portions of a coherent drama that Goethe 
 ever wrote are the Gretchen elements in Faust. That 
 is the highest drama in every sense, and one of 
 the most essential elements in it is a deep and true 
 remorse. 
 
 After his return from Wetzlar, and publication 
 of Gotz and Werther, Goethe became a famous man. 
 The effect of this fame upon himself was certainly 
 very great. Not only are the letters to Kestner 
 clearly Aviitten under great excitement after the pub- 
 lication, but other correspondences which he then 
 began are far more dizzy than JVerther itself. His 
 letters to the Countess von Stolberg are mostly 
 mystical emotional quavers. This young lady he 
 never saw. They struck up an inarticulate attach- 
 ment on the strength of Werther. Goethe rushed 
 into a correspondence ^vith her of this description ;
 
 I GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 45 
 
 " My dear one, — I will call you by no name ; — for 
 what are the names — friend, sister, lover, bride, wife, or 
 even a word that expresses a union of all these names 
 — compared with the very feeling itself to which — 
 I can write no more ; your letter has come upon me 
 at a strange moment — Adieu — (written at) the very 
 first moment." ^ And some of these remarkable 
 letters are more incoherent still. So greatly did 
 Goethe err in afterwards representing IFerther as 
 setting his mind free from the fever of sentiment- 
 alism, that not till after its publication did he fully 
 succumb to it. 
 
 Introduced by his celebrity as a writer to many 
 eminent men, Goethe began to see and to study a far 
 wider and more various field of social life than he 
 ever attempted to delineate. It might be matter of 
 surprise, that in so freely-moving a plot as that of 
 Wilhelm Meister Goethe should not have antici- 
 pated the easy sketches of character which Dickens 
 and Thackeray have made so popular, and thus 
 effectively used his large experience of social life ; 
 for he never mllingly let a grain of real experience 
 go unused. The reason obviously is, that he had 
 so little of the humour Avhich makes sketches of 
 superficial life and manners living and agreeable. 
 His remarks on common men and manners and on 
 uncommon men and manners are always subtle, often 
 amusing ; but you need to have his personal com- 
 ments to give his descriptions of these trivial matters 
 any interest ; he has not the art of making his char- 
 acters speak so as to explain their OAvn folly ; he 
 cannot give just that touch of caricature by which 
 Dickens eff"ected this ; he cannot introduce that 
 
 ^ Quoted by Dlintzer in his FrauenMMcr aus Goethe's Lelcn, 
 p. 271.
 
 46 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE I 
 
 background of fine irony by which Thackeray 
 turned men into critics of themselves. He under- 
 stood everyday German life as well as either Dickens 
 or Thackeray understood everyday English life. 
 Nothing could be much more skilful than his 
 accounts, for instance, of the prophetic Lavater 
 (whom Mr. Lewes most uncharitably and untruly 
 terms a " born hypocrite," quite in contradiction to 
 Goethe's latest and maturest estimate), and of Base- 
 dow, the educational reformer, — the one a man of 
 real power, spoiled by being a lady's preacher and 
 by the needful devices for keeping up popularity 
 which this involved ; — the other a coarse, self-indul- 
 gent, unscrupulous, and exceedingly dirty philan- 
 thropist, who chai-acteristically enough had the 
 greatest horror of baptism.^ The only element 
 wanting in Goethe's descriptions is, not a perception 
 of that in them which is to us ridiculous, but a 
 thorough perception and enjoyment of the ridiculous 
 part. He can- see a full-blown absurdity, but not 
 the delicate transition by which real life passes into 
 unreality. His " Plundersweilern Fair," and other 
 things of that descrijDtion -wi^itten at this time, and 
 his subsequent comic works (such at least as I know), 
 of which Mr. Lewes thinks the " Triumph of Suscept- 
 ibility " a fair specimen, are mere farces, — laughable 
 on the stage, perhaps, but tiresome to read. " Bom- 
 bastes Furioso " gives a good idea of this kind of 
 
 1 Sclilosser, in liis History of the Eighteenth Century, tells us 
 that Basedow had a long dispute with his wife and the clergy- 
 man, in which both of them used all possible arguments and 
 entreaties to induce him to give up theoiotion of having his 
 daughter baptized " Praenumerantia Elenientaria Philan- 
 thropia," partly, I suppose, in ridicule of the ceremony, and 
 partly as a jiuff of his Philanthropic Academy at Dessau.
 
 I GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 47 
 
 production, but seems to me more amusing. It is 
 strange that so great a jjoet had not a quicker eye 
 for the boundary-line between reality and unreality, 
 between things and words ; he was never quite out 
 of danger of mistaking sham pathos for true; he 
 had never the eye of a great humorist for the subtle 
 distinction between the ring of holloAV and of solid 
 metal in others, not always even in himself. A thin 
 vein of genuine trash may be traced both in his 
 compositions and his personal life, — a kind of inanity 
 to which indeed all men are subject, but Avhich a 
 man with real humour would immediately have de- 
 tected in himself and suppressed on the spot. I 
 may take as instances the execrable sentimental 
 device of giving an artificial appearance of life to 
 Mignon's corpse, in ^ the last part of JVilhelm 
 Meister (against which Schiller meekly but hesi- 
 tatingly protested), — or, in actual life, the ponderous 
 sentimentality that induced Goethe, at the mature 
 age of thirty-three, being seized with a taste for 
 inscriptions, actually to engrave on a big stone in 
 his garden at Weimar some lines beginning, " Here 
 the lover has mused in silence on his beloved" ; nor 
 does it appear that he ever suftered from nausea on 
 beholding it. This sort of unreality was in the 
 atmosphere, no doubt ; but Goethe was proof against 
 so much malaria that was also in the atmosphere, 
 that it is worthy of notice — especially in connection 
 with the little artistic use he made of his wide 
 experience of contemporary manners — that he was 
 not able to keep himself completely free from this. 
 His observations on society, which were very acute 
 and rich and various, he threw into the form of epi- 
 grammatic maxims, and stowed them away in every 
 gap and corner — suitable or unsuitable — of his many
 
 48 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE ., i 
 
 works. He used them but very little — owing, I 
 think, to the unfitness for successful manners-painting 
 I have just indicated — in the really concrete delinea- ' 
 tion of the times he lived in and the society he had 
 himself observed. 
 
 Soon after Goethe's literary fame was established, 
 in the Christmas of the year 1774, he was introduced 
 to Anna Elizabeth Schonemann, whose mother, the 
 widow of a rich Frankfort banker, was one of the 
 very few who at that time ever thought of assem- 
 bling fashionable society in their houses so often as 
 every evening in the season. To this young lady, 
 so familiar in Goethe's writings as Lili, the poet now 
 transferred his affections. His father and mother 
 had been anxious that he should marry a quiet girl 
 in their own circle, to whom he had been thrice 
 assigned by a marriage-lottery in the picnics of the 
 previous year — Anna Sibylla Miinch ; but he re- 
 garded this parental view as one in which it was 
 impossible to concur, although in the meantime he 
 was quite ready to be affectionate. To Lili, on the 
 other hand, he was really warmly attached, and for 
 a time betrothed ; but neither his father's pride nor 
 his own found it easy to bear the relutance felt 
 towards the engagement by Lili's friends, who knew 
 that Goethe had neither that amount of money nor 
 of prestige to offer, for which, as it is said, not only   
 the family, but the bank itself, had a cra"sdng. Poetry 
 was no object. Goethe "wrote many of his most 
 exquisite lyrics under the inspiration of this attach- 
 ment, sending them simultaneously to the ' young 
 lady and to the newspaper.^ It is curious to note 
 
 1 The lovely song, " Wanim zielist du micli iTiiwiderstelilicli," 
 was, as Diinster has ascertained, composed in March 1775, and 
 sent to Jacobi for insertion in the Iris at the same time. So of
 
 I GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 49 
 
 how all Goethe's finest lyrics cluster round his 
 attachments. Few things else seem ever to waken 
 in him the same tones of unconscious airy melody. 
 His other poetry, often exquisitely fine, has the 
 polish of high art upon it, — but his lyrics seem to 
 escape as unconsciously from the essence of the earth 
 au,d air as the scent from a violet, or the music from 
 a bird. Some of Goethe's finest lyrics sprang up 
 at Leipzig under the genial influence of Kathchen 
 Schonkopf ; others, but scarcely of equal loveliness, 
 owe their origin to Frederika ; the third, and as 
 - yet the richest group, belong to Lili ; but curiously 
 enough, the richest cluster, I think, of all, — that 
 which most resembles a lapful of fresh wildflowers,^ 
 was wiitten in 1803, when Goethe was fifty-four years 
 old, and is due, we imagine (from what Mr. Lewes 
 tells us concerning the origin of the Elective Affini- 
 Mes), as well as the sonnets written two or three 
 years later, to Minna Herzlieb, the WNard of the Jena 
 bookseller. The engaged or married ladies he adored 
 appear to have had a more prosaic influence upon 
 him. 
 
 But to return to Lili. After a good deal of tor- 
 ture, due to the elder representatives of both families, 
 a worthy Fraulein Delf, much given to mediation, 
 procured a tacit consent of the parents on both sides, 
 and Goethe was engaged to Lili. This seems to have 
 on the whole made him unhappy. His sister, who 
 was married and at a distance, took a strong view 
 against the match, and wrote letters about it ; the 
 old Rath, she thought, would never so accommodate 
 himself to the arrangement as to make Lili happy ; 
 
 other songs. Of course names were not given ; but the entire 
 absence of any reserve in the sentimental life of that period is 
 very curious. 
 
 L E
 
 50 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE I 
 
 Goethe would be obliged still to live with his father 
 and mother, as the custom was, and a young lady of 
 family and wealth would put the former out. In 
 short, his sister was sure that /o?' Lili's sake, he ought 
 to break oif the engagement, intimating, in fact, as 
 Goethe implies, that she found her OAvn husband but 
 dull company, and that Goethe could never make up 
 to Lili for the splendour she would resign. So, after 
 some agonies, he suddenly departed for Smtzerland 
 with the two Counts von Stolberg, on a probationary 
 absence, only hinting to Lili that he was going, for 
 he could not bear to take leave. It appears to have 
 been his intention, if he could have persuaded him- 
 self to endure the pain, to break off the engagement 
 by, going on into Italy ; if not, as proved to be the 
 case, to return and see what fate should give. It is 
 not easy to imagine, from the style of Goethe's nar- 
 rative, that all this effort was made for Lili's sake. 
 He admits that she never hazarded a doubt of her 
 own happiness, and was mlling to follow him even 
 to America ; a solution which distressed her lover 
 extremely. "My father's good house, but a few 
 hundred yards from her own, was at all events a 
 more tolerable condition to take up with than distant 
 uncertain possibilities beyond the sea." They were 
 actually engaged at this time ; and it does not seem 
 very generous in Goethe to have left Lili wdthout 
 explanation to fight his battles for him with her 
 reluctant friends, in order to try experiments on his 
 own fortitude. 
 
 This flight into S^vitzerland, while pursued by 
 Lili's image, gave rise to one or two of his loveliest 
 lyrics. As the heavy white masses of the distant 
 Alps rose up in the early dawn, at the foot of the 
 broad lake of Zurich, bordered by its gently sloping
 
 I GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 51 
 
 cornfield banks, he composed the lovely little poem 
 of which I have attempted to produce an English 
 version. Goethe was at the time debating in his 
 mind his future relation to Lili. I must premise, 
 Avith Mr. Lewes, that Goethe is untranslatable 
 Some dim vision of the beauty of the poem may 
 however, glimmer through the following semi-trans- 
 parent medium : — 
 
 " I draw new milk of life, fresh blood, 
 
 From the free universe, — 
 Ah, Nature, it is all too good 
 
 Upon thy breast, sweet nurse ! 
 Waves rock our boat in equal time 
 
 With the clear-plashing oar, 
 And cloudy Alps with head sublime 
 
 Confront us from the shore. 
 
 "Eyes, have ye forgot your yearning ? 
 Golden dreams, are ye returning ! 
 Gold as ye are, O, stay above ! 
 Here too is life — here too is love. 
 
 " Hosts of stars are blinking 
 
 In the lake's crystal cup, 
 Flowing mists are drinking 
 
 The tow'ring distance up. 
 Morning winds are skimming 
 
 Eound the deep-shadowed bay. 
 In its clear mirror swimming 
 
 The ripening harvests play." 
 
 On the summit of the St. Gothard Goethe felt that 
 his German home and love behind him were sweeter 
 than all the wide warm loveliness into which the 
 bright Ticino rushed eagerly before his eyes ; and he 
 returned, with hesitation in his heart, to Frankfort. 
 Lili, naturally hurt at his unexplained absence, was
 
 52 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE i 
 
 soon as affectionate as ever, and the poet as happy ; 
 but it did not last long. The hurt pride at feeling 
 himself rather tolerated than welcomed by her friends, 
 and the dread of domestic fetters, returned. Gradually 
 he broke the chain, and strove to flirt with other 
 young ladies ; but he was miserable. In this state 
 he began Egmont. 
 
 An invitation to visit the young Duke of Weimar 
 was now very welcome to him. His father opposed 
 his going, thinking it would place him in a dependent 
 position. Moreover, the Weimar friend' in whose 
 company he had been invited to make the journey 
 never appeared, and his father treated the mistake 
 as an intentional slight. But Goethe's portmanteau 
 was ready packed, his mind set upon change. His 
 father proposed to give him money for an Italian 
 journey. Goethe consented to go by Heidelberg and 
 the Tyrol to Italy, if in Heidelberg he found no 
 trace of the missing Weimar escort. There lived 
 Fraulein Delf, the mediating lady who had in vain 
 secured the consent of the reluctant parents to his 
 engagement with Lili. Her head was now busy with 
 mediating a substitute scheme. She hoped to marry 
 him to a lady at the Mannheim Court, and connect 
 him permanently with it after his return from Italy. 
 A courier came from Frankfort in the middle of the 
 night to announce the arrival of the Weimar friend 
 and to recall Goethe immediately. Fraulein Delf 
 gave vehement counsel, urging him to decline, and 
 go on into Italy. Goethe was in favour of Weimar, 
 and ordered the post-chaise. Long he disputed by 
 candlelight with this lady, while an impatient pos- 
 tillion fidgeted about. At length Goethe tore him- 
 self away, apostrophising his astonished friend in the 
 words of Egmont : " Child, child no more. . Lashed 
 
 ^
 
 I « GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 53 
 
 as by invisible spirits, the sun-steeds of time whirl 
 on the light car of our destiny ; and for us it only 
 remains in calm self-possession to hold fast the reins, 
 and here to the right, there to the left, — here from 
 a rock, there from a precipice, — to direct the wheels. 
 Whither we are going who can tell ? Scarcely can 
 we remember whence we came." The " sun-steeds 
 of time," with the aid of the visible postillion, took 
 him safely to Weimar. Goethe, reluctant to talk of 
 Providence, intimates, however, that this epoch in 
 his life loas providential, and that the " daemonic " 
 element to which a man ought to concede " no more 
 than is fitting" was represented by his father, his 
 own impatience, and good Fraulein Delf, — all eager 
 to shatter his Weimar prospects. I am not at all 
 sure that the reverse was not true — that the young 
 Duke of Weimar may not have been the " daemonic " 
 element at this crisis, while the elderly lady may have 
 spoken the voice of higher warning, — if not in her 
 match-making views, at least so far as she resisted 
 the attraction to Weimar. Goethe had now reached 
 the maturity of his powers, and henceforth we shall 
 find his character more distinctly written in his 
 works than in the monotonous incidents of his 
 external life. 
 
 There is no part of Mr. Lewes's book which is 
 more interesting and picturesque than the delineation 
 of the Weimar localities and the new life the poet 
 led. He has himself visited the place, and surveyed 
 everything with a quick and thoughtful eye. The 
 garden-house on the banks of the Ilni — the larger 
 house to which Goethe removed in the town — the 
 open-air theatricals at Ettersburg — and the life of 
 the Court — are all gracefully and vividly sketched. 
 Far from convincing me, however, that the new life
 
 54 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE i 
 
 had no injurious effect on Goethe's mind, even Mr. 
 Lewes's apologetic narrative strengthens a strong 
 impression in the other direction. That it made 
 Goethe into a "servile courtier," no one with the 
 faintest insitrht into the man could for a moment 
 dream. Karl August, the young Duke of Weimar, 
 was a lad of nineteen years — eight years younger 
 than the poet; and though possessed of a strong 
 will and a certain personal fascination, Goethe was 
 far too conscious of his o'wn superiority of mind to 
 become a courtier, had even his temperament allowed 
 it. But it did not. He was a very proud man, and 
 one, moreover, whose lifelong principle it Avas to 
 resist every encroachment of external influence on 
 his own individuality of character. He never endured 
 interference with himself ; but he frequently inter- 
 fered >vith remonstrances in order to tranquillise the 
 mad humours of his young master. "When Goethe 
 said of himself in his old age, that he had always 
 been conscious of an innate aristocracy which made 
 him feel perfectly on a level Avith princes, and this 
 too in its fullest measure before as well as since 
 receiving the dijaloma which ennobled him, he spoke 
 no more than the truth. He could endure any 
 criticism ; but he coidd not endure any assumption 
 of a right to influence and direct him. When the 
 old poet Klopstock \\Tote to remonstrate "wath him, 
 during his first year at AYeimar, for the wild life he 
 was encouraging at Court, Goethe wrote back a 
 polite reply as brief and haughty in its reserve as 
 he could well have returned to a college companion. 
 And it is as clear as day that the majestic mannerism 
 of his later years was the stifiness of princeliness 
 itself, not the petrified ceremony of a prince's satellite. 
 But, nevertheless, it seems clear enough that some of
 
 I GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 55 
 
 the worst tendencies of his mind were fostered by 
 his Weimar life. The man who rejolied to his 
 dearest friends, Charlotte Kestner and her husband, 
 when they expostulated on the public exposure of 
 private relations, "Ye of little faith ! Could you 
 feel the thousandth part of what Werther is to a 
 thousand hearts, you would not reckon the sacrifice 
 you have made towards it," — who surprised Fraulein 
 Delf with the assurance that "the sun-steeds of time 
 were whirling on the light car of his destiny," — was 
 not the man to be improved by living in a narrow 
 circle of admirers where none of the humiliating and 
 busy indifference of the great world could ever draw 
 his keen eye away from himself to those many high 
 qualities of practical minds in which he himself was 
 relatively deficient. It was good, even intellectually, 
 for Goethe to have objects above himself; yet he 
 left a social world in which he must often have felt 
 himself an insignificant learner, for a literary world 
 in which all the talent was of the same kind as his 
 own, but far beneath it. 
 
 Again, what was far worse than this, the Weimar 
 atmosphere was stagnant with moral evil. Laborious 
 indolence and pleasure-seeking were the great occupa- 
 tion of the greater part of the Court. The women had 
 no employment at once so fashionable and interesting 
 as intrigues. "There is not one of them," says 
 Schiller, "who has not had a liaison" ; and women's 
 influence was the only influence Avhich eff'ectively 
 reached Goethe. " The first years at Weimar were 
 perplexed -with love aflairs," as he told Eckermann ; 
 and what love affairs ! One of them at least with a 
 married woman, whose children were growing up 
 around her to learn that the family bond had no 
 sacredness in their mother's heart, and that fidelity
 
 56 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE I 
 
 and purity were far less noble than passion in the 
 eyes of the great poet of their nation. We know 
 well that this was the sin of the century, and may 
 not be in any large measure attributed to the personal 
 laxity of any one man's conscience. But all the 
 more is it to be lamented that Goethe left a social 
 atmosphere where domestic virtue was held com- 
 paratively sacred, for one where it was almost a 
 thing unknown. There was indefinitely more differ- 
 ence between Frankfort morals and Weimar morals 
 than between the social virtue of a Avholesome busy 
 city like Manchester and that of an idle watering- 
 place cursed with barracks. Weimar was a place, 
 like all idle places, eager for self-conscious stimulants 
 of enjoyment. And it acted upon Goethe accordingly. 
 He became more devoted to that cultus of his own 
 character, which would not, perhaps, have been his 
 worst occupation in a Court where there was very 
 little so much worth attending to, if unfortunately it 
 had not been the very Avorst thing possible for that 
 character that he should thus affectionately nurse it. 
 He never became, indeed, at all deeply infected either 
 with the vulgar selfishness or with the frivolity of 
 Court life. It did not act upon him in this way. 
 He had not been a year at Weimar before he felt its 
 genuine hollowness, and busied himself as much as 
 in him lay with the regular discharge of oificial duty, 
 and the busy earnestness of artistic creation. Always 
 generous by natiu'e, always deeply touched with the 
 sight of suffering, it is pleasant, but not surprising, 
 to find him giving away a sixth part of his income 
 in charity, and still less surprising to find him doing 
 it in secret, so that his left hand knew not what his 
 right hand did. There never was a man less in- 
 fiuenced by the love of approbation : he never
 
 I GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 57 
 
 through his whole life seems even to have felt the 
 passion strongly agitating him, except perhaps in the 
 flush of the first months of his JFerther-isime. 
 His pride alone would have raised him above it, even 
 if he had not had so strong a feeling of contempt for 
 the public judgment that he was scarcely shaken by 
 disapprobation, and scarcely confirmed by approba- 
 tion. He had a thorough contempt for ostentation. 
 When he was giving a poor man two hundred dollars 
 a year, no one knew of it ; and moreover he continued 
 to give it, in si)ite of rather graceless and ungrateful 
 acceptance of his charity. He pointed out calmly to 
 his pensioner the unfitness of such conduct, and gave 
 on. The way in which Weimar affected him so 
 unfavourably was not by the contagion of selfishness, 
 but rather by giving him such an inferior world with 
 which to compare himself — by the easy victory it 
 permitted him in active goodness on the one hand, 
 and by the contagion of impurity on the other. 
 Goethe had no active religious conviction, and of all 
 men most needed to look up to his companions : he 
 was in almost every direction, at this time, obliged 
 to look down. "The mind," he said, "is driven back 
 all the more into itself, the more one accommodates 
 oneself to other men's modes of life, instead of seek- 
 ing to adapt them to one's own : it is like the 
 relation of the musician to his instrument" — a 
 remarkable indication that these " other men's " life 
 was on a platform below rather than above the 
 speaker. Goethe felt that his companions were in a 
 sense his "instruments," from whom he could bring 
 forth fine music, — which was, however, his own 
 music after all, not theirs. But he Avould not have 
 felt so amongst men and women who, even in mere 
 practical power and domestic virtue and devotedness,
 
 58 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE I 
 
 called forth his reverence as standing higher than 
 himself. 
 
 The thing that jars upon the mind throughout 
 Goethe's life, in his letters, his books — everything he 
 said and did — is the absence of anything like 
 devotion to any being, human or divine, morally 
 above himself. God he regarded as inscrutable, and 
 as best left to reveal Himself. The future life was 
 not yet. From all men he withdrew himself in a sort 
 of kindly isolation — sympathising Avith them, aiding 
 them, helping them against themselves, understanding 
 them, but never making any of them the object of 
 his life. The object of his life, so far as any man 
 can consciously and permanently have one, was the 
 completion of that ground-plan of character presented 
 to the world in Johann Wolfgang Goethe. To per- 
 fect this he denied himself much both of enjoyment 
 and real happiness ; to keep this ground-plan intact, 
 or to build upon it, he was always ready to sacrifice 
 either himself or anybody else. To this he sacrificed 
 Frederika's love, Lili's love, and his own love for 
 them — the friendship of any who attempted to inter- 
 fere with his own modes of self-development ; to this, 
 he would at any time have sacrificed, had he supposed 
 it needful, the favour of the duke and his position at 
 Court ; to this, in fact, his life was one long offering, 
 There was nothing Goethe would not have given up 
 for others, excejot any iota of what he considered to 
 be his own individuality. To tend that was his 
 idolatry. And that this self -worship grew rapidly 
 upon him at Weimar, no one can doubt. Only com- 
 pare the tone of JVilhelm Meistn with that of 
 Gotz von Beiiicliingen. Compare even his letters 
 to the Frau von Stein with his letters to the Kestners. 
 There is a real sense of humility and remorse gleaming
 
 I GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 59 
 
 out at times in the latter : with all his susceptibility 
 to other persons' sufterings, there is nothing but at 
 most a sense of error, regret at past mistakes, 
 generally merged in satisfaction at his own steady 
 progress towards " clearness and self-rule," pervading 
 the former. Compare the picture of the cold, self- 
 absorbed, remorseless Lothario, held up as it is to 
 admiration as a kind of ideal, with the ideal of 
 Goethe's earlier days. Compare even Wilhelm 
 Meister himself, who is meant, we are told, to be a 
 progressive character, with Werther, who is meant to 
 be a deteriorating character. With all his hysterics, 
 there is far more trace of humility and sense of the 
 wrong he is doing, and even effort to undo it, in the 
 latter than in the former. Mr. Lewes discovers a 
 " healthy " moral in Wilhelm Meister — that he is 
 raised from "mere impulse to the subordination of 
 reason, froni dreaming self-indulgence to practical 
 duty, from self -culture to sympathy." This is a mere 
 dream of Mr. Lewes's. Wilhelm seems to me to; 
 become, so far as he changes at all, more selfish as he 
 goes on. He begins with a real deep affection, and 
 ends with the most cold and insipid of "preferences," 
 which he is far from sure is a preference. He begins 
 with resisting, and yet finally yields to, mere physical 
 passion. He begins with an enthusiasm for at least 
 one art, and ends with an enthusiasm for none. He 
 begins with a passionate love of fidelity, and ends 
 with worshipping Lothario, whose only distinction is 
 calm superiority to such ideas. In short, he begins 
 a kind-hearted enthusiastic milksop, and ends a kind- 
 hearted milksop, with rather more experience and 
 more judgment, but Avithout any enthusiasm and 
 with far laxer morality. If this be Goethe's notion 
 of progress, it gives but a painful idea of Goethe.
 
 60 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE i 
 
 The only element in which Wilhelm is made to grow- 
 better is knowledge and coolness ; in everything else 
 he degrades. You can see that even Werther, much 
 more Gotz, Avas written with a much distincter feeling 
 of right and wrong, of the contrast betAveen real 
 strength and real weakness, betAveen domestic purity 
 and guilt, than JFilhelm Meister. 
 
 And in purity of thought the change is more 
 remarkable still. Goethe Avas not infected AAdth the 
 commonplace selfishness and frivolity of Court life — 
 he Avas only driven in upon himself. He tvas infected 
 AAdth its impurity. His former Avi'itings had been 
 coarse ; but they were not coarser than the day, not 
 so coarse as Shakespeare, not near so coarse as Field- 
 ing. Goiter Heldcn unci JFieland and Gotz are delicate 
 to many parts of Tom Jones. But Avhile most of his 
 later Avritings are perhaps less coarse than his earlier, 
 they are indefinitely more tainting. The fragment 
 of the "Letters from SAvitzerland," at first intended 
 to be pieced on to the beginning of JFerther, several 
 portions of Wilhelm Meister, not a feAV minor poems, 
 and parts of the Elective Affinities, emulate Eousseau 
 in their pi'urience. " The plague of microscopes " 
 Avith which, as Emerson says, Goethe Avas pursued, 
 follows about everywhere that aAveless mind. Schiller 
 (quoted by Mr. Lewes) says, that " Avhatever is per- 
 mitted to innocent nature is permitted also " to 
 the artist ; but Goethe gazes aAvay every shrinking 
 reserve of "iiniocent nature" A\ath bold "curious eye. 
 This he seems to have learnt in Weimar society. 
 Goethe was in his OAvn life higher, I believe, than he 
 Avas in his Avorks — fuller in sympathy and generous 
 self-denials for others' sake than he ever makes his 
 heroes to be. But his Avorks betray the moral 
 standard by which he consciously moulded himself —
 
 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 61 
 
 I 
 
 the absolute prominence in his mind of the aim of 
 self-cultivation — the infinite value he attached to 
 ?f«moral self-mastery as an eiul and as in itself far 
 higher than any duty for the sake of which he might 
 master himself — the great deficiency of fidelity of 
 nature, and of the purity with which fidelity is 
 usually associated, and the general absence of moral 
 reverence. They also reflect the geniality, the large 
 charity, the intellectual wisdom, the complete in- 
 dependence of praise or blame, and the thorough 
 truthfulness of mind which marked him throughout 
 life. Goethe never deceived himself about himself. 
 
 During the ten years of Weimar life, before his 
 Italian journey, Goethe's external life had but few 
 recorded events. He was ennobled in 1782. He 
 carried on a correspondence of billets with the Frau 
 von Stein, which are extremely tiresome reading, 
 and were never meant for publication. Mr. Lewes 
 is very desirous to prove that all the trifling was on 
 the lady's side, and that whenever she drew back 
 from Goethe's advances, it was only in the spirit of 
 a flirt. It is not a charitable view. In the complete 
 absence of her letters, we know nothing about the 
 matter. It does not seem at all impossible that 
 visitings of remorse and delicacy, and real doubt of 
 the disinterested devotedness of a man who considered 
 so little her other domestic and social relations, may 
 have led, in the earlier years of this connection, to 
 the vibrations of feeling which are reflected in 
 Goethe's replies. There is no need to judge the 
 matter at all. It is almost the only case in which 
 Mr. Lewes paints another in dark colours, without 
 justification, for his hero's sake. 
 
 During these years Goethe wrote Iphigenia and 
 a part of Tasso in their earliest shape ; and worked
 
 62 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE i 
 
 hard at Egmont, besides the composition of the 
 finest part of JFilhelm Meister. Nothing is more 
 striking than the infinite distance between Goethe's 
 success in imagining women and men. The femi- 
 nine characters in Goethe's works are as living, we 
 dare almost say more living than Shakespeare's, 
 though there is much less variety and range in his 
 conceptions of them. His men are often credit- 
 able sketches ; sometimes faint, sometimes entirely 
 shadowy ; they are never so lifelike that we cannot 
 imagine them more so. But his women are like most 
 of his lyrical poems — peiiect. " My idea of Avomen 
 is not one dra^vn from external realities," said 
 Goethe to Eckermann, " but it is inborn in me, or 
 else sprang up God knows how. My delineations of 
 women are therefore all successful. They are all 
 better than are to be met with in actual life." " The 
 more incommensurable and incomprehensible for the 
 understanding a poetic production is, so much the 
 better," he said on another occasion ; and jiidged by 
 this standard also, almost all his women (the dull 
 Theresa and Natalia in the latter part of Wilhelm 
 Meister alone excepted) are better than almost any 
 of his men. His men are conceptions badly outlined ; 
 his women sjDring up unconsciously out of his nature, 
 exactly like his smaller poems. Mariana, Philina, 
 and Mignon in JFilhelm Meister, Clarchen in Egmont, 
 Gretchen in Faust, and Ottilie in the Elective Affinities, 
 are characters any one of which would immortalise a 
 poet. We think the reason of this lies deep in the 
 nature of Goethe's genius. 
 
 There is a tiresome dispute whether he is more 
 objective or subjective. He is really as much one 
 as the other ; for you find in all his poems at once a 
 vague indefinite self, reflecting a defined and clearly
 
 II - 
 
 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 63 
 
 outlined influence which impresses that self. His 
 own mind is the sheet of water which reflects the 
 image, and you see only that it stretches vaguely 
 away far beyond and beneath the image it is reflect- 
 ing ; but what catches the eye is the clear outline of 
 the reflected object in the water. His imagination 
 was passive, not active ; it did not, like Shakespeare's, 
 by its o^vTi inherent energy mould 'itself into living 
 shapes, and pass into new forms of existence. It 
 always waited to be acted on, to be determined, to 
 receive an influence ; and then, while under the spell 
 or pressure of that influence, it pictured with perfect 
 fidelity the impressing power. Goethe was so far 
 dramatic that he was never absorbed in depicting the 
 mere result on himself, but rather reflected back with 
 faithful minuteness the influence which produced 
 these results. Where (as in Werther, and perhaps 
 Tasso) he was mainly occupied in painting the 
 internal eff'ect produced, he was far vaguer and less 
 successful than where he lent his imagination to 
 reflect truly the external influence which had thus 
 deeply affected it. But still it was a passive ima- 
 gination — i.e. one which acted under the spell of 
 external influences, and generally sensuous influences 
 — not one which went voluntarily forth to throw 
 itself into new forms and moulds. Hence, though 
 far the best part of his poems is that in which 
 external objects and social impulses are rendered 
 again, you always find the vague mental reflecting 
 surface by which they are thus given back ; you 
 always have both the deep dim Goetheish mirror 
 and the fine outlined object which skims over it. 
 The two never coalesce, as is the case in Shake- 
 speare. If you have a Gretchen living before your 
 eyes, you must have with her, as the condition of
 
 64 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE i 
 
 her existence, the shadowy Fav^st whom she impresses. 
 The point of sight of the picture requires the presence 
 of Faust ; not because she is delineated through the 
 effect produced on Faust's nature, but because you 
 really only see that portion of her nature which Avas 
 turned to Faust, and no other side. It may be 
 noticed that, perfect as Goethe's women are, they 
 are never very finely drawn in their mutual influence 
 on each other ; it is only in the presence of the lover 
 who is for the time Goethe's representative that they 
 are so strikingly painted. Even their lovely songs 
 only express the same aspect of their character. 
 Indeed it is of the essence of Goethe's feminine 
 characters to express themselves in song. Eacti of 
 them is a distinct fountain of song. But the current 
 of all these songs 'sets straight towards the poet 
 himself, who is always in love with these creations 
 of his own genius. As an instance, take the lovely 
 little song of Clarchen in Egmont, of which I 
 attempt an English version for my non - German 
 readers : — 
 
 " FreudvoU " Cheerful 
 
 Und leidvoll, And tearful, 
 
 Gedankenvoll seyn ; With quick busy brain ; 
 
 Langen Swayed hither 
 
 Und bangen And thither 
 
 In schvvebender Pein ; In fluttering jjain ; 
 
 Himmellioch jauchzend, Cast do-\vTi unto death — 
 
 Zum Tode betrlibt : Soaring gaily above ; 
 
 Gliicklich allein Oh, happy alone 
 
 1st die Seele, die liebt." Is the heart that can love." 
 
 If Goethe paints two women alone in each other's 
 com|3any, the scene either fails, or they are both 
 talking away towards some imaginary masculine
 
 I GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 65 
 
 centre ; and instead of being a telling dialogue, it 
 falls into two monologues. Hence Goethe seldom 
 attempts this at all. The scene between the two 
 Leonoras is the worst in Tasso, and those between 
 Ottilie and Charlotte are the worst in the Elective 
 Affinities; the scene between Cliirchen and her mother 
 in Egmont is really only a soliloquy of Cliirchen 's ; 
 that between Elizabeth and Maria in Gotz paints 
 no mutual influence of the women on each other — 
 they are simply placed in juxtaposition. 
 
 And Goethq's imaginative power is not only 
 passive,: — not only waits to be influenced, — but it 
 is generally a sensuous influence that most easily 
 and deej)ly impresses it. Hence, he not merely 
 paints special women, but he can always give the 
 very essence of a feminine atmosphere to characters 
 not at all individually well marked. He is so sensi- 
 tive to the general social influence diffused by women, 
 that he makes you feel a feminine power at work 
 almost without copying the distinguishing peculiar- 
 ities of any particular person ; he can make a woman 
 a very living woman without being what is called a 
 character at all. This is what few can do. Mignon 
 and Philina and Adelheid and Ottilie are women 
 and something more — they are characters, and we 
 should know them when we met them among a 
 thousand. But all human beings are not thus 
 marked characters ; and when they are not, most 
 authors in attempting to picture them become merely 
 faint and vague. They depend on special peculiar- 
 ities for the life of their pictures. Not so Goethe. 
 Gretchen is little more than a simple peasant girl. 
 She has not a single striking characteristic ; yet she 
 is his finest creation. Cliirchen and Mariana are a 
 little more distinctively moulded, but very slightly ; 
 L F
 
 66 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 1 
 
 and yet they too live more in us than most of our 
 own acquaintances. The little play "Die Gesch- 
 wister" (The Brother and Sister) has a delightful 
 heroine, who is nothing at all more than an 
 ordinary affectionate girl ; yet she has more life than 
 would fill out a hundred " characteristic sketches " 
 of modern novelists. It is Goethe's extreme sensi- 
 tiveness to all feminine influence that gave him this 
 power. Men exercised in general no such influence 
 over him — hence his imagination is never impressed 
 by them ; he has to string up his powers of observa- 
 tion to draw them by sheer effort, and he seldom 
 succeeds conspicuously even in delineating himself. 
 Werther is scarcely so much a delineation of himself 
 as of a series of emotions by which he had been 
 agitated. Goethe needed to have some fascinating 
 power taking hold of his imagination in order to call 
 out its full strength. Nature could do it ; women 
 could do it ; but he could not A^athout such external 
 help fascinate the eye of his own imagination. He 
 could picture the influences which touched him most ; 
 but never, as a whole, the nature which they thus 
 stirred. You do indeed get some notion of his men, 
 who are all more or less quarried out of his own 
 nature ; but it is not by means of any unique in- 
 fluence which accompanies them everywhere, but 
 only by a sort of secondary inference from the suc- 
 cessive states of emotion in which we are accustomed 
 to see them. Tasso, Werther, etc., are never personally 
 known to us ; we have gathered up a very good notion 
 of them, but the mark of organic unity Avhich dis- 
 tinguishes living influence from the fullest description 
 has not been set upon them. Edward, in the Elective 
 Affinities, is perhaps the most skilful portrait amongst 
 Goethe's male figures. But Goethe could not outline
 
 I GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 67 
 
 any character — did not even know the outlines of 
 his own. Where he succeeded, it was not by outline, 
 like Scott, but by a single keynote, usually a feminine 
 undertone running through everything they say. 
 When that is wanting, the character may be true, 
 but does not hang together ; it is a loosely-knit affair. 
 That Goethe should be called by Mr. Lewes 
 " more Greek than German " struck me with astonish- 
 ment. But in the special criticisms on his works 
 Mr. Lewes virtually retracts altogether this general 
 verdict. Greek poetry is never the jDroduct of this 
 passive imagination, that waits for a distinct impres- 
 sion and then reflects back the impressing power. 
 And moreover its subjects are as different from 
 Goethe's as its intellectual process. It does not 
 occupy itself with character so much as events. The 
 characters are there more for the sake of the circum- 
 stance than the circumstance for the characters. And 
 so too Avith the gods themselves. There is no anxiety 
 to display their personal characters ; they are not 
 explained as in later times ; their caprices or their 
 kindness is only a part of the machinery for enlisting 
 human interest. But Goethe makes a study of his 
 Greek gods and demigods, and takes his idea entirely 
 from the most godlike element he could feel in his 
 own character — his cool self-dependence, and his 
 power of shaking himself free at will from the acute 
 impressions of pain or pleasure. There was nothing 
 Greek at all about the character of Goethe's intellect. 
 What Mr. Lewes had in his mind was the heathen 
 element (not specially Greek) in his character. The 
 entire superseding of personal trust by self-reliance, 
 the absence of all trace of humility, the calm superior 
 glance which he cast into the mystery around but 
 never into the holiness above him, gave often a
 
 68 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE I 
 
 heathen colourina; to his works ; but his cast of in- 
 tellect is strikingly, distinctively German, far more 
 so than Schiller's. For one whose mind yielded 
 freely to any sensitive impression, he had a won- 
 derful power of shaking off voluntarily all adhering 
 emotions, and raising his head high above the mists 
 they stirred. This power of assuming at will a cruel 
 moral indifference to that which he did not choose to 
 have agitating him, is the feeling he has so finely 
 embodied in the picture of the gods contained in 
 the song of the Fates in Iph'igenia, — far the finest 
 thing in a poem rich in small beauties, but without 
 any successful delineation of human character. This 
 last has been so well translated by an American 
 ■writer,^ and represents so truly a characteristic phase 
 of Goethe's mind, that I will give it as a pendant 
 to Mr. Lewes's translation fi'om the "Prometheus." 
 
 " Within my ear there rings that ancient song, — 
 Forgotten was it, and forgotten gladly, — 
 Song of the Parcte, which they shuddering sang 
 When from his golden seat fell Tantalus. 
 They ^suffered in his wrongs ; their bosom boiled 
 Within them, and their song was terrible. 
 To me and to my sister in our youth 
 The nurse would sing it, and I marked it well. 
 
 " ' The gods be your terror, 
 Ye children of men ; 
 They hold the dominion 
 In hands everlasting. 
 All free to exert it 
 As listeth their will. 
 
 ^ Mr. N. L. Frothingham. Metrical Pieces, Translated and 
 Oriyinal. Boston : Crosby and Nichols, 1855. A word or two 
 is altered.
 
 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 69 
 
 " ' Let liim fear tliem doubly 
 Whome'er they've exalted ! 
 On crags and on cloud-piles 
 The seats are made ready 
 Around the gold tables. 
 
 " ' Dissension arises : 
 
 Then tumble the feasters 
 
 Reviled and dishonoured 
 
 To gulfs of deep midnight ; . 
 
 And look ever vainly 
 
 In fetters of darkness 
 
 For judgment that's just. 
 
 " ' But THEY remained seated 
 At feasts never failing 
 Around the gold tables. 
 They stride at a footstep 
 From mountain to mountain ; 
 Througli jaws of abysses 
 Steams towards them the breathing 
 Of suffocate Titans. 
 Like offerings of incense 
 A light-rising vapour, 
 
 " ' They turn, the proud masters, 
 From whole generations 
 The eye of their blessing ; 
 Nor will in the children 
 The once well beloved 
 Still eloquent features 
 Of ancestor see.' 
 
 ' So sang the dark sisters. 
 The old exile heareth 
 That terrible music 
 In caverns of darkness, 
 Remembereth his children, 
 And shaketh his head."
 
 70 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE i 
 
 The metre, like the thought, has a heathen cast. It 
 speaks of cold elevation above all human prayers. 
 
 In the autumn of 1786 Goethe " stole away " from 
 Carlsbad, having received secret permission from the 
 duke for a lengthened journey in Italy, which had 
 long been the dream of his life. Mr. Lewes has 
 made no use of the many marvellous and most 
 characteristic touches which Goethe's journal-letters 
 of this tour contain. He speaks of them as of little 
 interest. To me they seem the most fascinating and 
 delightful of the prose works of Goethe. They not 
 only illustrate his character, as it showed itself in the 
 quiet isolated study of beauty, but they explain more 
 than any other of his works the common ground in 
 his mind where science and poetry met. I must 
 give two very characteristic glimpses into his charac- 
 ter which the incidents of this journey furnish. On 
 his way to Venice he turned aside to visit the Lago 
 di Garda, and took his way down the lake in a boat. 
 A strong south wind obliged them to put into Malse- 
 sina, on the east side of the lake, a little spot in the 
 Venetian territory close to the (then) boimdary be- 
 tween the Venetian and Austrian States. Goethe 
 went up to sketch the old dismantled castle. He 
 was absolutely alone and unknown — had not even 
 introductions to any authorities in Venice. The 
 stranger was observed, and soon many of the villagers 
 had assembled round him with signs of displeasure. 
 One man seized his drawing, and tore it up. Others 
 fetched the podesta. Goethe found that he was 
 taken for an Austrian spy sent to make drawings of 
 the strong points on the boundary. The podesta's 
 clerk was threatening, the podesta himself was a cap- 
 tive to his clerk. Goethe was near being sent as a 
 prisoner to Verona to account for his conduct. In-
 
 I GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 71 
 
 stead of feeling nervous and embarrassed, however, 
 he was enjoying the scene, and undertaking to in- 
 struct the Italian peasants in the pleasiires and pur- 
 suits of an artist. "I stood on my steps, leaning 
 with my back against the door, and surveyed the 
 constantly increasing crowd. The curious dull 
 glances, the good-natured expression in most faces, 
 and all that usually characterises a mob, gave me the 
 most agreeable impression." He assured them all, 
 in his best Italian, that he drew for beauty, and not 
 from political designs. He explained that they could 
 not possibly see so much beauty in the old castle, 
 which they had known all their lives, as he did. 
 The morning sun threw tower, walls, and rocks into 
 the most picturesque light, and he began to describe 
 the picture to them with a painter's enthusiasm. 
 These picturesque objects being, however, in the 
 rear of his audience, who did not Avish to turn quite 
 away from him, " they twisted round their heads 
 like the birds which they call ' wrynecks,' in order to 
 see with their eyes what I was thus glorifying to 
 their ears." This ridiculous scene vividly reminded 
 Goethe of the " chorus of birds " in the play of Aris- 
 toi^hanes, and, with intense amusement, he would 
 not let them off without a detailed dissertation 
 on every element of beauty in the picture, particu- 
 larly dwelling on the ivy which hung about the 
 walls. His presence of mind extricated him from 
 the scrape. 
 
 A still more characteristic incident occurs on his 
 voyage from Sicily back to Naples. The ship should 
 have passed the Straits between the island of Capri 
 and the mainland. Evening came on ; Vesuvius 
 glowed brightly ; sheet-lightning was in the air ; it 
 was a dead calm ; the captain had missed the course ;
 
 72 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE ^ 
 
 a very slow bvit decided under-current was drifting 
 them straight on the rocks of Capri ; the herdsmen 
 were visible on the rocks, shouting that the ship 
 would strand ; on deck was a crowd of Italian peas- 
 ants — men, women, and children; handkerchiefs 
 were held up to try and find a breath of air by which 
 they might be saved; the women screamed reproaches 
 on the captain, and all was shrieking and confusion. 
 "I," says Goethe, "to whom anarchy had ever been 
 more hateful than death itself, found it impossible to 
 be longer silent. I stood up, and represented to 
 them that their cries and shrieks were stunning the 
 ears and brains of those from whom alone help could 
 be expected. As for you, I said, retire into your- 
 selves, and then put up your most fervent prayers to 
 the Mother of God, wdth whom it alone rests, whether 
 she will intercede with her Son to do for you what 
 He once did for the apostles, when, on the stormy 
 lake of Tiberias, the waves were already washing 
 into the ship while the Lord slept ; and yet, when 
 the helpless disciples awakened Him, He immediately 
 commanded the winds to be still, as He can now com- 
 mand the breeze to bloAv, if it be His holy will."' 
 These words had the best effect. The women fell 
 on their knees, left biT abusing the captain, and fell 
 to prayer. They were so near the rocks, that the 
 men seized hold of beams to stave the ship oflF, 
 directly they should be able to reach them. " My 
 sea-sickness, which returned in spite of all this, com- 
 pelled me to go down to the cabin. I threw myself 
 half-stunned on my mattress, and yet with a certain 
 pleasant sensation, which seemed to emanate from 
 the sea of Tiberias ; for the picture in Merian's illus- 
 trated Bible hovered quite clearly before my eyes. 
 And thus the force of all sensuous-moral impression
 
 I GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 73 
 
 is always strongest when men are quite thrown liack 
 into themselves." Goethe lay here "half-asleep," 
 with death impending, till his companion came down 
 to inform him that a light breeze had just sprung up to 
 save them. There is no incident more characteristic 
 of the calm self-possessed artist in Goethe's whole 
 life, — the " musician adapting himself to his instru- 
 ment " ; playing thus skilfully on strings which were 
 deficient in his own mind, in order to bring out tones 
 of feeling for which there were ulterior reasons ; then 
 lying down to dream so vividly of what he really 
 held to be but a picturesque legend, that all the awe 
 of death was held at a distance by the vivid light of 
 that "inward eye which is the bliss of solitude." 
 This one scene brings out the secret at once of the 
 man's vast personal influence, and of the poet's yield- 
 ing wax -like imagination, more vividly than any 
 incident of his life. 
 
 It was in his Italian journey that his poetic 
 powers culminated, and that science and art met in 
 his mind. You see the meeting-point in his descrip- 
 tions of what he saw. He fits his mind so close to 
 the objects he studies, that he not only takes off" a 
 perfect impression of their present condition, but 
 becomes conscious of their secrets of tendency, and 
 has often a gliinpse back into what they have been. 
 Goethe discovered, as is well kno'WTi, that all the 
 parts of a plant — stalk, leaf, stamen, petal, fruit — are 
 but various modifications of the same essential germ, 
 best exhibited in the leaf. It was a most character- 
 istic discovery. But to understand the mental pro- 
 cess by which it was made — to prove that it was not, 
 in him, due to a mere scientific tendency — just look 
 at this glance of his into the essence of a quite dif- 
 ferent thing, — the amphitheatre, written at Verona :
 
 74 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE i 
 
 "It ought not to be seen empty, but quite full of 
 men ; for, properly speaking, such an amphitheatre 
 is made in order to give the people the imposing 
 spectacle of themselves, to amuse the people with 
 themselves. If anything Avorth looking at happens 
 on a flat space, the hindmost seek in every possible 
 way to get on higher ground than the foremost ; they 
 get on to benches, roll up casks, bring up carriages, 
 and plank them over, cover any hill in the neighbour- 
 hood, and thus a crater forms itself. If the spectacle 
 is often repeated, such a crater is artificially con- 
 structed," etc. Now this illustrates the way in which 
 Goethe became so great in criticism, so great in 
 science, so great in description, and so great in the 
 more conscious and less inspired part of his poetry. 
 He moulded himself Avith such flexible mind to every- 
 thing he studied that he caught not only the existing 
 present, but the state which had just preceded, the 
 state Avhich Avould follow ; he caught the thread as it 
 untwined, he caught not the " being " only {das Seyn), 
 but the " l)ecoming " [das JFcrden). He had no gift 
 for experimental science. He could not even hclieve in 
 laws of nature that did not make themselves felt on the 
 living surface of things. He rejected " refractional " 
 theories of light with scorn, 1)ccause the coincidence 
 that certain geometrical and arithmetical properties 
 attach to the laws of colour (and it really is nothing 
 more than a coincidence) did not explain in any way 
 the living colours as they shine upon the eye. What 
 is it to the living perception that the length of the 
 wave of the red ray is greater than that of the violet 
 ray ; does length explain anything about colour ? 
 It is only a sort of inward thread of order running 
 through the phenomena, Avhich is quite independent 
 of the essence of the phenomena as they aff"ect the
 
 I GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 75 
 
 living organs of man. Goethe had no faculty at all 
 for this experimental detection of aids to Immoledge, 
 which are not in any way aids to living insight. He 
 thought it a kind of mathematical hackstair to optics, 
 which it was mean to desire ; you ought to look the 
 phenomenon livingly in the face, and explore its 
 symptoms as you do the physiology of a plant or an 
 animal. He used the microscope to detect what is 
 really going on ; but he despised an hypothesis 
 which left the physiology of colour just where it 
 was. 
 
 Indeed, his science and his poetry and his descrip- 
 tions alike were of the microscopic order ; not that 
 they had the confinement of the microscope, for his 
 eye ranged freely ; but I mean, that he rather pierced 
 nature and life at many points in succession, letting 
 in gleams of an indefinite vista everywhere, than 
 combined all he conceived and saw in one co-existing 
 whole. Look at his finest poems and descriptions. 
 It is the intensely vivid gleam thrown on single spots, 
 not the aspect of the whole, that makes you seem to 
 see with your own eyes what he describes. Thus, in 
 one of his finest poems, " Hermann and Dorothea," 
 every touch of description will illustrate what I mean. 
 And the sense of breadth and freedom pervading it 
 is given in the same way by transient glances side- 
 wards and forwards, which open out little vistas of 
 life in many directions, without completing them in 
 any:— 
 
 " Unci die Hengste rannten nacTi Hause, hegierirj des 
 Sialics, 
 Aber dieWolke des Staubes qiioll miter den maclitigen 
 
 Hiifen. 
 Lange nocli stand der Jiingling und sail den Stanb 
 sich erheben,
 
 76 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE I 
 
 Sail den Staub sicli zerstreu'n ; so stand er ohne 
 Gedanken."! 
 
 What a vivid impression (it is only one or two strokes 
 for a picture, not properly a picture) is here given, 
 by means of pursuing a little side-path of insight into 
 the feelings of horses, and then fixing the eye in- 
 tensely just on that dreamy cloud of dust in the dis- 
 tance which would most catch the eye of a man in a 
 reverie ! It is always by casting those isolated 
 piercing glances in two or three directions, that ' 
 Goethe produces his vivid impressions. When Her- 
 mann and Dorothea, for instance, are walking by 
 moonlight to the village, there is no attempt to paint 
 the scene ; but each object, as it comes in view, is 
 made to flash on the eye of the reader. Thus : — 
 
 " ' How sweet is the glorious moonshine, as clear it is as 
 the daylight ; 
 
 I can surely see in the town the houses and court- 
 yards quite plainly, 
 
 In that gable a casement, — I fancy I count every 
 pane there.' 
 
 Then they rose, and went downwards through the 
 cornfield together, 
 
 Dividing the thick-standing corn, and enjoying the 
 splendour above them ; 
 
 And thus they had reached the vineyard, and passed 
 from the light into shadow." 
 
 ^ "And the horses started off home, pricking their ears for 
 
 the stable, 
 But a cloud of dust grew under the rushing hoofs of their 
 
 gallop. 
 Long the youth stood still, and watched the dust whirling 
 
 upwards, 
 Watched the dust settle down, — thus stood he vacant in 
 
 spirit."
 
 I GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 77 
 
 When Goethe returned from Italy in 1788, his 
 genius had reached its highest maturity. Faust 
 (his greatest work) was virtually written, though 
 afterwards modified, and not published for eighteen 
 years. Iphigenia and Egmont had received their 
 last touches, and Tasso was all but finished. The 
 really fine part of JFilhchn Mc'iskr was in exist- 
 ence ; all that he added afterwards Avas a dreary 
 superinduced element of "high art," a painful "Hall 
 of the Past," — except indeed, the religious episode, 
 which is a study from memory, a reproduction of the 
 religious "experience" of a gentle mystic whom 
 both he and his mother had dearly loved. "Her- 
 mann und Dorothea " is the only great poem of any 
 length Avhich he wrote afterwards — in 1796 — and it 
 is the most perfect though not the richest of them all. 
 
 During his Italian residence he had only fallen in 
 love once. He returned reluctantly to the north, 
 like a child from a Christmas visit, feeling that 
 everything at home was old and slow, and that he, 
 coming from the sweet south, was bringing "gold 
 for brass, what was worth a hundred oxen for what 
 was worth nine." Even the Frau von Stein was 
 tedious ; the Italian lady had displaced her. In this 
 mood he fell in with Christiane Vulpius, a girl of no 
 culture and considerably lower rank than himself, 
 who, after being for seventeen years his mistress, 
 became in 1806 his wife. There can be no doubt 
 that he was passionately in love at first, and that his 
 passion ripened afterAvards into a real and deeper 
 affection, which had sufficient strength, when he 
 found his heart attracted to another, to enable him 
 to resist the danger and remain faithful to the 
 mother of his child, in spite of the serious estranging 
 influences arising from her intemperance. Goethe's
 
 78 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE i 
 
 connection with Christiane, if judged by the lax 
 morality of his age, — by which alone we can fairly 
 judge him, when we have once admitted, as Ave must 
 dOj that he was in no way morally purer than his 
 age — that, indeed, in his estimate of these matters 
 he had become less pure since his residence in 
 Weimar, — was surely not the worst of his life. It 
 is in its origin that it is most ofiensive. That he 
 should either allow himself to encourage passion 
 without love, and feel no horror, no self-abasement, 
 but rather immortalise it by using it as literary 
 capital for "elegies"; or,-von the other hand, if he 
 did feel real love for^this poor girl, that he could en- 
 dure to write about her to friends in the tone of his 
 letters to the Frau von Stein, — is one of those facts 
 concerning Goethe which makes one feel that a wider 
 gulf divided his nature from purity and fidelity than 
 any merely passionate sins could create. During the 
 first months of his liaison he writes, in answer to the 
 Frau von Stein's remonstrances, "And what is this 
 relation ? Who is beggared by it ? Who lays any 
 claim to the feelings I give to the poor creature 1 
 Who to the hours I pass with her ? " And again : 
 " I will say nothing in excuse ; but I beg thee to 
 help me, so that the relation which is so objectionable 
 to thee may not become yet worse, but remain as it 
 is. Give me thy confidence again ; look at the 
 thing in a natural light ; allow me to speak to thee 
 quietly and reasonably about it, and I may hope 
 that all will be once more right between us." That 
 a man should write in this tone about a woman he 
 really loved, and keep her in so humiliating a 
 position in Avhich he knew that she was a mark for 
 the contempt of his friends, is hardly credible. And 
 yet, if he did not really love her, that he should
 
 1 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 79 
 
 have felt no self-reproach and disgust at his own 
 conduct, while he calmly worked it up into poetry, 
 is still more revolting and still more incredible. The 
 truth seems to be that he did really love her, and 
 yet was insensible to the dishonour to himself and to 
 her implied in writing or thinking of his relation to 
 her in this way, and permitting his friends' neglect. 
 Mr. Lewes says that Christiane declared later that 
 she had herself resisted the marriage. Possibly she 
 may have wished to .excuse Goethe ; possibly it was 
 so ; but the decision lay with him, and no theories 
 can relieve him from the charge of permitting 
 a permanent dishonour to rest upon the woman 
 who was to him in the place of a wife. He took 
 her to live with him immediately on the birth of his 
 son, and never again forsook her. But I can hardly 
 doubt that one great exciting cause for those habits 
 of intemperance of hers which caused him so much 
 misery was the consciousness of her miserable 
 position in society, — slighted as she was by the very 
 friends whom Goethe most honoured and loved, 
 Goethe permitting the slight. Schiller never seems 
 to have sent her one greeting in his letters, nor even 
 alluded to her existence ; while Goethe's messages 
 to Schiller's wife are constant and courteous. Con- 
 trasts of this kind should surely have stung him to 
 the quick, if he really honoured and loved her as a 
 wife. Since Mr. Lewes's book was first published, 
 letters have appeared from Goethe and his wife to 
 Dr. Nicolaus Meyer of Bremen, a medical student in 
 Jena in 1798, who resided in Goethe's house in the 
 winter 1799-1800. The correspondence adds little 
 to what we knew; but the letters from Christiane 
 Vulpius (who in 1806 became Christiane Goethe) 
 confirm Mr. Lewes's conception of her as an unculti-
 
 80 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE I 
 
 vated but not vulgar person ; and one or two show 
 great depth of feeling. The editor intimates that 
 they were poorly spelt and worse wi'itten ; but in 
 those days many> ladies of rank had little knowledge 
 of this kind. The letters — both Goethe's and his 
 wife's. — are mostly about herrings, butter, and port 
 ^Avine. Goethe's letters are seldom very good. He 
 saved up his best' things for type. One does not 
 expect literary merit from Christiane Vulpius. But 
 her letters are simple, housewifely, and friendly. It 
 seems she had a genius for jams, which had in part 
 gained her Meyer's esteem. Parts of one or two 
 letters, Avritten in 1805, during a dangerous illness 
 of Goethe's, gave a glimpse of the thread of pain in 
 her life. She tells Meyer that Goethe has " now for 
 three months back never had an hour of health, and 
 frequently periods when one fancies he must die. 
 Think only of me — who have not, excepting yourself 
 and him, a single friend in the world ; and you, dear 
 friend, by reason of the distance, are as good as 
 lost. . . . Here there is tio friend to whom I could 
 tell all that lies on my heart. I might have many ; 
 but I cannot again form such a friendship with any 
 one, and shall be forced to tread my path alone." 
 Seldom, indeed, in these letters, does she express 
 feeling of this kind, which gives it more meaning 
 when it is expressed. She says again, " I live a life 
 of pure anxiety." Then she writes a better account, 
 adding, that though better, she fears "it is but patch- 
 work. God, when I think a time may come when 
 I may stand absolutely alone, many a cheerful hour 
 is made wretched." ^ The sentence in Avhich Goethe 
 
 1 I have before alluded to the fact, that Goethe's passion for 
 Minna Herzlieb gave rise to his novel of the Elective Affinities, 
 and is depicted in the love of Edward for Ottilia. It seems,
 
 I GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 81 
 
 announces to Meyer, in 1806, his own marriage, is 
 •characteristic. He speaks of the French occuj^ation 
 of Weimar, and the misery it caused, and adds : 
 " In order to cheer these sad days Avith a festivity, 
 I and my little home-friend (Hausfreundin) yesterday 
 resolved to enter Avith full formality into the state of 
 holy matrimony, Avith Avhich notification, I entreat 
 you to send us a good supply of butter and other 
 provisions that Avill bear carriage." 
 
 Early in the neAV century, Goethe's groAving 
 attachment to Minna Herzlieb seems to have given 
 rise to one of the richest groups of minor poems that 
 he ever Avi'ote ; and of one of these so beautiful a 
 translation has come into my hands, ^ that I venture 
 to hope it Avill at least convey some feeling of the 
 charm of Goethe's little ballads :— 
 
 now, not improbable that Meyer's friendship for Christiane 
 Vulpius at least suggested the relation of the Captain to 
 Charlotte in the same novel, Meyer must have been at least 
 six or seven years younger than Christiane, as he was born in 
 1775. But it seems from these letters that the friendship 
 between them had been strong, and not without sentiment. 
 Christiane keeps Meyer's picture in her room, and speaks of the 
 constant pleasure and comfort that she derived from looking at 
 it. It was after, and immediately after, Meyer's own marriage 
 in 1806, that Goethe determined to take this step, and an- 
 nounced it to him in the curious form given in the text. There 
 is no allusion at all to her marriage in any of Christiane's 
 letters to Meyer. She speaks of his own marriage thus : — "I 
 have been especially pleased to hear that you have at last re- 
 solved to enter the state of holy matrimony, in which I heartily 
 wish you happiness, and believe that you will also be convinced 
 of these my sentiments." Meyer and his wife visited Weimar 
 on their wedding journey : a great chasm in the correspondence 
 occurs immediately afterwards. 
 
 ^ Translated by the Hon. J. C. Richmond, formerly the 
 "Native Minister" of New Zealand. 
 L G
 
 82 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 
 
 THE HILL CASTLE. 
 
 Aloft stands a castle lioary 
 
 On yonder craggy height, 
 
 Where of old each gate and doorway 
 
 Was guarded by horse and knight. 
 
 The doors and the gates lie in ashes, 
 And silence broods over all ; 
 I clamber about unchallenged 
 On the ancient mouldering wall. 
 
 Close here lay a cellar, of yore 
 Well filled with the costliest wine ; 
 With the bottle and pitcher no more 
 Steps the maiden merrily in. 
 
 No more in the hall the beaker 
 She sets for the welcome guest ; 
 No more for the holy altar 
 She fills the flask of the priest. 
 
 To the thirsty squire in the courtyard 
 No more the flagon she gives , 
 No more for the fleeting favour 
 Their fleeting thanks she receives. 
 
 For burnt are the ceilings and floors 
 Into ashes long long ago passed ; 
 And corridor, chapel, and stairs, 
 Are splinters and rubbish and dust. 
 
 Yet when on a merry morning 
 From these crags I saw with delight. 
 With lute and with wine, my darling 
 Ascending the stony height, — 
 
 Seemed a gay entertainment to burst 
 From tlie dulness of still decay. 
 And it went as, in times long passed. 
 On a joy oils and festive day
 
 I GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 83 
 
 It seemed the most stately rooms 
 Were prepared for some guest of worth ; 
 It seemed from tliose hearty old times 
 A loving pair had stepped forth ; 
 
 And as if stood the holy father 
 Within his chapel hard by, 
 And asked, " Will ye have one another ? " 
 And we smilingly answered "Ay." 
 
 And when onr hearts' deep emotion 
 In music broke forth aloud, 
 Rang out the mellow-voiced echo 
 In answer — instead of the crowd. 
 
 And when, at the coming of even, 
 In silence all was entranced, 
 And the sun from the glowing heaven 
 On the craggy summit glanced. 
 
 The squire and the maiden, like nobles, 
 Shine out in that golden blaze ; 
 Again the goblet she proffers, 
 And again his thanks he pays. 
 
 Goethe seems ultimately to have battled firmly 
 with, and finally subdued, the affection which thus 
 renewed the freshness of his poetry with a second 
 spring of even greater beauty than the first ; but the 
 whole story, as he has embodied it in the Elective 
 Affinities, is a thoroughly repulsive one, and no 
 mind but one so destitute as Goethe's of natural re- 
 morse from the most humiliating class of sins, could 
 have given such experience publicity in a work of 
 art. The book betrays, in spite of its power, some 
 of the difiuseness of age ; a very great part of it is 
 devoted to describing the laying down of a new 
 gravel-walk and the making of a summer-house.
 
 84 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE i 
 
 In 1816 his Avife died; and Goethe's burst of 
 grief Avas terrible. We are told ^ that he utterly lost 
 his presence of mind, kneeled down beside her death- 
 bed, and seizing her hands, cried out " Thou wilt not 
 forsake me ! No, no ; thou durst not forsake me." 
 The verse he wrote on the day of her death has more 
 true affection than all his poems of passion together. 
 
 The last sixteen yeai's of Goethe's life Avere passed 
 in tranquil labour at the completion of his unfinished 
 works. Now and then he wrote a lovely little poem. 
 In 1818, when he was in his seventieth year, came one 
 of those little flashes of song, — giving birth to a poem 
 like those which, he tells us, he would in his youth 
 often get up to scribble off in the middle of the night, 
 or write doAvn on the first scrap of paper he found, 
 not even venturing to set the paper straight, lest the 
 little mechanical act should put to flight the floAV of 
 the insjjiration. Its beauty is quite as strange as 
 that of the ^oems of his youth. Goethe always 
 loved the song, and said it was of the very essence 
 of himself. Here is a faint version of it, Avhich I 
 insert less as a poem than as a light on the old mane's 
 character : — 
 
 AT DEAD OF NIGHT. 
 
 At dead of niglit I went, reluctant going — 
 A wee, wee boy, across the cliurchyard-way, 
 To father's house, the pastor's ; heaven was glowing 
 With star on star — oh, sweetly twinkled they 
 At dead of niglit. 
 
 Then in broad life, when new impellings drove me 
 To seek my love — impellings which she sent — 
 The stars and Northern-lights in strife above me — 
 I, going, coming, drank in sweet content 
 At dead of night. 
 
 1 Preface to Meyer's Corrcfijiondciice.
 
 I GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 85 
 
 Till the bright moon at last in her high season, 
 So pure, so clear, me in my darkness found ; 
 And with her, willing, thoughtful, vivid Eeason 
 Her light aljout my past and future wound 
 At dead of night. 
 
 He fell in love once or twice more; and in 1823 
 was said to be near marrying again. The result, as 
 usual, was not marriage, but an elegy^of beauty not 
 greatly inferior to that which the poems of earlier 
 days can show, and which, as his youngest and dearest 
 poem, he copied out in Roman letters on fine vellum, 
 and tied with a silk band into a red morocco cover, 
 in which glory Eckermann saw it. Mr. Lewes, in 
 deference to physiology, unpleasantly and untruly 
 calls the story of an old man's life a "necrology." 
 As a man Goethe was never so complete as in his 
 old age. 
 
 The only great addition to his fame which the last 
 twenty years of Goethe's life produced was the con- 
 versations with Eckermann — a book which gives to 
 the English reader a far clearer concej)tion of his 
 personal influence than any other of his works. He 
 never runs an opponent through, like Dr. Johnson : 
 indeed, he does not wilKngly talk Avith an opponent 
 at all. He rather flows round his disciple like an 
 atmosphere, leaks into you at every pore, and en- 
 velops you in such a calm wide mist of wisdom, that 
 you can only say what he means you to say so long as 
 you breathe that atmosphere. There is no possibility 
 of a contest. There is no point to contest. He 
 credits you with a truth "Whenever you open y-our 
 mouth (Itisst das gelten, as the Germans say) ; only he 
 circumvents it with a whole mass of modifying 
 thought ; so that it would be easier to bring the 
 air itself to a point than to bring the question you
 
 86 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE i 
 
 are discussing to an issue. In his old age he recurred 
 
 again frequently to his religious belief, and some of 
 
 his most fascinating conversations have relation to it. 
 
 Goethe had a taste for religion, and a shrewd guess 
 
 jat the next world ; but his mind seems to have been 
 
 f quite devoid of personal trust. He Avas perhaps the 
 
 wisest man totally "without moral humility and per- 
 
 I sonal faith whom the world has ever seen. He took 
 
 ' the pantheistic view of God along mth the personal 
 
 view of man.^ He knew that man was a free and 
 
 responsible being, but he could not attribute human 
 
 attributes of any kind to God ; he thought the In- 
 
 - finite Avould be l)est honoured by merely denying finite 
 
 characteristics, and leaving Him unapproached : — 
 
 " Feeling is all in all ; 
 Name but an earthly smoke. 
 Darkening the glow of heaven." 
 
 . And not only " name " but definite thought concerning 
 God he equally rejected. " No one," he says, " noAV~ 
 doubts the existence of God any more than his own" ; 
 but " what do we know of the idea of the divine, and 
 what shall oftr narrow conceptions say of the Highest 
 Being?" And so of immortality also; he believed 
 in it by a sort of extension of his insight into nature, 
 but he put it aside as not bearing in any way on this 
 life. " I do not doubt of our future existence, for 
 nature cannot afford to throw away any living prin- 
 ciple (ivreXex^ia). But we are not all in the same 
 manner immortal ; and in order to manifest ourselves 
 as a powerful living principle in the future we must 
 be one." Immortality was no present aid to him; he 
 thought we should wait to rest on it till we had 
 gained it. " To the able man this world is not dumb ; 
 ^ See, for instance, the fine little poem, "Das Gottlicbe."
 
 I GOETHE AND IIIS INFLUENCE 87 
 
 why should he ramble off into eternity % What he 
 really hiows can be apprehended." And he was 
 annoyed with anything that he thought a fuss about 
 the matter. 
 
 Speaking of a poem by Tiedge relating to this 
 subject, he says : — 
 
 " Wherever yoii went, there lay ' Urania ' on the table. 
 ' Urania ' and immortality were the topics of every con- 
 versation. I could in no wise dispense with the happiness 
 of believing in our future existence, and, indeed, could 
 say, with Lorenzo de Medici, that those are dead for this 
 life even, who have no hope for another. But such in- 
 comprehensible subjects lie too far off, and only disturb our 
 thoughts if made the theme of daily meditation. Let him 
 who believes in immortality enjoy his happiness in silence, 
 without giving himself airs thereupon. The occasion of 
 ' Urania ' led me to observe that piety has its pretensions 
 to aristocracy no less than noble blood. I met stiipid 
 women, who plumed themselves on believing, with Tiedge, 
 in immortality, and I was forced to bear much catechising 
 on this point. They were vexed by my saying I should 
 be well pleased to be ushered into a futiTre state after the 
 close of this, only I hoped I should tliere meet none of 
 those who had believed in it here. For, how should I be 
 tormented ! The pious would throng around me, and 
 say, ' Were we not right 1 Did we not foresee it ? Has 
 not it happened just as we said 1 ' And so there would 
 be ennui without end. 
 
 " All this fuss about such points is for people of rank, 
 and especially women, who have nothing to do. But an 
 able man, who has something to do here, and must toil and 
 strive day by day to accom.'plish it, leaves the future loorld till 
 it comes, and contents himself loith being active and useftd in 
 this. Thoughts about immortality are also good for those 
 who have small success here below, and I would wager 
 that better fortune would have brought our good Tiedge 
 ■better thoughts."
 
 88 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE i 
 
 In only one sentence do Ave catch a glimpse of a 
 time when Goethe had looked to God for a Father's 
 help, and, at least for a moment, conceived the spiritual 
 world not as the mere unknown space beyond life, 
 but as the inspiring love which shines everywhere 
 into it. "We may lean for a while," he says once, 
 in speaking of his youth " on our brothers and friends, 
 be amused by acquaintances, rendered happy by those 
 Ave love ; but in the end man is alAA^ays driven back 
 upon himself, and it seems as if the Divinity had so 
 placed Himself in relation to man as not always to respond 
 to his reverence, trust, and love ; at least not in the terrible 
 moment of need." There had, then, been a time Avhen 
 the easy familiarity Avith AA^hich the young man 
 scrutinised the universe had been exchanged for the 
 humble glance of a heart-stricken child ; and he had 
 shrunk aAA^ay from that time (as he did from every 
 hour of life Avhen pain Avould have j^robed to the very 
 bottom the secrets of his nature), to take refuge in 
 the exercise of a faculty Avhich Avould have been far 
 stronger and purer had it never helped him to evade 
 those aAvful pauses in existence when alone the 
 depths of our personal life lie bare before the inward 
 eye, and Ave start to see both " whither Ave are going, 
 and Avhence Ave came." Goethe deliberately turned 
 his back upon those inroads Avhich sin and death 
 make into our natural habits and routine. From the 
 pleading griefs, from the challenging guilt, from the 
 warning shadoAvs of his OAvn past life, he turnied 
 resolutely aAvay, like his OAvn Faust, to the alleviating 
 occupations of the present. Inch by inch he con- 
 tested the inroads of age upon his existence, striving 
 to banish the images of neAv graves from his thoughts 
 long before his nature had ceased to quiver Avith the 
 shock of parting ; never seemingly for a moment led
 
 I GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE 89 
 
 V 
 
 by grief to take conscious refuge in the love of God 
 and his hopes of an hereafter. 
 
 And so, with his eyes still clinging to the life he 
 left, on the 2 2d March 1832, he passed away himself, 
 while drawing with his finger pictures in the air and 
 murmuring a last cry for " more light." During the 
 years which have intervened, the influence of his 
 wi'itings in England has steadily increased. He has 
 been held up as the wisest man of modern days, and 
 by some half -worshipped as a demigod. And, in 
 truth, his was a light and spacious mind. I grant 
 that he was the wisest man of modern days who ever 
 lacked the msdom of a child ; the deepest who never 
 knew what it was to kneel in the dust with bowed 
 head and broken heart. And he was a demigod, if a 
 demigod be a being at once more and less than 
 ordinary men, having a power which few attain, and 
 owing it, in part, to a deficiency in qualities in which 
 few are so deficient ; a being who puts forth a stronger 
 fascination over the earth because expending none of 
 his strength in yearnings towards heaven. In this 
 sense Goethe was a demigod : — 
 
 " He took the suffering human race ; 
 He read each wound, each weakness clear ; 
 He struck liis finger on the place. 
 And said, ' Thou ailest here, and here.' " 
 
 He knew all symptoms of disease, a few alleviations, 
 no remedies. The earth was eloquent to him, but the 
 skies were silent. Next to Luther he was the greatest 
 of the Germans ; next — but what a gulf between ! 
 " Adequate to himself," was written on that broad 
 calm forehead ; and therefore men thronged eagerly 
 about him to learn the incommunicable secret. It 
 was not told, and will not be told. For man it is a 
 weary way to God, but a wearier far to any demigod.
 
 II 
 
 THE GENIUS OF WORDSWORTH 
 
 The commonplace modern criticism on Wordsworth 
 is that he is too transcendental. On the other hand, 
 the criticism with which he was first assailed, which 
 Coleridge indignantly repelled, and Avhich is reflected in 
 the admirable parody published among the "Rejected 
 Addresses," was that he was ridiculously simple, that 
 he made an unintelligible fuss about common feelings 
 and common things. The reconciliation of these 
 opposite criticisms is not difficult. He drew un- 
 common delights from very common things. His 
 circle of interests was, for a poet, singularly narrow. 
 He was a hardy Cumbrian mountaineer, with the 
 temperament of a thoroughly frugal peasant, and a 
 unique personal gift for discovering the deepest secon- 
 dary springs of joy in what ordinary men either took 
 as matter of course, or found uninteresting, or even 
 full of pain. The same sort of power which scientific 
 men have of studiously fixing their minds on natural 
 phenomena, till they make these phenomena yield 
 lessons and laws of which no understanding, destitute 
 of this capacity for detaching itself entirely from the 
 commonplace train of intellectual associations, would 
 have dreamt, Wordsworth had in relation to objects 
 of the imagination. He could detach his mind from
 
 II THE GENIUS OF WORDSWORTH 91 
 
 the commonplace series of impressions which are 
 generated by commonplace objects or events, resist 
 and often reverse the cnrrent of emotion to which 
 ordinary minds are liable, and triumphantly justify 
 the strain of rapture Avith which he celebrated what 
 excites either no feeling, or weary feeling, or painful 
 feeling, in the mass of unreflecting men. Two dis- 
 tinct peculiarities, and rare loeculiarities of character, 
 chiefly assisted him in this — his keen spiritual cour- 
 age, and his stern spiritual frugality. Though his 
 poetry reads so transcendental, and is so meditative, 
 there never was a poet who was so little of a dreamer 
 as Wordsworth. There is volition and self-govern- 
 ment in every line of his poetry, and his best 
 thoughts come from the steady resistance he opposes 
 to the ebb and flow of ordinary desires and regrets. 
 He contests the ground inch by inch with all despon- 
 dent and indolent humours, and often, too, with 
 movements of inconsiderate and wasteful joy — turn- 
 ing defeat into victory, and victory into defeat. He 
 transmutes sorrows into food for lonely raptiu-e, as 
 he dwells upon the evidence they bear of the depth 
 and fortitude of human nature ; he transmutes the 
 periodic joy of conventional social occasions into 
 melancholy as he recalls how " the wiser mind " 
 
 " Mourns less for what age takes away 
 Than what it leaves behind." 
 
 No poet ever contrived by dint of " plain living and 
 high thinking " to get nearer to the reality of such 
 life as he understood, and" to dispel more thoroughly 
 the illusions of superficial impression. 
 
 To this same result again the rare spiritual fru- 
 gality of Wordsworth greatly contributed. Poets, as 
 a rule, lust for emotion ; some of the most unique
 
 92 THE GENIUS OF WORDSWORTH it 
 
 poets — like Shelley and Byron in their very different 
 ways — pant for an unbroken succession of ardent 
 feelings. Wordsworth, as I shall try to show, was 
 almost a miser in his reluctance to trench upon the 
 spiritual capital at his disposal. He hoarded his 
 joys, and lived upon the interest which they paid in 
 the form of hope and expectation. This is one of 
 the most original parts of his poetic character. It 
 was only the \vindfalls, as one may say, of his ima- 
 gination, the accidents on which he had never counted 
 beforehand, the delight of which he dared thoroughly 
 to exhaust. He paused almost in awe at the thresh- 
 old of any promised enjoyment, as if it were a 
 spendthrift policy to exchange the hope for the 
 reality. A delight once over, he multiplied it a 
 thousandfold through the vision of "that inward 
 eye which is the bliss of solitude." Spiritual thrift 
 was at the very root of his soul, and this was one of 
 his most remarkable distinctions among a race Avho, 
 in spiritual things, are too often prodigals and spend- 
 thrifts. In these two characteristics lies sufficient 
 explanation of the opposite views as to his simplicity 
 as a poet. No poet ever drew from simpler sources 
 than Wordsworth, but none ever made so much out 
 of so little. He stemmed the commonplace currents 
 of emotion, and often succeeded in so reversing them, 
 that men were puzzled when they saw Aveakness 
 transformed into power and sorrow into rapture. 
 He used up successfully the waifs and strays of his 
 imaginative life, reaped so much from opportunity, 
 hope, and memoiy, that men were as puzzled at the 
 simplicity of his delights as they are when they 
 watch the occasions of a child's laughter. 
 
 Thus there is no poet Avho gives to his theme so 
 perfectly new a birth as Wordsworth. He does not
 
 II THE GENIUS OF WOEDSWORTII 93 
 
 discern and revivify the natural life which is in it ; 
 he creates a new thing altogether, namely, the life of 
 thought which it has the power to generate in his 
 own brooding imagination. I have already said that 
 he uses human sorrow, for example, as an influence 
 to stir up his own meditative spirit, till it loses its 
 own nature and becomes 
 
 " Sorrow that is not sorrow, but delight ; 
 And miserable love, that is not jiain 
 To hear of, for the glory that redounds 
 Therefrom to human kind and what we are." ^ 
 
 And it is this strange transmuting power, which his 
 meditative spirit exercises over all earthly and human 
 themes, that gives to Wordsworth's poems the intense 
 air of solitude which everywhere pervades them. 
 He is the most solitary of poets. Of him, with 
 far more point than of Milton, may it be said, in 
 Wordsworth's own words, that "his soul was like 
 a star, and dwelt apart." Of all English poems, his 
 works are the most completely outside the sphere of 
 Shakespeare's universal genius. In solitude only 
 could they have originated, and in solitude only can 
 they be perfectly enjoyed. It is impossible not to 
 feel the loneliness of a mind which never surrenders 
 itself to the natural and obvious currents of thought 
 or feeling in the theme taken, but changes their 
 direction by cool sidewinds from his own spiritual 
 nature. Natural rays of feeling are refracted the 
 moment they enter Wordsworth's imagination. It is 
 not the theme acting on the man that you see, but 
 the man acting on the theme. He himself con- 
 sciously brings to it the spiritual forces which deter- 
 mine the lines of meditation; he evades, or, as I 
 ^ Prehide, book xiii. p. 345.
 
 94 THE GENIUS OF WOEDSWORTH ii 
 
 have insisted, even resists the inherent tendencies of 
 emotion belonging to his subject ; catches it up into 
 his high spiritual imagination, and makes it yield a 
 totally different fruit of contemjjlation to any which 
 it seemed naturally likely to bear. It is in this that 
 he differs so completely in manner from other self- 
 conscious poets — Goethe, for instance, who in like 
 manner always left the shadow of himself on the 
 field of his vision. But with Goethe it is a shadow 
 of self in quite a different sense. Goethe watches 
 himself drifting along the tide of feeling, and keeps 
 an eye open outside his heart. But though he over- 
 hears himself, he does not interfere "vvith himself ; he 
 listens breathlessly, and notes it down. Wordsworth, 
 on the other hand, refuses to listen to this natural 
 self at all. He knows another world of pure and 
 buoyant meditation ; and he knows that all which is 
 transplanted into it bears there a new and nobler 
 fruit. With fixed visionary purpose he snatches 
 away his subject from the influence of the lower 
 currents it is beginning to obey, and compels it to 
 breathe its life into that silent sky of conscious free- 
 dom and immortal hope in which his own spirit lives. 
 Wordsworth has himself explained this fixed purpose 
 of his imagination to stay the drift of common 
 thoughts and common trains of feeling, and lift them 
 up into the light of a higher meditative mood, in a 
 passage of a remarkable letter to The Friend. It 
 illustrates so curiously the deeper methods of his 
 genius, that I must quote it : — 
 
 "A familiar incident may render plain tlie manner in 
 which a process of intellectual improvement, the reverse of 
 that ivhich nature pursues, is by reason introduced. There 
 never, perhaps, existed a school-boj^ who, having, when 
 he retired to rest, carelessly blown out his candle, and
 
 11 THE GENIUS OF WOEDSWORTII 95 
 
 having chanced to notice, as he lay upon his bed in the 
 ensuing darkness, the sullen light which had survived 
 the extinguished flame, did not, at some time or other, 
 watch that light as if his mind were bound to it by a 
 spell. It fades and revives — gathers to a point — seems 
 as if it would go out in a moment — again recovers its 
 strength, nay, becomes brighter than before : it continues 
 to shine with an endurance, which in its apparent weak- 
 ness is a mystery — it protracts its existence so long, 
 clinging to the power which supports it, that the ob- 
 server, who had lain down in his bed so easy-minded, 
 becomes sad and melancholy : his sympathies are touched 
 — it is to him an intimation and an image of departing 
 life ; the thought comes nearer to him — it is the life of a 
 venerated parent, of a beloved brother or sister, or of an 
 aged domestic ; who are gone to the grave, or whose des- 
 tiny it soon may be thus to linger, thus to hang upon the 
 last point of mortal existence, thus finally to depart and 
 be seen no more. This is nature teaching seriously and 
 sweetly through the affections ; melting the heart, and, 
 through that instinct of tenderness, developing the under- 
 standing. In this instance the object of solicitude is the 
 bodily life of another. Let us accompany this same boy 
 to that period between youth and manhood, when a 
 solicitude may be awakened for the moral life of himself. 
 Are there any powers by which, beginning with a sense 
 of inward decay, that affects not, however, the natural 
 life, he could call to mind the same image, and hang over 
 it with an equal interest as a visible type of his own 
 perishing spirit ? 0, surely, if the being of the individual 
 be under his own care ; if it be his first care ; if duty 
 begin from the point of accountableness to our conscience, 
 and, through that, to God and human nature ; if without 
 such primary sense of duty, all secondary care of teacher, 
 of friend or parent, must be baseless and fruitless ; if, 
 lastly, the motions of the soul transcend in worth those 
 of the animal functions, nay, give to them their sole
 
 96 THE GENIUS OF WORDSWORTH II 
 
 value, — then truly are there such powers : and the image 
 of the dying taper may be recalled and contemplated, 
 though with no sadness in the nerves, no disposition to 
 tears, no unconquerable sighs, yet with a melancholy in the 
 soul, a sinking inward into ourselves from thought to thought, 
 a steady remonstrance, and a high resolve. Let, then, the 
 youth go back, as occasion will permit, to nature and to 
 solitude, thus admonished by reason, and relying upon 
 this newly-acquired support. A world of fresh sensations 
 will gradually oj^en upon him as his mind puts off its 
 iufirmities, and as, instead of being ijropelled restlessly to- 
 wards others in admiration, or too hasty love, he makes it 
 his prime business to understand himself. New sensa- 
 tions, I affirm, will be opened out — pure, and sanctioned 
 by that reason which is their original author ; and pre- 
 cious feelings of disinterested, that is, self-disregarding joy 
 and love may be regenerated and restored : and, in this 
 sense, he may be said to measure back the track of life 
 he has trod." 
 
 One feels that the poet must live alone in order 
 thus consciously to bathe all that he touches with a 
 new atmosphere not its own. We are most alone 
 when we most distinctly feel the boundary-line be- 
 tween ourselves and the Avorld beyond us. In acts 
 of free-will the sense of human solitude is always at 
 its height ; for in them we distinguish ourselves from 
 all things else. And in the world of imagination 
 this spiritual freedom is esjiecially remarkable. 2'here 
 one has always heard that freedom is not, that genius 
 is undisputed master of the will. Wordsworth's poetry 
 is the living refutation of this assertion. He is so 
 solitary, because his spirit consciously directs his 
 imagination, and imposes on it from wdthin influences 
 stronger than any it receives from without. 
 
 "The outward shows of sky and earth. 
 Of hill and valley, he has viewed " ;
 
 II THE GENIUS OF WORDSWOKTH 97 
 
 but 
 
 " imj^ulses of deeper birth 
 Have come to liim in solitude." ^ 
 
 Reverie is not, in this sense, solitary, and Wordsworth 
 is not the poet of reverie. In reverie the mind 
 wholly loses the boundaries of its own life, and wan- 
 ders away unconsciously to the world's end. Words- 
 worth's musings are never reveries. He neither loses 
 himself nor the centre of his thought. He carries 
 his own spiritual world with him, draws the thing or 
 thought or feeling on which he intends to write, from 
 its common orbit, fixes it, like a new star, in his own 
 higher firmament, and there contemplates it beneath 
 the gleaming lights and mysterious shadows of its 
 new sphere. It is in this respect that he differs so 
 widely in habit of thought from Coleridge, who was 
 also a muser in his way. All his thoughts in any 
 one poem flow as surely from a distinct centre as the 
 fragrance from a flower. With Coleridge they flit 
 away down every new avenue of vague suggestion, till 
 we are lost in the inextricable labyrinth of tangled 
 associations. The same spiritual freedom which set 
 Wordsworth's imagination in motion, also controlled 
 and fixed it on a single focus. And this he himself 
 noted in contrasting his o-svn early mental life with 
 his friend's abstract and vagrant habits of fancy : — 
 
 " I had forms distinct 
 To steady me ; each airy thought revolved 
 Round a substantial centre, which at once 
 Incited it to motion and controlled. 
 I did not pine like one in cities bred, 
 As was thy melancholy lot, dear friend, 
 
 1 (( 
 
 A Poet's Epitaph," vol. v. of Wordsworth's Poems, p. 24 
 
 (the seven-volume edition). 
 
 L H
 
 98 THE GENIUS OF WORDSWORTH il 
 
 Great spirit as thou art, in endless dreams 
 Of sickliness, disjoining, joining, things 
 Without the light of knowledge.'' ^ 
 
 That this hardy spiritual freedom, acting through the 
 imagination, and drawing the object of the poet's 
 contemplation voluntarily and purposely into his own 
 world of thought, is the most distinguishing char- 
 acteristic of Wordsworth's poetry, may be best 
 verified by comparing him with any other of our 
 great poets. Most other poets create their poetry, 
 and even their meditative poetry, in the act of throw- 
 ing themselves into the life of the scene or train of 
 thought or feeling they are contemplating : Words- 
 worth deliberately withdraws his imagination from 
 the heart of his picture to contemplate it in its 
 spiritual relations. Thus, for instance, Tennyson 
 and Wordsworth start from the same mood, the one 
 in the song " Tears, idle tears," the other in the 
 poem called "The Fountain." Tennyson's exquisite 
 poem is well known : — 
 
 " Tears, idle tears, I Tsnow not what they mean ; 
 Tears from the depth of some divine despair 
 Eise in the heart, and gather to the eyes. 
 In looking on the happy Autumn-fields, 
 And thinking of the days that are no more. 
 
 " Fresh as the first beam glitteiing on a sail. 
 That brings our friends up from the underworld ; 
 Sad as the lasjt which reddens over one 
 That sinks with all we love below the verge ; 
 So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more. 
 
 " Ah, sad and strange, as in dark summer dawns 
 The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds 
 
 1 "Prelude," book viii. p. 224.
 
 II THE GENIUS OF WORDSWOETH 99 
 
 To dying ears, when unto dying eyes 
 
 The casement slowly grows a glimmering square ; 
 
 So sad, so strange, the days that are no more. 
 
 " Dear as remembered kisses after death, 
 And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned 
 On lips that are for others ; deep as love, 
 Deep as first love, and wild with all regret ; 
 O Death in Life, the days that are no more." 
 
 Now turn to Wordsworth's treatment of the 
 same theme : — 
 
 " My eyes are dim with childish tears, 
 My heart is idly stirred ; 
 For the same sound is in my ears 
 Which in those days I heard. 
 
 " Thus fares it still in our decay ; 
 And yet the wiser mind 
 Mourns less for what age takes away 
 Than what it leaves behind. 
 
 " The blackbird amid leafy trees, 
 The lark above the hill. 
 Let loose their carols when they please. 
 Are quiet when they will. 
 
 " With Nature never do they wage 
 A foolish strife ; they see 
 A happy youth, and their old age 
 Is beautiful and free. 
 
 " But we are pressed by heavy laws ; 
 And often, glad no more. 
 We wear a face of joy because 
 We have been glad of yore." 
 
 Tennyson continues in the same strain of emotion 
 with which he begins, picturing the profound iin-
 
 100 THE GENIUS OF WOKDSWORTH ii 
 
 speakable sadness wath which Ave survey the irre- 
 coverable past ; Wordsworth no sooner touches the 
 same theme than he checks the current of emotion, 
 and, to use his own words, " instead of being rest- 
 lessly propelled " by it, he makes it the object of 
 contemplation, and, " with no unconquerable sighs, 
 yet -with a melancholy in the soul, sinks inward into 
 himself, from thought to thought, to a steady re- 
 monstrance and a high resolve." And thus meditating, 
 he wrings from the temporary sadness fresh conviction 
 that the ebbing away, both in spirit and in appearance, 
 of the brightest past, sad as it must ever be, is not 
 so sad a thing as the weak yearning which, in 
 departing, it often leaves stranded on the soul, to 
 cling to the appearance when the spirit is irrecover- 
 ably lost. There is no other great poet who thus 
 redeems new ground for spiritual meditation from 
 beneath the very sweep of the tides of the most 
 engrossing affections, and quietly maintains it in 
 possession of the musing intellect. There is no 
 other but Wordsworth who has led us " to those 
 sweet counsels between head and heart" which flash 
 upon the absorbing emotions of the moment the 
 steady light of a calm infinite world. None but 
 Wordsworth has ever so completely transmuted by 
 an imaginative spirit, unsatisfied yearnings into 
 eternal truth. No other poet ever brought out as 
 he has done 
 
 " The soothing thoughts that spring 
 Out of human suffering " ; 
 
 or so tenderly preserved the 
 
 " wall-flower scents 
 From out the crumbling ruins of fallen pride " ; 
 
 or taught us how,
 
 II THE GENIUS OF WORDSWORTH 101 
 
 " By pain of heart, now checked, and now impelled, 
 The intellectual power through words and things 
 Went sounding on a dim and perilous way." 
 
 He has himself described this self-determination of 
 his genius to "preserve and enlarge the freedom in 
 himself" in lines so beautiful, that, though I have 
 already lingered long on this point, I cannot forbear 
 quoting them : — 
 
 "Within the soul a faculty abides 
 That, with interpositions which would hide 
 And darken, so can deal that they become 
 Contingencies of pomp, and serve to exalt 
 Her native brightness. As the ample moon, 
 In the deep stillness of a summer even, 
 Rising behind a thick and lofty grove, 
 Burns like an unconsuming fire of light 
 In tlie green trees ; and, kindling on all sides 
 Their leafy umbrage, turns the dusky veil 
 Into a substance glorious as her own. 
 Yea with lieT own incorporated, by power 
 Capacious and serene. Like power abides 
 In man's celestial spirit ; virtue thus 
 Sets forth and magnifies herself ; thus feeds 
 A calm, a beautiful, and silent fire 
 From the enciimbrances of mortal life, 
 From error, disappointment, — nay, from guilt ; 
 And sometimes, so relenting justice wills. 
 From palpable oppressions of despair." ^ 
 
 Of other poets, Tennyson at least may seem in some 
 of his more thoughtful poems (the " In Memoriam " 
 and " The Two Voices ") to have approached Words- 
 worth's domain in employing the spiritual imagination 
 to illuminate the moods of human emotion. In 
 
 1 "Excursion," book iv. p. 152.
 
 102 THE GENIUS OF WOEDSWORTH li 
 
 reality, however, even these poems are quite distinct 
 in kind. They are more like glittering sparks flying 
 upwards from the flames of self-consuming aspirations 
 than the quiet, steadfast, and spiritual lights of 
 Wordsworth's insight. 
 
 But it is by no means principally in treating 
 these deeper themes that "Wordsworth brings the 
 most of this conscious, voluntary, imaginative force 
 to bear upon his subjects. All his most characteristic 
 poems bear vivid traces of the same mental process. 
 In his poems on subjects of natural beauty it is 
 perhaps even more remarkable than in his treatment 
 of mental subjects Avhere this contemplative with- 
 drawal from the immediate tyranny of a present 
 emotion, in order to gain a higher point of view, 
 seems more natural. But in all his most charac- 
 teristic poems on nature there is just the same 
 method : first a subjection of the mind to the scene 
 or object of feeling studied ; then a withdrawing into 
 his deeper self to exhaust its meaning. Thus, in 
 the fine poems on Yarrow, the point of departure is 
 the craving of the mind to see an object long ago 
 painted in the imagination ; but instead of yielding 
 to the current of that feeling, the poet checks himself, 
 and asks whether the imaginative anticipation may 
 not in itself be a richer wealth than any reality 
 which could take its place : — 
 
 " Let beeves and homebred kine partake 
 
 The sweets of Burn-mill meadow. 
 The swan on still St. Mary's Lake 
 
 Float double swan and sliudow ! 
 We will not see them, will not go 
 
 To-day, nor yet to-morrow : 
 Enough if in our hearts we know 
 
 There's such a place as Yarrow.
 
 n THE GENIUS OF WORDSWOIITII 103 
 
 " Be Yarrow stream unseen, unknown ! 
 
 It must, or we shall rue it ; 
 We have a vision of our own, — 
 
 Ah, why should we undo it I 
 The treasured dreams of time long past. 
 
 We'll keep them, winsome Marrow ; 
 For when we're there, although 'tis fair, 
 
 'Twill be another Yarrow." 
 
 And in the same way, in the poem on " Yarrow 
 visited," after brooding over its beauties, he puts 
 them at a distance from him, to distinguish the 
 influence of the " waking dream," " the image that 
 hath perished," in helping him to see the reality : 
 " I see, but not by sight alone, loved Yarrow, have 
 I won thee." And then finally, in revisiting the 
 same spot in old age, we have first the picture of the 
 present ; and, as the memory of the past, with its 
 regrets, naturally follows, again the poet shakes him- 
 self free from this regret — the natural mood of the 
 natural man, so to speak — in recognising the beauties 
 of happier years, to win the higher spiritual insight 
 that 
 
 " the visions of the past 
 
 Sustain the heart in feeling 
 Life as she is — our changeful life. 
 
 With friends and kindred dealing." 
 
 And he ends this most perfect triad of spiritual 
 imaginations with the characteristic verse- — 
 
 "O" 
 
 " Flow on for ever. Yarrow stream, 
 
 Fulfil thy pensive duty. 
 Well pleased that future bards should chant 
 
 For simple hearts thy beauty ; 
 To dream-light dear while yet unseen, 
 
 Dear to the common sunshine.
 
 104 THE GENIUS OF WORDSWOKTH II 
 
 And dearer still, as now I feel, 
 
 To memory's shadowy moonshine." 
 
 As more striking illustrations of the same poetic 
 method — more striking simply because the sul)jects 
 are apparently so purely descriptive that there Avould 
 seem to be less room for this " sinking inward into 
 himself from thought to thought " — I may recall 
 those daffodils transfigured before the " inward eye, 
 which is the bliss of solitude " ; the cuckoo, which, 
 though " babbling only to the vale of sunshine and 
 of flowers," he spiritualises into a "wandering voice" 
 that " tellest unto me a tale of visionary hours " ; 
 the mountain echo, which sends her "unsolicited 
 reply " to the same babbling w^anderer ; the nut-laden 
 hazel-branches, whose luxuriant feast first threw him 
 into " that SAveet mood when pleasure loves to pay tri- 
 bute to ease," and which then so " patiently gave up 
 their quiet being," that, haunted by remorse, he is com- 
 pelled to exclaim, " with gentle hand touch, for there 
 is a spirit in the woods " ; the daisy, that recalls him 
 from " stately passions " to " the homely sympathy 
 that heeds the common life our nature breeds " ; and 
 the mists, which "magnify and spread the glories of 
 the sun's Ijright head." But there is no finer instance 
 of Wordsw^orth's self-Avithdra-wing mood in gazing at 
 external things than that of the lines on the Boy of 
 Windermere who mocked the owls. For real lovers 
 of Wordsworth, these lines have effected more in 
 helping them adequately to imagine the full depth of 
 the human imagination, and to feel the inexhaustible 
 wealth of Nature's symbols, than any magnificence of 
 storm, or shipwreck, or Alpine solitude : — 
 
 " There was a boy : ye knew him well, ye cliffs 
 And islands of Winander ! many a time
 
 II • THE GENIUS OF WOKDSWORTH 105 
 
 At evening, when the earliest stars began 
 
 To move along the edges of the hills, 
 
 Eising or setting, would he stand alone 
 
 Beneath the trees or by the glimmering lake ; 
 
 And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands 
 
 Pressed closely palm to palm, and to his month 
 
 Uplifted, he, as through an instrument. 
 
 Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls. 
 
 That they might answer him ; and they would shout 
 
 Across the watery vale and shout again, 
 
 Eesponsive to his call, with quivering peals, 
 
 And long halloos and screams, and echoes loud 
 
 Redoubled and redoubled ; concourse wild 
 
 Of mirth and jocund din : and when it chanced 
 
 That pauses of deep silence mocked his skill, 
 
 Then sometimes, in that silence while he hung 
 
 Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise 
 
 Has carried far into his heart the voice 
 
 Of mountain torrents ; or the visible scene 
 
 Would enter unawares into his mind, 
 
 With all its solemn imagery, its rocks, 
 
 Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received 
 
 Into the bosom of the steady lake." 
 
 No other poet but Wordsworth that the world ever 
 produced could have written this ; you feel in read- 
 ing it that the lines " a gentle shock of mild surprise 
 has carried far into his heart the voice of mountain tor- 
 rents," had for him an exactness as well as a fulness of 
 meaning ; — for he shows a curious power of carefully 
 discriminating the degrees of depth in his poetic 
 imaginations : some lie near the surface ; others lie 
 deeper, but still within the sphere of less meditative 
 minds ; others spring from a depth far beyond the 
 reach of any human soundings. 
 
 Again, the beauty of Wordsworth's little ballads 
 is never properly understood by those who do not
 
 106 THE GENIUS OF WORDSWORTH ii 
 
 enter into the contemplative tone in which they are 
 written. There is none of them that can be ap- 
 proached in a mood of sympathetic emotion without 
 failing to produce its full effect. " Lucy Gray," for 
 example, is a continual disappointment to those who 
 look for an expression of the piteousness and desola- 
 tion of the lost child's fate.^ Wordsworth did not 
 feel it thus ; he was contemplating a pure and lonely 
 death as the natural completion of a pure and lonely 
 life. He calls it not "Desolation," but "Solitude." 
 He strikes the keynote of the poem in speaking of 
 her in the first verse as "the solitary child," and 
 then 
 
 " No mate, no comrade Lucy knew ; 
 
 She dwelt on a wide moor, 
 The siceetest thing that ever greio 
 
 Beside a human door." 
 
 Wordsworth's purpose evidently was to paint a 
 perfectly lovely solitary flower snapped, for its very 
 purity, in its earliest bud, that it might remain an 
 image of solitary beauty for ever. He intended to 
 dissolve away all pain and pity in the loveliness of 
 the picture. It was not the lot of Lucy Gray, but 
 the spiritualised meaning of that lot as it lived in 
 his imagination, that he desired to paint. Again, in 
 the exquisite ballad "We are Seven," few discern 
 how every touch throughout the whole is intended 
 to heighten the contrast between the natural health 
 and joy of life in the living child and the super- 
 natural secret of death. It is not a mere tale of one 
 little cottage girl, who could not conceive the full 
 meaning of death : it is the poet's contemplative 
 
 ^ Such as Mr. Kingsley, for instance, lias so finely given in 
 his ballad on the girl lost on the sands of Dee.
 
 II THE GENIUS OF WOEDSWORTH 107 
 
 contrast between the rosy beauty and buoyant joy- 
 ousness of children's life and the " incommunicable " 
 sleep, which is the subject of the poem. The perfect 
 art with which this is effected is seldom adequately 
 observed. He introduces the living child with a 
 glimpse of the brightness that childish health and 
 beauty breathe around them : — 
 
 " She had a rustic woodland air, 
 And she was wildly clad ; 
 Her hair was fair, and very fair : 
 Her beauty made me glad." 
 
 And when he has drawn the picture of her eating 
 her supper by the little graves of her brother and 
 sister, that she may "sit and sing to them," he 
 heightens the contrast yet more, — 
 
 " The first that died was little Jane : 
 In bed she moaning lay, 
 Till God released her of her pain, 
 And then she went away. 
 
 " So in the churchyard she was laid ; 
 And when the grass was dry, 
 Together round her grave we played, 
 My brother John and I. 
 
 " And when the ground was white with snow, 
 And I could run and slide, 
 My brother John was forced to go, 
 And he lies by her side." 
 
 Simple as this language is, it is not dramatic, it is 
 not the language in which a child would have sjDoken. 
 It is the language of a poet musing on the contrast 
 between the little silent graves, changing with every 
 season, freshening with the spring, wetted by the
 
 108 THE GENIUS OF WOKDSWORTH ii 
 
 rain, and whitened by the winter's snow, like any- 
 other specks of common earth, and the buoyant 
 child's unshaken fancy that they contain her sister 
 and her brother still. So full is she of life herself, 
 that though she can "run and slide," the Avhitened 
 mounds still seem to her to hide a life as vivid as 
 her OAvn. 
 
 The voluntary element that I have noticed in 
 Wordsworth's genius — the preference for checking 
 obvious and natural currents of thought or feeling in 
 order to brood over them meditatively and bring out 
 a result of a higher order — leads to many of his 
 imperfections as well as beauties. He had, as I have 
 noticed, an eminently frugal mind. He liked of all 
 things to make the most of the smaller subject before 
 he gave himself up to the greater. The sober, 
 sparing, free-will with Avhich he gathers up the 
 crumbs, and feeds his genius on them before he will 
 break in on any whole loaf, is eminently character- 
 istic of him. Emotion does not hurry him into poetry 
 nor into anything else. He " slackens his thoughts 
 hy choice"^ when they grow eager; he defers his 
 feast of nuts that he may first enjoy expectation to 
 the full ; he will wear out the luxury of his imagin- 
 ations of Yarrow before he tries the reality ; he is 
 more willing by far to wait for the due seasons of 
 poetry than the husbandman for the due seasons 
 of fruit : — 
 
 " His mind was keen, 
 Intense, and frugal ; apt for all affairs. 
 And watcliful more than ordinary men."^ 
 
 The poem on the strawberry-blossom is right from 
 the heart of his own nature : — 
 
 1 " Prelude," book i. = Michael.
 
 II THE GENIUS OF WOKDSWOKTH 109 
 
 " That is work of waste and ruin : 
 Do as Charles and I are doing. 
 Strawberry-blossoms one and all, 
 We must spare them — here are many 
 Look at it, the flower is small — 
 Small and low, but fair as any ; 
 Do not touch it — summers two 
 I am older, Anne, than you. 
 
 Hither, soon as spring has fled. 
 
 You and Charles and I will walk ; 
 
 Lurking berries ripe and red 
 
 Then will hang on every stalk. 
 
 Each within its leafy bower ; 
 
 And for that promise spare the flower." 
 
 And so Wordsworth himself would always have 
 saved up his strawberry-blossoms of poetry till the 
 "lurking berries ripe and red" lay in them, had he 
 had the quick eye to distinguish surely between the 
 unripe beauty and the ripe. But this he had not. 
 As he himself tells us, he found it almost impossible 
 to distinguish "a timorous capacity from prudence," 
 " from circumspection, infinite delay." He had not 
 that swiftness and fusion of nature which helps a 
 man to distinguish at once the fruit of his lovrer from 
 that of his higher moods. He gathered in 
 
 " the harvest of a quiet eye. 
 That broods and sleeps on its own heart," 
 
 with undiscriminating frugality, gathering in often 
 both tares and wheat. It was that same voluntary 
 character of his imaginative life, which enabled him 
 to give so new an aspect to his themes, which also 
 rendered him unable to distinguish with any delicacy 
 between the various moods in which he wrote. A
 
 110 THE GENIUS OF WOEDS WORTH ii 
 
 poet who is the mere instrument, as it were, of his 
 own impulses of genius, knows when the influence 
 is upon him ; but a poet whose visionary mood is 
 always half-voluntary, and a result of a gradual with- 
 drawing of the mind into its deeper self, cannot 
 well have the same quick vision for the boundary 
 between commonplace and living imagination which 
 belongs to natures of more spontaneous genius. 
 Wordsworth seems to kindle his own poetic flame 
 like a blind man kindling his own fire ; and often, 
 as it were, he goes through the process of lighting it 
 without observing that the fuel is damp and has not 
 caught the spark ; and thus, though he has left us 
 many a beacon of pure and everlasting glory flaming 
 from the hills, he has left us also many a monu- 
 mental pile of fuel from which the poetic fire has 
 early died away. 
 
 It is clear that Wordsworth as a poet did, as he 
 tells us himself, " feel the weight of too much liberty." 
 In his finest poem he declares — 
 
 " Me this unchartered freedom tires, 
 I feel the weight of chance desires." 
 
 And no doubt he had even too complete a mastery 
 over himself. He could not distinguish the arbitrary 
 in his poetry from the conscious conquests of insight. 
 And being, as we have seen, most frugal, — feeling, 
 as he did, to the very last day of his poetic life, that 
 it was the greatest of impieties to " tax high Heaven 
 with prodigality,"^ — he made not only the most of 
 these " chance desires " or suggestions, but often more 
 than the most, using them as the pedestals to 
 thoughts in reality far too broad for them. It is 
 
 ^ See the beautiful verses, ' ' The unremitting voice of nightly 
 streams," to which the date 1846 is attached.
 
 II THE GENIUS OF WOEDS WORTH 111 
 
 the great defect of Wordsworth's poems, that where 
 he has to deal with circumstance at all, he either 
 gives it in all its baldness, or makes his meditations 
 overhang it, like the projecting stories of old- 
 fashioned houses, in which the basement is more 
 costly than the air, and therefore is husbanded more 
 carefully. To him the basement of circumstance 
 was very costly, and the superinduced contemplation 
 as abundant as the former was costly. Coleridge 
 has criticised this tendency in Wordsworth to spread 
 out a dome of thought over very insufficient supports 
 of fact, in accusing him of " thoughts and images too 
 great for their subject." It is mistaken criticism, I 
 think, to assert this, as Coleridge does, of any of his 
 poems on Nature. The daisy and the daflfodils 
 breathed a buoyant joy and love into Wordsworth's 
 simple natui'e which Coleridge could but half under- 
 stand. The thoughts were not too great for the real 
 influences they are capable of exerting. But to his 
 poems on incident, Coleridge's charge is often per- 
 fectly applicable. The folloAving criticism, for in- 
 stance, contains a fair illustration of this tendency to 
 erect a meditative dome over an inadequate pedestal. 
 I quote from Coleridge's Biographia Literaria : — 
 
 " The poet having gone out for a clay's tour of pleasure, 
 meets early in the morning with a knot of gipsies, who 
 had pitched their blanket-tents and straw-beds, together 
 with their children and asses, in some field by the road- 
 side. At the close of the day, on his return, our tourist 
 found them in the same place. 'Twelve hours,' says he, 
 
 " 'Twelve hours, twelve bounteous hours are gone, while I 
 Have been a traveller under open sky, 
 Much witnessing of change and cheer ; 
 Yet as I left I find them here.' 
 
 Whereat the poet, without seeming to reflect that the poor
 
 112 THE GENIUS OF WORDSWORTH ii 
 
 tawny wanderers might probably have been tramping for 
 weeks together through road and lane, over moor and 
 mountain, and consequently must have been right glad to 
 rest themselves, their children, and cattle for one whole 
 day ; and overlooking the obvious truth, that such repose 
 might be quite as necessary for them as a walk of the 
 same continuance was pleasing or healthful for the more 
 fortunate poet, — expresses his indignation in a series of 
 lines, the diction and imagery of which would have been 
 rather above than below the mark had they been applied 
 to the immense empire of China, improgressive for thirty 
 centuries : — 
 
 " ' The weary sun betook himself to rest : — 
 Then issued Vesper from the fulgent west, 
 Outshining like a visible god, 
 The glorious path in which he trod. 
 And now ascending after one dark hour, 
 And one night's diminution of her power, 
 Behold the mighty Moon ! This way 
 She looks, as if at them ; but they 
 Regard not her : — 0, better wrong and strife, 
 Better vain deeds or evil, than such life ! 
 The silent heavens have goings on ; 
 The stars have tasks ; — but these have none.' " 
 
 There is no structural power in Wordsworth's 
 mind. When he has to deal with things, influences, 
 living unities, he is usually opulent and at ease ; for 
 the natural emanations which flowers and mountains 
 and children and simple rustic natures breathe 
 around them are homogeneous in themselves, and 
 only need a poet who will open his whole spirit to 
 them with steady contemplative eye, and draw in 
 their atmosphere. But when much incident enters 
 into poetry, the poet also needs high combining 
 power ; he needs the art of rapidly changing his 
 mental attitude, and yet keejiing the same tone and
 
 II THE GENIUS OF WORDSWORTH 113 
 
 mood throughout ; and to this the voluntary, frugal, 
 contemplative character of Wordsworth's intellectual 
 nature is quite unequal. AVherever there is extended 
 surface in his subject, there there is want of unity in 
 the poem — inadequacy to blend a variety of elements 
 into a single picture. There is no whole landscape 
 in all Wordsworth's exquisite studies of nature. 
 There is no variety of moral influences in all his 
 many beautiful contemplations of character. There 
 is no distinct centre of interest in any but his very 
 simplest narratives. Indeed, he can deal with facts 
 successfully only when they are simple enough to 
 embody but a single idea : as in the case of Peter 
 Bell and the Idiot Boy. If they have any character 
 of accident about them, this reappeai"s in his poems 
 in all the accidental, discontinuous, and straggling 
 form of its original existence. Almost any one of 
 Wordworth's fact-poems will immediately occur to 
 the mind in illustration of this — " Simon Lee," 
 "Alice Fell," the story of the traveller lost on 
 Helvellyn, and many others. They are anecdotes, 
 with passages often of surpassing beauty, but still 
 untransmuted anecdotes, — here a bit of fact — there 
 a gleam of natural loveliness — then a layer more of 
 fact, and so forth. He neither throws himself into 
 the narrative, so as to give you the active spirit of 
 life inside it, as Scott did ; nor does he give solely 
 the contemplative view of it, as in his simplest 
 ballads he can do with so much beauty ; but he 
 sprinkles a little macadam of stony fact along the 
 fair upland path of his imagination. Thus, in the 
 early editions of " The Thorn," he anxiously recorded 
 the size of the infant's grave — 
 
 " I've measured it from side to side, 
 'Tis three feet long and two feet wide," 
 
 L I
 
 114 THE GENIUS OF WORDSWORTH ii 
 
 — suggesting, of course, that the poet was an under- 
 taker calculating accurately the measure of the 
 coffin. 
 
 Yet these spots of prosiness are eminently char- 
 acteristic of Woixlsworth. He had vividly acute 
 senses, and delighted in the mere physical use of 
 them ; they both relieved him from the strain of 
 contemplation, and suggested new food for contem- 
 plation. "I speak," he says in "The Prelude," 
 
 " in recollection of a time 
 When the bodily eye — in every stage of life 
 The most despotic of our senses — gained 
 Such strength in me, as often held my mind 
 In absolute dominion. . , . 
 I roam'd from hill to hill, from rock to rock, 
 Still craving combination of new forms ; 
 New pleasure ; wider empire for the sight. 
 Proud of her own endowments ; and rejoiced 
 To lay the inner faculties asleei)." 
 
 The truth of this statement is obvious to any one 
 who reads his earliest poems ; and these vivid senses 
 continued to the last to work quite in separation 
 from the poetic sj^irit within him ; so that no poet 
 gives us so strong a feeling of the contrast between 
 the inward and the outward as Wordsworth ; he 
 dives into himself between his respirations, that he 
 may exclude for a little Avhile the tyranny of the 
 senses, and so not waste his life in the mere animal 
 pleasure of breathing. A geometrician would say, 
 that while most other poetry moves on the plane of 
 life, Wordsworth's is poetry of double curvature, and 
 winds in and out continually beneath and above it. 
 One of Wordsworth's biographers states, that the 
 sense of hearing was the finest sense Wordsworth 
 had, and gave rise to the finest poetry of Nature he
 
 II THE GENIUS OF WORDSWOETH 115 
 
 ever ^vl■ote. The latter statement is, I think, true ; 
 but the inference from it, that the ear was the finest 
 of Wordsworth's senses, is probably an error. There 
 is no indication that he had any fine faculty for 
 music ; and I think the reasoning by which it was 
 inferred that he had, is probably almost an inversion 
 of the truth. It is because the ear cannot and does 
 not fill and distract the contemplative mind so much 
 as the eye, — because sound appeals directly to the 
 interj)reting spirit, and has so little substantive signi- 
 ficance of its own, — that Wordsworth's poetry on 
 sounds has, perhaps, less discontinuity, more fusion, 
 than his poetry on sight. Vision absorbed him, and 
 would not allow his " inward eye " to see until sight 
 was exchanged for memory; and even then his 
 poems on visible things have two distinct portions — 
 the descriptive portion, or the strophe dedicated to 
 the eye, and the meditative antistrophe, which be- 
 longs to the mind. But when he listened, the 
 sound only served to keep his mind fixed on a single 
 centre, while it allowed him full scope for free medi- 
 tation. It was not easy for him to macadamise his 
 poetry with little abrupt matter-of-fact sounds. 
 There is no poem like that "To the Cuckoo" — of 
 all his poems Wordsworth's own darling. Whether 
 "through water, earth, and air, the soul of happy 
 sound was spread," or the "far-distant hills into the 
 tumult sent an alien sound of melancholy not un- 
 noticed," there was in every sound exj^ression enough 
 to stir the depths of Wordsworth's watchful heart 
 without enslaving his senses. 
 
 But it is by no means due only to the imperfect 
 unity between Wordsworth's spirit and senses, and 
 his disposition to save up all he saw for his poetry 
 just as he saw it, that these little disfiguring specks
 
 116 THE GENIUS OF WORDSWORTH ii 
 
 of incongruous material so often annoy us ; the 
 same thing occurs almost as often in his meditative 
 poems. There was a rigidity in his mind, the off- 
 spring probably of the intense meditation he was 
 wont to concentrate on single centres of thought. 
 Hazlitt has thus finely described the general expres- 
 sion of his personal appearance : —   
 
 "The next day Wordswoi-th arrived from Bristol 
 at Coleridge's cottage. I think I see liim now. He 
 answered in some degree to his friend's description of 
 him, but was more gaunt and Don-Quixote like. He was 
 quaintly dressed (according to the costume of that uncon- 
 strained period) in a brown fustian-jacket and striped 
 pantaloons. There was something of a roll, a lounge, in 
 his gait, not unlike his own Peter Bell. There was a 
 severe, worn pressure of thought about his temples, a 
 fire in his eye (as if he saw something in objects more 
 than the outward appearance), an intense high narrow 
 forehead, a Roman nose, cheeks furrowed by strong pur- 
 pose and feeling, and a convulsive inclination to laughter 
 about the mouth, a good deal at variance with the solemn 
 stately expression of the rest of his face. Chantrey's 
 bust wants the marking traits ; but he was teased into 
 making it regiilar aiid heavy. Haydon's head of him, 
 introduced into the Entrance of Christ into Jemsaleni, is 
 the most like his drooping weight of thought and expres- 
 sion. He sat down, and talked veiy naturally and 
 freely, with a mixture of clear gushing accents in his 
 voice, a deep guttural intonation, and a strong tincture of 
 the northern burr, like the crust on wine." 
 
 Clearly in Wordsworth, as well as in Peter Bell, 
 there were many of 
 
 " The unshaped half-human thoughts. 
 Which solitary nature feeds 
 'Mid summer storms or winter's ice."
 
 II THE GENIUS OF WORDSWORTH 117 
 
 One may almost apply to him that fine verse — 
 
 " There was a hardness in his cheek, 
 There was a hardness in his eye, 
 As though the man had fixed his face 
 In many a solitary place 
 Against the wind and open sky." 
 
 Indeed, he expressly tells us that this tendency to 
 hardness was the leaning of his mind ; but that he 
 had been led to more delicate and sensitive thoughts 
 by his sister's influence — 
 
 " She gave me eyes, she gave me ears, 
 And humble cares, and delicate fears ; 
 A heart the fountain of sweet tears. 
 And love, and thought, and joy." 
 
 The natural rigidity of his mind was great, and 
 hence, probalily, his great deficiency in humoiu", 
 which cannot exist -without a certain flexibility of 
 both feeling and thought, allowing of rapid transi- 
 tions from one point of view to another. It was not 
 only that he had " fixed his face in many a solitary 
 jjlace, against the wind and open sky," but in the 
 intellectual spaces it was the same. Against the in- 
 finite solitudes of the eternal world he had intently 
 fixed his spirit, till it too had something of the rigid 
 attitude of the mystic, and was crossed at times by 
 the dark spots which constant gazing at a great 
 brightness will always produce. He paid for the 
 frequency of 
 
 " that blessed mood 
 In which the burden of the mystery, 
 In which the heavy and the weary weight 
 Of all this unintelligible world 
 Is lightened — that serene and blessed mood, 
 In which the affections gently lead us on,
 
 118 THE GENIUS OF WORDSWORTH ii 
 
 Until the breatli of this corporeal frame, 
 And even the motion of our human blood, 
 Almost suspended, we are laid asleep 
 In body, and become a living soul ; 
 While with an eye made quiet by the power 
 Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, 
 We see into the life of things " ; 
 
 — he paid for the frequency of this mood by a want 
 of ease and delicacy in the lesser movements of his 
 intellectual nature, which rendered him often unable 
 to bring the minutiae even of his finest poems into 
 harmony with their spirit. Thus he often mistook 
 the commonplace observations of his superficial 
 understanding for the deeper thoughts of his heart ; 
 he had no living feeling that told him when he was 
 dividing things with the blunt edge of common 
 sense, and when he was Avielding that fine SAVord of 
 the imagination by which to the discerning eye the 
 poet divides asunder soul and spirit as surely as that 
 greater sword divides for judgment. He would fall 
 and rise in the same poem from clear vision to the 
 obscure gropings of common sense — from obscure 
 gropings to clear vision — and not feel the incon- 
 gruity. No one can help shrinking at the sudden 
 discord, when, in the lovely poem, " She was a phan- 
 tom of delight," we read — 
 
 " And now I see with eyes serene 
 The very pulse of the machine, 
 A being breathing thoughtful breath, 
 A traveller between life and death," 
 
 It is a jar to the mind, like coming do^vn three 
 steps A^thout notice, to stumble over this " machine " 
 in the midst of such a poem ; you think of an auto- 
 maton at once, or of Madame Tussaud's breathing
 
 II THE GENIUS OF WOEDSWORTH 119 
 
 figure. There are numbers of gritty little poems 
 completely written in this machine-mood ; but the 
 trial is severe when such a crag starts up to bruise 
 you in the midst of perfect loveliness. We should 
 not grumble if that " worthy short-lived youth " 
 commemorated in one of his sonnets, had been thus 
 spoken of as a superseded mechanism ; but that " a 
 dancing shape, an image gay," should be associated 
 with any notion of the kind, suggests a meaning for 
 the exquisite line " to haunt, to startle, and waylay," 
 the farthest possible, we should imagine, from the 
 mind of the poet in -^vriting it. 
 
 Many of these small discords which interrupt the 
 harmony of Wordsworth's poetry are due to the 
 egotism by which a man of moods so solitary and of 
 genius so decisive was almost necessarily haunted. 
 The smallest memoranda of his own mind or life he 
 will often preserve in his poetry, with a kind of blind 
 faith that they have a universal meaning. Thus, in 
 one of his sonnets, he tells us elaborately how he 
 gazed one day at the sea, and saw many ships, and 
 his mind gradually began to take a particular interest 
 in one of them, and how this one sailed northwards. 
 One of his most thoughtful admirers suggested that 
 this sonnet was perhaps trivial ; but Wordsworth 
 confuted her in a long letter, in which he proved 
 that the sonnet was a poetic illustration of a universal 
 law of mind, by virtue of which man must either 
 find or make a unity in all that he contemplates ; 
 and if there be no determining reason, then the 
 "liberty of indifference," as the metaphysicians call 
 it, will come into play, and he will select a unit of 
 thought ar1)itrarily, as the poet here chose for special 
 interest a special ship, of which he truly observes, 
 that she "was naught to me, nor I to her." "I
 
 120 THE GENIUS OF WORDSWOKTH ii 
 
 must say," says Wordsworth of this gently remon- 
 strant admirer, " that even she has something yet to 
 receive from me. I say this with confidence, from 
 her thinking that I have fallen below myself in the 
 sonnet beginning, ' With ships the sea was sprinkled 
 far and nigh.' " It might be replied, perhaps, that 
 the same reasoning would prove him to be justified 
 in using poetry to illustrate the simple conversion of 
 propositions, or in writing a touching sonnet on the 
 " Illicit process of the Major." The best and even 
 the most poetical defence Ave can make for such 
 caprices is, that they are venial egotisms ; for it is 
 certainly more poetic to exhibit life — even egotistic 
 life — in any fashion, than to illustrate merely formal 
 laws. I should not have alluded to this at all, but 
 that Hazlitt has set up a theory, founded in some 
 measure, perhaps, on these little personal egotisms, 
 to prove that Wordsworth's poetic power is born of 
 egotism, and is part and parcel of his com})lete want 
 of universality. 
 
 " Mr. Wordsworth is tlie last man to ' look abroad 
 into universality,' if that alone constituted genius : he 
 looks at home into himself, and is ' content with riches 
 fineless.' He would in the other case be ' poor as winter,' 
 if he had nothing but general capacity to trust to. He is 
 the greatest, that is, the most original j)oet of the present 
 day, only because he is the greatest egotist. He is ' self- 
 involved, not dark.' He sits in the centre of his own 
 being, and there ' enjoys bright day.' He does not waste 
 a thought on others. Whatever does not relate exclusively 
 and wholly to himself, is foreign to his views. He con- 
 teraplates a whole-length figure of himself ; he looks along 
 the unbroken line of his personal identity. He tlirusts 
 aside all other objects, all other interests, with scorn and 
 impatience, that he may repose on his own being ; that
 
 11 THE GENIUS OF WOKDSWORTII 121 
 
 he may dig out the treasures of thought contained in it ; 
 that he may unfold the precious stores of a mind for ever 
 brooding over itself. His genius is the effect of his in- 
 dividual character. He stamps that character — that deep 
 individual interest — on whatever he meets. The object 
 is nothing but as it furnishes food for internal meditation, 
 for old associations. If tliere had been no other being in 
 the universe, Mr. Wordsworth's poetry would have been 
 just what it is. . . , With a mind averse from outward 
 objects, but ever intent upon its own workings, he hangs 
 a weight of thought and feeling upon every trifling cir- 
 cumstance connected with his past history. The note of 
 the cuckoo sounds in his ear like the voice of other years ; 
 the daisy spreads it leaves in the rays of boyish delight 
 that stream from his thoughtful eyes ; the rainbow lifts 
 its proud arch in heaven but to mark his progress from 
 infancy to manhood ; an old thorn is buried, bowed down 
 under the mass of associations he has wound about it ; 
 and to him, as he himself beautifully says, 
 
 " ' The meanest flow'r that blows can give 
 Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.' " 
 
 Hazlitt's malicious genius delighted in this kind 
 of thorny praise. His criticisms are generally full 
 of insight ; and fall short of the truth mainly from 
 the deep scepticism which always leaves him per- 
 fectly contented with his own paradox. He has no 
 conviction that apparent paradox is not real. He is 
 quite willing to believe that mere egotism can be the 
 root of genius or of anything else that is noble, and 
 is not driven back to his facts by any aversion to so 
 startling a conclusion. He tells us farther on, that 
 Wordsworth's "strength, as it often happens, arises 
 from excess of weakness." This is but the sceptic's 
 bitter version of the truth, that " weakness constantly 
 arises from excess of strength " ; a form of the pro- 
 position not only more true in itself, but far more
 
 122 THE GENIUS OF "WORDSWORTH il 
 
 applicable to Wordsworth's poetry. Rcare gifts of 
 mind almost always tend to some overbalance of 
 habit, or thought, or feeling — to some narro-\vness, 
 pride, or humour, that is in itself a weakness. But 
 no weakness ever of itself tends to an opposite strength, 
 even though, as Wordsworth so finely observes in a 
 passage I have already quoted, the free and volun- 
 tary -wisdom of man may transmute it into an occa- 
 sion for developing the highest strength ; but this 
 is through the supernatural life, not through any 
 natural gravitation of weakness towards its opposite. 
 Strong affections may tend to feebleness of purpose, 
 but not feebleness of piu'pose to strong afiections. 
 Great contemplative power Avill tend to self-occupa- 
 tion, but self- occupation does not tend to contem- 
 plative power. Hazlitt saw that the egotism and 
 the genius in Wordsworth were closely related, and 
 -with half-malicious pleasure hastily assumed that the 
 worse quality had the deeper root. When he says 
 that Wordsworth's poetry is mainly derived from 
 " looking at home into himself," he says what I have 
 all along endeavoured to establish ; but when he 
 means by this the contradictory of " looking abroad 
 into universality," he is certainly and wilfully wrong. 
 There are two selfs in every man — the private and 
 the universal ; — the source of personal crotchets, and 
 the humanity that is our bond Avith our fellow-men, 
 and gives us our influence over them. Half AVords- 
 worth's weakness springs from the egotistical self, as 
 he himself implies when he says, 
 
 " Or is it that when human souls a journey long have had. 
 And are returned into themselves, they cannot but 
 be sad?"i 
 
 ^ " Star-gazers " {Poetical Works, vol. ii.)
 
 II THE GENIUS OF WORDSWORTH 123 
 
 But all his power springs from the universal self. 
 Nor is it in the least true that Wordsworth's finest 
 poems, as Hazlitt implies, are cocoons of arl)itrary 
 personal associations, spun around local and accidental 
 centres. The worst element in Wordsworth is the 
 arbitrary and occasional element. Freedom, indeed, 
 enters into his very finest poems, — but thoughtful, 
 not arbitrary freedom : he draws us out of the 
 natural currents of thought and emotion ; but if it 
 be from " chance desires," — if it be to have us " all to 
 himself," and give us an egotistic lectiu-e in his own 
 little study, — he is as far as possible from his true 
 poetic mood. 
 
 It is in order to put us into communication with a 
 part of his nature which has a feebler counterpart in 
 ourselves, — to give us the joy of feeling latent in- 
 tellectual powers quickened into conscious energy, — 
 that, in his finer poems, he gently intrudes upon us 
 his own higher imaginative life. It is an egotism, no 
 doubt, when he ends a fine poem with the verse — 
 
 " Matthew is in his grave ; yet now 
 Methinks I see him stand, 
 As at that moment, with a bough 
 Of wilding in his hand." 
 
 But it is not an egotism to tell us, as he does in 
 " The Prelude "— 
 
 " O, when I have hung 
 Above the raven's nest, by knots of grass 
 And half-inch fissures in the slippery rock, 
 But ill-sustained, and almost (so it seemed^) 
 Suspended by the blast that blew amain. 
 Shouldering the naked crag, — O, at that time, 
 
 ^ Unless, indeed, this pedantic accuracy as to insignificant 
 fact (not unusual in Wordsworth) be an egotism.
 
 124 THE GENIUS OF WOKDSWOETH II 
 
 While on the perilous ridge I hung alone, 
 With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind 
 Blow through my ear ! the sky seemed not a sky 
 Of earth, and with what motion moved the clouds ! " 
 
 The difference lies in this, that in the former case 
 the statement is a bare individual experience — vv^hich 
 adds nothing to the living expression of the poem — 
 the bough of " wilding " being entirely an " accidental 
 grace " — while the whole verse breaks the unity of 
 the subject by its abrupt transition to a different 
 period and point of view ; whereas the latter, though 
 also a personal memory, paints to the very life that 
 fresh wonder which the excitement of a little physical 
 danger will spread for any watching eye over the 
 whole face of heaven and earth. There is no egotism 
 or caprice in delineating personal experience that 
 helps to widen or renew the whole experience of 
 others. Wordsw^orth was much excited on one occa- 
 sion at being told he had written a poem on " a 
 daisy." "No," he said, "it was on the daisy — a 
 very different thing." There ivas a difference, and 
 it was a difference characteristic of his best poetry. 
 His finest mood never descends to local or personal 
 accidents alien to the experience or imagination of 
 his readers. Coleridge truly says in one of his 
 lectures, that Shakespeare never copied a character 
 from a mere individual — never painted a unique 
 character at all ; each of his characters might repre- 
 sent a whole class ; and so too, in his very different 
 world, all Wordsworth's higher poems have a certain 
 breadth of life and influence, without any of the 
 abstractness Avhich, in inferior poets, accompanies 
 breadth. 
 
 In what, then, may one say, in answer to Hazlitt's 
 criticism, that Wordsworth's universality consists, if
 
 ir THE GENIUS OF WORDSWOETH 125 
 
 high universal intelligence is to be found in his 
 poems ? Not in any power of elaborating what is 
 usually understood by universal Truth : indeed, for 
 so contemplative a poet, there is singularly little of 
 the comprehensive grasp of Reason in his mind. 
 Still less in any remarkable power of expressing 
 universal emotions, .though Hazlitt does regard him 
 as essentially lyrical. His especial poetic faculty 
 lies, I think, in contemplatively seizing the charac- 
 teristic individual influences Avhich all living things, 
 from the very smallest of earth or air, up to man 
 and the Spirit of God, radiate around them to every 
 mind that will siuTender itself to their expressive 
 power. It is not true that Wordsworth's genius lay 
 mainly in the region of mere Nature ; — rather say it 
 lay in detecting Nature's influences just at the point 
 where they were stealing unobserved into the very 
 essence of the human soul. Nor is this all. His 
 characteristic power lay no less in discovering divine 
 influences, as they fall like dew upon the spirit. One 
 may say that Wordsworth's poetry is fed on sympathy 
 less, and on influences from natures differing in kind 
 from his own more, than any other poetry in the 
 world ; and that he delineates these influences just 
 as they are entering into the very substance of 
 humanity. Strike out the human element from his 
 Nature poems, and they lose all their meaning : he 
 did not paint Nature, like Tennyson ; he arrested 
 and interpreted its spiritual expressions. He re- 
 garded other men chiefly as natural influences acting 
 on himself ; but he never was inclined to identify 
 Nature with either Man or God ; for freedom, im- 
 mortality, and a spiritual God were of the very 
 essence of his own meditative world. He is not 
 specifically the poet of Nature, nor the poet of Man,
 
 126 THE GENIUS OF WOIIDSWORTH ii 
 
 nor the poet of Truth, nor the poet of Eeligion ; 
 he is the poet of all separate living emanations from 
 Nature, or from Man or God. Contemplative as he 
 is, his mind was too concentrated and intense for 
 general Truth. He fixed his imagination and his 
 life too entirely and intensely on single centres of 
 influence. He could not pass from the one to the 
 other, and grasp many at once, so as to discern their 
 mutual relations, in the discrimination of which 
 Truth consists. He kept to single influences : soli- 
 tary contemplative communion ^vith all fonns of life 
 which did not disturb the contemplative freedom of 
 his spirit, was his strength. His genius was uni- 
 versal, but was not comprehensive ; it did not hold 
 many things, but it held much. You see this 
 especially in his larger poems : he is like one of his 
 own " bees that murmur by the hour in foxglove- 
 bells." He cannot move gradually through a train 
 of thought or a consecutive narrative. He flies from 
 bell to bell, and sucks all the honey deliberately out 
 of each. Hence he was so fond of the sonnet, be- 
 cause it was just suited to embody one thought ; yet 
 it seldom exhausted for him one subject, and there 
 is often an injury to his genius in the transition from 
 sonnet to sonnet when he Avrote a series on one 
 theme. His " plain imagination and severe," as he 
 himself called it, isolated whatever it dealt with, 
 brought it into immediate contact Avith his own 
 spirit, and so drew from it slowly and j^atiently 
 every drop of sweet or sad or stern influence that 
 it had the power to give off. But it is Avith him 
 consciously influence, and influence only. He never 
 humanises the spirits of natural objects, as Shelley 
 did. He puts no fairy into the flower, — no dryad 
 into the tree, — no nymph into the river ; — he is too
 
 II THE GENIUS OF WOEDSWORTII 127 
 
 much of a realist for that, and he has far too intense 
 a consciousness of the simple magnificence of moral 
 freedom. Indeed he has too strict a human centre 
 of contemplation for that to be possible. He regards 
 Nature as a tributary to Man, sending him influences 
 and emanations which pass into the very essence of 
 his life, but never constitute that life. These influ- 
 ences are not like in hind to humanity. To liken 
 them to higher beings is but to find " loose types of 
 things through all degrees " ; and when he addresses 
 the river thus — 
 
 " O glide, fair stream, for ever glide, 
 Thy quiet soul on all hestoioing, 
 Till all our minds for ever flow 
 
 As tliy deep waters now are flowing," 
 
 there is not even a momentary attempt to forget the 
 visible water, and bestow a human " soul " upon the 
 river; he only gathers up the spiritual influences 
 which emanate from it into a living centre, just as 
 he elsewhere spreads abroad the "soul of happy 
 sound " through earth and air. He has the deepest 
 conviction that different objects and scenes do radiate 
 specific influences of their own, not dependent merely 
 on the mood of the contemplative observer : — 
 
 " Love had he found in huts where poor men lie, 
 His daily teachers had been woods and rills, 
 The silence that is in the starry sky. 
 
 The sleep that is among the lonely hills." 
 
 But these radiated influences are never human till 
 they touch the human soul, and are transmuted by 
 that touch. Eich and almost infinite streams of 
 power and beauty Nature does pour into Man ; but 
 first when they reach that free and solitary spirit 
 which draws down other and higher influences to
 
 128 THE GENIUS OF WOKDSWORTH n 
 
 meet them from God, do they fulfil their simple 
 destiny. If any one chooses to deny that there is 
 an absolute reality in the expressions of Nature to 
 human minds, — that they are something as unalter- 
 able as the meaning of a smile or a frown, — he may 
 and must say Avith Hazlitt that Wordsworth " never 
 looks abroad into universality," but overwhelms 
 natural objects with the weight of his own arbitrary 
 associations. If the dancing daffodils are no real 
 image of simple joy ; if the " power of hills " be a 
 vague and misleading metaphor ; if the " welcome 
 snowdrop " — - 
 
 " That child of winter, prompting tlionglits that climb 
 From desolation towards the genial prime " — 
 
 can tell no true tale of immortality to the simple- 
 hearted when sinking beneath the snows of age ; if 
 it be a mere confusion of ideas for a poet to believe 
 
 " That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved 
 To blend liis murmurs with ray nurse's song ; 
 And from his alder shades and rocky falls. 
 And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice 
 That flowed along my dreams " ; 
 
 if there be nothing ghostly in the yew-tree, no 
 " witchery " in the sky, and no eternal voices in the 
 sea ; if, in a word, " the invisible things of Him from 
 the creation " are not " clearly seen, being understood 
 by the things that are made," — then indeed was 
 Wordsworth "vain in his imagination," and "his 
 foolish heart was darkened." 
 
 But Wordsworth did not doubt about these 
 things ; he kneiu them ; and he knew too well the 
 kind of human character they served to make or mar. 
 His own nature was of this primitive humanity : —
 
 II THE GENIUS OF WORDSWORTH 129 
 
 " Long have I loved what I behokl — 
 
 The night that calms, the day that cheers ; 
 
 The common growth of mother earth 
 
 Suffices me — her tears her mirth, 
 Her humblest mirth and tears." 
 
 He knew how these simple influences could not be 
 received into the heart without receiving also 
 
 " a spirit strong. 
 That gives to all the selfsame bent 
 Where life is wise and innocent " ; 
 
 he knew that no heart which "watches and receives" 
 what quiet Nature gives can have any of the pre- 
 occupying restlessness which evil brings ; he knew 
 that he 
 
 " Who affronts the eye of solitude, shall learn 
 That her mild nature can be terrible." 
 
 And thus we have a set of characters of simple 
 grain, all of them fed by the life of Nature, but all 
 religious, spiritual, and free, — in Michael, the Leech- 
 gatherer, and the Wanderer in " The Excursion " ; 
 while we have Peter Bell, and, in part, the Solitary, 
 on the other hand, whose personal strength had been 
 spent in "aftronting the eye of solitude." 
 
 The result of almost all Wordsworth's universal 
 experience of the influences of Nature acting alone 
 on man is gathered up into his three poems, "Lucy," 
 "Ruth," and "The Song at the Feast of Brougham 
 Castle " (the last, perhaps, the most perfect effort of 
 his genius) : the first containing his conception of 
 the plastic influences of Nature in moulding us into 
 beauty ; the second, of her exciting spells for awak- 
 ening the passions ; the last, of her tranquillising 
 influences on thought. If we take with these the 
 L K
 
 130 THE GENIUS OF WORDSWOETH li 
 
 poem on the lonely Leech -gatherer, in which he 
 contrasts the instinctive joy and life of Nature with 
 the burden of human free-will ; the great " Ode on 
 Immortality," in which he brings natural life into 
 contrast with the supernatural, speaking of " those 
 high instincts before which our mortal nature doth 
 tremble like a guilty thing surprised " ; and finally, 
 the lines in which he draws together Nature, free- 
 will, and God into one of the sublimest poems of our 
 language, the " Ode to Duty," — we have in essence 
 nearly all the truth that AVordsworth anxiously 
 gleaned from a life of severe meditation, though a 
 very slight epitome indeed of the innumerable living 
 influences from which that truth was learned. If 
 any one doubts the real affinity between the expres- 
 sions Avi'itten on the face of Nature and those human 
 expressions which so early interpret themselves to 
 even infants that to account for them except as a 
 natural language seems impossible, the exquisite 
 poem on " Lucy " ought to convert him. The con- 
 trast it illustrates between Wordsworth's faith in 
 real emanations from all living or unliving "mute 
 insensate " things, and the humanised " spirits " of 
 life in the Greek mythological jDoetry, is very striking. 
 Influences come from all these living objects, but 
 personified influences never : — 
 
 " Three years she grew in sun and shower ; 
 Then Nature said, ' A lovelier flower 
 
 On earth was never sown. 
 This child I to myself will take, 
 She shall be mine, and I will make 
 
 A lady of my own. 
 
 " ' Myself will to my darling be 
 
 Both law and impulse ; and with me 
 The girl, in rock and jilain,
 
 11 THE GENIUS OF WORDSWORTH 131 
 
 In earth and heaven, in glade and bower, 
 Shall feel an overseeing power 
 To kindle or restrain. 
 
 " ' She shall be sportive as the fawn 
 That wild with glee across the lawn 
 
 Or up the mountain springs ; 
 And hers shall be the breathing lialni, 
 And hers the silence and the calm 
 Of mute insensate things. 
 
 " ' The floating clouds their state shall lend 
 To her ; for her the willows bend : 
 
 Nor shall she fail to see 
 Even in the motion of the storm 
 Grace that shall mould the maiden's form 
 
 By silent sympathy, 
 
 " ' The stars of midnight shall be dear 
 To her ; and she shall lean her ear 
 
 In many a secret place 
 Where rivulets dance their wayward round ; 
 And beauty born of murmuring sound 
 
 Shall pass into her face. 
 
 " ' And vital feelings of delight 
 
 Shall rear her form to stately height — 
 
 Her virgin bosom swell : 
 These thoughts to Lucy I will give, 
 When she and I together live 
 
 Here in this happy dell.' 
 
 " Thus Nature spake — -the work was done. 
 How soon my Lucy's race was run ! 
 
 She died ; and left to me 
 This heath, this calm and cj^uiet scene. 
 This memory of what hath been 
 
 And never more will be."
 
 132 THE GENIUS OF WOKDSWORTH II 
 
 Of the poetry of Wordsworth, it cannot, perhaps, 
 ever be said, as Wordsworth truly said of Burns, 
 that " deep in the general heart of man his power 
 survives " ; for his is the poetry of solitude, and the 
 " general heart of man " cannot bear to be alone. 
 But there are some solitudes that cannot l^e 
 evaded : — 
 
 " Amid the groves, i;nder the shadowy hills 
 The generations are prepared ; the pangs. 
 The internal pangs, are ready — the dread strife 
 Of poor humanity's afflicted will," — 
 
 and then we leave the greatest poets of the great 
 world, and look to one who was ever glad to gaze 
 into the deepest depths of his o"\vn heart, of Nature, 
 and of God. " The pangs, the internal pangs," were 
 not ready for him. " Bright, solemn, and serene," 
 perhaps he alone, of all the great men of that day, 
 had seen the light of the countenance of God shining 
 clear into the face of Duty : — 
 
 " Stern Lawgiver ! Yet thou dost wear 
 The Godhead's most benignant grace ; 
 
 Nor know we anything so fair 
 As is the smile upon thy face. 
 
 Flowers laugh before thee in their beds : 
 
 And fragrance in thy footing treads. 
 
 Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong ; 
 
 And the most ancient Heavens through thee 
 are fresh and strong." 
 
 And therefore in his poems there will ever be a 
 spring of something even fresher than poetic life — a 
 pure, deep well of solitary joy.
 
 Ill 
 
 SHELLEY AND HIS POETRY ^ 
 
 It Avoiild be untrue to say that Shelley's life is even 
 as much of a key to his poetry as Coleridge's or 
 Wordsworth's or even Byron's. For Shelley's poetry is 
 in a different plane from human life of any kind, and 
 even his strange story can only be said to throw some 
 light upon the singularity of his lyrical genius. Such 
 a light, however, it certainly does shed ; and the lovers 
 of Shelley's poems have every reason to be thankful 
 to Professor Dowden for clearing up finally most of 
 the puzzles concerning Shelley's character and career. 
 Professor Dowden has a right to say, as he does in 
 the closing sentence of the preface to his excellent 
 biography : "If I have erred in matters of opinion, 
 I have tried to set before my reader materials as 
 abundant as it was in my power to exhibit, by which 
 to correct my errors." No doubt where Professor 
 Dowden condemns Shelley's conduct, he condemns it 
 with great reluctance, and is disposed to believe that 
 Shelley's own conscience thoroughly acquitted him of 
 wrong-doing; while where he sustains him, he sustains 
 him with the utmost warmth ; but if that be a fault 
 
 ^ The Life of Percy Bysshc Shelley. By Edward Dowden, 
 LL.D., Professor of English Literature in the University of 
 Dublin. 2 vols. London : Kegan Paul, Trench, & Co.
 
 134 SHELLEY AND HIS POETRY -III 
 
 in a biographer, it is probably a fault on the right 
 side. Indeed, Shelley's natural disposition was so 
 exceptional, so far beyond the range of ordinary 
 experience, that even those who feel most confident 
 that Shelley wandered very far indeed from the right 
 track, may well feel utterly incompetent to determine 
 with the smallest confidence how far it was a twist 
 of nature inborn, and how far voluntary wilfulness, 
 which led to that wandering. Hence, in his case 
 even more certainly than in that of less extraordinary 
 men, it is safer not to assume that the judgment 
 which we pass from our own point of view on the 
 man's conduct, is a fair judgment on one in whose 
 moral position it is simply impossible to place our- 
 selves adequately at all. 
 
 Perhaps there never was a more singular nature 
 or character than that of which Professor Dowden 
 gives us the history. Even in physical qualities 
 Shelley was a strange mixture of paradoxical con- 
 trasts. His voice, when it was low, was singularly 
 sweet ; but when it rose, it became so discordant as 
 to be quite repulsive.' " With his grace of bearing," 
 says Professor Dowden, " was strangely united a 
 certain awkwardness." Quoting, I imagine, from 
 Hogg, he states that Shelley would " stumble in 
 stepping across the floor of a drawing-room ; he 
 would trip himself up on a smooth-shaven grass-plot, 
 and he Avould tumble in the most inconceivable 
 manner in ascending the commodious, facile, and 
 Avell-carpeted staircase of an elegant mansion, so as 
 to bruise his nose or his lip on the upper steps, or to 
 tread upon his hands, and even occasionally to dis- 
 turb the composure of a well-bred footman ; on the 
 contrary, he would often glide Avithout collision 
 through a crowded assembly, thread with unerring
 
 Ill SHELLEY AND HIS POETRY 135 
 
 dexterity a most intricate path, or surely and rapidly 
 tread the most arduous and uncertain ways." It 
 was the same with his intellectual and moral qualities. 
 Sometimes he would seem wholly incompetent to 
 deal with matters of business at all, so that Hogg 
 would speak of him with supreme contempt, while 
 Professor Dowden likens him to the captive albatross, 
 which seamen sometimes make walk the deck, with 
 his great white wings drooping piteously at his side and 
 impeding every movement that he makes among the 
 jeering crew. At other times Shelley drew forth the 
 admiration of the most practical minds by the lucidity 
 with which he would gather up, as, for instance, in 
 the paper which he submitted to the Court of Chancery 
 concerning his own legal rights as a parent, the sub- 
 stance of a case intended to impress practical men. 
 Again, a more singular mixture of moral dignity and 
 incapacity for anything like self-control, than Shelley's 
 character, was probably never seen in English society. 
 In expostulating with Lord Byron, in rebuking God- 
 win, in asserting his rights as a father to Lord Eldon, 
 Shelley displays a large and tranquil self-control such 
 as few men could surpass. But, again, we find him 
 almost foaming at the mouth Avith helpless rage in cases 
 where one would have expected that his self-respect 
 and pity, his sympathies and his affections, Avould 
 have strengthened his self-control ; — as when he turns 
 upon the idol he had set up in his imagination, poor 
 Miss Elizabeth Hitchener, and dubbing her " a broAvn 
 demon," speaks of her as " a woman of desperate 
 views and dreadful passions, but of cool and undevi- 
 ating revenge," which she certainly was not ; or when 
 he opens the sluices of his rage against his sister-in- 
 law, and speaks of the " disgust and horror " with 
 which he sees her caress his daughter lanthe, and of
 
 136 SHELLEY AND HIS POETEY III 
 
 his difficulty in checking " the overflowings " of his 
 "unbounded abhorrence for this miserable wretch." 
 But most strange of all is the mixture of that purity 
 of feeling which everybody seems to have discerned 
 in Shelley, with that concentration of his imagination 
 on the most revolting and unnatural subjects visible 
 in much of his poetry, especially in The Cenci, in 
 " Laon and Cythna," and even in a few of his minor 
 poems, — poems in which the thrill of lyrical rapture 
 and the thrill of delight in defying and confounding 
 the natural instincts of human nature seem to blend 
 in inextricable confusion. No wonder that Shelley 
 was by some of his friends called "the snake," a 
 creature for which he felt the warmest regard, if we 
 may judge from the frequent references to it in his 
 poems. There was mingled "with all his beauty of mind, 
 which was certainly unearthly, a vein of unearthly 
 and ghastly delight in violating natural instincts, as 
 illustrated, for instance, to take a very mild example, 
 in the ghoulish prescription which he wrote out under 
 a household recipe of Mary Godwin's — a prescription 
 in which he drew on his imagination for medica- 
 ments of horror. So, again, Shelley's reverence for 
 the higher disinterestedness and courage of human 
 heroism, and his awe before the beauty and splen- 
 dour of the intellectual and moral universe, are as 
 marvellously contrasted with the boastful irreverence 
 that led to his expulsion from Oxford, to the tenor 
 of his notes in "Queen Mab," and to the vulgar 
 caprice of his publication of atheism in the 
 travellers' book at Montanvert, as if he had 
 combined in his own person the spirit of a loving- 
 child and the sijirit of a tricksy fiend. Sometimes 
 his heart seems to be bowed in awe and love, 
 sometimes his irritable dislike of the traditions of
 
 in SHELLEY AND HIS POETRY 137 
 
 ages seems to burst forth in the shrill revolt of 
 petulant defiance. 
 
 It is Professor Dowden's great merit that he not 
 only does not conceal from us these strange paradoxes 
 of Shelley's nature, but that he frankly reveals them. 
 He shows us plainly the grisly thread which is inter- 
 twined with all the beauty of Shelley's singular 
 character, and gives us even fuller materials than 
 ever for our conviction that the poet, who was the 
 first to originate the phrase which has since become so 
 famous, " the enthusiasm of humanity," combined mth 
 this enthusiasm (which was most genuine and deep), 
 a habit of shallow bravado in the presence of all 
 those warning instincts in man which our race has 
 inherited from the teaching of an unanalysed but 
 cumulative experience. His second wife called Shel- 
 ley at one time her " elfin knight," or her " airy elf." 
 And really it often seems as if the elvish element in 
 him were at least as strong as the human element, and 
 much stronger in him than that reverence and shame 
 out of which the higher conventions of human society 
 have grown, and by which the deeper modesties of 
 human nature have been preserved. There is in 
 Shelley at once a singularly ethereal nature, and a 
 singularly unshrinking defiance of everything in 
 human emotion which does not at once explain itself. 
 His poetry is as thin and clear as those " horns of 
 elfland faintly blowing," of which Tennyson has told 
 us, and as shrill and defiant too. None of these 
 characteristics does Professor Dowden in any way 
 veil from his readers ; but, of course, he dwells most, 
 and quite rightly, on the higher side of Shelley's 
 intellect and character. Nor can I conceive a much 
 finer sketch of his thin ethereal poetic genius than 
 Professor Dowden gives us in the study of Shelley's
 
 138 SHELLEY AND HIS POETRY ill 
 
 mind at the time that he composed " Alastor," his 
 first really great poem, though I think he finds too 
 little that is morbid in it, and too much that is 
 calm and clear : — 
 
 " With calm and health and freedom from disintegrat- 
 ing cares, Shelley's higher and truer self expanded. The 
 poet within him wakened from the oppression and the 
 trance, and, when he now stood erect, his stature was that 
 of manhood. The voice in which his spirit uttered itself 
 was no longer a boyish treble or the broken voice of a 
 youth ; it had the fulness and purity of early adult years, 
 with some of the violin's lyric intensity. The happiness 
 and calm had, however, followed hard upon a season of 
 pain, and disappointment, and melancholy foreboding. 
 Already, at twenty -three, Shelley was disillusioned of 
 some eager and exorbitant hopes ; the first great experi- 
 ment of his heart had proved a failure ; his boyish ardour 
 for the enfranchisement of a people had been without 
 result ; his literary efforts had met with little sympathy 
 or recognition ; and, during the early months of the year, 
 he had felt how frail was his hold on life, and had almost 
 confronted that mystery which lies behind the veil of 
 mortal existence. Therefore if now he sang, there must 
 needs be something of exalted pain and melancholy wis- 
 dom mingled witli the rapture of his song. In the midst 
 of his vigorous rowing-enjoyment and the abounding 
 animal spirits, of which Peacock tells us, he had mused 
 on death, while the stars came out above the lessening 
 spire and the dim graves of Lechlade Churchyard. 
 
 ' Thus solemnised and softened, death is mild 
 And terrorless as this serenest night : 
 Here could I hope, like some inquiring child 
 
 Sporting on graves, that death did hide from human 
 sight 
 Sweet secrets, or beside its breathless sleep 
 That loveliest dreams perpetual watch did keep.'
 
 Ill SHELLEY AND HIS POETRY 139 
 
 And later, as he wandered alone in the glades of Windsor 
 Great Park, now when in still autumnal mornings the foli- 
 age was brightening to decay, or when the autumnal winds 
 drove to east or west the leaves of chestnut and elm and 
 oak, his thoughts had in them some of the breadth and 
 solemnity of the season of the year. * Alastor ' is an 
 imaginative rendering of the mood which came upon him 
 on his return to Bishopsgate, an interpretation of his past 
 experiences and of the lore that he had gathered from life, 
 and a record, marvellously exalted and enhanced, of all 
 the impressions derived from external nature during the 
 past year — from snowy mountain and valley of Switzer- 
 land, from the arrowy Eeuss and rock-guarded passes of 
 the Rhine, from the gentler loveliness of our English 
 river, and the solemn woodland glories of Windsor. In 
 its inmost sense the poem is a pleading on behalf of human 
 love. This, which liad now been found by Shelley, he 
 might have sought for ever and in vain, and then his fate 
 would have been that of the solitary dreamer in ' Alas- 
 tor ' ; but when he returned from lonely musings under 
 the Windsor oaks to his home, it was to look into Mary's 
 ' redeeming eyes,' and to find a place of rest in Mary's 
 faithful heart. Three years after ' Alastor ' was con- 
 ceived, Shelley, when in Italy, wrote of his wife as the 
 ' dear friend with whom added years of intercourse only 
 add to my apprehension of its value, and who would have 
 had more right than any other one to complain that she 
 has not been able to extinguish in me the very power of 
 delineating sadness.' In 1815, though he had not yet 
 estimated to the full the preciousness of her love, its near- 
 ness quickened his conception of the wasting pain of one 
 who, having long neglected or scorned the natural sym- 
 pathies of the heart, is suddenly overmastered by a 
 tyrannous need of love, and at the same time is dis- 
 qualified for ever finding satisfaction for his ideal aspira- 
 tion and desire. Shelley in ' Alastor ' would rebuke the 
 seeker for beauty and seeker for truth, however high-
 
 140 SHELLEY AND HIS POETRY in 
 
 minded, who attempts to exist witliout human sympathy, 
 and he would rebuke the ever-unsatisfied idealist in his 
 own heart. Yet, at the same time, he would exhibit 
 the advantage possessed by such an one over the world- 
 ling, blind and torpid ; for the very fact that he is punished 
 by an avenging fate, and thirsts for love, and dies because 
 he cannot find it, constitutes his purification and redemp- 
 tion ; and as he rests with languid head upon the ivied 
 stone, gazing westwards at the great moon, and about to 
 resign his being to the universal frame of things, 
 
 ' Hope and despair, 
 The torturers, slept ; no mortal pain or fear 
 Marred his repose' ; 
 
 and he lies ' breathing there at peace and faintly smil- 
 ing.' Better this, Shelley would say, than to fatten in a 
 loveless lethai'gy, ' deluded by no generous error, insti- 
 gated by no sacred thirst of doubtful knowledge, duped 
 by no illustrious superstition, loving nothing on the earth 
 and cherishing no hopes beyond.' Such are, indeed, 
 already morally dead. 'They are neither friends, nor 
 lovers, nor fathers, nor citizens of the world, nor bene- 
 factors of their country. Among those who attempt to 
 exist without human sympathy, the pure and tender- 
 hearted perish through the intensity and passion of their 
 search after its communities, when the vacancy of their 
 spirit suddenly makes itself felt. All else, selfish, blind, 
 and torpid, are those unforeseeing multitudes, who consti- 
 tute, together with their own, the lasting misery and 
 loneliness of the world.' ' Alastor ' has been described as 
 hectic and unhealthy in sentiment ; in truth, it was the 
 product of calm and happy hours, and the mood which it 
 expresses is one of high, sad sanity. Its influencings 
 upon us are like those of the autumnal wind, — not joyous, 
 but pure and spiritual, enlarging the horizons and reveal- 
 ing to us the boundaries of hope and joy." 
 
 If Professor Dowden has missed anything of grave
 
 Ill SHELLEY AND HIS POETKY 141 
 
 importance in his estimate of Shelley's life, it is the 
 impressiveness of the lesson Avhich that life embodies 
 against those loose Godwinian doctrines concerning 
 marriage with which he identified himself, and by 
 which his life at every turn was poisoned and spoiled. 
 His separation from his first wife, which certainly 
 led to her suicide, and, perhaps, though the evidence 
 is of extremely dubious character, to her moral ruin 
 as well, is now shown to have been entirely due to 
 Shelley's complete indiiference to the sacredness of 
 marriage ; for though there is no doubt that at one 
 time (not, indeed, at the time of the separation) he 
 persuaded himself that Harriet had been unfaithful 
 to him before the separation, we feel pretty sure that 
 Professor Dowden himself regards that after-belief of 
 Godwin's and Shelley's as a complete illusion, while 
 Harriet's pathetic letter to Hookham before the 
 formal separation took place, seems to prove beyond 
 all question that she was still wrapped up in her 
 husband, and that a very little effort on Shelley's 
 part would have restored entirely the old tenderness 
 between them. 
 
 But Shelley was not one to make any effort to re- 
 vive an emotion which he had ceased to feel. Dwellino- 
 as he did in 1814 on "the music of two voices" 
 neither of which was his wife's, and "the light of 
 one sweet smile " which also was not hers, he was in 
 no humour to find happiness in his " sad and silent 
 home " ; and he held no creed which imposed upon 
 him as a duty what was not the teaching of impulse. 
 The story of his flight with Mary Godwin, and the 
 cold-bloodetl letter which he wrote to his wife, beesina: 
 her to come and reside under his friendly protection 
 in their neighbourhood, are as striking illustrations 
 of the debasing eff"ects of such a creed as his, con-
 
 142 SHELLEY AND HIS POETKY III 
 
 cerning the authority of impulse, as we have ever 
 seen in connection with a life of so much nobility 
 as Shelley's. And his own lawlessness no doubt 
 fostered, if it did not cause, the lawlessness of others. 
 His wife's step -sister, who fled with them to the 
 Continent in 1814, learned doubtless from his ex- 
 ample to yield to passion without scruple, and thus 
 arose her disastrous intrigue with Lord Byron, which 
 rendered it impossible for her to find a respectable 
 home except with Shelley, and which for that reason 
 overshadowed the happiness of Shelley's own sub- 
 sequent life, besides bringing upon it, in the constant 
 troubles and griefs concerning Miss Clairmont's 
 daughter Allegra, disposed of at the "will of a profli- 
 gate father, a long series of anxieties which did not 
 tend to draw Shelley any closer to his second wife. 
 
 Yet Shelley could never see in all these 
 troubles any shadow of guilt. Southey made him 
 very angry by suggesting it. Nay, Shelley was 
 so resentful of any suggestion that he had not 
 acted on the purest principles in running away 
 from his wife, that he declared that poor Fanny 
 Godwin's suicide, for which he was in no way re- 
 sponsible, caused him far more grief than Harriet 
 Shelley's, for which he was in the fullest sense 
 responsible, since in leaving a kind-hearted but weak 
 woman to live alone and become the sport of resentful 
 jealousy and bitter pique, and that, too, with no 
 relatives in whose goodness and wisdom he himself 
 had the smallest confidence, he might have felt per- 
 fectly certain how it Avould end. There is something 
 like bravado in the boast that Fanny Godwin's suicide 
 caused him bitterer pain than his wife's — bravado 
 which we can hardly help believing to have been 
 partly due to the pricks of conscience. Yet even
 
 Ill SHELLEY AND HIS POETRY 143 
 
 Fanny Godwin, — or Fanny Imlay, as she was at one 
 time called, — was doubtless the victim of exactly 
 the same unwholesome depreciation of marriage on 
 her mother's part, as Shelley subsequently embodied 
 in his own life. It was Mary Wollstonecraft's despair 
 at being abandoned by the man whom she had not 
 married, a despair which caused her to attempt an 
 ineffectual suicide, which doubtless led to poor Fanny's 
 lifelong dejection and to her ultimate suicide. If 
 Shelley had had eyes to see, he would have dis- 
 covered, on his very first relations with the Godwin 
 family, how ill the grasping old philosopher's doctrines 
 had worked in real life. Indeed, he had to discover 
 by painful experience how little they had given to 
 Godwin himself of that fortitude and magnanimity 
 to which the selfish old pagan aspired. Shelley's 
 mind, with all its wilful blindnesses, was altogether 
 of a higher type than Godwin's, and nothing is more 
 painful than to see him clinging with the utmost 
 tenacity, — the tenacity of a kind of intellectual pride, 
 — to Godwin's false and shallow teaching, and endea- 
 vouring to hide from himself how badly that teaching 
 had borne the wear and tear of life. Professor 
 Dowden is, we suspect, fully conscious of all this ; 
 but he has shi'unk from drawing out what seems to 
 us the chief lesson of Shelley's many sufferings. 
 When, towards the end of his brief career, we find 
 Shelley complaining to Williams of having to return 
 to his "cold home," — the home made for him by 
 Mary Shelley, — in words that almost repeat the 
 language which he used in 1814 concerning the 
 " sad and silent home " of his first wife, Harriet 
 Shelley, — we cannot help seeing in it the natural 
 retribution on his own fickle and lawless, and, if I 
 may use such an expression, unselfishly selfish life.
 
 144 SHELLEY AND HIS POETRY HI 
 
 We do not mean, of course, that he ever lost his love 
 for his second wife as he did his love for his first ; 
 he had at least virtue enough to remain faithful to 
 her in spite of the undignified confidences which he 
 poured out to friends, not the most intimate or 
 trusted, concerning her shortcomings. And doubtless 
 he respected, and in a true sense loved her, to the 
 end. But, undoubtedly, he had in 1821 and 1822 
 ample opportunities, if he would only have availed 
 himself of them, for testing and condemning that 
 antinomian theory of marriage to which he owed the 
 tragedy of his life. Shelley's experiences seem to 
 present us with as complete a refutation of the 
 shallow theories of Godwin on the relations between 
 the sexes, as it would be possible to find in actual 
 life. We may say that all his worst griefs were due 
 to the lawlessness of love either as illustrated by 
 himself or as taught to others by those who taught 
 it to him, and that all his consolations were due to 
 the better instincts which kept him fi-om always 
 following out the drift of the same teaching to its 
 logical results. Two terrible suicides, one lifelong 
 shame, and several years of painful shrinking from 
 public criticism, were the direct fruits of those doc- 
 trines. And when Shelley had to remonstrate with 
 Byron on Byron's much more deliberate wickedness, 
 he must have felt his authority lessened, if not ex- 
 tinguished, by the knowledge that Byron in his 
 cynicism would regard his friend's remonstrances as 
 due rather to prudential than to moral feelings. 
 
 No one can read Shelley's story without feel- 
 ing that there was a strange capriciousness not 
 only in his love, but in his friendship. He par- 
 doned Hogg, indeed, much too easily for conduct 
 which ought, I think, to have made a permanent
 
 Ill SHELLEY AND HIS POETRY 145 
 
 breach between them. But the rapidity with which 
 he would vibrate between dislike and the utmost 
 warmth of feeling, was shown in his relations not 
 only to Avomen, but to Godwin, to Peacock, to 
 Medwiii, to Mr. Gisborne, and even to Hookham 
 and Oilier. Nothing, indeed, is stranger than to 
 find him reproaching the Gisbornes in the most 
 cordial fashion Avith "cheating him by delay" in 
 relation to a promised visit, and then when they 
 arrive, reporting to Miss Clairmont that his own 
 manners had been "gentle but cold," by way of 
 expressing resentment for the real or fancied injuries 
 concerning which he had a few months earlier ex- 
 pressed himself with great violence. It is not very 
 "^cold" to reproach your friends Avith "cheating" 
 you by " delay " in paying a visit. There was, so 
 far as I can judge, a genuine vein of caprice in 
 Shelley always obvious enough in his relations with 
 women, and brought out by Professor Dowden's 
 story, even in his friendships with men. 
 
 There was, however, a real improvement in Shelley, 
 instead of a falling-off, as he grew older. His caprice 
 was less serious, his generosity soberer and more 
 thoughtful, his political enthusiasms less Avindy and 
 bombastic, his nature less irreverent, his forbearance 
 more constant, his sympathy less relaxed and more 
 self-controlled. He Avrote to his Avife from Eavenna 
 that good impulses had been the cause of far more 
 mischief to him than evil impulses, except so far as 
 she had been the object of them. Nor in this sense 
 of the word " good," — for by " good " Shelley only 
 meant "loving," — need he have made so large an 
 exception as that Avhich excluded his feelings 
 for his second Avife from the number, for his first 
 and greatest sin was due to falling in love Avith 
 
 L L
 
 146 SHELLEY AND HIS POETRY III 
 
 her. However, in the latter part of his life he 
 learned to restrain those impulses, which, though 
 they were impulses of love, were in no true sense 
 " good," much more carefully than he had restrained 
 them in earlier life, and it can hardly be doubted 
 that he learned even to believe in God as he 
 drew towards the end. Yet to the end he would 
 talk of the worst sins as mere " errors." For ex- 
 ample, his own language shoAvs us that he regarded 
 the imputation made against him that his second 
 wife's step-sister had been his mistress as the imputa- 
 tion of a mere " error," and nothing more. He dis- 
 claimed it, but expressed no kind of horror at such 
 an imputation. To the end, too, it must be admitted 
 that in Shelley reverence for truthfulness in small 
 matters was wholly wanting. He told and recom- 
 mended white lies with the utmost freedom. 
 
 Professor Dowden's criticisms on Shelley's poetry 
 are always thoughtful and wise ; but I think he 
 attaches too much importance to Shelley's longer 
 poems, and too little to the highest of his creations 
 — those exquisite lyrics in which his genius was 
 most completely embodied. For instance he speaks 
 of Goethe's Faust as " inferior in imaginative 
 splendour to Prometheus Unbound" whereas I 
 should have said that while Faust as a whole is 
 splendid, Prometheus Unbound as a whole is both 
 obscure and weak, and splendid only in individual 
 elements. 
 
 In the Prometheus Unbound, the parts are 
 greater than the whole, — the most lovely passages 
 far more beautiful out of their context than in it. 
 It is in such bursts of song as the song of the 
 "Sixth Spirit," "Ah, Sister! Desolation is a delicate 
 thing " ; or the song, " Life of life, thy lips enkindle,"
 
 in SHELLEY AND HIS POETRY 147 
 
 — that we find lyrics which, seem fuller of spiritual 
 fire than any other English poet has poured into our 
 hmguage. And it is the same with such lyrics as 
 the great chorus in Hellas, "The world's great age 
 begins anew " ; the wonderful wail, " When the lamp 
 is shattered, the light in the dust lies dead " ; or the 
 weird lines, "Written in dejection at Naples," to 
 which Professor Dowden pays such just honour. To 
 me it seems that lyidcs such as these are greater than 
 any of the longer poems as a whole, — unless, indeed, 
 I except "Adonais," which I agree Avith Shelley 
 in thinking the most perfect work of art among 
 his longer poems. The Cenci, of course, is full of 
 power and grandeur, but the subject is too revolting, 
 as well as one which admits too little scope for pure 
 song, to exhibit Shelley's genius in its most charac- 
 teristic light. On the whole, he seems to have 
 failed in working out any complex conception, while 
 his passion is at once more aerial and more sweet than 
 that of any other English poet. His life is like his 
 poetry in being marked by snatches of beauty and 
 snatches of disfiguring passion, which make the parts 
 much greater than the whole. The unique rapture 
 of Shelley's lyrical cry of dread, of desire, of despair, 
 is his distinguishing feature as a poet. 
 
 And yet there was another unique characteristic 
 of his poetry in perfect keeping with this, of which 
 less account has been taken, namely, his mysticism. 
 For Shelley was a poetical mystic, but a poetical 
 mystic of a very unique kind. Usually the word 
 denotes a tendency to bore deep into the world of 
 divine Infinitude, a disposition to prostrate the mind 
 before the Eternal Will, and to bring the mysteries 
 of faith close to the simplest acts of daily life. This 
 is not only the common tendency of the religious
 
 148 SHELLEY AND HIS POETEY in 
 
 mystics, but it was the characteristic of some of 
 Shelley's own contemporaries : in philosophy, of 
 Coleridge ; in poetry, of Wordsworth. In this sense, 
 however, mysticism is usually the characteristic of 
 a mature, not of a youthful, mind ; and Shelley's 
 poetical mysticism is, — in the quick throb of its 
 pulses, in the flush and glow of its hectic beauty, 
 in the thrill of its exquisite anguish, and equally 
 exquisite delirium of imagined bliss, — essentially and 
 to the last the mysticism of intellectual youth. His 
 poetry is the poetry of desire. He is ever the homo de- 
 sideriorum ; — always thirsting, always yearning ; never 
 pouring forth the strains of a thankful satisfaction, 
 but either the cravings of an expectant rapture, or 
 the agony of a severed nerve. This is the great 
 distinction which separates him from the other 
 poetical mystics of his day. Wordsworth, for instance, 
 is always exulting in the fulness of nature ; Shelley 
 always chasing its falling stars. Wordsworth grate- 
 fully pierces the homely crust of earth to find the 
 rich fountains of life in the Eternal Mind ; Shelley 
 follows with wistful eye the fleeting stream of beauty 
 as it for ever escapes him into the illimitable void. 
 Hence Shelley's great admii-ation for Goethe's Faust 
 as a poem expressive of illimitable desires. He says, 
 in one of his letters to Mr. Gisborne, that " it deepens 
 the gloom, and augments the rapidity of ideas "; " and 
 yet," he adds, "the pleasure of sympathising with 
 emotions known only to few, although they derive 
 their sole charm from despair, and the scorn of the 
 narrow good we can attain in our present state, 
 seems more than to ease the pain which belongs to 
 them. Perhaps all discontent with the less (to use a 
 Platonic sophism) supposes the sense of a just claim 
 to the greater, and that we admirers of Faust are
 
 Iir SHELLEY AND HIS POETKY 149 
 
 on the right road to Paradise. Such a supposition 
 is not more absurd, and is certainly less demoniacal, 
 than that of Wordsworth, where he says, — 
 
 '"This earth, 
 Which is the world of all of us, and where 
 We find our hapinness, or not at all.' 
 
 As if, after sixty years' suffering here, we were to 
 be roasted alive for sixty million more in Hell, or 
 charitably annihilated by a coup-de-grace of the bungler 
 who brought us into existence at first." This passage, 
 written not in Shelley's boyish days, but within a 
 few months of his death, when he was thirty years of 
 age, brings out with striking force, in its utter blind- 
 ness to Wordsworth's meaning, how impossible it was 
 for the eager-souled poet of unsatisfied desire — the 
 poet of perpetual flux and reflux, the Heraclitus of 
 the poetic world — to enter into the mind of the poet 
 of intellectual rest and "lonely rapture." Of course 
 Wordsworth had no such theological meaning as 
 Shelley indicates. He merely intended to affirm, 
 that if the springs of infinite joy are not to some 
 extent discoverable in man here, as he was sure that 
 they were, they can scarcely be inherent in human 
 nature, and can hardly be confidently expected in the 
 world to come. But it was so impossible for Shelley 
 to conceive any fulness of joy in the present world, 
 that he supposed Wordsworth to be launching a 
 thunderbolt against the school of the Unsatisfied, — 
 the school who sang with himself, — 
 
 " Nor was there aught 
 The world contains the which he could approve," — 
 
 when Wordsworth was in fact only testifying to the 
 spiritual opulence of this homely earth. The same 
 extraordinary contrast comes out in two of the most
 
 150 SHELLEY AND HIS POETEY 111 
 
 beautiful poems which our language contains, — Shel- 
 ley's " Skylark " and Wordsworth's " Skylark." Shel- 
 ley's " Skylark " is a symbol of illimitable thirst drink- 
 ing in illimitable sweetness, — an image of that rapture 
 which no man can ever reach, because it soars so far 
 from earth, because it is ever rising with unflagging 
 wing, despising old delights. Shelley will not recog- 
 nise its earthly form or abode at all ; it is not a bird 
 whose nest is on the ground ; it is a mnged desire, 
 always rising, aspiring, singing, "like an unbodied 
 joy, whose race is just begun": — 
 
 " Hail to thee, blithe spirit, — 
 Bird thou never wert, — 
 That from Heaven, or near it. 
 Poorest tliy full heart 
 In profuse strains of unpremeditated art. 
 
 " Higher still, and higher. 
 
 From the earth thou springest ; 
 Like a cloud of fire 
 
 The blue deep thou wingest ; 
 And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest, 
 
 " In the golden lightning 
 Of the sunken sun, 
 O'er which clouds are bright'ning, 
 Thou dost float and run. 
 Like an unbodied joy, whose race is just begun." ^ 
 
 Yet even this symbol of a thirst ever new, and ever 
 seeking to be slaked from sweeter fountains, throws 
 
 ' Mr. Rossetti, in his edition, adopts Professor Craik's 
 amendment of " embodied" for "unbodied joy." It seems to 
 me a most unauthentic change. Shelley was intending to sug- 
 gest that the skylark represented in its fire and music the up- 
 ward flight of a joy that had just got rid of the fetters of a body.
 
 Ill SHELLEY AND HIS POETRY 151 
 
 him into utter dejection before this most marvellous 
 of English lyrics closes : — 
 
 " We look before and after, 
 
 And pine for what is not ; 
 Our sincerest laughter 
 
 With some pain is fraught ; — 
 Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. 
 
 'o" 
 
 Yet if we could scorn 
 
 Hate and pride and fear, 
 If we were things born 
 
 Not to shed a tear, 
 I know not how thy joy we ever could come near." 
 
 How strong is the contrast with Wordsworth's 
 "Skylark"! Shelley's is far the more wonderful 
 poem, for the quick pulses of his panting measure 
 seem to give us the very beats of those quivering 
 wings, while Wordsworth's stately lines are obviously 
 the expression of the thoughts of a meditative watcher. 
 But while Shelley has ignored the earth and the real 
 bird altogether in his ideal flight, the firm grasp of 
 Wordsworth's thought gives the green earth her due 
 share in the " ethereal minstrel's " rapture, and bids 
 us observe, that it is not the distance from earth, but 
 the nearness to it, which inspires the celestial joy : — 
 
 " To the last point of vision and beyond 
 Soar, daring warbler ; thy love-prompted strain, 
 'Twixt thee and thine a never-failing bond, 
 Tlnills not the less the bosom of the plain. 
 Else might'st thou seem — proud privilege — to sing 
 All independent of the leafy spring." 
 
 It was Wordsworth's lifelong faith that fidelity to the 
 "kindred points of heaven and home" made both 
 earth the more joyous, and heaven the more sublime.
 
 152 SHELLEY AND HIS POETKY iri 
 
 Shelley's was a different creed, the creed of longing 
 and of loss, which sought to spring from earth and to 
 create its own heaven, — an enterprise in which it is 
 not easy to succeed. 
 
 Shelley, then, was essentially the poet of intel- 
 lectual desire, not of all emotion. The thrill of some 
 fugitive feeling, which he is either vainly pursuing, 
 or which has just slijjped through his faint intellectual 
 grasp, gives the keynote to every one of his finest 
 poems. His wonderful description of the Hours in 
 the Prometheus Unbound, — one of the few passages 
 in which Shelley has found a great subject for 
 a painter, at least for one capable of entering into 
 him, — is a description in fact of the two poetic atti- 
 tudes of his own mind : — 
 
 " The rocks are cloven, and through the purple night 
 I see cars drawn by rainbow-wingfed steeds, 
 Which trample the dim winds ; in each there stands 
 A wild-eyed charioteer urging their flight. 
 Some look behind as fiends j^ursued them there, 
 And yet I see no shapes but the keen stars ; 
 Others with burning eyes lean forth, and drink 
 With eager lips the wind of their own speed, 
 As if the thing they loved fled on before. 
 And now, even now, they clasped it. Their bright locks 
 Stream like a comet's flashing hair : they all 
 Sweep onward." 
 
 As it seems to me, Shelley himself, in one of his 
 moods of wild-eyed breathless inspiration, — " ITn- 
 glese malincolico," as the poor people called him at 
 Florence, — leaning passionately forward into the 
 future or backwards to the past, should be the im- 
 personation of these spirit-charioteers of time. Eager, 
 visionary, flashing forms, " drinking the Avind of their 
 own speed," they are wonderful impersonations of
 
 in SHELLEY AND HIS POETRY 153 
 
 his most characteristic poetic moods. If we look at 
 any of the lyrics on which he has set the full stamp 
 of his genius, we find that it images one of these two 
 attitudes of intellect, — the keen exquisite sense of 
 want, gazing wildly forward or wildly backward, but 
 vainly striving to close on something which eludes 
 its grasp : — 
 
 " The desire of the moth for the star, 
 Of the night for the morrow, 
 The devotion to something afar 
 From the sphere of our sorrow," 
 
 — that is the true burden of every song. Sometimes 
 the gaze is fixed on the future, and sometimes on the 
 past ; sometimes it is, 
 
 " Swiftly walk o'er the western wave, 
 
 Spirit of night ! 
 Out of the misty eastern cave. 
 
 Where all the long and lone daylight 
 Thou wo vest dreams of joy and fear, 
 Which make thee terrible and dear, — 
 
 Swift be thy flight !" 
 
 and sometimes, 
 
 " When the lamp is shattered, 
 
 The light in the dust lies dead ; 
 When the cloiid is scattered, 
 The rainbow's glory is shed ; 
 
 " When the lute is broken. 
 
 Sweet tones are remembered not ; 
 Wlien the lips have spoken. 
 
 Loved accents are soon forgot" ; 
 
 but whether forward or backward gazing, the attitude 
 of unsatisfied desire is always the same, distinguish- 
 ing Shelley from the many great contemporaries who,
 
 154 SHELLEY AND HIS POETRY III 
 
 like Goethe himself, for instance, — except in Faust, 
 where he had set himself to delineate the pangs of 
 an insatiable heart and intellect, — sing out of the 
 wealth of happy possession even more melodiously 
 than out of the gnawing ardour of desire. And even 
 between the animating spirit of Faust and the 
 poetical moods of Shelley's poetry there is one very 
 marked distinction. Faust's passion is a hunger for 
 experience, — human experience in the largest and 
 most universal sense ; but the thirst which breathes 
 through Shelley is a continual thirst for those rare 
 moments of tingling veins and flushing soid, those 
 instants when the whole frame of nature and human 
 life seems a transparency for sweet emotion, which 
 are but one element in Faust's pursuit. What the 
 passages in Faust were which fascinated Shelley 
 most intensely he himself may tell us. Speak- 
 ing of some fine German etchings of Fa^ist he 
 says : "I never perfectly understood the Hartz 
 Mountain scene until I saw the etching ; and then 
 Margaret in the summer-house with Faust ! The 
 artist makes one envy his happiness that he can 
 sketch such things with calmness, which I only dared 
 look upon once, and which made my brain swim round 
 only to touch the leaf on the opposite side of which 
 I knew that it was figured." This is of the very 
 essence of Shelley. He is the poet, not of human 
 yearning in general, but of the yearning for that 
 youthful ecstasy which bounds like fresh life through 
 every nerve. He cannot be satisfied without a thrill 
 of his whole soul. He knows nothing of serene joy. 
 He thinks the whole universe should be ever thrilling 
 in every fibre Avith mysterious tenderness. The 
 nature of this thirst cannot be better described than 
 ill his own musical words : —
 
 Ill SHELLEY AND HIS POETEY 155 
 
 " With a spirit . . . trembling and feeble through its 
 tenderness, I have everywhere sought, and have found 
 only repulse and disappointment. Thou demandest, 
 What is love ? If we reason, we would be understood : 
 if we imagine, we would that the airy children of our 
 brain were born anew within another's : if we feel, we 
 would that another's nerves should vibrate to our own, — 
 that the beams of her eyes should kindle at once, and 
 mix and melt into our own, — that lips of motionless 
 ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with 
 the heart's best food. This is love ; this is the bond and 
 the sanction which connects not only the two sexes, but 
 everything that exists. 
 
 "We are born into the world, and there is something 
 within us which, from the instant we live and move, 
 thirsts after its likeness. This propensity develops itself 
 with the development of our nature — to this eagerly re- 
 fers all sensations, thirsting that they should resemble or 
 correspond with it. Tlie discovery of its antitype — the 
 meeting with an understanding capable of clearly estimat- 
 ing the deductions of our own — an imagination which 
 can enter into and seize upon the subtle and delicate 
 peculiarities which we have delighted to cherish and un- 
 fold in secret — with a frame whose nerves, like the 
 chords of two exquisite lyres strung to the accompani- 
 ment of one delightful voice, vibrate with the vibration 
 of our own — and of a combination of all of these in such 
 proportion as the type within demands, — this is the invis- 
 ible and unattainable point to which love tends ; and to 
 attain which it urges forth the powers of man to arrest 
 the faintest shadow of that without which there is no rest 
 or respite to the heart over which it rules. Hence, in 
 solitude, or in that deserted state when we are surrounded 
 by human beings, and yet they sympathise not with us, 
 we love the flowers, and the grass, and the waters, and 
 the sky. In the motion of the very leaves of spring — in 
 the blue air, there is found a secret correspondence with
 
 156 SHELLEY AND HIS POETRY iii 
 
 our heart that awakens the spirits to a dance of breath- 
 less rapture, and brings tears of mysterious tenderness to 
 the eyes, like the enthusiasm of patriotic success, or the 
 voice of one beloved singing to you alone. Sterne says, 
 that if he were in a desert, he would love some cypress. 
 So soon as this want, or power, is dead, man becomes the 
 living sepulchre of himself, and what yet survives is the 
 mere wreck of what he was." 
 
 It is this constant longing to have ever sweet 
 pulsations of feeling coursing through a transparent 
 organism of life and nature which constitutes the 
 " lyrical cry," as Mr. Arnold has so admirably termed 
 the distinguishing note of lyrical poetry, in Shelley's 
 poems. Sometimes, after a long strain on the nerves 
 of intellectual desire, the cry rises almost to a shriek, 
 as, for instance, in the closing lines of "Epipsy- 
 chidion " : — 
 
 " "Woe is me ! 
 
 The wingfed words on which my soul would pierce 
 
 Into the height of love's rare Universe, 
 
 Are chains of lead aroiind its flight of fire ; 
 
 I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire ! " 
 
 And his most characteristic poem, " Alastor," is a 
 mere picture of a mind pierced wdth sweet suscept- 
 ibilities, rushing in mad pursuit of some empty 
 vision of the night, that has set those susceptibilities 
 throbbing with liquid fire. "Quaerebam quid amarem, 
 amans amare," is the motto that he takes for it from 
 St. Augustine. Other lyrical poets A\T:-ite of what 
 they feel, but Shelley almost uniformly of what he 
 wants to feel. The source of his idealism and mys- 
 ticism lies in this constant protest against the mani- 
 fold dross of an opaque existence, through the thick 
 film of which he could not discern — nay, could not
 
 Ill SHELLEY AND HIS POETRY 157 
 
 well imagine that he discerned — any sweet fountains 
 of warm life. 
 
 And Shelley's idealism betrays its genuineness in 
 the sorrowful wail, the even hoarsely discordant note, 
 which frequently rings through it. A true idealist 
 necessarily becomes restless as he leaves the earth 
 and finds that he is getting into a drearier and colder 
 atmosphere. There is a kind of faith or quietism, 
 the very opposite of proper idealism, which is some- 
 times confounded with it because it is always finding, 
 like Platonism, that earth is full of the thoughts of 
 God. Shelley thought himself a Platonist, but with 
 the least possible insight into Plato's true faith. In 
 that constant yearning which he felt for a tingling 
 thrill of new intellectual life, there was at times, as 
 there is in all profound love of excitement, a jarring 
 nerve, which even reflected itself in his general 
 demeanour. Hazlitt, keenest of observers, describes 
 him as having the general j;7^?/sijMe of a fanatic. 
 , He had "a fire in his eye, a fever in his blood, a 
 maggot in his brain, a hectic flutter in his 
 speech, which mark out the philosophic fanatic. He 
 is sanguine -complexioned and shrill -voiced." Mr. 
 Hogg, too, tells us, as Professor Dowden has told 
 us, that the voice, which, in poets at least, is apt to 
 denote some quality profoundly rooted in the char- 
 acter,^ was often " of the most cruel intension ; 
 
 ^ Compare Hazlitt's description of Coleridge and "Words- 
 worth's voices, both of them most expressive of their poetic 
 character. " When I got there," Hazlitt says, "the organ was 
 playing the Hnndredth Psalm ; and when it was done, Mr. 
 Coleridge rose and gave out his text : ' And he went up into 
 the mountain to pray, himself alone.'' As he gave out this text, 
 his voice rose like a stream of rich distilled perfumes ; and 
 when he came to the two last words, which he pronounced loud,
 
 158 SHELLEY AND HIS POETKY in 
 
 it was perpetual and without any remission, — it ex- 
 coriated the ears." And Shelley was quite aware of 
 this hectic fever in his own nature. In one of his 
 latest letters he Amtes to Mr. Gisborne : " As to 
 real flesh and blood, you know that I do not deal in 
 these articles ; and you might as well go to a gin- 
 shop for a leg of mutton as expect anything human 
 or earthly from me." There Avere many of his con- 
 temporaries whose poetry had infinitely more in it of 
 mere stimulant than Shelley's ; for the excitement he 
 craved was of a highly distilled intellectual kind, a 
 stimulant for the finest sensibilities — never for the 
 mere senses. What he loves to feel is a new quiver 
 through his soul, — a quiver of delicious flame, if it 
 may be, but a shiver of horror, if it may not. The 
 high treble key of Shelley's poetry is sometimes a 
 cry of yearning ; but sometimes also a cry of ghastly 
 dread at a spectre raised by himself. His early 
 poems especially are full of " wormy " horrors ; and 
 the loathsomeness of the incident on which the plot 
 of The Cenci turns, evidently had a dreadful fas- 
 cination for him. Mr. Hogg tells a playful little 
 story of Shelley's vegetarian days, which reflects this 
 side of his nature : — 
 
 "He broke a quantity, often, indeed, a surprising 
 quantity, of bread into a large basin, and poured boiling 
 
 deep, and distinct, it seemed to me, who was then young, as if 
 the sounds had eclioed from the bottom of the human heart, 
 and as if that prayer might have floated in solemn silence 
 through the universe." Wordsworth, says the same close 
 observer, "sat down and talked very naturally and freely, with 
 a mixture of clear gushing accents in his voice, a deep 
 guttural intonation, and a strong tincture of the Northern 
 burr, like the crust on v/ine." —Fivm " 3fy First Acquaintance 
 with the Poets."
 
 Ill SHELLEY AND HIS POETRY 159 
 
 water ui)on it. When the bread had been steeped awhile, 
 and had swelled sufficiently, he poured off the water, 
 squeezing it out of the bread, which he chopped up with 
 a spoon ; he then sprinkled pounded loaf-sugar over it, 
 and grated nutmeg upon it, and devoured the mass with 
 a prodigious relish. He was standing one day in the 
 middle of the room, basin in hand, feeding himself vora- 
 ciously, gorging himself with pap. 'Why, Bysshe,' I 
 said, ' you lap it up as greedily as the Valkyrise in Scan- 
 dinavian story lap up the blood of the slain ! ' ' Ay ! ' 
 he shouted with grim delight ; ' I lap up the blood of 
 the slain ! ' The idea captivated him ; he was continually 
 repeating the words ; and he often took panada, I suspect, 
 merely to indulge this wild fancy, and say, ' I am going 
 to lap up the blood of the slain ! to sup up the gore of 
 murdered kings ! ' " 
 
 The story might, no doubt, be told of almost any 
 one ; yet the fascination of this not very striking 
 joke for Shelley's mind is partly explained by the 
 character of much of his poetry, which not unfre- 
 quently and purposely dips into curdling subjects, 
 simply for the sake of the chill to the blood, the 
 vibration to the nerves. When he said to Nature 
 in "Alastor," 
 
 " I have made my bed 
 In charnels and on coffins, where black death 
 Keeps records of the troi^hies won from thee," 
 
 he probably scarcely exaggerated the reality. At 
 least, one of his letters to Mr. Hogg begins with an 
 excuse for a bad handwriting on the ground of cold, 
 because " I have been pacing a churchyard all night." 
 And there is not one of his longer poems in which 
 he does not alternate the breathless upward flight of 
 his own skylark "vvith occasional plunges into a weird 
 world of morbid horrors. He has described to us, in
 
 160 SHELLEY AND HIS POETKY lii 
 
 his hymn to Intellectual Beauty, how intimately con- 
 nected in his mind was the first thrill of his adora- 
 tion for the universal Beauty with these moods of 
 startled and fascinated dread : — 
 
 " While yet a boy, I sought for ghosts, and sped 
 Through many a listening chamber, cave, and ruin, 
 And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing 
 Hopes of high talk with the departed dead. 
 I called on poisonous names with which our youth is 
 fed : 
 
 I was not heard, I saw them not ; 
 
 When musing deeply on the lot 
 
 Of life at that sweet time when winds are wooing 
 
 All vital things that wake to bring 
 
 News of buds and blossoming, 
 
 Sudden thy shadow fell on me ; 
 I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy ! 
 
 " I vowed that I would dedicate my powers 
 
 To thee and thine ; have I not kept the vow ? 
 
 With beating heart and streaming eyes even now 
 
 I call the phantoms of a thousand hours 
 
 Each from his voiceless grave : they have, in visioned 
 bowers 
 Of studious zeal or love's delight, 
 Outwatched with me the envious night : 
 They know that never joy illumed my brow 
 Unlinked with hope that thou would'st free 
 This world from its dark slavery, 
 That thou, O awful Loveliness, 
 
 Would'st give whate'er these words cannot express." 
 
 " Awful Loveliness " Shelley calls this object of his 
 adoration ; and there is, I suppose, no doubt that he 
 ascribed significance to the term, but certainly not 
 the significance which most men assign to it ; he did 
 not mean to refer to that bending of the humiliated
 
 iir SHELLEY AND HIS POETliY 161 
 
 spirit before a holy Power from whom it craves 
 much, from whom it can compel nothing, that ex- 
 IH'esses to most of us the essence of "awe." The 
 loveliness which he called "awful" was one which 
 he hoped to uncover and take by storm, the awe 
 only whetting the force of his desire — not a personal 
 power, but a half-veiled source of anticij)ated rapture. 
 Profound awelessness, indeed, characterises all Shel- 
 ley's poetry, on subjects both of human and of divine 
 mystery. No doubt the habit of tearing the veil 
 rudely from all subjects over which the reverence of 
 nature or custom had cast it, was peculiar to the 
 revolutionary era in which Shelley Avas born, and it 
 cannot have been counteracted by either the com- 
 panion of his youth or the companion of his maturity. 
 His college friend and biographer, Mr. Hogg, seems, 
 by his own account, to have acted the part of a very 
 conceited Mephistopheles to Shelley's Faust, mock- 
 ing his enthusiasm and encouraging all his wildest 
 irreverence. Such an influence as is shown by the 
 following story — probably a little coloured up by 
 Hogg — cannot but have tended to render Shelley 
 even less inclined to bow before the object of others' 
 worship than he was by nature : — 
 
 " Shelley took me one Sunday to dine with his father, 
 by invitation, at Miller's hotel, over Westminster Bridge. 
 We breakfasted early, and sallied forth, taking as usual a 
 long walk. He told me that his father would behave 
 strangely, and that I must be prepared for him ; and he 
 described his ordinary behaviour on such occasions. I 
 thought tlie portrait was exaggerated, and I told him so ; 
 but he assured me that it was not. 
 
 "Shelley had generally one volume at least in his 
 pocket wlienever he went out to walk. He produced a 
 little book, and read various passages from it aloud. It 
 
 L M
 
 162 SHELLEY xVND HIS TOETRY III 
 
 was an unfavourable and unfair criticism on the Old 
 Testament — some work of Voltaire's, if I mistake not, 
 which he had lately picked up on a stall. He found it 
 amusing, and read many pages aloud to me, laughing 
 heartily at the excessive and extravagant ridicule of the 
 Jewish nation, their theocracy, laws, and peculiar usages. 
 
 " We arrived at the appointed hour of five at the 
 hotel, but dinner had been postponed until six. Mr. 
 Graham, whom I had seen before, was there. Mr. 
 Timothy Shelley received me kindly ; but he presently 
 began to talk in an odd unconnected manner ; scolding, 
 crying, swearing, and then weeping again ; no doubt he 
 went on strangely. ' What do you think of my father ? ' 
 Shelley whispered to me. 
 
 " I had my head filled with the book which I had 
 heard read aloud all the morning, and I whispered, in 
 answer, ' Oh, he is not your father. It is the God of the 
 Jews ; the Jehovah you have been reading about ! ' 
 Shelley was sitting at the moment, as he often iised to 
 sit, quite on the edge of his chair. Not only did he 
 laugh aloud, with a wild demoniacal burst of laughter, 
 but he slipped from his seat and fell on his back at full 
 length on the floor. 
 
 " ' What is the matter, Bysshe ? Are you ill ? Are 
 you dead ? Are you mad ? Why do you laugh ? ' " 
 
 It was not likely that a man w^ho was thus early 
 helped to throw away in one cast the reverence of 
 nature for an earthly and a heavenly father, could 
 have ever permitted the mere shrinking of instinct 
 to deter him from entering in imagination into the 
 arcana of any subject where the stream of desire led 
 him ; and the only Avonder is that in later life he 
 should, in comparison at least Avith Byron, have 
 shown a spirit of something like reverence and self- 
 restraint. 
 
 Shelley's awelessness of nature — "curiosity," as
 
 Ill SHELLEY AND HLS POETRY 163 
 
 Hazlitt calls it — is only the result of the limitless 
 longing with which he seeks to tear the veil from 
 almost any secret, human or divine ; and yet not in 
 the spirit of a thirst for new truth so much as a thirst 
 for a new effervescence of nature half way between 
 knowledge and feeling. This characteristic in Shelley 
 is an exceedingly different thing from that species of 
 scoffing wit in which Byron attained such pre-emin- 
 ence, and which consists in insolent daring displayed 
 wantonly before the face of a mysterious or sacred 
 Power, without ever caring to penetrate the secret 
 of the mystery. Shelley's intellect was far subtler 
 than Byron's, and betrayed no fascination for mere 
 acts of intellectual impertinence. Byron was a 
 grown-up schoolboy, with a keen pleasure in playing 
 practical jokes on mighty Powers in which he half 
 believed. Shelley crept up to them with an irresist- 
 ible longing to peejD under the veil, and feel a new 
 thrill vibrate through his own nature. Still, as I 
 said, his temptation was not towards scoffing, but 
 towards a morbid subtlety of imagination on un- 
 healthy subjects ; and the irreverence fostered in 
 the external relations of his life through the unhappy 
 peculiarities of a coarse and obstinate father, and the 
 petty sarcastic egotism of his most intimate friend, 
 cannot but have had an evil influence in dissolving 
 the spell of that inward awe which arrests the curious 
 imagination on the verge of subjects upon which it 
 is not good for us to dwell. 
 
 And, quite apart from the influences of his early 
 culture, I must admit that Shelley's mind resembled 
 that of the Greeks in not being clothed with that 
 instinctive " mutual awe " which Plato makes, in his 
 Protagoras, the natural protection of all human 
 society. There is a mental characteristic, setting a
 
 164 SHELLEY AND HIS POETEY III 
 
 bound to what we may call spiritual familiarities, 
 which the Jews, the Romans, and the English have 
 in common, and in which Greeks and Frenchmen 
 always seem to be comparatively deficient, which 
 Voltaire and Rousseau had almost eradicated from 
 the minds of their pupils, and which is not very easy 
 to define, but which we all recognise as existing at 
 once both in the spirit of worship, and in the re- 
 pelling shame which acts like a molecular force to 
 limit the mutual approaches of human beings, and 
 to guard the precincts of certain subjects from the 
 invasion even of imagination, — to which we give this 
 name of aAve. It is flagrantly violated in the anec- 
 dote we have quoted from Mr. Hogg. It is best 
 illustrated, perhaps, by the spirit which breathes in 
 the old Hebrew tradition of Jacob's dream, or that 
 vision of Moses which taught him to "put off the 
 shoes from his feet." When Jacob rises from the 
 sleep in Avhich he had seen the ladder connecting 
 earth and heaven, he says, " How dreadful is this 
 place ! Behold the Lord was in this place, and I 
 knew it not. This is no other than the house of 
 God. This is the gate of heaven." Here is the 
 spirit of awe, which sees a shadow of mystery cast 
 from above even on the colour of a dream. It is a 
 spirit which may pass into slavish sui^erstition, but 
 Avhich still gives us the true attitude both for 
 worship, and for adequately appreciating the fitting 
 reserves of human character. The opposite to it is 
 the spirit which is incited by the very jiresence 
 of a veil to pierce it, by a shadow of power to 
 brave it, by a secret recoil of nature to overcome it, 
 by an indefinable reserve to defy it. Shelley seems 
 to have been a shy man ; but, like many shy men, 
 he seems almost to have revelled in breaking, in
 
 in SHELLEY AND HIS POETRY 165 
 
 imagination, through all the boundary - walls of 
 nature, and following the Avave of desire into the 
 penetralia of life, both human and divine. " Suj^er- 
 stition " was his one great foe. " Thou taintest all 
 thou look'st upon," he said, and forthwith strove to 
 banish the attitude of reverence from his spirit in 
 dealing with religious subjects. This was his usual 
 style : — 
 
 " Gray Power was seated 
 Safely on her ancestral throne ; 
 And Faith, the Python undefeated. 
 Even to its blood-stained step dragged on 
 Her foul and wounded train, and men 
 Were trampled on and deceived again." 
 
 And so on ad nauseam. The same spirit of almost 
 morbid fascination for anything positively nefas, 
 penetrated into the human subjects treated by his 
 imagination. In his delineations of love, he is 
 always urging on passion to the impossible leap over 
 the boundaries of personality itself : — 
 
 " The fountains of our deepest life shall be 
 Confused in passion's golden purity," 
 
 he sings ; and he can scarcely bear to admit any 
 vestige of personal distinction at all, — beating as it 
 were almost frantically at the barrier between mind 
 and mind : — 
 
 " We shall become the same, we shall be one 
 Spirit within two frames : oli, wherefore two ? 
 One i^assion in twin hearts which grows and grew. 
 Till, like two meteors of expanding Hame, 
 Those spheres instinct with it become the same. 
 Touch, mingle, are transfigured ; ever still 
 Burning, yet ever inconsumable :
 
 1G6 SHELLEY AND HIS POETRY iii 
 
 In one another's substance finding food, 
 Like flames too pure and liglit and imimbiTed, 
 To nourisli tlieir bright lives with baser prey, 
 Which point to Heaven and cannot pass away ; 
 One hope within two wdlls, one will beneath 
 Two overshadowing minds, one life, one death. 
 One Heaven, one Hell, one Immortality, 
 And one annihilation." 
 
 I do not quote this as an instance of the violation of 
 natural reserves, of which I think Shelley is often 
 guilty, but to show the force of the impulse which 
 led his imagination to violate such reserves, when 
 once he had ceased to respect them. That eager 
 mind, rushing breathlessly along the track of ima- 
 ginative desire, would have needed much to convince 
 it that any precincts were inviolable. 
 
 Thus far it would seem that Shelley's genius was 
 almost the opposite of mystical, — that instead of 
 halting on the edge of the spiritual world, and 
 bending before its mighty mysteries, he dissipates, — 
 to his o^Yn satisfaction at least, — a host of illusions, 
 hy pursuing with frantic eagerness one or two hasty 
 trains of ardent personal impression, Avhich he does 
 not hesitate to spur into a region of thought far 
 beyond their legitimate bounds. This is the spirit 
 of an enthusiast, no doubt, but certainly not of a 
 mystic. When he told Mr. Hogg that there could 
 be "no entire regeneration of mankind till laughter 
 was put doAvn," he spoke in the spirit not of the 
 mystic, but of the most doctrinaire enthusiasm,— 
 of a man who had what seemed to him the most 
 definite notions, and did not love to hear their 
 foundation shaken by irony. And Shelley's mysti- 
 cism does certainly arise much more from a refusal 
 .to recognise some very large regions of life and
 
 Ill SHELLEY AND HIS POETRY 167 
 
 nature, — from the exceedingly limited sphere of his 
 wonderful imagination, and the complete abandon 
 with which he trusts its guidance in the reconstruc- 
 tion of the spiritual universe, than from any con- 
 scious recognition of a great world of unexplored 
 mystery. This a little examination will, I think, 
 suffice to prove. 
 
 Shelley never shows his full power in dealing 
 separately with intellectual or moral or physical 
 beauty. His appropriate sphere was what I may 
 call smft sensibility, the intersecting line between 
 the sensuous and the intellectual or moral. Mere 
 sensation is too literal for him, mere feeling too 
 blind and dumb, mere thought too cold ; but in the 
 line where sensation and feeling are just passing 
 into thous;ht, where the stream of desire receives a 
 new poignancy from the chill current of subtle 
 discrimination with which his mind penetrated it, his 
 great power lay. An exquisitely beautiful poem 
 which Mr. Garnett first gave to the world will in 
 some degree illustrate this : — 
 
 " She left me at the silent time 
 When the moon had ceased to climb 
 The azure path of Heaven's steep, 
 And, like an albatross asleep. 
 Balanced on her wings of light, 
 Hovered in the purple night. 
 Ere she sought her ocean nest 
 In the chambers of the West. 
 She left me, and I stayed alone, 
 Thinking over every tone 
 Which, though now silent to the ear, 
 The enchanted heart could hear. 
 Like notes which die when born, but still 
 Haunt the echoes of the hill ;
 
 168 SHELLEY AND HIS POETRY 
 
 And feeling ever — too much ! 
 
 The soft vibration of her touch, 
 
 As if lier gentle hand, even now, 
 
 Lightly trembled on my brow ; 
 
 And thus, although she absent were, 
 
 Memory gave me all of her 
 
 That even Fancy dares to claim. 
 
 Her i^resence had made weak, and tame 
 
 All passions, and I lived alone 
 
 In the time which is our own ; 
 
 The past and future were forgot, 
 
 As they had been, and would be not. 
 
 But soon, the guardian angel gone. 
 
 The daemon reassunied his throne 
 
 In my faint heart. I dared not speak 
 
 My thoughts ; but thus disturbed and weak, 
 
 I sat and watched the vessels glide 
 
 Over the ocean bright and wide, 
 
 Like spirit- winged chariots sent 
 
 O'er some serenest element. 
 
 For ministrations strange and far ; 
 
 As if to some Elysian star 
 
 Sailed for drink to medicine 
 
 Such sweet and bitter pain as mine. 
 
 And the wind that winged their flight 
 
 From the land came fresh and light, 
 
 And the scent of sleeping flowers, 
 
 And the coolness of the hours 
 
 Of dew, and sweet warmth left by day, 
 
 Was scattered over the twinkling bay. 
 
 And the fisher, with his lamp. 
 
 And sjaear, about the low rocks' damp 
 
 Crept, and struck the fish which came 
 
 To worship the delusive flame. 
 
 Too happy they, whose pleasure sought 
 
 Extinguishes all sense and thought 
 
 Of the regret that pleasure leaves. 
 
 Destroying life alone, not peace ! " 
 
 in
 
 ni SHELLEY AND HIS POETRY 169 
 
 But this is more tranquil than is usual with 
 Shelley in poems of equal beauty. The feeling of 
 want which sighs through it is less bitter, the eflfer- 
 vescence between the sense of beauty and the long- 
 ing for it is less vivid ; there is more of still 
 reflectiveness, of patient thought, than is quite 
 characteristic of him. Generally, in the more per- 
 fect minor poems, ^ou almost see the angel troubling 
 the water, — the very thrill of intellectualised impulse, 
 — the fixed air of thought bubbling up through the 
 intermittent springs of hot desire. Mr, Trelawny 
 has given us a very graphic account of this : — 
 
 " The clay I found Shelley in the pine-forest, he was 
 writing verses on a guitar. I picked up a fragment, but 
 could only make out the first two lines : — 
 
 ' Ariel, to Miranda take 
 This slave of music. ' 
 
 It was a frightful scrawl ; words smeared out with his 
 finger, and one upon the other, over and over in tiers, 
 and all run together in most ' admired disorder ' ; it 
 might have been taken for a sketch of a marsh overgrown 
 with bulrushes, and the blots for wild ducks ; such a 
 dashed-oft' daub as self- conceited artists mistake for a 
 manifestation of genius. On my observing this to him, 
 he answered, ' When my brain gets heated with thought, 
 it soon boils, and throws off images and words faster than 
 I can skim them off. In the morning, when cooled down, 
 out of the rude sketch, as you justly call it, I shall 
 attempt a drawing.' " 
 
 This gives one key to Shelley's mysticism. Shel- 
 ley's mind was heated through at a much lower com- 
 parative temperature, if I may be allowed the image, 
 than almost any other English poet's. I would not 
 say, as Mr. Emerson has said of some minor poet.
 
 170 SHELLEY AND HIS POETKY III 
 
 that the susceptibility of his imagination ilhistrated 
 the proverb " little pot soon hot " ; for Shelley stands 
 in the very front rank of English poets. But still 
 there was something of tenuity in the essence of his 
 genius, which is clearly connected with this liability 
 to rapid excitation. I would rather say, that his 
 genius resembles the water taken to a mountain top, 
 and which, under that attenuated atmospheric pres- 
 sure, boils with far less heat — or in his case what 
 seems to general observers far less heat — than other 
 men's. Under the influence of a sentiment Avhich 
 would at most warm the surface of other poets' 
 minds into a genial glow, Shelley's bubbles up from 
 its very depths, in a sort of pale passion, and seethes 
 with imprisoned thought. This alone produces a 
 mystifying effect on ordinary minds. To be aware 
 that Shelley breathes an exceedingly rarefied atmo- 
 sphere of abstract sentiment, and yet to see this 
 rarefied air intoxicating his imagination till his pulses 
 bound as if under the spell of an ardent passion, is 
 like hearing a flow of hot thought from the lips of 
 a spectre, or seeing the bloodless ichor coursing 
 furiously through its veins. There is something 
 necessarily mystifying in this. The sentiment is 
 half abstract ; yet the ardour is unparalleled even in 
 the most eager pursuits of human passion ; and the 
 crowd of impressions and images which rush in so 
 thickly, merely to amplify an apparently thin, if not 
 unreal, sentiment, are dizzying to any reader at the 
 first onset. 
 
 If we examine wherein consists the abstract and 
 ideal air which colours Shelley's most ardent poetic 
 passion, we shall find it partly due to the ideal 
 susceptibilities of his mind, but in some measure 
 also to the habit he had of writing down trains of
 
 Ill SHELLEY AND HIS POETRY 171 
 
 secondary feeling, of which the living explanation 
 was contained in his own memory, and nowhere 
 else. " Epipsychidion," for instance, to ordinary 
 readers the most mystical of all his poems, was 
 pi'obably to him one of the most simply expressive ; 
 but then it paints the impressions made upon him 
 by persons and events entirely beneath the horizon 
 of the poem. The practical centre or focus of his 
 meaning lies concealed in his own heart, while all 
 that he pictures for us is the secondary effect exerted 
 upon himself, Avithout the causes which produced it. 
 We are in the position of the prisoners in Plato's 
 myth, who see the flickering shadows on the wall of 
 the cave, but never the real objects which cast those 
 shadows. In the poem I have mentioned, " Epipsy- 
 chidion," Shelley intends to describe apparently the 
 three abstract types of feminine influence of which 
 he had the most vivid experience ; but he can 
 scarcely be said to give us even so much as three 
 shadows : rather he gives us three distinct aromas ; 
 and yet, notwithstanding this, the iire with which the 
 verse seems to pant is more ardent than in most poems 
 of direct passion. Here is the first feminine influence 
 he is subjected to, the deleterious enchantress : — 
 
 " One whose voice was venomed melody 
 Sate by a well, under blue nightshade bowers ; 
 The breath of her false mouth was like faint flowers ; 
 Her touch was as electric poison ; flame 
 Out of her looks into my vitals came ; 
 And from her living cheeks and bosom flew 
 A killing air, which pierced like honey-dew 
 Into the core of my green heart, and lay 
 Upon its leaves ; until, as hair grown gray 
 O'er a young brow, they hid its unblown prime 
 With ruins of unseasonable time."
 
 172 SHELLEY AND HIS POETKY III 
 
 It Avould be impossible to describe the poisonous 
 subtlety of beautiful falsehood with more intensity ; 
 this enchantress diiluses an atmosphere of killing ex- 
 citement, which enters and blights at every pore. But 
 still the poet fails to make the reader understand the 
 intensity of his horror, because he does not present 
 even a phantom to the mind, does not give even a 
 glimpse of the cause, — only of the effect. One can 
 scarcely imagine that the glow of the poet's own 
 feeling is purely ideal in origin ; but if it related to 
 any painful personal experience, nothing is told us 
 to betray this. It has, therefore, all the mystical 
 effect of a phantom passion, the object of it, if not 
 purely ideal, being beyond our view. And the same 
 is true of the other personifications in this remarkable 
 poem. 
 
 But assuredly no such clue of personal experience 
 runs through some of the most passionate of Shelley's 
 poems. " Alastor," for instance, embodies a purely 
 ideal passion, and yet one so ardent, that it draws 
 the hero, who is an imaginative copy of Shelley, 
 across the Balkans, over the steppes of Southern 
 Russia, into a little leaky boat on the Black Sea, 
 where, using his cloak for a sail, he drives for two 
 days, with his hair very naturally turning gray all 
 the time ; and having sailed up one of the rivers 
 that flow down from the Caucasus, he dies in a spot 
 of apparently impossible geography, in wild pursuit 
 of an image presented to him in a dream, the fascina- 
 tion of which centres in a pair of visionary eyes : — 
 
 " When his regard 
 Was raised by intense pensiveness, two eyes, 
 Two starry eyes, liung in the gloom of thought. 
 And seemed, Avitli their serene and azure smiles, 
 To beckon him."
 
 Ill SHELLEY AND HIS POETRY 173 
 
 No theory of the eyes can dispel the ajiparent in- 
 commensurability between the cause and the eftect. 
 Had Lord Jeffrey reviewed the poem, he would 
 assuredly have passed a very short and rude judg- 
 ment on the eyes, and perhaps on the poet too. 
 And yet this is certainly one of Shelley's most 
 characteristic and most beautiful poems. It is a 
 ghostly kind of passion that is described, but the 
 ghostly passion throbs as high as ever did that of 
 man. 
 
 The tnith seems to be, that Shelley's mind was 
 not powerfully excited either by the merely spiritual 
 or by the merely physical world, either by the 
 supernatural or by the natural, but by an ideal zone 
 peculiar to himself, where the uninteresting part, as 
 he thought it, of reality Avas purged away, and the 
 solemn mystery of unseen power was not yet reached. 
 His imagination does not seem to have been strong- 
 enough to weld together the invisible and visible, 
 the spiritual causes and the earthly phenomena, into 
 a single imaginative whole. " Lift not the painted 
 veil," he said, " which those who live call life," even 
 "though unreal shapes be pictured there." He had 
 tried to lift it, and it only made him lose his hold 
 of life, without gaining any hold of unseen realities. 
 And this suggests the true sphere of his genius. He 
 recoiled from the Avorld of living reality ; he had not 
 penetrated to the world of unseen strength ; his 
 imagination remained suspended between the two, 
 wielding a wonderful power over ideal essences, but 
 neither giving him a strong hold on life nor reaching 
 their root in God. His intellect, subtle as it was, 
 had no vigorous grasp in it ; or, if I may use a 
 somewhat pedantic expression, it had no integrating 
 power. It was swift, and infinite in fertility ; but
 
 174 SHELLEY AND HIS POETRY III 
 
 the only string by which he ever bound his thoughts 
 firmly together was continuity of desire. There was 
 but the faintest measure of binding strength in his 
 thought, the faintest possible volition in it. Hence 
 he had no enjoyment at all in reality as such. There 
 never was a poet who had less sympathy "\\ath the 
 pre-Raphaelite school of art. Poets, and artists, and 
 thinkers, and politicians, and theologians, Avho hunger 
 after reality, hold, we suppose, that the actual com- 
 bination of qualities and substances and personal 
 influences, as God has made them, contains some- 
 thing much better worth knowing and imagining 
 accurately, than any recast they could effect of their 
 own. They believe in the infinite significance of 
 actual ties. And those Avho feel this, as all realists 
 do usually feel it, must cherish a certain spirit of 
 faithful tenacity at the bottom of their minds, a 
 respect for the mere fact of existence, a wish to see 
 good reason before they separate things joined 
 together by nature and, perhaps, they will think, 
 by divine law ; a disposition to cling to the details 
 of experience, as having at least a presumptive 
 sacredness ; nay, they feel even a higher love for 
 such beauty as is presented to them in the real 
 universe, than for any which is got by the dissolving 
 and recomposing power of their OAvn eclectic idealism. 
 Shelley shows no trace of this feeling. He is 
 idealist to the heart's core. The root of much of 
 the sort of feeling I have described is fidelity of 
 temperament, and Shelley had but very little of 
 this ; he did not instinctively cling to things or 
 persons as he had seen and known them, simply 
 because he had so seen and kno^ai them. Again, 
 a good deal more of the same feeling is due to 
 a spiritual preference for that goodness which has
 
 Ill SHELLEY AND IIIS POETKY 175 
 
 penetrated us and conquered our resistance, as com- 
 pared with the natural beauty which has shone upon 
 us, but has exerted no such moulding power. Shelley 
 had no such preference. He held that all beauty 
 should sink into our being directly as the dew sinks 
 into the thirsty soil ; and his aspiration was to refine 
 away the coarse material of earth until the magic 
 worked without hindrance. His adoration is all for 
 the ease and richness and warmth of overflowing, 
 passionate, lavish beauty. Asia, in his Prometheus 
 Unbound is his true goddess, and he paints her thus : 
 
 " Life of Life ! thy lips enkindle 
 
 With their love the breath between tliem ; 
 And thy smiles before they dwindle 
 
 Make the cold air fire ; then sci^een them 
 1\\ those looks, where whoso gazes 
 Faints, entangled in their mazes. 
 
 " Child of Light ! thy lips are burning 
 
 Through the vest which seems to hide them, 
 As the radiant lines of morning 
 
 Through the clouds ere they divide them ; 
 And this atmosphere divinest 
 Shrouds thee wheresoe'er thou shinest. 
 
 " Fair are others ; none beholds thee, 
 
 But thy voice sounds low and tender. 
 
 Like the fairest, for it folds thee 
 
 From the sight, that liquid splendour ; 
 
 And all feel, yet see thee never. 
 
 As I feel now, lost for ever ! 
 
 " Lamp of earth ! where'er thou movest, 
 Its dim shapes are clad with brightness, 
 
 And the souls of whom thou lovest 
 Walk upon the winds with lightness. 
 
 Till they fail as I am failing, 
 
 Dizzy, lost, yet unbewailing."
 
 176 SHELLEY AND HIS POETRY iii 
 
 Nothing could express better the ideal of melting 
 beauty ; the beauty which, like a rich odour, makes 
 us "faint," according to Shelley's o"wii favourite ex- 
 pression. 
 
 Further again, as I have already said, Shelley's 
 intellect and imagination were not of a sort to master 
 a complex whole. _ There was no grip in them. In- 
 finitely subtle they were ; and if they had had more 
 volition, they might perhaps have been less subtle ; 
 but of volition they were almost destitute. His 
 imagination was of one dimension only, — a point of 
 moving fire generating myriads of beautiful shapes, 
 but never illuminating anything beyond the single 
 series of connected positions which the spark tra- 
 versed between the moment of kindling and the 
 moment of extinction. Hence the far greater per- 
 fection of his shorter lyrics, and the superiority 
 of The Cenci, which is constituted by one single 
 thrill of preternatural horror, to any other of his 
 longer poems. He never holds up either a subject 
 or a character steadily before his mind to examine it 
 in all its parts ; even The Cenci is a passion, not 
 a drama, — the silver gleam of a winter torrent doivn 
 a terrific precipice, leaving a shudder behind, and no 
 more. 
 
 Thus Shelley's intellectual, moral, and emotional 
 nature alike made him a pure idealist. There was 
 no moulding, no subduing, no conquering element 
 in the Beauty he worshipped. It conquered by 
 fascination alone, not by any poAver of character. 
 There was no inherent strength in his conception of 
 beauty. He abstracted it from the world, instead of 
 impressing or imposing it on the world. His in- 
 tellect had no grappling-irons wherewith to cling to 
 the existing order of things till he had exhausted its
 
 Ill SHELLEY AND HLS TOETRY 177 
 
 possibilities ; his conscience showed the finest feminine 
 qualities of disinterestedness and even fortitude, but 
 recoiled al)ruptly from all aggressive exploits against 
 the coarse jumbled evils of the world ; his affections 
 Avere not dumb conservative things, which fastened 
 on the forms consecrated by time and usage, but 
 swift gleams of chameleon-like rapture. His creed 
 on this head he has versified for us, though he was 
 perhaps higher than his creed. The passage throws 
 a considerable light on his whole cast of intellect : — 
 
 " I never was attached to that great sect 
 Whose doctrine is, that each one should select 
 Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend. 
 And all the rest, thotigh fair and wise, commend 
 To cold oblivion ; though it is the code 
 Of modern morals, and the beaten road 
 Which these poor slaves with weary footsteps tread 
 Who travel to their home among the dead 
 By the broad highway of the world, and so 
 With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe, 
 The dreariest and the longest journey go. 
 True love in this differs from gold and clay. 
 That to divide is not to take away ; 
 Love is like understanding, that grows bright 
 Gazing on many truths ; 'tis like thy light, 
 Imagination ! which from earth and sky. 
 And from the depths of human fantasy. 
 As from a thousand prisms and mirrors, fills 
 The universe with glorious beams, and kills 
 Error, the worm, with many a sunlike arrow 
 Of its reverberated lightning. Narrow 
 The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates, 
 The life that wears, the spirit that creates 
 One object and one form, and builds thereby 
 A sejjulchre for its eternity." 
 
 This is the natural creed of an inconstant imagination. 
 
 L N
 
 178 SHELLEY AND HIS POETRY iii 
 
 Eapid change, strung together only by the con- 
 tinuity of a flash of feeling, being thus the law of 
 Shelley's imagination, all his longer poems, except 
 The Cenci, are very defective in unity. Even 
 "Adonais" is only a rainljow of beautiful regret, 
 full of arbitrary though harmonious and delicate 
 colours ; and the " Witch of Atlas " gauges for us 
 the spontaneous tendencies of Shelley's volatile and 
 inconstant imagination when it happened to be en- 
 tirely free from the spell of any strong desire, and 
 shows us how loose was the texture of his genius 
 when not dominated by such feelings. No other 
 poet could make us take the slightest interest in the 
 subject. The Avitch is the impersonation of Shelley's 
 own fancy-free imagination, and is said to be the 
 spirit of love, but exhibits it only in the shape of 
 that pale gentleness of disposition which Shelley so 
 often confounded with love. She, like the poet 
 himself, has storehouses of all essences of beauty, 
 " sounds of air," " folded in cells of crystal silence" : — 
 
 " Such as Ave hear in youth, and think the feeling 
 Will never die ; yet, ere we are aware. 
 The feeling and the sound are fled and gone, 
 And the regret they leave remains alone." 
 
 And then, too, she has essences of dreams, " swift, 
 sweet, and quaint," " each in his thin sheath like a 
 chrysalis " ; and " odours in a kind of aviary " Avhich 
 are commissioned " to stir sweet thoughts or sad in 
 destined minds"; and even " liquors clear and sweet," 
 — an assortment of agreeable healing influences, the 
 quintessence of a celestial apothecary's shop Avithout 
 any of the unpleasant terrestrial alloys, — in fact, all 
 the beauties Avhich Shelley had distilled in thought 
 out of this miscellaneous Avorld ; — and Avonderful 
 atoms of detailed beauty they are, most excjuisitely
 
 Ill SHELLEY AND HIS POETRY 179 
 
 combining thoughts with feelings and perceptions, 
 but wanting as a whole just in the very thing in 
 which Shelley's imagination was wanting, — connect 
 ing purjiose or poetical comprehensiveness. The 
 Witch does not sleep at night, but lies in trance, 
 "with open eyes, closed feet, and folded palm," in 
 the fountain, Avatching the constellations reel and 
 dance over her ; or, in winter, in a well of crimson 
 fire, watching the flakes of snow melt as they touch 
 it. She moulds a sexless companion out of snow 
 and fire " tempered by love," and with it voyages 
 about, " circling the image of a shooting star," and 
 otherwise investigating all the subtle dreams of 
 Shelley's fancy. But her most characteristic occupa- 
 tion is the one Shelley assigns her in human affairs : 
 here she would defeat all the crooked purposes of 
 priests and hypocrites, but without changing the 
 heart of deceit ; she would gratify lovers' passions, 
 and save them from the results ; in short, she would 
 remove all the natural obstructions to the sweeter 
 desires of hun^ian life, defeat the unnatural vices, and 
 smooth the way to a placid adjustment of wants and 
 pleasures. This is an exact reflection of the spon- 
 taneous reverie of Shelley's imagination when not 
 illuminated by some glowing flash of feeling. It 
 busied itself A\ath fusing together mental and sensuous 
 impressions into symbols of rare beauty ; in shaking 
 them up in the kaleidoscope of his delicate fancy ; 
 or in using them more thoughtfully to construct a 
 world from which all Avrong and violence should be 
 eliminated ; — a thin world of distilled loveliness and 
 spontaneous instinct, but containing nothing that 
 could be called the strength of divine love, — a world 
 in which evil should be foiled or evaporated rather 
 than conquered.
 
 180 SHELLEY AND HIS POETRY ill 
 
 This intei'lunar sphere, in which Shelley places 
 the activity of his Witch of Atlas, is the region with 
 which his ovm imagination was most familiar, — the 
 sphere of ideal beauty lying midway between Divine 
 Power and human life. His mysticism arises quite 
 as much from his refusal to acknowledge the world 
 beyond, as from his reluctance to meddle with the 
 coarse details on this side of his chosen sphere. His 
 Witch of Atlas puts forth nothing which can be 
 called constraining power at all, — she only removes 
 friction ; and it was a characteristic of Shelley's 
 mind that he could scarcely conceive either Power 
 or Government, properly so called, except as pure 
 evil and tyranny. This alone gives much of the 
 apparent mysticism both to his political and his 
 religious poems. It is obvious, I suppose, that 
 politics involve a faith in government, religion a 
 faith in the divine JFill. Shelley had no such faith. 
 He believed rather in the abolition of government 
 than in government ; in the divinity of love, perhaps, 
 but love of the thinnest naturalistic type, certainly 
 not in the love of infinite power. Hence there are 
 no poems that seem more hazy to our own age than 
 his political and religious dreams. In both he is 
 striving to delineate something to which beneficent 
 power is essential, and he does it by omitting the 
 very idea. He paints a mere shadow of Influence, 
 a white symbol of Acquiescence, thinner and less real 
 than the Witch of Atlas herself, and puts the reins 
 of this headstrong universe into its hands. In his 
 political poems, indeed, Shelley scarcely takes the 
 trouble to sketch even a shadow of government, while 
 he carefully erases all the distinctive features which 
 give force and reality to the meaning of the 
 word : —
 
 Ill SHELLEY AND HIS POETRY 181 
 
 "The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains, 
 Sceptreless, free, uncircum scribed, but man 
 Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless. 
 Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king 
 Over himself, just, gentle, wise." 
 
 All that is wanted to his imagination is the 
 rejection of the tyrannical yoke, not the imposition 
 of a just one. Man would be greater if " sceptreless, 
 free, equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless," than 
 under the laws which are the growth of history, and 
 which recognise the actual distinctions between nation 
 and nation. From the sceptre on the one hand, from 
 the vulgar details of national prejudice and peculiar- 
 ities on the other, his ideal mind alike recoiled. 
 When Shelley was writing his poem of "Hellas," 
 Trela^vny insisted on taking him to see actual Greeks 
 on board the ships at Leghorn, that he might better 
 know what he was writing of. They found the 
 Greek crews "squatting about the decks in small 
 knots, shrieking, gesticulating, smoking, eating, and 
 gambling, like savages." "'Does this realise your 
 idea of Hellenism, Shelley?' I said. 'No; but it 
 does of Hell,' he replied." The skipper Avas opposed 
 to the Greek revolution because it "interrupted 
 trade." "Come away," said Shelley; "there is not 
 a drop of the old Hellenic blood here. These are 
 not the men to rekindle the ancient Greek hre ; their 
 souls are extinguished by traffic and superstition. 
 Come away ; I had rather not have any more of my 
 hopes and illusions mocked by sad realities." This 
 is a striking picture of the recoil of Shelley's mind 
 from the actual men concerning whose political state 
 he dreamed and poetised. 
 
 And of course he neglected to notice not only the 
 vices and faults which render some government
 
 182 SHELLEY AND HIS POETRY III 
 
 necessary by way of remedy, but also many virtues 
 and capacities for life in common, Avhich render all 
 such government valuable as a concentration of the 
 energies of a imited race. Abstract man might live, 
 perhaps " sceptreless, tribeless, and nationless " ; but 
 with the actual qualities shared by the tribe and the 
 nation the value of the sceptre begins. One can 
 easily understand, therefore, the feeling which Shelley 
 is said to have expressed to Mr. Hogg : " With how 
 unconquerable an aversion do I shrink from political 
 articles in newspapers and reviews ! I have heard 
 people talk politics by the hour, and how I hated it 
 and them ! I went with my father several times to 
 the House of Commons, and what creatures did I see 
 there ! what faces ! what an expression of counte- 
 nance ! Avhat wi-etched beings ! " Here he raised his 
 voice to a painful pitch mth fervid dislike. " Good 
 God ! what men did we meet about the House, in 
 the lobbies and passages ; and my father was so civil 
 to all of them — to animals that I regarded with 
 unmitigated disgust ! " Of course he did : here he 
 found the stringy fibre of real politics, — power in its 
 coarse form, 'svielding vulgar motives and machinery 
 — the gristle of government. Shelley had no belief 
 in such government. He Avanted to see man " tribe- 
 less and nationless," following gentle instincts without 
 any friction or any yoke. 
 
 But if Shelley's political view of men is confusing, 
 because it ignores the governing power and the need 
 of government in man, his religious view of the 
 world is still more so, from a corresponding hiatus 
 in his spiritual creed. It is ciu'ious that both in 
 politics and in religion he has a tendency to give us 
 feminine softness as the sovereign power, where 
 he will allow us any. In the "Kevolt of Islam,"
 
 Ill SHELLEY AND HIS POETEY 183 
 
 Laone, if any one, fills the vacuum left by the throne, 
 — certainly Laone more than Laon, who is himself 
 feminine enough. In the Prometheus Unbound, while 
 Prometheus brings about the catastrophe by patient 
 endurance, Asia, as I have said, is the only positive 
 representation of the " ruling " spirit of love ; and 
 Asia is a rich overpowering perfume rather than a 
 power. Demogorgon, the genius of Eternity, who, 
 in appearance at least, dethrones the tyrant Jupiter 
 when the fated hour comes, is abstract nothingness. 
 He sits waiting for his task in the gloom, and never 
 appears to do anything again after it is performed. 
 The whole catastrophe is significantly enough brought 
 about by passive virtues ; and Demogorgon is there- 
 foi'e fitly enough the pure Nothing, the "reine 
 Nichts," or at best, let us say, Kant's pure idea of 
 lo priori Time seated in a priori Space, who over- 
 throws the tyrant at last simply because the tyrant's 
 day is done. "Panthea" describes him thus, and 
 his career is even more negative than he himself is 
 described to be : — 
 
 " I see a mighty darkness 
 Filling the seat of power, and raj's of gloom 
 Dart roiuid, as light from the meridian sun, 
 Ungazed upon the shapeless ; neither limb, 
 Nor form, nor outline ; yet we feel it is 
 A living Spirit." 
 
 The reader does not feel it at all, and certainly 
 Shelley as a poet did not feel it, — nothing can be 
 more imbecile than Demogorgon's function in the 
 poem. Prometheus represents only created beings ; 
 and his virtues are summed up in lines which tell 
 how anxiously Shelley wished to inculcate that the 
 highest virtues of the creature are purely passive : —
 
 184 SHELLEY AND HIS POETRY in 
 
 " To suffer woes wliicli Hope thinks infinite, 
 To forgive wrongs darker than death or night, 
 To defy power which seems omnipotent, 
 To love and bear, to hope till Hope creates 
 From its own wreck the thing it contemplates ; 
 Neither to change, nor flatter, nor repent, — 
 This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be 
 Good, great, and joyous, beautiful and free ; 
 This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory." 
 
 In this fine poem Shelley in reality puts no per- 
 sonal power over Jupiter. Tyranny he represents 
 as personal Avill ; but the power that dethrones 
 tyranny is a breath, a shadow, nothing. In short, 
 Will falls from the throne of the Universe by its 
 own weight, and there is nothing to take its place. 
 To Shelley all ^vill is obstructive ; the only being 
 he can really worship is the rich radiant spirit of 
 feminine loveliness, through whom alone even 
 Prometheus can find his rest ; and even for her 
 he feels not Avorship, but " the desire of the moth 
 for the star." 
 
 The characteristics, then, of Shelley's poetical 
 mysticism seem to me to be the spirit of unsatisfied 
 desire which kindles it, the intellectualised character 
 of that desire, impregnated as it is everywhere Avith 
 the fixed air of subtle thought, and yet never domi- 
 nated or controlled by that thought, — a consequent 
 awelessness of instinct, which rushes on its way with 
 a craving w^hetted by the desultory stirrings of a 
 hungry intellect into the curiosity of passion, — an 
 eclectic idealism which recoils from everything un- 
 attractive, — a love of beauty, which excludes the 
 attribute of strength, and includes only passive 
 virtues, — all culminating in the substitution of either 
 Time or Nothingness in the place of the power of
 
 Ill SHELLEY AND HIS POETRY 185 
 
 God. I do not think that Shelley's genius, trained 
 as it was, could have taken any other path of de- 
 velopment. He received in his earliest days the 
 severest shock of repulsion from the world as it was. 
 His whole nature led him to the elaboration of 
 ideal beauties. There was something of his own 
 " Sensitive Plant " in his mind, Avhich made him start 
 away from repulsive qualities, and rendered him 
 incapable of reconciling contradictions, or holding 
 together wdth a strong hand the various elements of a 
 complex problem. Into one side of human perfection 
 he had a far higher insight than most men of his day, 
 — the passive nobility of beautiful instinct and en- 
 durance. But the very idealising tendency which 
 repelled him from human politics, repelled him also 
 from all human creeds, and the very first objection 
 he took to them was to their demand of deference 
 for a spiritual King. From all arbitrary authority 
 he recoiled, and never apparently conceived the 
 possibility of cmthoritij properly so called, and yet 
 not arbitrary. Hence, to save his faith in human 
 nature, he was almost compelled to seat a shadow on 
 the throne of the Universe. The only marvel is, 
 that his imagination still kept a throne of the Uni- 
 verse at all, even for a shadow. His ideal world 
 was one " where music and moonlight and feeling 
 are one," and in such a world apparently no throne 
 or sceptre would be needed. The result of his 
 idealism, as of all such idealism, was, that he no- 
 where found any true rest for his sjDirit, since he 
 never came upon any free and immutable Avill on 
 which to lean. The sense of weakness, of a long- 
 ing to lean somewhere, without recognising any 
 strength on which to lean, runs through his whole 
 poems : —
 
 186 SHELLEY AND HIS POETRY iii 
 
 " Yet now despair itself is mild 
 Even as the winds and waters are ; 
 I could lie down like a tired child, 
 And weep away the life of care 
 Which I have borne, and yet must bear," 
 
 is a burden that reappears habitually in his poetry. 
 There is but one passage in all Shelley's exquisite 
 poetry which rises into pure sublimity, — because 
 power is of the essence of sublimity, and Shelley had 
 no true sense of power. But one does, and that is, 
 characteristically enough, the passage in which he 
 puts into Beatrice Cenci's heart the sudden doubt 
 lest the spiritual world be without God after all : — 
 
 " Sweet Heaven, forgive weak thoughts ! If there 
 should be 
 No God, no Heaven, no Earth, in the void world, — 
 The wide, gray, lampless, deep, unpeopled world !" 
 
 A sublimer line was scarcely ever wi'itten. It 
 casts just a gleam on the infinite horror of an empty 
 eternity, and then drops the veil again, leaving the 
 infinitude of Aveakness and emptiness intensified into 
 a sublimity. Yet here is the true root of Shelley's 
 restlessness — the suspicion that when desire fails, the 
 object of the heart's desire may fail with it, — that " the 
 One " who " remains " is a thinner, fainter, less living 
 thing than the " many " which " change and pass," 
 — that there is nothing su.bstantial at the heart of 
 the universe, — no Will behind the fleeting beauty, 
 no strength of self-sacrifice behind the melting love. 
 Shelley was no Atheist. His Pantheism was sincere, 
 and at times no doubt a kind of faith to him ; but 
 belief in a universal essence gave no solidity to the 
 order of the world, no firm la-w to the flux and re- 
 flux of human desire, had no power to accept the
 
 Ill SHELLEY AND HIS POETRY 187 
 
 command, "Be still, and know that I am God." 
 Behind this " form and flush of the universal beauty " 
 there always lay a dreadful phantom of possible 
 emptiness. He felt of Pantheistic hopes as he felt 
 of the pictured falsehoods on the surface of the in- 
 dividual mind, that they might be all illusory scenic 
 effects. " Lift not the painted veil which those who 
 live call life." What if we were to find even behind 
 the fresco of universal loveliness nothing but a " wide, 
 gray, lampless, deep, unpeopled world " 1
 
 IV 
 
 MR. browning! 
 
 Mr. Browning, though commanding a wider intel- 
 lectual sweep of view than almost any artist of our 
 day, is hardly as yet a poet of European celebrity, 
 though he is the prime favourite of an intellectual 
 sect. This arises not from any sectarian tendency 
 in his poetry, — nothing could be more catholic, — but 
 from the general absence of that atmosphere of 
 fascination about his verse, that melody of mind and 
 speech, which is the main attraction of poetry to ordi- 
 nary men, and but for Avhich, imaginative power, 
 hoAvever great, would scarcely arrest their attention 
 at all. Coleridge once defined poetry — very badly I 
 conceive — as "that species of composition which is 
 opposed to works of science, by proposing for its 
 immediate object pleasure, not truth ; and from all 
 other species (having this object in common with, it) 
 it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight 
 from the tvhole as is compatil^le vnih. a distinct grati- 
 fication from each component ^fwl" Now Coleridge 
 certainly did not intend to exclude Mi\ Browning's 
 Avorks by anticipation from all claim to the title of 
 
 ' The Poetical Works of Itohert Browning. 3 vols. Third 
 edition. Chapman & Hall. The Pdng and the Book. 4 vols. 
 Smith & Elder, 1869.
 
 IV MR. BROWNING 189 
 
 poems ; if he had lived to read Mr. Browning, 
 Coleridge's profound, rich, and catholic imagination 
 would scarcely have failed to appreciate fully the 
 power and insight of the younger poet ; but no de- 
 finition of a poem could have been contrived more 
 ingeniously calculated to exclude Mr. Browning's 
 works from that class of composition. Most of Mr. 
 Browning's poems might be described precisely "as 
 proposing for their immediate object truth, not plea- 
 sure, and as aiming at such a satisfaction from the 
 whole as is by no means compatible with any very 
 distinct gratification from each component part." In 
 other words, Mr. Browning's poems, though, when 
 clearly apprehended, they seldom fail to give that 
 higher kind of imaginative satisfaction which is one 
 of the most enviable intellectual states, give a very 
 moderate amount of immediate sensitive pleasiu-e. 
 There is little of the thrill through the brain, of the 
 vibrating melodious sweetness, of the tranquillising 
 harmony, of the atmosphere of loveliness, which one 
 usually associates with the highest powers of poetical 
 expression. And then, as to the relation of the 
 whole to the part, which is Coleridge's second test of 
 a poem, Mr. Browning's poems are not so organised 
 that the parts give you any high gratification till 
 you catch a view of his Avhole. 
 
 Coleridge says, that " the reader should be carried 
 forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical 
 impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive 
 at the solution, but by the pleasurable activity of 
 the mind, excited by the attractions of the journey 
 itself. Like the motion of a serpent, which the 
 Egyptians made the emblem of intellectual power, 
 or like the path of sound through the air, at every 
 step he (the poet) pauses and half recedes, and from
 
 190 MK. BROWNING iv 
 
 the retrogressive movement collects the force which 
 again carries him onward." Nothing could be farther 
 from describing the ordinary movement of Mr. 
 Bro^vlling's poems. Instead of fascinating you with 
 his harmony of movement, and gradually insinuat- 
 ing the spirit of the poem into your imagination, 
 Mr. Browning rushes upon you ^svith a sort of in- 
 tellectual douche, half stuns you with the abruptness 
 of the shock, repeats the application in a multitude 
 of swift various jets from unexpected points of the 
 compass, and leaves you at last giddy and won- 
 dering Avhere you are, but with a vague sense that, 
 were you but properly prepared beforehand, you 
 would discern a real unity and power in this intel- 
 lectual water -spout, though its first descent only 
 drenched and bewildered your imagination. Take 
 the following short poem for example— one of really 
 marvellous force, indeed of true genius, but which I 
 purposely decline to present with any further intro- 
 duction than Mr. Bro'WTiing has himself accorded — in 
 order to illustrate this characteristic of his, that the 
 whole must be fairly grasped before any of the 
 " component parts " are intelligible ; the component 
 parts, indeed, being little more than diminutive 
 wholes, too diminutive in scale to be clearly legible 
 until you have seen the whole, Avhence you go 
 back to the component parts again with a key to 
 their meaning that at last gradually deciphers 
 them : — 
 
 SOLILOQUY OF THE SPANISH CLOISTER. 
 
 Gr-r-r — there go, my heart's abhorrence ! 
 
 Water your damned flower-pots, do ! 
 If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence, 
 
 God's blood, would not mine kill you !
 
 IV MR. BROWNING 191 
 
 What ? your myrtle-bush wants trimming ? 
 
 Oil, that rose has prior claims-^ 
 Needs its leaden vase filled brimming ? 
 
 Hell dry you up with its flames ! 
 
 At the meal we sit tocjether : 
 
 Salve tihi ! I must hear 
 Wise talk of the kind of weather, 
 
 Sort of season, time of year : 
 Not a plenteous corlc-cwp : scarcely 
 
 Dare we hope oak-galls, I doubt : 
 What's the Latin name for " parsley " ? 
 
 What's the Greek name for Swine's Snout ? 
 
 Whew ! We'll have our platter burnished, 
 
 Laid with care on our own shelf ! 
 With a fire-new spoon we're furnished, 
 
 And a goblet for ourself. 
 Einsed like something sacrificial 
 
 Ere 'tis fit to touch our chaps — 
 Marked with L. for our initial ! 
 
 (He-he ! There his lily snaps !) 
 
 Saint, forsooth ! While brown Dolores 
 
 Squats outside the Convent bank. 
 With Sanchicha, telling stories, 
 
 Steeping tresses in the tank, 
 Blue-black, lustrous, thick like horsehairs. 
 
 Can't I see his dead eye glow, 
 Bright as 'twere a Barliary corsair's ? 
 
 (That is, if he'd let it show !) 
 
 When he finishes refection, 
 
 Knife and fork he never lays 
 Cross-wise, to my recollection, 
 
 As do I, in Jesu's praise. 
 I, the Trinity illustrate, 
 
 Drinking M'atered orange-pulp — 
 In three sips the Arian frustrate ; 
 
 While he drains his at one gulp !
 
 192 MR. BROWNING 
 
 Oh, those melons ! If he's able 
 
 We're to have a feast so nice ! 
 One goes to the Abbot's table, 
 
 All of us get each a slice. 
 How go on your flowers 1 None double 
 
 Not one fruit-sort can you spy ? 
 Strange ! — And I, too, at such trouble. 
 
 Keep them close-nipped on the sly ? 
 
 There's a great text in Galatians, 
 
 Once you trip on it entails 
 Twenty-nine distinct damnations, 
 
 One sure, if another fails : 
 If I trip him just a-dying, 
 
 Sure of Heaven as sure as can be. 
 Spin him round and send him flying 
 
 Off to Hell, a Manichee ? 
 
 IV 
 
 '5 
 
 Or, my scrofulous French novel 
 
 On gray paper with blunt type ! 
 Simply glance at it, you grovel 
 
 Hand and foot in Belial's gripe : 
 If I double down its pages 
 
 At the woeful sixteenth print, 
 When he gathers his greengages. 
 
 Ope a sieve and slip it in't ? 
 
 Or, there's Satan ! — one might venture 
 
 Pledge one's soul to him, yet leave 
 Such a flaw in the indenture 
 
 As he'd miss till, past retrieve, 
 Blasted lay that rose-acacia 
 
 We're so proud of ! Hy, Zy, Hine . . . 
 'St, there's Vespers ! Plena gratia, 
 
 Ave, Virgo ! Gr-r-r — you swine ! 
 
 When we have caught the idea that Mr. Bro^^^ling 
 is painting the jealous disgust and tricky spite felt 
 by a passionate, sensual, self-indulging, superstitious
 
 IV ME. BROWNING 193 
 
 monk for the pale, blameless, vegetating, contented 
 sort of saint who takes kindly to gardening, and 
 " talks crops " at the monastery table, we see how 
 living and strongly conceived the picture is : but the 
 wording, though vigorous, and one verse at least 
 (that concerning Sanchicha) highly pictiu-esque, is 
 neither melodious nor even very lucid for its pur- 
 pose ; and the parts, as I said, are diminished images 
 of the whole, and hence enigmatic till the whole has 
 been two or three times read. Yet the average of 
 the versification, and the verbal efficiency generally, 
 in this little poem, are in power a good deal above 
 those of most of the pieces called " lyrical," chiefly 
 because it is lyrical only in name, and does not 
 attempt to be in form much more than it really is in 
 essence, a semi-dramatic fragment. 
 
 Mr. Browning's deficiency in the power of sensuous 
 expression, and in the art of giving an independent 
 interest and attractiveness to the component parts of 
 his poems, as distinguished from the whole, is of 
 course most strikingly seen in the deficiencies of his 
 metre and rhyme, which are the natural gauge of 
 poetic expressiveness and harmony of poetic struc- 
 ture. A metre that does not fit the movement of the 
 thought gives the painful sense of a man rattling in 
 a case of armour quite too large for him ; and rhyme 
 that is only rhyme, and that does not bring with the 
 regular beat of the rhythm something of new power to 
 the sense, annoys with a sense of something artificial, 
 ingenuity at best, interfering with the imaginative 
 eff"ect instead of heightening it. Mr. Browning is 
 never happy in his lyrical metres, and his rhymes 
 have the careless wilful air of being cast off" at ran- 
 dom by one whom the half -whimsical eff'ect of rhyme 
 stimulates and entertains. His versification is almost 
 L o
 
 194 MR. BEOWNING 
 
 IV 
 
 always best where it is nearest to prose, where, as in 
 the dramas, the metre is blank verse without rhyme. 
 For example, where else is there in Mr. Browning, 
 for what comes near to lyric fire, anything like that 
 apostrophe which ends the prologue to The Ring 
 and the Booh, the first couplet of which has more 
 of the true ring of inspiration than anything else in 
 the whole range of his poems ; though in the closing 
 lines he re-passes into that over-compressed thought 
 which makes him at times so obscure 1 — 
 
 " O lyric Love ! half-angel and half-bird, 
 And all a wonder and a wild desire, — 
 Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun. 
 Took sanctuary withiu the holier blue, 
 And sang a kindred soul out to his face, — 
 Yet human at the red-ripe of the heart — 
 When the first summons from the darkling earth 
 Reached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blite, 
 And bared them of the glory — to drop down, 
 To toil for man, to suffer or to die, — 
 This is the same voice : can thy soul know change ? 
 Hail, then, and hearken from the realms of help ! 
 Never may I commence my song, my due 
 To God who best taught song by gift of thee, 
 Except with bent head and beseeching hand — 
 Tliat still, despite the distance and the dark, 
 AVhat was, again may be ; some interchange 
 Of grace, some splendour once thy very thought. 
 Some benediction anciently thy smile : — 
 Never conclude, but raising hand and head 
 Thither where eyes, that cannot reach yet yearn 
 For all hope, all sustainment, all reward, 
 Their utmost up and on, — so blessing back 
 In those thy realms of help, that heaven thy home. 
 Some whiteness which, I judge, thy face makes proud, 
 Some wanness where, I think, thy foot may fall ! "
 
 IV ME. BROWNING 195 
 
 This is blank verse, and fine blank verse. Elsewhere 
 there is but little elasticity in the rhythm, and rarely 
 indeed, when Mr. Browning tries rhyme, does he use 
 it to effect its legitimate function, — the delicate and 
 definitive clasping of thought to thought. Except in 
 " The Lost Leader," " Bringing the Good News from 
 Ghent to Aix," and one or two other ballads of the 
 same kind, which have a stately gallop in their move- 
 ment that corresponds well to the movement of the 
 thought, there is hardly a metre or a rhyme in the 
 poems that strikes you by its felicity, and but few, 
 except some of the blank metres, that do not pain- 
 fully drag or jar. And this deficiency in the verse is 
 only the reflection of the deficiencies of the style 
 generally, wherever, at least, it attempts to be 
 lyrical. 
 
 Mr. Browning has himself suggested, not perhaps 
 with any conception of the full scope of his remark, 
 the reason why many of his so-called lyrics are un- 
 satisfactory in form ; and if we follow the clue his 
 suggestion gives, we shall probably find that it 
 accounts for much both of his great power and great 
 uncouthness. He says, in a note to the first of the 
 Lyrics, "Such poetry as the majority in this 
 volume might also come properly enough, I suppose, 
 under the head of ' Dramatic Pieces ' ; being, though 
 often Lyric in expression, always Dramatic in prin- 
 ciple, and so many utterances of so many imaginary 
 persons, not mine." Except that I should prefer to 
 call Mr. Browning semi-dramatic rather than dramatic 
 — as there is always a Browningite style in the voices 
 he gives to his various studies, — and that I take 
 exception to the asserted lyrical expression, that is 
 certainly true. These pieces make an effort to take 
 the lyric shape ; but having another essence, they
 
 196 MK. BKOWNING iv 
 
 show, by the rasping and the friction of the style, 
 that they have somehow got embodied in an unsuit- 
 able poetic form. The truth is, I think, that Mr. 
 Browning combines in his own person the half of a 
 great dramatist with a large capacity for pure intel- 
 lectual thought, but has little of that liability to 
 flashes of emotion tinging his whole creative power 
 which generates true lyric poetry. His mind seldom 
 or never seems to fall under the dominion of a single 
 sentiment or passion, without which poetry cannot 
 properly be lyric. He can throw himself dramatic- 
 ally into such a mood, but that has an altogether 
 different effect. A semi-dramatic picture and inter- 
 pretation of emotion he can always give ; but then 
 this has not the true lyrical spontaneity, ease, single- 
 ness of effect ; for almost always (usually even in 
 soliloquies) it has direct relation to the minds and 
 actions of others. 
 
 Mr. Bro'wniing is a dramatic thinker, — generally 
 thinking within the imaginative fetters of monologue, 
 even when not throwing his thoughts into that ex- 
 ternal form ; writing with a view to a resisting 
 medium of thought or feeling foreign to that which 
 he is expressing at the moment. You feel that he 
 invariably contemplates some other phase of character, 
 against which his thought has to justify itself, or 
 into the heart of which it has to force an entrance. 
 He is a great imaginative apologist, rather than 
 either a lyric or dramatic poet. A genuine lyric is 
 not written under the sense of external limits, and 
 with direct reference to the presence of some other 
 form of thought or character. Lyrical poetry is "a 
 law unto itself," defined by its own nature, but ^vith- 
 out defined end or purpose, falling into shapes due 
 only to the inward harmony of the mind in which it
 
 IV MK. BROWNING 197 
 
 originates, and essentially free from the control of 
 any immediate foreign inflnence. A lyric is complete 
 in itself, and shonld justify itself by the perfect indi- 
 vidual organisation of its versification. 
 
 Why, then, it may well be asked, does a mind 
 which delights so much in these interpretations of 
 character, ever feel tempted to adopt the lyric form ? 
 The answer I believe to be because Mr. Browning is 
 only half a dramatist — an intellectual apologist for 
 the dramatic part of life rather than a dramatist — 
 his dramatic powers being controlled entirely by 
 speculative interests, and never hurrying on his imagi- 
 nation deep into the play of those practical forces 
 which constitute the life of a great drama. He does 
 not enter into character as a prelude to the excite- 
 ment of a conflict, but only describes the conflict 
 in order to illustrate the character. He conceives 
 men in their relation to each other, and in mental 
 collision with each other ; but, after all, he does not 
 care which way the battle goes, except so far as that 
 is involved in his interpretation. There is no narra- 
 tive force in him at all. He hardly enters into the 
 story, and even in his dramas — even in The Ring 
 and the Book — evades a plot as far as he possibly 
 can. He has the keenest of all eyes for every quali- 
 fying circumstance which alters the point of view of 
 each age and each individual, — but he is never really 
 dramatic, for we never lose sight of the critical eye 
 of the poet himself, who discriminates all these dif- 
 ferent shades of thought, and tosses them off with a 
 hardness of outline, and sometimes a touch of intel- 
 lectual caricature, or a sharp sarcasm, that could not 
 possibly have proceeded from the inside of the situa- 
 tion he is painting for us, that could only have pro- 
 ceeded from one outside it, but looking (very keenly)
 
 198 ME. BEOWNING iv 
 
 into it. He paints with wonderful swiftness and 
 brilliancy, but also ^\ii\l a certain A^alful carelessness 
 and singularity, mth some of the qualities shown in 
 old David Cox's fine water-colour sketches, — and with 
 a singular contempt for sweetness and finish of style. 
 In fertility of intellectual interests there is no poetry 
 anywhere like Mr. Browning's ; in the brilliancy of 
 his descriptions of character he has no rival ; but for 
 beauty of form he seems to me to have almost a dislike. 
 The consequence is, that he is constantly tempted 
 to throw his dramatic conceptions into a form which 
 rids him altogether of the necessity for a plot. And 
 in order to disguise more effectually the fragmentary 
 character of these pieces torn from their dramatic 
 connection, they are frequently forced into an arti- 
 ficial mould of lyrical shape. Yet, as they are really 
 apologetic monologues addressed to a visionary but 
 half-indicated auditor, the lyrical metres and rhymes 
 are often the most awkward of artificial accompani- 
 ments, which, instead of setting them to a soft 
 melody, give them the easy, familiar, often jaunty 
 recitative, which expresses a lively external criticism. 
 A very short extract will show what I mean : I take 
 it from a poem of fine conception, " The Grammarian's 
 Funeral "; the aim of which is to bring out the strong 
 implicit faith in an eternal career which there must 
 be in any man who devotes this life wholly to the 
 preliminary toil of mastering the rudiments of lan- 
 guage : — 
 
 " Was it not great ? Did not he throw on God 
 (He loves the burthen) 
 God's task to make the heavenly x^eriod 
 
 Perfect the earthen 1 
 Did not he magnify the mind, show clear 
 Just what it all meant 1
 
 IV MK. BKOWNING 199 
 
 He woiild not discount life, as fools do here, 
 
 Paid by instalment ! 
 He ventured neck-or-nothing — lieaven's success 
 
 Found, or earth's failure : 
 ' Wilt thou trust death, or not ? ' He answered, 
 'Yes! 
 
 Hence with life's pale lure ! ' 
 
 So, with the throttling hands of death at strife, 
 
 Ground he at grammar ; 
 Still, through the rattle, parts of speech were rife : 
 
 While he could stammer 
 He settled ort's business — let it be ! 
 
 Properly based ovv— 
 Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic Se 
 
 Dead from the waist down." 
 
 Now this is a very spirited defence of a grammarian's 
 life ; and if the substance of it had fallen naturally 
 into a grammarian's o^vn mouth, instead of being 
 forced out of shape into a kind of hoarse triumphal 
 recitative — chant I cannot call it — over his grave, it 
 might have made a fine dramatic fragment. But as 
 it is, this is in form not meant to be dramatic, but 
 a sort of rhapsody of critical praise. While the 
 thought throughout suggests simply an imaginative 
 effort in the poet's mind to explain and defend the 
 narrow range of a grammarian's studies, the form of 
 the expression tries to pour out a flood of lyrical 
 enthusiasm over him which the writer hardly feels 
 though he thinks it, and the striving after which, 
 therefore, comes out in the quick awkward rattle of 
 a jingling metre. 
 
 Nothing is easier than to multiply instances of 
 the same kind of blunder in Mr. Browning's so-called 
 lyrics. As a rule, wherever we have a peculiarly
 
 200 MR. BROWNING iv 
 
 jarring metre and jingling rhymes, there Mr. Brown- 
 ing is attempting to disguise sharp or sympathetic 
 criticisms on character in the flomng forms of lyrical 
 melody, — to disguise a speech in a song, to hide the 
 tight garment of apologetic monologue, by throwing 
 over it the easy undress of spontaneous feeling, — in 
 short, to give the effect of " wandering at its own 
 sweet will " to a stream of thought which is strongly 
 and pointedly directed, through a sort of intellectual 
 hose, on a specific object. Here, for instance, is a 
 young lady complaining of her lover for ceasing to 
 care for her, because she had allowed him to see her 
 love for him too plainly. She gives expression to a 
 very clever criticism and complaint, but there is no 
 music in her pain ; and the attempt to put it into a 
 lyrical form results in a funny compromise between 
 the beat of wings and a firm step, a form which is 
 rhetorical without being passionate, and critical with- 
 out beino; calm : — 
 
 '& 
 
 " Never any more 
 
 While I live, 
 Need I hope to see his face 
 
 As before. 
 Once his love grown cliill, 
 
 Mine may strive — 
 Bitterly we re-embrace, 
 
 Single still. 
 
 ^o^ 
 
 " Was it something said, 
 
 Something done, 
 Vexed him ? was it touch of hand, 
 
 Turn of head ? 
 Strange ! that very way 
 
 Love begun : 
 I as little understand 
 
 Love's decay.
 
 IV MK. BEOWNING 201 
 
 ' ' When I sewed or drew, 
 
 I recall 
 How he looked as if I sung, 
 
 — Sweetly too. 
 If I spoke a word, 
 
 First of all 
 Up his cheek the colour sprung, 
 
 Then he heard. 
 
 " Sitting by my side, 
 
 At my feet. 
 So he breathed the air I breathed, 
 
 Satisfied ! 
 I, too, at love's brim 
 
 Touched the sweet : 
 I would die if death bequeathed 
 
 Sweet to him. 
 
 " ' Speak, I love thee best ! ' 
 
 He exclaimed. 
 'Let thy love my own foretell,' 
 
 I confessed : 
 ' Clasp my heart on thine 
 
 Now unblamed, 
 Since upon thy soul as well 
 
 Hangeth mine ! ' 
 
 " Was it wrong to own. 
 
 Being truth ? 
 Why should all the giving prove 
 
 His alone 1 
 I had wealth and ease, 
 
 Beauty, youth, — 
 Since my lover gave me love, 
 
 I gave these," etc. 
 
 This marked genius of Mr. Browning for inter- 
 preting (in his own language however) character in 
 position — that is, in its most characteristic attitude
 
 202 ME. BEOWNING iv 
 
 towards the rest of the world — is probably the secret 
 not only of his lyrical failures, but of his generally 
 defective powers of poetical expression ; for it im- 
 plies a purely intellectual basis for such dramatic 
 power as he has, and suggests that Mr. Browning is 
 rather a highly -intellectual interpreter of action, 
 thro'wing himself into a new part, and feeling its 
 characteristic points, as a good rider just feels his 
 horse's mouth with the bit — or, to use a better 
 image, perhaps, throAving out all his nervous percep- 
 tion into the defining outline and moral profile of his 
 part, as a blind man will finger the contour of a face 
 that is dear to him, to secure his image of the char- 
 acteristic lines,- — rather than that he works, like 
 Shakespeare or Goethe, by intense sympathy from 
 within, leaving the final outline to crystallise as it 
 may, according to the internal law and nature of the 
 life thus germinating in his imagination. 
 
 And no doubt the basis of Mr. Browning's whole 
 genius is keenly intellectual, — not meditatively in- 
 tellectual, but, on the contrary, observingly, defin- 
 ingly, speculatively intellectual, — of which we may 
 see one great proof in the usually far superior char- 
 acter of his masculine to his feminine sketches, 
 of his "men" to his "women," though I must 
 except here the saint of The Ring and the Booh. 
 Educated men's characters are naturally in position, 
 and most vigorous masculine characters of any kind 
 have a defined bearing on the rest of the world, a 
 characteristic attitude, a personal latitude and longi- 
 tiide on the map of human affairs, which an intellect- 
 ual eye can seize and mark out at once. But it is 
 not so usually with women's characters. They are 
 best expressed not by attitude and outline, but by 
 essence and indefinite tone. As an odour expresses
 
 IV ME. BROWNING 203 
 
 and characterises a flower even better than its shape 
 and coloiu-, as the note of a bird is in some sense 
 a more personal expression of it than its form and 
 feathers, so there is something of vital essence in 
 a great poet's delineations of women which is far 
 more expressive than any outline or colour. When 
 Shakespeare makes Cleopatra say, over the body of 
 Antony, 
 
 " And there is nothing left remarkable 
 Beneath the visiting moon," 
 
 he somehow contrives to embody in a sentence the 
 concentrated essence of the imperious and voluptuous 
 queen. When Goethe makes Kliirchen, in Egmont, 
 sing, 
 
 "Freudvoll und leidvoll, 
 
 GedankenvoU sein, 
 
 Langen nnd bangei], 
 
 In schwebender Pein, 
 
 Himmelhoch jauclizend, 
 
 Zum Tode betriibt, 
 
 Gliicklicb allein 
 
 1st die Seele, die liebt," 
 
 he has given you the whole character in an aroma of 
 brief but surpassing sweetness. There is no trace 
 of this power in Mr. Browning. He throws his 
 feminine characters into as strongly-defined attitudes 
 as his masculine, and the consequence is, that they 
 are seldom nearly so true; and also that, half- 
 conscious of this intellectualising mould of his mind, 
 he attempts them very much less often. He has 
 drawn women, indeed, of a certain grandeur of outline, 
 — as, for instance, the guilty Ottima, in Pijjpa Passes, 
 who stimulates her lover to the murder of her 
 husband, and then asks him to crown her his queen.
 
 204 MR. BROWNING iv 
 
 his " spirit's arbitress, magnificent in sin " ; but the 
 picture is painfully inflamed, and though it impresses 
 one as true, it is because, under such exceptional 
 circumstances, the pronounced attitude Avhich Mr. 
 Browning loves to draw is to be found even more 
 sharply defined in the passionate woman, fearful that 
 the guilt may alienate love, than in the most mas- 
 culine of men. And no one can mistake the peculiar 
 abrvipt Browningite style in which Ottima, like all 
 Mr. Browning's characters, phrases her monologue : — 
 
 Otti. " Well, then, I love you better now than ever, 
 And best (look at me while I speak to you) — - 
 Best for the crime ; nor do I grieve, in truth, 
 This mask, this simulated ignorance. 
 This affectation of simplicity. 
 Falls off our crime ; this naked crime of ours 
 May not, now, be looked over : look it down, then ! 
 Great? let it be great; but the joys it brought. 
 Pay they or no its price ? Come : they or it ! 
 Speak not ! The Past, would you give up the Past 
 Such as it is, pleasure and crime together ? 
 Give uji that noon I owned my love for you ? 
 The garden's silence ! even the single bee 
 Persisting in his toil, suddenly stopt ; 
 And where he hid, you only could surmise 
 By some campanula's chalice set a-swing : 
 Who stanunered — ' Yes, I love you ' V 
 
 It is essentially an intellectual picture ; a passionate 
 attitude, with its swollen veins and starting muscles, 
 delineated crisply by an abruptly intellectual mind. 
 And of the only other feminine pictures that strike 
 me at all, " Pompilia " excepted, of whom I must 
 speak separately, — those, namely, in the fine piece 
 called " In a Balcony," — it may be equally said that 
 though they are not, perhaps, overdraAvn, they are
 
 IV MR. BROWNING 205 
 
 drawn on the stretch, and not in the way in which 
 women most naturally express themselves. Even 
 "Pompilia" is intellectualised and over -sharply 
 defined in the monologue in which her critic makes 
 her speak. Mr. Browning's power is always most 
 naturally expended in drawing masculine characters 
 in sharply defined relations to the rest of the world. 
 And, again, this defective, because too intellectual, 
 basis of Mr. Browning's powers of expression betrays 
 itself clearly in his choice of language. In that 
 strange freak of creative self-will, "Sordello," — which, 
 had it not received special panegyrics as well as 
 elaborate criticisms from members of the Browninu' 
 Society, I should have supposed that no man or 
 woman except the author had ever understood, — 
 there are one or two flashes of intelligible thought 
 which give one some insight into Mr. Browning's 
 own troubles. Sordello is an ambitious poet of the 
 ancient Troubadour type and times, divided with 
 himself whether he should try to influence the world 
 directly or only through his song. And it is the 
 psychological history of this conflict which Mr, 
 Browning apparently wishes to desci'ibe. One of 
 Sordello's first difficulties, during his poetic period, 
 in getting at mankind, is language. He is oppressed 
 apparently (like our Lake poets of the end of the 
 last century) by the unreal character of the poetic 
 phraseology, and he leaves off imagining for a season, 
 to see if he can make something more effective of 
 the medium through which his imaginations must be 
 presented to the world : — 
 
 " He left imagining, to try the stuff 
 That held the imaged thing, and — let it writhe 
 Never so fiercely — scarcely allowed a tithe 
 To reach the light, — his Language."
 
 206 MR. BROWNING IV 
 
 Certainly Sordello was quite right in supposing tliat 
 this was the great obstacle to his fame, if we have 
 any measure of his powers of expression in this 
 poem ; for a more completely opaque medium than 
 the wording either of his o^vn thoughts or of the 
 author's thoughts about him, Talleyrand himself 
 would have failed to invent. However, it is some- 
 thing that Sordello so keenly felt the obscurity, while 
 the attempt to remedy it, and the reason of the failure, 
 are instructive : — 
 
 " How he sought 
 The cause, conceived a cure, and slow re-wrought 
 That Language, — welding Avords into the crude 
 Mass from the new speech round him, till a rude 
 Armour was hammered out, iu time to be 
 Approved beyond the Roman panoply 
 Melted to make it, — boots not. This obtained 
 With some ado, no obstacle remained 
 To using it ; accordingly he took 
 An action with its actors, quite forsook 
 Himself to live in each, returned anon 
 With the result — a creature, and, by one 
 And one, proceeded leisurely to equip 
 Its limbs in harness of his workmanship. 
 'Accomplished! Listen, Mantuans ! ' Fond essay! 
 Piece after piece that armour broke away. 
 Because perceptions whole, like that he sought 
 To clothe, reject so pure a work of thought 
 As language : thought may take percej)tion's place, 
 But hardly co-exist in any case. 
 Being its mere presentment — of the whole 
 By parts, the simultaneous and the sole 
 By the successive and the many." 
 
 Whether this expresses Sordello's process of poetical 
 construction or not, I strongly suspect that it ex- 
 presses Mr. Browning's. To cast his language, like
 
 IV ME. BROWNING- 207 
 
 bronze armour, in moulds of its own ; to conceive 
 and imagine in a separate intellectual world far 
 removed from this verbal armour of the imagination, 
 and then bring " the result, a creature," to have the 
 armour of language " leisurely " fitted on to it ; and 
 finally to find that armour break away, 
 
 " Because perceptions whole, like that he sought 
 To clothe, reject so pure a work of thought 
 As language," — 
 
 seems to me a very graphic, though not very poetical 
 — in one small respect only erroneous — account of 
 Mr. BroAvning's own struggles with the difficulties of 
 poetic expression. I say, in one respect erroneous, 
 because it is only to intellects like Mr. Browning's 
 that language is "so pure a work of thought " ; and 
 to them only because they see mainly the intellectual 
 side of language, and look at its defined meanings so 
 much more than its often far more vital undefined 
 associations. Instead of language being too pure a 
 work of thought to clothe Mr. Browning's perceptions 
 adequately, it would be nearer the truth to say that 
 his perceptions are too much overruled and concen- 
 trated by thou^ght to admit of the most poetical use 
 of language. 
 
 This may seem obscure ; but I can explain what 
 I mean about Mr. Browning's style, and I think 
 justify it, in a few words. Every one must have 
 noticed that the style introduced by Mr. Carlyle is 
 far from poetical, and yet in the highest degree 
 picturesque, while also open to the charge of being 
 not a little obscure. It is a style the essence of 
 which consists in driving your perceptions into the 
 service of your intellect, and talking a sort of hiero- 
 glyphic, every picturesque symbol in which expresses
 
 208 MU. BKOWNING 
 
 IV 
 
 a thought. Thus, to open Mr. Carlyle at random : 
 " To such length can transcendental moonshine, cast 
 by some morbidly radiating Coleridge into the chaos 
 of a fermenting life, act magically there, and produce 
 divulsions and convulsions and diseased developments. 
 So dark and abstruse, without lamp or authentic 
 finger-post, is the course of pious genius towards the 
 eternal kingdoms grown." Here we have the rather 
 ordinary thought that the "high philosophy of a 
 genius like Coleridge's is able to cast a charm over 
 minds in difficulty and doubt, and jDersuade them 
 this way and that, when they have no really safe 
 guide to look to," — illuminated, like the old missals, 
 by a little series of images, in which vision is made 
 the instrument for sharply emphasising thought. 
 Here is a style crowded with stress, and making the 
 same kind of fatiguing impression on the mind which 
 a handwriting sloped the Avrong way makes on the 
 eye, — an impression of strain and eftbrt. It is 
 therefore apt to be obscure, and certain not to be 
 poetical, for one and the same reason, — namely, that 
 over - emphasis is both exhausting and unnatural ; 
 and while an exhausted attention is necessarily en- 
 veloped by a mist of obscurity, emphasis too crowded 
 for nature misses the undertones and the neutral 
 tints which are absolutely essential to the harmony 
 of poetry. 
 
 Now, of com-se, I do not mean to say that Mr. 
 Browning's style is the illuminated style of Mr. 
 Carlyle. He is too near a poet for such dispro- 
 portion of the picturesque, such fatiguing gold-and- 
 crimson. But it is true that his style also is 
 elaborately fatiguing and destitute of lower tints 
 and under-tones, and that when he is pictorial, as he 
 very often is, he crowds and emphasises the striking
 
 IV MR. BROWNING 209 
 
 points, so as to miss the harmony of poetry. It 
 gives one the impression of a vigilant intellect noting 
 all the principal features of the scene acutely, and 
 concentrating the perceptive faculties so completely 
 in the gaze of attention as to miss those numberless 
 undergrowths of half-dreamy observation which con- 
 stitute, perhaps, the chief charm of poetic insight. 
 Mr. Browning's style is too keen, too restless, too 
 startling, — his soul is too much in his eyes, his mind 
 too devoid of that lazy receptiveness which fills in 
 and softens and warms the effect of the whole, — for 
 a true poetic style. Compare, for instance, his purely 
 descriptive talent, which is highly picturesque, but 
 not poetical, with Tennyson. Thus Mr. Browning 
 describes a lunar rainbow : — 
 
 " For lo, what think you ? suddenly 
 The rain and the wind ceased, and the sky 
 Received at once the full fruition 
 Of the moon's consummate apparition. 
 The black cloud-barricade was riven, 
 Ruined beneath her feet, and driven 
 Deep in the West ; while, bare and breathless, 
 North and South and East lay ready 
 For a glorious Thing, that, dauntless, deathless, 
 Sprang across them, and stood steady. 
 'Twas a moon-rainbow, vast and perfect. 
 From heaven to heaven extending, perfect 
 As the mother-moon's self, full in face. 
 It rose, distinctly at the base 
 With its seven proper colours chorded. 
 Which still, in the rising, were compressed, 
 Until at last they coalesced, 
 And supreme the spectral creature lorded 
 In a triumph of whitest white, — 
 Above which intervened the night.
 
 210 MR. BROWNING IV 
 
 But above night too, like only the next, 
 The second of a wondrous sequence, 
 Eeaching in rare and rarer frequence, 
 Till the heaven of heavens were circumflext, 
 Another rainbow rose, a mightier, 
 Fainter, flushier, and flightier, 
 Eapture dying along its verge ! 
 Oh, whose foot shall I see emerge. 
 Whose, from the straining topmost dark. 
 On to the keystone of that arc ? " 
 
 This is powerful, keen-eyed, piercing, — too much of 
 all these for the harmony of poetry. The style is to 
 the poetic style like the secondary rainbow to the 
 primary, "fainter, flushier, and flightier"; "fainter," 
 because the colours are washed on with a thin hasty 
 hand ; " flushier," because they come and go with a 
 certain flush of attentive perception that subsides 
 back into pure thought; and "flightier," from the 
 abrupt breathless air of the whole metre. The sense 
 of rest which a still lunar rainbow after a storm 
 should produce on the heart is entirely absent. 
 Tennyson also is one of the greatest of poetic 
 painters ; but how much of the still undergrowth 
 of perception, or rather reception, which does not, 
 nay cannot, come if you watch for it, which steals 
 into the brooding mind when the attention is relaxed 
 and the mind's eye half shut, is there in every frag- 
 ment of his descriptions ! Take a fragment from 
 "In Memoriam," for instance : — 
 
 " Doors, where my heart was used to beat 
 So quickly, not as one that weeps 
 I come once more ; the city sleeps 
 I smell the meadow in the street, 
 
 " I hear a chirp of birds ; I see 
 
 Betwixt the black fronts long withdrawn
 
 IV ME. BROWNING 211 
 
 A light-blue lane of early dawn, 
 And think of early days and thee." 
 
 That is poetry in which the brooding, silent, receptive 
 mind drinks in much that the restless eye and ear 
 could never catch ; poetry that reflects the silence as 
 well as the sound, that preserves the middle tints 
 as well as the flashes of light and colour. And the 
 want of this power in Mr. Browning seems to me to 
 show that for him language is not in reality "too 
 pure a work of thought " to contain his perceptions, 
 but that his perceptions are too piu-e a work of 
 thought, too full of vigilant intellectual activity, to 
 give him the full command of the associative charms 
 and latent riches of language. His imagination is 
 impatient ; it never broods. 
 
 The impatient shorthand elliptic style, so notable in 
 " Sordello," has returned fatally upon Mr. Browning in 
 his later years, so that amongst the wilderness of such 
 works as those on "Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangan," 
 " Red Cotton Nightcap Country," " The Inn Album," 
 " Ferishtah's Fancies," " Communings with Certain 
 Persons Notable in their Day," and a good many 
 others — which must, many of them, have been written 
 solely for the behoof of "The Bro^vning Society" 
 and not for mankind in general — one hardly knows 
 whether one shall come upon a single green oasis of 
 anything like lucid and artistic finish in the course 
 of a whole poem. Yet amongst these later works 
 there are one or two, especially the "Dramatic Idyls," 
 in which Mr. Browning exhibits in the most marked 
 form both the merits and demerits of his too abrupt 
 and emphatic syle, in which he flashes weird figures 
 upon the imagination with all the suddenness and 
 abruptness of a magic lantern, presenting you with a 
 subject that takes your breath away as much by the
 
 212 ME. BROWNING 
 
 IV 
 
 singularity of its attitude as by the suddenness of its 
 appearance. He often seems to reject purposely the 
 shading and the moral atmosphere which make the 
 grimmest subjects seem natural when they are given 
 in connection with all the conditions of their history 
 and origin, his object being to make you see the 
 wonder of the world, rather than its harmony, or the 
 context which, partly at least, explains it. 
 
 Take for instance the fine story, reminding us of 
 Emily Bronte and the figures in " Wuthering Heights," 
 of the father and son, Halbert and Hob, — two wild 
 North-England savages who agreed to live and growl 
 at each other, till at last the passion in them broke 
 loose in the scene described in the following idyl, 
 where Mr. Browning's style seems expressly made to 
 reflect the passing ferocity of the Yorkshire boors : — 
 
 "Here is a thing that happened. Like wild beasts whelped, 
 
 for den, 
 In a wild part of North England, there lived once two 
 
 wild men 
 Inhabiting one homestead, neither a hovel nor hut. 
 Time ont of mind their birthright : father and son, these 
 
 —but — 
 Such a son, such a father ! Most wildness by degrees 
 Softens away : yet, last of their line, the wildest and worst 
 
 were these. 
 Criminals, then ? Wliy, no : they did not murder and 
 
 Toh ; 
 But, give them a word, they returned a blow — old Halbert 
 
 as young Hob : 
 Harsh and fierce of word, rough and savage of deed, 
 Hated or feared the more — who knows ? — the genuine 
 
 wild-beast breed. 
 
 "Thus were they found by the few sparse folk of the 
 country-side ;
 
 IV ME. BROWNING 213 
 
 . But how fared each with other ? E'en beasts couch, hide 
 by hide, 
 
 In a growling, grudged agreement : so, father and son lay- 
 curled 
 
 The closelier up in their den because the last of their kind 
 in the world. 
 
 " Still, beast irks beast on occasion. One Christmas night 
 
 of snow. 
 Came father and son to words — such words ! more cruel 
 
 because the blow 
 To crown each word was wanting, while taunt matched 
 
 gibe, and curse 
 Competed with oath in wager, like pastime in hell, — nay, 
 
 worse : 
 For pastime turned to earnest, as up there sprang at last 
 The son at the throat of the father, seized him and held 
 
 him fast. 
 
 " ' Out of this house you go ! ' — (there followed a hideous 
 
 oath) — 
 ' This oven where now we bake, too hot to hold us both ! 
 If there's snow outside, there's coolness : out with you, 
 
 bide a spell 
 In the drift and save the sexton the charge of a parish 
 
 shell ! ' 
 
 " Now, the old trunk was tough, was solid as stump of oak 
 Untouched at the core by a thousand years : much less 
 
 had its seventy broke 
 One whipcord nerve in the muscly mass from neck to 
 
 shoulder-blade 
 Of the mountainous man, whereon his child's rash hand 
 
 like a feather weighed. 
 
 " Nevertheless at once did the mammoth shut his eyes, 
 Drop chin to breast, drop hands to sides, stand stiffened 
 
 — arms and thighs 
 All of a piece— struck mute, much as a sentry stands. 
 Patient to take the enemy's fire : his captain so commands.
 
 214 MR. BROWNING IV 
 
 " "Whereat tlie son's wratli flew to fury at such sheer scorn 
 Of his puny strength by the giant eld thus acting the babe 
 
 new-born : 
 And ' Neither will this turn serve ! ' yelled he. ' Out 
 
 with you ! Trundle, log ! 
 If you cannot tramp and trudge like a man, try all-fours 
 
 like a dog ! ' 
 
 " Still the old man stood mute. So, logwise,— down to 
 
 floor 
 Pulled from his fireside place, dragged on from hearth to 
 
 door, — 
 Was he pushed, a very log, staircase along, until 
 A certain turn in the steps was reached, a yard from the 
 
 house-door-sill. 
 
 " Then the father opened his eyes — each spark of their rage 
 extinct, — 
 
 Temj)les, late black, dead-blanched, — right-hand with left- 
 hand linked, — 
 
 He faced his son submissive ; when slow the accents came. 
 
 They were strangely mild, though his son's rash hand on 
 his neck lay all the same. 
 
 " ' Halbert, on such a night of a Christmas long ago, 
 For such a cause, with such a gesture, did I drag — so — 
 My father down thus far ; but, softening here, I heard 
 A voice in my heart, and stopped : you wait for an outer 
 word. 
 
 " ' For your own sake, not mine, soften you too ! Uutrod 
 Leave this last step we reach, nor brave the finger of 
 
 God! 
 I dared not pass its lifting : I did well. I nor blame 
 Nor praise you. I stopped here : Halbert, do you the 
 
 same ! ' 
 
 " Straightway the son relaxed his hold of the father's throat. 
 They mounted, side by side, to the room again : no note
 
 IV MR. BROWNING 215 
 
 Took either of each, no sign made each to either : last 
 As first, in absolute silence, their Christmas-night they 
 passed. 
 
 " At dawn, the father sate on, dead, in the self-same place 
 With an outburst blackening still the old bad fighting- 
 face : 
 But the son crouched all a-tremble like any lamb new- 
 yeaned. 
 
 " When he went to the burial, some one's staff he borrowed 
 
 — tottered and leaned. 
 But his lips were loose, not locked, — kept muttering, 
 
 mumbling. ' There ! 
 At his cursing and swearing ! ' the youngsters cried : but 
 
 the elders thought ' In praj'er.' 
 A boy threw stones : he picked them up and stored them 
 
 in his vest. 
 
 " So tottered, muttered, mumbled he, till he died, perhaps 
 
 found rest. 
 ' Is there a reason in nature for these hard hearts 1 ' 
 
 Lear, 
 That a reason out of nature must turn them soft, seems 
 
 clear ! " 
 
 The closing couplet throws out this grim picture of 
 the " Reason in Nature " which had transmitted so 
 hard and savage a disposition from father to son, and 
 from son to son's son, in fine relief against that 
 " Reason out of Nature " which touched in turn both 
 father and son with a softening remorse for their 
 unfilial passion, — the father more spontaneously, but 
 with little effect on his subsequent life ; the son only 
 through his father's recollection, but with a trans- 
 forming effect on his subsequent life. And in the 
 fine idyl in which Mr. Browning describes two of 
 Bunyan's most depraved converts, Ned Bratts and
 
 216 MK. BROWNING iv 
 
 his wife, the painting is quite as startling and vehe- 
 ment in its eftects, quite as destitute of those under- 
 tones and medium tints which give the effect of 
 harmony to Avhat is other'wdse a series of discordant 
 sounds. " Tab," the bad wife of the bad innkeeper, 
 tells us the story of her conversion in language which 
 she could never have used, for it is all of it Mr. 
 Browning's own peculiar rasping shorthand style, far 
 too terse and far too sharply outlined for any vulgar 
 woman of Tab's type. But nothing could illustrate 
 better the savage conciseness with which Mr. Brown- 
 ing loves to dash in his sketches in black and white, 
 to signalise rather than to paint what strikes his eye. 
 His shotthand style, which is so dreary and difficult 
 in long disquisitions, does not suit badly vivid and 
 violent episodes such as those of the "Dramatic 
 Idyls." 
 
 But I have devoted enough, perhaps more than 
 enough, space to the discussion of Mr. Browning's 
 poetic deficiencies. They mark distinctly the limits 
 of his imaginative power, which is nevertheless very 
 high. In range of thought he certainly far surpasses 
 most of his poetic contemporaries, and in vividness 
 of conception he is second to none but Tennyson, 
 though certainly his inferior. To a considerable 
 extent he has lost merited popularity by belonging 
 neither to this country nor to this time. Saturated 
 with foreign, and especially with Italian, culture, 
 possessed by the human genius though keenly alive 
 to the errors of Roman Catholicism, and occupying 
 himself both Avitli forms of character and with modes 
 of thought that seem more native to the Middle 
 Ages than to modern England, — Mr. Browning's 
 poems have naturally become famous as much for the 
 curiosity they excite as for the enjoyment they bestow.
 
 IV MR. BKOWNING 217 
 
 I have said that Mr. Browning's chief power lies 
 in the intellectual side of drama, — the semi-dramatic 
 delineation of characters, especially of masculine 
 characters, in their most characteristic relation to 
 the world, but that his interest in the dramatic 
 " situation " is purely intellectual, and fails therefore 
 to impart any vigorous movement or practical excite- 
 ment to the plot. I must add, that there is one 
 cardinal interest which so greatly overpowers all 
 others in Mr. Bro-\vning's creations, that it forms 
 more or less the stajjle interest of all his best poems, 
 and not only explains his wonderful artistic grasp of 
 the genius of the Catholic Church, but gives an 
 additional reason why the living centre of his im- 
 aginative power is generally in a man's mind, and 
 but seldom in a woman's heart. 
 
 It is evident how much a long residence in the 
 country of Machiavelli and Cavour, and a close 
 study of the ecclesiastical wisdom, craft, and sub- 
 tlety produced by the system of the confessional, has 
 intensified his interest in the border land between 
 supernatural and worldly wisdom. I had noted this 
 long before the publication of The Ring and the 
 Book, the crowning work of Mr. Browning's genius, 
 to which, however, this remark especially apj)lies. 
 He has that command of motives which is given by 
 a constant study of the secrets of the heart, either 
 for saintly and mystical or for worldly and selfish 
 reasons. And none knows better than Mr. Browning 
 how strangely they intertwine. By far the greatest 
 intellectual fascination of his poems consists in his 
 marvellous mastery of the infinitely various com- 
 pounds between the religious and the worldly 
 wisdom, and of the deep awe that both alike, in their 
 higher degrees, whether pure or blended, inspire in
 
 218 MR, BROWNING 
 
 IV 
 
 the simpler minds over which they cast their in- 
 fluence. Every one of the greater poems includes 
 in some shape — very seldom indeed involving a 
 repetition, for Mr. Browning's power of dramatic 
 variation of this theme is endless — a study of some 
 striking conflict or some still more striking combina- 
 tion between the craft of the visible world and the 
 craft of the invisible, and of the many threads of 
 connection betAveen the two. 
 
 Mr. Browning's early poem, "Paracelsus," which 
 bears all the marks of youth, is nothing but a study 
 of the craving for a knowledge of the absolute 
 principle of life in the mind of a mediaeval aspirant 
 who might have hoped eventually to attain such 
 knowledge. The poem is one of the least successful, 
 because it wants the local colour peculiar to the life 
 of the Middle Ages, and is also deficient in that 
 intimate knowledge of the ambitious heart and in- 
 tellect which the later poems abundantly show. 
 Paracelsus aspires at first only to absolute hnoivledge ; 
 when, after long wanderings, his heart is beginning 
 to fail him, he meets a true poet, who in like manner 
 has aspired passionately to love, and has failed even 
 more bitterly than Paracelsus in attaining the fulfil- 
 ment of his desire. From him Paracelsus learns 
 that true life consists in seeking to blend love for 
 man with knowledge (however incomplete) of the 
 laws of man's life ; and accordingly begins to de- 
 vote himself to teaching (at Basle) what little he 
 knows. Then comes the temptation to aff'ect more 
 knowledge than he has, in order to gain a fit audi- 
 ence for what he has, and the consequent dabbling in 
 pretended magic. The only powerful part of the 
 poem consists in the delineation of the strange mix- 
 ture of self-scorn and self-belief, — the compunction
 
 IV 
 
 MR. BROWNING 219 
 
 for assuming false powers, and the lingering faith in 
 a transcendental method of mastering the secret of 
 life, — the conviction that God disapproves his pious 
 frauds to gain influence with the world, and that He 
 approves the effort to teach and serve the world, 
 which seems to necessitate them. This struggle, no 
 doubt, is finely delineated. The bitter hope that 
 even in cheating the world for its good Paracelsus is 
 doing better than in mere solitary study without any 
 attempt to serve it ; at all events, that thus, if not 
 doing " most good," he is yet effecting " least harm " ; 
 the almost cynical remonstrance with God for not 
 showing him his way clearer, — are all powerfully 
 drawn : — 
 
 " You little fancy what rude shocks a^^prise us 
 We sin : God's intimations rather fail 
 In clearness than in energy : 'twere well 
 Did they but indicate the course to take, 
 Lite that to be forsaken." 
 
 That is a very fine expression of the half-angry, half- 
 mournful disappointment of a proud and shadowy 
 mind; and all this portion of "Paracelsus," where 
 Paracelsus is openly and furiously at war with 
 himself for the false assumption of secret lore by 
 which he renders his teaching popular, and with 
 God for not either giving him knowledge enough to 
 do without falsehood, or else at least relieving him 
 from the heavy obligation to teach others with the 
 imperfect knowledge he has, is striking. But, on the 
 whole, " Paracelsus " appears to me vague and unim- 
 pressive in execution, though not perhaps in the 
 design. 
 
 Mr. Browning's favourite, and perhaps highest, 
 exercise of art, however, is shown in the various
 
 220 MR. BROWNING iv 
 
 delineations of the worldly force of ecclesiastical 
 dignities struggling with, or flavouring, the Catholic 
 faith. Of this he has given us many and very 
 remarkable pictures, ranging from the childish, full- 
 fed, superstitious, sensual - creeded " bishop, who 
 orders his tomb at St. Praxed's Chvu'ch," to the 
 diabolic rat-like craft of Count Guido — the high- 
 ecclesiastical layman of The Ring and the Book — 
 or the passionate contrast drawn by Canon Capon- 
 sacchi in the same great work, between the life of 
 the fashionable preacher and the heart of the true 
 saint. And these are but three out of many studies 
 of the same genus, though different species. I 
 scarcely know whether the St. Praxed's bishop's 
 flushed physical appetite for the splendid Roman 
 Catholic rites, or the keen laughing twinkle that 
 glitters in the eyes of aged Legates and Nuncios, 
 whom Mr. Bro"\vning depicts in their dealings Avith 
 captious children of the Church, is the more power- 
 fully painted. No painting can be more striking 
 than the pleading of the dying bishop with his own 
 natural sons to fulfil their pledge to him in giving 
 him a tomb of jasper handsomer than that of his 
 rival Gandolf, who^died before him, with an inscrijD- 
 tion of purer Latinity : — 
 
 " Nay, boys, ye love me — all of jasper, then ! 
 'Tis jasper ye stand i^ledged to, lest I grieve 
 My bath must needs be left behind, alas ! 
 One block, pure green as a pistacliio-nut, 
 There's plenty jasper somewhere in the world — 
 And have I not Saint Praxed's ear to pray 
 Horses for ye, and brown Greek manusci'ipts. 
 And mistresses with great smooth niarbly limbs ? 
 — That's if ye carve my epitaph aright, 
 Choice Latin, picked phrase, Tully's every word.
 
 IV MR. BROWNING 221 
 
 No gaudy ware like Gandolf 's second line — 
 Tally, my masters ? Ulpian serves liis need ! 
 And then liow I shall lie through centuries, 
 And hear the blessed mutter of the mass, 
 And see God made and eaten all day long, 
 And feel the steady candle-flame, and taste 
 Good strong thick stupefying incense-smoke ! " 
 
 The piece is full of passionate superstition, volup- 
 tuous and intellectually dramatic ; but the shades of 
 thought in it are, perhaps, less delicate and difficult 
 to draw than in some other of Mr. Browning's 
 ecclesiastical sketches. Perhaps the most striking 
 contrast to it, showing, in its way, equal art and 
 insight, is the wonderful picture of the Gottingen 
 Professor and his Christmas Eve discourse, on the 
 mythical character of Christianity, in "Christmas 
 Eve and Easter Day." There you have the thin 
 intellectual ghost, or hardly distinguishable shadow, 
 of Christian faith, in place of the high-fed body of 
 superstition we have just seen ; and each is painted 
 with such strict intellectual truth, that one scarcely 
 knows whether one is most fascinated by the picture 
 of the faith which steams with the " burnt offerings 
 of rams and the fat of fed beasts," or of the faded 
 and pallid rationalism that seems just disappearing 
 into the inane, — 
 
 " That sallow, virgin-minded, studious 
 Martyr to mild enthusiasm, 
 As he uttered a kind of cough preludious, 
 That woke my sympathetic spasm 
 (Beside some spitting that made me sorry). 
 And stood surveying his auditory 
 With a wan pure look well nigh celestial, — 
 Those blue eyes had survived so much."
 
 222 MR. BROWNING IV 
 
 No theological student in a German university can 
 miss the type ; and the lines Avhich follow might 
 certainly have been painted from personal experi- 
 ence : — 
 
 " He pushed back higher his spectacles, 
 Let the eyes stream out like lamps from cells, 
 And giving his head of hair — a hake 
 Of undressed tow for colour and quality — 
 One rapid and impatient shake, 
 
 The Professor's grave voice, sweet though hoarse, 
 Broke into his Christmas Eve's discourse." 
 
 This discourse, no less than the portrait, is a striking 
 pendant to the delirious address of the Bishop of St. 
 Praxed to his sons, as it explains, 
 
 "How the ineptitixde of the time, 
 And the penman's prejudice, expanding 
 Fact into fable, fit for the clime, 
 Had by slow and sure degrees translated it 
 Into this myth, this Individuum, — 
 Which, when reason had strained and abated it 
 Of foreign matter, gave for residuum 
 A Man ! — a right true man, however, 
 Whose work was worthy a man's endeavour." 
 
 And Mr. Browning's subtle and striking criticism 
 on his Gottingen Professor's mythological lecture, 
 though apparently needless for the portrait, really 
 adds its most effective touch, when he concludes it 
 by saying to his lecturer : — 
 
 " Go on, you shall no more move my gravity 
 Than, when I see boys ride a-cockhorse, 
 I find it in my heart to embarrass them 
 By hinting that their stick's a mock horse, 
 And they really carry what they say carries them."
 
 IV MR. BROWNING 223 
 
 The whole picture of the exhausted intellectual re- 
 ceiver in the professor's mind, of his constant effort 
 to remove husks till the grain was gone, and of his 
 cough, which, 
 
 " Like a droutlity piston, 
 Tried to dislodge the husk, that grew to him," — 
 
 is completed by this hint, that if you could get at 
 the centre of his mind, his weary and wan and joy- 
 less air would be explained by the constant spiritual 
 labour of actually carrying "what he says carries 
 him." 
 
 A poem quite as impressive from its strange mix- 
 ture of physical and voluptuous passions (richly set 
 in an artistic nature), with an implicit faith in all the 
 legends of the Church, is the sketch of the Floren- 
 tine monk and artist, Fra Lippo Lippi. His promise 
 to himself of how he will atone for his irregularities 
 of life, and paint the fashion of his pardon, is one of 
 the most powerful conceptions in all Mr. Browning's 
 poems : — 
 
 " I shall paint 
 God in the midst. Madonna and her babe, 
 Einged by a bowery, flowerj^ angel-brood, 
 Lilies and vestments and white faces, sweet 
 As puff on puff of grated orris-root. 
 When ladies crowd to church at midsummer. 
 And then in the front, of course a saint or two — 
 Saint John, because he saves the Florentines ; 
 Saint Ambrose, who puts down in black and white 
 Tlie convent's friends and gives them a long day." 
 
 Into this saintly crowd, secured at their devotions, 
 the artist is to introduce himself in his old serge 
 gown, coming " as one by a dark stair into a great 
 light," "mazed, motionless, and moonstruck," and 
 looking anxiously for escape : —
 
 224 MR. BROWNING iv 
 
 " Then steps a sweet angelic slip of a tiling 
 Forward, puts out a soft palm — ' Not so fast ! ' 
 — Addresses the celestial presence, ' nay — 
 He made you and devised you, after all. 
 Though he's none of you ! Could Saint Jolm there, 
 
 draw — 
 His camel-hair make up a painting-brush ? 
 We come to brother Lippo for all that, 
 Iste perfecit opus I ' So, all smile — 
 I shuffle sideways with my blushing face 
 Under the cover of a hundred wings 
 Thrown like a spread of kirtles when you're gay 
 And play hot cockles, all the doors being shut, 
 Till, wholly unexpected, in there pops 
 The hothead husband ! " 
 
 This, of course, though a wholly different picture, is 
 closely akin to the St. Praxed bishop in intellectual 
 conception ; showing the same strong mixture of 
 eager fleshly naturalism beneath the robe of super- 
 stitious awe ; but it is the infinitely varied trans- 
 formations under which Mr. Browning can present 
 the same elements, which prove how great an intel- 
 lectual interpreter of human nature he is. 
 
 The intermediate place between the Bishop of St. 
 Praxed and the Gottingen Professor, but embodying 
 also some of the shrewd political instinct which Mr. 
 Bro^vning so subtly and thoroughly penetrates, is 
 " Bishop Blougram," who gives us a rather too ex- 
 tended apology for continuing to hold his place in 
 the Catholic hierarchy, though admitting that a large 
 part of its creed is either doubtful or false to him. 
 Nothing can exceed the tortuous sophistry of this 
 admirable special pleading ; but for the subject of a 
 work of art it is a bad one, presenting too few points 
 of living interest, and lying wholly in the leaden-
 
 IV MR. BROWNING 225 
 
 coloured region where moral fallacies have their 
 roots. It ought to interest deeply clergymen in a 
 false position ; hut few else will recognise the mar- 
 vellous minuteness and fidelity of this Denner-like 
 painting of every wrinkle on the ecclesiastic's con- 
 science, and every pucker in his understanding. Of 
 course it is all translated as usual by Mr. Browning 
 into his own dialect. 
 
 The most wonderful picture of the ecclesiastical 
 politician and diplomatist is certainly the pontifical 
 legate Ogniben, in "A Soul's Tragedy," who trots 
 into a papal town to suppress a popular revolution, 
 alone on muleback, humming " Cur fremuere gentes ? " 
 and saying, as he laughs gently to himself, " I have 
 known three -and -twenty leaders of revolts." The 
 acute knowledge of human motives, and still acuter 
 manipulation of them, which this not unkindly old 
 man shows ; the courage and the real spiritual power 
 over man which the confessional has given him, at 
 the expense of course of uprightness ; the Socratic 
 address A\dth which he draws out the selfish ambition 
 in the new leader of revolt, and lures him with it 
 into renouncing the popular cause, and finally dis- 
 poses of him in words curiously mingling a genuine 
 kind of piety, not unascetic, with ecclesiastical craft, 
 concluding with, " I have known /owr- and -twenty 
 leaders of revolts," — constitute one of the most 
 subtle and striking pictures of modern imagination. 
 The pity is that all the subsidiary characters — even 
 Chiappino, the leader of revolt, himself, who is not 
 ill-conceived — are as usual so far inferior to this figure, 
 that, even without regard to the Browningite dialect, 
 in which all alike speak, the drama is a poor one, 
 though the intellectual conception is inimitable. 
 
 Nor is it only the intersecting line between 
 
 L Q
 
 226 MK. BROWNING iv 
 
 worldly and spiritual Avisdom that Mr. Browning 
 traces so finely. The jealous hatred of the Bishop of 
 St. Praxed for his rival Gandolf, and the first extract 
 I made for another purpose from his poems, called 
 " The Sohloquy of the Spanish Cloister," both show 
 how finely he can conceive the union of earthly pas- 
 sions with monastic and ritual ideas. The same 
 power is shown, with much more of poetic form and 
 expression, in the short piece called "A Heretic's 
 Tragedy," though here the picture is of the blending 
 of inquisitorial cruelty Avith the passionate bigotry of 
 faith. The triumphant joy of vindicating the Infinite 
 Justice in those who apply the torture to the recus- 
 ant heretic, the pitiless gaiety which the natural 
 cruelty of savage nature engrafts thereon, directly 
 the belief that the suftering is deserved absolves them 
 from the duty of sympathy, the fine shading-off of 
 the consciousness of Avreaking a divine retribution, 
 into common human brutality, — mark a Avork of rare 
 skill. 
 
 But the most characteristic of all Mr. Browning's 
 ecclesiastical poems is that powerful picture of Koman 
 society and casuistry, in the days of Innocent XII., 
 which he has given us in his longest and in many 
 respects his finest poem. The liing and the Book. 
 The story itself is easily told. Mr. Browning foimd 
 on a bookstall in Florence, — the description of the 
 scene of the discovery is one of the most graphic 
 passages of the poem,' — amidst much rubbish, an old 
 book, part print, part MS., purporting to be the 
 actual pleadings in a Roman murder case of the year 
 1698, in which one Count Guido Franceschini, of 
 Arezzo, with four cut-throats in his pay, murdered 
 his Mafe, a girl of seventeen years, who had a fort- 
 night ago borne him an heir, and with her the old
 
 IV ME. BKOWNING 227 
 
 couple who had brought her up, and who had at first 
 given themselves out as her parents. The Count 
 and his four accomplices Avere arrested before the 
 death of the wiie (Pompilia), who survived her 
 wounds four days. Count Guido pleaded, first, that 
 the murder was a justifiable vindication of his 
 honour, since his wife had fled from his house to 
 Rome with a certain handsome priest, Canon Capon- 
 sacchi, and had been incited to this crime by the old 
 couple who had brought her up, and who had passed 
 themselves off" on her husband as her parents. To 
 this the prosecuting counsel rejoined that Guido, by 
 his horrible cruelty and treachery, had deliberately 
 set a trap for her, intending to drive her from his 
 home in this Canon's company, in order that he him- 
 self might get a divorce and still keep her property, 
 — that the girl was pure of all guilt, and that the 
 letters produced as hers to Caponsacchi had been 
 deliberately forged by the husband, she herself being 
 unable either to read orwi'ite; — on which the judgment 
 of the tribunal was death to Guido and his accom- 
 plices. Thereupon, however, there was an appeal to 
 the Pope in person, as Count Guido, though a lay- 
 man, had taken some steps towards holy orders, and 
 was to a certain slight extent entitled to the special 
 privileges of the priesthood; whereupon the good 
 old Pope, Innocent XII., then eighty -six years of 
 age, and near his end, reviewed the case himself, at 
 the instance, amongst others, of the Emperor's envoy, 
 who took the side of Count Guido. After reviewing 
 the case, the Pope ordered the execution to take 
 place immediately, in the most public spot in Eome. 
 Such is the mere skeleton of the story. Mr. 
 Browning makes it, after his fashion, the occasion 
 for a rich and shrewd semi-dramatic picture of all
 
 228 MR. BROWNING iv 
 
 the various influences at work in the Roman society 
 of the day ; of the provincial society in the country 
 towns of the Pope's dominions ; of the poor nobility, 
 the hangers-on of the Church, who danced attendance 
 on the Cardinals, hoping for profitable sinecures ; of 
 the professional Roman lawyers, deep in ecclesiastical 
 precedents and Ciceronian eloquence and in the 
 verses of Horace and Ovid, who pleaded in the case ; 
 of the eloquent and brilliant worldly Churchman of 
 the time, part priest, part fashionable poet ; and 
 finally, of the populace of Rome itself. IVIr. Brown- 
 ing gives us the view taken of this great case from 
 all sides. He gives the view favourable to Count 
 Guido, taken by one -half of Rome, and the view 
 favourable to his victim, taken by the other half of 
 Rome. He gives us the critical Cardinal's view of 
 the pending trial as developed in refined Roman 
 drawing-rooms ; the criminal's o-\vn defence ; the 
 dying wife's statement of her own case ; the speech 
 of the handsome young Canon who took her away 
 from Count Guido's cruelty at Arezzo ; the lawyers' 
 pleadings on either side ; finally, the Avorking of the 
 old Pope's mind on the day when he gives the final 
 judgment : then Count Guido's confession ; and last, 
 the poet's own final presentation of the pure gold of 
 the tragedy, set free from all the alloys of accidental 
 one-sided criticism. 
 
 I can remember nothing which has at once so 
 much force and fire, and also so much of the subtlety 
 of intellectual drama, — intellectual rendering, that is, 
 by Mr. Browning himself, of his own study of the 
 characters of others, — in any other of his -smtings, 
 as many parts of this great work, — especially those 
 painting Count Guido, Canon Caponsacchi, the be- 
 trayed Pompilia, and the broad-Church Pope Inno-
 
 IT MR. BEOWNING 229 
 
 cent XII. Even the finest passion in Piiypa Passes 
 is not so rich and eloquent as the defence poured out 
 by Caponsacchi of the murdered Pompilia, nor is the 
 " Soliloquy in the Spanish Cloister " so expressive of 
 the spite of venomous cunning, as Count Guido 
 Franceschini's defence of himself and malignant in- 
 sinuations against his wife and her parents and 
 Caponsacchi. Of course, there is an obvious defect 
 in dramatic keeping, in putting into the mouth of a 
 man just fresh from the torture, so astute, elaborate, 
 and ecclesiastical a dissertation on the evidence which 
 had been produced ; to which it may be added that, 
 except as to passion and force, the style (i.e. in con- 
 struction and illustration) of Count Guido Frances- 
 chini is scarcely to be distinguished from that of the 
 Canon Caponsacchi. But this is always so with Mr. 
 Browning. He only aims at giving a complete re- 
 flection of his various characters in his own forms of 
 thought ; and as he only aims at this, the mere cir- 
 cumstance of putting a subtle speech of 2000 lines 
 into the mouth of a man fresh from the torture is no 
 falsification of the artistic intention, — which is, to 
 give the drift of his defence, supposed to be confided 
 to Mr. Browning, in any form that his poetic con- 
 fidant may deem most effective. 
 
 What is there in modern imaginations finer than 
 the contrast between the shiftj^ ecclesiastical intrigue, 
 the rat-like voracity and cunning, the craft formed 
 and trained in the attempt to squeeze promotion out 
 of bishops and cardinals, — in a word, the half -tricky, 
 half-subtle Pharisaism of the Tuscan Count, who had 
 been familiar with the Roman courts of justice all 
 his life, and knew the uwst side at least of every 
 judge before him, and the passionate despair of the 
 ardent young priest who, summoned back to Rome
 
 230 MR. BROWNING iv 
 
 to hear that Pompilia was dying by the dagger of 
 her husband, throws all reserve to the winds, pours 
 out his own loathing of his early life of fashionable 
 frivolity, describes the awakening of a divine nature 
 in him through the influence of Pompilia's saintly 
 sweetness and purity, and tells in burning words the 
 story of Guido's loathsome attempt to force his wife 
 into infidelity, of her flight to Rome under his own 
 protection, and of the words which fell from her from 
 time to time during the joiu-ney, stamped as they 
 are for him on the face of the different landscapes 
 and different skies Avhich his eye happened to take in 
 as they were uttered ? Mr. Browning's picture of 
 this passionate human love stirring in the heart of a 
 fashionable, frivolous, and dissipated, but still noble 
 unspoiled nature, and awakening it at one and the 
 same time to the holiness of the priest's desecrated 
 faith and calling, and to the unearthly beauty of her 
 whom he could not but half love with earthly rapture 
 and half adore with a worship very like the true 
 Catholic cultus of the Madonna, is to me the finest 
 effort of Mr. Browning's genius. But it would 
 scarcely produce the effect it does upon one, did it 
 not so immediately succeed the exposition of the 
 venomous and cunning sleight -of -mind ^viih which 
 Count Guido tries to persuade his judges that 
 wounded honour and burnina; shame have instigated 
 all his own coldly and craftily calculated actions 
 towards his "wife and her parents, and have left him 
 Avith a good and quiet conscience even after the triple 
 murder. As we follow the intellectual "writhings of 
 Coimt Guido's ingenious special pleadings, which skil- 
 fully evade the most critical tests of his guilt, and 
 make it their aim, instead, to put the judges off the 
 scent and convince them beyond refutation of his
 
 IV 
 
 MR. BROWNING 231 
 
 wife's shame, trusting that, if he can manage that, 
 the palliation of his own guilt must follow as a 
 natural consequence, we almost lose the meaning of 
 the words " truth " and " falsehood," and seem to 
 sink lower and lower into an abyss of sophistry and 
 simulated passion, Avith only a glimmer here and 
 there of genuine Satanic spite to remind us of where 
 we are. 
 
 Pompilia is a figure at once of the most original 
 and simplest school of art. It has something of the 
 loveliness of Kaffaelle's Madonna della Seggia about 
 it, but with more both of the child and of the saint. 
 I doubt if Mr. Browning's fame will be perpetuated 
 by any of his intellectual studies so long as by this. 
 Her husband, a murderer, calls her the " pale poison 
 my hasty hunger took for food," and speaks of her 
 as like one of the favourite figures of Fra Angelico — 
 
 " Who traces you some timid chalky ghost, 
 That turns the church into a charnel. Ay, 
 Just such a pencil might depict my wife." 
 
 But that, of course, is the libel of the malignant 
 and greedy man, who can vahie nothing without a 
 spice of wickedness in it, nothing that is not willing 
 and even anxious to take a taint in his foul service. 
 But the Pope understands her thoroughly. He 
 makes it her special praise that having been " obe- 
 dient to the end," "dutiful to the foolish parents 
 first," "submissive next to the bad husband," she 
 could, nevertheless — 
 
 " Rise from law to law, 
 The old to the new, promoted at one cry 
 O' the trump of God to the new service, not 
 To longer bear, but henceforth fight, — be found
 
 232 ME. BROWNING it 
 
 Sublime in new impatience witli the foe : 
 Endure man and obey God ; plant firm foot 
 On neck of man, tread man into the hell 
 Meet for him, and obey God all the more." 
 
 There is alacrity, even valour, at the bottom of Pom- 
 pilia, in spite of what her husband called the " timid 
 chalky ghost " in her : she can seize his sword and 
 point it at his breast when his cruelty and malignity 
 pass all bounds ; and even he feels this. Mr. Brown- 
 ing, in what is perhaps the only purely dramatic 
 passage in his whole picture, makes Guido, when at 
 last the procession enters his cell to lead him away 
 to execution, call out in his last agony of terror : — 
 
 " Abate — Cardinal, — Christ, — Maria, God. . . . 
 Pompilia ! will you let them murder me ?" 
 
 — Pomj^ilia standing at the very climax of his thought 
 of everything Godlike, in spite of the fury of his 
 hate. To her, dead, he appeals as to a power almost 
 beyond God's to save him. And yet, with this high 
 valour at the bottom of her, no more simple " woman- 
 child," as the old Pope finely calls her, was ever 
 painted than Pompilia, — simple alike in her religious 
 maternal love for the boy to whom she gave birth 
 just a fortnight before her own murder, and in the 
 confession of the pure depth and intensity of her 
 devotion to the young priest who saved her from her 
 husband, and for whose purity of soul she fights as 
 for her own. The Pope sj^eaks of her as of a way- 
 side flower that — 
 
 "Breaks all into blaze, 
 Spreads itself, one wide glory of desire 
 To incorporate the whole great sun it loves, 
 From the inch-height whence it looks and longs."
 
 IV MR. BROWNING 233 
 
 And then observe how finely the religious passion of 
 the mother's heart is expressed : — 
 
 " I never realised God's birth before — 
 How he grew likest God in being born. 
 This time I felt like Mary, had my babe 
 Lying a little on my breast like hers." 
 
 And this, again, for the spiritual perfection of mater- 
 nal love, is scarcely equalled in our language : — 
 
 " Even for my babe, my boy, there's safety thence — 
 From the sudden death of me, I mean : we poor 
 Weak souls, how we endeavour to be strong ! 
 I was already using up my life, — 
 This portion, now, should do him such a good. 
 This other go to keep off such an ill ! 
 The great life ; see, a breath and 'it is gone ! 
 So is detached, so left all by itself 
 The little life, the fact which means so much. 
 Shall not God stoop the kindlier to His work, 
 His marvel of creation, foot would crush. 
 Now that the hand He trusted to receive 
 And hold it, lets the treasure fall perforce ? 
 The better ; He shall have in orphanage 
 His own way all the clearlier : if my babe 
 Outlive the hour — and he has lived two weeks — 
 It is through God who knows I am not by. 
 Who is it makes the soft gold hair turn black, 
 And sets the tongue, might lie so long at rest. 
 Trying to talk ? Let us leave God alone ! 
 Why should I doubt He will exi)lain in time 
 Wliat I feel now, but fail to find the words ? " 
 
 Taken as a whole, the figure of Pompilia seems to me 
 a masterpiece of delicate power. Passionate tender- 
 ness with equally passionate purity, submissiveness 
 to calamity with strenuousness against evil, the trust- 
 fulness of a child with the suffering of a martyr,
 
 234 MR, BROWNING IV 
 
 childishness of intellect with the visionary insight of 
 a saint, all tinged with, the ineffably soft colouring of 
 an Italian heaven, breathe in every touch and stroke 
 of this fine picture. 
 
 The old Pope affords a subject much easier, I 
 should suppose, for Mr. Browning to draw. It is a 
 very subtle study. There is in it all the mark of 
 venerable age, except any failure of intellectual 
 power. The flashes of intellectual and spiritual light 
 are of the thin, bright, auroral kind. Take, for in- 
 stance, the passage in which the gallant old man 
 deliberates whether he shall or shall not dare con- 
 demn the aristocratic murderer to his rightful fate : — 
 
 " As I know, 
 I speak, — what should I know, then, and how speak 
 Were there a wild mistake of eye or brain 
 In the recorded governance above ? 
 If my own breath, only, blew coal alight, 
 I, called celestial and the morning star ? 
 I who in this world act resolvedly, 
 Dispose of men, the body and the soul, 
 As they acknowledge or gainsay this light 
 I show them, — shall I too lack courage ? — leave 
 I, too, the post of me, like those I blame ? 
 Refuse, with kindred inconsistency, 
 Grapple with danger whereby souls grow strong ? 
 I am near the end ; but still not at the end ; 
 All till the very end is trial in life : 
 At this stage is the trial of my soul, 
 Danger to face, or danger to refuse ? 
 Shall I dare try the doubt now, or not dare ? " 
 
 Still more striking is the old Pope's interpretation of 
 the sense in which the " Aveak things of this world " 
 shall " confound the mighty." Here we have one 
 of the finest illustrations of the restless intellectual
 
 IV MR. BROWNING 235 
 
 working of Mr. Browning's imagination in a purely- 
 spiritual region. It is the apparent weakness, he 
 says, in the true faith, which appeals to the help and 
 brings forth the love of man, till man finds at last that 
 it was in its weakness that its strength consisted, in 
 its imploring appeal to the heart that the marvellous 
 power lay, which could not have lain hid in the fiat 
 of Almighty strength : — 
 
 " What but the weakness in a faith supplies 
 The incentive to humanity, no strength 
 Absolute, irresistible, comports ? 
 How can man love but what he yearns to help 1 
 And that which men think weakness within strength, 
 But angels know for strength and stronger yet. 
 What were it else but the first things made new, 
 But reiJetition of the miracle. 
 The divine instance of self-sacrifice 
 That never ends and aye begins for man 1 " 
 
 Of a piece with this suggestion is the fine presage 
 that the power of Christ can only be restored through 
 an approaching age of doubt, which shall shake the 
 towers of the Church till they tremble, and dissipate 
 the formal and conventional monotony of ortho- 
 doxy — 
 
 " Till man stand out again, pale, resolute, 
 Prepared to die, — that is, alive at last. 
 As we broke up that old faith of the world, 
 Have we, next age, to break up this the new — 
 Faith, in the thing, grown faith in the report — 
 Whence need to bravely disbelieve report 
 Through increased faith in thing reports belie ? " 
 
 The picture of the courageous old man's slight hesi- 
 tation in the discharge of his terrible duty, — of the 
 deep questions as to the truths whereon he and his
 
 236 ME. BKOWNING IV 
 
 office rest, which that hesitation stirs, — of the 
 pkimbing of the most difficult problems of philo- 
 sophy and faith, as his mind travels round the 
 intellectual horizon of his lonely eminence, — of the 
 gratitude with which he fixes his glance on Pom- 
 pilia's spiritual loveliness as the one blossom 
 " vouchsafed unworthy me, ten years a gardener of 
 the untoward ground," — of the anxious and doubtful 
 admiration with which he notes Caponsacchi's im- 
 pulsive nobleness, — and of the half anxiety and half 
 trust with which he observes the signs of moral de- 
 composition — omens for those who are to come after 
 him, — all is drawn so as to leave an indelible im- 
 pression on the imagination. There is nothing in all 
 Mr. Browning's works that ^vill bear deliberate com- 
 parison with the four great figures of Guido, Pom- 
 pilia, Caponsacchi, and Innocent. 
 
 Perhaps, however, the most characteristic, though 
 not the greatest, of Mr. Browning's many poems on 
 this class of semi-spiritual, semi-intellectual subjects 
 is the "Epistle containing the strange Medical Ex- 
 perience of Karshish, the Arab Physician " ; which 
 is an attempt to bring such medical science, or rather 
 empirical skill, as might have existed in the time of 
 Christ into direct contact Avith the " case " of the 
 risen Lazarus, whom the Arab physician encounters 
 in Bethany at the time when the siege of Jerusalem 
 by Titus has just begun. Karshish, questioning 
 himself and his friends as to the asserted resurrec- 
 tion, reports his opinion on it to his master in a letter 
 vibrating helplessly between a guess that it was 
 really a cure of unusually prolonged epilepsy which 
 had left mania behind, and a proudly-resisted in- 
 clination to believe that there was something' divine 
 
 o 
 
 in the matter, as Lazarus himself asserted. The
 
 IV 
 
 MK. BEOWNING 237 
 
 artist's skill, however, is shown, as usual, in de- 
 lineating the influence of the two opposite sorts of 
 thirst for knowledge in this dignified Arabian leech, 
 — the pride of human science and craft, which 
 makes him eager to penetrate the secret of a new 
 and remarkable cure, and the yearning for divine 
 knowledge, which thrills him with a humiliating, 
 sense of awe and hope at the very words he affects 
 to despise from the ignorant peasant. The letter 
 begins with stealthy Oriental subtlety — of course 
 Bro^vningite in form — far from his mark (for he is 
 evidently bewildered and ashamed at the impression 
 made upon him by the story of Lazarus), explaining, 
 after compliments, a few new recipes ; describing 
 his temporary abode at Bethany, which lies, he says, 
 from Jerusalem 
 
 " scarce the distance thence 
 
 A man with plague-sores at the tliird degree 
 
 Euns till he drops down dead " : 
 
 chronicling his new pathological experiences — " a 
 viscid choler is observable in tertians," " scalp 
 disease confounds me, crossing so with leprosy," and 
 so forth ; until at length he comes, with many 
 apologies, on his "case of mania subinduced by 
 epilepsy " : — 
 
 " The man, — it is one Lazarus a Jew, 
 Sanguine, proportioned, fifty years of age, 
 The body's habit wholly laudable, 
 As much indeed beyond the common health 
 As he were made and put aside to show." 
 
 And then gradually the physician allows it to be 
 seen how much thought he has spent on his dia- 
 gnosis of the mania, how its very simplicity subdues 
 and bewilders his wisdom. The effect, he says, on
 
 238 MK. BROWNING IV 
 
 the mind of the patient is as if some new and vast 
 Avorld had been opened out to him, making this 
 Avorld worthless, though Lazarus is forbidden to 
 leave it. The patient has no measure of the true 
 proportions of things ; the armaments assembled 
 round Jerusalem are trivial to him, while he is lost 
 .in wonder that others do not' see the value of the 
 most trivial facts with his " opened eyes." "Wonder 
 and doubt come wi'ongly into play, preposterously at 
 cross purposes." Unbroken in cheerfulness if his 
 child be ill or dying, a word or gesture on its part 
 that he disapproves will startle him into an agony of 
 fear. In short, the patient clings to "a narrow and 
 dark thread of life, which runs across an orb of 
 glory " into which he may not enter, though it gives 
 its law to his spirit. His notions of right and 
 wrong, instead of being adapted to the narrow con- 
 ditions of this thread of life and its continuance, are 
 always taking into account a whole universe of in- 
 visible and apparently imaginary facts : — 
 
 " So is the man perplext with inipulses 
 Sudden to start off crosswise, not straight on, 
 Proclaiming wliat is Right and Wrong across 
 And not along, this black tliread throngli the Ijlazc — 
 ' It should be ' balked l^y ' here it cannot be.' 
 And oft the man's soul springs into his face, 
 As if he saw again and heard again 
 His sage that bade him rise, and he did rise ! " 
 
 In this antique and painstaking enumeration of the 
 mental symptoms of the patient, the most startling 
 and impressive is reserved, with a sort of scientific 
 shame, to the last, and only then oozes out involun- 
 tarily Avith the half apology, that, " in Avriting to a 
 leech, 'tis well to keep back nothing of a case."
 
 IV 
 
 MK. BROWNING 239 
 
 " This man so cured regards the curer then 
 As — God forgive me — who but God himself, 
 Creator and Sustainer of the world, 
 That came and dwelt in flesh on it awhile ! 
 — 'Sayetli that such an One was born and lived, 
 Taught, healed the sick, broke bread at his own house, 
 Then died, with Lazarus by, for aught I know, 
 And yet was . . . what I said nor choose repeat, 
 And must have so avouched himself in fact, 
 In hearing of this very Lazarus, 
 Who saith — but why all this of what he saith ? 
 Why write of trivial matters, things of price 
 Calling at every moment for remark ? 
 I noticed on the margin of a pool 
 Blue-flowering borage, the Aleppo sort 
 Aboundeth A'ery nitrous. It is strange." 
 
 But the subject fascinates him, in spite of his 
 scientific scorn for it. He goes back to relate the 
 mode of his encounter with /Lazarus ; and finally 
 there is wrung as it were from him, reluctant as he 
 is to mention the mere ravings of a madman which 
 have no pathological bearing on the case : — 
 
 " The very God ! Think, Abib ; dost thou think ? 
 So the All-great were the All-loving too — 
 So, through the thunder comes a human voice, 
 Saying, ' O heart I made, a heart beats here ! 
 Face, my hands fashioned, see it in Myself. 
 Thou hast no power nor may'st conceive of Mine ; 
 But love I gave thee, with Myself to love, 
 And thou must love Me who have died for thee ! ' 
 The madman saith He said so : it is strange." 
 
 Certainly no more original conception has been 
 worked out in our time than this, — brief as the poem 
 is, — and very powerfully is it sustained, the dignity 
 and satisfied wisdom of the physician giving way at
 
 240 MR. BROWNING iv 
 
 times beneath the glory of the poor Syrian's dream 
 and the strange consistency of simplicity of his de- 
 meanour, — but returning again with full elastic force 
 wherever he can regain his complete assurance of the 
 impossibility of the story, and the wholly unprofes- 
 sional character of the explanation. It is only here 
 and there that Mr. Browning has drawn worldly 
 skill or wisdom, thus half-worshipping, with dazzled 
 eyes, a simplicity above it. Generally in his poetry, 
 as in the world, the prevalent type of sagacity freely 
 makes use of an established faith, but is not willing 
 to recognise it so far as it is new and distui^bing. 
 But this Oriental physician, who has evidently given 
 up his life to study all diseases and remedies with 
 open eyes, is one of the exceptions. When a light 
 shines upon him, if he cannot gaze at it, it is his 
 nature not to ignore it. Mr. Browning finds a deeper 
 humility in science, with all its pride, than in the 
 shifty talent of worldly knowledge. 
 
 To sum np in conclusion my conception of Mr. 
 Browning's genius. He is not a great dramatist, but 
 a great intellectual interpreter of the approaches to 
 action. His most striking characteristic is the vigour 
 of his intellectual and spiritual imagination, and of 
 his carnal imagination (if I may be permitted a 
 technical Scripture phrase to express the imagination 
 of all the passions and perceptions), and the almost 
 complete absence of the intermediate psychical or 
 sentimental imagination, which is with most poets 
 the principal spring of all their poetry, and perhaps 
 the only spring of lyrical poetry. I do not know a 
 poem of Mr. Browning's which can be said to express 
 a mood, as Shelley expresses so vividly moods of 
 passionate yearning, Wordsworth of meditative 
 rajjture, Tennyson of infinite regret. Mr. Bro"\vning
 
 IV MK. BROWNING 241 
 
 has no moods. His mind seems to leap at once from 
 its centre to its surface Adthout passing through the 
 middle states which lie between the spirit and the 
 senses. Hence we may see from another side why 
 Mr. Browning's women are so imperfect, for their 
 truest life is usually in this middle region, which 
 seems totally absent from his poems. The nearest 
 approach to a sentiment which he has drawn is, on 
 the one side a passion, which he has drawn repeatedly 
 and powerfully, — on the other a spiritual affection, 
 " the devotion the heart lifts above and the heavens 
 reject not," such as he has so finely painted in 
 "Caponsacchi " and "Pompilia," in "Agnes," and in 
 that love of David for Jonathan, which comes floAving 
 in in great waves, like a spring-tide, till it pours on 
 into his love for God. This Mr. Browning has drawn 
 as scarcely any other man could draw it. But these 
 are essentially different from- what is properly de- 
 noted by sentiment, which is apt to lean upon the 
 occasional, lives on memory and association, tinges 
 everything around it with a secondary glow of its 
 own, and has neither the immediate carnal origin of 
 a passion, nor that absolute independence both of 
 circumstance and instinct, which characterises what 
 I have called a spiritual affection. It is, as I have 
 said, in sentiment that the tempering moods are 
 rooted which give rise to so much of our highest 
 poetry, and which touch with a sort of illuminating 
 magic so much which would otherwise have no in- 
 trinsic charm. Gray's "Elegy," for instance, is 
 popular solely for the tender melancholy that hangs 
 around it, and almost constitutes it an incarnation 
 of evening regret. Now, of those sentiments which 
 tune the imagination Mr. Browning's poems seem 
 destitute, and the consequence is that he is apt to 
 I- R
 
 242 MR. BROWNING IV 
 
 plunge us from cold spiritual or intellectual power 
 into the fever of passion, and back again from this 
 fever into the cold. 
 
 But I suspect that his interpreting intellect has 
 gained through this hiatus in his imagination. Senti- 
 ment, because it is lyrical, because it tempts the mind 
 into dwelling on its own moods, is a great hindrance 
 to that strategic activity of the intellect which 
 enables it to pass easily from one intellectual and 
 moral centre to another. Mr. Browning is not a 
 great dramatist, for in style he always remains him- 
 self, but he is a great intellectual interpreter of 
 human character, — in other words, a great intellectual 
 and spiritual ventriloquist ; and nothing should, one 
 Avould think, more interfere with the ease of spiritual 
 ventriloquism than those clinging personal senti- 
 ments, which never leave the creative mind really 
 free and solitary. For it must require a habit not 
 merely of physical, but, if I may so speak, of spiritual 
 solitude, to migrate rapidly in this way from your 
 own actual centre in the world of intellect and feel- 
 ing to a totally different centre, where you not only 
 try to speak an alien language, but to think unac- 
 customed thought and feel unaccustomed passions ; 
 and yet to do this, as Mr. Browning does, without 
 really losing for a moment his own centre of critical 
 life. Mr. Browning says very finely in one of his 
 dramas — 
 
 " When is man strong, imtil lie feels alone ? 
 It was some lonely strength at first, be sure, 
 Created organs such as those you seek 
 By which to give its varied purj^ose shape, — 
 And, naming the selected niinistrants. 
 Took sword and shield and sceptre — each a man !" 
 
 This seems to me to describe Mr. Browning's own
 
 IV MR. BROWNING 243 
 
 work very powerfully. His intellectual and spiritual 
 strength has apparently been much braced in this 
 cold solitude. No poet of modern days gives us 
 more distinctly the sense of an imagination which 
 acts propria rtiotu than Mr. Browning. He is always 
 masculine and vigorous. Original modern poetry is 
 apt to be enervating, producing the effect of intel- 
 lectual luxury ; or, if, like Wordsworth's, it is as cool 
 and bright as morning dew, it carries us away from 
 the world to mountain solitudes and transcendental 
 dreams. Mr. Bro-\vning's — while it strings our intel- 
 lect to the utmost, as all really intellectual poetry 
 must, and has none of the luxuriance of fancy and 
 wealth of sentiment Avhich relaxes the fibre of the 
 mind — keeps us still in a living world, — not always 
 the modern world, very seldom indeed the world of 
 modern England, but still in contact with keen, quick, 
 vigorous life, that, as well as engaging the imagina- 
 tion, really enlarges the range of one's intellectual 
 and social, sometimes almost of one's political, ex- 
 perience. Mr. Browning cannot, indeed, paint action ; 
 but of the intellectual approaches to action he is a 
 great master. And in spite of a more grating 
 medium of expression than any eminent English poet 
 perhaps ever made use of, his -writings have slowly 
 won for him, — and won most for him amongst those 
 whose intellect is most nimble and vigorous, — a great, 
 a growing, and an enduring fame.
 
 THE POETRY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 Many attempts have been from time to time made to 
 give to the devotional poems of the Old Testament 
 the rhythmical harmony of modern verse. But hardly 
 with even the very best of these attempts, hardly 
 with Milton's fine versions of some of the Psalms 
 themselves, has there been much success ; and in 
 general readers of these versions fret at the unaccus- 
 tomed monotony and the ever -recurring chimes, 
 something as they would if the sea should begin to 
 murmur sonatas, or the mnd to whistle tunes. Nor 
 is it simply that any change of form, impressed by a 
 foreign cast of mind on poetry that has sunk deep 
 into the heart of ages, is distressing and bewildering. 
 Unless I am making the mistake with which modern 
 philosophy so often reproaches modern thought, — of 
 confounding the " second nature " of constant associa- 
 tion with the original nature of inherent constitution, 
 — there is something in most of the Hebrew poetry 
 which is essentially inconsistent with the framework 
 of defined metre or rhyme. No doubt there are 
 Hebrew lyrics which, had rhyme and fixed measure 
 been a recognised form of poetical expression at the 
 time they were composed, would have been thrown 
 into that form. Such one may recognise in David's
 
 V THE POETEY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 245 
 
 lament over Saul and Jonathan ; and again, in those 
 Psalms which approach nearer in cast and concep- 
 tion to the religious poetry of our o^vn day, — that 
 is, to an artistic presentation of the devotional feel- 
 ings of man, — than to the sublimer type of the more 
 characteristic Hebrew poetry, which seems generally 
 to be busied mth a direct delineation of God. But 
 in most of the grander Psalms, and even more in the 
 wonderful poetry of Isaiah and the minor prophets, 
 there is something that defies the laws of regular 
 metre or rhyme, — something that breaks through and 
 rises up above them, when they are artificially 
 imposed. 
 
 Not that I am of the number of those who regard 
 these natural forms of poetry as arbitrary and orna- 
 mental restrictions, observed only in order to enhance 
 the beauty of the essential thought ; rather, to the 
 true poet, are they fresh powers, new media of ex- 
 pression, enabling him to tell much which otherwise 
 must have remained for ever untold. Metrical 
 beauty is the inborn music, as it were, Avhich beats a 
 natural accompaniment to the creative toil of the 
 imagination, and vindicates the essential unity of the 
 life which runs through it. As the conception of the 
 poet gradually gets itself translated into the language 
 of mankind, the rhythm and harmony of the whole 
 afford a real test of the depth and power of the 
 creative genius, as distinguished from a faculty of 
 mere mechanical construction. But though this is 
 true of poetic eff"orts in general, it does not apply to 
 the greater works of the Hebrew poets. Marvellous 
 as is the imaginative power which they display, yet, 
 for the most part, they are not, in the strict sense, 
 works of imagination, — works, that is, of which the 
 purpose, unity, and proportions are seized before-
 
 246 THE POETEY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT v 
 
 hand by the overseeing imagination, and worked out 
 by it into their full development. On the contrary, 
 they seem expressly to renounce all claim to imagin- 
 ative unity, properly so called, — nay, to insist pas- 
 sionately on the fragmentary and isolated character 
 of the glimpses which they gain into the Eternal 
 secret, — to testify that the riddle of God's Providence 
 is hidden from them, though the spirit of His life is 
 revealed. And while this is the case, while the 
 greatest imaginative beauties of the Hebrew poets 
 have no living imaginative centre or unity of their 
 own, but are used as scattered symbols of spiritual 
 truths which pierce the natural and visible universe 
 at isolated points, rather than harmonise and explain 
 it, it seems almost a mockery to round them off Avith 
 a rhythm and a rhyme which are the appropriate dress 
 of finished creations. They are greater than other 
 poems from the very same cause which renders them 
 less complete. The plan of the universe was too 
 great a plan to grasp, though here and there it was 
 given to the Hebrew poets to shed upon it a bril- 
 liant light. And the fragmentary character of their 
 insight is fitly mirrored in the broken music of our 
 prose versions. 
 
 When, indeed, the mind of the poet dwelt directly 
 and exclusively on the spiritual perfection of God, 
 the harmony of his theme ensured a certain imag- 
 inative unity in his work. But Avhen, as was more 
 common, it was his effort to afford some glimpse into 
 the mystery of Providence, it was his very aim to 
 maintain that what was visible to the imagination had 
 no independent unity or significance in itself ; and 
 then he appealed for the solution of the human drama 
 to the undeclared counsels of God, and affirmed his 
 faith in a heavenly music, inaudible as yet, lurking
 
 V THE POETRY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 247 
 
 under the apparent discords of human destiny, but 
 confessed his inability to explain what that music 
 was. And in all such direct appeals from the visible 
 to the invisible, — in all such confessions that the 
 principle of harmony was still undiscovered, that the 
 truth was shrouded in mystery, — the perfect rhythm, 
 which seems to mark the natural march of a visible 
 order and harmony, is far less suitable than the less 
 measured speech in which all that is incipient or 
 fragmentary in human life finds its natural medium 
 of expression. Even Milton, ^vith true poetic insight, 
 as I think, into this principle, confined his versified 
 renderings of the Psalms to those more strictly devo- 
 tional outpourings in which the human heart is 
 expressed, rather than those in which the "burden 
 of the mystery " of Divine government is half relieved 
 and half magnified. Is there not something obviously 
 and painfully incongruous, for instance, in any ver- 
 sification of such verses as these, which are deeply 
 impressed with the characteristic genius of Hebrew 
 poetry 1 — 
 
 " Wliither shall I go then from thy spirit, or whither 
 shall I go then from thy presence ? If I climb up into 
 r^ heaven, thou art there : if I go down to hell, thou art 
 ^ there also. If I take the wings of the morning, and 
 remain in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there also 
 shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold 
 me. If I say, Peradventure the darkness shall cover 
 me, then shall my night be turned to day. Yea, the 
 darkness is no darkness with thee : but the night is clear 
 as the day : the darkness and the light to thee are both 
 alike." 
 
 To me, the broken harmony of the metre, the 
 absence of rhyme, — in other words, the absence of 
 any affectation of satisfied or adequate imaginative
 
 248 THE POETRY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT x 
 
 power, — is absolutely essential to portray the insup- 
 portable bui'den of the mystery weighing on the mind 
 of the poet. And it is not so much the deficiency in 
 the art of the follo"\\dng lines, as the attempt at art at 
 all, — the mere effort to run the thoughts of the 
 Psalmist into smooth verse, — Avhich repels me. I 
 quote from a poetical version, made by Mr. Edgar 
 Browning, from the English Prayer Book of the Book 
 of Psalms : — 
 
 " Where from Thy spirit shall I go ? where from Thy 
 
 presence hide ? 
 Climb I to heaven, Thou'rt there ; or go to hell, Thou'rt 
 
 by my side. 
 If morning's wings I take, and dwell beside the farthest 
 
 sea, 
 E'en there Thy hand shall lead me, and Thy right hand 
 
 succour me. 
 If perad venture I should say, The darkness shall surround 
 
 me, 
 Then shall my night be turned to day, and utterly 
 
 confound me. 
 No darkness darkness is with Thee : as clear as day is 
 
 night ; 
 For unto Thee alike appear the darkness and the light." 
 
 I wonder the mere attempt to rhyme such thoughts 
 as these did not at once convince any one who made 
 the attempt, that there is no discord like that which 
 fastens outward symbols of artistic unity on those 
 heavings of elemental thought which are expressly 
 confessed as utterly beyond the control of the thinker. 
 To rhyme the thunders of Sinai would seem a scarcely 
 less appropriate task ; or, to make what is perhaps a 
 fairer comparison, how would it be possible to trans- 
 late Jacob's awe-struck exclamation, on awaking from 
 the dream in which he had seen the ladder with
 
 V THE POETRY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 249 
 
 angels ascending and descending between heaven and 
 earth, — " How dreadfnl is this place ! this is none 
 other than the house of God, this is the gate of 
 heaven ! " — into any more finished metrical form that 
 would equally well express the inadequacy of the 
 imagination to grasp the thoughts on Avhich it 
 brooded 1 Yet this one sentence might be taken as 
 a perfect condensation of the attitude in which the 
 imagination of the Hebrew poet was left when most 
 deeply stirred by the breath of Divine inspiration. 
 
 But I have no intention of dwelling on the merits 
 of the attempt to reduce to metre and rhyme our 
 English translations of the Hebrew poets. The often 
 repeated effort to exhibit some of them in a form 
 adapted to certain exigencies of the popular taste, 
 may aftbrd sufficient excuse for these comments on 
 their intrinsic genius and literary character. It is a 
 strange thing that, among all the various criticisms 
 of modern times, there should have been so little 
 effort to appreciate the special relation of the Hebrew 
 poetry to the poetry of other nations and other ages. 
 However true it may be that by far the highest 
 value of the writings of the Hebrew poets is not 
 literary, but spiritual and moral, — that they are 
 generally read, and generally rightly read, for pur- 
 poses from which any literary estimate of their 
 qualities and worth is far removed, — still, to the 
 student of national literatures, no phenomena can be 
 either more remarkable or more instructive than those 
 of a literature produced in a moral climate so widely 
 separated from that of all other nations as the Hebrew. 
 /The more jn-ofoundly we accept the spiritual inspira- 
 tion of the Hebrew poets, — only rejecting, of course, 
 the absurd doctrine of absolute verbal dictation by 
 the Divine Spirit, through the mechanical instru-
 
 250 THE POETRY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT V 
 
 mentality of certain chosen men, which obviously 
 degrades them from poets into amanuenses at once, — 
 the more remarkable these phenomena must be ; for 
 the more completely new will the conditions be under 
 which the human imagination acts, and the more 
 instructive will be the contrast between literatures 
 which, like the Greek or the Teutonic, seem the indig- 
 enous development of human conditions of imagina- 
 tion, acting without any consciousness at least of 
 supernatural constraint, and that which is educed, 
 from first to last, out of the creative germs of a 
 Divine inspiration. What are the distinctive featiu'es 
 of such a literature 1 What are the characteristics 
 which it has in common with all other literatures ? 
 
 Perhaps we shall get the distinctest conception of 
 the characteristic aspects of the Hebrew imagination, 
 if we look first at what may be called its least unique, 
 its least individual efforts, — those exquisite pastoral 
 and national traditions in which the imagination cer- 
 tainly cannot be said to have been properly creative at 
 all, but only formative and selective ; evincing its 
 special characteristics rather by the details on which 
 it fixes and the prominence it gives to special features 
 in the tradition, than by any productive power of its 
 own. In such pastoral traditions as the book of 
 Genesis records, or in the later but equally simple 
 and lovely story of the book of Ruth, there is more 
 of that common beauty and simplicity which belongs 
 to the early records of all great nations, — more which 
 in its rural pictures and quiet naturalism reminds us 
 at times of the Odyssey or the Scandinavian poems, 
 — more of that "freshness of the early world" Avhich 
 belongs to the childhood of humanity itself, and there- 
 fore contains fewer characteristically Hebrew features, 
 — than in any other part of the Bible literature.
 
 V THE POETRY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 251 
 
 Few can read the account of Abraham's servant 
 waiting beside his kneeling camels at the well outside 
 the city of Nahor till the hour of sunset, when the 
 women came out to draw ; of his first meeting with 
 Rebekah, her kindly help in drawing for him and 
 his camels, and her joyful return into the city with 
 the news of the discovered relationship to his master, 
 and the gold bracelets and earrings with which he 
 had loaded her, — without being in some measure 
 reminded of the beautiful narrative, in the Odyssey, 
 of the Princess Nausikaa and her maidens going out 
 for the day to wash the clothes of the household in 
 the little river of the island, and disturbing, by their 
 lamentations over the loss of their ball, the sleeping 
 Ulysses. In both cases alike, a higher agency is 
 made the thread of the story. The servant of 
 Abraham is seeking a wife for his young master 
 from among his own people, and God has " sent his 
 angel before him," to choose for Isaac a wife more 
 suitable than Canaan could have produced. Nausikaa, 
 again, is represented as acting under the impulse of 
 Athene, whose care for Ulysses prepares for him this 
 fortunate meeting with the princess. In both cases, 
 therefore, the naturalness of the life delineated is in 
 a certain way bound up vnth the national religion, — 
 or, as we must call it in the case of Greece, mythology ; 
 and the contrast between them is a fair illustration 
 of the contrast between the national imagination of 
 the two races. A light fancy plays round all the 
 delineations of the one ; a serious satisfaction in thus 
 tracing out the ways of the ancestral Providence 
 animates and condenses every description in the 
 other. It is not that the actors are at all less human, 
 less strictly nautral ; the golden bracelets are at 
 least as much prized by Rebekah and her friends as
 
 252 THE POETEY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT v 
 
 are the " delicate garments " which haunt Nausikaa's 
 dreams, and which it is her greatest delight to wash. 
 But the one tale is largely embellished, if not entirely 
 created, by a graceful fancy ; the other is a cherished 
 link in the national life. The one is full of simile 
 and by-play, and the author evidently set as much 
 store by the discursive illustrations as by the story 
 itself, — which, indeed, we cannot but feel is little 
 more than a framework invented for the sake of the 
 pictures it contains ; the other runs directly and 
 eagerly on to its conclusion. The crowd of Phaeacian 
 maidens striving gaily Avith each other while stamp- 
 ing out the clothes in the water-troughs, and after- 
 wards dancing and singing and throwing the ball on 
 the banks of the stream, are not more widely different, 
 as a picture, from the grave Rebekah "with the pitcher 
 on her shoulder coming from the city to draw, than 
 is the treatment of the theme in the Greek poem 
 from that in the Hebrew narrative. 
 " She went, but followed by lier virgin train. 
 At the delightful rivulet arrived, 
 Where those perennial cisterns were prepared. 
 With purest crystal of the fountain fed 
 Profuse, sufficient for the deepest stains : 
 Loosing the mules, they drove them forth to browse 
 On the sweet herb beside the dimpled flood. 
 The carriage next light'ning, they bore in hand 
 The garments down to the unsullied wave. 
 And thrust them heap'd into the pools, their task 
 Despatching brisk, and with an emulous haste. 
 When they had all purified, and no sjjot 
 Could now be seen or blemish more, they spread 
 The raiment orderly along the beach 
 Where dashing tides had cleansed the pebbles most, 
 And laving, next, and smoothing o'er with oil 
 Their limbs, all seated on the river's bank.
 
 V THE POETRY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 253 
 
 They took repast, leaving the garments stretched 
 
 In noon-day fervour of the snn to dry. 
 
 Their hunger satisfied, at once arose 
 
 The mistress and her train, and putting off 
 
 Their head attire, played wanton with the ball. 
 
 The princess singing to her maids the while. 
 
 Such as shaft-armed Diana roams the hills, 
 
 Taygetus sky-capt or Erymanth, 
 
 The wild-boar chasing, or fleet-footed hind. 
 
 All joy ; the rural nymphs, daughters of Jove, 
 
 Sport with her, and Latona's heart exults : 
 
 She high her graceful head above the rest. 
 
 And features lifts divine, though all be fair, 
 
 With ease distinguishable from them all : 
 
 So all her train she, virgin pure, surpassed. 
 
 The princess then, casting the ball toward 
 A maiden of her train, erroneous threw. 
 And jjlunged it deep into the dimpling stream. 
 All slirieked ; Ulysses at the sound awoke. 
 And sitting, meditated thus the cause : 
 Ah me ! what mortal race inhabit here ? 
 Rude are they, contumacious, and unjust ? 
 Or hospitable and who fear the Gods ? " etc.^ 
 
 Compare with this the interview between Abra- 
 ham's steward and Kebekah. 
 
 "And the servant ran to meet her, and said, Let me, 
 I pray thee, drink a little water of thy pitcher. And she 
 said, Drink, my lord : and she hasted, and let down her 
 pitcher upon her hand, and gave him drink. And wlien 
 she had done giving him drink, she said, I will draw for 
 thy camels also, until they have^done drinking. And the 
 man wondering at her held his peace, to wit whether the 
 Lord had made his journey prosperous or not. And it 
 came to pass, as the camels had done drinking, that the 
 
 ^ Cowper's translation of tlie Odyssey.
 
 254 THE POETRY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT v 
 
 man took a golden earring of half a shekel weight, and 
 two bracelets for her hands of ten shekels weight of gold. 
 And said, Whose daughter art thou ? tell me, I pray thee, 
 is there room in thy father's house for us to lodge in ? 
 And she said to him, I am the daughter of Bethuel the 
 son of Milcah, which she bare unto Nahor. She said 
 moreover unto him, We have both straw and provender 
 enough, and room to lodge in. And the man bowed 
 down his head and worshipped the Lord. And he said. 
 Blessed be the Lord God of my master Abraham, who 
 hath not left destitute my master of his mercy and truth : 
 I being in the way, the Lord led me to the house of my 
 master's brethren. And the damsel ran, and told them 
 of her mother's house these things. And Eebekah had 
 a brother, whose name was Laban : and Laban ran unto 
 the man unto the well. And it came to pass, when he 
 saw the earring and bracelets upon his sister's hands, and 
 when he heard the words of Rebekah his sister, saying, 
 Thus spake the man unto me, that he came unto the man ; 
 and, behold, he stood by the camels at the well. And 
 he said, Come in, thou blessed of the Lord ; wherefore 
 standest thou without ? for I have prejDared the house, 
 and room for the camels." 
 
 Now, of course, one does not expect in what pro- 
 fesses to be true narrative anything like the same 
 play of fancy, the same plentiful growth of subsidiary 
 life, as we may well look for in the confessedly 
 legendary poems of Greece. But the remarkable 
 point, as regards the Hebrew imagination, is this, — 
 that being so powerful and vivid as we know it to 
 have been, it nevertheless clings so closely to past 
 reality, to ancestral traditions, and never seems to 
 have exercised itself in creating or developing, from 
 existing germs, imaginative traditions such as abound 
 in the Greek and Teutonic literature. With num- 
 berless rude fragments of heroic story ready to its
 
 V THE POETEY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 255 
 
 purpose, such as we find scattered through the Book 
 of Judges, for example, there seems to have been no 
 tendency in the HebreAV imagination to give that 
 life, and form, and development to them, which the 
 popular imagination of an imaginative people is 
 generally so ready to impart. There is no literature 
 with so many neglected fragments of story as the 
 Hebrew. Where the true history lives, it lives with 
 marvellous vividness in the people's imagination ; to 
 that the national mind evidently clings with intense 
 tenacity ; but where the history becomes discon- 
 tinuous, where there is only the " shadow of a great 
 name," the imaginative power does not seem to step 
 into its place. It is not with the Hebrew people a 
 productive, but, as regards human story, only a 
 representative power ; it does not multiply, but only 
 preserves, the hints of the past ; it is, in its human 
 sphere at all events, not a discursive and prolific 
 capacity, but merely a faculty of glowing and 
 tenacious vision or retrospect. 
 
 Perhaps, natural as it is, it may be a mistake 
 warranted by a very partial experience, to connect 
 as we do great imaginative power Avith fertility and 
 luxuriance of conception. Any national or any 
 individual mind that can summon imaginary, and 
 even real, past scenes and actions so vividly before it 
 as to live, as it were, in their presence and under 
 their influence, must be said to live, in the highest 
 sense, an imaginative life. There is in such a mind 
 a faculty of spiritual vision which rivals the power 
 of the senses. But there need not be necessarily any 
 fertility of imagination, any power of reproducing in 
 new and varied shapes the impressions gathered from 
 the invisible forms of life on which it feeds. " If," 
 said Coleridge, in distinguishing between fancy and
 
 256 THE POETRY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT V 
 
 imagination, "the check of the reason and senses 
 were withdrawn, fancy would become delirium, and 
 imagination mania." The Hebrew imagination was 
 of this latter type. It was the pervading presence 
 of one or two great — sometimes perverted — spiritual 
 impressions, or convictions, Avhich gave unity to 
 Hebrew traditions, and the characteristic intensity to 
 Hebrew thought and language. The haunting power 
 of two great convictions. National Unity and Super- 
 natural Guidance, supplies at once the main connect- 
 ing threads of Jewish tradition. But an imagination 
 thus haunted could not well be fertile or original in 
 its dealings with human story ; for national pride is 
 conservative, not inventive ; and the mind which 
 feeds eagerly on the evidences of an actual Providence 
 will not care to live in a world of its own creation. 
 
 These two great convictions, of national unity and 
 supernatural guidance, are, then, I believe, the two 
 principal centres of Jewish imagination, Avhich at 
 once jDrecluded its being creative like the Greek, and 
 also governed the selection and arrangement of even 
 its simplest and most strictly human traditions. All 
 of them have one thread connecting them with the 
 growth and glory of the national life, and another 
 parallel thread illustrating the wonderful Providence 
 of supernatural government. For example, there is 
 no tradition in the Hebrew literature Avhich is at 
 first sight less closely interwoven with either of these 
 threads, more purely composed of universal human 
 elements, than the story of Kuth. Hartley Coleridge, 
 in verses commenting on the mysterious "tale of 
 bloodshed" which constitutes the history of Israel, 
 has called this story an oasis of human beauty in 
 "the wild and waste of Bible truth." Yet the cause 
 of its preservation and consecration among the
 
 V THE POETRY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 257 
 
 chronicles of the nation is scarcely the loveliness of 
 the rural picture of the young gleaner in the harvest- 
 fields of Bethlehem followed by the kindly eye of the 
 rich farmer bidding his young men drop ears on 
 purpose for her from the sheaves ; nor even the mere 
 devotedness of heart which made K,u.th " cleave " to 
 Naomi. It is, on the one side, the exultation in the 
 providential reward which was allotted to an alien 
 woman of Moab for her abandonment of her country 
 and gods in order to embrace the faith, and identify 
 herself with the fortunes, of Israel; on the other, 
 side, the fact, that David, the great king of Israel^ 
 was descended so directly from her, — Avhich made 
 this beautiful narrative so precious to the Jews. And 
 Naomi said, " Behold, thy sister-in-law is gone back 
 unto lier people, and unto her gods : return thou after 
 thy sister-in-law. And Euth said. Entreat me not to 
 leave thee, or to retiu^n from following after thee : 
 for whither thou goest, I will go ; and where thou 
 lodgest, I will lodge : thy people shall be my people, 
 and thy God my God." And again, " Boaz answered 
 and said unto her, It hath fully been shown me all 
 that thou hast done unto thy mother-in-law since the 
 death of thine husband : and how thou hast left thy 
 father and thy mother, and the land of thy nativity, 
 and art come unto a people which thou knewest not 
 heretofore. The Lord recompense thy work, and a 
 full reward be given thee of the Lord God of Israel, 
 under whose wings thou art come to trust." And 
 there the narrative ends, and as it were justifies itself 
 by tracing the descent of David from the marriage of 
 Boaz and Ruth. 
 
 In fact, incidentally beautiful and tender as many 
 of the early traditions of Israel are, the imagination 
 of the Jews dwelt chiefly, if not entirely, on the 
 L S
 
 258 THE POETRY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT v 
 
 illustrations they contain of the two great spiritual 
 realities on which their hearts were fixed, — the divine 
 unity of their nation, and the supernatural Providence 
 which watched over its children individually and its 
 collective destinies. In saying this, of course, I do 
 not pretend that this accoiuits for the imaginative 
 beauty and power with which these traditions are 
 told ; I merely indicate the kindling convictions 
 which stirred the thoughts of the Avriters who first 
 embodied them in their present shape. The visionary 
 eye and ear must, of course, have been theirs, or no 
 intensity of spiritual convictions could have enabled 
 them by a few simple touches to delineate scenes 
 that must live as long as the human race. But this 
 visionary faculty would be entirely quiescent were 
 not some kindling faith or conception to excite its 
 activity. The vividness of the outward picture must 
 depend on the manner of the painter • and if " the 
 eyes of them that see " are not to "be dim, and the 
 ears of them that hear " are to " hearken," the visions 
 and sounds which pass before them must be con- 
 nected and engraved upon the seer by some inward 
 trust or love. The spiritual roots, so to say, of the 
 Hebrew traditionary poems are the faith in the 
 glorious destiny of the nation, and the overseeing 
 Providence of God as the power which had wrought 
 out that destiny and should further work it out to 
 its conclusion. 
 
 But if it is easy to trace the main streams of 
 popular tradition to those two closely allied and 
 indeed ultimately identical sources, — the pride of 
 national unity and greatness, and the delight in 
 tracing the movements of that guiding hand which 
 had shaped the discipline of the nation in shaping 
 the lot of its fathers and its kings,— it is yet easier
 
 V THE POETRY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 259 
 
 to trace the same overruling thoughts in those 
 " occasional " poems, as one may call them, which 
 are still preserved among its records. Of course, 
 where the occasions are directly political, as in the^ 
 case of the lament of David over the death of Saul 
 and Jonathan, or the vindictive paean of Deborah 
 over the fate of Sisera, we should fully expect to 
 find these thoughts most conspicuous ; and yet, in 
 both cases, very few readers are at all aware how 
 entirely these thoughts give their whole unity and 
 colouring to the poems. In the one case, the beauty 
 of the personal lament which David pours forth for 
 Jonathan, and in the other, the intensity of the 
 personal exultation with which Deborah depicts the 
 murder of Sisera, — have distracted our thoughts 
 from the real imaginative roots of the poems. Cer- 
 tainly, the true spirit of David's lamentation is not 
 caught, if the expression of love for his friend with 
 which it closes is regarded as the essential thought 
 of the poem. Strong as that feeling is, it is clearly 
 subordinated to a grander and a stronger feeling, 
 and one which ruled more completely in the future 
 king of Israel's heart than any individual affection. 
 The defeat and death of Saul had been announced to 
 him by an Amalekite, who expected the injured and 
 exiled chief to receive it as good news, and even to 
 reward him for the part he had taken as an accessary 
 to the slaughter of the defeated king. Saul, says 
 the messenger, in his despondency at his overthrow, 
 had implored him, as he passed by, to jDut an end to 
 his life ; and he had complied. The horror that 
 David feels for this profane spilling of the blood of 
 the anointed king of Israel, which he thinks must 
 drop a curse on the very mountains of Gilboa, where 
 it happened, — his dread lest even the Philistines
 
 260 THE POETEY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT A' 
 
 should hear and rejoice at that which the messenger 
 had cruelly supposed might be welcome tidings to 
 himself, — is the keynote of the lament. J( 
 
 " And David said nnto liiin, How wast tliou not afraid 
 to stretch forth thine hand to destroy the Lord's anointed ? 
 Thy blood be upon thy head ; for thy mouth hath testified 
 against thee, saying, I have slain the Lord's anointed. 
 And David lamented with this lamentation over Sanl, 
 and over Jonathan his son. The beauty of Israel is slain 
 upon thy high places : how are the mighty fallen ! Tell 
 it not in Gatli, publish it not in the streets of Askelon ; 
 lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice, lest the 
 daughters of the uncircumcised triumph. Ye mountains 
 of Gilboa, let there be no dew, neither rain upon you, nor 
 fields of offerings : for there the shield of the mighty is 
 vilely cast away, the shield of Saul, as though not anointed 
 with oil. From the blood of the slain, from the fat of 
 the mighty, the bow of Jonathan turned not back, and 
 the sword of Saul returned not empty. Saul and Jonathan 
 were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death 
 they were not divided. They were swifter than eagles, 
 they were stronger than lions. Ye daughters of Israel, 
 weep over Saul, who clothed you in scarlet, with other 
 delights ; who put on ornaments of gold on your apparel. 
 How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle ! 
 Jonathan, thou wast slain in thy high places. I am 
 distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan : very pleasant 
 hast thou been unto me : thy love to me was wonderful, 
 passing the love of women. How are the mighty fallen, 
 and the weapons of war perished ! " 
 
 Personal grief is only an episode in the lament, 
 though constituting its greatest beauty ; the repre- 
 sentative character of the kina; and his son as the / 
 chiefs of Israel, appointed by God, is the promment 
 thought ; and the ignominy of the shield cast away 
 before the enemy constitutes the burden of the song.
 
 V THE rOETEY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 261 
 
 Again, in the greatest war-song of any age or 
 nation, the exultation of Deborah over Sisera's com- 
 plete defeat, and sul)sequent assassination by the 
 hand of Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite, — no 
 doubt personal revenge might seem to blaze high 
 above Deborah's faith in her nation and her God, 
 as the kindling or exciting spiritual principle which 
 brings the scene in such marvellous vividness before 
 her eyes. But though this feeling may add perhaps 
 some of the fire to the latter part of the poem, it is 
 clear that her faith in the national unity, and God, 
 as the source of the national unity, was the great, 
 binding thought of the whole. The song dAvells, 
 first, with the most intense bitterness on the decay 
 of patriotism in the tribes that did not combine 
 against the common foe : " For the divisions of 
 Keuben," she says, " there were great searchings of 
 heart. Why abodest thou among the sheepfolds, to 
 hear the bleatings of the flocks ? For the divisions 
 of Reuben there were great searchings of heart. 
 Gilead abode beyond Jordan, and why did Dan 
 remain in ships 1 Asher continued on the seashore, 
 and abode in his breaches"; with which she contrasts 
 the nobler conduct of Zabulon and Naphtali, Avho 
 "jeoparded their lives unto the death in the high 
 places of the field." Their kings came and fought, J 
 she says, and " took no gain of money " ; and all 
 powers of heaven and earth were on their side. 
 " They fought from heaven ; the stars in their 
 courses fought against Sisera ; the river of Kishon 
 swept them away, that ancient river, the river 
 Kishon. my soul, thou hast trodden down 
 strength." And the transition by which she passes 
 to her fierce exultation over Hisera's terrible fate 
 shows distinctly what was the main thought in her
 
 262 THE POETRY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT v 
 
 mind. "There was peace," we are told, between 
 the king of Hazor, whose forces Sisera commanded, 
 and Heber the Kenite ; the latter was only distantly 
 akin to the people of Israel ; the help of his tribe 
 was not expected ; and yet, though the aid of many 
 true Israelites was wanting, from Ms house came 
 the blow, treacherous though it was, which rid the 
 nation of the dreaded and hated enemy. 
 
 " Curse ye Meroz, said the angel of the Lord ; curse 
 ye bitterly the inliabitants thereof, because they came. 
 not to the help of the Lord, to the help of the Lord 
 against the mighty. Blessed above women shall Jael the 
 wife of Heber the Kenite be ; blessed shall she be above 
 women in the tent. He asked for water, and she gave 
 him milk : she brought forth butter in a lordly dish ; 
 she put her hand to the nail, and her right hand to the 
 workmen's hammer ; and with the hammer she smote 
 Sisera, she smote off his head when she had pierced and 
 stricken through his temples. At her feet he bowed, he 
 fell, he lay down : at her feet he bowed, he fell ; where 
 he bowed, there he fell down dead. The mother of 
 Sisera looked out at a window, and cried through the 
 lattice. Why is his chariot so long in coming ? Why 
 tarry the wheels of his chariots ? Her wise ladies 
 answered her, yea, she returned answer to herself. Have 
 they not sped ? have they not divided the prey ; to every 
 man a damsel or two ; to Sisera a prey of divers colours, 
 a prey of divers colours of needlework, of divers colours 
 of needlework on both sides, meet for the necks of them 
 that take the spoil 1 So let all Thine enemies perish, O 
 Lord : but let them that love Thee be as the sun when he 
 goeth forth in his might." 
 
 The exultation with which the poet dwells on the 
 treachery of the act, on the heli)less prostration of 
 the great cai)tain's corpse before a mere woman's 
 knees ; the terrible minuteness with Avhich she gloats
 
 V THE POETRY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 263 
 
 over the raised expectations of the mother of the 
 luurdered soldier ; the picture of the " wise ladies " 
 in attendance suggesting triumphant reasons for the 
 delay, and of the anxious eagerness with which she 
 even suggested these reasons to herself, — no doubt 
 indicate fierce personal as well as fierce patriotic 
 triumph. But the whole tenor of this grand poem 
 and the conclusion, " So let all thy enemies perish, 
 Lord : but let them that love thee be as the sun 
 when lie goeth forth in his might," at all events 
 prove that the personal hatred was so closely bound 
 up with the representative feelings of the writer as a 
 judge of Israel, and with her trust in the Lord of 
 Hosts, that the latter lent a kind of halo to the 
 unscrupulous ferocity of the former. 
 
 The two historical songs I have noticed celebrate 
 exciting political events. But nothing is more strik- 
 ing than the tendency of all lyrical poetry, among 
 the Hebrews, to connect itself with the same haunt- 
 ing conceptions of the national unity and the national 
 Providence. The great number of beautiful poems 
 which directly or indirectly are connected with the 
 Babylonian captivity are all of this class. Instead 
 of containing, as might be expected, a mere pathetic 
 record of individual privations and sorrows, they all 
 of them seem to speak in the name of the nation ;/ 
 and to address God, not as the healer of individual 
 affliction, but as holding in His hand the destiny of 
 the nation, whose common suffering or common joy 
 was inseparable from that of the individual heart. 
 Such is the beautiful psalm written "by the waters 
 of Babylon," which ends with curses on the oppressors 
 almost as fierce as those of Deborah's song. Such, 
 too, is the still more beautiful poem in which the 
 restoration of Israel to their own land is celebrated,
 
 264 THE POETRY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT v 
 
 and the captivity treated as a source of spiritual 
 blessing, rather than a curse. Even the heathens, 
 it tells us, confessed that the Lord had " done great 
 things for them," and so it was ; for, as the winter 
 torrent returns again to its dry bed when the jDarch- 
 ing summer is past, — as the seed sown in grief re- 
 turns in joy in the yellow sheaves of harvest, — so, 
 by one of those rapid and unreal changes of fate 
 which make even the waking ask if they dream, 
 the Israelites found themselves returning to their 
 land ; once more a nation, and once again assured 
 of the unchangeable purposes of their God. 
 
 " When the Lord turned again the captivity of Sion : 
 then were we like unto them that dream. Then was our 
 mouth filled with laughter : and oiir tongue with joy. 
 Then said they among the heathen, The Lord hath done 
 great things for them. Yea, the Lord hath done great 
 things for us already : whereof we rejoice. Turn our 
 captivity, O Lord : as the rivers in the south. They 
 that sow in tears shall reap in joy. He that now goeth 
 on his way weeping, and beareth forth good seed, shall 
 doubtless come again with joy, and bring his sheaves with 
 him." 
 
 It is, then, I believe, a matter of fact that the 
 imagination of the Hebrew poets is never thoroughly 
 stirred by mere individual emotion. Nothing is 
 more striking than the tendency of their individual 
 and solitary moods of thought to widen, as the fire 
 kindles, into meditations on the national history and 
 the mystci'ies of its supernatural providence. Often 
 the turn is so sudden and abrupt, that to our modern 
 ears, in which history and poetry sound incompatible 
 terms, the transition seems harsh and grotesque. The 
 poet who is sinking under the burden of disease and 
 sorrow, and is pouring forth what seems a weight of
 
 V THE rOETllY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 265 
 
 strictly private trouble into the ear of God, has no 
 sooner confessed that it is " his own infirmity," and 
 not the neglect of the Most High, Avhich makes his 
 weariness seem so intolerable, than he plunges into 
 the " wonders of old," and ends his hymn with Avhat 
 to modern ears sounds like a strange anti- climax : 
 " Thy Avay is in the sea, and thy path in the great 
 waters, and thy footsteps are not known. Tlwu 
 leddest thy people like sheep, by the hands of Moses and 
 Aaron." Of lyi'ics proper, no doubt, there are many 
 in the Book of Psalms ; but usually the clear vision 
 of God summons up by a kind of necessity the image 
 of the nation, and the story of the nation's fates. 
 
 Sometimes one understands better the charac- 
 teristic moving power of a great literature by con- 
 trasting it with that of a different people or age, 
 than by contemplating it as it is in itself. It would 
 be untrue to say that the Hebrew literature is wholly 
 devoid of any feeling of art ; for it must be confessed, 
 that when a great faith has to be expressed, or a 
 great problem stated, there is that powerful instinct 
 for comparison and contrast which is almost insepar- 
 able from a vivid and, so to say, haunted imagination. 
 Art is, after all, only a second nature ; and want of 
 artistic power is not felt until the first glow of poetic 
 fire begins to fade. But certainly there is in the 
 Hebrew literature about as little conscious art as in 
 any literature in the world. Let us look at it, for 
 instance, in its pictorial aspect. Considering the 
 gi-aphic power with Avhich it abounds, how utterly 
 destitute is it of artistic painting, — of colouring or 
 drawing, that is put in for the sake of the picture 
 itself, rather than for any 2Jur})ose Avhich the pictui'e 
 is to answer ! I may l^est illustrate what I mean by 
 a contrast between one of the poetical fragments of
 
 266 THE POETRY OF TUE OLD TESTAMENT v 
 
 Jewish history, and the modern rendering of it by 
 Sir Walter Scott^ The kindling or germinal thought 
 which induced that great artist to versify the frag- 
 ment to which I allude was the sense of mere external 
 picturesqueness ; while the purpose which was stirring 
 in the heart of the Hebrew writer was the desire I 
 have so often spoken of to record the glory of the 
 national life, and the might of the outstretched arm 
 of Jehovah, which made it what it was. Writing of 
 the guidance of the people of Israel through the 
 desert, the author of the Book of Exodus says : 
 " And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar 
 of a cloud, to lead them the way ; and by night in a 
 pillar of fire, to give them light ; to go by day and 
 night. He took not away the pillar of the cloud by 
 day, nor the pillar of fire by night, from before the 
 people" (xiii. 21, 22), — which Sir Walter Scott 
 renders into this well-known verse : — 
 
 "When Israel, of the Lord beloved. 
 Out of the land of bondage came, 
 Her fathers' God before her moved, 
 An awful Guide, in smoke and flame. 
 By day, along the astonished lands, 
 The cloudy pillar glided slow ; 
 By night, Arabia's crimsoned sands 
 Returned the fiery column's glow." 
 
 The occupation of mind wdth the picture of the 
 desert scenery here indicated ; "with the external 
 effects of the pillar of cloud and of fire ; with the 
 astonishment ivith which the solemn procession would 
 be regarded by the Arabian tribes ; with the relief of 
 the dark object amid the noonday desert-glare ; with 
 the bright patch of sand moving through the midnight; 
 — is given in a manner quite foreign to that of the 
 Hebrew poet. The modern artist delights in the
 
 V THE POETRY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 267 
 
 scenic effect ; the ancient chronicler was wholly occu- 
 pied -with the overshadowing power of God. 
 
 The poet, as we understand him in modern days, 
 is perhaps only too exclusively a student of beauty ; 
 and much that he delineates he delineates without 
 any further reason than that it has shaped itself 
 vividly in his imagination, and seems to demand 
 from him an expression in words. There is not a 
 vestige of such poetry in the Old Testament, unless, 
 indeed, one may except Solomon's Song. I have 
 traced already the thread of significance which has 
 given a place in the Bible to those traditions which 
 modern readers so often value chiefly for the pictures 
 of Rebekah "by the palm-shaded well," or Ruth 
 gleaning among the yellow corn. But when we 
 study what we may call the casual pictures in the 
 Bible, — the wealth of poetic material strewn among 
 its pages, which is used only by the Hebrew poets 
 in incidental illustration and allusion, — this complete 
 absence of the artistic value for beauty and sub- 
 limity as such becomes extremely striking. 
 
 Modern poets are never tired of dwelling directly 
 on the beauty of nature. The " sunshine," they tell 
 us, "is a glorious birth." They never weary "of 
 splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower." And 
 the Hebrew poet perceived these things too, but 
 how did he use them 1 " The God of Israel," sings 
 David, "said, the Rock of Israel spake to me. He 
 that ruleth over men must be just, ruling in the fear 
 of God. And he shall be as the light of the morn- 
 ing, when the sun riseth, even a morning without 
 clouds ; — as the tender grass springing out of the 
 earth in the clear shining after rain." We should 
 not know that Isaiah had ever lingered on the beach 
 of Palestine, watching the Mediterranean as it cast
 
 V 
 
 268 THE POETRY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT V 
 
 up seaweed and the soil of many a neighbouring 
 island under the lash of the Avest wind, but for the 
 passing image : " The wicked are like the troubled / 
 sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire 
 and dirt. There is no peace, saith my God, to the 
 wicked." We should never guess that he had 
 watched the Tyrian sailors trying to shake out 
 canvas under a light wind, -svith a crippled ship to 
 manage, but for the metaphorical denunciation 
 against the enemies of the Lord : " Thy tacklings 
 are loosed ; they could not well strengthen their 
 mast ; they could not spread their sail." How 
 totally different from the spirit of the modern 
 poet ! — 
 
 " As some grave Tyrian trader from the sea 
 Descried at sunrise an emerging prow 
 Lifting the cool-liaired creepers stealthily, 
 The fringes of a southward-facing brow, 
 Among the iEgean isles ; 
 And saw the merry Grecian coaster come, 
 Freighted with amber grajjes and Chian wine. 
 Green bursting figs and tunnies steeped in brine, 
 And knew the intruders on his ancient home, — 
 The young liglithearted master of the waves ; — 
 And snatched his rudder, and shook out more sail, 
 And day and night held on indignantly 
 O'er the blue Midland waters with the gale," ^ etc. 
 
 In every line here the poet lingers "svith satisfied eye 
 on some fresh beauty ; while, however grand the 
 scene before the mind of the Hebrew poet, it is to 
 the meaning behind it that he is hurrying on. 
 Thus the Psalmist had certainly gazed Avith awe on 
 the grandeur of the sudden " white squalls " of the 
 Mediterranean ; and yet, but for the passing allusion 
 ^ Poems by Mattliuw Arnold.
 
 J 
 
 V THE rOETRY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 269 
 
 to God's power, — " He commandetli and raiseth the 
 stormy wind which lifteth up the waves thereof;- 
 they mount up to the heavens ; they go down to the 
 depths ; their soul is melted because of trouble ; 
 they reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, 
 and are at their wit's end. Then they cry unto the 
 Lord in their trouble, and He bringeth them out of 
 their distresses. He maketh the storm a calm, so 
 that the waves thereof are still. Then are they glad 
 because they be quiet. So he bringeth them to the 
 haven where they would be," — he would never have 
 embodied what he had seen in a poem. Any modern 
 poet would have delighted to dwell upon the scene : 
 the pale line of foam scudding nearer and nearer 
 before the blast ; the blue sea suddenly turning black 
 beneath the cloud, and then lashed into whiteness 
 by the squall ; the cries of the sailors ; the quivering 
 of the ship as the tempest strikes her ; — in short, he 
 would have made a picture of it, and then, touching 
 on the despair of the passengers, would gradually 
 have led up to the pity and power of God. But to/ 
 the Hebrew poet the thing is not interesting in itself,-^ 
 as a picture, at all ; it is a passing symbol of Almighty 
 goodness and discipline ; he uses it only to express 
 his intense sense of the omnipresence of providential 
 power. 
 
 So, too, with the common imagery of modern 
 Christian poetry — mountains, fields, trees. That 
 the Hebrew poets felt the stateliness of the cedar, 
 knew, too, when " the power of hills " was on them, 
 were alive to the gratefid shelter of the "leafy 
 spring," no one who reads their pages can doubt. 
 " The trees of the Lord are full of sap, the cedars of 
 Lebanon which he hath planted." " He watereth 
 the hills from his chambers, the earth is satisfied with
 
 270 THE POETRY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT V 
 
 the fruit of his works." " In the Lord put I my 
 trust : how say ye to my soul, Flee as a bird to your j 
 mountain 1 For lo, the wicked bend their bow," 
 / etc. And yet Ave never find a single express de- 
 ^ lineation of the plains of Hebron, or the snows of 
 Lebanon, of sunset in the Mediterranean as the 
 prophets must have seen the sun go down from Mount 
 Cai'mel, of the valley of the Jordan, or of the de- 
 solate solitudes of the Dead Sea, in all their writings. 
 These things are alluded to, but only and purely to 
 ^ express their higher thoughts of God — as a kind of 
 pictorial language of trust, prophecy, or prayer, 
 never from the sense of their individual beauty. 
 " He maketh grass to grow upon the mountains." 
 " Fire and hail, snow and vapour, stormy winds," 
 are mentioned ; but only " as fulfilling his word." 
 These things are not beautful for their OAvn sakes, 
 but glorious only as the instruments of His will. 
 " Hear ye mountains," says the jirophet Micah, " the 
 Lord's controversy, and ye strong foundations of the 
 earth"; and even there, alone with the hills and the 
 sky, he pours forth no wonder at the glory of nature, 
 but, while uttering indignation at the sins of men, 
 uses nature only allusively, as the instrument to 
 shadow forth his thought. So also, to the shepherd 
 Amos, the mountain winds and the midnight stars are 
 no study in themselves, but a fleeting glimpse of the 
 I Eternal power : " Lo, he that formed the mountains, 
 and createth the wind, and declareth to man what is 
 his thought, that maketh the morning darkness, and 
 treadeth upon the high places of the earth. The Lord, 
 the God of hosts, is his name." "Ye Avho turn 
 judgments to wormwood, and leave off righteousness 
 in the earth ; seek him that maketh the seven stars 
 and Orion, and turneth the shadow of Death into
 
 V THE POETEY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 271 
 
 the morning, and maketh the day dark unto night ; 
 that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth 
 them out upon the earth. The Lord of hosts is his 
 name." It is not easy to conceive a sublimer char- / 
 acteristic of the Hebrew poetry than this, that it- 
 treats all creation as a mere shadow ; and finds the 
 essence of its beauty, as Avell as the sustaining power 
 of its life, in the spiritual world. 
 
 And it is this total absence from the Hebrew 
 literature of any trace of human Art, — its complete 
 want of appreciation for the subordinate perfections 
 of inferior natures and groups of life, each "after its 
 kind,"- — its constant eifort to refer all things to the 
 divine will and thought as the true centre and root 
 of all things, — its indisposition to enter with any 
 depth or breadth of interest into the inner life of 
 any inferior nature, except so far as that inner life 
 points to some visible divine end, — in a word, its pre- 
 ference for studying the universal beauty of life only 
 in God's will, instead of studying God's will in the 
 universal beauty, — which makes the Hebrew poetry 
 so distinct in kind from the larger portion of the 
 poetry of other literatures. It resolves the visible!^ 
 world into a hieroglyphic of the spiritual world ; 
 and even regards all these regions of naturalistic life 
 rather impatiently, as a veil, where they do not seem 
 to aid directly in the work of revelation. Purpose, 
 significance, beauty, natural harmony in the visible 
 creation, if they do not bear directly on the moral 
 and spiritual relations with God, are consigned in- 
 discriminately to the general realm of His mysterious 
 acts of power ; and are valued only as illustrating 
 the scale, grandeur, and infinite multiplicity of His 
 energies. " The young lions roar after their prey, 
 they seek their meat from God. The sun ariseth.
 
 272 THE POETRY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT V 
 
 they gather themselves together and lay them down 
 in their dens. Man goeth forth to his work and to 
 his labour till the evening. O Lord, how manifold 
 are thy works ! in wisdom hast thou made them all : 
 the earth is full of thy riches. . . . These all wait 
 upon thee, that thou mayest give them their meat 
 in due season ; that thou givest them they gather. 
 Thou openest thine hand, they are filled with 
 good ; Thou hidest thy face, they are troubled ; Thou 
 takest away their breath, they die and return to 
 their dust." How different this from the imagina- 
 tive care mth which Homer, for instance, dwells on 
 the characteristic nature and individual habits of the 
 lion — 
 
 " So forth he went, as goes the lion forth, 
 Whom winds have vexed, and rains ; fire fills his eyes, 
 And whether herds of flocks or woodland deer 
 He finds, he rends them, and adust for blood, 
 Abstains not even from the guarded fold." ^ 
 
 What is not seen to be essential to the moral and 
 spiritual beauty and constitution of the universe, 
 enters into the Hebrew poet's thought only as illus- 
 trating the unsearchable riches of God ; and has no 
 intrinsic interest and no fascination for the imagina- 
 tion apart from this view of it. 
 
 Now this, I need hardly say, puts a great gulf 
 between the Hebrew and ordinary literatures. Man 
 is usually interested in all varieties of human and 
 finite beauty or life, without special or exclusive 
 reference at all events to their divine purpose. He 
 may recognise the necessary degradation which all 
 natural beauty undergoes when the divine light no 
 longer shines upon it ; but still, usually the first 
 
 ^ Odyssey, vi, 130, Cowper's translation.
 
 V THE POETRY OF TUE OLD TESTAMENT 273 
 
 poetic instinct is indicated by a capacity for entering 
 into the heart of natural life, — it may be the mental 
 and moral varieties of human natui'e, or it may be 
 the simple life of the flower or the stream, and for 
 rising, if he should so rise, through this vividness of 
 sympathy with Nature to the spiritual meanings or 
 symbols it may suggest. He sees the dafibdils fluttering 
 and dancing in the breeze beside the lake, and says — 
 
 " Tlie waves beside them danced, but they 
 Outdid the sparkling waves in glee ; 
 A poet could not but be gay 
 In such a jocund company " ; 
 
 and it is not till he has, as it were, reached the very 
 essence of the natural loveliness before him, that he 
 dilates on the unsuspected stores of joy they have 
 brought to " that inward eye which is the bliss of 
 solitude." But this is quite alien to the habit of 
 the old Hebrew poet ; he saw the divine light shin- 
 t ing on the world of nature and man, but scarcely shin- 
 \^ ing through the world of nature and man, except in 
 the direction of man's moral and spiritual life. He 
 took no pleasure in rising through the purely natural 
 to the supernatural ; he looked with awe on God's 
 works, because he knew, and entered into, and wor- 
 shipped God's spirit ; but he did not care to explore 
 the non-spiritual aspects of the wisdom of God, 
 through a life of patient and quiet sympathy with 
 the natural beauties of His Avorks. 
 
 The modes of thought most natural to a 
 modern poet, — such modes of thought as gave 
 Shakespeare his genial insight into the varieties of 
 human passion and action, or Wordsworth and 
 Tennyson their insight into those spiritual aspects 
 of Nature which only study and meditative sym-
 
 / 
 
 274 THE POETRY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT V 
 
 pathy disclose, — were, in general, quite foreign to 
 the poets of Israel. As the Jewish thinkers had 
 little share in forwarding that growth of science and 
 the arts which were due, in Greece, to a minute 
 intellectual study of the laws of physical creation, — 
 so Je^nsh poets had little share in forwarding that 
 growth of epic and dramatic literatiu-e, Avhich also 
 arose in Greece, and was due to the gromng insight 
 into the ways of man, and the affinities between man 
 and the natural world around him. So far, indeed, 
 as the spiritual nature of man was concerned, the 
 Hebrew poetry contains a delineation full of sym- 
 pathetic insight. All the highest resources of the 
 poet are exhausted in describing the thirst for God 
 of which the soul of man is conscious. The " hart 
 panting after the water-brooks," — the "dry and thirsty 
 land where no water is," — the tempest-driven bird seek- 
 ing refuge from the storm, — do but serve to remind 
 one of the many tender and characteristic poems of 
 this class in which the Hebrew literature abounds. 
 
 But go beyond the spiritual nature of man, and 
 the sympathy of the Hebrew poets is dried up at 
 once. Even into the varieties of moral temperament 
 no insight is shown. The line is drawn between the 
 wicked and the good ; but in all the contemplative 
 poetry of the Bible, no interest is betrayed in the 
 inward varieties of impulse, motive, and affection, 
 which distinguish the innumerable kinds of human 
 excellence or frailty from each other. Pride and 
 humility, insincerity and uprightness, avarice and 
 generosity, are condemned and praised, without one 
 trace of meditative or instinctive intelligence of the 
 constitiitional frailties and gifts which vary so in- 
 finitely the degrees of guilt or virtue attaching to 
 them in different men and different circumstances ;
 
 V THE POETRY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 275 
 
 the absolute divine standard is clearly displayed — the 
 relative human conditions are left entirely out of 
 view. The poet who can delineate with so inspired 
 a pen the divine " beauty of holiness," has little or 
 no interest in the wonderfully varied forms of human 
 conflict through which that beauty must be pursued. 
 His central sympathy is Avith the divine life of God, 
 — his compassion is equal and impartial for all the 
 shortcomings of human unworthiness ; hinds he does 
 not distinguish ; it is not into the individual heart 
 that he has taught himself to enter ; the natural 
 history of human character it is not for him to write, 
 for his is the greater task of delineating for us 
 the character which " is the same yesterday, to-day, 
 and for ever." ;- 
 
 One of the finest, and perhaps the earliest, of all 
 the poems in the Hebrew literature, — that in which 
 the divine origin of Creation is revealed to man 
 under an imaginative form of erroneous physical 
 history, often foolishly regarded as invalidating the 
 spiritual authority of the whole, — not only gives us 
 the true key to the problem of the universe, but 
 points out, at the same time, the characteristic aspects 
 under which alone the JcAvish poets and prophets 
 were likely to regard the life of nature and humanity. 
 The purpose and order of the lower universe, we are 
 told, is man ; to the use of man all the lower forms of 
 life are made subject ; but man, again, finds all his 
 meaning and life in God ; and all nature, therefore, — 
 human nature included, — is to look for its significance 
 to the word of God. From Him all our life receives 
 its order and its meaning ; it is the orderly succes- 
 sion of His creative work which is to be held as the 
 ground of the like orderly succession in our tasks 
 and duties ; it was because there was in His mind a
 
 276 THE POETRY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT v 
 
 spring of eternal rest, as well as of creative energy, 
 that we are enjoined to respect the law of rest as 
 well as the law of labour. In God is to be found 
 the explanation of man's being ; in man's being the 
 explanation of every descending stage of creation. I 
 have paraphrased, in very awkward language, the 
 sublime words to which I refer ; but this was neces- 
 sary in order to draw attention to the point I wish 
 to illustrate. The stately succession of created 
 things springing into being beneath the living breath 
 of God ; the evenings, which see each fresh Avork 
 accomplished, the mornings, which see the next 
 begun ; the orderly separation of earth and sky, of 
 sea and land ; the growth of grass and trees ; the 
 first circles of the sun, moon, and stars in the 
 heavens ; the new - born seasons ; the creation of 
 living creatures ; the birth of man in God's image ; 
 the gift of the supremacy into his hands ; and the 
 divine sentence upon each new " kind " as it arises, 
 and finally upon the whole, that it is good, — are all 
 so familiar to us, that we are apt to overlook the 
 characteristic thought contained that each lower 
 nature refers upward to the next above it, and the 
 highest created nature to God : the light to the - 
 heavens ; the heavens to the sun, moon, and stars ; 
 these to the earth ; the earth to the vegetable world ; 
 this, again, to the animal world above it ; this to 
 man, who rules over it, and man to God. At what 
 link can you stop in such a chain 1 What nature can 
 you study, without seeking the key to it in that 
 next superior ? And if so, how shall it be possible 
 to stop at the natural at all, or imagine that we can 
 study fitly any order that is not supernatural and 
 eternal ? Earthly and human beauty can only be 
 relative, after all, and do not deserve a moment's ~V\
 
 V THE POETRY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 277 
 
 attention, unless they symbolise a beauty that is 
 absolute, perfect, and self-sustained. 
 
 This revelation of the natural law of subordina- 
 tion of things and creatures is actually and not 
 merely poetically true ; and yet it naturally leads, 
 of course, to an effort which could only be partially 
 successful — to study the secrets of the universe in 
 God, in whose image man is made, and to suppose 
 everything absolutely hidden from us on which this 
 direct communion Avith God throws no light. So 
 far as spiritual life is concerned, this is the true 
 order of study. God reveals His spirit to us directly ;/ 
 and without it nothing spiritual is intelligible at all.^ 
 And the method of the Hebrew poetry, therefore, 
 presents thus far not only the divine truth, but the 
 only true approach to the spiritual secrets of human 
 life. But on other sides of our life this is not so. 
 Though spiritual truth is kno'vvn first through the 
 knowledge of God, and though, Avithout knowing 
 Him, all other truth is misseen and misconstrued, — 
 yet, this key once gained, the range of its compre- 
 hension is indefinitely extended by studying God 
 in nature and humanity, instead of contemplating 
 nature and humanity only in God. And as the life 
 of the universe was regarded by the prophets of 
 Israel only on this latter side, there was necessarily 
 a large field which their imagination never visited 
 and represented. The various works of creation 
 were pronounced separately good, " each after its 
 kind " ; but what those " kinds " were in themselves, 
 it was left to Gentile nations and other ages to study 
 and describe. To the writer in the Book of Genesis, 
 the life of each kind was merged in that of the kind ^ 
 above it ; all the lower world in man, and man in 
 God. And the national poets uniformly pursued
 
 J 
 
 278 THE POETKY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT v 
 
 this line of thought : all that was purely human, 
 and all which was below the human type, was used 
 only as symbolic of something higher, if not wholly 
 passed by as existing exclusively for the sake of that 
 which was above it. 
 
 And hence all the poetry of the Old Testament is 
 true and divine at the expense of variousness of 
 insight and breadth of sympathy. It is what one 
 might call a heliocentric, as distinguished from a geo- 
 centric, representation of life. The former gives the 
 true and absolute standard ; but for that very reason 
 cannot enter into the natural history of human errors 
 and human individuality. If you would study the 
 life of earth, you must leave your central position in 
 the sun. The strange habits and ways of man can- , 
 not be mastered by communion only with the spirit 
 of God, though they cannot be understood at all ^ 
 without it. But the prophets, who were also the 
 poets of Israel, were sent to announce and reveal the 
 Light, not to study the winding avenues by which 
 alone it could penetrate the human heart. 
 
 Hence one does not see in the Hebrew poets' strains 
 the uplifted eye of the suppliant, half so vividly as 
 the searching glance of the Eternal. Fascinated by 
 the supernatural gaze of the Almighty, the prophet 
 often so identifies himself with God that he forgets 
 his own person, and speaks in the very name of 
 Jehovah. The Psalmists, for example, are always 
 vacillating between the first person and the third, 
 when they deliver the purposes of God. As they 
 warm with their spiritual ins})iration, they lose them- 
 selves in the person of Him who inspires them, and 
 then are again recalled to themselves. And the 
 prophets habitually fall into the same changing 
 mode of address. "Behold," says Isaiah, "/ have
 
 V THE POETKY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 279 
 
 taken out of thine hand the cup of trembling." " I 
 will cause thee to ride upon the high places of the 
 earth, and feed thee with the heritage of Jacob thy 
 father ; for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it." 
 The prophet, as he writes, is no longer the child of 
 Israel, — the holder himself of a cup of trembling, — 
 a wayworn son of earth : he sees the high places of 
 the earth far beneath his feet ; he sees the cup of 
 trembling held to the lips of others — he himself is 
 sweeping the universe with the infinite gaze of God. 
 This sublime characteristic of the Hebrew pro- 
 phets, that they seem almost to forget their human 
 centre of life in their effort to delineate divine truth, 
 is strikingly illustrated in the frequent surrender of 
 their private lives and aflfections, for the purpose of 
 sculpturing, in a living symbol, on the mind of the 
 nation, the lesson that no mere words could have 
 taught. How far can any human lieing now, even 
 distantly, comprehend the state of mind in which 
 Ezekiel must have lived when he acted thus under 
 the divine inspiration 1 
 
 " Also the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, 
 Son of man, behold, I take away from thee the desire of 
 thine eyes with a stroke : yet neither shalt thou mourn 
 nor weep, neither shall thy tears run down. Forbear 
 to cry, make no mourning for the dead, bind the tire of 
 thine head upon thee, and put on thy shoes iipon thy 
 feet, and cover not thy lips, and eat not the bread of men. 
 So I spake unto the people in the morning : and at even 
 my wife died ; and I did in the morning as I was com- 
 manded. And the people said unto me, Wilt thou not 
 tell us what these things are   to us that thou doest so 1 
 Then I answered them, The word of the Lord came unto 
 me, saying. Speak unto the house of Israel, Thus saith 
 the Lord God, Behold, I will profane my sanctuary, the
 
 280 THE POETKY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT V 
 
 excellency of your strength, tlie desire of your eyes, and 
 that which your soul jjitieth ; and your sons and your 
 daughters whom ye have left shall fall by the sword. 
 And ye shall do as I have done : ye shall not cover your 
 lips, nor eat the bread of men. And your tires shall be 
 upon your heads, and your shoes upon your feet : ye 
 shall not mourn nor weep ; but ye shall pine away for 
 your iniquities, and mourn one toward another. Thus 
 Ezekiel is unto you a sign : according to all that he hath 
 done shall ye do : and when this cometh, ye shall know 
 that I am the Lord God. Also, thou son of man, shall 
 it not be in the day when I take f^om them their strength, 
 the joy of their glory, the desire of their eyes, and that 
 whereupon they set their minds, their sons and their 
 daughters. That he that escapeth in that day shall come 
 unto thee, to cause thee to hear it with thine ears ? In 
 that day shall thy mouth be opened to him which is 
 escaped, and thou shalt speak and be no more dumb; 
 and thou shalt be a sign unto them ; and they shall know 
 that I am the Lord." 
 
 There is one great poem in the Hebrew Scriptures 
 so remarkable and exceptional in every respect, that 
 to pass over it without special comment would be to 
 disregard wilfully one of the principal phenomena 
 from which every adequate appreciation of the char- 
 acteristics of the Old Testament poetry should be 
 derived — the drama of Job. I have reserved my 
 notice of it to the last, because it seems to me that 
 the highest critical aiithorities must be right in 
 thinking that it is nearly the latest, as Avell as the 
 only formally artistic, product of the poetic genius of 
 the Jews. This, at least, is in intention, as well as in 
 fact, a literary effort, — an attempt to present, and 
 perhaps more or less to solve, in a dramatic form 
 some of the highest problems of man's si)iritual life. 
 It is the only important l)ook in the Old Testament
 
 V THE POETRY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 281 
 
 which is not closely interwoven mth the real history 
 and life of the nation, — which stands apart as a 
 conscious effort of imagination. 
 
 No doubt, the Book of Job marks in many ways 
 the culmination of the national genius, and the transi- 
 tion from the exclusively divine centre of the Hebrew 
 poetic thought to the wider range of insight into 
 Nature and Man, from the natural as well as the 
 supernatural side, which was to succeed it. The 
 very treatment of a divine theme under the human 
 conditions of an imaginary drama would alone appear 
 to indicate this. The conflict with the narrowly 
 Jewish conceptions of Providence which it contains 
 would also indicate it. The contemplative delia;ht 
 which the wonders of Nature and the mysteries of 
 animal life arouse in the writer's mind, and the 
 naturalistic minuteness with which they are painted, 
 as well as the delineation of the inward perplexities 
 of the spiritual life, all point to an origin in an age 
 when that more genial appreciation of Nature and 
 Man which we perceive in the later prophecies bear- 
 ing the name of Isaiah had been carried even further. 
 Moreover, as regards man himself, the whole argu- 
 ment turns on the subtle distinction between that 
 part of his nature which, finite and shortsighted 
 though he is, yet gives him a right to claim a real 
 aflBnity with God, and that part which, finite and 
 limited as it is, necessarily obscures his poAver of 
 judgment. This is not a point which could well 
 have been discussed in an early period of the Jewish 
 literature. 
 
 There is an evident effort throughout the drama 
 to distinguish the " creature " in Job from that 
 "spirit" in him which gives him a right to plead 
 with God. The drama is usually understood as a
 
 1/ 
 
 282 THE POETRY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT V 
 
 mere exposure of the false view which makes calamity 
 a certain index of the wrath of God and therefore of 
 guilt. This, no doubt, it is ; but it is also much 
 more. It is a discussion of the mystery of God's 
 relation to man and to the lower universe. There is 
 an effort, I believe, in the poem to show that man is 
 related to God in two ways, — as a spiritual being, 
 and as a creature. As a spiritual being, he may 
 justify himself and speak what God Himself cannot 
 override, and will certainly affirm : as a creature, he ^ 
 is in complete ignorance of the lot it may be right 
 for the ruler of the universe to assign him ; since He 
 only can judge who sees the universe as a whole, 
 who moves the very springs of its life. Man cannot 
 and ought not to accuse Providence of injustice in 
 any external lot He may send, unless he could under- 
 take to wield the whole scheme of Providence in His 
 place ; then, and then only, might he " disannul " 
 God's judgment, and condemn Him in order " to 
 establish his own righteousness." The ignorant 
 creature is wrong in criticising the acts of the Creator; 
 but the spirit of the man is right in asserting the 
 absolute character of his highest spiritual convictions 
 against any array of external argument. Job is 
 sustained in his assertion that though his body 
 should be destroyed, yet a living Redeemer should 
 vindicate his inward purity ; he is sustained in 
 reiterating, "God forbid that I should justify you 
 till I die : I will not remove mine integrity from 
 me ; my righteousness will I hold fast and will not 
 let it go " ; he is sustained in holding fast by the 
 judgment of his spirit on his own actions, for that is 
 a judgment with full knowledge : but he is con- 
 demned for JTulging God's outward conduct to him 
 by any standard whatever ; since in doing so he
 
 V THE POETRY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 283 
 
 judges by "words without knowledge," seeing thatc 
 the knowledge requisite for such judgment would be 
 the omniscience of the Creator Himself. The aruu- 
 ment is illustrated with the fullest delineation of the 
 mystery of Nature, the broadest contrast between 
 the narrow circle of spiritual knowledge and inde- 
 pendence really reserved to man, and to man alone, 
 and the utter incompetence of man to wield a single 
 attribute of Providence either over his own world or 
 that of the lower creation. How minute and full of 
 naturalistic observation and artistic admiration is the 
 treatment of the order of Nature, the following 
 passage will adequately show : — 
 
 " Gavest tliou wings and feathers to the ostrich ? whicli 
 leaveth her eggs in the earth, and warmeth them in the 
 dust ; and forgettetli that the foot of man may crush 
 them, or that the wild-beast may break them. She is 
 hardened against her yoimg ones, as though they were not 
 hers : her labour is in vain without fear ; because God 
 hath deprived her of wisdom, neither hath he imparted 
 to her understanding. What time slie lifteth herself on 
 high, she scorneth the horse and his rider. Hast thou 
 given the horse strength? hast thon clothed his neck 
 with thunder ? Canst thou make him afraid as a grass- 
 hopper ? the glory of his nostrils is terrible. He paweth 
 in the valley and rejoiceth in his strength : he goeth on 
 to meet the armed men. He mocketh at fear, and is not 
 affrighted ; neither tnrneth he back from the sword. The 
 cjuiver rattleth against him, the glittering spear and the 
 shield. He swalloweth the ground with fierceness and 
 rage ; neither believe th he that it is the sound of the 
 trumpet. He saith among the trumpets. Ha, ha ! and he 
 smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, 
 and the shouting." 
 
 This deeper insight into the natural constitution
 
 284 THE POETRY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT V 
 
 and beauty of the universe, and complete disavowal 
 of all power on the part of man to form any judgment 
 upon it, is especiallj^ remarkable as compared with 
 the bold justification of the spiritual participation of 
 human nature in one of the attributes of God. It 
 proves that the Hebrew poet had already distinguished 
 between the direct knowledge of God's Spirit which 
 spiritual communion gives, and the indirect know- 
 ledge of His mysterious ways which can only be 
 gained by a study of those ways. It shows that he 
 had mastered the conviction, that to neglect the 
 study of the natural mysteries of the universe leads 
 to an arrogant and illicit intrusion of moral and 
 spiritual assumptions into a different world, — in a 
 word, to the false inferences of Job's friends as to his 
 guilt, and his o-vvn equally false inference as to the 
 injustice of God./ 
 
 Here, then, we have the Hebrew imagination in 
 a state of transition. It is still occupied, almost 
 entirely, with the divine side of creation, — the 
 holiness and omnipotence of God, and the feebleness 
 of man ; but already a sincere admiration for natural 
 life, and power, and beauty, begins to be seen ; and 
 humanity asserts its own share in the life of the 
 divine righteousness in clearer tones than in any of 
 the older prophets. In short, that unique type of 
 poetry which is expressed and symbolised in the 
 tradition of Jacob's dream is beginning to disappear. 
 In all the characteristic poetry of Israel man seems 
 to lie enveloped in the darkness of earth ; yet with a 
 stream of supernatural radiance cast upon him from 
 that opening in the heavens above, through which 
 forms of light ascend and descend. For the rest, 
 the heaven is dark "with the clouds which veil Omni- 
 })otence, and the earth has no proper radiance of its
 
 V THE POETEY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 285 
 
 own ; while the grandeur of the effect is heightened 
 by the Rembrandt-like contrast of light and shadow. 
 In the later prophecies of Isaiah, — generally attri- 
 buted by modern critics to a later prophet, — and the 
 great poem of Job, this startling narrowness and 
 intensity of effect is visibly on the decline. The 
 clouds of Omnipotence begin to break ; the intrinsic 
 beauty of Nature begins to be more closely associated 
 with the spiritual lights of heaven, and humanity 
 esj)ecially to have a distinct standing point and 
 radiance of its o^vn. From this time the marvel- 
 lously unique poetry of Israel ceases, and ceases 
 never to be revived. But the supernaturalism which 
 it discerned so vividly as brooding over the early 
 world does not cease with it. It has transmuted for 
 ever the pure naturalism of Greek poetry. And 
 now no modern poet can ever become really great, 
 who does not feel and reproduce in his writings the 
 characteristic difference between that mild inner light 
 which "lightens every man that cometh into the 
 world," which grows with our growth and strengthens 
 with our strength, and that which, descending sud- 
 denly from God upon the startled conscience, makes 
 us exclaim : a" How dreadful is this place ! this is 
 none other but the house of God ; this is the gate of 
 heaven." ^
 
 VI 
 
 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH ^ 
 
 These two volumes, as they now stand, contain as 
 adequate a picture of the singular but large, simple, 
 and tender nature of the Oxford poet as is attainable, 
 and it is one which no one can study without much 
 profit, and perhaps also some loss ; without feeling 
 the high exaltation of true poetry and the keen 
 pleasure caused by the subtlety of true scholarship, 
 at every turn ; nor also Avithout feeling now and 
 again those " blank misgivings of a creature moving 
 about in worlds not realised," which are scattered so 
 liberally among these buoyant ardours, disappointed 
 longings, and moods of speculative suspense, and 
 which characterise these singular letters of I'eticent 
 tenderness and rough self-satire. 
 
 Every one who knew Clough even slightly, received 
 the strongest impression of the unusual breadth and 
 massiveness of his mind. Singularly simple and 
 genial, he Avas unfortunately cast upon a self-question- 
 ing age, which led him to worry himself with con- 
 stantly testing the veracity of his own emotions. He 
 has delineated in foiu' lines the impression which his 
 
 ^ The Poems and Prose Remains of Arthur Hugh Clough, 
 with a Selection from his Letters, and a Memoir. Edited by his 
 "Wife. 2 vols. With a Portrait. Macniillan.
 
 VI ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 287 
 
 habitual reluctance to converse on the deeper themes 
 of life made upon those of his friends who were 
 attracted by his frank simplicity. In one of his 
 shorter poems he writes — 
 
 " I said my heart is all too soft ; 
 He who would climb and soar aloft 
 Must needs keep ever at liis side 
 The tonic of a wholesome pride." 
 
 This expresses the man in a very remarkable manner. 
 He had a kind of proud simplicity about him, singu- 
 larly attractive, and often singularly disappointing 
 to those Avho longed to know him well. He had a 
 fear, which many would think morbid, of leaning 
 much on the approbation of the world ; and there is 
 one characteristic passage in his poems, in which he 
 intimates that men Avho lean on the good opinion of 
 others might even be benefited by a crime Avhich 
 would rob them of that evil stimulant : — 
 
 " Why so is good no longer good, but crime 
 Our truest best advantage ; since it lifts us 
 Out of the stifling gas of men's opinion 
 Into the vital atmosphere of Truth, 
 Where He again is visible, though in anger." 
 
 So eager was his craving for reality and perfect 
 sincerity, so morbid his dislike even for the unreal 
 conventional forms of life, that a mind cjuite unique 
 in simplicity and truthfulness represents itself in his 
 poems as 
 
 " Seeking in vain, in all my store, 
 One feeling based on truth." 
 
 ^t> 
 
 Indeed, he wanted to reach some guarantee for 
 simplicity deeper than simplicity itself. I remember 
 his principal criticism on America, after returning
 
 288 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH vi 
 
 from his residence in Massachusetts, was that the 
 New Englanders were much simpler than the English, 
 and that this was the great charm of New England 
 society. His o'svn habits were of the same kind, — 
 sometimes almost austere in their simplicity. 
 Luxury he disliked, and at times his friends thought 
 him even ascetic. 
 
 This almost morbid craving for a firm base on the 
 absolute realities of life was very wearying to a mind 
 so self-conscious as Clough's, and tended to paralyse 
 the expression of a certainly great genius. As a 
 rule, his lyrical poems fall short of complete success 
 in delineating the mood Avhich they are really meant 
 to delineate, owing to this chronic state of introspec- 
 tive criticism on himself in which he is apt to write, 
 and which, characteristic as it is, necessarily di- 
 minishes the linearity and directness of the feeling 
 expressed, refracting it, as it were, through media of 
 very variable density. As he himself, — no doiibt in 
 this stanza delineating himself, — says of one of his 
 heroes in " the Clergyman's first tale " : — 
 
 " With all liis eager motions still there went 
 A self-correcting and ascetic bent, 
 That from the obvious good still led astray. 
 And set liim travelling on the longest way." 
 
 And in the same poem there are descriptive touches 
 which very skilfully portray the nature of those dis- 
 persive influences, as I may call them, in his char- 
 acter, Avhich, while they may injure his lyrical, add 
 a great wealth of criticism to his speculative and 
 disquisitional poems : — 
 
 " Beside the wislung-gate, which so they name 
 'Mid Northern hills, to me this fancy came ; 
 A wish I formed, my wish I thus expressed :
 
 vi AKTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 289 
 
 ' Would I could wish my wishes all to rest, 
 And know to ivish the luish that loere the best ! 
 Oh, for some winnowing wind to tli' empty air 
 This chaflf of easy sympathies to bear 
 Far off, and leave me of myself aware ! ' " 
 
 That is clearly self-portraiture, and it describes an 
 element in Clough's nature which, no doubt, contri- 
 buted greatly to diminish the number of his few but 
 exquisite lyrical poems, and sometimes to confine 
 even those to the delineation of feelings of a certain 
 vagueness of drift. Yet there was, besides this most 
 subtle and almost over-perfect intellectual culture in 
 Clough, much of a boyish, half-formed nature in him, 
 even to the last ; and this, when fully roused, con- 
 tributed a great deal of the animation, and, when 
 least roused, contributed not a little of the embar- 
 rassed, shy, half-articulate tone to some of the most 
 critical passages of his finest poems. He describes this 
 side of boyish feeling admirably in one of his In 
 Mari Magno tales : — 
 
 " How ill oiir boyhood understands 
 Incipient manhood's strong demands ! 
 Boys have such trouble of their own 
 As none, they fancy, e'er have known, 
 Such as to speak of, or to tell 
 They hold were unendurable : 
 Religious, social, of all kinds, 
 That tear and agitate their minds. 
 A thousand thoughts within me stirred 
 Of which I could not speak a word ; 
 Strange efforts after something new 
 Which I was wretched not to do ; 
 Passions, ambitions, lay and lurked, 
 Wants, counter-wants, obscurely worked 
 Without their names, and unexplained." 
 
 L U
 
 290 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH ' vi 
 
 And even in his latest and most finished poems you 
 see the traces of this half -developed element of 
 Clough's massive and rich but to some extent inert 
 imagination ; and you see, too, how powerfully it 
 operated to discontent him "vWth his own productions, 
 to make him underrate vastly their real worth. 
 Rapidly as his genius ripened at an age Avhen, with 
 most men, the first flush of it would have passed 
 over, there was something of conscious inertia, not 
 unlike immaturity, in it to the last, which gives a 
 tone of proud hesitation, a slowness of hand, to the 
 literary style of his finest poems. He calls himself, 
 in his " Long Vacation Pastoral," "the grave man, 
 nicknamed Adam," and there is really something of 
 the flavour of primeval earth, of its unready vigour 
 and crude laboriousness, about his literary nature. 
 Even when he succeeds best, the reader seems to see 
 him " wipe his honourable brows bedewed with toil." 
 And yet he is impatient "svith himself for not suc- 
 ceeding better, and despises his own work. 
 
 The " Long Vacation Pastoral " belongs to a class 
 of poems that is scarcely naturalised in England — 
 the class of which Goethe's " Hermann and Dorothea " 
 is, perhaps, the most perfect specimen, though in 
 vigour and breadth of imagination, Clough's pastoral 
 is certainly superior. Goethe's influence over the 
 school of poetry of which Matthew Arnold and 
 Clough have been the most considerable English 
 disciples, is very powerfully marked. There is the 
 same longing after the old Homeric simplicity, — less 
 successful perhaps in a cultivated Englishman than 
 in the more childlike German, — the same love of 
 homely naturalness of manner, of the wholesome 
 flavour of earth, an even deeper desire to tame or 
 exorcise all romance that is alien to common sense,
 
 VI AETHUR HUGH CLOUGH 291 
 
 and the same intellectual disposition to give common 
 sense the casting vote, wherever there seems to be a 
 conflict between it and the thirst of their own 
 natures for something deeper. Moreover, in Clough's 
 poem there is the same underlying theme which 
 haunted Goethe so constantly, — the wish to analyse 
 the true secret of womanly fascination ; and, finally, 
 the keynote of the answer given in the "Long 
 Vacation Pastoral " is also the keynote of the 
 " Hermann and Dorothea," that the highest charms 
 of women consist in a certain union between homely 
 usefulness and classical beauty, in the graceful cut- 
 ting of bread-and-butter, like Werther's " Charlotte," 
 or graceful " potato-uprooting," like Philip's heroine 
 in Clough's Pastoral. As one of his " reading " 
 party expresses it — 
 
 " All cathedrals are Christian, all Christians are cathe- 
 drals : 
 
 Such is the Catholic doctrine ; 'tis ours with a slight 
 variation. 
 
 Every woman is or ought to be a cathedral, 
 
 Built on the ancient plan — a cathedral pure and per- 
 fect, 
 
 Biiilt by that only laio, thai Use he suggester of Beauty ; 
 
 Nothing concealed that is done, hut all things done to 
 adornment ; 
 
 Meanest utilities seized as occasions to grace and em- 
 hellish." 
 
 But if the school of art and the predominant thought 
 which marks Goethe's " Hermann and Dorothea " 
 and Clough's poem are the same, — if they both alike 
 seek and find their ideal of women in " the freshness 
 of the early world," in some well-born or well-taught 
 maiden,
 
 292 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH vi 
 
 " Milking the kine in the field ; like Rachel watering 
 
 cattle, 
 Rachel, when at the well the predestined beheld and 
 
 kissed her ; 
 Or with pail upon head, like Dora beloved of Alexis, 
 Comely, with well-poised pail over neck arching soft 
 
 to the shoulders, 
 Comely in gracefuUest act, one arm uplifted to stay it. 
 Home from the river or pump moving stately and 
 
 calm to the laundry " ; 
 
 — yet all the imaginative form and framework of 
 Clough's poem are entirely his own, — entirely 
 original, and marked strongly with the stamp of its 
 Oxford origin. 
 
 The almost Homeric vigour "svith Avhich all the 
 characteristics of the reading party are dashed off, 
 the genial humour with which their personal peculi- 
 arities are coloured-in, the buoyant life of the dis- 
 cussions which arise among them, the strength Avith 
 which the Highland scenery is conceived and ren- 
 dered in a few brilliant touches, the tenderness and 
 simplicity with which now and then the deeper 
 pathos of life is allowed to be seen in glimpses 
 through the intellectual play of the poem, are all 
 Clough's own. He is far more terse, far less prolix, 
 than the great German poet in his style of painting 
 homely nature. There is none of that relaxed fibre 
 which makes scoffers say that Goethe is a little 
 spooney on his Charlotte's bread-and-butter, and his 
 Dorothea's proficiency as a waggoner. Clough's 
 poem is masculine throughout, though the sentiment 
 is, perhaps, not entirely healthy, and the humour 
 certainly is of a kind of which Goethe had little 
 trace. Here, for example, is Airlie, the high dresser 
 of the party : —
 
 Vi ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 293 
 
 " Airlie descended the last, effulgent as god of Olympus ; 
 Blue, half-doubtfully blue, was the coat that had white 
 
 silk facings ; 
 Waistcoat blue, coral buttoned, the white tie finely 
 
 adjusted, 
 Coral moreover the studs on a shirt as of crochet of 
 
 women : 
 Wlien the fourwheel for ten minutes already had 
 
 stood at the gateway, 
 He, like a god, came leaving his ample Olympian 
 
 chamber." 
 
 And here is a Highland dance, in which Airlie again 
 figures, described vvdth all the humour and force of a 
 modern Homer : — 
 
 " Him rivalling, Hobbes, briefest kilted of 
 
 heroes, 
 Enters, stoutest, rashest of creatures, mere fool of a 
 
 Saxon, 
 Skill-less of philibeg, skill-less of reel too, the whirl and 
 
 the twirl o't : 
 Him see I frisking and whisking, and ever at swifter 
 
 gyration 
 Under brief curtain revealing broad acres — not of broad 
 
 cloth. 
 Him see I there and the Piper — the Piper what vision 
 
 beholds not ? 
 Him and his Honour with Arthur, with Janet our Piper, 
 
 and is it. 
 Is it, O marvel of marvels ! he too in the maze of the 
 
 mazy, 
 Skipping and tripping, though stately, though languid, 
 
 with head on one shoulder, 
 Airlie, with sight of the waistcoat the golden - haired 
 
 Katie consoling ? 
 Katie, who simple and comely, and smiling and blushing 
 
 as ever,
 
 294 ARTHUE HUGH CLOUGH VI 
 
 What though she wear on that neck a blue kerchief, re- 
 membered as Philip's, 
 
 Seems in her maidenly freedom to need small console- 
 ment of waistcoats ! " 
 
 Or take the description of Sir Hector's speech at the 
 clansmen's dinner, which is rich in Homeric metaphor, 
 as well as modern humour : — 
 
 " Bid me not, grammar defying, repeat from grammar 
 defiers 
 
 Long constructions strange, and plusquam-Thucydidean, 
 
 Tell how, as sudden torrent in time of speat in the 
 mountain 
 
 Hurries six ways at once, and takes at last to the 
 roughest. 
 
 Or as the practised rider at Astley's or Franconi's, 
 
 Skilfully, boldly bestrides many steeds at once in the 
 gallop. 
 
 Crossing from this to that, with one leg here, one yon- 
 der, 
 
 So, less skilful, but equally bold and wild as the tor- 
 rent. 
 
 All through sentences six at a time, unsuspecting of 
 syntax. 
 
 Hurried the lively good will and garrulous tale of Sir 
 Hector." 
 
 Not, however, by such passages as these can be 
 measured the depth and fulness of Clough's poetic 
 nature. I have said that, in his dread of the romantic 
 school, and his longing for that antique type of 
 nobility in which the simpler and more homely tasks 
 are associated with classical grace and dignity, he had 
 borrowed much from Goethe. But his mind had been 
 also deeply influenced by the very diff'erent poetry of 
 Wordsworth in its strong love for a frugal, hardy, 
 and simple industry as the highest school of human
 
 VI AKTHUE HUGH CLOUGH 295 
 
 character. And perhaps, too, in spite of his steady 
 preference of Aristotle to Plato, of common sense to 
 what he thought idealism, of what is common to 
 what is high, the deep and sometimes transcendental 
 musings of Wordsworth's meditative mind had a 
 charm for him of which he was almost ashamed. At 
 all events, there is a gleam of transcendental depth 
 and subtlety here and again in this poem, shyly — 
 almost apologetically — put forth, and scarcely put 
 forth but to be withdrawn. The lines in which 
 Elspie confesses her love for Philip, the radiant poet, 
 are couched in a very different key from that of 
 Goethe's naturalistic school, — a different, and I think 
 a higher, key : — 
 
 " And she was silent some time, and blushed all over, and 
 
 answered 
 Quietly, after her fashion, still knitting, ' Maybe I think 
 
 of it. 
 Though I don't know that I did' ; and she paused again. 
 
 ' But it may be ; 
 Yes, I don't know, Mr. Philip, but only it feels to me 
 
 strangely 
 Like to the high new bridge they used to build at, 
 
 below there, 
 Over the burn and glen on the road. You won't 
 
 understand me. 
 But I keep saying in my mind — this long time, slowly 
 
 with trouble, 
 I have been building myself up, up, and toilfully raising, 
 Just like as if the bridge were to do it itself without 
 
 masons, 
 Painfully getting myself upraised one stone on another. 
 All one side, I mean ; and now I see on the other 
 Just such another fabric uprising, better and stronger, 
 Close to me, coming to join me. And then I sometimes 
 
 fancy, —
 
 296 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH vi 
 
 Sometimes I find myself dreaming at niglit about arches 
 and bridges, — 
 
 Sometimes I dream of a great invisible hand coming 
 down and 
 
 Droj)ping the great key-stone in the middle ; there in 
 my dreaming 
 
 There I felt the great key-stone coming in, and through 
 it 
 
 Feel the other part, — all the other stones of the archway. 
 
 Joined into mine, with a strange happy sense of com- 
 pleteness. But, dear me, 
 
 This is confusion and nonsense. I mix all the things I 
 can think of, 
 
 And you won't understand, Mr. Philip.'" 
 
 This is a definite addition to the great doctrine of 
 the poem, that "women, like flowers, must be " rooted 
 in earth " to be either beautiful or useful — a definite 
 addition and a noble addition. Here we have some- 
 thing of Wordsworth's conception of the poet : — 
 
 " The outward shows of sky and earth. 
 Of hill and valley, he has viewed, 
 And impulses of deeper birth 
 Have come to him in solitude." 
 
 There are " impulses of deeper birth " struggling with 
 the naturalism of Clough's chosen school of thought. 
 Still, the great sea, and the wide omnipresent sun- 
 light, are his favourite symbols of what is divine, — 
 what is broad, bright, and simple, rather than what 
 is lofty, mysterious, and dim. 
 
 Clough always seems to have needed external 
 stimulus, something of excitement in the atmosphere, 
 for his best poetic success. Thus, the siege of Eome 
 during his residence there in 1849 was the stimulus 
 which gave rise to his very original and striking
 
 VI ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 297 
 
 poem, " Amours de Voyage," — a poem brimful of the 
 breath of his Oxford culture, of Cardinal Newman's 
 metaphysics, of classical tradition, of the political en- 
 thusiasm of the time, and of his own large, speculative 
 humour, subtle hesitancy of brain, and rich pictorial 
 sense. Yet so ill-satisfied was he with this striking 
 poem, that he kept it nine years in MS., and pub- 
 lished it apologetically at last only in an American 
 magazine, the Atlantic Monthly. He himself says 
 that what he doubted about in it was not its truth 
 of conception, but its vigour and execution. Yet no 
 execution could have been more perfect of the picture 
 — a picture of inchoacy, I admit — which he intended 
 to draw. Mr. Emerson has in some cases shown 
 himself a fine critic ; but he never made a more 
 egregious bluncjer than when he found fault with 
 Clough for not making this poem end more satisfac- 
 torily. The whole meaning and drift of it would 
 have been spoiled if it had so ended. His idea was 
 to draw a mind so reluctant to enter on action, 
 shrinking so morbidly from the effects of the "ruin- 
 ous force of the will," that even when most desirous 
 of action it would find a hundred trivial intellectual 
 excuses for shrinking back in spite of that desire. 
 His own explanation of the poem is contained in the 
 final verse : — 
 
 " So go forth to the world, to the good report and the 
 evil ! 
 Go, little book ! thy tale, is it not evil -and good 1 
 Go, and if strangers revile, pass quietly by without 
 answer. 
 Go, and if curious friends ask of thy rearing and age. 
 Say, ' I am flitting about many years from brain unto 
 brain of 
 Feeble and restless youths born to inglorious days :
 
 298 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH vi 
 
 But/ so finish the word, ' I was writ in a Eoman 
 
 chamber, 
 When from Janiculan heights thundered the cannon of 
 
 France.' " 
 
 And it is this brain of what the author chooses to 
 call "feeble and restless youths born to inglorious 
 days " that the poem is meant to delineate through- 
 out, — its speculative discontent, its passion for the 
 abstract, its dread of being committed to a course, 
 its none the less eager craving for action and for the 
 life that can only be reached through action, its 
 driftings and reactions ; — and all this is artistically 
 contrasted with the great Roman stage on which so 
 many great dramas had been enacted in years gone 
 by, and whereon one great revolutionary drama was 
 going forward at that very moment. To my mind, the 
 poem would lose half its character and meaning if the 
 hero's incipiency of passion had been developed into 
 anything but incipiency, if it had not faded away, 
 just as it is represented as doing, with the first diffi- 
 culties, into a restless but still half-relieved passive- 
 ness. The irony of the poem, with its background 
 of Mazzinian and Garibaldian achievement, would have 
 been utterly spoiled by any other conclusion. How 
 perfect a picture of the paralysis caused by too subtly 
 speculative a nature is there in such lines as these, for 
 example, in which the hero declares his intention to 
 abide by the indications of the first adverse throw of 
 fortune : — 
 
 " Great is Fate, and is best. I believe in Providence 
 
 partly. 
 Wliat is ordained is right, and all that happens is 
 
 ordered. 
 Ah, no, that isn't it ! But yet I retain my conclusion.
 
 VI AETHUR HUGH CLOUGH 299 
 
 I will go where I am led, and will not dictate to the 
 chances." 
 
 "Amours de Voyage" would indeed have been spoiled, 
 if it had ended "prettily," like any other novel. 
 
 The oftener I return to Clough's unfinished but 
 striking poems, the more I am struck by something 
 in their fresh natural handling, and a certain lustre of 
 sunlight on their surface, which suggests to me a 
 modern and intellectualised Chaucer ; and I think the 
 same homely breadth and simplicity were strongly 
 marked in his countenance. Of course, the whole 
 essence of such genius is changed by the intellectual 
 conditions of Clough's age, and the still higher intel- 
 lectual conditions of his personal career. But the 
 characteristic is only the more strongly marked for 
 such striking and fundamental variations ; and had 
 he lived to fill more completely with his individual 
 genius, and to complete the beautiful fragments of 
 tales which are entitled In Mari Magno, every one 
 would have noticed not merely an external resem- 
 blance in structure and scheme, but a very close 
 analogy in genius between the Canterbury Tales 
 by the father of English poetry, and the series by 
 this later representative of our academic school. 
 His Chaucer-like love of the natural simplicities of 
 life was probably Clough's strongest creative impulse ; 
 his mode of describing is in the same style of bold, 
 direct, affectionate feeling for the earth and the true 
 children of the earth ; and the homely though polished 
 pathos of his stories have again and again filled me 
 with like haunting associations, even when the analogy 
 was so much disguised by the diiferent intellectual 
 accent of our time that its secret was not easy to 
 catch. In the following piece, there is certainly no 
 manner of difficulty in tracing the resemblance. But
 
 300 AKTHUR HUGH CLOUGH vi 
 
 though the similarity of mere style may arise from 
 Clough's own familiarity with the poet, and with the 
 tales whose plan he was adopting, the portrait is cer- 
 tainly studied from an ecclesiastical type quite foreign 
 to Chaucer's age : — 
 
 " The vicar was of bulk and thews. 
 Six feet he stood within his shoes, 
 And every inch of all a man ; 
 Ecclesiast, on the ancient plan, 
 Unforced by any party rule 
 His native character to school ; 
 In ancient learning not unread, 
 But had few doctrines in his head ; 
 Dissenters truly he abhorred ; 
 They never had his gracious word. 
 He ne'er was bitter, or unkind, 
 But positively spoke his mind ; 
 Tlieir piety he could not bear, — 
 A sneaking, snivelling set they were. 
 Their tricks and meanness fired his blood ; 
 Up for his Church he stoutly stood. 
 No worldly aim had he in life 
 To set him with himself at strife. 
 A spade, a spade he freely named. 
 And of his joke was not ashamed ; 
 Made it, and laughed at it, be sure. 
 With young and old, with rich and poor. 
 His sermons frequently he took 
 Out of some standard reverend book ; 
 They seemed a little strange indeed, 
 But were not likely to mislead. 
 Others he gave that were his own,- — 
 The difference could be quickly known 
 Though sorry not to have a boy, 
 His daughters were his perfect joy ; 
 He plagued them, oft drew tears from each, 
 Was bold and hasty in his speech,
 
 VI ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 301 
 
 All through the house you heard him call, 
 
 He had his vocatives for all ; 
 
 Patty Patina, Pat became, 
 
 Lydia took Languish with her name ; 
 
 Philippa was the Gentle Queen, 
 
 And Phoibe Madame Prosperine ; 
 
 The pseudonyms for Mary Gwen 
 
 Varied with every week again ; 
 
 But Emily, of all the set, 
 
 Emilia called, was most the pet." 
 
 It is not the mere subject here — it is the simple, direct 
 manner of painting which brings back a flavour of 
 Chaucer to the memory as we read the more intel- 
 lectual poet of modern days. Look, again, at Clough's 
 feeling for women's beauty ; the mingled breadth and 
 tenderness of his drawing, his keen sense of the 
 healthy simplicity of true womanliness, his constant 
 preference for the true woman rather than the true 
 lady, his evident bias for that which has its root in 
 the homely earth, though it attains a beauty which 
 earth alone could not give ; it is Chaucer become 
 conscious of the diflerence between his owai inner 
 mind and the taste of our modern intellectual day. 
 Chaucer describes his ideas of feminine loveliness in 
 the person of Blanche, wife of John of Gaunt, 
 thus : — 
 
 " I sawgh hir daunce so comeley, 
 Carole and synge so swetely, 
 Laughe and pleye so womanly. 
 And loke so debonairly ; 
 So goodely speke, and so friendly ; 
 That, certes, I trow that evermore 
 Nas [was not] seyne so blysful a tresore. 
 For every heer on hir hede, 
 Sotlie to seyne, hyt nas not rede,
 
 302 ARTHUE HUGH CLOUGH vi 
 
 Ne noutlier yelowe, ne browne, liyt nas, 
 Me thought most lyke golde hyt was. 
 And whiche eyen [eyes] my hxdy hadde ! 
 Debonaire, goode, glade, and sadde [grave], 
 Symple, of goode mochel, nought to wide. 
 Therto hir looke was not asyde, 
 Ne overtwert, but besette to wele, 
 It drew and took everydele, 
 AUe that on hir gonne beholde." 
 
 And now let me take an extract from one of Clough's 
 tales to compare with this picture of Chaucer's : — 
 " A highland inn amongst the western hills, 
 A single parlour, single bed, that tills 
 With fisher or with tourist as may be ; 
 A waiting maid as fair as you can see. 
 With hazel eyes and frequent blushing face, 
 And ample brow, and with a rustic grace 
 In all her easy ample motions seen. 
 Large of her age, which haply is nineteen ; 
 Christian her name, in full a pleasant name, 
 Christian and Christie scarcely seem the same. 
 A college fellow who has sent away 
 Tlie pupils he has taught for many a day, 
 And comes for fishing and for solitude. 
 Perhaps a little pensive in his mood, 
 An aspiration and a thought have failed. 
 Where he had hoped, another has prevailed, 
 But to the joys of hill and stream alive, 
 And in his boyhood yet at twenty-five. 
 
 A merry dance that made young people meet, 
 And set them moving both with hands and feet : 
 A dance in which he danced and nearer knew 
 The soft brown eyes, and found them tender too. 
 A dance that lit in two young hearts the fire, 
 The low soft flame of loving sweet desire. 
 And made him feel that he could feel again ; 
 The preface this what follows to explain."
 
 VI ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 303 
 
 Of course the parallel must not be pushed too far, 
 for even Chaucer, if possessed of all the new culture, 
 and striving to harmonise it "vvith his large, simple, 
 healthy, human tastes, would become quite a new 
 man. And no doubt Clough's poetry is in nature 
 and essence intellectual. Still there is no poet of 
 our generation whose intellectuality gives less of the 
 effect of a thinning and refining away of life to a 
 shadow, than Clough. 
 
 Such subtlety as there is in Clough is of a broad, 
 sweeping, comprehensive kind ; not the fine instinct 
 with which Tennyson, for instance, follows out one 
 by one a hundred shadowy paths of imaginative 
 reasoning, but the wide subtlety which hovers hither 
 and thither over one or two of the greater chasms 
 that separate thought from action. The ground 
 quakes under Clough's feet at points where generally 
 it would be supposed firm; and where ordinary 
 men's imaginative doubts begin, his scarcely reach. 
 The effect on his poetry is to exercise his imagina- 
 tion in depicting not so much universal feelings as 
 the craving of the cultivated mind for permission to 
 surrender itself to them. In some of his most char- 
 acteristic verses he asks : — 
 
 " What we, when face to face we see 
 The Father of our souls, shall be, 
 John tells us, does not yet appear ; 
 Ah ! did he tell what we are here ! 
 
 " A mind for thoughts to pass into,'; 
 A heart for loves to travel through. 
 Five senses to detect things near. 
 Is this the whole that we are here ? 
 
 " Rules baffle instincts — instincts rules, 
 Wise men are bad — and good are fools ;
 
 304 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH vi 
 
 Facts evil — wishes vain appear, 
 We cannot go, why are we here ? 
 
 " may we for assurance' sake, 
 Some arbitrary judgment take. 
 And wiKuUy pronounce it clear 
 For this or that 'tis we are here ? 
 
 " Or is it right, and will it do, 
 To pace the sad confusion through, 
 And say : ' It doth not yet appear, 
 What we shall be, what we are here ' ? 
 
 ■'J 
 
 " Ah ! yet when all is thought and said, 
 The heart still overrules the head ; 
 Still what we hope we must believe, 
 And what is given us, receive ; 
 
 " Must still believe ; for still we hope 
 That in a world of larger scope, 
 Wliat here is faithfully begun 
 Will be completed, not undone. 
 
 " My child, we still must think, when we 
 That ampler life together see. 
 Some true result will yet appear 
 Of what we are, together, here." 
 
 This, like almost all Clough's poems of this class, 
 presents the effect of a homely, simple, human 
 beauty, half undermined by fundamental doubts, — 
 doubts suggested, indeed, only to be jjartially aban- 
 doned, but also to be partially maintained, as a pre- 
 servative against the blind eager confidence of pre- 
 sumptuous faith. The massive and genial sympathy 
 which Clough feels with the universal instincts of 
 human nature, alike religious and social, is the first 
 marked feature that strikes us in all his poems : 
 then the sifting process begins of tracing them to
 
 Yi AETIIUK HUGH CLOUGH 305 
 
 their roots, showing how much wider is the trust 
 placed in them in the practical conduct of modern 
 life, than it is possible to justify intellectually ; and 
 then when he has pared these instincts down to their 
 minimum of meaning, and we have been shown how 
 impossible our whole life would be if they were 
 given no greater validity than that, they are per- 
 mitted, though with hesitation and a doubtful or 
 rather hypothetical confidence, to take back some- 
 thing of their natural authority, now that it is fairly 
 shown to be liable to all kinds of presumptuous 
 error. 
 
 No doubt, this sort of large, half-genial suspense 
 of judgment, that looks upon natural instincts with 
 a sort of loving doubt, and yields with cautious hand 
 a carefully stinted authority to human yearnings in 
 order not wholly to lose a share in the moving forces 
 of life, is not likely to be widely joopular. With 
 Clough this suspense of human judgment was unfor- 
 tunately not supplemented by any confident belief in 
 a divine answer to those vague yearnings, and con- 
 sequently his tone is almost always at once sweet 
 and sad. It is saturated with the deep but musical 
 melancholy of such thoughts as the following, whose 
 pathos shows how much more profoundly and deeply 
 Clough thirsted for truth than many of even the 
 most confident of those of us who believe that there 
 is a living water at which to slake our thirst : — 
 
 " To spend uncounted years of pain, 
 Again, again, and yet again, 
 In working out in heart and brain 
 The problem of our being here ; 
 To gather facts from far and near, 
 Upon the mind to hold them clear, 
 And, knowing more may yet appear, 
 
 L X 
 
 y
 
 306 AETHUE HUGH CLOUGH vi 
 
 Unto one's latest breatli to fear 
 The premature result to draw — 
 Is this the object, end, and law, 
 And purpose of our being here ? " 
 
 Yet even in poetry of this kind, which abounds 
 in the volume, there is something Qf the same large 
 hesitating melancholy that we should expect, if once 
 a mind of homely Chaucer-like wisdom fell under a 
 cloud of modern doubt. Instead of applying itself, 
 like the ordinary scepticism, to particular riddles, it 
 would touch the whole substance of life, not un- 
 kindly, with Clough's questioning finger ; treat the 
 fundamental instincts which guide us into our human 
 relations with the same half-confidence ; try to sepa- 
 rate, even in dealing mth "love," the real affinity 
 of nature from the " juxtaposition " of habit, and 
 show the problem to be indeterminate "with the 
 same quaint humour. And in things divine it would 
 state the problem as fairly, and substitute a sigh of 
 pathetic hope for the solution, with the same sad 
 fidelity. It may be something of a fancy, but it is 
 at all events a fancy that touches the border of 
 truth, if I recognise even in the type of Clough's 
 genial scepticism something not entirely unlike the 
 scepticism which might pervade the mind of a 
 Chaucer, watching, with the old homely shrewdness 
 as well as the rich modern culture, the swaying tides 
 of our theological debate, and clinging too closely 
 itself to the human forms of beauty and goodness, to 
 come with any clear personal conviction out of the 
 strife. 
 
 However, Clough's great literary powers never 
 manifested themselves even to his most intimate 
 friends by any outward sign at all commensurate 
 with the profound belief they hiad in his genius.
 
 VI AETIIUR HUGH CLOUGH 307 
 
 But if his powers did not, there was much in his 
 character that did produce its full eftect upon all 
 who knew him. He steadily refrained from looking, 
 even in time of severe trial, to his own interest, 
 when what seemed to him higher interests were at 
 issue. He never flinched from the worldly loss 
 which his deepest convictions brought on him. 
 Even when clouds were thick over his own head, 
 and the ground beneath his feet seemed crumbling 
 away, he could still bear witness to an eternal light 
 behind the cloud, and tell others that there is solid 
 ground to be reached in the end by the feet of all 
 who will wait to be strong : — 
 
 " Say not, the struggle nought availeth, 
 The labour and the wounds are vain. 
 The enemy faints not, nor faileth, 
 
 And as things have been, they remain. 
 
 " If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars, 
 It may be, in yon smoke concealed 
 Your comrades chased e'en now the fliers. 
 And, but for you, possess the field. 
 
 " For while the tired waves, vainly breaking. 
 Seem here no painful inch to gain. 
 Far back, through creeks and inlets making. 
 Comes silent, flooding in, the main. 
 
 " And not by eastern windows only, 
 
 When daylight comes, comes in the light : 
 In front the sun climbs slow — how slowly ! 
 But westward, look, the land is bright." 
 
 I do not think that any competent judge who 
 really studies Clough's Kemains will doubt for a 
 moment that he was one of the most original men 
 of our age, and perhaps its most intellectual and
 
 308 AETHUK HUGH CLOUGH vi 
 
 buoyant, though very far, of course, from its richest 
 or most musical and exquisite, poet. There is a 
 very peculiar and unique attraction about what I 
 may call the physical and almost animal buoyancy 
 of these subtly intellectual rhythms and verses, when 
 once the mass of the poet's mind — by no means 
 easy to get into motion — is fairly under weigh. 
 Matthew Arnold and Clough both represent the 
 stream of the modern Oxford intellectual tradition 
 in their poems, but how different is their genius. 
 With all his intellectual precision, there is something 
 of the boyishness, of the simplicity, of the vascular 
 Saxon breadth of Chaucer's poetry in Clough ; while 
 Mr. Arnold's poetical ancestor is certainly no earlier 
 than "Wordsworth. There are both flesh and spirit, 
 as well as emotion and speculation, in Clough ; 
 while, in Mr. Arnold, soul and sentiment guide the 
 emotion and the specu.lation. There is tenderness in 
 both ; but Clough's is the tenderness of earthly 
 sympathy, and Mr. Arnold's the lyrical cry of Vir- 
 gilian compassion. Both fill half their poems with 
 the most subtle intellectual meditations ; but Clough 
 leaves the problems he touches, all but where they 
 were, not half settled, reproaching himself for moon- 
 ing over them so long ; while Mr. Arnold finds some 
 sort of a delicate solution, or no-solution, for all of 
 them, and sorts them with the finest nicety. Finally, 
 when they both reach their highest poetical point, 
 Mr. Arnold is found painting lucidly in a region of 
 pure and exquisite sentiment, Clough singing a sort 
 of paean of buoyant and exultant strength : — 
 
 " But, 0, blithe breeze, and 0, great seas, 
 Though ne'er, that earliest parting past, 
 On your wide plain tliey join again, 
 Together lead them home at last !
 
 VI ARTHUE HUGH CLOUGH 309 
 
 " One port, methought, alike they sought, 
 One purpose hold where'er they fare. 
 0, bounding breeze, 0, rushing seas, 
 At last, at last, unite them there ! "
 
 VII 
 
 THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 Hazlitt, Avriting of one of Wordsworth's latest and 
 more classical poems, "Laodamia," describes it as 
 having " the sweetness, the gravity, the strength, the 
 beauty, and the languor of death : calm contemplation 
 and majestic pains." There also, we have, in one of 
 Hazlitt's terse and sententious criticisms, the aroma 
 of the finest poems of Wordsworth's greatest poetical 
 disciple — one, too, Avho is the disciple of Words- 
 worth, emphatically in his later rather than in his 
 earlier phase ; Wordsworth schooled into a grace and 
 majesty not wholly meditative, but in part, at least, 
 critical ; Wordsworth the conscious artist as well as 
 poet; not Wordsworth the rugged rhapsodist of 
 spiritual simplicity and natural joy. "The sweet- 
 ness, the gravity, the strength, the beauty, and the 
 languor of death, — calm contemplation and majestic 
 pains," — all these may be found in the most char- 
 acteristic and most touching of Mr. Arnold's poems ; 
 in the melancholy "vvith which the sick King of 
 Bokhara broods over the fate of the wretch Avhom 
 his pity and power could not save from the expiation 
 he himself courted; in the gloomy resentment of 
 Mycerinus against the unjust gods who cut short 
 his effort to reign justly over his people ; in the
 
 VII THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD 311 
 
 despair of Empedocles on Etna, at his failure to solve 
 the riddle of the painful earth — his weariness of 
 "the devouring flame of thought," the naked, 
 eternally restless mind whose thirst he could not 
 slake ; in those fine lines written by a deathbed, in 
 which Mr. Arnold contrasts the hopes of youth with 
 what he deems the highest gain of manhood, 
 " calm " ; in the noble sonnet which commemorates 
 Sophocles as one whom "business could not make 
 dull nor passion wild"; in the graphic "Memorial 
 Verses," wherein he praises Wordsworth for assuag- 
 ing that dim trouble of humanity which Goethe 
 could only dissect and describe ; in the melodious 
 sadness of the jDcrsonal retrospects in "Resignation," 
 "A Southern Night," and " Self- Dependence " ; in 
 the large concessions to Heine's satiric genius, made 
 in the verses composed at his tomb at Montmartre ; 
 in the consciously hopeless cravings of " The Scholar 
 Gipsy " and " Thyrsis " after a reconciliation between 
 the intellect of man and the magic of Nature ; and, 
 most characteristically of all, in the willing half- 
 sympathy given by Mr. Arnold to those ascetics of 
 the Grande Chartreuse, whom his intellect condemns, 
 and in the even deeper enthusiasm with which he 
 addresses, in the midst of melancholy Alpine soli- 
 tudes, that modern refugee from a sick world, the 
 author of " Obermann," delineates the intellectual 
 weakness and dejection of the age, and feebly 
 though poetically shadows forth his own hopeless 
 hope of a remedy. In all these poems alike, and 
 many others which I have not space to enumerate — 
 in all, indeed, in which Mr. Arnold's genius really 
 gains a voice — there is " the sweetness, gravity, 
 strength, beauty, and the languor of death," blended 
 in the spirit of a calm contemplativeness which takes
 
 312 THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD VII 
 
 all the edge off anguish and makes the poet's pains 
 "majestic"; for Mr. Arnold's poems are one long 
 variation on a single theme, the divorce between the 
 soul and the intellect, and the depth of spiritual 
 regret and yearning which that divorce produces. 
 Yet there is a didactic keenness Avith the languor, 
 an eagerness of purpose with the despondency, which 
 give half the individual flavour to his lyrics. A 
 note of confidence lends authority to his scepticism ; 
 the tone of his sadness is self-contained, sure, and 
 even imperious, instead of showing the ordinary 
 relaxation of loss ; and the reader of his poetry is 
 apt to rise from it Avith the same curious questioning 
 in his mind which Mr. Arnold has put into the 
 mouth of Nature, in the verses called "Morality," 
 — a questioning after the origin of " that severe, that 
 earnest air," which breathes through poetry of all but 
 hopeless yearning and all but unmixed regret. 
 
 No doubt one kind of answer to this question is, 
 that Mr. Arnold has inherited from the great teacher 
 of Rugby and historian of the Punic War the lofty 
 didactic impulse which marks all his prose and poetry 
 alike, although the substance of the lessons he is so 
 eager to give has sadly dwindled in the descent from 
 father to son. But that is but one sort of answer, 
 explaining rather the source of the peculiar strain 
 in his temperament which has impressed a certain 
 nervous depth and moral " distinction " upon poetry 
 of which the drift is uniformly a realistic melancholy, 
 than the source from which he has fed the flame of 
 his genius, and justified the calm egotism of its 
 literary rescripts. Intellectually, Mr. Arnold's de- 
 scent, as he himself is always foremost to acknow- 
 ledge, is to be derived in almost equal degree from 
 Goethe the critic and artist, and from Wordsworth
 
 VII THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD 313 
 
 the poet; both of them, observe, marked by the 
 same character of clear, self-contained, thoughtful, 
 heroic egotism. I say Goethe the critic and artist — 
 for I recognise but little, in Goethe's deepest and 
 most perfect vein of poetry, of that conscious self- 
 culture and that lucidity of enthusiastic self-study, 
 which lend the charm to his conversations, his 
 novels, and his criticisms. And Mr. Arnold, even 
 in his capacity of poet — I am not about to touch his 
 essays, except so far as they throw a light on his 
 poetry — is always aiming at self-culture ; and sing- 
 ing, not songs of involuntary melody, but of care- 
 fully-attuned aspiration or regret. From both 
 Goethe and Wordsworth, again, he has learned to 
 treat his own individuality with a certain exaltation 
 of touch, an air of Olympian dignity and grace, 
 which lends the fascination of " the grand style " to 
 lyrics so sad that they might otherwise trail upon 
 the earth too slack and limp a growth. Mr. Arnold 
 has always impressed on his poems that air of aris- 
 tocratic selectness and conscious exclusiveness which 
 Goethe, even after being the popular poet of Ger- 
 many, claimed for his own wi'itings. Eckermann 
 tells how, going to dine with Goethe one day in 
 1828, and finding him dressed in "the black frock- 
 coat and star in which I (Eckermann) always liked 
 best to see him," the stately old man took him aside 
 into the window, apart from the rest of the dinner 
 company, only to make the following confidence : — 
 
 " ' Dear child,' he said, ' I will confide sonietliing to 
 you, which will at once give you a lift over many puzzles, 
 and which may be an assistance to you throughout your 
 whole life. My writings cannot become popular ; any one 
 who thinks they can, and strives to make them so, is in 
 error. They are not written for the masses, but only for
 
 314 THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD Vii 
 
 individual men wlio themselves desire and seek some- 
 tliing analogous, and who are piirsuing similar lines of 
 thought.' " 
 
 One can well imagine Mr. Arnold at the same age, 
 and dressed with similar care, wearing the order 
 conferred upon him many years ago by the King 
 of Italy for his services to the Duke of Genoa, 
 making a precisely similar confidence to some 
 " young lion of the Daily Telegraph " engaged in the 
 study of his wi'itings, and disturbed at finding that 
 his poems secure so much less recognition from the 
 people than those of Tennyson or Morris. And he 
 would be far more in the right than Goethe, for 
 Goethe's songs are popular in their very essence ; it 
 is only those of his writings where his cool reflective 
 spirit has found expression, like Tasso, or Iphi- 
 genia, or Wilhelm Meister, or Faust, to which his 
 ingenuous confidence to Eckermann can properly 
 apply. But a similar confession would apply to all 
 Mr. Arnold's poems, for they draw their life entirely 
 from the proud self-conscious zone of modern ex- 
 'perience, and have scarcely given forth one single 
 note of popular grief or joy. It would apply, too, 
 for a different reason, to almost all Wordsworth's 
 poems, not because Wordsworth belonged to the 
 aristocratic school of modern culture — quite the 
 reverse ; but because he steeped himself in the 
 rapture of a meditative solitude which puts him at 
 a distance from all mankind, and makes him loom 
 large, as it were, out of the magnifying folds of one 
 of his own mountain mists. 
 
 But Mr. Arnold, in borrowing from Goethe the 
 artist and critic, and from Wordsworth the poet, 
 something of what I have called their style of clear 
 heroic egotism, has not borrowed from either of them
 
 VII THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD 315 
 
 the characteristic motive and individuality which in 
 them justifies that style. Had he done so he could 
 not be the original poet he is. He is neither the 
 poet of mere self-culture, nor the solitary interpreter 
 of Nature, but something between the two ; a care- 
 ful student and graphic, as well as delicate, expositor 
 of the spiritual pangs and restlessness of this age on 
 the one hand, and of the refreshments and anodynes 
 to be derived from Nature on the other. And he is 
 more or less conscious, moreover, in spite of some 
 youthful theories of the true function of poetry 
 which he has had to disregard, that it is in the elab- 
 orate delineation of his own poetic individuality that 
 these distresses and these consolations receive their 
 reconciliation and their best chance of being practi- 
 cally combined. He feels that his poetic personality 
 has a certain grandeur and meaning in it ; that while 
 he has something of Goethe's calm critical eye for 
 human life and its confusions, he has also something 
 of the meditative thirst and meditative pleasures of 
 Wordsworth ; and that the combination of these two 
 poetic qualifications gives him a distinctive power of 
 his own. " Non me tua turbida terrent dicta," he 
 said once in his majestic way to his critics, " Dii me 
 terrent et Jupiter hostis." There is no better key 
 to his true poetical aims than this passage from 
 the very characteristic poem, addressed in November, 
 1849, to the author of "Obermann": — 
 
 " Yet of the spirits who have reign'd 
 In this our troubled day, 
 I know but two, who have attain'd, 
 Save thee, to see their way. 
 
 " By England's lakes, in grey old age, 
 His quiet home one keeps ;
 
 316 THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD vii 
 
 And one, the strong, mucli-toiling sage 
 In German Weimar sleeps. 
 
 " But Wordsworth's eyes avert their ken 
 From half of human fate ; 
 And Goethe's course few sons of men 
 May think to emulate. 
 
 " For he pursued a lonely road, 
 His eyes on Nature's plan ; 
 Neither made man too much a God, 
 Nor God too much a man. 
 
 " Strong was he, with a spirit free 
 From mists, and sane, and clear ; 
 Clearer, how much ! than ours — yet we 
 Have a worse course to steer. 
 
 " But we brought forth and rear'd in hours 
 Of change, alarm, surprise. 
 What shelter to grow ripe is ours ? 
 What leisure to "row wise 1 
 
 &'■ 
 
 " Too fast we live, too much are tried. 
 Too harass'd, to attain 
 Wordsworth's sweet calm, or Goethe's wide 
 And luminous view to gain." 
 
 Nevertheless, that is precisely the combination 
 which Mr. Arnold has tried to attain for himself, 
 and which he aims at illustrating, through himself, 
 for others. He tries to combine a spirit " free from 
 mists, and sane, and clear," with Wordsworth's 
 "sweet calm" and pleasure in the freshness of 
 Nature. And if he has in any degree succeeded, he 
 knows that the success will best be realised, as those 
 great masters' greater successes were realised, in a
 
 VII THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD 317 
 
 delineation of his own poetic individuality. Accord- 
 ingly, it is really self-delineation of a kind like to 
 theirs, though self-delineation of aims and aspirations 
 about midway between theirs, which gives the charm 
 to his poems. In all his poetical successes, it is easy 
 to distinguish two distinct strands : first, the clear 
 recognition (with Goethe) of our spiritual unrest, and 
 the manful effort to control it ; next, the clear recog- 
 nition (with Wordsworth) of the balm to be found in 
 sincere communion with Nature. To the treatment 
 of both these elements indeed he has given a certain 
 freshness and individuality of his own. 
 
 I will first indicate generally his treatment of the 
 former point. His characteristic effort on this side 
 has been to introduce into a delineation, at once con- 
 sistent and various in its aspects, of the intellectual 
 difficulties, hesitations, and distresses of cultivated 
 minds in the nineteenth century, a vein of imperious 
 serenity — what he himself calls "sanity" of treat- 
 ment — which may stimulate the mind to bear the 
 I^ain of constantly disappointed hope. Yet, oddly 
 enough, his early theory of poetry would have 
 restrained him from giving us such a picture of 
 moral and intellectual sufierings at all ; and he did 
 for a time suppress a poem, " Empedocles on Etna," 
 which had already gained a certain reputation, and 
 which, beneath a thin disguise of antiquity, discussed 
 half the religious difficulties of modern days, simply 
 because he declared it poetically faulty to choose a 
 situation in which "everything is to be endured, 
 nothing to be done." It was a condemnation of 
 every successful poem he has written, emphatically 
 so of the long expositions of our modern spiritual 
 paralysis and fever in the two poems to the author 
 of " Obermann," of the lines at Heine's grave, of the
 
 318 THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD vil 
 
 stanzas at the Grande Chartreuse ; indeed, we may 
 say, of all his poems except the classic play " Merope," 
 which probably Mr. Arnold himself regarded as a 
 partial failure, since, though now restored, he kept it 
 back for a long time from his complete editions. 
 
 " Empedocles on Etna," according to Mr. Arnold 
 in his preface to the edition of 1853, Avas poetically 
 faulty because it was a picture of " a continuous 
 state of mental distress, unrelieved by incident or 
 hope," which is quite true, and not less true of 
 almost all his other poems. But when he added 
 that it was also unrelieved by "resistance," he was 
 unjust to himself. What alone renders all the 
 delineation of spiritual be^vilderment Avhich pervades 
 this poem endurable, is that there is a steady current 
 of resistance, a uniform " sanity " of self-control in 
 the treatment of the painful symptoms so subtly 
 described. Empedocles, in the course of his medita- 
 tions on suicide on the slopes of Etna, no doubt 
 dwells much on the feeble and false religious philo- 
 sophy of the time, the credulous self -flatteries of 
 human sophistry, and the sharp 'antagonism between 
 clear self-knowledge and the superstitions of the age; 
 but he also makes a vigorous appeal to the manliness, 
 fortitude, and sobriety of spirit with which all the 
 disappointments and failures of humanity ought to 
 be met, asserts that it is the part of a man of true 
 wisdom to curb immoderate desires, to bow to the 
 might of forces he cannot control, and, while nursing 
 no "extravagant hope," to yield to no despair. And 
 when, after thus completely justifying his own "sanity 
 of soul," he confesses himself unable to act as he 
 approves, and leaps into the fiery crater, the reader 
 feels that the blunder of the poet has not been in 
 colouring the suffering too highly — for it is not highly
 
 VII TPIE POETEY OF MATTHEW AKNOLD 319 
 
 coloured — but in selecting for the sufferer a man of 
 too low a courage, and in making his acts a foil to 
 his thoughts. So far from there being no resistance, 
 no breakwater opposed to the flowing tides of mental 
 suffering, Empedocles creates the sole interest of the 
 poem by his manly swimming against that stream 
 of despondency to which later he suddenly abandons 
 himself without sufficient cause assigned. It is like 
 the parable of the man who said " I go not," and 
 then went, without giving any glimpse of the reason 
 for his change of mind — a parable which, without 
 any attempt to fill in the missing link, would cer- 
 tainly not be a sufficient subject for a poem. It 
 seems to me striking enough that the very charm 
 of Mr. Arnold's method in dealing with this hectic 
 fever of the modern intellect, — for Empedocles, if a 
 true ancient, is certainly a still truer modern in his 
 argument, — is due to his own inconsistency ; is due, 
 that is, to the fact that when his subject required 
 him to paint and justify the last stages of moral 
 despondency, and when his intellectual view was 
 sceptical enough to be in sympathy with his subject, 
 he could not help expending his chief strength in 
 cutting away the moral ground from under his hero's 
 feet, by insisting that the well-spring of despair was, 
 after all, not in the hostility of Nature or of human 
 circumstances, but in the license of immoderate de- 
 sires and of insatiable self-will. And it is so through- 
 out his poems. He cannot paint the restlessness of 
 the soul — though he paints it vividly and well — 
 without painting also the attitude of resistance to it, 
 without giving the impression of a head held high 
 above it, a nature that fixes the limits beyond which 
 the corrosion of distrust and doubt shall not go, 
 a deep speculative melancholy kept at bay, not by
 
 320 THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD vii 
 
 faith, but by a kind of imperious temperance of 
 nature. This is the refrain of almost all his poems. 
 He yields much to this melancholy — intellectually, 
 we should say, almost everything — but morally, he 
 bids it keep its distance, and forbids it to engulph 
 him. 
 
 It is this singular equipoise betAveen the doubts 
 that devour him, and the intrepid sobriety that ex- 
 cites him to resistance, which gives the peculiar tone 
 to Mr. Arnold's poems. He has not the impulse or 
 abandon of nature for a pure lyric melancholy, such 
 as Shelley could pour forth in words that almost 
 make the heart Aveep, as, for instance, in the " Lines 
 Written in Dejection in Naples." Again, Mr. Arnold 
 has nothing of the proud faith that conquers melan- 
 choly, and that gives to the poems of Wordsworth 
 their tone of rapture. Yet he hits a wonderful 
 middle note between the two. The "lyrical cry," 
 as he himself has finely designated the voice in 
 which the true poetic exaltation of feeling expresses 
 itself, is to be found in a multitude of places in his 
 poems ; but in him it neither utters the dejection 
 of the wounded spirit, nor the joy of the victorious 
 spirit, but rather the calm of a steadfast equanimity 
 in conflict with an unconquerable, and yet also un- 
 conquering destiny — a firm mind, without either 
 deep shadows of despair or high lights of faith, 
 only the lucid dusk of an intellectual twilight. Per- 
 haps there is no more characteristic specimen of the 
 exact note of Mr. Arnold's "lyrical cry" than the 
 close of the fine poem called "Eesignation " : — 
 
 " Enough, we live ! — and if a life, 
 With large results so little rife, 
 Though bearable, seem hardly worth 
 This pomp of worlds, this pain of birth ;
 
 VII THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD 321 
 
 Yet, Fausta ! the mute turf we tread, 
 
 The solemn hills around us sj)read, 
 
 This stream which falls incessantly. 
 
 The strange-scrawl'd rocks, the lonely sky, 
 
 If I might lend their life a voice, 
 
 Seem to bear rather than rejoice. 
 
 And even could the intemperate prayer 
 
 Man iterates, while these forbear. 
 
 For movement, for an ampler sphere. 
 
 Pierce Fate's impenetrable ear, 
 
 Not milder is the general lot 
 
 Because our spirits have forgot. 
 
 In action's dizzying eddy whirl'd. 
 
 The something that infects the world." 
 
 Such is the general nature of the human strand 
 in Mr. Arnold's poetry, the restless spii'itual melan- 
 choly which he pictures, resists, and condemns. But 
 there is another permanent strand in it, that due 
 partly to his love for Wordsworth, and partly to his 
 love for Nature, of whom Wordsworth w^as the greatest 
 of modern priests. Mr. Arnold finds in the beauty 
 and sublimity of natural scenes the best assuagement 
 of intellectual unrest and moral perplexities. Nature 
 is his balm for every woe. He does not find in her, 
 as Wordsworth did, the key to any of life's mysteries, 
 or the source of hope, but only the best kind of dis- 
 traction, which, while it does not relax but rather 
 elevates the tone of the spirit, and even furnishes 
 it with a certain number of symbols for its thought 
 and emotion, also lightens the burden of the mys- 
 tery by its cooling and refreshing influence. The 
 "languor of death," of which Hazlitt speaks, as 
 characterising "Laodamia," and of which I have said 
 that it is also characteristic of Mr. Arnold's poetry, 
 drives liim to Nature for relief ; and though it 
 L Y
 
 322 THE POETEY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD vii 
 
 generally haunts him even under Nature's sweetest 
 spell, yet you can see that he finds the relief, that 
 the languor is less, and the pulse stronger while he 
 dwells on Nature's life. And it is this sense of pure 
 refreshment in Nature, this ease of mind which she 
 brings him, this calm amid feverish strife, this dew 
 after hot thought, that determines the style of his 
 studies of Nature. His poetry of this kind is the 
 sweetest, the most tranquillising, the most quieting 
 of its sort to be found in English literature. In 
 Wordsworth, Nature is the occasion, but his own 
 mind always the object, of thought, whether, in re- 
 culling the "host of golden daffodils," he exercises 
 " that inward eye that is the bliss of solitude," or finds 
 in the teaching of a daisy the true medicine for dis- 
 content. You cannot plunge yourself in the poetry 
 of Wordsworth without being mentally braced and 
 refreshed ; but then it takes an effort to enter into a 
 world so unique, " so solemn and serene," and so far 
 removed from that of ordinary life. Throw off the 
 yoke of the world sufficiently to steep yourself in 
 Wordsworth, and no doubt the refreshment is more 
 complete and the flow of new strength more full 
 than you can expect from the verse of Mr. Arnold ; 
 for Mr. Ai-nold's poetry of Nature is not like Words- 
 worth's, a newly-created meditative universe, distilled 
 by the poet's mind out of Nature ; it is a delicate 
 transcript of Nature, painted in the clear, dewy 
 water-colours of tranquil memory. What he says of 
 his own debt to Wordsworth would, if it did not 
 imply a more vivifying and animating influence than 
 Mr. Arnold's poetry ever really exerts, be more nearly 
 applicable to most men's debt to him : — 
 
 " He laid us as we lay at birth. 
 Oil tlie cool flowery lap of earth ;
 
 VII THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD 323 
 
 Smiles broke from us, and we had ease. 
 The hills were round us, and the breeze 
 Went o'er the sun-lit fields again ; 
 Our foreheads felt the wind and rain. 
 Our youth return'd ; for there was shed 
 On spirits that had long been dead — 
 Spirits dried up and closely furl'd — 
 The freshness of the early world." 
 
 Now that does not strike me as by any means an 
 accurate description of the influence of Wordsworth's 
 poetry on the mind. Wordsworth does not restore 
 us to the ease and freshness of our youth, he rather 
 baptizes us in his own strong and unique spirit. He 
 has a spell of his own, no doubt a cooling and re- 
 freshing one, but also a powerful and transforming 
 one. It is due to the strong, keen, meditative sim- 
 plicity of a mind that is as full of rapture as it is 
 full of insight. It is Wordsworth himself, far more 
 than the lark he watched, whose " canopy of glorious 
 light " snatches us out of ourselves, and from whom 
 we learn to be true " to the kindred points of heaven 
 and home." It is Wordsworth himself, far more than 
 the cuckoo to which he listened " till he did beget 
 that golden time again," who tells us the old enchant- 
 ing tale "of visionary hours." The strength and 
 freshness which Wordsworth gives us is not the 
 strength and freshness of childhood or youth, but 
 the strength and freshness of a poet on whom " the 
 power of hills " had rested till he lived in a purer 
 world than ours. When Wordsworth says of the 
 solitary reaper — 
 
 " Alone she cuts and binds the grain. 
 And sings a melancholy strain. 
 Oh listen ! for the vale profound 
 Is overflowing with the sound ! "
 
 324 THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD vil 
 
 — the charm is far less in the song, of which he gives 
 so thrilling a conception, than in those grateful 
 " impulses of deeper birth " springing out of his 
 o^vn heart, of which he tells us a still more thrill- 
 ing story. Wordsworth is the last poet of whom I 
 should say that he makes us children again. He 
 gives us a new youth, not the old — a youth of 
 deeper serenity, and of a far more truly spiritual 
 joy. But, for that very reason, it takes an effort 
 to plunge into him ; the change from the busy and 
 crowded levels of human life to his jDoetry is too 
 great and sudden to be easily taken ; it requires a 
 regeneration of our senses as well as a change of 
 scene. But Avith ]\lr. Arnold it is different. He 
 does not create for us a new world out of the 
 suggestions and influences of Nature: he only makes 
 us feel keenly the beauty and delicacy of the spec- 
 tacle which Nature, as she is in her gentler and more 
 subdued moods, presents to us, and her strange 
 power of resting and refreshing the mind wearied 
 by small human responsibilities. His eye is always 
 on the object itself, not on the spiritual lesson it 
 discloses. And he paints in the most restful way. 
 He never concentrates, like Tennyson, so that the 
 imagination is at some pain to follow all the touches 
 crowded into little space ; he never disembodies, like 
 Shelley, till it becomes an effort to apprehend essences 
 so rare ; it is seldom that he paints, like Byron, with 
 a brush dipped as deeply in the glomng passions of 
 his own heart as in the colours of the external world. 
 He paints Nature, like the author of " The Elegy in 
 a Country Churchyard," with the cool, liquid, rather 
 weary tone of one who comes to the scenery to take 
 a heart from it, instead of giving the heart to it ; but 
 he does it with infinitely more of the modern tender-
 
 vii THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD 325 
 
 ness and insight for Nature than Gray possessed, 
 and with far more flowing and continuous descriptive 
 power — far less of that polished mosaic-work manner 
 which makes Gray's verses read as if he had forgotten 
 most of the preceding links before completing and 
 enamelling the next link in the chain. In Mr. 
 Arnold's studies of Nature you see the quiet external 
 scene with exquisite lucidity, but you see also, instead 
 of a mirror of laborious and almost painful elabora- 
 tion, as you do in Gray, a tranquillised spirit, which 
 reflects like a clear lake the features of the scene. 
 Take, for example, this pictui'e of a wet and stormy 
 English spring and a soft deep English summer, 
 from the lovely poem "Thyrsis," written in com- 
 memoration of Mr. Arnold's early friend, Arthur 
 Hugh Clough : — 
 
 "So, some tempestuous morn in early June, 
 When the year's primal burst of bloom is o'er, 
 Before the roses and the longest day — 
 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 : 
 The bloom is gone and with the hloom go I ! 
 
 " Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go ? 
 Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on. 
 Soon will the musk carnations break and swell, 
 Soon shall we have gold-dusted snapdragon, 
 Sweet-William with his homely cottage-smell, 
 And stocks in fragrant blow ; 
 Roses that down the alleys shine afar. 
 And open, jasmine-muffled lattices, 
 And groups under the dreaming garden-trees, 
 And the full moon, and the white evening-star."
 
 326 THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD vii 
 
 It would be impossible to give Math greater ease as 
 well as delicacy a true picture of these scenes, and 
 A\dth it the subtler flavour of a real rest of spirit in 
 them. The " volleying " rain, the " tossing " breeze, 
 the " vext " garden trees, and the grass strewn with 
 shed May and chestnut blossom, call up the very life 
 of a squally spring day in England, as do the " high 
 Midsummer pomps," the "roses that down the alleys 
 shine afar," the "open, jasmine-muffled lattices," the 
 " groups under the dreaming garden-trees," and the 
 white moon and star, the very life of an English 
 midsummer night ; and yet the whole has a tinge of 
 careful tenderness and peace that tells you of the 
 refreshment of these images to the "writer. The 
 " vext garden trees " could have been spoken of as 
 " vext " only by one who had a true delight in their 
 air of tranquillity, just as they could have been 
 described as " dreaming " in the midsummer moon- 
 light only by one who had the deepest feeling for 
 the visionary beauty of contrast between the white 
 light streaming over them, and the black shade 
 beneath. Again, "roses that do^\^l the alleys shine 
 afar," is a line sufficiently betraying how deeply the 
 fair perspective of an English garden is engraved on 
 the poet's imagination, while the reproaches lavished 
 on the " too quick despairer " for the hasty neglect 
 of so rich a feast of beauty, strikes the keynote to 
 the feeling of the whole. Nor is this passage in any 
 sense a peculiar instance of Mr. Arnold's flowing, 
 lucid, and tender mode of painting Nature. In all 
 his descriptive passages — and they are many and 
 beautiful — it is the same. He is never sanguine and 
 bright indeed, but the scene is always drawn with a 
 gentle ease and grace, suggesting that it springs up 
 in the poet's imagination with as rapid and natiu:al
 
 VII THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD 327 
 
 a growth as the strokes which delineate it iDefore 
 your eyes, for he makes no heavy draft upon your 
 imaginative power to follow him ; you seem to be 
 sharing with him the very vision which he paints ; 
 and as to moral effect, the impressions that these 
 pictures make is something between wistful enjoy- 
 ment, quiet yearning, and regretful peace ; it is 
 always one of rest, but always of a rest that is not 
 fully satisfying — the rest of which the poet himself 
 says, " Calm's not life's crown, though calm is well." 
 And it is characteristic of Mr. Arnold, that in closing 
 his longer poems, even when they are poems of 
 narrative, he is very fond of ending with a passage 
 of purely naturalistic description which shadows 
 forth something more than it actually paints, and 
 yet leaves the field of suggestion absolutely to the 
 reader's own fancy. Thus, after painting the fatal 
 conflict between Sohrab and Eustum, in which the 
 famous old warrior Rustuni gives the death-wound to 
 his o'wn son, in ignorance that he is his son, Mr. 
 Arnold, after describing the tender farewell of Sohrab 
 to his father when the discovery is made, concludes 
 with this most beautiful passage, in which the 
 accomplished geographer turns the half-scientific, 
 half-poetical pleasure which he always betrays in 
 defining a geographical course, to the purpose of 
 providing a poetical anodyne for the pain which the 
 tragic ending has, or ought to have, given : — 
 
 " But the majestic river floated on. 
 Out of the mist and hum of that Ioav laud, 
 Into the frosty starlight, and there moved, 
 Rejoicing, through the hush'd Chorasmian waste, 
 Under the solitary moon ; — he flow'd 
 Right for the polar star, past Orgunje, 
 Brimming and bright, and large ; then sands begin
 
 328 THE POETKY OF MATTHEW AKNOLD vii 
 
 To hem his watery march, and dam his streams, 
 
 And split his currents ; that for many a league 
 
 The shorn and parcell'd Oxus strains along 
 
 Through beds of sand and matted rushy isles — 
 
 Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had 
 
 In his high mountain cradle in Pamere, 
 
 A foil'd circuitous wanderer — till at last 
 
 The long'd-for dash of waves is heard, and wide 
 
 His luminous home of waters opens, bright 
 
 And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bathed stars 
 
 Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea." 
 
 Of course the intention may have been to make 
 the flow of the Oxus, " out of the mist and hum of 
 that low land, into the frosty starlight," and through 
 the "beds of sand and matted rushy isles," which 
 make him a " foiled, circuitous wanderer," till at last, 
 his "luminous home of waters opens, bright and 
 tranquil," a sort of parable of the unhappy Rustum's 
 great career and the peace of his passing away ; but 
 nothing of this is so much as hinted, and we should 
 rather say that, though the course of a great river 
 may be selected rather than any other scene of 
 natural beauty, for the vague analogy it presents to 
 the chequered life of a great leader, the intention of 
 the poet is simply to refresh his own mind after the 
 spectacle of misspent heroism and clouded destiny, 
 Avith the image of one of Nature's greater works in 
 which there seems to be the same kind of vicissitude, 
 the same loss of pristine force and grandeur, and yet 
 a recovery of all and more than all the majestic 
 volume and triumphant strength of the earlier period 
 at the end. Mr. Arnold always seems to feel that 
 the proper anodyne for the pain of lacerated hearts 
 is the contemplation of the healing and the peace 
 which are to be found inherent in the vital energies
 
 VII THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD 329 
 
 of Nature ; but his view never seems to be to use 
 these natural analogies as a vague augury of happier 
 fortunes for his characters than it suits his purpose 
 as a poet to paint, but rather simply to recall that 
 there is a great restorative power in the life of Nature 
 to which we ought to turn for relief, whenever the 
 spectacle of disease and disorder and distress becomes 
 overpowering. It is in this sense, we suppose, that 
 Mr. Arnold ends the poem on that feeling of hopeless 
 conflict with his age which led Empedocles to plunge 
 into the crater of Etna, by the following exquisite 
 picture of the classical haunt of the Greek Muses : — 
 
 " Through the black, rushing smoke-bursts, 
 Thick breaks the red flame ; 
 All Etna heaves fiercely 
 Her forest-clothed frame. 
 
 " Not here, Apollo ! 
 Are haunts meet for thee. 
 But, where Helicon breaks down 
 In cliff to the sea. 
 
 " Where the moon-silvered inlets 
 Send far their light voice 
 Up the still vale of Thisbe, 
 speed, and rejoice ! 
 
 " On the sward at the cliff-top 
 Lie strewn the white flocks, 
 On the cliff'-side the pigeons 
 Roost deep in the rocks. 
 
 " In tlie moonlight the shepherds, 
 Soft lulled by the rills, 
 Lie wrapt in their blankets, 
 Asleep on the hills.
 
 330 THE POETEY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD vii 
 
 " — What forms are these coming 
 So white through the gloom ? 
 What garments out-glistening 
 The gold-flowered broom ? 
 
 " What sweet-breathing presence 
 Out-perfumes the thyme 1 
 What voices enrapture 
 y The night's balmy prime ? 
 
 " 'Tis Apollo comes leading 
 His choir, the Nine. 
 — The leader is fairest, 
 But all are divine. 
 
 " They are lost in the hollows ; 
 They stream up again ! 
 What seeks on this mountain 
 The glorified train ? — 
 
 " They bathe on this mountain, 
 In the spring by their road ; 
 Then on to Olympus, 
 Their endless abode ! 
 
 " — Whose praise do they mention ? 
 Of what is it told 1— 
 I What wall be for ever ; 
 What was from of old. 
 
 " First hymn they the Father 
 Of all things ; — and then, 
 The rest of immortals. 
 The action of men. 
 
 " The day in his hotness, 
 The strife with the palm ; 
 The night in her silence, 
 The stars in their calm." 
 
 A more perfect intellectual anodyne for the pain
 
 VII THE POETEY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD 331 
 
 of a sick mind, doubting if its own true life could be 
 harmonised with the life of the great universe, it 
 would be difficult to conceive ; it solves no problem, 
 it lifts no veil, but it sings of perfect beauty, human 
 effort, and celestial rest, as if they could really be 
 harmonised in the same bright vision, and so hushes 
 for a moment the tumultuous pulses of the heart. 
 And this is Mr. Arnold's habitual use of Nature. 
 He loves to steep his poems in the colours of the 
 great mountain landscapes, or the cool mountain 
 pastures, or the star-lit summer sea ; but it is as a 
 febrifuge from restlessness and doubt, a draught in 
 which he can find not joy but relief, not peace but a 
 sad serenity. Let us give one final instance in the 
 poem called "A Summer's Night," where, after 
 depicting the exhausting duties assigned by the 
 world to the world's labourers, and the disastrous 
 wreck which falls upon those who break away from 
 the world's fetters, he concludes in a strain somewhat 
 more explicit than usual, by affirming that in the 
 great world of Nature there is something, which, 
 though it cannot indeed satisfy the heart, still can 
 teach us fortitude, and instil into the soul a few 
 drops of stoic grandeur : — 
 
 " Is there no life, but these alone ? 
 Madman or slave, must man be one ? 
 Plainness and clearness without shadow of stain ! 
 Clearness divine ! 
 
 Ye heavens, whose pure dark regions have no sign 
 Of languor, though so calm, and though so great. 
 Are yet untroubled and unpassionate ! 
 Who, though so noble, share in the world's toil. 
 And, though so task'd, keep free from dust and soil ; 
 I will not say that your mild deeps retain 
 A tinge, it may be, of their silent pain
 
 332 THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD Vli 
 
 Wlio have long'd deeiDly once, and long'd in vain ; 
 
 But I will rather say that you remain 
 
 A world above man's head to let him see 
 
 How boundless might his soul's horizons be, 
 
 How vast, yet of what clear transparency ! 
 
 How it were good to live there, and breathe free ! 
 
 How fair a lot to fill 
 
 Is left to each man still ! " 
 
 I have now sketched slightly the two main strands 
 in Mr. Arnold's poetry, and am in a position to con- 
 sider better his specific power of poetic expression 
 and the degree of success and failure showii in the 
 more striking of his poems. His power of poetic 
 expression is founded on a delicate simplicity of 
 taste — such a simplicity as we might fairly expect 
 from the student of Goethe and AVordsworth ; from 
 one, moreover, who shows the finest insight into 
 Greek poetry, and who has a highly cultivated 
 appreciation both for the specific aroma of words 
 and for the poetical atmosphere of thought. Sim- 
 plicity is the characteristic fruit of all these studies 
 and tastes, and perhaps Mr. Arnold's bitterest re- 
 proach against this modern world of " change, alarm, 
 surprise," is the medley of unblest emotions, and 
 turbid, obscure feelings which it thrusts upon us. 
 Hence his own poetic style is remarkable for its 
 scholarlike delicacy and genuine simplicity of touch 
 (I doubt if more than one awkward or turgid 
 word — I must except the Avord " pullulating " in the 
 poem on Dean Stanley — is to be found in his 
 poems) ; and if his ear for rhythm is not equal 
 to his insight into the exjDressive power of words, 
 it is only in the poems of recitative that this fault is 
 observable. He has not caught from his fine studies 
 of Homer the exquisite music of the Homeric wave
 
 VII THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD 333 
 
 of rhythm ; but he has caught his clearness of atmo- 
 sphere, what he himself has so finely termed "the 
 pure lines of an Ionian horizon, the liquid clearness 
 of an Ionian sky." 
 
 So much as I have yet said of Mr. Arnold's power 
 of expression has relation only to form — to all which 
 is implied in delicacy of discernment of the force of 
 language, and preference for simplicity of suliject in 
 what he treats. But the special direction in which 
 Mr. Arnold's power of poetic expression is chiefly 
 shown is, as what I have said of the burden of his 
 lyrical poems will of course imply, that of sedate 
 and half-intellectual emotions, especially those which 
 turn towards Nature with tencler and melancholy 
 yearning. Now it is this purity and simplicity of 
 taste which give to Mr. Arnold's style an open-air 
 freshness, aff"ording a delightful variety to that element 
 of sedate majesty which I have noted in him. Take, 
 for instance, the beautiful song already quoted, in 
 which Callicles describes the haunt of the Muses, 
 and notice how limpid and fresh is the English as 
 well as the thought, and yet how sedate and stately 
 the general eff'ect. I will recall only the two lovely 
 verses : — 
 
 " What forms are these coming 
 
 So white through the gloom ? 
 
 What garments out-glistening 
 
 The gold-flowered broom ? 
 
 " What sweet-breathing presence 
 Out-perfumes the thyme 1 
 What voices enrapture 
 The night's balmy prime ? " 
 
 Observe here the exquisitely classical English 
 idiom "out-glistening" and "out -perfume," which 
 conveys with so much simplicity, precision, and grace
 
 334 THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD vii 
 
 the rivalry between the charms of the Muses and of 
 Nature, and the surpassingness of the former. Again, 
 the use of the word " enrapture," for the joy which 
 the divine voices diffuse through the moon-lit air, is 
 a stroke of genius in itself, so happily does it convey 
 the identification of the singer with the scene, and 
 with so much simple stateliness of effect. Or take 
 this lovely picture of Thames scenery near Oxford 
 in "The Scholar Gipsy," — a picture that is the perfect 
 embodiment of " sweetness and light " : — 
 
 " For most, I know, thou lov'st retired ground ! 
 Thee, at the ferry, Oxford riders blithe, 
 
 Returning home on summer nights, have met 
 Crossing the stripling Thames at Bab-lock-hithe, 
 
 Trailing in the cool stream thy fingers wet, 
 
 As the punt's rope chops round ; 
 And leaning backward in a pensive dream, 
 
 And fostering in thy laj) a heap of flowers 
 
 Pluck'd in shy fields and distant Wychwood bowers, 
 And thine eyes resting on the moonlit stream ! " 
 
 It would be impossible to express the tenderness 
 of feeling which scenery long loved and studied 
 excites in the heart — not by its mere beauty, but by 
 its associations also — with more perfect simplicity, 
 and yet not without grandeur of movement and 
 dignity of feeling. The latter effect is gained partly 
 by the cadence of the verse, which in this poem is 
 always perfectly musical and sedate, and partly by 
 the character of the expression, for instance, by a 
 tinge of gentle condescension (as in the expression 
 "the stripling Thames"), and the careful benignity 
 of the whole detail. The simplicity is gained partly 
 by the perfectly jjoetical and yet technical natural- 
 ness of the line, "As the punt's rope chops round," 
 which is poetical, because it brings the peculiar motion
 
 VII THE POETKY OF MATTHEW AKNOLD 335 
 
 SO vividly before yon ; partly by the bappy tender- 
 ness of the line, "Fostering in thy lap a heap of 
 flowers," to convey the conscious pleasure of both 
 tending and touching them ; but mostly by the per- 
 fectly easy flow of the language, and the still lucidity 
 of the verse. But Mr. Arnold hardly exercises the 
 full magic of his characteristic power of jDoetical 
 expression until he is in the mood in which some 
 sad, though calm, emotion is the predominant thread 
 of his thought, and natural beauty only the auxiliary 
 to it; till he is in the mood in which, if his heart 
 flies to his eyes, it is only to find some illustration 
 for the enigmas pent up within it, some new image 
 for the incommunicability of human joy and grief, 
 for the pain that results from the division of the 
 soul against itself, for the restlessness which yearns 
 inconsistently for sympathy and for solitude, and 
 rebounds like a shuttlecock from the one desire to 
 the other. No line, for instance, in the whole range 
 of English poetiy is fuller of depth of expression 
 than that which closes one of the poems to Marguerite, 
 the poem which begins with the sad cry — 
 
 " Yes ! in the sea of life enisled. 
 With echoing straits between us thrown, 
 Dotting the shoreless, watery wild, 
 "We mortal millions live alone." 
 
 — where Mr. Arnold ends his melancholy reverie by 
 confessing that it was God's mil which decreed this 
 strange isolation — 
 
 " And bade betwixt their shores to be 
 The unflumVcl, salt, estranging sea." 
 
 That last line is inexhaustible in beauty and force. 
 Without any false emphasis or prolix dwelling on the 
 matter, it shadows out to you the plunging deep-sea
 
 336 THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 VII 
 
 lead and the eerie cry of "no soundings," it recalls 
 that saltness of the sea which takes from water every 
 refreshing association, every quality that helps to 
 slake thirst or supply sap, and then it concentrates all 
 these dividing attributes, which strike a sort of lonely 
 terror into the soul, into the one word " estranging." 
 It is a line full of intensity, simplicity, and grandeur 
 — a line to possess and haunt the imagination. And 
 the same exceptional force of expression comes out 
 not unfrequently under the shadow of similar emotions. 
 Nothing, for instance, can have more force of its 
 peculiar kind than the description of the blended 
 delight in Nature and disappointment in Man felt by 
 the French recluse, the author of " Obermann," who 
 fled from the world he disdained to brood over its 
 maladies in French woods and Swiss huts — 
 
 " In the lone brakes of Fontainebleau, 
 Or chalets near the Alpine snow." 
 
 There is a mixed simplicity and exaltation of 
 feeling in the following lines, which few English 
 poets have surpassed : — 
 
 " I turn thy leaves ! I feel thy breath 
 Once more upon nie roll ; 
 That air of languor, cold, and death, 
 Which brooded o'er thy soul. 
 
 " A fever in these pages burns 
 Beneath the calm they feign ; 
 A wcainded human spirit turns, 
 Here, on its bed of pain. 
 
 " Yes, though the virgin mountain air 
 Fresh through these pages blows, 
 Though to these leaves the glaciers spare 
 The soul of their mute snows ;
 
 vn THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD 337 
 
 " Though here a mountain-murmur swells 
 Of many a dark-bough'd pine, 
 Though, as you read, you hear the bells 
 Of the high-j)asturing kine — 
 
 "Yet, through the hum of torrent lone, 
 And brooding mountain-bee, 
 There sobs I know not what ground tone 
 Of human agony ! " 
 
 Nor is the opening of this poem at all more char- 
 acteristic of the special power of its author than its 
 close. There is indeed something, more almost of 
 peroration than of the last swell of a lyric emotion, in 
 the poet's adieu to the hero of his reverie : — 
 
 " Farewell ! Under the sky we part. 
 In this stern Alpine dell. 
 O unstrung will ! broken heart, 
 A last, a last farewell ! " 
 
 And that leads me to remark how very near 
 poetry of this order — the predominant emotion of 
 which, however sad, is always sedate and stately in 
 its movement — often approaches to the nobler rhe- 
 toric, — of which, indeed, grandeur of total effect, 
 with simplicity of elementary structure, are the main 
 conditions. The object of the verse I have just 
 quoted seems to be almost as nearly one of per- 
 suasion, i.e. oratorical, as one of expression, i.e. 
 poetical. It reads more like an indirect but con- 
 scious effort to subdue the reader's mind into a mood 
 of compassionate admiration for the author of "Ober- 
 mann," than a mere utterance of the poet's o-wn feel- 
 ing ; — it is more eloquent than pathetic. And where, 
 as often happens in other poems — in the very fine 
 continuation of this same poem, for instance — Mr. 
 Arnold's thread of sentiment is much more directly 
 
 L Z
 
 338 THE POETKY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD Til 
 
 didactic than it is here {and this is especially the case 
 in his pieces of unrhymed recitative, where the leading 
 idea is usually a train of thought rather than feeling, 
 and very frequently a train of very directly hortative 
 or argumentative thought), the rhetorical often pre- 
 dominates greatly over the poetical vein, and seems 
 to court direct comparison rather with the effusions 
 of the improvisatore than with those of the singer. 
 In such pieces the verse fails — when it does fail — as 
 the inspiration of the improvisatore fails, more from 
 a subsidence of the initial impulse, than from artistic 
 exhaustion of the theme, or inadequate command of 
 language to Avork out fully the conception of the 
 imagination. Take, for instance, among the rhymed 
 pieces, the eloqvient indictment brought against Death, 
 as if it involved a sort of breach of faith Avith the 
 instinctive youthful hope for some fulness of earthly 
 rapture, in the piece called "Youth and Calm." No 
 one can read it Avithout noticing the regularly mount- 
 ing steps of an impassioned speech, rather than the im- 
 perceptibly graduated concentration of feeling natural 
 to a lyrical poem : — 
 
 "But all, though peace, indeed, is here. 
 And ease from shame, and rest from fear, 
 Though nothing can dismarble now 
 The smoothness of that limpid broAv, 
 Yet is a calm like this, in truth. 
 The croAA'ning end of life and youth ? 
 And when this boon rew^ards the dead, 
 Are all debts paid, has all been said ? 
 And is the heart of youth so light, 
 Its step so firm, its eye so bright. 
 Because on its hot l)row there blows 
 A wind of promise and repose 
 From the far grave, to which it goes ?
 
 vn THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD 339 
 
 Because it has the hope to come, 
 One day, to harbour in the tomb ? 
 Ah no, the bliss youth dreams is one 
 For daylight, for the cheerful sun, 
 For feeling nerves and living breath — 
 Youth dreams a bliss on this side death ! 
 It dreams a rest, if not more deep, 
 More grateful than this marble sleep ; 
 It hears a voice within it tell : 
 Calm's not life's croum, thongh calm is well I 
 'Tis all perhaps which man acquires. 
 But 'tis not what our youth desires."^ 
 
 Only here, what should be the peroration is an 
 anticlimax. The best illustrations, however, of the 
 rhetorical cast of a good deal of Mr. Arnold's poetry 
 are to be found in the recitatives which find so much 
 favour in his sight, but in which the perfect simplicity 
 and lucidity of structure of his rhymed poems are 
 sometimes — not always — remarkably deficient. The 
 music of rhymed verse always seems to bind him down 
 to the simpler ranges of human experience. He 
 does not resemble Shelley, who, like his own sky- 
 lark, sings the more sweetly the higher he rises into 
 the rarefied air of abstract essences. On the con- 
 trary, Mr. Arnold is always awakened to homelier 
 feelings by the melody of verse, and is never so lucid 
 and concrete as when he has to meet the exigencies 
 of a complex stanza such as he uses in " The Scholar- 
 Gipsy," and "Thyrsis." The little speech which I 
 have just quoted on the contrast between the youthful 
 hopes of earthly bliss and the sad calm of early death 
 is rhetorical in structure, but it is the pathetic rhetoric 
 
 ^ I have taken this poem in its earliest form — in ' ' Poems by 
 A." Mr. Arnold's modifications of old poems seem to me to be 
 seldom changes for the better.
 
 340 THE POETKY OF MATTHEW AENOLD vii 
 
 of a troubled heart, descanting on the experience of 
 almost every home. When, however, Mr. Arnold 
 chooses the unrhymed dactylic or anapaestic metres 
 for his oratory, though he is often extremely eloquent, 
 and sometimes even rich in pictorial effect, he is apt 
 to be cold and grandiose, and now and then even to 
 be obscure — a sin of which he is rarely indeed guilty. 
 The contrast may be best seen, though it would be im- 
 possible in any small space to illustrate it adequately, 
 in the comparison between the second poem addressed 
 to the author of "Obermann"("Obermann Once More," 
 vol. ii. p. 239), and the poem which folloAvs it, and 
 closes the volumes, called The F^dure. They are on 
 kindred subjects, the first tracing the signs of the 
 immediate future of modern religion ; the second, 
 the relation generally of the tendencies of the Future 
 to those of the Past. The Pantheistic vein of thought 
 and sentiment pervades both poems alike, — and it is 
 one which, as I need hardly say, runs counter to my 
 own deepest convictions, — but there is a vast diflfer- 
 ence between the two as poems. The former is full 
 of human yearning and pathos, of definite picture, 
 and clear imagery ; the latter is a dim vapour of 
 eloquent dissertation, in which, indeed, there are 
 vaguely seen some of the bright tints of the rainbow, 
 but there is no wai'mth and no clearness ; it is 
 grandiose without grandeur, nebulous without mys- 
 tery. Within moderate limits I do not know that I 
 can give a finer specimen at once of the frequently 
 high oratory of these choric outbursts of Mr. Arnold's 
 didactic genius, and also of the frequent tendency in 
 them to overpass the impulse which gave them birth, 
 than in the deservedly celebrated lines at Heine's 
 grave, in Avhich Mr. Arnold passes from criticism of 
 the bitter German poet into a grand image for this
 
 VII THE POETKY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD 341 
 
 Philistine nation of ours — for its blindness and its 
 strength ; but unfortunately does not stop there, 
 falling into bathos as he proceeds : — 
 
 " I chide thee not, that thy sharp 
 Upbraidiiigs often assail'd 
 England, my country ; for we, 
 Troublous and sad, for her sons, 
 Long since, deep in our hearts. 
 Echo the blame of her foes. 
 We, too, sigh that she flags ! 
 We, too, say that she now, 
 Scarce comprehending the voice 
 Of her greatest, golden-mouth'd sons 
 Of a former age any more. 
 Stupidly travels her round 
 Of mechanic business, and lets 
 Slow die out of her life 
 Glory, and genius, and joy ! 
 
 " So thou arraign'st her, her foe. 
 So we arraign her, her sons. 
 
 " Yes, we arraign her ! but she, 
 The weary Titan ! with deaf 
 Ears, and labour-dimm'd eyes, 
 Regarding neither to right 
 Nor left, goes passively by. 
 Staggering on to her goal ; 
 Bearing on shoulders immense, 
 Atlantean, the load, 
 Well-nigh not to be borne, 
 Of the too vast orb of her fate. 
 
 " But was it thou — I think 
 Surely it was — that bard 
 Unnamed, who, Goethe said. 
 Had every other gift, but ivanted love ; 
 Love, without which the tongue 
 Even of angels sounds amiss ?
 
 342 THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD vii 
 
 " Charm is the glory which makes 
 Song of the poet divine ; 
 Love is the fountain of charm ! 
 How without charm wilt thou draw, 
 Poet ! the world to thy way ? 
 Not by the lightnings of wit ! 
 Not by the thunder of scorn ! 
 These to the world, too, are given ; 
 Wit it possesses, and scorn — 
 Charm is the poet's alone. — 
 Hollow and dull are the great, 
 And artists envious, and the mob profane. 
 We know all this, we know ! 
 Cam'st thou from heaven, child 
 Of light ! but this to declare ? 
 Alas ! to help us forget 
 Such barren knowledge awhile, 
 God gave the poet his song." 
 
 It would be hard to find a higher piece of pure 
 pictorial oratory than that description of England ; — 
 as regards style, Mr. Bright, if he held with Mr. 
 Arnold, which of course he does not, might almost 
 have delivered it in one of his greater speeches ; — 
 and hard, too, to find a bathos deeper than the flat, 
 harsh, somewhat stilted prose, not even rhythmical, 
 though it is printed in metre, which immediately 
 follows, especially the lines which Mr. Arnold itali- 
 cises in the last two stanzas. The same may be said 
 of almost all his recitative pieces. They contain frag- 
 ments of high oratory, but they are coldly intellectual, 
 and tend to a grandiosity from which the fall to flat 
 prose is not difficult. 
 
 And it is, indeed, Mr. Arnold's chief defect as a 
 poet and artist that the themes Avhich intei-est him 
 most are seldom living and organic wholes, but are 
 rather trains of thought sufficiently fascinating to the
 
 VII THE POETKY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD 343 
 
 imagination and to the feelings, but without definite 
 form and organisation ; in fact, subjects Avhich neces- 
 sarily lend themselves more easily to the irregular 
 rhythmic improvisations to which we have just referred, 
 than to more perfect forms of verse. Even when he 
 adopts these more perfect forms, it is rather for the 
 sake of the pathos of elegiac moods than for the com- 
 pleteness they give to the framework of an artistic 
 whole. Of all his so-called narrative-poems, most of 
 which are, indeed, usually reflective rather than 
 narrative, " The Sick King in Bokhara " is the only 
 one that strikes me as reaching anything like the 
 higher levels of Mr. Arnold's force. "Sohrab and 
 Rustum," polished and elegant as it is, is tame beyond 
 anything that the story can account for. The long 
 Homeric similes are often extremely beautiful, the 
 subject itself is genuinely tragic, the style is classical ; 
 there is nothing to account for its tameness except 
 the tameness itself. It is evident that the author 
 felt no throbs of heart as he brought the gallant son 
 into the fatal conflict with the gallant father. He 
 looked on it with the polished interest of an Oxford 
 scholar in an episode of Oriental tradition, but "with- 
 out the slightest touch of that animated sympathy 
 and vivid suspense which Scott would have thrown 
 into such a theme. It is not till we get to the 
 beautiful description of the northward course of the 
 Oxus, when Rustum is left with the corpse of his son 
 lying beside him on the plain, enveloped in midnight 
 and despair, that we feel the true charm of the poet, 
 and then the story is over. " Balder Dead " has to 
 my ears even less interest than "Sohrab and Rustum." 
 " Tristram and Iseult " is a great advance on either, 
 and is unquestionably a very fine fragment ; but it 
 has little title to the name of a narrative-poem at all.
 
 344 THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD vii 
 
 Mr. Arnold borrows the Arthurian legend only to 
 give a beautiful picture of the ship■\^Teck of unhappy- 
 passions in a double form, in the feverish and restless 
 delirium of the dying knight, and in the hollow 
 disappointed youth of Iseult of Brittany after she 
 has survived her husband and her grander rival. 
 Iseult of Ireland is hardly painted, except in face 
 and form ; she only kneels beside her lover's death- 
 bed to die with him, and lend her outward image to 
 the poet's picture. But it would be difficult to speak 
 too highly of the exquisite and lucid painting of the 
 scene of Tristram's death in the Breton Castle, beneath 
 those " ghost-like tajDestries " on which are figured the 
 green huntsman, with his bugle and hounds, so dear 
 to the sylvan knight in lifetime, vnth the Irish queen 
 kneeling, also dead, at his bedside, both of them — 
 
 " Cold, cold as those who lived and loved 
 A thousand years ago " ; 
 
 or of Iseult of Brittany, of the white hands, in the 
 subsequent part, living, after her husband's and rival's 
 deaths, the joyless life of one who had sought, but 
 found not, the happiness of love, and who survives in 
 the happiness of her children as in a kind of moonlit 
 dream : — 
 
 " Joy has not found her yet, nor ever will — 
 Is it this thought that makes her mien so still. 
 Her features so fatigued, her eyes, though sweet. 
 So sunk, so rarely lifted save to meet 
 Her children's ? She moves slow ; her voice alone 
 Hath yet an infantine and silver tone, 
 But even that comes languidly ; in truth, 
 She seems one dying in a mask of youth." 
 
 No picture could be sweeter or fairer. Mr. 
 Arnold has a special gift for the delineation of these
 
 VII THE POETEY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD 345 
 
 moods of passionless pain — of still moonlit craving 
 that is never hot and never satisfied. But the beauty 
 of the poem certainly does not lie in the strength of 
 its narrative, but in its exquisite delineation of the 
 feelings of death-chilled passion and of joyless calm. 
 " The Forsaken Merman " — a very delicate little poem 
 of its kind — is again hardly in any sense a narrative- 
 poem. It is a pretty fanciful song full of picture, of 
 which the living pulse is the innocent childish heart- 
 longing of a bemldered, instinctive, unmasterful love 
 conscious of the existence of a rivalry in the claims 
 of religious feelings into which it cannot enter, and 
 yet full of painful yearning. This is always the tj^pe 
 of feeling which Mr. Arnold paints most finely. 
 
 But far higher are the pretensions of " The Sick 
 King in Bokhara." Slight as the subject is, the poem 
 is full of life, and paints not merely a new phase of 
 that painful calm or placid suffering in which Mr. 
 Arnold so much excels, but the richness and stateli- 
 ness, and also the prostration and fatalism, of Oriental 
 life ; and it is especially happy in portraying vividly 
 the concrete simplicities of Eastern imagery when 
 expressing desire and regret. The grave, business-like 
 local colour of the opening is in itself full of promise : — 
 
 Hussein. — 
 
 " most just Vizier, send away 
 The cloth-merchants, and let them be, 
 Them and their dues, this day ! the Kiug 
 Is ill at ease, and calls for thee." 
 
 The Vizier. — 
 
 " merchants, tarry yet a day 
 Here in Bokhara ! but at noon 
 To-morrow, come, and ye shall pay 
 Each fortieth web of cloth to me, 
 As the law is, and go your way."
 
 346 THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD vii 
 
 And then the story of the poor man who, in the 
 intensity of his thirst, during the long drought, had 
 secreted a pitcher of water for his own use, and when 
 he found it drained had cursed those who drained 
 it, his own mother amongst them, and who in his 
 remorse called upon the King to give judgment upon 
 him that he might be stoned and expiate his sin as 
 the law demanded, and the delineation of the King's 
 extreme reluctance, are given with the most genuine 
 force and simplicity. The King's gi'eat desire to 
 spare the man, and the orders given for that purpose, 
 of which it is pithily said, 
 
 " As the King said, so was it done," 
 
 the man's indignation at this hesitation to judge and 
 punish him, the King's loth consent at last, and the 
 fanatical joy of the victim, are painted with some- 
 thing like the grand simplicity of the Hebrew Scrip- 
 tures : — 
 
 " Now the King charged us secretly : 
 ' Stoned must he be, the law stands so. 
 Yet, if he seeks to fly, give way ! 
 Hinder him not, but let him go.' 
 
 ' ' So saying, the King took a stone, 
 And cast it softly ; — but the man, 
 With a great joy upon his face, 
 Kneel'd down, and cried not, neither ran." 
 
 And, perhaps, the most dramatic thing in the whole 
 range of Mr. Arnold's poems is the scornful reproof 
 administered by the old Vizier, when he has heard 
 the story, to the King's weakness and softness of 
 heart : — 
 
 TJie Vizier. — 
 
 " O King, in this I praise thee not ! 
 Now must I call thy grief not wise.
 
 VII THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD 347 
 
 Is he thy friend, or of thy blood, 
 To find such favour in tliine eyes 1 
 
 " Nay, were he thine own mother's son. 
 Still thou art king, and the law stands. 
 It were not meet the balance swerved, 
 The sword were broken in thy hands. 
 
 " But being nothing, as he is. 
 Why for no cause make sad thy face ? — 
 Lo, I am old ! three kings, ere thee, 
 Have I seen reigning in this place. 
 
 " But who, through all this length of time, 
 Could bear the burden of his years. 
 If he for strangers pain'd his heart 
 Not less than those who merit tears ? 
 
 " Fathers we miist have, wife and child, 
 And grievous is the grief for these ; 
 This pain alone which must be borne. 
 Makes the head white, and bows the knees. 
 
 " But other loads than this his own 
 One man is not well made to bear. 
 Besides, to each are his own friends. 
 To mourn with him and show him care. 
 
 " Look, this is but one single place. 
 Though it be great ; all the earth round. 
 If a man bear to have it so, 
 Things which might vex him shall be found. 
 
 ' ' Upon the Russian frontier, where 
 The watchers of two armies stand 
 Near one another, many a man. 
 Seeking a prey unto his hand, 
 
 " Hath snatch'd a little fair-haired slave ; 
 They snatch also, towards Merve, 
 The Shiah dogs, who pasture sheep, 
 And up from thence to Orgunje.
 
 348 THE POETRY OF MATTHEW AENOLD vii 
 
 " And these all, labouring for a lord, 
 Eat not the fruit of their own hands ; 
 Which is the heaviest of all plagues, 
 To that man's mind, who understands, 
 
 " The kafl&rs also (whom God curse !) 
 Vex one another, night and day ; 
 There are the lepers, and all sick ; 
 There are the poor, who faint alway. 
 
 " All these have sorrow, and keep still. 
 Whilst other men make cheer, and sing. 
 Wilt thou have pity on all these ? 
 No, nor on this dead dog, King ! " 
 
 Mr. Arnold has never achieved anything so truly 
 dramatic as this poem. The reasoning, never in the 
 abstract, but always by examples, which runs through 
 it, the profound abasement of mind before the de- 
 mands of the admitted conditions of social existence, 
 the utter acquiescence of the sage old minister's 
 intellect in the order of things as he knows it, the 
 wonder and distress of the young King that his own 
 urgent desire is of so little account when he would 
 alleviate the lot of one human being whom he pities, 
 and the kicking of his nature against the pricks of 
 the iron circle which limits his royal power, are all 
 painted with a brightness and care which would 
 almost argue a special Oriental culture, though I do not 
 suppose that Mr. Arnold has had any exceptional 
 opportunities in that direction. Of the poems which 
 are called narrative, this is in my opinion the only 
 one, rightly so] called, that is perfectly successful. 
 And perhaps its perfect success is due to the curious 
 correspondence between the elements of the story 
 and the pecidiar tendencies I have already noticed in 
 Mr. Arnold's genius. The stately egotism of manner,
 
 VII THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD 349 
 
 which has here full swing and a great field, the dig- 
 nified remorse which breeds so resolute a s^Dirit of 
 expiation in the sinner's mind, the sedate dignities of 
 the King's helplessness, the contemptuous criticism 
 of the Grand Vizier on the unreasonable excess of 
 his master's sympathy with one who had no natural 
 claims on him, and the extreme simplicity of the 
 whole action, all seem to fit the subject specially for 
 Mr. Arnold's treatment. At all events, as to the brill- 
 iant clearness and rich colouring of the completed 
 whole, there can be no two opinions. It seems to me 
 nearly the only case in which Mr. Arnold has chosen 
 a subject distinct and perfect in its parts, and com- 
 plete as a Avhole — a subject of which you cannot say 
 that he brought it to a conclusion chiefly because it 
 must end somewhere, and had exhausted his own 
 interest in it. This piece is the one exception to the 
 rule that Mr. Arnold's best poems are not artistic 
 wholes, which come to a necessary and natural end 
 because their structure is organically perfect, but 
 rather fragments of imaginative reverie, which begin 
 where the poet begins to meditate, and end when he 
 has done. 
 
 It must not be supposed, however, that I regard 
 the art of those of Mr. Arnold's poems which are 
 expressly elegiac and lyrical as generally poor. On 
 the contrary, as it is of the essence of pieces of this 
 kind to reflect absolutely the mood of the poet, to 
 begin where he begins and end where he ends, the 
 only artistic demand which can possibly be applic- 
 able to the structure of such pieces, is that it shall 
 show you the groAvth and subsidence of a vein of 
 thought and emotion, and make no abrupt demands 
 on the sympathy of the reader. This, at all events 
 in almost all his rhymed pieces of a lyrical and
 
 350 THE POETRY OF MATTHEW AENOLD vii 
 
 elegiac nature, Mr. Arnold effects with the greatest 
 delicacy and modulation of feeling ; in the others 
 he is not unfrequently stranded on bare prose, and 
 compelled to leap back with a very jerky movement 
 into the tide of his emotion. But from his highest 
 moods of reverie he subsides, by the help of some 
 beautiful picture of scenery in harmony with the 
 emotions he is delineating, as in the lovely Alpine 
 sketches of his " Obermann," or with some graceful 
 episode of illustration, like the beautiful comparison 
 between the wandering Scholar Gipsy's dread of the 
 contagion of our hesitating half-love of Nature, 
 which hugs the shore of artificial civilisation, and 
 the old Tyrian skipper's Avrath against the Greek 
 coaster, Avho troubled his realm by timid competition, 
 and yet never dared to launch out into the shoreless 
 ocean. No art can be more perfect than that with 
 which Mr. Arnold closes the finer of his lyrical and 
 elegiac poems — poems, however, of which it is the 
 very essence to reflect his own reveries, not to paint 
 any continuous whole. 
 
 AVhen I come to ask what Mr. Arnold's poetry has 
 done for this generation, the answer must be that no 
 one has expressed more powerfully and poetically its 
 spiritual Aveaknesses, its craving for a passion that it 
 cannot feel, its admiration for a self-mastery that it 
 cannot achieve, its desire for a creed that it fails to 
 accept, its sympathy with a faith that it will not 
 share, its aspiration for a peace that it does not know. 
 But Mr. Arnold does all this from the intellectual 
 side, — sincerely and delicately, but from the surface, 
 and never from the centre. It is the same with his 
 criticisms. They are fine, they are keen, they are 
 often true, but they are always too much limited to 
 the thin superficial layer of the moral nature of their
 
 VIi THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD 351 
 
 subjects, and seem to take little comparative interest 
 in the deeper individuality beneath. Kead 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 with comparative indifter- 
 ence over the true soul of Heine, the fountain both 
 of his poetry and his cynicism. Read his fine 
 lectvu-es on translating Homer, and observe how 
 exclusively the critic's mind is occupied with the 
 form, as distinguished from the substance, of the 
 Homeric poetry. Even when he concerns himself 
 Avith the greatest modern poets, with Shakespeare 
 (as in the preface to the earlier edition of his 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 pene- 
 trates the husks of conventional thought which 
 mislead the crowd ; whether there is sweetness as 
 well as lucidity in his aims ; whether a descriptive 
 wi'iter has " distinction " of style, or is admirable 
 only for his vivacity ; but he rarely goes to the 
 individual heart of any of the subjects of his criti- 
 cism ;— he describes their style and class, but not their 
 personality in that class ; he ra7iks his men, but does 
 not portray them ; hardly even seems to find much 
 interest in the individual roots of their character. 
 And so, too, with his main poetical theme, — the 
 spiritual weakness and languor and self- disdain of 
 the age. He paints these characteristics in language 
 Avhich makes his poems a sort of natural voice for
 
 352 THE POETKY OF MATTHEW AENOLD vii 
 
 the experience of Ms contemporaries, a voice without 
 which their intellectual life would be even more 
 obscure and confused than it is ; but still with a 
 certain intellectual superficiality of touch which 
 suggests the symj)athetic observer rather than the 
 wakeful sufferer, and which leaves an unfathomed 
 depth beneath the layer of perturbed consciousness 
 A\dth which he deals— that is, beneath that plane 
 wherein the spheres of the intellect and of the soul 
 intersect, of which he has so carefully studied the 
 currents and the tides. The sign of this limitation, 
 of this exclusion, of this externality of touch, is the 
 tinge of conscious intellectual majesty rearing its 
 head above the storm '\\dth the " Quos ego " of 
 Virgil's god, that never forsakes these poems of Mr. 
 Arnold's even when their " lyrical cry " is most 
 pathetic. It is this which identifies him "\\dth the 
 sceptics, which renders his poems, pathetic as they 
 often are, no adequate expression of the passionate 
 craving of the soul for faith. There is always a 
 tincture of pride in his confessed inability to believe 
 —a self -congratulation that he is too clear -eyed to 
 yield to the temptations of the heart. He asks with 
 compassionate imperiousness for demonstration rather 
 than conviction ; conviction he will not take Avithout 
 demonstration. The true humility of the yearning 
 for faith is far from Mr. Ai'nold's conception. The 
 Poet Laureate's picture of himself, as 
 
 " Falling with my weight of cares 
 Upon the world's great altar stairs 
 That slope through darkness up to God," 
 
 is a very great contrast indeed to Mr. Arnold's grand 
 air of tearful Virgilian regret as he gazes on the pale 
 ascetic faces of the Carthusian monks, and delivers 
 himself thus : —
 
 VII THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD 353 
 
 "Wandering between two worlds, one dead, 
 The other powerless to be born, 
 With nowhere yet to rest my head, 
 Like these, on earth I wait forlorn. 
 Their faith, my tears, the world deride ; 
 I come to shed theni at their side." 
 
 His vision of Christ and Christianity even, is 
 wholly taken from the same standing- point of genu- 
 ine but condescending sympathy. He can see how- 
 much greater the Christian Church was than the 
 Roman world it subdued ; but to him it is greater 
 not through the truth of its belief, but through that 
 vast capacity of belief which enabled it to accept 
 what was not true, — in short, to feign a truth higher 
 than the naked facts. No passage in Mr. Arnold's 
 poems is, perhaps, so grand as the one which de- 
 lineates this contrast, with its majestic though false 
 and desolating assumption that it was the mighty 
 dreaming power of the East, the power to create the 
 objects of its own belief, which conquered the hard 
 organisation of the West ; and as no passage is so 
 characteristic of Mr. Arnold's whole relation to the 
 thought of his day, with it, though it is somewhat 
 long, I will close my too voluminous extracts from his 
 stately and fascinating jDoems : — 
 
 " Wellnigh two thousand years have brought 
 Their load, and gone away, 
 Since last on earth there lived and wrought 
 A world like ours to-day. 
 
 " Like ours it look'd in outward air! 
 But of that inward prize, 
 Sold, that we take more count and care. 
 All ! there our future lies.^ 
 
 ^ This flat and unfortunate verse, as it seems to me, has been 
 inserted by Mr. Arnold in bis second edition to make his 
 L 2 A
 
 354 THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD vii 
 
 " Like ours it look'd in outward air ! — • 
 Its head was clear and true, 
 Sumptuous its clothing, rich its fare, 
 No pause its action knew ; 
 
 " Stout was its arm, each thew and bone 
 Seem'd puissant and alive — 
 But, ah ! its heart, its heart was stone. 
 And so it could not thrive. 
 
 " On that hard Pagan world disgust 
 And secret loathing fell ; 
 Deep weariness and sated lust 
 Made human life a hell. 
 
 " In his cool hall, with haggard eyes, 
 The Roman noble lay ; 
 He drove abroad, in furious guise, 
 Along the Appian way ; 
 
 " He made a feast, drank fierce and fast, 
 And crown'd his hair with flowers — 
 No easier nor no quicker pass'd 
 The impracticable hours. 
 
 " The brooding East with awe beheld 
 Her impious younger world. 
 The Roman tempest swell'd and swell'd, 
 And on her head was hurl'd. 
 
 " The East bow'd low before the blast 
 In patient, deep disdain ; 
 She let the legions thunder past, 
 And plunged in thought again. 
 
 " So well she mused, a morning broke 
 Across her spirit gray. 
 A conquering, new-born joy awoke, 
 And fill'd her life with day. 
 
 doctrine of the religion of the future seem more hopeful. It is 
 a prosaic doctrinal graft unworthy of the poet.
 
 Yii THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD 355 
 
 " ' Poor world,' she cried, ' so deep accurst ! 
 That runn'st from pole to pole 
 To seek a draught to slake thy thirst — 
 Go, seek it in thy soul ! ' 
 
 " She heard it, the victorious West, 
 In crown and sword array'd ! 
 She felt the void which mined her hreast, 
 She shiver'd and obey'd, 
 
 '' She veil'd her eagles, snapp'd her sword. 
 And laid her sceptre down ; 
 Her stately purple she abhorr'd, 
 And her imperial crown ; 
 
 " She broke her flutes, she stopp'd her sports. 
 Her artists could not please ; 
 She tore her books, she shut her courts, 
 She fled her palaces. 
 
 " Lust of the eye and pride of life, 
 She left it all behind — 
 And hurried, torn with inward strife, 
 The wilderness to find. 
 
 " Tears wash'd the trouble from her face ! 
 She changed into a child ! 
 'Mid weeds and wrecks she stood — a place 
 Of ruin — but she smiled ! 
 
 ' ' Oh, had I lived in that great day, 
 How had its glory new 
 Fill'd earth and heaven, and caught away 
 My ravish'd spirit too ! 
 
 " No cloister-floor of humid stone 
 Had been too cold for me ; 
 For me no Eastern desert lone 
 Had been too far to flee.
 
 356 THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD vil 
 
 " No thouglits that to tlie world belong 
 Had stood against the wave 
 Of love which set so deep and strong 
 From Christ's then open grave. 
 
 " No lonely life had pass'd too slow 
 When I could hourly see 
 
 That wan, nail'd Form, with head droop'd low, 
 Upon the bitter tree ; 
 
 " Could see the Mother with the Child 
 Whose tender winning arts 
 Have to his little arms beguiled 
 
 a^ 
 
 So many wounded hearts ! 
 
 " And centuries came, and ran their course, 
 And unspent all that time 
 Still, still went forth that Child's dear force, 
 And still was at its prime. 
 
 " Ay, ages long endured his span 
 Of life, 'tis true received. 
 
 That gracious Child, that thorn-crown'd Man ! 
 He lived while we believed. 
 
 " While we believed, on earth He went, 
 And open stood His grave ; 
 Men call'd from chamber, church, and tent. 
 And Christ was by to save. 
 
 " Now he is dead ! Far hence he lies 
 In the lorn Syrian town. 
 And on his grave, with shining eyes, 
 The Syrian stars look down. 
 
 " In vain men still, with hoping new. 
 Regard his death-place dumb, 
 And say tlie stone is not yet to, 
 And wait for words to come.
 
 vit THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD 357 
 
 " All, from that silent sacred land, 
 Of sun, and arid stone. 
 And crumbling wall, and sultry sand, 
 Comes now one word alone ! 
 
 f 
 
 " From David's lips this word did roll, 
 'Tis true and living yet ; 
 No man can save his brother's soul, 
 Nor pay his brother's debt. 
 
 "Alone, self-poised, henceforward man 
 Must labour ! must resign 
 His all too human creeds, and scan 
 Simply the way divine." 
 
 It would have been impossible to paint more 
 grandly the hard pageantry of Roman civilisation, 
 or more imaginatively the apparently magic victory 
 of the brooding mystic over the armed conqueror. 
 But when Mr. Arnold paints the "patient deep 
 disdain " of the East for physical might as the power 
 by which it won its miraculous victory, he is invert- 
 ing strangely the testimony of history, — indeed he is 
 reading his own lofty intellectualism back into the 
 past. The East has always been accused of bowing 
 with even too deep a prostration of soul before the 
 omnipotent fiat of the Almighty. It was the Eastern 
 delight in that semi-fatalism which gave Mahommed 
 his strange spell over the Eastern imagination ; nay, 
 it was the same fascinated submission to the finger 
 of sheer Power which is occasionally so intensely 
 expressed even in the Hebrew prophets as to read to 
 Christian ears as if God were above righteousness, 
 and as if responsibility could be merged in obedience. 
 If there were any disdain in the Eastern feeling 
 towards the armies of Rome, it was not disdain for 
 the Roman power, but for the Roman weakness —
 
 358 THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD vii 
 
 that inaccessibility of the West to whispers of the 
 soul which seemed to the Eastern mystic the oracles 
 of a power far greater than the Roman, and of one 
 before which the Eoman would be broken in pieces. 
 In other words, what the East disdained in Eome 
 was its want of listening power, not its want of 
 dreaming power, of which the Oriental world always 
 knew too well the relaxing and enervating influence. 
 It was too much dreaming which had brought it into 
 subjection to Rome, and further dreaming would 
 only make subjection more abject. Had Christ, or 
 rather His ideal image, "received," as Mr. Arnold 
 here says, from the enthusiastic reverie of the East, 
 the gift of a spiritual ascendancy which there was 
 no real divine Christ to exercise, the peculiar 
 strength of the East must have been precisely iden- 
 tical ^vith its peculiar weakness — namely, its faculty 
 for believing that to be due to a living PoAver, out- 
 side the mind, which was in truth only the unreal 
 image of the mind itself. The power which could 
 break to pieces hosts of legions was not in the 
 dreamer, but in Him who awakened the dreamer and 
 dispelled the dream. And it was not " disdain," but 
 " humility," by which the East learned to thrill to 
 the authority of this imperious whisper of the soul 
 — this " foolishness " of faith. 
 
 And for us, too, it is not disdain, but humility, 
 which must help us to recover the loss which Mr. 
 Arnold so pathetically bewails, but which his poetry 
 implicitly expresses also a deep reluctance to supply. 
 The old paradox is as true to-day as it was when St. 
 Paul proclaimed that the weak things of the world 
 should confound the mighty, and the things Avhich 
 were not should bring to nought the things which 
 were. Perhaps I may paraphrase the same truth,
 
 VII THE POETEY OF MATTHEW AliNOLD 359 
 
 ill relation to Mr. Arnold's many beautiful expres- 
 sions of the impotence of the intellect to believe, by 
 saying that he never reaches do^vn to the sources of 
 faith, simply because that final act of humility and 
 trust in which faith arises, is always individual, and 
 therefore to him an act of foolishness. Faith is not 
 susceptible of intellectual generalisation, being indeed 
 a living act of the individual soul, which must sur- 
 render itself captive to Christ in a spiritual plane far 
 deeper than that Avhere the dialogue with Doubt, 
 which Mr. Arnold so leisurely dramatises, takes place. 
 Like his own favourite Alpine peak, like 
 
 " Jaman ! delicately tall 
 Above his sun-warm'd firs," 
 
 Mr. Arnold's poetry towers above the warmth of the 
 faith it analyses and rejects, and gains thereby its air 
 of mingled pride and sadness. He seems, indeed, to 
 take a chilling pride in his assertion that Christ is 
 not risen ; that 
 
 " On his grave, with shining eyes 
 The Syrian stars look down " ; 
 
 an assertion which sends a quiver through the heart 
 that has discovered for itself how weak is the life 
 from which the trust in Christ is absent. 
 
 However, Mr. Arnold's poetry is no more the worse, 
 as poetry, for its erroneous spiritual assumptions, than 
 drama is the worse, as drama, for delineating men 
 as they seem to each other to be, and not as they 
 really are to the eye of God. And as the poet of 
 the soul's melancholy hauteur and plaintive benignity, 
 as the exponent of pity for the great excess of her 
 wants beyond her gifts and graces, as the singer at 
 once of the spirit's hunger, of the insufficiency of the
 
 3G0 THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD Vll 
 
 food which the intellect provides for her cravings, 
 and yet also of her fastidious rejection of more 
 heavenly nutriment, Mr. Arnold Avill be read and 
 remembered by every generation in which faith con- 
 tinues to be daunted by reason, and reason to seek, 
 not without pangs of inexplicable compunction, to 
 call in question the transcendental certainties of 
 faith ; in a word, he will be read and remembered, 
 as I said in my opening sentence, as the poet who, 
 more than any other of his day, has embodied in 
 his verse "the sweetness, the gravity, the strength, 
 the beauty, and the languor of death." /
 
 VIII 
 
 TENNYSON 
 
 Lord Tennyson was an artist even before he was a 
 poet ; in other words, the eye for beauty, grace, and 
 harmony of effect was even more emphatically one of 
 his original gifts than the voice for poetical utterance 
 itself. This ; probably it is which makes his very 
 earliest pieces appear so full of effort, and sometimes 
 even so full of affectation. They were elaborate 
 attempts to embody what he saw, before the natural 
 voice of the poet had come to him. Coleridge 
 remarks, in his "Table Talk," that Tennyson 
 had begun to ~\vrite poetry before he knew what 
 metre was. The remark applied, of course, only to 
 his very earliest publication ; and of that it was, I 
 think, true, odd as it now reads in relation to one 
 of the greatest masters of metre, both simple and 
 sonorous, that the English language has ever known. 
 It is interesting as showing how laborious and full 
 of effort his early verse sounded to one of the 
 finest judges of English verse, and so confirming the 
 suspicion that this great poet's vision of beauty had 
 ripened earlier than his poetic faculty for shaping 
 that vision into words. I think it is possible to 
 trace not only a pre-poetic period in his art — the 
 period of the Orianas, Owls, Hermans, etc. — a period
 
 362 ' TENNYSON 
 
 VIII 
 
 in which the p. iii^on " Eecollections of the Arabian 
 Nights " seems to 'me the only one of real interest, 
 and that is a poem expressive of the luxurious 
 sense of a gorgeous inward picture-gallery — but to 
 date the period at which the soul was " infused " 
 into his poetry, and the brilliant external pictures 
 became the dwelling - places of germinating poetic 
 thoughts creating their own music. The Eoman 
 Catholics have, I believe, a doctrine that at a certain 
 stage in the growth of the embryo body the soul 
 is " infused " into it, and from that stage it shapes 
 and moulds all the structures of the body with a 
 view to their subserviency to a moral and spirit- 
 ual growth. Apply that analogy to Tennyson's 
 poems, and the period before 1832 is the period 
 before his vivid pictures had a soul in them, 
 and consequently before they had a music of their 
 own. He himself has told us very finely in one 
 of his newer poems, when describing the building 
 of Arthur's great capital, —   Avhich, like Ilium, was 
 rumoured to have been built to a divine music, — 
 how the highest works of the human spirit are 
 created : — 
 
 " For an ye heard a music, like enow 
 They are building still, seeing the city is built 
 To music, therefore never built at all. 
 And therefore built for ever." 
 
 There was no such music in Tennyson's 
 earliest verses, but he himself has all but told us 
 when the period in which his productiveness was 
 due more to the " lust of the eye " than to any 
 true poetic gift, ceased. Curiously enough, the first 
 poem where there is any trace of those musings on 
 the legends of the Eound Table to which he has
 
 VIII 
 
 tennys6n 363 
 
 directed so much of his maturo?^ -^Mus, is also a 
 confession that the poet was sick or one magic mirror 
 of fancy and its picture-shadows, and was turning 
 away from them to the poetry of human life. " The 
 Lady of Shalott," the first poem of those published 
 in the autumn of 1832 — the same sad year which 
 laid the foundation of Tennyson's most perfect, 
 if not his greatest poem, " In Memoriam " — has for 
 its real subject the emptiness of the life of fancy, 
 however rich and brilliant, the utter satiety which 
 compels any true imaginative nature to break 
 through the spell which entrances it in an unreal 
 world or visionary joys. The Lady of Shalott — a 
 variation on Elaine — gazing in her magic mirror, sees 
 a faithful picture of all that passes by her solitary 
 isle, and copies it in the web she weaves : — 
 
 " There she weaves by night and day 
 A magic web with colours gay. 
 She has heard a whisper say, 
 A curse is on her if she stay 
 
 To look down to Camelot. 
 She knows not what the curse may be, 
 And so she weaveth steadily, 
 And little other care hath she, 
 
 The Lady of Shalott." 
 
 The curse, of course, is that she shall be involved 
 in mortal passions, and suffer the fate of mortals, if 
 she looks away from the shadow to the reality. 
 Nevertheless, the time comes when she braves the 
 curse : —   
 
 " But in her web she still delicdits 
 To weave the mirror's magic sights, 
 For often through the silent nights 
 A funeral, with plumes and lights, 
 And music, went to Camelot :
 
 364 TENNYSON 
 
 VIII 
 
 Or -when the moon was overhead, 
 Came two young lovers lately wed : 
 ' I am half sick of shadows,' said 
 The Lady of Shalott." 
 
 And probably it was the vision of a "funeral," 
 at least as much as that other \asion which made the 
 fairy Lady of Shalott more than half sick of shadows, 
 that first led the author of this beautiful little poem 
 into his true poetic work. 
 
 But even after the embryo period is past, even 
 when Tennyson's poems are uniformly moulded 
 by an " infused " soul, one not unfrequently notices 
 the excess of the faculty of vision over the governing 
 conception which moulds the vision, so that I think 
 he is almost always most successful when his poem 
 begins in a thought or a feeling rather than from a 
 picture or a narrative, for then the thought or feeling 
 dominates and controls his other^\ase too lavish 
 fancy. " Ulysses " and " Tithonus " are far superior 
 to " G^none," exquisite as the pictorial workmanship 
 of "(Enone" is; "The Palace of Art" is finer than 
 "The Dream of Fair Women"; "the Death of Lu- 
 cretius," painful as the subject is, than "Enoch 
 Arden" or "Aylmer's Field"; and, for the same 
 reason, " In Memoriam " is perhaps an even more 
 perfect whole than the poem of greatest scope, and 
 in some respects the noblest of his imaginative 
 efforts, the great Arthurian epic which he completed 
 so much later. Whenever Tennyson's pictorial 
 fancy has had it in any degree in its power to run 
 away with the guiding and controlling mind, the 
 richness of the workmanship has to some extent 
 overgro^vn the spiritual principle of his poems. 
 
 I sui^pose it is in some respects this lavish 
 strength of what may be called the bodily element
 
 VIII 
 
 TENNYSON 365 
 
 in poetry, as distinguished from the spiritual life 
 and germ of it, which has given Lord Tennyson at 
 once his delight in great variety and richness of ma- 
 terials, and his profound reverence for the principle 
 of spiritual order which can alone impress unity and 
 purpose on the tropical luxuriance of natural gifts. 
 It is obvious, for instance, that even in relation to 
 natural scenery, what his poetical faculty delights in 
 most are rich, luxuriant landscapes in which either 
 Nature or man has accumulated a lavish variety of 
 effects. There is nothing of Wordsworth's passion 
 for the bare, wild scenery of the rugged North in 
 his poems. For one picture of wild and barren 
 grandeur like the first of the two following in "The 
 Palace of Art," there are at least fifty variations on 
 the last, in his various poems : — 
 
 " And one, a foreground black with stones and slags, 
 Beyond, a line of heights, and higher 
 All barr'd with long white clond the scornful crags, 
 And highest, snow and fire. 
 
 " And one, an English home — gray twilight pour'd 
 On dewy pastures, dewy trees, 
 Softer than sleep — all things in order stored, 
 A haunt of ancient Peace." 
 
 It is in the scenery of the mill, the garden, the 
 chase, the down, the rich pastures, the harvest-field, 
 the palace pleasure-grounds, the Lord of Burleigh's 
 fair domains, the luxuriant sylvan beauty l^earing 
 testimony to the careful hand of man, " the summer 
 crisp with shining woods," that Tennyson most 
 delights. If he strays to rarer scenes it is almost 
 always in search of richer and more luxuriant love- 
 liness, like the tropical splendours of "Enoch Arden" 
 and the enervating skies which cheated the Lotus-
 
 366 TENNYSON viii 
 
 Eaters of their longing for home. There is always 
 complexity in the beauty which fascinates Lord 
 Tennyson most. 
 
 And with the love of complexity comes, as a 
 matter of course, in a born artist the love of the 
 ordering faculty which can give unity and harmony 
 to complexity of detail. Measure and order are 
 for Tennyson of the very essence of beauty. His 
 strong fascination for the Arthurian legends results 
 no doubt from the mixture, in the moral materials 
 of the age of chivalry, of exuberant stateliness and 
 rich polish with the imperious need for spiritual 
 order to control the dangerous elements of the 
 period. His Arthurian epic is a great attempt to 
 depict the infusion of a soul into a chaos of stately 
 passions. Even in relation to modern politics you 
 always see the same bias, a love of rich constitutional 
 traditions welded together and ruled by wise fore- 
 thought and temperate judgment. He cannot en- 
 dure either spasmodic violence on the one hand, or 
 bald simplicity on the other. What he loves is a 
 land 
 
 "Where Freedom broadens slowly down 
 From precedent to precedent." 
 
 In " In Memoriam " he goes out of his way to 
 condemn French political anarchy — 
 
 " The schoolboy heat, 
 The blind hysterics of the Celt "— 
 
 and to throw scorn on the "red fool-fury of the 
 Seine." Still more curioiis is the parenthetic ques- 
 tion, interpolated almost angrily, in the opening of 
 an exquisite love poem, " Love and Duty " : — 
 
 " O shall the braggart shout 
 For some blind glimpse of freedom, work itself
 
 vrii 
 
 TENNYSON 3G7 
 
 Through madness, hated hy the loise, to late, 
 System, and empire ? " 
 
 — as if he grudged revolutionary energy even its 
 occasional success. Never was any cry more absurd 
 than the cry made against " Maud " for the sym- 
 pathy it was supposed to show with hysterical pas- 
 sion. What it was meant to be, and what it was, 
 though inadequately, — the failure being due, not to 
 sympathy with hysterics, but to the zeal -with 
 which Tennyson strove to caricature hysterics, — was 
 an exposure of hysterics. The love of measure 
 and order is as visible in Tennyson's pictures of 
 character as in every other aspect of his poetry. 
 His " St. Simeon Stylites " is his hostile picture of 
 the fanatic, just as his " Ulysses " is his friendly 
 picture of the insatiable craving for new experience, 
 enterprise, and adventure, when under the control of 
 a luminous reason and a self-controlled will. 
 
 And this love of measure and order in complexity 
 shows itself even more remarkably in Lord Tenny- 
 son's leaning to the domestic, modern type of women. 
 All his favourite women are women of a certain 
 fixed class in social life, usually not the lowest ; 
 sometimes homely, like Alice the miller's daughter, 
 and Rose the gardener's daughter, or Dora, or the 
 wife of the Lord of Burleigh ; sometimes women of 
 the Drawing-room or the Palace, like Maud, Lady 
 Flora in " The Day-Dream," or the princess in the 
 poem about women, or Lynette, and Enid, and 
 Elaine, and Guinevere in " The Idylls of the King " ; 
 but always women of the quiet and domestic type 
 (except indeed the heroine of " The Sisters "), women 
 whom you might meet every day in a modern home, 
 women of the garden-flower kind rather than of the 
 wild-flower kind. He has set even his exquisite
 
 368 TENNYSON 
 
 vrii 
 
 poem on "The Sleeping Beauty" in a drawing-room 
 framework, i.e. made the "Lady Flora" to whom it 
 is related "take her broidery frame and add a crim- 
 son to the quaint macaw." In the beautiful little 
 idyll called " The Miller's Daughter," Mr. Tennyson 
 even injures the rustic effect of the piece by intro- 
 ducing an artificial element, a song about Alice's 
 earring and necklace, a touch which, however true 
 it may be to life — (earrings and necklaces are just 
 what millers' daughters would most value) — is idyl- 
 lically false as destroying the simplicity of the pic- 
 ture, just as it might have been true to life, but 
 would have been idyllically false, to call the heroine 
 Juliana or Matilda, instead of Alice. The simplest 
 and most lyrical heroines, heroines like Gretchen in 
 Faust or Mignon in JVilhelm Meister, are hardly in 
 Tennyson's way. He loves something of the air and 
 manner which a fixed social status gives. His " May 
 Queen " has ahvays seemed to me one of his few 
 falsetto poems. There is art, in the sense of complex 
 harmony, in all his greatest poems. 
 
 The simplest though hardly the most character- 
 istic form of that art is no doubt the " Idyll," in 
 which Tennyson has delighted from the first ; — 
 so much so, that he has applied the term, somewhat 
 misleadingly I think, to one of his later, and in many 
 respects his greatest, works. The " idyll " proper is, 
 I suppose, a picture coloured by a single emotion, 
 and intended to give a perfect illustration of that 
 emotion. The power which makes Tennyson's 
 idylls so unique in their beauty is, I think, his won- 
 derful skill in creating a perfectly real and living 
 scene, ^ — such as always might, and perhaps some- 
 
 1 Tliis criticism was first made in a very fine essay on Tenny- 
 son's genius, liy tlie late Mr. W. C. Roscoe, which will be found
 
 VIII TENNYSON 369 
 
 where does, exist in external Nature, — for the 
 theatre of the feeling he is about to embody, and 
 yet a scene every feature of which helps to make the 
 emotion delineated more real and vivid. For illus- 
 trations of what I mean take the idylls of " The 
 Miller's Daughter " and " The Gardener's Daughter," 
 both stories of happy first love, told in their later 
 years by old men who had married rustic beauties. 
 The former, however, paints a boy's first unexpected 
 passion, which finds him a dreaming lad, and break- 
 ing upon his quiet suddenly transforms him into a 
 man ; the latter paints the passion of an artist who 
 had long played with the feeling of love, and who 
 had heard enough beforehand of the rustic beauty 
 he was going to visit, to be thrilling with hope and 
 expectation of his destiny. Remembering this, 
 notice the completely different key of the two 
 poems, the simple brook -like music of the first, 
 which seems to keep time to the mill-stream, and its 
 cool April scenery, — the rich, full, conscious sweet- 
 ness of the second, and its fragrant scents of 
 May: — 
 
 " But, Alice, what an hour was that, 
 
 When after roving in the woods 
 ('Twas April then), I came and sat 
 
 Below the chestnuts, when their buds 
 Were glistening to the breezy blue ; 
 
 And on the slope, an absent fool, 
 I cast me down, nor thought of you, 
 
 But angled in the higher pool. 
 
 " A love-song I had somewhere read, 
 An echo from a measured strain, 
 
 in his volumes of posthumous poems and essays, published by 
 Chapman & Hall. 
 
 L 2b
 
 370 TENNYSON viii 
 
 Beat time to notliing in my head 
 From some odd corner of the brain. 
 
 It haunted me, the morning long, 
 With weary sameness in the rhymes, 
 
 The phantom of a silent song. 
 
 That went and came a thousand times. 
 
 " Then leapt a tx'out. In lazy mood 
 
 I watched the little circles die ; 
 They past into the level flood. 
 
 And there a vision caught my eye ; 
 The reflex of a beauteous form, 
 
 A glowing arm, a gleaming neck ; 
 As when a sunbeam wavers warm 
 
 Within the dark and dimpled beck. 
 
 " For you remember you had set, 
 
 That morning, on the casement's edge 
 A long green box of mignonette, 
 
 And you were leaning from the ledge : 
 And when I raised my eyes above, 
 
 They met with two so full and bright — 
 Such eyes ! I swear to you, my love. 
 
 That these have never lost their light." 
 
 That is April love in the heart of April, keeping 
 time to the liquid rapids of the mill -weir. The 
 vivid picture, too, of the kindly, dusty miller, with 
 his smile that seemed " half within and half without, 
 and full of dealings with the world," which intro- 
 duces the piece, and suggests the inequality of lot 
 over which this boyish passion was to leap, prepares 
 us for the sort of love — sudden, youthful, defying 
 obstacles of station — which the bubbling mill-stream 
 was to witness. 
 
 Now turn to the fair, rich, elaborate, and still 
 more lovely scene, by which the reader's mind is 
 prepared for the love-story of an artist, who, as the
 
 VIII TENNYSON 371 
 
 prelude shows, had, like St. Augustine, been eagerly 
 loving to love (amans amare), and who was in his 
 heart fully prepared for the first plunge. 
 
 " And sure tins orbit of the memory folds 
 For ever in itself the day we went 
 To see her. All the land in flowery squares, 
 Beneath a broad and equal-blowing wind. 
 Smelt of the coming summer, as one large cloud 
 Drew downward ; but all else of heaven was pure 
 Up to the sun, and May from verge to verge, 
 And May with me from head to heel. And now. 
 As though 'twere yesterday, as though it were 
 The hour just flown, that morn with all its sound 
 (For those old Mays had thrice the life of these) 
 Rings in mine ears. The steer forgot to graze, 
 And, where the hedge-row cuts the pathway, stood 
 Leaning his horns into the neighbour field, 
 And lowing to his fellows. From the woods 
 Came voices of the well-contented doves. 
 The lark could scarce get out his notes for joy, 
 But shook his song together as he near'd 
 His happy home, the ground. To left and right, 
 The cuckoo told his name to all the hills ; 
 The mellow ouzel fluted in the elm ; 
 The red-cap whistled ; and the nightingale 
 Sang loud, as though he were the bird of day." 
 
 That is the rich gladness which prepares for the 
 fuller and deeper passion of a mind devoted to the 
 study of beauty and nearing the verge of an antici- 
 pated joy. Note especially the realism (which Tenny- 
 son never fails to show) in the explanation of the 
 especial fragrance of the air, — that " one large cloud 
 drew downward," — Iso supplying the moisture that 
 brings out the odours of the spring. Observe, too, 
 that instead of the dancing mill-stream, we have a
 
 372 TENNYSON viii 
 
 stream in harmony with the richer, riper passion of 
 the conscious love of beauty :— 
 
 " News from the humming city comes to it 
 In sound of funeral or of marriage bells ; 
 And sitting muffled in dark leaves, you hear 
 The windy clanging of the minster clock ; 
 Although between it and the garden lies 
 A league of grass, wash'd by a slow, broad stream, 
 That, stirr'd with languid pulses of the oar, 
 Waves all its lazy lilies, and creeps on, 
 Barge laden, to three arches of a bridge 
 Crown'd with the minster-towers." 
 
 Two more real scenes cannot be imagined than 
 these. And yet how delicately their differences are 
 fitted (whether calculated or not I cannot say) to 
 deepen and enhance the impressions of the special 
 shade of love which each poem delineates. 
 
 But I should quote for ever were I to illustrate as 
 fully as might be Lord Tennyson's wonderful power 
 of putting Nature under contribution to help him in 
 delineating moods of feeling. It is not limited to 
 his idylls, but is equally marvellous in his pure 
 lyrics. Especially wonderful is this power in the 
 illustration of the sense of loss. Not to touch "In 
 Memoriam," take the voice which Mr. Tennyson has 
 found for a dumb, wistful grief in the following 
 little lyric. No poet ever made the dumb speak so 
 effectually : — 
 
 " Break, break, break 
 
 On thy cold gray stones, Sea ! 
 And I would that my tongvie could utter 
 The thoughts that arise in me. 
 
 " well for the fisherman's boy. 
 
 That he shouts with his sister at play ;
 
 VIII TENNYSON 373 
 
 well for the sailor lad, 
 
 That he sings in his boat on the bay ! 
 
 *' And the stately ships go on 
 
 To their haven under the hill ; 
 But for the touch of a vanish'd hand, 
 And the sound of a voice that is still ! 
 
 "Break, break, break 
 
 At the foot of thy crags, Sea ! 
 But the tender grace of a day that is dead 
 Will never come back to me ! " 
 
 Observe how the wash of the sea on the cold gray 
 stones is used to prepare the mind for the feeling of 
 helplessness with which the deeper emotions break 
 against the hard and rigid element of human speech ; 
 how the picture is then widened out till you see the 
 bay with children laughing on its shore, and the 
 sailor-boy singing on its surface, and the stately ships 
 passing on in the offing to their unseen haven, all 
 with the view of helping us to feel the contrast 
 between the satisfied and the unsatisfied yearnings 
 of the human heart. Tennyson, like every true 
 poet, has the strongest feeling of the spiritual and 
 almost mystic character of the associations attaching 
 to the distant sail which takes the ship on its lonely 
 journey to an invisible port, and has more than once 
 used it to lift the mind into the attitude of hope or 
 trust. But then the song returns again to the help- 
 less breaking of the sea at the foot of crags it can- 
 not climb, not this time to express the inadequacy 
 of human speech to express human yearnings, but 
 the defeat of those very yearnings themselves. Thus 
 does Lord Tennyson turn an ordinary sea-shore land- 
 scape into a means of finding a voice indescribably 
 sweet for the dumb spirit of human loss. Another
 
 374 TENNYSON 
 
 VIII 
 
 closely analogous illustration, at least as signal of 
 the same magic power to press Nature into the 
 service of the heart in uttering the sense of loss, will 
 be familiar to every one who loves Tennyson's 
 genius in that wonderful song in " The Princess " 
 concerning the sad strange " days that are no more," 
 in which he likens the mingled freshness and sadness 
 with which we contemplate them as they flash upon 
 our memory to a mixture of the feelings with which 
 we see the light upon an approaching sail that brings 
 us friends from the other hemisphere, and the light 
 upon a retreating sail which takes them away thither ; 
 for does not the memory of those days both bring 
 and take away 1 does it not restore us the vivid joy 
 of the past only to make us feel that it is vanished 1 
 No poet has ever had a greater mastery than 
 Tennyson over the power of real things — with him 
 they are always real, and not mere essences or 
 abstractions — to express evanescent emotions that 
 almost defy expression. I know no other poet, 
 except the author of Antony and Cleopatra him- 
 self, who might have imagined Cleopatra's passionate 
 cry over the corpse of Antony — 
 
 " And there is nothing left remarkable beneath the visit- 
 ing moon." 
 
 Lord Tennyson's power of compelling the external 
 world to lend him a language for the noblest feel- 
 ings is, however, but the instrument of a still higher 
 faculty, the power of apprehending those feelings 
 themselves with the vigour of a great dramatist; 
 and though his range is not wide, they include some 
 of the most delicate and intellectual, and some of 
 the coarsest and most earthly. He is not a great 
 dramatist, for his delineations move almost wholly
 
 VIII TENNYSON 375 
 
 in one plane, in the mood he has studied and writes 
 to interpret. He can find the exactly appropriate 
 reverie for the smarting and not very deeply wounded 
 heart of a grandiose and somewhat bumptious lover 
 dismissed like the rejected of Locksley Hall, for his 
 deficiencies in wealth and station, and who does not 
 suffer so much but that he can concern himself even 
 then with the prospects of the race and " the process of 
 the suns." Tennyson renders to perfection the random 
 and humorous fancies of the poet under the mellow- 
 ing influence of a pint of port, when the Muse 
 
 " Used all her fiery will and smote 
 Her life into the liquor." 
 
 He can tell you how St. Simeon Stylites must have 
 felt when the glory of his penances, mounting like 
 fumes into his head, aided the delirium of his wander- 
 ing brain to triumph over the half-dead body which 
 had in great measure dropjoed away from him before 
 he died. He can portray the intolerable restlessness 
 of the wanderer born and bred, when, like Ulysses, 
 he is expected to shut himself in between the narrow 
 walls of humdrum duties. He can conceive Avith the 
 subtlest power the passionate longing for death of 
 a mortal endowed with immortality, doomed like 
 Tithonus to outlive all life and joy, and tremble at 
 the awful prospect of a solitary eternity of decay. 
 Nay, he can find a language as real as the thought 
 for the kind grandmother's wandering maternal 
 memories, as well as for the overweening vanity of 
 the coarse old Northern Farmer, whose only notion 
 of duty is to serve the "squoire" and the "lond" 
 with a loyal and even passionate service, and who 
 has no patience with " God-amoighty " for not spar- 
 ing him to calve the cows and finish the " stubbing "
 
 376 TENNYSON Vlll 
 
 of Thornaby waste, — and finally for the far sordider 
 and more selfish farmer of the new style, who wor- 
 ships " proputty," especially in land, with a devout 
 worship, and can tell his son with the most serious 
 and earnest assurance — 
 
 " Tajike my word for it, Sammy, the poor in a loomp is bad." 
 
 All this he can do with marvellous finish ; but he has 
 hardly succeeded, except in " Queen Mary " and his 
 hue i^icture of Henry 11. in " Becket," in drawing a 
 character in all its variety of attitudes ; and though 
 those poems are quite fine enough to show dramatic 
 power, they are not sufficiently characteristic of his 
 genius to shoAv any wealth of dramatic fancy ; and 
 indeed " Harold " must be pronounced a decided 
 failure. Hence his genius can hardly be called 
 dramatic, though in relation to single moods he 
 finds an infinitely more characteristic language for 
 their expression than Mr. Browning, who would 
 make Tithonus, Ulysses, St. Simeon Stylites, and 
 the Northern Farmers all talk Browningese. But 
 admitting the partial limitation of Tennyson's genius 
 to the interpretation of moods, admitting even the 
 limited number of moods he can interpret ade- 
 quately, — for he seems to fail through caricature 
 when he attempts, as in " Maud " or " The Vision 
 of Sin," to express misanthropical moods, — yet no 
 other poet has rivalled, in force and subtlety, the 
 work he has thus achieved. When first published, 
 " The Northern Farmer (Old Style)" and "Tithonus" 
 stood side by side, and it is hardly possible to find 
 specimens of Avider-removed human emotions on the 
 subject of death : — 
 
 " But summun 'ull come arter meii mayliap \vi' 'is kittle 
 o' steam
 
 VIII TENNYSON 377 
 
 Hiizzin' an' maJizin' the blessed feiilds \vi' tlie Divil's oiin 
 
 teiini. 
 Gin I mun doy, I mnn doy, an' loife they says is sweet, 
 But gin I mnn doy, I mnn doy, for I couldn abear to 
 
 see it. 
 
 "What atta stanniii' theer for, an' doesn bring ma the 
 
 yaale ? 
 Doctor's a 'tottler. Lass, an' a's hallus i' the owd taale ; 
 I weiint break rules for Doctor a knaws naw moor than 
 
 a fioy ; 
 Get ma my yaale, I tell tha, an' gin I mun doy, I mun 
 
 doy." 
 
 Now hear Tithonus : — 
 
 " The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, 
 The vapours weep their burthen to the ground, 
 Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, 
 And after many a summer dies the swan. 
 Me only cruel immortality 
 Consumes : I wither slowly in thine arms, 
 Here at the quiet limit of the world, 
 A white-haired shadow, roaming like a dream 
 The ever silent spaces of the East, 
 Far-folded mists and gleaming halls of morn. 
 Alas for this gray shadow, once a man — 
 So glorious in his beauty and thy choice. 
 Who madest him thy chosen, that he seem'd 
 To his great heart none other than a God ! 
 T asked thee, ' Give me immortality.' 
 Then didst thou grant mine asking with a smile, 
 Like wealthy men who care not how they give. 
 But thy strong Hours indignant work'd their wills. 
 And beat me down and marr'd and wasted me. 
 And tho' they could not end me, left me maim'd 
 To dwell in presence of immortal youth, 
 Immortal age beside immortal youth. 
 And all I was in ashes."
 
 378 TENNYSON Vlll 
 
 The atom of common thought that connects the two 
 passages is the feeling expressed in both that there 
 is a price at which life, with its sweetness lost, is 
 not worth purchasing ; and though to the Northern 
 Farmer that price is the sacrifice of Avhat he calls 
 " breaking rules" to please the doctor, i.e. giving up 
 his accustomed draught of ale, and to Tithonus it is 
 the loss of all that made up the vigour and gladness 
 of life, incurred to save an ever-dwindling conscious- 
 ness of personality stripped of all command over the 
 old springs of happiness, still there is just enough 
 common to the two thoughts to make the range of 
 dialect and feeling the more startling and effective. 
 I should certainly have supposed, till " The Grand- 
 mother," the two "Northern Farmers," "Queen 
 Mary," and "Becket" were published, that Tenny- 
 son's power of poetical interpretation extended only to 
 the more refined, if not the more intellectual habits 
 of mind ; but that notion has been disposed of. He 
 can furnish good grandmotherly reminiscences, or a 
 hearty devotion to a narrow calling and a coarse 
 obtuseness to everything beyond, with, a voice at 
 least as appropriate as he finds for that restless 
 craving for ever new experience, and that contempt- 
 uous pity for plodding humdrum piety, which he 
 attributes to his somewhat modernised but marvel- 
 lously conceived Ulysses. But I think that while 
 the latter class of poems belong to him, as it were, 
 the former are the results of study, though of a study 
 which only a poet's imagination could have harmon- 
 ised into wholes so perfect. It is impossible to forget, 
 in reading the three studies of rural character I have 
 just referred to, that Lord Tennyson's powers of 
 observation, though by no means rapid, are exceed- 
 ingly close and tenacious, and that he has the strong
 
 VIII TENNYSON 379 
 
 apprehensive grasp of a naturalist in conjunction 
 with the harmonising faculty of the poet. He 
 seems to me to have studied his "Grandmother" 
 and his two "Northern Farmers" much as he has 
 studied the habits of trees and animals. He has a 
 striking microscopic faculty on which his poetic ima- 
 gination works. No poet has so many and such 
 accurate references to the vegetable world, and yet 
 at the same time references so thoroughly poetic. 
 He calls dark hair 
 
 " More black than ash-buds in the front of March " ; 
 
 auburn hair, 
 
 " In gloss and hue the chestnut, when the shell 
 Divides three-fold to show the fruit within," 
 
 He is never tired of reflecting in his poetry the 
 physiology of flowers and trees and buds. The 
 " living smoke " of the yew is twice commemorated 
 in his poems. He tells us how the sunflower, " shin- 
 ing fair," 
 
 " Rays round with flames her disk of seed " ; 
 
 observes on the blasts "that blow the poplars 
 white " ; and, to make a long story short, — for the 
 list of instances might be multiplied to hundreds, — 
 in his latest " Idylls of the King," he thus dates an 
 early hour in the night : — 
 
 " Nigh upon that hour 
 AVhen the lone hern forgets his melancholy. 
 Lets cloion his other leg, and stretching, dreams 
 Of goodly supper in the distant pool." 
 
 It is precisely the same microscopic faculty as this 
 applied to characteristic human habits which has pro-
 
 380 TENNYSON viii 
 
 duced the three wonderful studies in English ver- 
 nacular life. Just as Tennyson delights to chronicle 
 that at a given hour of the night the heron lets down 
 his other leg and stretches himself, and as he con- 
 jectures that the heron's dreams then take a happier 
 turn, so he delights to chronicle that an old woman 
 with her faculties failing, when she hears of the 
 death of her eldest-born, himself an old man, will 
 muse on the beauty of his baby legs after this 
 fashion : — 
 
 " Willy, my beauty, my eldest-born, the flower of the 
 
 flock ; 
 Never a man could fling him, for Willy stood like' a 
 
 rock. 
 ' Here's a leg for a babe of a week,' says Doctor, and 
 
 he would be bound 
 There was not like, that year, in twenty parishes 
 
 round." 
 
 And so precisely, too, he makes the property-wor- 
 shipping " Northern Farmer " of the new style put 
 the poor curate, whose daughter his eldest son wishes 
 to marry, under the microscope, as if he were a kind 
 of insect, in this contemptuous way : — 
 
 " Parson's lass 'ant nowt, and she weJint 'a nowt when 
 
 'e's dead, 
 Mun be a guvness, lad, or summut, and addle her 
 
 bread ; 
 Why ? fur 'e's nobbut a curate, an' weant nivir git naw 
 
 'igher ; 
 An' 'e maade the bed as 'e ligs on afoor 'e coom'd to 
 
 the shire. 
 
 " And thin 'e coom'd to the parish wi' lots o' 'Varsity 
 debt, 
 Stook to his taiiil they did, an' 'e 'an't got shut on 'em 
 yet.
 
 vin TENNYSON 381 
 
 An' 'e ligs on 'is back i' the grip, wi' noiin to lend 'iin 
 
 a shove, 
 Woorse nor a far-welter'd yowe : fur, Sammy, 'e married 
 
 fur luvv." 
 
 It is impossible not to see that it is much 
 more as naturalist than as poet that Tennyson has 
 mastered the materials for these three most re- 
 markable poems, though "without his imaginative 
 faculty he could never have harmonised them into 
 these wonderful wholes. When Shakespeare gives 
 us a character like Juliet's nurse, we feel somehow 
 that Juliet's nurse was in him, that he needed as 
 little study to enter into her and appropriate her 
 as Tennyson needed to enter into the full vipe 
 passion which breathes through " The Gardener's 
 Daughter " or the gusty heroics of " Locksley Hall." 
 But his fine studies of those three rustics have been 
 like the studies which the late Mr. Waterton de- 
 voted to the habits of birds, or which Mr. Frank 
 Buckland bestows on the hippopotamuses of his heart. 
 He has made them his own, and made them per- 
 fectly living and true ; and if he had time to give 
 to other types as large and simple, he could paint 
 them also as faithfully and impressively. But his 
 insight into them does not come through his sym- 
 pathy with active life, as Shakespeare's did ; it comes 
 of the careful scrutinising eye of a naturalist feeding 
 the brooding heart of a poet. And there are plenty 
 of indications of the same kind of close microscopic 
 power in the higher and purely spiritual sphere of 
 Tennyson's genius. What, for instance, can be finer 
 than the picture of the gloomy forecast of evil which 
 haunts Merlin before his living bui'ial ? — 
 
 " So dark a forethought rolled about his brain 
 As on a dull day in an ocean cave
 
 382 TENNYSON vm 
 
 The blind wave feeling round his long sea-hall 
 In silence." 
 
 "In Memoriam" is full of such magnifying- 
 glasses for secret feelings, and doubts, and fears, and 
 hopes, and trusts. How true and pathetic, yet how 
 like the effect of a brooding reverie under a micro- 
 scope, is the passage in which Tennyson describes 
 his minute comparison of the path of the moon- 
 beams in his bedroom with what he knows it must 
 be in the chancel Avhere the tablet to his friend is 
 placed, and i>aints the half -superstitious anxiety 
 with which he watches them while they are lighting 
 up the letters of the name, and then passing away, 
 leaving it in darkness till the glimmer of the daA\Ti 
 returns upon it ! How large he makes the fear that 
 when he follows his friend into the other world he 
 may find himself " a life behind " him, and doomed to 
 follow ever at the same distance ! How big seems the 
 doubt — one that we mvxst all of us have felt in such 
 cases — that he is exaggerating the delight which the 
 past companionship of his friend had caused him, 
 that it is but " the haze of grief " Avhich made the 
 "former gladness loom so great." Clearly there is 
 much of the microscopic naturalist in the spiritual 
 as well as the physical part of Tennyson's musings. 
 Any mood, however subtle, Avhen submitted to his 
 eye, grows large beneath that close and minute 
 scrutiny, and reappears on a new and magnified 
 scale, like Plato's moral law of the individual con- 
 science when -written out large in the structure and 
 function of the j^erfect State. 
 
 And yet it would be completely false to give the 
 impression that Lord Tennyson's studies are studies 
 in " still " life, studies of human nature as much at 
 rest as the fragment of a bat's Aving under a micro-
 
 VIII 
 
 TENNYSON 383 
 
 scope. There is always the movement of real life in 
 his poems, even in passages where the movement 
 could never show, if the movement itself, like the 
 subject of it, were not magnified by the medium 
 through which he makes us view it. " Will Water- 
 proof's Lyrical Monologue," for instance, never halts 
 a moment at any one point, though the whole 
 might have actually passed through the mind in a 
 few seconds. The " Grandmother's " and " Northern 
 Farmer's " reveries flow on at much the same rate 
 they might flow at in actual life ; and it is only the 
 extreme elaboration of the picture, reminding one 
 of some of Denner's portraits of rustic life, in which 
 every wrinkle and every shade of colour is accurately 
 rendered, that suggests to the reader the impression 
 of slow movement. So, too, the scorn of Ulysses for 
 the petty drudgery of his Ithacan household and 
 government, his longing to be once more shooting 
 the rapids of earthly adventure, his contemptuous 
 satisfaction in the capacity of Telemachus to fill his 
 place, and the great boixnd which his heart makes 
 towards the sea that " moans round with many 
 voices," succeed each other with a movement certainly 
 not more languid than that of Homer himself. In 
 painting, Tennyson is so terse and compressed, 
 that, though he never suggests the idea of swiftness, 
 — there is too much pains spent on the individual 
 stroke for that, — it would be simply absurd to call his 
 manner dilatory. Indeed, his jiictures often succeed 
 each other too rapidly, without the graduation which 
 prepares the mind for the change, so as to give a 
 sense of eff'ort to the reader by implying an extreme 
 condensation in the "vvriter. It is only in the song, 
 or pieces closely approaching a song in structure, like 
 " The Brook," that his style ripples along with per-
 
 384 TENNYSON vui 
 
 feet ease and grace. If we compare the lovely 
 modulation of " The Brook," or the liquid notes of 
 "Blow, bugle, blow, set the mid echoes flying," or 
 the delicate rapture of "Come into the garden, 
 Maud," -svith the stately compression of " The Palace 
 of Art " or of most of the " Idylls of the King," we 
 shall at once see that it is not want of motion, but 
 rather excessive compression, which gives to so many 
 of Tennyson's poems the air of moving through 
 a resisting medium. There is nothing like "still" 
 life to be found in his poems. When he puts a half- 
 understood emotion or a new natural fact under his 
 poetic object-glass, it may occupy a larger space than it 
 ever did in the poems of other poets, but that is only 
 because the scale of life is really larger. No poet is 
 less justly liable to the charge of making much of a 
 little or of pottering over his poetic discoveries. 
 
 And, indeed, " In Memoriam " is the only one of 
 Tennyson's poems of which even his most hostile 
 critics could say that its movement is slow. Here, 
 however, there is necessarily the brooding movement 
 of a haunting grief, for it is of the very essence of a 
 poem devoted to the expression of the pain, and fear, 
 and doubt, and hope, and faith, which a great wound 
 to the heart causes, to hover perpetually over tke, 
 same theme, and to transform every seemingly 
 foreign subject of reflection into new food for suffer- 
 ing or new promise of peace. Mrs. Bro^vning, in 
 perhaps her finest sonnet, has said that 
 
 "If to conquer love has tried, 
 To conquer grief tries more, as all things prove, 
 For grief indeed is love, and grief beside. 
 Alas, I have grieved so, I'm hard to love." 
 
 And Tennyson's great poem is a comment
 
 VIII TENNYSON 385 
 
 on this text, a comment showing how much 
 more grief may be than love — not only more 
 absorbing, which it must be, not only more task- 
 ing and more urgent in pushing the sufferer on 
 to seemingly vain and thankless efforts to vindicate 
 his fidelity of heart, from which he sinks back ex- 
 hausted into himself, for that to a great extent it 
 must be also — but also more fruitful of strength, 
 of courage, of hope, and of peace. St. Paul has not 
 got much credit for poetic feeling amongst the many 
 great poets of the Bible, and no doubt the passages 
 in which he rises into poetry are somewhat rare ; but 
 of one of them, I suspect, we miss the beauty and 
 force rather for want of such a mental history as 
 that of " In Memoriam " to explain it, than from any 
 want of pathos, depth, and singular precision of 
 feeling in the passage itself. It would injure "In 
 Memoriam" to give it a Biblical motto, for that 
 would tend to classify a great modern poem in that 
 dismal category of works known as " Serious reading," 
 and so to diminish its just influence; otherwise it 
 would be hard to find a more exact and profound 
 summary of its cycle of thought and emotion than 
 St. Paul's reason (evidently an afterthought) for 
 "glorying in tribulation" — "knowing that tribula- 
 tion worketh patience, and patience experience, and 
 experience hope; and hope maketh not ashamed, 
 because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts 
 by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us." That 
 is a true summary of the drift of "In Memoriam." 
 The poet sets out with a cry of desolation, of self- 
 pitying numbness of heart ; — for the piece which now 
 stands first of the series, and immediately follows the 
 grand apostrophe, "Strong Son of God, immortal 
 Love," is evidently a poetical preface to the whole, 
 L 2 C
 
 386 TENNYSON viil 
 
 and not even one of the first in point of time. The 
 first apostrophe to the tree of churchyards, the 
 funeral yew, whose roots "are "s\Tapped about the 
 bones " of the dead, is a cry of life in death, a cry of 
 horror at the prospect of death in life. And in all 
 those which follow it, till the poet's interest begins 
 to awaken as to the fate of the ship which was to 
 bring home his friend's body from the Adriatic, we 
 hear, under the various restlessly changing forms of a 
 stunned spirit, the constant presence of the thought — 
 
 " Break, thou deep vase of cliilling tears 
 That grief hath shaken into frost." 
 
 Then his imagination begins to fix itself, at inter- 
 vals, with the fanciful fidelity which grief always i^ 
 transfers from the dead to some half-living represent- 
 ative of the dead, on the ship that is bringing home 
 all that remained of his friend, and some of the most 
 beautiful reveries in the language describe how he 
 follows all its motions as if they were the motions of 
 his friend himself : — 
 
 " I hear the noise about thy keel ; 
 
 I hear the bell struck in the night ; 
 I see the cabin windows bright ; 
 I see the sailor at the wheel." 
 
 He flies off" in reverie, on visionary wings, " a weight 
 of nerves without a mind " (could there be a finer 
 expression for the acute sensation which renders 
 thought impossible 1), to meet the vessel on her way, 
 and " circles moaning in the air, ' Is this the end ? 
 Is this the end ?'" Then he tries to convince him- 
 self that he does not suffer "in a dream"; records, 
 what every one has felt in such cases, that if the dead 
 should prove to be alive and exjDress compassion and 
 grief for the illusions that have given so much pain,
 
 VIII 
 
 TENNYSON 387 
 
 nothing would seem more natural to him ; he hails 
 the vessel bearing the remains of his friend on her 
 arrival with a gleam of thankfulness that is the first 
 softening touch ; and from that point we have gentler 
 moods of grief alternating ■with the despair : — 
 
 " Ah yet, e'en yet, if this might be, 
 I, falling on liis faithful heart, 
 Would breathing thro' his lips impart 
 The life that almost dies in me ; 
 
 " That dies not, but endures with pain, 
 And slowly forms the firmer mind, \ / 
 Treasuring the look it cannot find, /A 
 The words that are not heard again." 
 
 Tribulation has already worked patience. 
 
 Then, first, we meet with "the Shadow cloak'd 
 from head to foot, who keeps the keys of all the 
 creeds," and the long series of poems full of search- 
 ing thought, and, here and there, of gleams of return- 
 ing serenity of spirit, in which the self-accusations, 
 the self-justifications, the doubts of science, the hopes 
 of conscience, the glimpses of God's love, alternate 
 like the parting clouds and shining stars of a stormy 
 November night. At last he can answer thus his 
 own question, whether love would not survive in this 
 life, even if it could hope for nothing beyond : — 
 
 " And Love would answer with a sigh, 
 ' The sound of that forgetful shore 
 Will change my sweetness more and more. 
 Half-dead to know that I shall die.' 
 
 " me, what profits it to jiut 
 
 An idle case ? If Death were seen 
 At first as Death, Love had not been, 
 Or been in narrowest working shut."
 
 388 TENNYSON Vlii 
 
 And then we knoAv that patience is already work- 
 ing experience, and experience hope ; and hope the 
 greater and not the less, for that vivid insight into 
 not merely the thoughts, but the living facts that 
 are the food of Doubt, which Tennyson has com- 
 pressed into some of these noble poems. There is 
 hardly finer reflective poetry in existence than the 
 series of poems in which he adduces the evidence 
 that Nature, as Nature, cares for neither individual 
 nor type ; that 
 
 " She cries, ' A thousand types are gone, 
 I care for nothing, all shall go'" ; 
 
 that she is utterly indifferent whether or not Man, 
 
 "Who loved, who suffered countless ills, 
 Who battled for the True, the Just, 
 Be blown about the desert dust 
 Or sealed within the iron hills." 
 
 And when he breasts all these hostile demonstrations 
 of science with the unconquerable though trembling 
 faith Avhich man's nature and God's revelations oppose 
 to all the vestiges of the lower creation, and ends 
 with the cry to what he feels is "Lord of all," and 
 faintly trusts "the larger hope," we cannot help con- 
 fessing that " hope maketh not ashamed," since it can 
 face boldly even this dread array of dumb discourage- 
 ments. 
 
 From this point the poet's grief passes more and 
 more into gentle memory, contemplation, and even 
 joy. Here and there, before the anguish dies wholly 
 away, we have exquisite bursts of returning life and 
 joy, like that Avonderful little address to the nightin- 
 gale, which seems to express the rapture at once of 
 pain and of victory over it : —
 
 VIII TENNYSON 389 
 
 " Wild bird, wliose warble, liquid sweet, 
 Rings Eden thro' the budded quicks, 
 
 tell me where the senses mix, 
 tell me where the passions meet, 
 
 " Whence radiate ; fierce extremes employ 
 Thy spirits in the darkening leaf. 
 And in the midmost heart of grief 
 Thy passion clasps a secret joy : 
 
 " And I — my harp would prelude woe, — 
 
 1 cannot all command the strings ; 
 The glory of the sum of things 
 
 Will flash along the chords and go." 
 
 With such alternations of joy, and an always rising 
 note of love and faith, this great history of grief 
 comes to a triumphant end, 
 
 " With faith that comes of self-control, '' 
 The truths that never can be proved 
 Until we close with all we loved 
 And all we flow from, soul in soul," 
 
 — where, if ever in human poetry, we see the glow 
 of that "love of God which is shed abroad in our 
 hearts by the Holy Ghost that is given us." I know 
 of no poem so great or so perfect which deals with 
 grief at all. The higher poetry has a tendency to 
 shun grief — submissive grief at least ; for grief that 
 bows to the stroke is of all emotions the one most 
 depressing to the immediate store of mental vitality ; 
 and the higher poetry springs from the fullest well of 
 life. Pain of all other kinds, including even that 
 defiant despair which fights against God, finds ample 
 voice in poetry ; but grave and quiet anguish under 
 the acknowledged fact of loss, anguish which does not 
 strive to kick against the pricks, and yet does not
 
 390 TENNYSON 
 
 VIII 
 
 seek to quench itself in mystic passion, has had few 
 and fragmentary representatives in our higher poetry. 
 Only a very strong spirit of poetry could have pre- 
 vented so long a series of mournful poems as this 
 from becoming oppressively sombre. Even as it is, 
 it is only in one's sadder moods that one turns to this 
 great poem ; and, indeed, it is only in one or two of 
 the latter poems of the series that it is possible for 
 Tennyson to embody the full strength and elasticity 
 of his poetic genius. There is a natural limitation 
 of power and vitality imposed by the nature of the 
 subject in this respect. 
 
 In one respect, however, I think " In Memoriam " 
 surpasses all his other works — I mean in the exquisite 
 tone of the pictures it contains. Elsewhere his pic- 
 tures are apt to start out from the surface of his 
 poems with colours almost too brilliant and outlines 
 almost too strongly defined, so that one is dazzled by 
 the detail, and the main subject of the poem is thrown 
 into the shade. It is never so in "In Memoriam," 
 where the lowered key of grief and hesitating hope, 
 results in colours as liquid in tone as the mood they 
 illustrate. Is there in the whole range of English 
 poetry such a picture of a summer twilight, itself 
 drawn in the very mood of such a twilight, as 
 this ?— 
 
 " By night we linger'd on the lawn. 
 For underfoot the herb was dry. 
 And genial warmth ; and o'er the sky 
 The silvery haze of suunuer drawn ; 
 
 " And calm that let the tapers burn 
 Unwaving : not a cricket chirr'd : 
 The brook alone far off was heard. 
 And on the board the fluttering urn :
 
 viii TENNYSON 391 
 
 " And bats went round in fragrant skies, 
 And wheel'd or lit the filmy shapes 
 That haunt the dusk, with ermine capes 
 And woolly breasts and beaded eyes ; 
 
 " While now we^sang old songs that peal'd 
 
 From knoll to knoll, where, couch'd at ease, 
 The white kine glimmer'd, and the trees 
 Laid their dark arms about the field." 
 
 And what a living picture of the dawn ends the same 
 wonderful poem ! — 
 
 " Till now the doubtful dusk reveal'd 
 
 Tlie knoll once more where, couch'd at ease, 
 The white kine glimmer'd, and the trees 
 Laid their dark arms about the field ; 
 
 " And, suck'd from out the distant gloom, 
 A breeze began to tremble o'er 
 The large leaves of the sycamore, 
 And fluctuate all the still perfume, 
 
 " And gathering freshlier overhead, 
 
 Rock'd the full-foliaged elms, and swung 
 The heavy-folded rose, and flung 
 The lilies to and fro, and said, 
 
 '"The dawn, the dawn,' and died away: 
 And East and West, without a breath, 
 Mixt their dim lights, like life and death. 
 To broaden into boundless day." 
 
 I know no descriptive poetry that has the delicate 
 spiritual genius of that passage, its sweet mystery, its 
 subdued lustre, its living truth, its rapture of peace. 
 And besides the indescribable beauty of the pictures 
 in "In Memoriam," in intellectual depth, especially 
 in the truthfulness of its knowledge of the heart, and 
 in the elasticity of soul which thrusts back the
 
 392 TENNYSON vill 
 
 heaviest burdens by its own inherent force, this poem 
 has never been rivalled in its kind by any English 
 poet. Its defects are few and very slight, and mostly 
 what I observe in all Lord Tennyson's poems. He 
 always shows a certain tendency to over-express any 
 morbid thought or feeling he wishes to resist, and 
 this jars more on the ear in a poem of which the very 
 essence is its sad self-possession and submissive pain. 
 Thus, where he says that man tried to believe Love 
 to be " Creation's final law," 
 
 " Tho' Nature, red in tootli and claw 
 With ravine, sliriek'd against his creed," 
 
 the phrase sounds to me hysterical, for Nature is 
 very much besides the teeth and claws of beasts of 
 prey, and the " shrieks " of her victims can hardly be 
 fairly represented as her voice. The significance of 
 the objection, which is undeniable, loses, I think, 
 instead of gaining in weight, from so excited a form 
 of expression. I feel just the same jar at the phrase 
 twice used of sorrow, " Sorrow with thy lying lip," 
 which, as representing the illusions into which sorrow 
 betrays us, sounds harsh, almost like the phrase of a 
 scold ; — yet nothing can be conceived less like the 
 general tenor of feeling in the poem than the scold- 
 ing mood. Now and then, too, there is a tone of 
 " effusion " beyond what a perfectly simple taste 
 admits, as where the poet supposes that his friend 
 might come down alive from the ship in which he 
 was looking only for his corpse, and " strike a sudden 
 hand in mine," where " strike " is surely too pro- 
 nounced, too emphatic a word for the occasion, 
 especially as the idea is conveyed by the word 
 "sudden." But when seeming faults, so "infinitely 
 Uttle " as these, are the only ones to be perceived in
 
 VIII TENNYSON 393 
 
 such a poem as this, the poem must be great, unless 
 indeed the critic be very blind. Certainly to me it 
 seems the most beautiful and vivid of all poems that 
 ever grew out of a grave. 
 
 No one can criticise " In Memoriam " and " The 
 Idylls of the King," still less pass from the one to 
 the other, without being conscious of the immense 
 influence which ethical principles have had in 
 moulding Tennyson's work as an artist, or without 
 reflecting in some form on the charge so commonly 
 made or implied against him, that he has injured the 
 character of his art for the sake of the perfectly 
 irrelevant interests of morality. No one can doubt 
 that if a poem which is, as it asserts itself, the simple 
 outpoui'ing of long years of grief, has what may be 
 called a moral teaching at all, the teaching of " In 
 Memoriam" is that Knowledge severed from Love 
 and Faith is "a child and vain"; that she should 
 know her place, which is to be second, not the first ; 
 that 
 
 " A higher hand must make her mild 
 If all be not in vain ; and guide 
 Her footsteps, moving side by side 
 With Wisdom, like the younger child." 
 
 If "In Memoriam " has a definite teaching at all, 
 as distinguished from a lyrical burden, this is it. 
 And no doubt it expresses a conviction which 
 springs from the very depths of the poet's soul. 
 Whether it injures his poetry or not must depend 
 on two conditions. First, Is it obtruded didactically 
 instead of merely shaping and turning his song ? In 
 other words. Does it mar the music, or is it of the 
 essence of the music ? For any one may spoil a 
 song or a poem of any kind by incorporating with it 
 fragments of a sermon. The second question is, " Is
 
 394 TENNYSON Vlii 
 
 it true 1 " For if the doctrine that Knowledge severed 
 from Love and Faith is out of place, be incorporated 
 into the very heart of the music, and be yet false, 
 unmanly, enervating doctrine, I at least should 
 admit at once that it must injure the poem, as well 
 as the morality of the poem. Mr. Swinburne, — who, 
 when he can lay aside petty resentments and clear 
 his essays from the intricate inuendoes inspired by 
 a whole host of unintelligible literary animosities, 
 always writes with the lucid beauty of genius, 
 though somewhat too much also ^vith the "high 
 action " of complacent consciousness, — appears to 
 think the first question alone relevant. He has 
 declared that "the worth of a poem has properly 
 nothing to do with its moral meaning or design " ; 
 that " the only absolute duty of Art is the duty she 
 owes to herself"; that "she is dependent on her- 
 self alone, and on nothing above or beneath." He 
 does not therefore prohibit Art from taking a moral 
 aim, so long as the aim does not so protrude as to 
 injure the art. But he will not admit that the 
 character of the morality involved is even an element 
 in the matter. Indeed, " there is a value," he says, 
 " beyond price and beyond thought, in the Lesbian 
 music which spends itself on the record of fleshly 
 fever and amorous malady." Unquestionably this is 
 not Lord Tennyson's doctrine. In verses which, had 
 they not been in all probability WTitten long before 
 Mr. Swinburne was born, might have been supposed 
 to bear some reference to his genius, the Laureate 
 has said that the highest creative beauty, whether of 
 the divine or of the poetic kind, must imply a moral 
 law : — 
 
 " My own dim life should teach me this. 
 That life shall live for evermore,
 
 VIII TENNYSON 395 
 
 Else earth is darkness at the core 
 And dust and ashes all that is ; 
 
 " This round of green, this orb of flame 
 Fantastic beauty ; such as lurks 
 In some wild Poet ivhen he works 
 Without a conscience or an aim." 
 
 Nor can I conceive of any rational interpretation 
 of the view for which Mr. Swinburne declares him- 
 self so absolutely — without, however, himself attempt- 
 ing to give it a rational interpretation. I doubt if 
 he even agrees heartily with himself. He declares, 
 for instance, against Tennyson's "Vivien," on the 
 ground that in depicting an unchaste woman. Art 
 requires " at least some trace of human, or, if need 
 be, of devilish dignity." Now, I do not suppose 
 that Mr. Swinburne means to imply that all the 
 proper subjects of Art must have dignity, either 
 human, devilish, or of any other kind. Malvolio 
 and Caliban are both, I suppose, fit subjects for Art, 
 and neither of them by reason of their dignity, 
 rather by reason of the want of it. What Mr. 
 Swinburne meant, I suppose, was that in a figure of 
 the type of Vivien, some trace of other dignity is 
 needed to render the intrinsic want of womanly 
 dignity tolerable. But if this be admitted, Mr. 
 Swinburne's " absolute independence of Art " is sur- 
 rendered at once. Why is some vestige of dignity 
 specially needed in the portraiture of one of Vivien's 
 type, except because the higher taste is so intolerant 
 of mere meanness — especially meanness of the sensual 
 order — that when you are painting a character in this 
 essential respect destitute of worth, you are bound 
 to relieve the picture by portraying some trait of 
 greatness of some other kind, greatness of passion,
 
 396 TENNYSON viii 
 
 or intelligence, or, if it must be so, greatness of evil 
 purpose itself ? I agree with the general principle, 
 if not with its special application to Vivien ; but what 
 does it imply 1 This fastidiousness of the higher 
 taste is not an accident of the artistic temj^erament. 
 We shrink from the meaner types of evil in Art, 
 because they are less representative of our nature, 
 because they fail to call out the deeper and more 
 ennobling moral emotions ; because, while we can 
 despise and loathe them, we cannot dread or hate 
 them. Well, but this is a virtual admission that 
 Art acknowledges the supremacy of these moral 
 emotions — in other words, of the conscience which 
 shapes them ; and, if it be so, then the poetry which 
 makes the loAver passions speak as if there were no 
 such moral emotions at all, is worse as poetry for 
 its grovelling blindness. Mr. Swinburne's "Lesbian 
 music which spends itself on the record of fleshly 
 fever and amorous malady," seems to me the music 
 of the satyr, not the music of human beings, and to 
 be condemned by the very reasons which he assigns 
 for condemning "Vivien." It is wanting in all 
 dignity except the dignity of flame, or rather it 
 revels in indignity, in what is the disgrace and not 
 the honour of human nature. You might as well 
 say that it is a fit subject for Art to paint the 
 morbid ecstasy of cannibals over their horrid feasts, 
 as to paint lust without love. If you are to de- 
 lineate man at all, you must delineate him with his 
 human nature, and therefore you can never really 
 omit from any worthy picture that conscience which 
 is its crown. I believe, myself, that Tennyson is 
 never guilty of letting his moral purpose crop out 
 ostentatiously so as to injure his art ; indeed, I have 
 never seen it even alleged that he is so guilty, except
 
 VIII 
 
 TENNYSON 397 
 
 in relation to his picture of Arthur, of which I have 
 presently to speak. And as I believe that his in- 
 tense conviction, that Knowledge is " the second, not 
 the first," is true — that Art herself must walk by 
 the light of Love and Faith, and must not paint 
 human nature in the monstrous and conscienceless 
 shapes it sometimes really assumes, unless with some 
 foil which shall make the void where the moral life 
 should be, painfully visible, — I cannot think that in 
 any respect Lord Tennyson has shown himself a 
 higher artist than in the important but generally 
 unostentatious place which the conscience takes in 
 his greater poems. 
 
 Of course the soundness of this judgment on 
 Tennyson as a poet must depend on the real value 
 of the great poem called, I think with somewhat 
 unfortunate modesty, "The Idylls of the King." 
 The title misled the public, and the fragmentary 
 mode in which the poem appeared misled it the 
 more. I confess that when the first four Idylls first 
 appeared I did not enjoy them nearly so much as 
 many of the Laureate's earlier poems. No one, I 
 suppose, with any taste for poetry at all could pos- 
 sibly have read " Elaine " and " Guinevere," especially 
 the latter, without delight. But appearing, as they 
 did, without any notice of their fragmentary char- 
 acter, and with, I still think, a good deal in the first 
 of them, "Enid," to suggest that they were rich 
 pictorial fancies, taken, certainly not altogether at 
 random, but yet without any really coherent design, 
 out of a great magazine of romantic story, there was 
 some excuse, I think, for the hasty impression that 
 they were four minutely finished cabinet pictures, 
 painted of course to hang by and illustrate each 
 other, but nevertheless with more view to the beauty
 
 398 TENNYSON Vlll 
 
 of the individual effects than to their relation to 
 each other. By the side of " Ulysses," " The Two 
 Voices," and many others of Tennyson's earlier 
 poems, I certainly thought at first the four first 
 "Idylls" a little wanting in intellectual interest, a 
 little too dependent on their pictorial brilliancy. 
 But as the poem put forth new shoots in both direc- 
 tions, backwards and forwards, and the noble portions 
 on " The Coming of Arthur," " The Holy Grail," and 
 "The Passing of Arthur," appeared, — poems in 
 which the gradual growth and fall of the ideal 
 kingdom of the spiritual chivalry were depicted, — 
 the grandeur of the new poem began, for me at 
 least, to eclipse in interest almost everything that 
 Tennyson had written, and the first published 
 Idylls themselves grew in intellectual fascination. 
 "The Last Tournament," and " Gareth and Lynette," 
 which furnished respectively almost the last and first 
 links in the chain, except the " Passing " and " Com- 
 ing" of Arthur themselves, seem to me to have 
 AATOught up the poet's conceptions into a far com- 
 pleter expression, and to have put the final touches 
 to a very great, though not quite perfect whole. 
 Most readers seem to find much less of grace and 
 finish in the later than in the earlier published 
 Idylls. As regards " Pelleas and Ettarre " and " The 
 Last Tournament," this is not only true, but was 
 necessary to the poet's purpose, which was to give 
 the impression of rude storms, gloom, and coming 
 ruin before the tragic close. I do not think myself 
 that it is true at all of the other parts. The new 
 additions to " The Passing of Arthur " — which now 
 embodies Tennyson's earliest as well as his latest 
 work on this great poem — seem to me to contain the 
 grandest lines he has ever written, lines resonant
 
 VIII TENNYSON 399 
 
 with the highest chords of spiritual yearning and 
 bewildered trust, lines which echo and re-echo in 
 one's imagination like the dying tones of the organ 
 in a great cathedral's aisles. " Gareth and Lynette," 
 which is intended to paint the freshest period of the 
 ideal kingdom and also to foreshadow its course, has 
 to my ear a mingled sweetness and depth that make 
 it far surpass " Enid " in poetic power, and so no 
 doubt it introduces a certain flaw into the workman- 
 ship of the whole poem, which rather declines in 
 power as it passes from its first to its second stage 
 and shows the origin of the evil influence which is to 
 lay the whole fair structure in ruins. I think, too, 
 there is a flaw of the same kind in the compara- 
 tive inferiority of " Pelleas and Ettarre " to the parts 
 which precede and follow it. " Pelleas and Ettarre " 
 is not merely harsh and revolting, as "The Last 
 Tournament" is harsh and revolting — that it must 
 have been : it is harsh and revolting without present- 
 ing any of the assuaging and ennobling eff"ects of 
 Arthur's exalting influence, without any reconciling 
 touch such as the passionate fidelity of the fool gives 
 to " The Last Tournament," and also I think without 
 sufficient grandeur even in the evil. Ettarre, at all 
 events, is hardly a figure dignified enough for the 
 evil part she has to play in a great tragedy. She 
 is no greater than she is in the old story itself, 
 where she has to play a far less important part, and 
 where there is a foil to her wanting in Tennyson's 
 picture. 
 
 These are the kind of artistic objections — objec- 
 tions of detail — to which I think Lord Tennyson's 
 great Arthurian poem is justly liable. The design 
 as a whole seems to me more within true poetic 
 limits, if not nobler in itself, than anything in our
 
 400 TENNYSON viii 
 
 epic literature; and though Tennyson does not of 
 course bring to its execution a voice of the mighty 
 volume of Milton's, he has not only Avritten what is 
 far more perfect as a work of art, though less impos- 
 ing as a work of genius, than "Paradise Lost" — 
 indeed, the former might easily be — but one which 
 shadows forth the ideal faith of his own time — a time 
 of at least as sincere if much less definite faith, and 
 of far higher moral and intellectual discrimination — 
 more adequately. 
 
 In taking his subject from the great mediaeval 
 myth of English chivalry, it was of coiu-se open 
 to Tennyson to adopt any treatment of it which 
 would really incorporate the higher and grander 
 aspects of the theme, and also find an ideal unity for 
 a number of legends in which of unity there was 
 none. It is obvious that in dealing with the chivalric 
 story with which strange and grand fragments of 
 mediaeval Christian mysticism are closely interwoven, 
 it was impossible to avoid the blending of the distinct 
 themes of ideal courage and honour, ideal love and 
 purity, and the rapt visions of an ideal faith. This 
 could not have been avoided. But undoubtedly 
 these various elements might have blended in various 
 ways ; and it would have been possible, no doubt, to 
 make the central figure of the poem one in which the 
 highest ideal aims were crossed by the tragic conse- 
 quences of a youthful sin, so that everywhere his 
 own sin rose up against him till it brought to ruin 
 the fair dream of his life. This is the view of the 
 story of Arthur which Mr. Smnburne and his school 
 maintain to be the only natural and legitimate one. 
 And there is no doubt that the treachery which finally 
 undermines and ruins Arthur's work is the treachery 
 of Modred, nor that, according to the story of the old
 
 VIII TENNYSON 401 
 
 legend, Modred is Arthur's own son, the offspring of 
 Arthur's guilty passion for one whom he did not 
 then know to be his half-sister Bellicent. Accord- 
 ing to the old story, Merlin prophesied to him the 
 evil destiny in store for him as the penalty of this 
 sin, and also forbade him to take part in the search 
 for the Holy Grail, as being rendered unworthy of it 
 by that sin. Nor can it be denied that there are 
 various other traces in the early part of these legends 
 of the moral taint which Arthur's nature had thus in- 
 cvuTed. For instance, the sword brought by the lady 
 of the isle of Avelyon cannot be drawn by Arthur, 
 because it can only be drawn by a knight in whom 
 there is no hidden shame. 
 
 For the rest, the picture of Ai'thur as given in the 
 old legends is exceedingly wavering and uncertain. 
 For the most part it is the picture of a gracious and 
 noble figure of mysterious origin and mysterious des- 
 tiny, — "Rex quondam, Rexque futurus," according 
 to the legendary inscription on his tomb, — whose 
 nobility insjaires a passion of love and fidelity in his 
 knights, and the profoundest agony of remorse in his 
 unfaithful queen ; but also at times crafty, and at 
 times weak, trying in the beginning of his reign, like 
 Herod, to exterminate the infants amongst whom 
 Merlin's lore pronounces that the cause of his own 
 ruin and death is to be found ; and yielding at the 
 end of his reign, against his own better mind, to the 
 bloody and vindictive counsels of his nephew Gawain 
 in the war with Lancelot. I will venture to say that 
 if only those legends collected by Sir Thomas Malory 
 were to be taken as authorities (and though I do not 
 profess a knowledge of the various other collections, 
 it is quite clear that many of them are far more 
 favourable to the ideal view of Arthur than Sir 
 L 2d
 
 402 TENNYSON viil 
 
 Thomas Malory's), and if everything they say of 
 Arthur were put together, no coherent character at 
 all could be constructed out of them. It would have 
 been impossible to draw any poetical portrait of the 
 king without the freest principle of selection. Had 
 Tennyson taken the view which Mr. Swinburne 
 affirms, — with a pert dogmatism quite unworthy of 
 the exquisite English in which he writes, and the fre- 
 quent flashes of genius in the substance of what he 
 writes, — to be the only possible one ; had the story 
 of Arthur been turned into that of a kind of medieval 
 (Edipus, and the a-\vful destiny which avenged his 
 voluntary sin but involuntary incest, that of death 
 by the hand of his own son, been made the subject 
 of it, — there would have been no room at all for the 
 spiritual halo which the mysterious stories of Arthur's 
 birth and of his return from the island of his rest 
 shed round the subject. No Greek tragedian would 
 have dreamt of investing (Edipus with such a halo as 
 that. This view of the story is a tragic one in the 
 true old sense of a story purifying the heart by pity 
 and by fear. The subject of so dread and dark a 
 destiny may be enabled to answer Sphinx-riddles as a 
 step to his own doom, but he cannot be one whose 
 coming is preceded by heavenly portents, and whose 
 passing takes place amidst the wailing of unearthly 
 mourners, the bitter grief and remorse of faithless 
 companions, and the mystic presage of a glorious 
 return. It seems to me perfectly evident that 
 Tennyson, as every true poet — Mr. S^vinburne him- 
 self, for example — had to choose betAveen the various 
 inconsistent elements in the Arthurian legends, which 
 of them he would keep and which he would eliminate, 
 that it would have been simply impossible to keep 
 the element of shame and retribution along with the
 
 vni TENNYSON 403 
 
 element of mystic spiritual glory, and that the last is 
 far the most charactei-istic and the most in keeping 
 with the Christianmysticism of the San Grail legends, of 
 the two. Let any one read either Sir Thomas Malory's 
 book, or the brief, graceful, and classical compilation^ 
 of the Legends of King Arthur by J. T. K., and then 
 judge for himself whether the sin of King Arthur or 
 his unearthly glory be the more deeply ingrained 
 element of the two, and I suspect he will end by 
 accepting as the overruling idea, and also as by far 
 the better adapted for coherent treatment, the verdict 
 of the old chroniclers, of Joseph of Exeter, for ex- 
 ample : " The old world knows not his peer, nor will 
 the future show us his equal ; he alone towers over 
 all other kings, better than the past ones, and greater 
 than those that are to be"; and again another old 
 compiler : "In short, God has not made, since Adam 
 was, the man more perfect than King Arthur."^ 
 It is perfectly evident that this tradition of unrivalled 
 spiritual glory was a development of elements of the 
 story quite inconsistent with that of his great sin and 
 shame. 
 
 Mr. Swinburne asserts, however, that Guinevere's 
 sin is closely implicated with Arthur's: "From the 
 sin of Arthur's youth proceeds the ruin of his reign 
 and realm through the falsehood of his wife — a wife 
 unloving and unloved."^ I believe this is not only 
 without basis in the story as told by Sir Thomas 
 Malory, but wholly inconsistent with it. So far is 
 Guinevere from being "unloved," that when Merlin 
 asks Arthur, " Is there any faire lady that yee love 
 
 1 Strahan & Co. 
 
 ^ I quote these from tlie preface to J. T. K.'s compilation. 
 ^ Under the Microscope, by Algernon Charles Swinburne, p. 
 37. (White, Coventry Street).
 
 404 TENNYSON viii 
 
 better than another?" he answers, "Yea, I love 
 Guinevere the King's daughter, Leodegrance of the 
 land of Camelyard, which Leodegrance holdeth in his 
 power the Table Round that yee told hee had of my 
 father Uther. And this demosell is the most gen- 
 tilest and fairest lady that I know living, or yet that 
 I ever could find." "Sir," said Merlin, "as of her 
 beautie and fairenesse, she is one of the fairest that 
 live ; hut an yee loved her not so well as yee doe, I would 
 finde yee a demosell of heautie and of goodnesse that should 
 like yee and please yee, and your heart were not set. But 
 there as a man's heart is set, he will he loth to return." 
 " That is truth," said Arthur ; — and here not only is 
 Arthur's passion for his queen represented as beyond 
 resistance, but Merlin treats the want of love of 
 Guinevere as the root of the calamities that were to 
 come, and intimates that by a happier choice these 
 calamities might have been avoided. And the simple 
 truth is, that this is the whole drift of the legends, 
 from the date of Arthur's marriage to the close. 
 After Arthur's mysterious death, Guinevere freely 
 takes upon herself and Lancelot the whole guilt of 
 the ruin of Arthur's kingdom. " Through this knight 
 and mee all these warres were -wrought, and the 
 death of the most noble knights of the world ; for 
 through our love that we have loved together is my 
 most noble lord slaine. . . . For as well as I have 
 loved thee. Sir Lancelot, now mine heart will not 
 once serve mee to see thee ; for through thee and mee 
 is the floure of kings and knights destroyed." And 
 her last prayer is not to see Sir Lancelot again with 
 her bodily eyes, lest her earthly and disloyal love 
 should return upon her, but that he should bury 
 her beside her true lord and master. King Arthur. 
 No one can read Sir Thomas Malory's book without
 
 viii TENNYSON 405 
 
 being struck by the complete disappearance, as it 
 proceeds, of all trace of remorse or shame in King 
 Arthur, and by the weight of guilt thrown upon 
 the passionate love of Lancelot and Guinevere. 
 Obviously, if Tennyson was to keep to the legends 
 which cast so mysterious a halo of spiritual glory 
 around King Arthur, he had no choice but to ignore 
 those which connected, CEdipus-fashion, his youthful 
 sin with the final catastrophe. 
 
 But it has been said that Arthur's exclusion from 
 the search for the San Grail is only intelligible on the 
 ground of his youthful guilt. Here again, I think, 
 Tennyson's poetic instinct proves triumphant. For 
 in the story of it as told by Sir Thomas Malory, 
 there is not only no trace of this, but a distinct justifi- 
 cation of the Poet Laureate's view that Arthur looked 
 on this search for the San Grail as almost a disloyalty 
 to the higher though humbler task that he had set 
 himself and his knights — of restoring order on earth ; 
 while, on the other hand, knights, who, like Sir 
 Lancelot, are stained with far deeper and more volun- 
 tary guilt than any with which the King, even on Mr. 
 Swinburne's view, is chargeable, are allowed to join 
 in the search. I do not know anything happier or 
 more true in its instinct, in English poetry, than the 
 tone Tennyson has attributed to Arthur's reluctant 
 assent to the search for the San Grail. It is amply 
 justified by the old legends, and it just enables the 
 poet to express through Arthur that spiritual distrust 
 of signs and wonders which, while it serves to link 
 his faith closely with modern thought, is in no 
 way inconsistent \Wth the chivalric character of the 
 whole story. In Sir Thomas Malory's version, after 
 the descent of the Holy Ghost, the vision of the holy 
 vessel, and that Pentecostal scene in which all the
 
 406 TENNYSON 
 
 VIII 
 
 knights, amid profound silence, had beheld each other 
 invested with a higher beauty than their own, Arthur 
 yields thanks to God "of his grace that hee had 
 sent them, and for the vision hee had showed them 
 at the high feast of Pentecost," yet not only suggests 
 no quest, but imagines none ; nor is it the holiest of 
 the knights, nor one of those who are to succeed 
 wholly or partially in achieving it, who proposes it. 
 It is Sir Gawain ; — though Tennyson, who has 
 accepted for other reasons a lower conception of Sir 
 Gawain than the old chroniclers, puts the first oath 
 into the mouth of the mystic -minded Percivale. 
 Arthur at once expresses his displeasure in language 
 at least fairly interpretable as implying disapproba- 
 tion of the surrender of a prior earthly duty for a 
 visionary spiritual aim. " 'Alas ! ' said King Arthur 
 unto Sir Gawain, ' yee have nigh slaine mee with the 
 vow and promise yee have made ; for through you 
 yee have bereft mee of the fairest fellowship and the 
 truest of knighthood that ever were scene together 
 in any realme of the world. For when they shall 
 depart from hence, I am sure that all shall never 
 meete more in this world, for there shall many die in 
 the quest, and so it forethinketh (repenteth) mee a 
 little, for I have loved them as well as my life ; where- 
 fore it shall grieve me right sore the separation of 
 this fellowship, for I have had an old custome to have 
 them in my fellowship.' " And again, more passion- 
 ately : " ' Ah, Sir Gawain, Sir Gawain, yee have 
 betraied mee, for never shall my heart be amended 
 by you, but yee ■will never be sorry for mee as I am 
 for you' ; and there^\^th the teeres began to runne 
 downe by his visage. And therewith the King said : 
 'Ah, knight, Sir Lancelot, I require thee that thou 
 wilt counsaile mee, for I would this quest were un-
 
 VIII 
 
 TENNYSON 407 
 
 done, and it might bee.'" This is not the language 
 of one too guilty to join in the quest himself, but of 
 one who sincerely disapproves it, as the exchange of 
 a clear prior duty undertaken by his knights, for one 
 of doubtful obligation, though of spiritual ambition. 
 
 On the whole, I cannot help thinking that Mr. 
 Smnburne's hostile criticism of " The Idylls of the 
 King" for their omission of the taint in the king's 
 life and character, is virtually a complaint that the 
 poet has not excluded the whole halo of spiritual 
 glory from the Arthurian traditions, and substituted 
 an old Greek tragedy for a mystic mediseval vision. 
 Doubtless Mr. Swinburne himself would have pre- 
 ferred the former subject — the dark shadows of fate, 
 the sensual horror, the black remorse, and the fell 
 retribution, which haunt a sin of passion and an un- 
 natural though partly involuntary crime. He has 
 often shown an almost ostentatious preference for 
 artistic subjects of this specially painful kind. But 
 looking solely to the Arthurian legends themselves, I 
 think Tennyson was more than justified in taking 
 the other view. By doing so he has not only raised 
 the character of his poem, but connected it with 
 some of the most prominent and distinctive threads 
 in our modern spiritual life. 
 
 To come to the poem itself, — the various links in 
 which too few of its readers have, I fear, as yet 
 considered in the order in which Tennyson means 
 them to be ultimately studied, rather than in that in 
 which he has given them to the world, — what a 
 splendour of dusk and dawn is there not in the intro- 
 ductory poem, " The Coming of Arthur"; what a veil 
 of lustre is drawn over the birth and origin of this 
 mysterious king, whose royal right is half reflected 
 rumour flashed back from the greatness of his subse-
 
 408 TENNYSON Vlli 
 
 quent deeds, and half that dim oracular testimony 
 which always seems to anticipate the higher orders 
 of greatness from their earliest days ! His knights 
 believe him to be of the old royal race, the more that 
 his tones of command "and simple words of great 
 authority " sink into them with a self-attesting power, 
 so 
 
 " That when they rose, knighted from kneeling, some 
 Were pale as at the passing of a ghost, 
 Some flush'd, and others dazed, as one who wakes 
 Half-blinded at the coming of a light." 
 
 His sister, full of a deeper loyalty and a more 
 feminine faith, believes the rumour of a supernatural 
 origin, — that he came with portents, borne a naked 
 babe upon the sea, the sign of the ^vinged dragon 
 above him in heaven, and a lambent fire playing 
 round him as the last and greatest of nine great 
 waves bore him to Merlin's feet. Merlin himself, 
 the great master of all mediaeval lore, could only say 
 of Arthur that though men might wound him, he 
 could never die, but " pass, again to come," declaring 
 of him in words that haunt the mind of Guinevere 
 when she sees him depart to retiu-n to her no more — 
 
 " From the great deep to the great deep he goes." 
 
 Leodogran's dream, when he is doubting whether 
 Arthur's mysterious descent is truly royal, so that 
 he may give him Guinevere for his wife, or not, — the 
 dream in which he mingles the story of the actual 
 wars of Arthur against the heathen Avith the rumours 
 of the still struggling passions of his rebellious 
 subjects, and yet augurs that the grandeur of the 
 King will survive even the history of his deeds, — is 
 a splendid embodiment of Tennyson's drift throughout 
 the poem. Grant that a perfect king is a phantom
 
 VIII TENNYSON 409 
 
 of the human imagination, yet it is a phantom which 
 will haunt it long after what we call the real earth 
 shall have been dissolved : — 
 
 " She spake and King Leodogran rejoiced, 
 But musing, ' Shall I answer yea or nay ? ' 
 Doubted, and drowsed, nodded and slept, and saw, 
 Dreaming, a slope of land that ever grew, 
 Field after field, up to a height, the peak 
 Haze-hidden, and thereon a phantom king. 
 Now looming, and now lost ; and on the slope 
 The sword rose, the hind fell, the herd was driven, 
 Fire glimpsed ; and all the land from roof and rick, 
 In drifts of smoke before a rolling wind, 
 Stream'd to the peak, and mingled with the haze 
 And made it thicker ; while the phantom king 
 Sent out at times a voice ; and here or there 
 Stood one who pointed toward the voice, the rest 
 Slew on and burnt, crying, ' No king of ours, 
 No son of Uther, and no king of ours ' ; 
 Till with a wink his dream was changed, the haze 
 Descended, and the solid earth became 
 As nothing, and the king stood out in heaven, 
 Crown'd. And Leodogran awoke, and sent 
 Ulfius, and Brastias and Bedivere, 
 Back to the court of Arthur answering yea." 
 
 Like all true authority, that of the ideal king is 
 hidden in mystery, but the image of his glory in the 
 heavens survives the crumbling of his kingdom on 
 earth. Not in painting the restless hunger of 
 travel in his "Ulysses," not in making us shudder 
 at the immortal mortality of the weary "Tithonus," 
 has Tennyson displayed more power than in this 
 wonderful picture of the mystery which envelops, 
 and the inspiration which seems to attend, the 
 exercise of spiritual authority over the wills of men.
 
 410 TENNYSON Vlll 
 
 — of the spell which it lays upon them, — of the 
 certain failure of that spell as passion and , pleasure 
 and selfish interest reassert their sway, and yet of 
 the inevitable reassertion of its power in memory and 
 its eternal triumph in faith. 
 
 The second of these poems, and the newest of 
 them, " Gareth and Lynette," is meant to paint the 
 golden age of Arthur's reign, while as yet no germ 
 of guilt has sprung into visible life, while the chivalry 
 of perfect courage, perfect love, and perfect faith is 
 still dominant, and all Arthur's knights are aiding 
 him in redeeming the earth and the souls of men 
 from the tyranny of brutal instincts and the lawless 
 caprice of human self-mil. Gareth is the embodi- 
 ment of childlike loyalty and buoyant youthful faith, 
 willing for any service, however seemingly igno- 
 minious, which is the service of the true King " who 
 makes us free," and not only willing for it, but happy 
 and radiant in it. He is chosen for one which is 
 representative of the aims of Arthur's whole kingdom, 
 — to rescue her who is beset in " Castle Perilous " 
 by four strong but foolish and boastful knights, who 
 resist Ai-thm-'s authority and wish to destroy the 
 order he has founded, and who have challenged him 
 to send his bravest and most glorious knight to 
 encounter them, and deliver their fair captive if he 
 may. "WTiom the fair captive of " Castle Perilous " 
 may represent, and of what fashion the knights who 
 there confine her, Tennyson has not left us to con- 
 jecture, though the allegory must not be pushed so 
 far as to destroy the beauty of the poetic story : — 
 
 " Anon they past a narrow comb wherein 
 Were slabs of rock with figures, knights on horse 
 Sculptured, and deckt in slowly-waning hues. 
 ' Sir Knave, my knight, a hermit once was here.
 
 VIII TENNYSON 411 
 
 Whose lioly hand hath fashion'd on the rock 
 The war of Time against the soul of man. 
 And yon four fools have suck'd their allegory 
 From these damp walls, and taken but the form. 
 Know ye not these 1 ' and Gareth lookt and read — 
 In letters like to those the vexillary 
 Hath left crag-craven o'er the streaming Gelt — 
 ' Phosphorus,' then ' Meridies,' — ' Hesperus ' — 
 ' Nox ' — ' Mors,' beneath five figures, armed men. 
 Slab after slab, their faces forward all. 
 And running down the Soul, a Shaj)e that fled 
 With broken wings, torn raiment and loose hair. 
 For help and shelter to the hermit's cave." 
 
 In this the earliest and most joyous of the pictures 
 of Arthur's reign, something more of symbolism is 
 permissible, by way of illustrating the drift and 
 bearing of the whole, than in the later poems, where 
 sin and shame have struck their dark personal 
 impress on the story ; and nothing can be brighter 
 and yet in its w^ay more thrilling than the story of 
 Gareth's fearful encounter with the Evening Star — 
 him who with the wiry tenacity of worldly experience 
 and indiu'ated habit, warded off the daring enthusiasm 
 of youth and faith, — and him who chilled the blood 
 of all under the awful seeming of Night and Death, 
 and yet proved to be but a blooming boy, dis- 
 guised in false terrors by the stratagem of the chil- 
 dren of Time. Of course Tennyson means that the 
 whole aim of Arthur's Order was to deliver the 
 spiritual captive of " Castle Perilous " from the 
 power of these worldlings of the flesh, and that the 
 battle was to grow more grievous as the long day 
 grew towards its close, though "the passing of 
 Arthur " at the last, fearful as it seemed, should be 
 but the easy victory over a danger really conquered
 
 412 TENNYSON vili 
 
 before — the passing into an isle of rest, whence in 
 higher glory he should return again. The mixture 
 of buoyant life with symbolism in this story of Gareth, 
 and the delicacy with which Tennyson has used and 
 yet quite transformed the old Arthurian story of this 
 relief of " Castle Perilous," seem to me to rank this 
 poem amongst his happiest efforts. / 
 
 In "Enid," where it is the purpose of the poet 
 to picture the infection of distrust, the contagious 
 jealousy which the rumour of Guinevere's unfaithful- 
 ness vnth Lancelot spread downwards amongst the 
 knights of Arthur, though as yet in but a compara- 
 tively incipient and conquerable stage, Tennyson's 
 delight in picture rather overpowers his main pur- 
 pose ; and we approach nearer to the type of the 
 versified novelette — the type of " Enoch Arden " 
 and " Aylmer's Field " — than in any other section of 
 the Arthurian epic. We must remember, however, 
 that Enid is painted as especially distinguished by 
 Guinevere's love ; that it is her closeness to Guinevere 
 which alarms Geraint on her behalf when he hears 
 Guinevere's virtue impugned ; and that it is the 
 King's healing influence, no less than Enid's spotless 
 purity, which restores Geraint to himself. Arthur's 
 chivalry is already attacked from the side of purity, 
 but the taint is not yet deep. In "Vivien" and 
 "Elaine" the taint spreads. In the former, which 
 Mr. Swinburne has assailed for vulgarity and gross- 
 ness, we have certainly, in Vivien's wiles with Merlin, 
 the picture of a true harlot worming out of that 
 time-worn craft and intellect — which, while it is high 
 enough to discern and serve willingly the true 
 spiritual king, yet is not itself of moral or spiritual 
 descent, — its secrets of power, in the very wanton- 
 ness of selfish envy. She had first tried her wiles
 
 VIII 
 
 TENNYSON 413 
 
 with the higher nature, with the King himself, and 
 failed. She has heard of the sensual charm by which 
 a living death may be brought upon the highest; 
 mind : — 
 
 " And Vivien ever sought to work the charm 
 Upon the great Enchanter of the Time, 
 As fancying that her glory would be great 
 According to his greatness whom she quench'd." 
 
 How the great Enchanter hears the foul libels of 
 her evil heart with loathing, and then, " overtalked 
 and overworn," yields to her allurements, tells her 
 the charm, and becomes its victim, so robbing 
 Arthur's kingdom of its shrewdest mind, Tenny- 
 son tells in one of his most powerful but certainly 
 not one of his most attractive poems. Yet I cannot 
 see that it would have been right, as Mr. Swinburne 
 asserts, to clothe Vivien with some sort of dignity, 
 "human or diabolic." Shakespeare himself never 
 clothes with dignity, even in tragedy, characters 
 against which he desires to excite pure loathing, — 
 like Goneril and Regan. What is wanted is to show 
 the power which sensual natures, partly because they 
 are without dignity, may attain over the highest and 
 most experienced intellects unprotected by something- 
 higher yet. Any addition of dignity to Vivien 
 would have been a fault for the purposes of the 
 picture. But I do think that Vivien's naked wicked- 
 ness is insufficiently connected with the taint on 
 Arthur's Court caused by Guinevere's and Lancelot's 
 sin. Vivien should belong, at all events, to the last 
 and not to the earliest period. She might be con- 
 ceivable when Ettarre was the queen of beauty, and 
 during the open shamelessness of " The Last Tourna- 
 ment." She is before her time in the period when
 
 414 TENNYSON 
 
 VIII 
 
 even Guinevere's fall has only just become the 
 scandal of the time. Vivien, the type of those 
 Avho 
 
 " Inflate themselves with some insane delight 
 And judge all Nature from her feet of clay," 
 
 is surely premature ! 
 
 I do not suppose any one questions the exquisite 
 beauty of the poem in which Elaine's pure first love 
 for Lancelot, and her death on his behalf, is con- 
 trasted with the Queen's jealous and guilty passion. 
 The lurid picture of the crowned skeleton on which 
 Arthur trod in a moonlit pass, long before he became 
 king, when he broke from it that diadem all the 
 jewels in which Lancelot was to win for the object 
 of his guilty passion, makes a fine opening of evil 
 augury to this contrast between guilty and innocent 
 love, just as the passage of Elaine's corpse in the 
 boat to Camelot makes for it a noble and tragic 
 close. The contrast between Guinevere and Elaine, 
 imaged in that simple and exquisite passage where 
 the Queen flings the diamonds that Lancelot ofFers 
 her into the river, — 
 
 " And down they flash'd, and smote the stream, 
 Then from the smitten surface flash'd as it were, 
 Diamonds to meet them, and they pass'd away," — 
 
 marks the turning point of the Ai"thurian story. 
 The King's pure influence wanes, and the Queen's 
 guilty passion grows. Sir Gawain, the type of gay 
 and gallant pleasure-seeking, has already begun to 
 trifle disloyally with his King's orders. And the 
 burst of grand remorse in Lancelot, with which the 
 poem ends, prepares the way for that morbid, self- 
 introspective cast of thought, those fever-fits of
 
 VIII TENNYSON 415 
 
 spiritual craving and despondency, that yearning 
 for signs and wonders, that thirst for expiation, by 
 which the search for the Holy Grail, with its kirid 
 enthusiasms and its apocalyptic dreams, is ushered 
 in. " The year of miracle " is painted, as it seems 
 to me, with even more than Mr. Tennyson's higher 
 kind of power. The mystic passion in it, the stormy 
 remorse, the fitful humility, the dreamy mingling of 
 earth and heaven, tell of the closest study of the 
 literature of ecstasy and the rapture of the seventh 
 heaven. The picture is heightened by the striking 
 glimpse given us of that common-place monk with 
 his village gossips, and his earthly cares, all glued 
 like " the martin's nest " to the little thorpe which 
 lies under the monastery's walls, to whom Percivale 
 relates it — a pictu^re almost worthy to set by that of 
 the " Northern Farmers " for its realism and its force. 
 The close of the poem, in which Arthur claims for 
 himself spiritual visions more than all of them, and 
 yet condemns the neglect of one plain practical 
 duty in order to indulge these visions, one of Tenny- 
 son's finest touches, serves to mark at once the 
 waning influence of the King, and the growing 
 stature of the " phantom " whom men disowned : — 
 
 " And some among you held, that if the King 
 Had seen the sight he would have sworn the vow : 
 Not easily, seeing that the King must guard 
 That which he rules, and is but as the hind 
 To whom a space of land is given to plough, 
 Who may not wander from the allotted field 
 Before his work be done ; but, being done, 
 Let visions of the night or of the day 
 Come, as they will ; and many a time they come. 
 Until this earth he walks on seems not earth, 
 This light that strikes his eyeball is not light,
 
 416 TENNYSON viii 
 
 This air tliat smites his forehead is not air, 
 
 But vision — yea, his very hand and foot — 
 
 In moments when he feels he cannot die. 
 
 And knows himself no vision to himself. 
 
 Nor the high God a vision, nor that One 
 
 Wlio rose again : ye have seen what ye have seen." 
 
 I have said I cannot greatly admire the poem 
 which follows, "Pelleas and Ettarre." It has great 
 power, and delineates the growth of a sensual chaos 
 with terrible force, but there is no relieving element 
 in it. Pelleas, who starts with an enthusiastic purity, 
 deserves a better fate (which, indeed, in the old 
 legends he obtains) than that of desperation and 
 wild defiance of the kingdom in whose greatness he 
 had believed. We miss altogether Arthur's presence. 
 All is sensual anarchy, and the victory of the harlot 
 is complete. The reader greatly needs a touch like 
 that which ends " The Last Tournament," where the 
 fidelity even of a fool turns horror into true tragedy, 
 and opens a glimpse of love behind the foul orgies 
 of victorious lust. I think the Arthurian poem 
 would be a more perfect whole if "Pelleas and Et- 
 tarre " were completely omitted. " The Last Tour- 
 nament " seems to me not only to give us over again 
 all that " Pelleas and Ettarre " gives, but to give it 
 in a nobler form, in less harsh and grating discords. 
 
 " Guinevere," and " The Passing of Arthur," how- 
 ever, heal all wounds. The passage in which the 
 King, while shrinking from even the touch of the 
 Queen's hand, tells her it is his doom to love her 
 still, and that he claims her in the eternal world 
 as his — one of those passages on which, I believe, 
 the taunt has been founded, that Tennyson's 
 "Arthur" is "an impeccable prig," — seems to me 
 one of the noblest and most moving in English
 
 Vili TENNYSON 417 
 
 poetry. Doubtless, in one view, all sinlessness is 
 didactic, and therefore jarring to those who are 
 not sinless. But Tennyson means Arthur for the 
 impersonation of spiritual authority from the first, 
 as he means Guinevere for the impersonation of that 
 highest form of woman's beauty, which is the noblest 
 embodiment of purity, and therefore shows most 
 sadly the flaw of passionate sin. If the spirit of 
 holiness, of mercy, of love, is priggish because it ia 
 impeccable, then, and only then, could I see the 
 truth of that flippant charge against language such 
 as this : — 
 
 " I camiot take thy hand, that too is flesh. 
 And in the flesh thou hast sinn'd ; and mine own flesh, 
 Here looking down on thine polluted, cries 
 ' I loathe thee ' : yet not less, Guinevere, 
 For I was ever virgin save for thee, 
 
 ' My love thro' flesh hath wrought into my life 
 So far, that my doom is, I love thee still. 
 Let no man dream but that I love thee still. 
 Perchance, and so thou purify tliy soul, 
 And so thou lean on our fair father Christ, 
 
 I Hereafter in that world where all are pure 
 
 1 We two may meet before high God, and thou 
 Wilt spring to me, and claim me thine, and know 
 I am thine husband — not a smaller soul, 
 Nor Lancelot, nor another. Leave me that, 
 I charge thee, my last hope. Now must I hence. 
 Thro' the thick night I hear the trumpet blow : 
 They summon me their King to lead mine hosts 
 
 - Far down to that great battle in the west, 
 Where I must strike against my sister's son, 
 Leagued with the lords of the White Horse and knights 
 Once mine, and strike him dead, and meet myself 
 Death, or I know not what mysterious doom. 
 And thou remaining here wilt learn the event ; 
 h 2 E
 
 418 TENNYSON viii 
 
 But hither shall I never come again, 
 Never lie by thy side, see thee no more, 
 Farewell ! 
 
 And while she grovell'd at his feet, 
 Slie felt the King's breath wander o'er her neck, 
 And, in the darkness o'er her fallen head. 
 Perceived the waving of his hands that blest." 
 
 "The Passing of Arthur," which contains some 
 of Tennyson's earliest, and also of his latest, work, 
 and all of it in his best and highest and most 
 masculine strain, is a striking evidence of the singular 
 unity of his genius. No single poem of his contains 
 at once so much vivid colour and so much intellectual 
 and spiritual magic. The wonderful picture of the 
 weird and desolate hour of seeming spiritual failure, 
 of the wounded heart, of forsaken suffering, of sinking- 
 trust, but not of failing fortitude or shrinking will, 
 which precedes and follows the last great battle, 
 is perhaps the highest Lord Tennyson has drawn. 
 Nothing in all his poems gives me so strong a feeling 
 of his power as those which contain the dream in 
 Avhich he seems to see the ghost of the pleasure- 
 loving, pleasure-seeking Gawain : — 
 
 *' Before that last weird battle in the west 
 Tliere came on Arthnr sleeping, Gawain kill'd 
 In Lancelot's war, the ghost of Gawain blown 
 Along a wandering wind, and past his ear 
 Went shrilling ' Hollow, hollow, all delight ! 
 Hail, King ! to-morrow thou shalt pass away. 
 Farewell ! there is an isle of rest for thee. 
 And I am blown along a wandering wind, 
 And hollow, hollow, hollow all delight.' 
 And fainter onward, like wild birds that change 
 Their season in the night and wail their way 
 From cloud to cloud, down the long wind the dream
 
 VIII TENNYSON 419 
 
 Slirill'd ; but in going mingled with dim cries 
 Far in the moonlit haze among tlie hills, 
 As of some lonely city sack'd by night, 
 When all is lost, and wife and child with wail 
 Pass to new lords ; and Arthur woke and call'd, 
 ' Who spake ? A dream, O light uijon the wind, 
 Thine, Gawain, was the voice — are these dim cries 
 Thine ? or doth all that haunts the waste and wild 
 Mourn, knowing it will go along with me ? ' " 
 
 The state of mind in which the spirit begins to 
 creep against the flesh, as knowing that the period of 
 united existence is past, and all things look spectral, 
 while a horror descends even upon the highest courage 
 at a prospect rendered in this case indefinitely more 
 chill by the broken honour and sullied vows of others, 
 and the seeming failure of the pui^est spiritual con- 
 stancy to subdue the world to itself, is delineated as 
 only one of the great poets of the world can de- 
 lineate anything. Tennyson is never so great as 
 when he has a mystic dread to paint, when Tithonus 
 is shivering at the prospect of an immortal burden, 
 or Arthur asking himself on the edge of the hereafter, 
 whether there had been anything of true eternity in 
 his life here. I have said that what is rich and 
 complex, like the beauty and chivalry and faith of 
 this great poem, always attracts the Laureate most ; 
 that his most characteristic poetry contains in it all 
 the richest elements of artistic composition. But, 
 perhaps, for that very reason, no other poet has 
 painted so powerfully that mysterious thrill with 
 which the glory of this world passes away, and leaves 
 the nakedness of the soul behind. Percivale, with 
 _every grand and lovely vision, falling into dust at 
 his touch, and leaving him alone, and "wearying in 
 a land of sand and thorns," or Arthur feeling a way
 
 420 TENNYSON viii 
 
 " Thro' this blind haze, which ever since I saw 
 One lying in the dust at Almesbury, 
 Hath folded in the passes of the world," 
 
 is alike clad in the sublimity of that deepest kind of 
 desolation from which a vesture of rich thought and 
 hope has suddenly been stripped away. The very 
 grandeur of the scenery from which Arthur passes to his 
 isle of rest, when, after the long day's battle wrapped 
 in mist, and the grievous wound from the traitor's 
 hand, and the one remaining knight's unfaithfulness, 
 he is borne to the margin of the mystic water, — 
 
 " When on a sudden, lo ! the level lake 
 And the long glories of the winter moon," 
 
 contributes, by the rich flash of its contrast, to 
 enhance the impression of a ghostly solitude of spirit 
 and a trembling, halting faith. The vision of Leodo- 
 gran's dream is literally fulfilled. The cloud has 
 rolled down upon the earth, and the King, a mighty 
 phantom, stands out in heaven — but stands out 
 crowned, for he has lost nothing in himself of the 
 spiritual elements of his kingdom ; his courage is un- 
 shaken, his honour unsullied, his purity untarnished, 
 and his faith, though wavering as, in the hour of 
 deepest darkness, it wavers in the most perfect human- 
 ity, is still the life and blossom of his nature. And 
 as Merlin's riddling prophecy rings in our ears, 
 
 " Where is he who knows ? 
 From the great deep to the great deep he goes," 
 
 we recognise in the drooping King, as the barge 
 takes him slowly to his isle of rest, the image of the 
 "new order" almost as much as of the old — the 
 elements of that true chivalry, in which courage, 
 truth, purity, and faith are even more of spiritual
 
 VIII 
 
 TENNYSON 421 
 
 and inward than of outward gifts, and stretch out 
 arms of yearning towards the life beyond the veil. 
 
 If not the most perfectly finished of Tenny- 
 son's poems, " The Idylls of the King " has a grander 
 aim and larger scope than any, and paints the waste 
 places of the heart and the strength of the naked 
 soul with a stronger and more nervous touch. As 
 the rich colours of the great story fade, the air fills 
 with low, spiritual rumours of that higher life of 
 which the order of the Round Table is but a symbol ; 
 while Tennyson paints the stately passing of the 
 spirit to its rest as he painted the greatness of its 
 rising, but with added touches of mystery and 
 beauty. The old Arthurian epic has been rendered 
 by Tennyson significant to modern ears. In it he has 
 found the common term between the ideas of chivalry 
 and the ideas of an age of hesitating trust, an age of 
 a probing intellect and of a trusting heart. The 
 conquests and the yearnings, and the sad resolves of a 
 spirit far too Kingly to rule successfully men who only 
 half recognise the kingly voice, have never before 
 been delineated by a poet who can use almost all the 
 wealth of colour belonging at once to the visible and 
 the invisible life, Avith the reticent hand and sure eye 
 of Tennyson's rich and patient and spiritual genius. 
 
 Of Tennyson's plays, whether " Queen Mary " or 
 " Becket " or " Harold," no one will, I think, be in- 
 clined to say that they are fully Avorthy of his genius. 
 Though he has the dramatic mind, yet his mind is not 
 by instinct dramatic. On the contrary, you see that 
 drama is to a certain extent foreign to him, and puts the 
 curb on his favourite modes of thought. Still " Queen 
 Mary" is strong from end to end, which could not be said 
 of either " Becket " or " Harold." It is so thoroughly 
 dramatic that it might, with an adequate cast of actors,
 
 422 TENNYSON 
 
 VIII 
 
 be produced with the highest effect on the stage ; and 
 if this has not been done, it is chiefly that the number 
 of the actors, and of the good actors required, is too 
 great for the command of any manager. Almost all 
 the characters who j^lay a real part in the drama, 
 however slightly touched, are clearly defined — Philip, 
 whose disgust for the Queen is powerfully painted, 
 but who remains otherwise something of a cold, 
 cruel, and sensual shadow, being perhaps in some 
 degree an exception. Courtenay, Earl of Devon, — 
 the vain and flighty Catholic Plantagenet, — " this 
 Prince of fluff and feather," as Lord Howard in 
 speaking to Elizabeth calls him ; Eeginald Pole, the 
 fair-weather Papal Legate, who shrinks alike from 
 being persecuted and from persecuting, but is easily 
 driven into the latter policy under fear of the former; 
 Bishop Gardiner, with his fierce Eomanising dog- 
 matism and his English hatred of Italian interference 
 in English concerns, — 
 
 ..." His big baldness, 
 That irritable forelock wliicli lie rubs, 
 His buzzard beak, and deep incavern'd eyes " ; 
 
 Bonner and his moral brutality ; Lord Paget, with 
 the half -confessed Protestantism of his statesman's 
 intellect, and yet that craving for English influence 
 abroad which makes him support the alliance with 
 Spain ; Lord Howard, with his aristocratic Catholi- 
 cism, his complete comtempt for the vulgarity and 
 ignorance of the new schismatics, and yet his thor- 
 oughly rooted antipathy to the bigotry of the sacer- 
 dotal spirit ; Sir Thomas Wyatt, vnth. his tasteful 
 literary cravings, and the keen, audacious soldier 
 beneath them ; Sir Ralph Bagenhall, with his bold, 
 meditative insubordination and his hopelessness of
 
 VIII 
 
 TENNYSON 423 
 
 active resistance ; Sir Thomas White (the Lord 
 Mayor), with his political indecision, and his wonder- 
 ful dexterity at swaying the London Guilds directly 
 the feather's -weight has tiu-ned the scale which 
 he is pleased to call his mind, so as to decide him 
 on his own course ; Cranmer, with his somewhat 
 questionable faith and courage, — questionable we 
 mean as regards historical fact, not questionable 
 at all in Tennyson's picture, — his humility, peni- 
 tence, and sweetness ; and lastly, the imaginary ser- 
 vants and peasants, both men and women, who are 
 made parties to the drama, — these are all drawn 
 with a firm hand and painted with a delicate touch. 
 But the great characters of the piece are, as of course 
 they ought to be, Mary and her half-sister Elizabeth, 
 whose star declines as the Catholic Queen's rises, and 
 rises fair again as Mary's sets. Of course the por- 
 trait of Elizabeth is comparatively slight as compared 
 with that of Mary, but though much less carefully 
 filled-in, it is to the full as dramatic and lifelike. 
 Moreover, as it is intended to do, it makes by con- 
 trast the chief portrait all the more striking and 
 characteristic. Both Mary and Elizabeth have the 
 Tudor courage in emergencies, and flashes of what 
 may be called that dramatic magnanimity which en- 
 ables them to see how best to seem superior to sus- 
 picion and fear in a moment of danger. Mary, when 
 she met Elizabeth at Wanstead, at the moment 
 when her own accession was still doubtful, took her 
 rival's hand, as Tennyson's drama reminds us, called 
 her " sweet sister," and kissed not her alone, but all 
 the ladies of her following, and further spoke of the 
 Lady Jane Grey as a poor innocent child who had 
 but obeyed her father. Elizabeth, again, could so 
 far feel with the dead Queen, whose reign had been
 
 424 TENNYSON ' vill 
 
 one long menace to her, as to half-believe in her own 
 reluctance to succeed her, and to be absorbed for the 
 moment, or think herself absorbed, in pity for the 
 sad fate which had darkened steadily down to the 
 miserable close. But while both had the Tudor in- 
 stinct in emergencies, in Mary it was, as a rule, en- 
 tirely subordinated to personal emotions, like her 
 irrational passion for the Spanish prince she had 
 never seen, her fixed hatred for the counsellors who 
 were forward in advocating her mother's divorce, and 
 her superstitious craving for the blood of the enemies 
 of the Church. On the contrary, in Elizabeth, per- 
 sonal feeling was, as a rule, subordinated to her 
 strong instinct of policy, so that her personal wilful- 
 ness flashed up almost as capriciously in her as 
 the Tudor sagacity did in Mary's less sober mind. 
 The masterly sketch of Elizabeth which Tennyson 
 puts into Cecil's mouth at the close of the play, — a 
 sketch which ends it with a Shakespearian strength 
 and pithiness that make Cranmer's somewhat hyper- 
 bolic and certainly by no means discriminating Moge 
 of Elizabeth, at the close of the play of " Henry VIIL," 
 sound flat as well as flattering in the comparison,^ — • 
 is a key to Tennyson's drift throughout his de- 
 lineation of Mary. I may be excused for giving the 
 closing passage of the play first, on the ground that 
 the critic who wants to point out the movement of 
 the poet's thought in the drama to those who have 
 not yet read it, cannot follow the gradually opening 
 purpose of the play itself, but must make the end 
 clear from the beginning. This is Cecil's brief pic- 
 ture of Elizabeth : — 
 
 "Much it is 
 To be nor mad, nor bigot — have a mind — 
 Nor let priests' talk, or dream of worlds to be,
 
 viii , TENNYSON 425 
 
 Miscolour things about her — sudden touches 
 
 For him, or him — sunk rocks ; no passionate faith — 
 
 But — if let be— balance and compromise ; 
 
 Brave, wary, sane to the heart of her — a Tudor 
 
 School'd by the shadow of death — a Boleyn, too, 
 
 Glancing across the Tudor — not so well." 
 
 It is against this background, as it were, of the 
 ideal Tudor character, that Tennyson paints, with 
 great power and many flashes of striking detail, the 
 breakdown of Mary's reign, — the pict^^re of the 
 woman who, with momentary intervals of true Eng- 
 lish feeling and true Tudor sagacity, yet sacrificed 
 her realm to a hopeless and capricious passion which 
 even her most devoted ecclesiastical advisers dis- 
 couraged ; who was, in addition, mad with bigotry ; 
 who let " priests' talk miscolour things about her" 
 while dreaming of worlds to be ; who had a passion- 
 ate prejudice which she supposed to be faith forbid- 
 ding all "balance and compromise"; who, with all 
 her courage and self-devotion, was neither "sane" 
 nor " wary " ; and who, instead of having been 
 " schooled " by the shadow of death, had been ren- 
 dered by it fierce, wild, and vindictive. The per- 
 sonal caprices of the Tudors were almost always 
 dangerous and evil ; it was only the power that lay 
 in them of subordinating the personal to the national 
 feeling on matters which most deeply aff'ected the 
 nation which made them great Sovereigns ; and 
 Mary Tudor either had not this power, or cast it 
 away from her in the heat of her Spanish passion 
 and gloomy superstition. The fitful ascendancy of 
 these personal impulses over the political instincts 
 which were never quite wanting to Mary is finely 
 delineated in an early scene : —
 
 426 TENNYSON viii 
 
 [" Mary ivith Philip's miniahire. Alice. 
 
 Mary (Jdssing the miniature). ]\Iost goodly, kinglike 
 and an Emperor's son, — • 
 A king to be, — is lie not noble, girl ? 
 
 Alice. Goodly enough, your Grace, and yet, methinks, 
 I have seen goodlier. 
 
 Mary. Ay, some waxen doll 
 
 Thy baby eyes have rested on, belike ; 
 All red and white, the fashion of our land. 
 But my good mother came (God rest her soul) 
 Of Spain, and I am Spanish in myself. 
 And in my likings. 
 
 Alice. By your Grace's leave 
 
 Your royal mother came of Spain, but took 
 To the English red and white. Your royal father 
 (For so they say) was all pure lily and rose 
 In his youth, and like a lady. 
 
 Mary. P, just God ! 
 
 Sweet mother, you had time and cause enough 
 To sicken of his lilies and his roses. 
 Cast off, betray'd, defamed, divorced, forlorn ! 
 And then the king — that traitor past forgiveness, 
 The false archbishop fawning on him, married 
 The mother of Elizabeth — a heretic 
 Ev'n as she is ; but God hath sent me here 
 To take such order with all heretics 
 That it shall be, before I die, as tho' 
 My father and my brother had not lived. 
 What wast thou saying of this Lady Jane, 
 Now in the Tower ? 
 
 Alice. Why, Madam, she was passing 
 
 Some chapel down in Essex, and with her 
 Lady Anne Wharton, and the Lady Anne 
 Bow'd to the Pyx ; but Lady Jane stood up 
 Stiff as the very backbone of heresy. 
 And wherefore bow ye not, says Lady Anne, 
 To him within there who made Heaven and Earth 1
 
 VIII TENNYSON 427 
 
 I cannot, and I dare not, tell your Grace 
 Wliat Lady Jane replied. 
 
 Martj. But I will liave it. 
 
 Alice. She sai<l — pray pardon ine, and pity her — 
 She hath hearken'd evil counsel — ah ! she said, 
 The baker made him. 
 
 Mary. Monstrous ! blasphemous ! 
 
 She ought to burn. Hence, thou (Exit Alice). No — 
 
 being traitor 
 Her head will fall : shall it ? she is but a child. 
 We do not kill the child for doing that 
 His father whipt him into doing — a head 
 So full of grace and beauty I would that mine 
 "Were half as gracious ! 0, my lord to be, 
 My love, for thy sake only. 
 I am eleven years older than he is. 
 But will he care for that ? 
 No, by the Holy Virgin, being noble. 
 But love me only ; then the bastard sprout, 
 My sister, is far fairer than myself. 
 Will he be drawn to her ? 
 No, being of the true faith with myself. 
 Paget is for him — for to wed with Spain 
 Would treble England — Gardiner is against him ; 
 The Council, people. Parliament against him ; 
 But I will have him ! My hard father hated me ; 
 My brother rather hated me than loved ; 
 My sister cowers and hates me. Holy Virgin, 
 Plead with thy blessed son ; grant me my prayer ; 
 Give me my Philip ; and we two will lead 
 The living waters of the Faith again 
 Back thro' their widow'd channel here, and watch 
 The parch'd banks rolling incense, as of old. 
 To heaven, and kindled with the palms of Christ ! " 
 
 Then comes the jwcture of infatuated and almost 
 mad hope for the birth of a son in which Mary in- 
 dulges, in the childish belief that that event, without
 
 428 TENNYSON viii 
 
 any other change of character or policy, will bring 
 her Philip's love, and restore the nation's pride in 
 her — the self-will of the Tudor caprice clouding her 
 brain naore and more, and the cool Tudor sympathy 
 ■witK English policy showing itself less and less, — 
 indeed, only when her advisers urge her to some- 
 thing conspicuously opposed to all the currents of 
 national feeling, like the execution of Elizabeth, or 
 when the open detestation felt for her proposed mar- 
 riage and the perils of a great revolt call her out of 
 herself into that world of action in which she Avas 
 always most of a Tudor, and least of a brooding 
 fanatic. One of the finest scenes in the play is the 
 one in which the two morbid veins of Mary's nature, 
 her religious fanaticism and the passion for Philip, 
 including the power of persuading herself that her 
 son is quick within her, beat with the fullest pulse 
 of hope, and extinguish for the time all the latent 
 sagacity of the Tudor monarch. Cardinal Pole's in- 
 gratiating professional quotation from the Song of 
 Solomon, as he places Mary between himself and 
 Philip, and the grim, ill-omened jokes with which 
 he garnishes his conversation on the happy occasion 
 of his inauguration at Lambeth, lend the additional 
 force of a fine contrast to the fierce intensity of 
 Mary's brooding hopes : — 
 
 " Ah, gentle cousin, since your Herod's death, 
 How oft liath Peter knock'd at Mary's gate ! 
 And Mary would have risen and let him in, 
 But, Mary, there were those within the house 
 Who would not have it. 
 
 Mary. True, good cousin Pole ; 
 
 And there were also those without the house 
 Who would not have it. 
 
 Pole. I believe so, cousin.
 
 VIII 
 
 TENNYSON 429 
 
 State-policy and cliurch-policy are conjoint, 
 But Janus-faces looking diverse ways. 
 I fear the Emperor much misvalued me, 
 But all is well ; 'twas ev'n the will of God, 
 Who, waiting till the time had ripen'd, now. 
 Makes me his mouth of holy greeting. ' Hail, 
 Daughter of God, and saver of the faith. 
 Sit benedictus fructus ventris tui ! ' 
 
 Mary. Ah, heaven ! 
 
 Pole, Unwell, your Grace ? 
 
 Mary. No, cousin, happy — 
 
 Happy to see you ; never yet so happy 
 Since I was crown'd. 
 
 Pole. Sweet cousin, you forget 
 
 That long low minster where you gave your hand 
 To this great Catholic King. 
 
 Philip. Well said, Lord Legate. 
 
 Mary. Nay, not well said ; I thought of you, my 
 liege, 
 Ev'n as I spoke. 
 
 Philip. Ay, Madam ; my Lord Paget 
 
 Waits to present our Council to the Legate. 
 Sit down here, all ; Madam, between us you. 
 
 Pole. Lo, now you are enclosed with boards of cedar, 
 Our little sister of the Song of Songs ! 
 You are doubly fenced and shielded sitting here 
 Between the two most high-set thrones on earth, 
 The Emperor's highness happily symbol'd by 
 The King your husband, the Pope's Holiness 
 By mine own self. 
 
 Alary. True, cousin, I am happy. 
 
 When will you that we summon both our houses 
 To take this absolution from your lips, 
 And be regather'd to the Papal fold ? 
 
 Pole. In Britain's calendar the brightest day 
 Beheld our rough forefathers break their Gods, 
 And clasp the faith in Christ ; but after that 
 Might not St. Andrew's be her happiest day.
 
 430 TENNYSON 
 
 VIII 
 
 Mary. Then these shall meet upon St. Andrew's day. 
 [Enter Paget, who presents the Council. Dumb show. 
 
 Pole. I am an old man wearied with my journey, 
 Ev'n with my joy. Permit me to withdraw. 
 To Lambeth ? 
 
 Philip. Ay, Lambeth has ousted Cranmer, 
 
 It was not meet the heretic swine should live 
 In Lambeth. 
 
 Mary. There or anywhere, or at all. 
 
 Philip. We have had it swept and garnished after him. 
 
 Pole. Not for the seven devils to enter in 1 
 
 Philip. No, for we trust they parted in the swine. 
 
 Pole. True, and I am the Angel of the Pope. 
 Farewell, your Graces. 
 
 Philip. Nay, not here — to me ; 
 
 I will go with you to the w^aterside. 
 
 Pole. Not be my Charon to the counter side ? 
 
 Philip. No, my Lord Legate, the Lord Chancellor goes. 
 
 Pole. And unto no dead world ; but Lambeth palace, 
 Henceforth a centre of the living faith. 
 
 [Exeunt Philip, Pole, Paget, etc. 
 
 Mary (manet). He hath awaked ! he hath awaked ! 
 He stirs within the darkness ! 
 Oh, Philip, husband ! now thy love to mine 
 Will cling more close, and those bleak manners thaw, 
 That make me shamed and tongue-tied in my love. 
 The second Prince of Peace — 
 The great unborn defender of the Faith, 
 Who will avenge me of mine enemies — 
 He comes, and my star rises. 
 The stormy Wyatts and Northumberlands, 
 The proud ambitions of Elizabeth, 
 And all her fieriest partisans — are pale 
 Before my star ! 
 
 The light of this new learning wanes and dies : 
 The ghosts of Luther and Zuinglius fade 
 Into the deathless hell which is their doom
 
 vui TENNYSON 431 
 
 Before my star ! 
 
 His sceptre shall go forth from Ind to Iiul ! 
 
 His sword shall hew the heretic peoples down ! 
 
 His faith shall clothe the world that will be his, 
 
 Like universal air and sunshine ! Open, 
 
 Ye everlasting gates ! The King is here ! — 
 
 My star, my son ! 
 
 [Enter Philip, Ddke op Alva, etc. 
 Oh, Phili]3, come with me ; 
 Good news have I to tell you, news to make 
 Both of us hap2:)y — ay, the Kingdom too. 
 Nay, come with me — one moment ! 
 
 Philip (to Alva). More than that : 
 
 There was one here of late — William the Silent 
 They call him — he is free enough in talk, 
 But tells me nothing. You will be, we trust. 
 Sometime the viceroy of those provinces — 
 He must deserve his surname better, 
 
 Alva. Ay, sir, 
 
 Inherit the Great Silence. 
 
 Philip. True, the provinces 
 
 Are hard to rule and must be hardly ruled ; 
 Most fruitful, yet, indeed, an empty rind. 
 All hollow'd out with stinging heresies ; 
 And for their heresies, Alva, they will fight : 
 You must break them or they break you. 
 
 Alva {proudly). The first. 
 
 Philip. Good ! 
 Well, Madam, this new happiness of mine. [Exeunt." 
 
 Except the close, this is, we think, the finest portion 
 of the play. The scene in which Pole absolves the 
 Estates of the Kingdom assembled in Parliament for 
 their heresy, and receives them back into the 
 Catholic Church, the quarrel in the Council as to 
 the revival of the statutes against Lollardism, and 
 the scene of Mary's cold refusal to spare Cranmer
 
 432 TENNYSON 
 
 VIII 
 
 even after his retractation, are scenes of a fair level 
 of power, but tame as compared with many in the 
 book. Especially it is not made clear why Philip 
 takes his wife's part in urging and flattering Cardinal 
 Pole into the policy of bitter persecution to which 
 the Legate was opposed, and to which it seems 
 probable that, in England at least, where he desired 
 popularity for the sake of the political help it might 
 bring him against his enemies abroad, Philip also 
 was opposed. Nor does Lord Paget, who is eager 
 for a policy of tolerance, though probably as much 
 from sympathy with the Protestants as from pure 
 statesmanship, give Cardinal Pole the sort of support 
 we might have expected, or avail himself, as so 
 shrewd a statesman would, both of the Cardinal's 
 influence and of his own former good service in for- 
 warding the Queen's marriage, to bring the Queen 
 to her senses as regards the violent policy proposed. 
 On the whole, the scene of the quarrel in the Council 
 as to the revival of the Lollard Acts is the tamest in 
 the play, and that in which Mary declines to spare 
 Cranmer is, perhaps, the next to it in deficiency of 
 colour. In that scene we should have expected signs 
 of a fiercer struggle between the Tudor Queen, Avith 
 her keen instinct for the true policy, and the Spanish 
 fanatic, with her frantic thirst for revenge on the 
 author of her mother's divorce, than any Tennyson 
 gives us. With the scenes of Cranmer's martyrdom 
 the fire of the play revives, though the view of 
 Cranmer is, we suspect, a good deal too heroic. 
 Yet Tennyson permits himself, as we suppose, one 
 sarcasm at Cranmer's expense : — 
 
 -J " Cranmer. Last night, I dream'd the faggots were 
 ' alight, 
 
 And that myself was fastened to the stake,
 
 Vlii TENNYSON 433 
 
 And found it all a visionary flame, 
 Cool as the light in old decaying wood ; 
 And then King Harry look'd from out a cloud, 
 And bad me have good courage ; and I heard 
 An angel cry, ' There is more joy in heaven,' — 
 And after that, the trumpet of the dead." 
 
 That notion of the self-willed, bloody, and cruel 
 King Henry, as the ministering angel who raises the 
 old Archbishop's courage, even though it was only 
 in his dreams, ought to be intended as a bitter satire l 
 on the pliant ecclesiastic's former subservience. No' 
 whitewashing will ever turn Henry VHI. into an' 
 angel of light, and it can hardly be doubted that 
 Tennyson here allows himself the only sneer at 
 Cranmer's worldliness and servility which the play 
 contains. After Cranmer's withdrawal of his re- 
 tractation, there follows a dialogue between two 
 countrywomen, Tib and Joan, which brings out the 
 popular feeling about Gardiner and the burning of 
 Cranmer, and which is admirably dramatic of its 
 kind — and after it the gloom of the play grows 
 rapidly towards its tragic end. The scene in which 
 Mary — with her reason already on the verge of 
 delirium — hears of the loss of Calais, and in which 
 her despair pours itself forth in the one exquisite 
 lyrical wail of the drama, is as fine as anything in 
 modern literature. Take this passage, for instance, 
 where Mary, among her ladies, picks up one of the 
 seditious papers strewn about the palace, which 
 Cardinal Pole had intended but failed to remove : — 
 
 ^^ Mary {seeing the paioer dropt- by Pole). There, there! 
 another paper ! said you not 
 Many of these were loyal ? Shall I try 
 If this be one of such ? 
 
 L 2f
 
 434 TENNYSON Vlii 
 
 Lady Clarence. Let it be, let it be. 
 God pardon me ! I Have never yet found one. {Aside. 
 
 Mary (reads). ' Your people hate you as your husband 
 hates you.' 
 Clarence, Clarence, what have I done ? what sin 
 Beyond all grace, all pardon ? Mother of God, 
 Thou knowest never woman meant so well. 
 And fared so ill in this disastrous world. 
 My people hate me and desire my death. 
 
 Lady Clarence. No, Madam, no. 
 
 Mary. My husband hates me, and desires my death. 
 
 Lady Clarence. No, Madam ; these are libels. 
 
 Mary. I hate myself, and I desire my death. 
 
 Lady Clarence. Long live your Majesty ! Shall Alice 
 sing you 
 One of her pleasant songs ? Alice, my child, 
 Bring us your lute (Alice goes). They say the gloom of 
 
 Saul 
 Was lighten'd by young David's harp. 
 
 Mary. Too young ! 
 
 And never knew a Philip {re-enter Alice). Give me the 
 
 lute. 
 He hates me ! {She sings.) 
 
 ' Hapless doom of woman happy in betrothing ! 
 Beauty passes like a breath, and love is lost in 
 
 loathing : 
 Low, my lute ; speak low, my lute, but say the 
 world is nothing — 
 
 Low, lute, low ! 
 Love will hover round the flowers when they first 
 
 awaken ; 
 Love will fly the fallen leaf, and not be overtaken ; 
 Low, my lute ! oh low, my lute ! we fade and are 
 forsaken — 
 
 Low, dear lute, low ! ' 
 
 Take it away ! not low enough for me ! 
 Alice. Your Grace hath a low voice.
 
 vin TENNYSON 4.35 
 
 Mary. How dare you say it ? 
 
 Even for that lie hates me. A low voice 
 Lost in a wilderness where none can hear ! 
 A voice of shipwreck on a shoreless sea ! 
 A low voice from the dust and from the grave (sitting on 
 
 the ground), 
 There, am I low enough now ? 
 
 Alice. Good Lord ! how grim and ghastly looks her Grace, 
 With both her knees drawn upward to her chin. 
 There was an old-world tomb beside my father's, 
 And this was open'd, and the dead were found 
 Sitting, and in this fashion ; she looks a corpse." 
 
 Such gloom as that can hardly be said to deepen 
 even in the final scene, hut it spreads. The reader 
 is made to see the hatred in which the Queen's 
 policy is held out of doors, and the confusion which 
 it has introduced Avithin. 
 
 On the whole, I think I may say that this is a 
 play which will compare with something more than 
 advantage with Shakespeare's " Henry VIII." Of 
 course that is by no means the finest even of the 
 historical plays of Shakespeare, nor is it probably 
 wholly his owai, — and I only mention it because it, 
 too, contains a study of the good and of the evil 
 qualities of the Tudor character, — but then no play 
 of any modern poet's would be likely to rank vnth 
 any of the greater plays of Shakespeare. Certainly 
 I should be surprised to hear that any true critic 
 would rate " Queen Mary," whether in dramatic 
 force or in general power, below " Henry VIII.", and | 
 my own impression is that it is a decidedly finer 
 work of dramatic art. The morbid passions of 
 Mary, the brief intervals of her lucid and energetic 
 action, the gloom of her physical decay, and the 
 despair of her moral desolation, together make up a
 
 436 TENNYSON viii 
 
 picture which it would be impossible for any one 
 who can enter into it ever to forget. 
 
 " Becket," quite the second of Tennyson's poems 
 in dramatic power, is not the equal of " Queen Mary." 
 The two main portions of the play are hardly fused 
 together. We pass from the one play, — the play on 
 the great ecclesiastical hero, — to the other play, — 
 the play on the King's mistress. Fair Rosamund, 
 whom Becket is made to save from the dagger and 
 the cup of poison Avithout, we suppose, any historical 
 authority for such an achievement, — as if they were 
 distinct compositions added together rather than 
 blended into one. We are well aware that in the 
 fine prologue, — one of the finest scenes in the whole, 
 — provision is carefully made for connecting the two 
 threads of interest. But even so the connection 
 between the two threads seems a rather arbitrary 
 knot. The interest of " Becket " centres somewhat 
 more than it ought to do in Henry, and somewhat 
 less than it ought to do in Becket. The picture 
 which Tennyson gives us of Henry's sudden Angevine 
 fury, and of the high imaginative statesmanship that 
 alternated with it, is very striking, and, indeed, 
 interests us far more deeply than the picture of the 
 great ecclesiastical statesman to whom Henry was 
 opposed. But even " Becket " will not add to Tenny- 
 son's reputation as a dramatic "WTiter, for, taken as a 
 whole, and in spite of some passages which perhaps 
 surpass any in " Queen Mary," it falls considerably 
 below that fine study of the most unfortunate of 
 the Tudors. The great poet of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury will certainly never be regarded as a great 
 dramatist. But that, being the great lyric poet he 
 is, he should be so great as he is even in drama, will 
 always be his singular distinction. ^
 
 IX 
 
 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 
 
 Hawthorne has been called a mystic, which he was 
 not, — and a psychological dreamer, which he was in 
 very slight degree. He was really the ghost of New 
 England, — I do not mean the " spirit," nor the 
 "phantom," but the ghost in the older sense in 
 which that term is used, the thin, rarefied essence 
 which is supposed to be found somewhere behind 
 the physical organisation : embodied, indeed, and not 
 at all in a shadowy or diminutive earthly taber- 
 nacle, but yet only half embodied in it, endowed 
 with a certain painful sense of the gulf between his 
 nature and its organisation, always recognising the 
 gulf, always trying to bridge it over, and always 
 more or less unsuccessful in the attempt. His 
 writings are not exactly spiritual writings, for there 
 is no dominating spirit in them. They are ghostly 
 writings. Hawthorne was, to my mind, a sort of 
 sign to New England of the divorce that has been 
 going on there (and not less perhaps in old England) 
 between its people's spiritual and earthly nature, and 
 of the difficulty which they will soon feel, if they 
 are to be absorbed more and more in that shrewd 
 hard common sense which is one of their most 
 striking characteristics, in even communicating Avith
 
 438 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE ix 
 
 their former self. Hawthorne, with all his shyness, 
 and tenderness, and literary reticence, shows very 
 distinct traces also of understanding well the cold, 
 inquisitive, and shrewd spirit which besets the 
 Yankees even more than other commercial peoples. 
 His heroes have usually not a little of this hardness 
 in them. Coverdale, for instance, in The Blytli- 
 dale Romance, and Holgrave, in The House of the 
 Seven Gables, are of this class of shrewd, cold in- 
 quisitive heroes. Indeed there are few of his tales 
 without a character of this type. But though Haw- 
 thorne had a deep sympathy with the practical as 
 well as the literary genius of New England, it was 
 always in a ghostly kind of way, as though he were 
 stricken by some spell which half-paralysed him, and 
 so prevented him from communicating with the life 
 around him, as though he saw it only by a reflected 
 light. His spirit haunted rather than ruled his body ; 
 his body hampered his spirit. 
 
 Yet his external career was not only not romantic, 
 but identified with all the dullest routine of com- 
 mercial duties. That a man who consciously tele- 
 graphed, as it were, with the world, transmitting 
 meagre messages through his material organisation, 
 should have been first a custom-house officer in 
 Massachusetts, and then the consul in Liverpool, 
 brings out into the strongest possible relief the 
 curiously representative character in which he stood 
 to New England as its literary or intellectual ghost. 
 There is nothing more ghostly in his wiitings than 
 his account of the consulship in Liver2)Ool, — how he 
 began by trying to communicate frankly ^vith his 
 fellow-countrymen, how he found the task more and 
 more difficult, and gradually drew back into the 
 twilight of his reserve, how he shrewdly and some-
 
 IX NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 439 
 
 what coldly watched " the dim shadows as they go 
 and come," speculated idly on their fate, and all the 
 time discharged the regular routine of consular 
 business, witnessing the usual depositions, giving 
 captains to captainless crews, affording meagrely 
 doled-out advice or assistance to Yankees when in 
 need of a friend, listening to them when they were 
 only anxious to offer, not ask, assistance, and gener- 
 ally observing them from that distant and specula- 
 tive outpost of the universe whence all common 
 things looked strange. 
 
 Hawthorne, who was a delicate critic of himself, 
 was well aware of the shadowy character of his own 
 genius, though hardly aware that precisely here lay 
 its curious and thrilling power. In the preface to 
 Twice-told Tales he tells us frankly, " The book, if you 
 would see anything in it, requires to be read in the 
 clear brown twilight atmosphere in which it was 
 written ; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to look 
 exceedingly like a volume of blank pages." 
 
 It is one of his favourite theories that there must 
 be a vague, remote, and shadowy element in the 
 subject-matter of any narrative with which his own 
 imagination can successfully deal. Sometimes he 
 apologises for this idealistic limitation to his artistic 
 aims. "It was a folly," he says in his preface to 
 The Scarlet Letter, " with the materiality of this daily 
 life pressing so intrusively upon me, to attempt to 
 fling myself back into another age, or to insist on 
 creating the semblance of a world out of airy matter, 
 when at every moment the impalpable beauty of my 
 soap-bubble was broken by the rude contact of some 
 actual circumstance. The wiser effort would have 
 been to diffuse thought and imagination through the 
 opaque substance of to-day, and thus to make it a
 
 440 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE ix 
 
 bright transparency ; to spiritualise the burden that 
 began to weigh so heavily ; to seek resolutely the 
 true and indestructible value that lay hidden in the 
 petty and wearisome incidents and ordinary char- 
 acters with which I was now conversant. The fault 
 was mine. The page of life that was spread out 
 before me was so dull and commonplace only because 
 I had not fathomed its deeper import. A better 
 book than I shall ever ivrite was there ; leaf after 
 leaf presenting itself to me just as it was wi"itten 
 out by the reality of the flitting hour, and vanishing 
 as fast as ■written, only because my brain wanted the 
 insight and my hand the cunning to transcribe it. 
 At some future day, it may be, I shall remember a 
 few scattered fragments and broken paragraphs and 
 write them down, and find the letters turn to gold 
 upon the page." 
 
 And yet that dissatisfaction with his own idealism 
 which Hawthorne here expresses never actually 
 sufficed to divert his eff"orts into the channel indi- 
 cated. In The Blitliedale Romance he tells us 
 that he chose the external scenery of the Socialist 
 community at Brook Farm " merely to establish a 
 theatre, a little removed from the highway of ordi- 
 nary travel, where the creatures of his brain may 
 play their phantasmagorical antics without expos- 
 ing them to too close a comparison with the 
 actual events of real lives. In the old countries with 
 which fiction has long been conversant, a certain con- 
 ventional privilege seems to be awarded to the 
 romancer ; his work is not put exactly side by side 
 with nature ; and he is allowed a license ^v\th. regard 
 to every-day probability, in view of the improved 
 eff"ects which he is bound to produce thereby. 
 Among ourselves, on the contrary, there is as y«t no
 
 IX NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 441 
 
 such Fairy Land so like the real world that, in a suit- 
 able remoteness, one cannot well tell the difference, but 
 with an atmosphere of strange enchantment, beheld 
 through which the inhabitants have a propriety of 
 their own. This atmosphere is what the American 
 romancer wants. In its absence, the beings of imagi- 
 nation are compelled to show themselves in the same 
 category as actually living mortals, — a necessity that 
 generally renders the paint and pasteboard of their 
 composition but too painfully discernible." And 
 once more, in the preface to his last novel, Trans- 
 formation, he reiterates as his excuse for laying the 
 scene in Italy, that "no author without a trial can 
 conceive of the difficulty of WTiting a romance about 
 a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no 
 mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor any- 
 thing but a commonplace prosperity in broad and 
 simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear 
 native land. It will be very long, I trust, before 
 romance writers may find congenial and easily -handled 
 themes either in the annals of our stalwart republic, 
 or in any characteristic and probable event of our 
 individual lives. Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens, 
 and wall-flowers, need ruin to make them grow." 
 These passages throw much light on the secret affini- 
 ties of Hawthorne's genius. But it would be a mis- 
 take to conclude from them, as he himself woidd ap- 
 parently have us, that he is a mere romantic idealist, 
 in the sense in which these words are commonly used, 
 — that he is one all whose dramatic concej^tions are 
 but the unreal kaleidoscopic combinations of fancies 
 in his own brain. 
 
 I may, perhaps, accept a phrase of which Haw- 
 thorne himself was fond, — " the moonlight of ro- 
 mance," — and compel it to explain something of the
 
 442 NATHANIEL HAWTHOENE ix 
 
 secret of his characteristic genius. There are wi'iters 
 — chiefly poets, but also occasionally writers of 
 fanciful romances like Longfellow's Htjpermi — 
 whose productions are purely ideal, are not only seen 
 by the light of their own imagination but consti- 
 tuted out of it, — made of moonshine, — and rendered 
 vivid and beautiful, so far as they are vivid and beau- 
 tiful, with the vividness and beauty merely of the 
 poet's own mind. In these cases there is no distinc- 
 tion between the delineating power and the deline- 
 ated object ; the dream is indistinguishable from the 
 mind of the dreamer, and varies wholly with its 
 laws. Again, at the opposite extreme, there is a 
 kind of creative imagination which has its origin in 
 a deep sympathy wdth, and knowledge of, the real 
 world. (, That which it deals with is actual life as it 
 has existed, or still exists, in forms so innumerable 
 that it is scarcely possible to assert that its range is 
 more limited than life itself. Of course the only 
 adequate example of such an imagination is Shake- 
 speare's, and this kind of imaginative power resembles 
 sunlight, not only in its brilliancy, but especially in 
 this, that it casts a light so full and equable over the 
 universe it reveals, that we never think of its source 
 at all. We forget altogether, as we do by common 
 daylight, that the light by which we see is not part 
 and parcel of the Avorld which it presents to us. The 
 sunlight is so efficient that we forget the sun. We 
 find so rich and various a world before us, dressed in 
 its own proper colours, that no one is reminded that 
 the medium by which those proper colours are seen 
 is uniform and from a single source. We merge the 
 delincative magic by which the scene is illuminated, 
 in the details of the scene itself. 
 
 Between these two kinds of creative imagination
 
 IX NATHANIEL HAWTHOENE 443 
 
 there is another, which also shows a real world, but 
 shows it so dimly in comparison with the last as to 
 keep constantly before our minds the unique char- 
 acter of the light by which we see. The ideal light 
 itself becomes a more prominent element in the 
 picture than even the objects on which it shines ; 
 and yet is made so chiefly by the very fact of shin- 
 ing on those objects which we are accustomed to 
 think of as they are seen in their own familiar 
 details in full daylight. If the objects illuminated 
 were not real and familiar, the light would not seem 
 so mysterious ; it is the pale uniform tint, the loss 
 of colour and detail, and yet the vivid familiar out- 
 line and the strong shadow, which produce what 
 Hawthorne calls the " moonlight of romance." 
 " Moonlight in a familiar room," he says, in his 
 preface to The Scarlet Letter, " falling so white upon 
 the carpet, and showing all its figures so distinctly, 
 making every object so minutely visible, yet so 
 unlike a morning or noontide visibility, — is a medium 
 the most suitable for a romance writer to get ac- 
 quainted with his illusive guests. There is the little 
 domestic scenery of the well-kno-wn apartment ; the 
 chairs, with each its separate individuality; the centre 
 table, sustaining a work-basket, a volume or two, 
 and an extinguished lamp ; the sofa, the bookcase, 
 the picture on the wall ; — all these details, so com- 
 pletely seen, are so spiritualised by the unusuaL 
 light, that they seem to lose their actual substance 
 and become things of intellect. Nothing is too 
 small or too trifling to undergo this change and 
 acquire dignity thereby. A child's shoe, the doll 
 seated in her little wicker carriage, the hobby-horse, 
 — whatever, in a word, has been used or played with 
 during the day, is now invested with a quality of
 
 444 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE IX 
 
 strangeness and remoteness, though still almost as 
 vividly present as by daylight. Thus, therefore, the 
 floor of our familiar room has become a neutral 
 territory, somewhere between the real vforld and 
 fairyland, where the Actual and the Imaginary may 
 meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the 
 other." Sir Walter Scott's delineative power par- 
 takes both of this moonlight imagination and of the 
 other more powerful, brilliant, and realistic kind. 
 Often it is a wide genial sunshine, of which we 
 quite forget the source in the vividness of the common 
 life which it irradiates. At other times, again, when 
 Scott is in his Black Douglas mood, as I may call it, it 
 has all the uniformity of tint and the exciting pallor 
 of what Hawthorne terms the moonlight of romance. 
 At all events, there is no wi'iter to whose crea- 
 tions the phrase applies more closely than to Haw- 
 thorne's own. His characters are by no means such 
 unreal webs of moonshine as the idealists proper 
 constitute into the figures of their romance. They 
 are real and definitely outlined, but they are all seen 
 in a single light, — the contemplative light of the 
 particular idea which has floated before him in each of 
 his stories, — and they are seen, not fully and in their 
 integrity, as things are seen by daylight, but like 
 things touched by moonlight, — only so far as they 
 are lighted up by the idea of the story. The thread 
 of unity which connects his tales is always some 
 pervading thought of his o>vn ; they are not wi'itten 
 mainly to disjilay character, still less for the mere 
 narrative interest, but for the illustration they cast 
 on some idea or conviction of their author's. 
 Amongst English writers of fiction, Ave have many 
 besides Shakespeare whose stories are merely appro- 
 priate instruments for the portraiture of character,
 
 IX NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 445 
 
 and who therefore never conceive themselves bound 
 to confine themselves scrupulously to the one aspect 
 most naturally developed by the tale. Once intro- 
 duced, their characters are given in full, — both 
 that side of them which is, so to say, turned 
 towards the story, and others which are not. Other 
 writers, again, make the characters quite subsidiary 
 to the epical interest of the plot, using them only 
 to heighten the colouring of the action it describes. 
 Hawthorne's tales belong to neither of these classes. 
 Their unity is ideal. His characters are often real 
 and distinct, but they are illuminated only from one 
 centre of thought. So strictly is this true of them 
 that he has barely roo7n for a novel in the ordinary 
 sense of the word. If he were to take his char- 
 acters through as many phases of life as are ordi- 
 narily comprised in a novel, he could not keep the 
 ideal unity of his tales unbroken ; he would be 
 obliged to delineate them from many different points 
 of view. Accordingly his novels are not novels in 
 the ordinary sense ; they are ideal situations, ex- 
 panded by minute study and trains of clear, pale 
 thought into the dimensions of novels. A very 
 small group of figures is presented to the reader 
 in some marked ideal relation ; or if it be in conse- 
 quence of some critical event, then it must be some 
 event which has struck the aiithor as rich in ideal 
 or spiritual suggestion. But it is not usually in his 
 way — though his last complete novel gives us one 
 remarkable exception to this observation — to seize 
 any glowing crisis of action when the passion is lit 
 or the blow is struck that gives a new mould to life, 
 for his delineation ; he prefers to assume the crisis 
 past, and to delineate as fully as he can the ideal 
 situation to which it has given rise, when it is
 
 446 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE IX 
 
 beginning to assume a fainter and more chronic 
 character. 
 
 But, however this may be, almost all Hawthorne's 
 tales embody single ideal situations, scarcely ever for 
 a moment varied in their course in any essential 
 respect. For instance, to take his shorter, tales, the 
 mockery of the attempt to renew in wasted age 
 the blasted hopes of youth is crystallised into a 
 ghostly tahleav, vivant in "The Wedding- Knell." 
 The absolute isolation of every man's deepest life, 
 and the awe which any visible assertion of that isola- 
 tion inspires, even when made by the mildest of our 
 guilty race, is translated into an eerie picture in 
 "The Minister's Black Veil." So in "The Great 
 Stone Face " we have an embodiment of the convic- 
 tion that he is best fitted to fulfil any great human 
 hope or trust whose heart is constantly fed upon the 
 yearning to find the perfect fulfilment of it in an- 
 other. So in " Eoger Malvin's Burial " Ave are shown 
 how an innocent man, who is too cowardly to face 
 the mere appearance of guilt, may thereby incur a 
 remorse and guilt as deep as that from the faintest 
 suspicion of which he shrank. And so we may run 
 through almost all the tales properly so called. 
 
 I do not mean that in any of them the author 
 thought the thought first in its abstract form, and 
 then condensed it into a story. I should suppose, 
 on the contrary, that the artistic form is the one in 
 which the idea of the tale first flashed on him, and 
 that the work of elaboration only gave more sub- 
 stance and greater variety of colour to the parts. 
 But not the less was the essence originally ideal, 
 since every touch and line in his imagined picture 
 was calculated to impress some leading thought on 
 the reader.
 
 IX NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 447 
 
 But it is only when we look at his longer tales, 
 whose dimensions would lead us to expect more 
 variety of aspect in the characters, more circum- 
 stance, and less sameness of leading thought, that this 
 characteristic of Hawthorne's tales becomes striking. 
 The stories of The Scarlet Letter, The Home of the 
 Seven Gables and of Transformation, might all have 
 been included in their full ideal integrity, and 
 with all the incident they contain, in the Twice-told 
 Tales without adding more than a few pages to the 
 book. I do not mean that thus compressed they 
 would produce the same, or anything like the same, 
 haunting impression ; but only that, as far as either 
 the aspect of his characters or the circumstantial 
 interest of the stories is concerned, there need be no 
 compression in thus shortening them. The omissions 
 would be most important, indeed, to the effect ; but 
 they would be the omission of pale, contemplative 
 touches, imaginative self-repetitions, and so forth, 
 which seldom indeed give us a single glimpse of any 
 other than the one side of his characters, or add a 
 second thread to the one interest of the tale. 
 
 In The Scarlet Letter, for instance, there is but 
 one conception, which is developed in three — perhaps 
 I should say four — scenes of great power, and that is 
 the deranging effect of the sin of adultery on the in- 
 trinsically fine characters of those principally affected 
 by it, with a special view to its different influence on 
 the woman, who is openly branded with the shame, 
 and on the man, whose guilt is not published, and 
 who has a double remorse to suffer, for the sin, and 
 for the growing burden of insincerity. The effect of 
 the sin on the child who is the offspring of it is made 
 a special study, as are the false relations it introduces 
 between the mother and child. Throughout the tale
 
 448 NATHANIEL HAWTHOKNE ix 
 
 every one of the group of characters studied is seen 
 in the hirid light of this sin, and in no other. The 
 only failure is in the case of the injured and vindictive 
 husband, whose character is subordinated entirely to 
 the artistic development of the other three. 
 
 In the same way, the predominant idea of The 
 Blithedale Romance is to delineate the deranging effect 
 of an absorbing philanthropic idea on a powerful 
 mind, — the unscrupulous sacrifices of personal claims 
 which it induces, and the misery in which it ends. 
 There is scarcely one hicklent in the tale properly so 
 called except the catastrophe, and what there is, is so 
 shrouded in mystery as to have the enigmatic charac- 
 ter of a tableau vivant, not too mysterious for a distinct 
 drift, but of doubtful interpretation as to details. 
 The author seems to say to the reader, " Here is a 
 group of characters in relations tending to illustrate 
 how much more sacred are personal affections than 
 any abstract cause, however noble : what these rela- 
 tions exactly are, except as they illustrate my idea, 
 I will not say, as that is quite non-essential; you 
 may imagine them what you please, — I tell you only 
 enough to impress you with my predominant convic- 
 tion." 
 
 Again, in The House of the Seven Gables we have 
 a picture studied to impress on us that both personal 
 character, and the malign influences of evil action, 
 are transmitted, sometimes with accumulating force, 
 even through centuries, blighting every generation 
 through which they pass. This subject would appar- 
 ently involve a series of sketches, but only two are 
 introduced from the past, and the family charac- 
 teristics are so anxiously preserved as to make even 
 these seem slight modifications of some of the living 
 group. Hawthorne, with rare art, pictures the shadow
 
 IX NATHANIEL HAWTHOENE 449 
 
 of the past as constantly hanging, like a baneful 
 cloud, over the heads of his figures ; and every detail, 
 even the minutest, is made to point backwards to the 
 weary past from which it has derived its constitu- 
 tional peculiarities. Even the little shop which " old 
 maid Pyncheon " reopens in the dark old house is not 
 new. A miserly ancestor of the family had opened 
 it a century before, who is supposed to haunt it, and 
 the scales are rusty with the rust of generations. 
 The half- effaced picture of the ancestral Pyncheon 
 which hangs on the walls, the garden-mould black 
 with the vegetable decay of centuries, the exhausted 
 breed of aristocratic fowls which inhabit the garden, 
 — every touch is studied to condense the dark past 
 into a cloud hanging over the living present, and make 
 the reader feel its malign influence. The only inci- 
 dent in the tale is the light thrown upon a crime, — 
 which had been committed thirty years before the 
 story opens, — by the sudden death of the principal 
 representative of the family, from the same specific 
 disease, in the same chair, and under the same circum- 
 stances, as that of the old ancestor and founder of the 
 family whose pictiu-e hangs above the chair. 
 
 The same criticism may be made on Hawthorne's 
 last complete novel. The sole idea of Transformation 
 is to illustrate the intellectually and morally awaken- 
 ing power of a sudden impulsive sin, committed by 
 a simple, joyous, instinctive, " natural " man. The 
 whole group of characters is imagined solely with a 
 view to the development of this idea. Hawthorne 
 even hints, though rather hesitatingly, that without 
 sin the higher humanity of man could not be taken 
 Up at all ; that sin may be essential to the first con- 
 scious awakening of moral freedom and the possibility 
 of progress. The act of sin itself is the only distinct 
 L 2g
 
 450 NATHANIEL HAWTHOKNE ix 
 
 incident of the tale ; all the rest is either extraneous 
 dissertation on Art, or the elaboration and study of 
 the group of characters requisite to embody this lead- 
 ing idea. A tale containing the Avhole ideal essence 
 of the book, and in this instance, though only in this 
 instance, almost equally powerful, might have been 
 told in a few pages. 
 
 And yet I am very far indeed from meaning to 
 say that the microscopic diftuseness with which Haw- 
 thorne enlarges these pale studies into the length of 
 an ordinary novel is wasted. For the secret of his 
 power lies in the great art with which he reduplicates 
 and reflects and re-reflects the main idea of the tale 
 from the countless faces of his ghostly imagination, 
 until the reader's mind is absolutely haunted by it. 
 There are many among his shorter tales, which now 
 occupy perhaps only five or ten pages, which would 
 have gained infinitely in power by similar treatment, 
 without the addition of a single fresh incident or 
 scene. As they read now they have almost a feeble 
 eff'ect : they give the Avriter's idea, and no more ; they 
 do not fill the reader with it ; and Hawthorne's pecu- 
 liar genius lies in the power he possesses to be haunted, 
 and in his turn to haunt the reader, with his concep- 
 tions, far more than in their intrinsic force. Look 
 at the central notion of his various minor tales, and 
 you will perhaps be struck Avith a certain ideal sim- 
 plicity, and a strange dash of lurid colour in them 
 that will impress you as promising, but no more. 
 But let him summon this idea before you in the in- 
 numerable Protean shapes of his own imagination, 
 with alterations of form just striking enough to make 
 it seem at once the same and something fresh, and 
 before he has done with you you are pursued, you 
 are possessed, you are beset with his notion : it is in
 
 IX NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 451 
 
 your very blood ; it stares at you with ghastly force 
 from every word of his narrative ; it is in the earth 
 and in the air ; and every mouth that opens among 
 his characters, however little they may be involved in 
 the secret of the tale, only sends it thrilling with 
 greater force through your heart. What a story, for 
 instance, might he not have made out of the very 
 eerie tales called "Eoger Malvin's Burial," or "Rap- 
 pacini's Daughter," if he had elaborated them with 
 anything like the art shown in The House of the Seven 
 Gables ! 
 
 Hawthorne was quite aware of the slight ideal 
 structure of his earlier and' shorter tales. He him- 
 self criticised them "vvith rare candour and subtlety, 
 though not with a fair appreciation of the promise of 
 deeper power which they contained, in that preface 
 to one of the editions of the Tivice-told Tales, to which 
 I have already once referred : — 
 
 " At all events, there can be no harm in the Author's 
 remarking that he rather wonders how the Twice-Told 
 Tales should have gained what vogue they did, than that 
 it was so little and so gradual. They have the j^ale tint 
 of flowers that blossomed in too retired a shade — the 
 coolness of a meditative habit, which diffuses itself 
 through the feeling and observation of every sketch. In- 
 stead of passion there is sentiment ; and, even in what 
 puriJort to be pictures of actual life, we have allegory, not 
 always so warmly dressed in its habiliments of flesh and 
 blood as to be taken into the reader's mind without a 
 shiver. Whether from lack of power, or an unconquer- 
 able reserve, the Author's touches have often an effect of 
 tameness ; the merriest man can hardly contrive to laugh 
 at his broadest humour ; the tenderest woman, one would 
 suppose, will hardly shed warm tears at his deepest pathos. 
 With the foregoing characteristics, proper to the produc- 
 tions of a person in retirement (which happened to be the
 
 452 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE ix 
 
 Author's category at the time), the book is devoid of others 
 that we should quite as naturally look for. The sketches 
 are not, it is hardly necessary to say, profound ; but it is 
 rather more remarkable that they so seldom, if ever, show 
 any design on the writer's part to make them so. They 
 have none of the abstruseness of idea, or obscurity of ex- 
 pression, which mark the written communications of a 
 solitary mind within itself. They never need translation. 
 It is, in fact, the style of a man of society. Every sen- 
 tence, so far as it embodies thought or sensibility, may be 
 understood and felt by anybody who will give himself the 
 trouble to read it, and will take up the book in a proper 
 mood. This statement of apparently opposite peculiarities 
 leads us to a perception of what the sketches truly are. 
 They are not the talk of a secluded man with his own 
 mind and heart (had it been so, they could hardly have 
 failed to be more deeply and permanently valuable) but 
 his attempts, and very imperfectly successful ones, to open 
 an intercourse with the world." 
 
 This passage contains some of the truest and finest 
 touches in the way of literary self-criticism Avith Avhich 
 I am acquainted ; but it does not, as I said, do justice 
 to the undeveloped germs of power in many of the 
 pieces comprised in this and Hawthorne's other collec- 
 tions of short tales. It is true, indeed, that, through- 
 out almost all he wrote, sentiment takes the place of 
 passion, and it is frequently true, though it by no 
 means holds of the majority of his finished studies of 
 character, that, in the place of " pictures of actual life, 
 Ave have allegory not always so Avarmly dressed in its 
 habiliments of flesh and blood as to be taken into the 
 reader's mind Avithout a shiver." But there is enough 
 even in the early tales of Avhich HaAvthorne here speaks 
 to prove that the allegorical turn Avbich his tales are 
 apt to take was not Avith him, as it often is, a sign of 
 meagre or shallow imaginative endoAvments — a proof
 
 IX NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 453 
 
 that fancy predominated in him rather than genuine 
 imagination. 
 
 When a man sits down professing to paint human 
 life and character, and in phxce thereof succeeds only 
 in representing abstract virtues, vices, passions, and 
 the like, under human names, we may fairly say that 
 with him the allegorical vein proves the general 
 poverty of his spiritual blood. He has peeled off the 
 outer surface where he professed to model the sub- 
 stance. But when, on the other hand, the same truth, 
 which by an ordinary intellect would be expressed in 
 a purely abstract form, naturally takes shape in a 
 man's mind under an imaginative clothing which 
 savours of allegory, no inference of the kind is legiti- 
 mate. In the one case the allegory is a degenerate 
 romance, in the other it is a thought expressing itself 
 in the language of the imagination. The weakness in 
 the former case is measured by the inability of the 
 imagination to see the broad chasm between the reality 
 and the allegorical shadow. In the latter case there 
 is no such inabilitj^, but the thought which would 
 have entered an ordinary mind in a purely abstract 
 form presents itself to this in the form of a distinct 
 shadow-picture. 
 
 And it is a sign that Hawthorne's genius has not 
 the weakness usually belonging to allegorists, that 
 the longer a subject rests in his mind, the more 
 certainly do the allegorical shadows of its first out- 
 line gather solidity of form and variety of colour, 
 and gradually substantiate themselves into real 
 though dimly-lighted figures. In the ideal situation 
 as it first presents itself to the author's mind, the 
 places of the human actors are perhaps occupied by 
 appropriate symbols of some predominant sentiment 
 or characteristic which each of the group subse-
 
 454 NATHANIEL HAWTHOENE IX 
 
 quently embodies. If written down in that faint 
 early form, the tale seems allegorical. But if allowed 
 to lie by in the imagination, it deepens into a pallid 
 dramatic situation ; a body of human life and char- 
 acter gathers round, and clothes each of the ideal 
 skeletons in the original plan, turning the faint 
 allegory into a chapter of human experience. So 
 clearly did Edgar Poe perceive this vein of genuine 
 imaginative power in Hawthorne's writings, even at 
 a time when he had published only his shorter tales, 
 that he boldly asserted, — in this, as I think, over- 
 leaping the truth, — that the conspicuously ideal 
 scaffoldings of Hawthorne's stories were but the 
 monstrous fruits of the bad transcendental atmo- 
 sphere which he had breathed so long, — the sign of 
 the Emersonian school of thought in Avhich he had 
 studied. "He is infinitely too fond of allegory," 
 said Edgar Poe, " and can never hope for popularity 
 so long as he persists in it. This he will not do, for 
 allegory is at war with the whole tone of his nature, 
 which disports itself never so well as when escaping 
 from the mysticism of his Goodman Browns and 
 AVhite Old Maids into the hearty, genial, but still 
 Indian-summer sunshine of his Wakefields and Little 
 Annie's Eambles. Indeed, his spirit of metaphor 
 run mad is clearly imbibed from the phalanx and 
 phalanstery atmosphere in which he has been so long 
 strugglino; for truth. He has not half the material 
 for the exclusiveness of authorship that he possesses 
 for its universality. He has the purest style, the 
 finest taste, the most available scholarship, the most 
 delicate humour, the most touching pathos, the most 
 radiant imagination, the most consummate ingenuity, 
 and with these varied good qualities he has done 
 well as a mystic. But is there any one of these
 
 IX NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 455 
 
 qualities which should prevent his doing doubly well 
 in a career of honest, upright, sensible, prehensible, 
 and comprehensible things ? Let him mend his pen, 
 get a bottle of visible ink, come out from the Old 
 Manse, cut Mr. Alcott, hang (if possible) the editor 
 of The Dial, and throw out of the window to the 
 pigs all his odd numbers of The North- American 
 Review." 
 
 The caustic American critic was, I think, con- 
 fusing two things in this brief summary of Haw- 
 thorne's qualifications and deficiencies. He saw that 
 Hawthorne could produce the most skilful studies 
 from real life, as, for instance — to take one amongst 
 many — in his sketch of the old Apple Dealer ; he 
 saw also that almost all his tales proper embodied 
 an idea or a truth, and he thought the former the 
 natural bent of Hawthorne's mind, the latter the 
 imported mannerism of a clique. But the truth is, 
 that both are equally natural to him, the pale 
 transparency of an idea being quite as essential to 
 him in putting together a tale as an unlimited store 
 of exciting emergencies is to Fennimore Cooper or 
 G. P. K James, or a picturesque episode in history 
 to Sir Walter Scott. Hawthorne could never weave 
 his studies of human nature into a continuous 
 narrative, based on mere circumstantial incident and 
 striking adventure. The constructive talent, prob- 
 ably the special tastes and interests, requisite for 
 that kind of framework of a tale, were not a part of 
 his genius. He was bound to have a ghostly centre 
 of his own, or he could not -write at all. 
 
 His power over his readers always arises from 
 much the same cause as that of his own fanciful 
 creation, — the minister who wore the black veil as a 
 symbol of the veil which is on all hearts, and who
 
 456 NATHANIEL HAWTHOENE ix 
 
 startled men less because he was hidden from their 
 view than because he made them aware of their own 
 solitude. "Why do you tremble at me alone? " says 
 the mild old man on his deathbed, from beneath his 
 black veil, and with the glimmering smile on his 
 half-hidden lips ; " tremble also at each other ! 
 Have men avoided me, and women shown no pity, 
 and children screamed and fled only from my black 
 vein What but the mystery which it obscurely 
 typifies has made this piece of crape so awful 1 
 When the friend shows his inmost heart to his 
 friend, the lover to his best beloved, when man does 
 not vainly shrink from the eye of his Creator, loath- 
 somely treasuring up the secret of his sin, then deem 
 me a monster for the symbol beneath which I have 
 lived and died ! I look around me, and lo ! on 
 every visage a black veil 1 " Hawthorne, with the 
 pale melancholy smile that seems to be always on 
 his lips, speaks from a somewhat similar solitude. 
 Indeed I suspect the story was a kind of parable of 
 his own experience. 
 
 But, though Hawthorne's imagination Avas a 
 solitary and twilight one, there was nothing allegori- 
 cal about his genius. If we want to find his power 
 at the very highest, we must look to his instinctive 
 knowledge of what we may call the laws, not exactly 
 of discordant emotions, but of emotions which ought 
 to be mutually exclusive, and which combine with 
 the thrill and the shudder of disease. This is almost 
 the antithesis of Allegory. And he makes his 
 delineation of such " unl:)lest unions " the more 
 striking, because it stands out from a background of 
 healthy life, of genial scenes and simple beauties, 
 which renders the contrast the more thrilling. I 
 have often heard the term " cobweby " applied to
 
 IX NATHANIEL HAWTHOKNE 457 
 
 his romances ; and their most marking passages 
 certainly cause the same sense of unwelcome shrink- 
 ing to the spirit which a line of unexpected cobwel) 
 suddenly drawn across the face causes physically 
 when one enters a deserted but familiar room. 
 Edgar Poe, indeed, is much fuller of uncanny 
 terrors ; but then there is nothing in his writings of 
 the healthy, simple, and natural background which 
 gives sin and disease all its horror. It is the pure 
 and severe New England simplicity which Hawthorne 
 paints so delicately that brings out in full relief the 
 adulterous mixture of emotions on which he spends 
 his main strength. I might almost say that he has 
 carried into human affairs the old Calvinistic type of 
 imagination. The same strange combination of clear 
 simplicity, high faith, and reverential realism, Avith a 
 reluctant, but for that very reason intense and de- 
 vouring, conviction of the large comprehensiveness 
 of the Divine Damnation which that grim creed 
 taught its most honest believers to consider as the 
 true trust in God's providence, Hawthorne copies 
 into his pictures of human life. He presents us with 
 a scene of pale severe beauty, full of truthful good- 
 ness, and then he uncovers in some one point of it a 
 plague-spot, that, half-concealed as he keeps it, yet 
 runs away with the imagination till one is scarcely 
 conscious of anything else. Just as Calvinism, with 
 all its noble features, can never keep its eyes off that 
 one fact, as it thinks it, of God's calm foreknowledge 
 of a widespread damnation ; and this gradually en- 
 croaches on the attention till the mind is utterly 
 absorbed in the fascinating terror of the problem 
 how to combine the clashing emotions of love and 
 horror which its image of Him inspires ; — so Haw- 
 thorne's finest tales, with all the simj^licity of their
 
 458 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE IX 
 
 general outline, never detain you long from some 
 uneasy mixture of emotions which only disease can 
 combine in the same subject, until at last you ask 
 for nothing but the brushing clean away of the in- 
 fected web. 
 
 There are many illustrations of this peculiarity of 
 Hawthorne's genius in his earlier and shorter tales. 
 In one of them he exclaims, and it is the key to his 
 genius, "Blessed are all simple emotions, be they 
 dark or bright ! It is the Im'id intermixture of the 
 two that produces the illuminating l)lazes of the in- 
 fernal regions." The tale in which Hawthorne 
 makes this remark, "Kappacini's Daughter," itself 
 exemplifies in a somewhat fanciful but striking form 
 this constant bent of his imagination. Dr. Rappa- 
 cini is a professor of medical science in the University 
 of Padua. He has devoted himself to the study of 
 deadly poisons, and learnt how to infuse them so 
 subtly into both animal and vegetable natures as to 
 render that which would be fatal in the ordinary 
 way essential to life and health, and even productive 
 of unusual lustre and bloom. Hawthorne has evi- 
 dently based his tale on the physiological fact — 
 which, at least in the case of arsenic, is Avell attested 
 — that a malignant poison, if gradually administered, 
 may at length become a condition of life and con- 
 ducive to beauty. Dr. Rappacini has filled his 
 garden A\ath flowers so poisonous that he himself 
 dare not touch them, and can scarcely venture to 
 breathe the air around them. But the life of his 
 daughter Beatrice has been imbued and fed with the 
 same poisons which give so rich a bloom and so 
 sweet but deadly a perfume to these rare plants ; 
 and to her they are health and added loveliness. 
 Her breath is instantly fatal to the insect or the
 
 IX NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 459 
 
 butterfly that drinks it in, and even her touch is 
 deadly. But her heart is stainless and noble, and 
 she shudders herself at the malign influences which 
 she involuntarily puts forth as insects fall dead 
 around her. Her great beauty fascinates one of the 
 students, whose lodging looks out above this strange 
 garden ; and by Rappacini's skill, exercised without 
 the young man's knowledge, he is gradually imbued 
 with the same poisons which enter so deeply into 
 the life and constitution of Beatrice. The point and 
 art of this eerie tale lie in the conflict of emotions 
 which Beatrice's true spiritual beauty and malignant 
 physical influences raise in the mind of her lover, 
 filling him with a passion blended equally of love 
 and horror; and in the description of the despair 
 with which he discovers that the same malignant 
 influences are already part of himself. 
 
 The same tendency of imagination, in perhaps 
 quite as characteristic, but a far more unpleasant 
 form, is shown in the tale called "The Birth-mark," 
 which turns on the morbid horror inspired by a 
 slight birth-mark on the cheek of a beautiful woman 
 in the mind of her husband, who is at the same 
 time passionately attached to her and bent on 
 eradicating it. This tale has no imaginative beauty, 
 and is only remarkable for the diseased mixture of 
 emotions which it depicts. Again, in the tale con- 
 cerning " The Man with the Snake in his Bosom," 
 and "Young Goodman Brown," and, indeed, all the 
 most remarkable of Hawthorne's shorter tales, the 
 same prominent feature, in some form or other, may 
 be discerned. 
 
 But it is in the more elaborate tales that Haw- 
 thorne has most scope, at once for the relieving 
 elements which these morbid interests, if they are to
 
 460 NATHANIEL HAWTHOHNE ix 
 
 be artistically treated at all, especially require, and 
 for the fuller development and justification, so to 
 say, of emotions so subtle and unhealthy. In The 
 Scarlet Letter he has a subject naturally so painful 
 as exactly to suit his genius. He treats it "svith 
 perfect delicacy, for his attention is turned to the 
 morbid anatomy of the relations which have origi- 
 nated in the sin of adultery, rather than to the sin 
 itself. There are two points on which Hawthorne 
 concentrates his power in this remarkable book. 
 The first is the false position of the minister, who 
 gains fresh reverence and pojiularity as the very 
 fru.it of the passionate anguish with which his heart 
 is consumed. Frantic with the stings of unacknow- 
 ledged guilt, he is yet taught by those very stings 
 to understand the hearts and stir the consciences of 
 others. His character is a pre-Raphaelite pictui'e of 
 the tainted motives which fill a weak but fine and 
 sensitive nature Avhen placed in such a position ; of 
 self -hatred quite too passionate to conquer self-love ; 
 of a quailing conscience smothered into insane crav- 
 ings for blasphemy ; of the exquisite pain of gratified 
 ambition conscious of its shameful falsehood. The 
 second point on which Hawthorne concentrates his 
 power is the delineation of anomalous characteristics 
 in the child who is the ofispring of this sinful passion. 
 He gives her an inheritance of a lawless, mischievous, 
 and elfish nature, not devoid of strong affections, but 
 delighting to probe the very sorest points of her 
 mother's heart, induced in part by some mysterious 
 fascination to the subject, in part by wanton mischief. 
 The scarlet A, which is the brand of her mother's 
 shame, is the child's delight. She Avill not approach 
 her mother unless the A be on her bosom ; and the 
 unnatural complication of emotions thus excited in
 
 IX NATHANIEL HAWTHOIINE 461 
 
 Hester Prynne's heart presents one of the most 
 characteristic features of the book, and is painfully 
 engraved on the reader's mind. 
 
 The scene of most marvellous power which the 
 book contains, contrives to draw to a focus all the 
 many clashing affections portrayed. Mr. Dimmes- 
 dale, the unhappy minister, eager to invent vain 
 penances in expiation of the guilt which he dares not 
 avow, creeps out at midnight in his canonical robe 
 to stand for an hour on the scaffold on which Hester 
 and her child had been pilloried years before. It is 
 the night when many are watching by the dying-bed 
 of the governor of Massachusetts, and one of the 
 minister's reverend colleagues, who has been praying 
 with the governor, passes under the scaftbld, lantern 
 in hand. In his nervous and excited mood, Dimmes- 
 dale almost addresses him aloud, and then, paralysed 
 by dread and his limbs stiffened by cold, it occurs 
 to him that he will never be able to descend the 
 steps of the scafibld, and that morning will break 
 to show him there to all his revering flock : — 
 
 " Morning would break and find him there. The 
 neiglibourliood wonld begin to rouse itself. The earliest 
 riser coming forth in the dim twilight, would perceive 
 a vaguely-defined figure aloft on the place of shame ; and 
 half crazed betwixt alarm and curiosity, would go knock- 
 ing from door to door, summoning all the people to 
 behold the ghost — as he needs must think it — of some 
 defunct transgressor. A dusky tumult would flap its 
 wings from one house to another. Then — the morning 
 light still waxing stronger — old patriarchs would rise up 
 in great haste, each in his flannel gown, and matronly 
 dames without pausing to put ofl" their night gear. The 
 whole tribe of decorous personages, who had never hereto- 
 fore been seen with a single hair of their heads awry,
 
 462 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE IX 
 
 would start into public view with the disorder of a night- 
 mare in their aspects. Old Governor Bellingham would 
 come grimly forth, with his King James' ruff fastened 
 askew ; and Mistress Hibbins, with some twigs of the 
 forest clinging to her skirts, and looking sourer than 
 ever, as ha\dng hardly got a wink of sleep after her night 
 ride ; and good Father Wilson too, after spending half 
 the night at a deathbed, and liking ill to be disturbed 
 thus early out of his dreams about the glorified saints. 
 Hither likewise would come the elders and deacons of 
 Mr. Dimmesdale's church, and the young A'irgins who so 
 idolised their minister, and had made a shrine for him 
 in their white bosoms ; which now, by-the-by, in their 
 hurry and confusion, they would scantily have given 
 themselves time to cover with their kerchiefs. All 
 people, in a word, would come stumbling over their 
 thresholds, and turning up their amazed and horror- 
 stricken visages around the scaffold. Whom would they 
 discern there, with the red eastern light upon his brow ? 
 Whom, but the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, half-frozen 
 to death, overwhelmed with shame, and standing where 
 Hester Prynne had stood ! 
 
 " Carried away by the grotesque horror of this picture, 
 the minister, unawares, and to his own infinite alarm, 
 burst into a great peal of laughter. It was inunediately 
 responded to by a light, airy, childish laugh, in which, 
 with a thrill of the heart — but he knew not whether of 
 exquisite pain, or pleasure as acute — he recognised the 
 tones of little Pearl. 
 
 " ' Pearl ! Little Pearl ! ' cried he, after a moment's 
 pause ; then, suppressing his voice, ' Hester ! Hester 
 Prynne ! Are you there ? ' ' Yes ; it is Hester Prynne ! ' 
 she replied in a tone of surprise ; and the minister heard 
 her footsteps approaching from the side walk, along 
 which she had been passing. ' It is I, and my little 
 Pearl.' ' Whence come you, Hester?' asked the minister. 
 ' What sent you hither V 'I have been watching at a
 
 IX NATHANIEL HAWTHOliNE 463 
 
 death-bed,' answered Hester Prynne ; ' at Governor 
 Winthrop's death-bed, and have taken his measure for a 
 robe, and am now going homeward to my dwelling.' 
 ' Come np hither, Hester, thou and little Pearl,' said the 
 Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. ' Ye have both been here 
 before, but I was not with you. Come up hither once 
 again, and we will stand all three together.' 
 
 "She silently ascended the steps, and stood on the 
 platform, holding little Pearl by the hand. The minister 
 felt for the child's other hand, and took it. The moment 
 that he did so, there came what seemed a tumultuous 
 rush of new life, other life than his own, pouring like a 
 torrent into his heart, and hurrying through all his 
 veins, as if the mother and the child were communicating 
 their vital warmth to his half-torpid system. The three 
 formed an electric chain. 
 
 " ' Minister ! ' whispered little Pearl. ' What wouldst 
 thou say, child ? ' asked Mr. Dimmesdale. ' Wilt thou 
 stand here with mother and me, to-morrow noontide ? ' 
 inquired Pearl. ' Nay ; not so, my little Pearl,' answered 
 the minister ; for, with the new energy of the moment, 
 all the dread of public exposure, that had so long been 
 the anguish of his life, had returned upon him ; and he 
 was already trembling at the conjunction in which, with 
 a strange joy nevertheless, he now found himself — ' not 
 so, my child. I shall indeed stand with thy mother and 
 thee one other day, but not to-morrow.' 
 
 " Pearl laughed, and attempted to pull away her 
 hand. But the minister held it fast. 'A moment 
 longer, my child ! ' said he. ' But wilt thou promise,' 
 asked Pearl, 'to take my hand, and mother's hand, to- 
 morrow noontide ? ' " 
 
 At this moment a sudden meteoric light flashes 
 across the sky, and lights up the scaff"old ; after 
 describing it the tale proceeds : — 
 
 " There was a singular circumstance that characterised
 
 464 NATHANIEL HAWTHOKNE ix 
 
 Mr. Dimmesdale's psychological state at this moment. 
 All the time that he gazed upward to the zenith, he was 
 nevertheless perfectly aware that little Pearl was pointing 
 her finger towards old Roger Chillingworth, who stood 
 at no great distance from the scaffold. The minister 
 appeared to see him with the same glance that discerned 
 the miraculous letter. To his features, as to all other 
 objects, the meteoric light imparted a new expression ; or 
 it might well be that the physician was not careful then, 
 as all other times, to hide the malevolence with which he 
 looked upon his victim. Certainly, if the meteor kindled 
 up the sky, and disclosed the earth, witli an awfulness 
 that admonished Hester Prynne and the clergyman of the 
 day of judgment, then might Roger Chillingworth have 
 passed with them for the arch-fiend, standing there with 
 a smile and a scowl to claim his own. So vivid was the 
 expression, or so intense the minister's perception of it, 
 that it seemed still to remain painted on the darkness, 
 after the meteor had vanished, with an eff"ect as if the 
 street and all things else were at once anniliilated. 
 
 " ' Who is that man, Hester ? ' gasped Mr. Dimmesdale, 
 overcome with terror. ' I shiver at him ! Dost thou 
 know the man ? I hate him, Hester ! ' 
 
 " She remembered her oath and was silent. 
 
 "'I tell thee, my soul shivers at him ! ' muttered the 
 minister again. ' Who is he ? Who is he ? Canst thou 
 do nothing for me ? I have a nameless horror of the 
 man ! ' 
 
 " IMinister,' said little Pearl, ' I can tell thee who he is.' 
 
 " ' Quickly, then, child ! ' said the minister, bending 
 his ear close to her lips. ' Quickly ! and as low as thou 
 canst whisper.' 
 
 ' Pearl mumbled something into his ear that sounded, 
 indeed, like human language, but was only such gibberish 
 as children may be heard amusing themselves with by 
 the hour together. At all events, if it involved any 
 secret information in regard to old Roger Chillingworth,
 
 IX NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 465 
 
 it was in a tongue unknown to the erudite clergyman, 
 and did but increase the bewilderment of his mind. The 
 elvish child then laughed aloud." 
 
 This strange vigil, the grim hysteric humour of 
 the minister, the proud and silent fortitude of Hester, 
 the mocking laughter of the child as she detects her 
 unknown father's cowardice, together make as weird- 
 like a tangle of human elements as ever bubbled 
 together in a witches' caldron. Yet this scene, 
 though probably the most powerful which Hawthorne 
 ever painted, scarcely exemplifies his uncanny fashion 
 of awakening the most mutually repellant feelings at 
 the same moment towards the same person so charac- 
 teristically as many of his other tales. 
 
 In the most striking chapter of The House of 
 the Seven Gables, Hawthorne makes Judge Pyn- 
 cheon, who has died in his chair from a sudden 
 effusion of blood, holding his still ticking watch in 
 his hand, a subject at once for awe and scorn. He 
 recalls all the judge's engagements for the day, — the 
 bank-meeting at which he was to take the chair, — 
 the business apjDointment he was to keep, — the 
 private purchases he was to make, — the little act of 
 charity which he had thought of, time and purse 
 permitting, — the half -formal call on his physician 
 concerning some trifling symptoms of indisposition, — 
 the political dinner to discuss the election of the next 
 State governor ; and then he taunts the judge with 
 his forgetfulness. He had resolved to spend only 
 half-an-hour in this house. " Half-an-hour ! Why, 
 judge, it is already two hours by your own unde- 
 viatingly accurate chronometer. Glance your eye 
 down on it and see. Ah ! he will not give himself 
 the trouble either to bend his head or elevate his 
 hand, so as to bring the faithful time-keeper within 
 L 2h
 
 466 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE ix 
 
 his range of vision. Time all at once appears to 
 have become a matter of no moment with the judge ! " 
 And so Hawthorne goes on through the list of his 
 engagements, reminding him separately of each as 
 the time comes for it, recalling to the dead man the 
 importance he had attached to it when he made his 
 plans in the morning. The private dinner would, in 
 all probability, determine the next election, — and 
 Judge Pyncheon was a candidate, and with rare 
 chances of success. "Make haste, then; do your 
 part ! . . . Drink a glass or two of that noble 
 wine ! — make your pledges in as low a whisper as 
 you will — and you rise up from table virtually 
 governor of the glorious old State — Governor 
 Pyncheon of Massachusetts ! And is there no 
 potent and exhilarating cordial in a certainty like 
 this 1 It has been the grand purpose of half your 
 lifetime to obtain it. Now, when there needs little 
 more than to signify your acceptance, why do you 
 sit so lumpishly in your great-grandfather's old chair, 
 as if preferring it to the gubernatorial one ? " Thus 
 Hawthorne goes on throughout the twenty-four hours 
 during which the judge's body remains undiscovered, 
 — mingling with the most powerful picture of the 
 supernatural side of death, which he never ceases to 
 keep vividly before us, the feelings that cluster round 
 petty business, the sarcasms that might sting the 
 sensitive, the urgency that might hasten the dilatory, 
 the incentives that would spur the aml^itious, flinging 
 them all in cold irony at the corpse with an eerie 
 effect that only Hawthorne could produce. 
 
 But the most characteristic instance of Hawthorne's 
 power in studying combinations of emotions that are 
 as it were at once abhorrent to nature and true 
 to life, is in Tnmsfiyrmation. The one powerful
 
 IX NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 467 
 
 scene in that distended work is the scene of crime. 
 The young Tuscan Count Donatello, — the "natural 
 man " of the l)Ook, who is rumoured to be a descend- 
 ant of an ancient Faun, and described in the open- 
 ing of the tale as possessed only of the happy 
 spontaneous life of the natural creatures, but who is 
 afterwards awakened to the higher responsibilities 
 and life of man by his remorse for an impulsive 
 crime, — has fallen in love with Miriam, a lady artist 
 of warm and passionate nature, high powers, and 
 mysterious origin. This young lady is pursued by 
 some half-madman, half-demon, who from some 
 (unexplained) connection with her previous life has 
 power to torment her by his threats to the very 
 verge of unsettling her reason. Walking with 
 Donatello, one moonlight night, at a little distance 
 from their party, on the verge of the Tarpeian rock, 
 this tormenting being is discovered, dogging her 
 footsteps as usual, under the shadow of an archway. 
 Donatello seizes him, holds him over the precipice, 
 catches Miriam's eye, reads in it eager and fierce 
 assent to the act he is meditating, and drojDS him 
 down ; there is a dead thump on the stones below 
 and all is over. Up to this instant Miriam had felt 
 nothing but pity for her young lover. Now for the 
 first time, in this hideous moment, horror and love 
 are born together in her breast, and the monstrous 
 birth, the delirium of love born in blood, is thus 
 powerfully described; — except, by the way, that 
 Miriam certainly never addressed Donatello at such 
 a moment as " Oh, friend ! " either " with heavy 
 richness of meaning " or otherwise, and that this is 
 a sentimental blot on Hawthorne's pictiu-e. 
 
 " ' Did you not mean that he should die ? ' sternly 
 asked Donatello, still in the glow of that intelligence
 
 468 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE ix 
 
 whicli passion had developed in him. ' There was short 
 time to weigh the matter ; but he had his trial in that 
 breath or two, while I held him over the cliff, and his 
 sentence in that one glance, when your eyes responded to 
 mine ! Say that I have slain him against your will — 
 say that he died without your whole consent — and in 
 another breath, you shall see me lying beside him.' ' Oh, 
 never ! ' cried Miriam. ' My one own friend ! Never, 
 never, never ! ' She turned to him — the guilty, blood- 
 stained, lonely woman — she turned to her fellow-criminal, 
 the youth so lately innocent, whom she had drawn into 
 her doom. She pressed him close, close to her bosom, 
 with a clinging embrace that brought their two hearts 
 together, till the horror and agony of each was combined 
 into one emotion, and that a kind of rapture. 'Yes, 
 Donatello, you speak the truth ! ' said she ; ' my heart 
 consented to what you did. We two slew yonder wretch. 
 The deed knots us together for time and eternity, like 
 the coil of a serpent ! ' They threw one other glance at 
 the heap of death below, to assure themselves that it was 
 there ; so like a dream was the whole thing. Then they 
 turned from that fatal precipice, and came out of the 
 court -yard, arm in arm, heart in heart. Instinctively, 
 they were heedful not to sever themselves so much as a 
 pace or two from one another, for fear of the terror and 
 deadly chill that would henceforth wait for them in soli- 
 tude. Their deed — the crime which Donatello wrought, 
 and Miriam accepted on the instant — had wreathed itself, 
 as she said, like a serpent, in inextricable links about 
 both their souls, and drew them into one by its terrible 
 contractile power. It was closer than a marriage-bond. 
 So intimate, in those first moments, was the union that 
 it seemed as if their new sympathy annihilated all other 
 ties, and that they were released from the chain of 
 humanity ; a new sphere, a special law, had been created 
 for them alone. The world could not come near them ; 
 they were safe ! . . . ' Oh, friend,' cried Miriam, so
 
 IX NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 469 
 
 putting her soul into that word that it took a heavy- 
 richness of meaning, and seemed never to have been 
 spoken before, — 'oh, friend, are you conscious, as I 
 am, of this companionship that knits our heart strings 
 together?' 'I feel it, Miriam,' said Donatello. 'We 
 draw one breath ; we live one life ! ' ' Only yesterday,' 
 continued Miriam; 'nay, only a short half- hour ago, I 
 shivered in an icy solitude. No friendship, no sisterhood, 
 could come near enough to keep the warmth within my 
 heart. In an instant, all is changed ! There can be no 
 more loneliness ! ' ' None, Miriam ! ' said Donatello. 
 ' None, my beautiful one ! ' responded Miriam, gazing in 
 his face, which had taken a higher, almost an heroic 
 aspect from the strength of passion. ' None, my innocent 
 one ! Surely, it is no crime that we have committed. 
 One wretched and worthless life has been sacrificed, to 
 cement two other lives for evermore.' ' For evermore, 
 Miriam ! ' said Donatello, ' cemented with his blood ! ' 
 The young man started at the word which he had himself 
 spoken ; it may be that it brought home, to the simplicity 
 of his imagination, what he had not before dreamed of — 
 the ever-increasing loathsomeness of a union that consists 
 in guilt. ' Cemented with blood, which would corrupt 
 and grow more noisome for ever and for ever, but bind 
 them not the less strictly for tliat ! ' ' Forget it ! Cast 
 it all behind you ! ' said Miriam, detecting, by her sym- 
 pathy, the pang that was in his heart. ' The deed has 
 done its office, and has no existence any more.' They 
 flung the past behind them, as she counselled, or else 
 distilled from it a fiery intoxication, which sufiiced to 
 carry them triumphantly through those first moments of 
 their doom. For guilt has its moment of rapture too. 
 The foremost result of a broken law is ever an ecstatic 
 sense of freedom. And thus there exhaled upward (out 
 of their dark sympathy, at the base of which lay a human 
 corpse) a bliss, or an insanity, which the unhappy pair 
 imagined to be well worth the sleepy innocence that was
 
 470 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE ix 
 
 for ever lost to them. As tlieir spirits rose to the solemn 
 madness of the occasion, they went onward — not stealthily, 
 not fearfully — but with a stately gait and aspect. Passion 
 lent them (as it does to meaner shapes) its brief nobility 
 of carriage. They trode through the streets of Eome as 
 if they too were among the majestic and guilty shadows 
 that, from ages long gone by, have haunted the blood- 
 stained city." 
 
 This is very finely conceived and yet revolting. 
 Have I not reason for saying that Hawthorne's chief 
 power lies in the delineation of unnatural alliances 
 of feeling, which are yet painfully real, — of ciu-dling 
 emotions that may mix for a moment, but shrink 
 apart again quickly, as running water from clotted 
 blood ? 
 
 But it Avould be very unjust to Hawthorne to 
 represent him as in any degree addicted, like Edgar 
 Poe, to the invention of monstrosities and horrors. 
 I only mean that his genius naturally leads him to 
 the analysis and representation of certain outlying- 
 moral anomalies, which are not the anomalies of 
 ordinary evil and sin, but have a certain chilling 
 unnaturalness of their own. But under Hawthorne's 
 treatment these anomalies are only the subtle flaws 
 or passionate taints of natures full of fine elements ; 
 they are never superlatives of physical horror like 
 Edgar Poe's. They are the dark spots in a fine 
 picture, never the very substance of the whole. 
 There is, for instance, every palliation which a 
 charitable imagination can invent for Hester's sin 
 and Dimmesdale's cowardice in The Scarlet Letter ; 
 and even the child's elfish Avantonness, though in 
 some degree preternatural, is not demoniacal, but 
 the mere lawless taint in an otherwise warm and 
 open heart. So, too, in Transformation, there is
 
 IX NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 471 
 
 every excuse that circumstances can give to the 
 crime which Donatello commits and Miriam sanc- 
 tions ; — after the first moment of mad excitement 
 is over, it fills them with unspeakable anguish ; it 
 rouses all the tender devotion of the woman in 
 Miriam for the man who had thus stained his con- 
 science under the impulse of love to her ; it awakens 
 the sleeping soul of Donatello ; — and the book is 
 meant to record their uninterrupted upward progress 
 from that moment. Moreover, in the two other 
 characters we find a peaceful contrast to the turbid 
 hearts of the sinful lovers. Neither in this nor in 
 any other tale does Hawthorne cast any slur on 
 human nature. He loves to picture it in its highest 
 and tenderest aspects. And when he delineates what 
 is revolting, one of the main elements that makes it 
 so revolting is the Manichean incarceration of some 
 noble and half-angelic afii"ection in a malignant body 
 of evil, from which it vainly seeks to be divorced. 
 
 This bent of Hawthorne's genius is no doubt in 
 great degree determined by the lonely wistfulness of 
 his mind. Even his imagination is inquisitive and — 
 if I may call it what he calls it himself in The 
 Blithedale Romance — rather prying than ardent. It 
 is curious to find that Hawthorne was a descendant 
 of the "witch -judge," — the Hawthorne of whom 
 Longfellow introduced a sketch into his New Eng- 
 land tragedies. One might fancy that Hawthorne had 
 inherited not a little of the eeriness of the spiritual 
 inquisitor mthout any touch of his cruelty, — except 
 so far as a passionless curiosity which is very little 
 agitated by sympathy, even where it is analysing 
 painful subjects, may popularly (and very unjustly) 
 be confused with cruelty. But it is not only the 
 inquisitorial side of Hawthorne's cold fancy which
 
 472 NATHANIEL HAWTHOENE IX 
 
 seems to connect him with his ancestor the " witch- 
 judge." There seems to have been in him a con- 
 siderable vein of what would probably very unjustly 
 be called superstition, — ie. a special attraction towards 
 the morbid side of mental phenomena, Avith, perhaps, 
 an undue tendency to credulity. As to the credulity, 
 I am not sure. It may well be that Hawthorne 
 believed no more of the so-called science of mesmeric 
 and spiritualistic phenomena than the most acute and 
 incredulous men of his society. But that he was 
 specially fascinated by these morbid phenomena, as 
 by all morbid phenomena of human nature, is proved 
 by a vast number of passages in his various note- 
 books, as well as by the subjects of his novels. 
 
 His notes are full of suggestions for imaginative 
 inquisitions into morbid subjects. In one page we 
 find a suggestion, more cynical and less preternatural 
 than usual, that two persons might make their -wills 
 in each other's favour, and then wait impatiently for 
 the death of the other, till each was informed that 
 the long-desired event had taken place, and hastening 
 to be present at the other's funeral, they might meet 
 each other in perfect health. In another page we 
 find noted down, " Curious to imagine what murmur- 
 ings and discontent would be excited if any of the 
 great so-called calamities of human beings Avere to be 
 abolished, — as for instance, death." Again, we have 
 a suggestion for a new sort of reading of Boccaccio's 
 story of Isabel, that a girl, not knowing her lover to 
 be dead and buried in her own garden, might yet 
 feel an indescribable impulse of attraction towai'ds the 
 flowers growing out of his grave, might find them of 
 admirable splendour, beauty, and perfume, and re- 
 joice in keeping them in her bosom and scenting her 
 room with them. Again, on another page we have a
 
 IX NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 473 
 
 suggested sketch of a man who tries to be happy in 
 love, but who cannot really give his heart, or prevent 
 the affair from seeming a pure dream ; — in domestic 
 life, in politics, in every sphere it is to be the same, 
 — he is to seem a patriot, and care nothing really for 
 his country, only trtj to care ; he is to seem the 
 kindest of sons and brothers, but feel the whole rela- 
 tion unreal ; in a word, he is to be wholly " detached " 
 from life, like a Eoman Catholic monk or nun, but 
 without that life in another world at which they 
 aim. These are only a very few illustrations of the 
 fascination with which Hawthorne's fancy dwelt on 
 morbid psychology as his natural subject. There are 
 but few pages in his notebooks which do not afford 
 examples of the same interest. Hawthorne seems to 
 have illustrated his contemporary and friend Dr. 
 Holmes's theory that we are each of us a sort of 
 physiological and psychological omnibus for bringing 
 back our ancestors in new shapes and under different 
 conditions to this earth. The " witch-judge," associ- 
 ating himself, perhaps, with some more literary 
 ancestor of Hawthorne's, reappeared in this most 
 original of American novelists. Hawthorne was a 
 novelist because he was an intellectual and moral 
 inquisitor. " Inquisitor and novelist," would describe 
 him even better than "novelist and inquisitor," 
 always carefully expelling, of course, all notion of 
 torture from the inquisitorial character of his ima- 
 gination. 
 
 Hawthorne's genius, then, was fertile, but in a 
 cold and restless way. It was used more to help 
 him to explore mysteries than in obedience to the 
 glowing creative impulse that cannot choose but paint. 
 He stated to himself a problem, and set his imagina- 
 tion at work to solve it. How was it the woman
 
 474 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE ix 
 
 felt who wore publicly the symbol of her own sin 
 and shame fancifully embroidered on her bosom ? 
 What would be the state of mind of one who had 
 unhappily killed another, and could never clearly 
 determine in his own conscience Avhether his will had 
 consented to the deed or not ? What would be the 
 result of a wrongful life -imprisonment on a soft 
 aesthetic nature made for the enjoyment of the beau- 
 tiful 1 How would a sin of passion work on a healthy, 
 innocent, natural man of una wakened spirit ? These 
 are the kind of hypotheses on which Hawthorne's 
 imagination worked ; and from the nature of the 
 case, images summoned up in obedience to such 
 questionings could not always be of a very whole- 
 some kind. The problems that Hawthorne started 
 were usually connected with the deepest mysteries of 
 the human mind and conscience ; and the imagina- 
 tion which attempts to keep pace with the inquisitive 
 intellect cannot but paint strange and thrilling anom- 
 alies in reply to its queries. 
 
 " That cold tendency," says Mr. Coverdale, the hero 
 of The Blithedale Romance, who has many points 
 of intellectual affinity with its author, — " that cold 
 tendency between instinct and intellect, Avhich made me 
 pry with a speculative interest into people's passions 
 and impulses, appeared to have gone far towards 
 unhumanising my heart." I do not suppose that it 
 went far, or any way at all, towards unhumanising 
 Hawthorne's heart, which was evidently tender. But 
 no doubt, he was led by the speculative bias of his 
 mind to steep his imagination in arcana on which it 
 is scarcely good to gaze at all. 
 
 It is remarkable, and, perhaps, a symptom of the 
 same imaginative constitution, that while Hawthorne 
 had the most eager desire to penetrate the secret
 
 IX NATHANIEL HAWTHOENE 475 
 
 attitudes of minds painfully or anomalously situated, 
 he had little or no interest in picturing the exact 
 combination of circumstances which brought them 
 into these attitudes. His imagination was the very 
 converse of De Foe's. De Foe seizes the outer fact 
 with the most vivid force ; indirectly only, by the 
 very force and minuteness of his conception of the 
 visible circumstances, actions, and gestures he narrates, 
 do you get at the inward mind of his characters. 
 Hawthorne, on the contrary, is often positively 
 anxious to s^ipprcss all distinct account of the actual 
 facts which have given rise to his ideal situations. 
 He wishes to save the mental impression from being 
 swallowed up, so to say, in the interest of the out- 
 ward facts and events. He sees that people of a 
 matter-of-fact turn of mind attach more value to 
 knowing the exciting causes than to knowing the 
 state of mind which results. If they hear what 
 seems to them an insufficient cause for a heroine's 
 misery, they set her down as feeble-minded, and 
 give up their interest in her fate. If they hear a too 
 sufficient cause, they say she deserved all she suf- 
 fered, and for that reason discard her from their 
 sympathies. Hawthorne saw the difficulty of invent- 
 ing facts that would exactly hit the shade of feeling 
 that he desired to excite in his readers' minds, and 
 so he often refused to detail the facts distinctly at all. 
 He often gives us our choice of several sets of facts 
 which might be adequate to the result, declines to 
 say which he himself prefers, and insists only on the 
 attitude of mind produced. 
 
 Thus, in The Blithedale Romance, he preludes 
 a far from explanatory or lucid conversation with 
 this mystifying sentence, "I hardly could make out 
 an intelligible sentence on either side. What I seem
 
 476 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE ix 
 
 to remember I yet suspect may have been patched 
 together by my fancy in brooding over the matter 
 afterwards." Again, in another part of the same 
 book, "The details of the interview that followed 
 being unknown to me, while notwithstanding it would 
 be a pity quite to lose the picturesqueness of the 
 situation, I shall attempt to sketch it mainly from 
 fancy, although with some general grounds of sur- 
 mise in regard to the old man's feelings." But he 
 carried this preference for delineating states of mind, 
 and obscurely suggesting the class of facts Avhich may 
 have given rise to them, to the furthest point in his 
 last novel, Trcmsformatmi. " Owing, it may be," he 
 tells us, in a chapter justly headed "Fragmentary 
 Sentences," at a critical juncture in the tale, "to 
 this moral estrangement, — this chill remoteness of 
 their position, — there have come to us but a few 
 vague whisperings of what passed in Miriam's inter- 
 view that afternoon -with the sinister personage who 
 had dogged her footsteps ever since her visit to the 
 catacomb. In weaving these mystic utterances into 
 a continuous scene, we undertake a task resembling 
 in its perplexity that of gathering up and piecing to- 
 gether the fragments of a letter which has been torn 
 and scattered to the winds. Many words of deep 
 significance, — many entire sentences, and these prob- 
 ably the most important ones, — have flown too far 
 on the winged breeze to be recovered. If we insert 
 our own conjectural amendments, we may perhaps 
 give a purport utterly at variance with the true one." 
 And then he continues, "Of so much we are sure, 
 that there seemed to be a sadly mysterious fascina- 
 tion in the influence of this ill-omened j^erson over 
 Miriam ; it was such as beasts and reptiles of subtle 
 and evil natures sometimes exercise over their victims.
 
 IX NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 477 
 
 . . . Yet let us trust there may have been no crime 
 in Miriam, but only one of those fatalities which are 
 among the insoluble riddles propounded to mortal 
 comprehension — the fatal doom by which every crime 
 is made to be the agony of many innocent persons, 
 as well as of the single guilty one." In other words, 
 Hawthorne wishes us to picture a mind perturbed, 
 flushed, on the verge of despair, but does not wish us 
 to know how far the exciting causes had involved her 
 in real guilt, or merely in misery. It is not essential, 
 he thinks, to the purpose of the book, which is rather 
 to trace the effects of the subsequent guilt on the 
 relation between Miriam and Donatello than to 
 develop fully the previous character of the woman 
 who draws the poor young Count into crime. As 
 far as regards Miriam, the problem set himself by the 
 author in this book is only to delineate the influence 
 exerted over her heart by Donatello's plunge into 
 guilt on her behalf. He thinks it enough to indicate 
 that she who led Donatello into guilt was either her- 
 self guilty, or at least intimately imbued with all the 
 infectious fever of a guilty atmosphere. More is not 
 essential to the author's purpose, and more he Avill 
 not tell us. He seems to hint, perhaps truly, that 
 the chasm between guilt and wretchedness in a 
 woman's mind is not always so wide as in a man's ; 
 and that, at all events, there is as much power in any 
 deeply roused affection to extricate her from the 
 one as from the other. For like reasons, I suppose, 
 the end of the tale is as shadowy as the beginning. 
 The transfonnation is accomplished : the Faun is no 
 longer a Faun ; and all the author contemplated is 
 therefore attained. The wreath of mist which hangs 
 over Miriam's past is allowed also to settle over her 
 own and Donatello's future. The problem has been
 
 478 NATHANIEL HAWTHOKNE ix 
 
 solved in the dissolving colours of two dimly-outlined 
 minds. And their earthly destiny is nothing to the 
 reader ; to know it might even divert his attention 
 from the artist's true purpose, and concentrate it on 
 the dSnouement of a commonplace story. 
 
 This predominance of moral colouring over the 
 definite forms of actual fact in Hawthorne's novels is 
 to me, I confess, unsatisfactory. And the degree to 
 which it is absent or prevails in his several works, 
 seems to me a fair measure of their relative artistic 
 worth. The Scarlet Letter, in which there is by far 
 the most solid basis of fact, is, I think, also con- 
 siderably the finest and most powerful of his efforts. 
 The House of the Seven Gables, in itself nearly a 
 perfect work of art, is yet composed of altogether 
 thinner materials. Yet the details are worked up 
 with so much care and finish, — the whole external 
 scenery of this, as well as of The Scarlet Letter, is 
 so sharply defined, so full of the clear air of New 
 England life, — that one can bear better the subtle 
 moral colouring and anatomy with which they both 
 abound. In The BUtheclale Romance I observe the 
 first tendency to shroud certain portions of the 
 narrative in an intentional veil, and to attempt to 
 paint a distinct moral expression without giving a 
 distinct outline of fact. The effect is powerful, but 
 vague and not satisfying. The figures wander 
 vagrant-like through the imagination of the reader. 
 They seem to have no distinct place of their own 
 assigned to them. You know what sort of characters 
 you have beheld, but not when and under what 
 circumstances you have beheld them. In Trans- 
 formation these defects are at their maximum ; and 
 the evil is exaggerated by the mass of general padding 
 — artistic criticisms, often powerful, and always subtle.
 
 IX NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 479 
 
 upon Italian art; — puflfs of the works of American 
 sculptors ; — silly attacks upon nude figures, and the 
 like, — which distend, alloy, and ungracefully speckle 
 the ideal tenor of the tale. 
 
 Both the novels and the notebooks testify to their 
 author's melancholy, though hardly melancholy of a 
 deep order. It is the melancholy of a man with a 
 rather slow flow of blood in his veins, and almost a 
 horror of action, rather than any deep melancholy, 
 which speaks in him. He is always sensible, but 
 always apart from the rest of the world. There is a 
 sort of capillary repulsion between his mind and that 
 of the society in which he mixes, and this it is Avhich 
 gives a slight gloom to the general tone of his obser- 
 vations. " The world is so sad and solemn," he says, 
 " that things meant in jest are liable by an over- 
 powering influence to become dreadful earnest, — gaily 
 dressed fantasies turning to ghostly and black- clad 
 images, of themselves." This was, no doubt, an 
 observation founded on considerable experience of 
 his own mental life, and any one who knows well his 
 minor tales will be able at once to verify it from 
 them. But there is very little of deep pain in either 
 his criticisms of life or his pictures of it. He pictured 
 real anguish, but more as an anatomist would lay 
 bare a convulsive movement of the nerves, than as a 
 poet would express passion. You feel that you are 
 reading a study of human pain, rather than feeling 
 the throb of the pain' itself. The melancholy is the 
 meditative and microscopic melancholy of a curious 
 and speculative intelligence ; there is little of that 
 imaginative sympathy with pain which is at the heart 
 of all true tragedy. 
 
 Hawthorne's humour is partly of the same root as 
 his melancholy, springing from slow, close, inquisitive
 
 480 NATHANIEL HAWTHOENE ix 
 
 scrutiny of the paradoxes of life, — the humour which 
 is quite as much true criticism as true humour. Take, 
 for example, this observation on one of his children : 
 "One of the children drawing a cow on the black 
 board says, ' I'll kick this leg out a little more,' a very 
 happy energy of expression, completely identifying her- 
 self with the cow; or perhaps as the cow's creator, 
 conscious of full power over its movements." Or take 
 the remark, " There is a kind of ludicrous unfitness 
 in the idea of a venerable rose-bush . . . apple-trees, 
 on the other hand, grow old -without reproach." Or 
 again, take the following, apparently written at a 
 time when his wife was away, and he had no servant 
 to look after his house : " The washing of dishes 
 does seem to me the most absurd and unsatisfactory 
 business that I ever undertook. If, when once 
 washed, they would remain clean for ever and ever 
 (which they ought in all reason to do, considering 
 how much trouble it is) there would be less occasion 
 to grumble ; but no sooner is it done than it requires to 
 be done again. On the whole, I have come to the 
 resolution not to use more than one dish at each 
 meal." Or this, on a piece of boiled beef which he 
 had boiled himself at great pains and trouble : "I am 
 at this moment superintending the corned beef, which 
 has been on the fire, as it seems to me, ever since the 
 beginning of time, and shows no symptoms of being 
 done before the crack of doom. . . . The corned 
 beef is exquisitely done, and as tender as a young 
 lady's heart, all owing to my skilful cookery. . . . 
 To say the truth, I look upon it as such a masterpiece 
 in its way that it seems irreverential to eat it. Things 
 on which so much thought and labour are bestowed 
 should surely be immortal." His humour arises, as 
 it seems to me, in all these cases from the magnifying
 
 IX NATHANIEL HAWTHOENE 481 
 
 glass under which he views a somcAvhat minute pheno- 
 menon, till we see its characteristics exaggerated and 
 caricatured in^ relation to the proportions of ordinary 
 life ; and partly also from the humorous but deter- 
 mined resistance which his mind offers to every 
 attempt to subdue it to uncongenial habits. Thus 
 he says elsewhere : "I went to George Hillard's 
 office, and he sjjoke "with immitigable resolution of 
 the necessity of my going to dine A\dth Longfellow 
 before returning to Concord ; but I have an almost 
 miraculous power of escaping from necessities of this 
 kind. Destiny itself has often been worsted in the attempt 
 to get me oiit to dinner" which strikes me as a stroke 
 of true humour and true self-knowledge all in one. 
 His own shy, solitary nature was so averse to any 
 attempt to assimilate it to the temper of ordinary 
 society, that it might truly be said that destiny 
 itself had failed in the attempt to get him to dine out 
 like other folks, just as the most solid masonry often 
 fails to crush a flower, and will even be rent asunder 
 by the upward growth of a tender plant. But besides 
 the truth of the application to himself, there is real 
 humour in the conception of Destiny as trying to get 
 any man " out to dinner." It really is what Destiny 
 seems oftenest to insist upon, and to succeed in, in 
 these days, in spite of enormous obstacles. Haw- 
 thorne seldom displayed his humour more finely than 
 in thus depicting the same Destiny which, in the 
 Greek drama, devotes itself to the most sidDlime 
 tasks, as engaging itself, in this flaccid, and yet in 
 some senses far more closely-knit, nineteenth century, 
 in the ignoble task of bringing an irresistible pressure 
 to bear in order to get men to go out to dinner ! 
 
 The most distinguishing deficiency in Hawthorne's 
 mind, which is also in close connection with its highest 
 L 2i
 
 482 . NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE IX 
 
 power, is his complete want of sympathy not only 
 with the Avorld of voluntary action, but -with the 
 next thing to action — namely, the world of impulsive 
 passion. With exceedingly rare exceptions — the 
 scene of crime and passion which I have quoted from 
 Transformation is the only exception I can recall 
 — the highest power of Hawthorne is all spent on 
 the delineation of chronic suffering or sentiment, in 
 which all desire to act on others is in a measure 
 paralysed. He likes to get past the rapids any way 
 he can ; — as we have seen, he not seldom introduces 
 you to his tale with only the distant rush of them 
 still audible behind you, his delight being to trace 
 the more lasting perturbations which they eff"ect for 
 winding miles below. But what he does paint for 
 you, he likes to study thoroughly ; he loves to get 
 beneath the surface, to sovmd the deeper and mys- 
 terious pools, measure the power of the fretted waters, 
 and map carefully out the sandy shallows. The result 
 is necessarily a considerable limitation in the field of 
 his senius. The excitement which other Avriters find 
 in delineating the swaying fortunes of an active career, 
 he is — I will not say ohliged to find, for of course the 
 positive capacity of his genius, not its incapacity for 
 other fields, leads him in this direction — but he is 
 obliged to find only in curious and often painful 
 pictures of unhealthy sentiment. 
 
 This is what circles so closely the range of Haw- 
 thorne's characters. They are necessarily very limited 
 both in number and in moral attitude. We have but 
 two studies, in his tales, of characters "wdth any active 
 bent — Hollingsworth in The BUthedale Romance, 
 and Phoebe in The House of the Seven Gables. 
 Both are carefully dra^^^l, but both are far slighter 
 sketches, and more evidently taken from observation
 
 IX NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 483 
 
 only, than his other characters. His nearest approach 
 to the delineation of impulsive passion is seen in the 
 sketch of Zenobia in The Blithcdale Romance, and 
 of Miriam in Transformation. But in neither case 
 is it real impulse to act on others which he draws 
 well ; it is rather the turbid tossing of a rich mind 
 ill at ease with itself, and casting about for sympathy 
 and help. The characters which he draws most com- 
 pletely — though they are not always the pleasantest 
 — are those which, like Mr. Coverdale in The Blithe- 
 dale Romance, and Holgrave in The Hoiise of the 
 Seven Gables, have "no impulse to help or to hinder," 
 caring only "to look on, to analyse, to explain matters 
 to themselves." CliflFord, too, in the latter tale — who 
 e'V'idently represents the sensitive and {esthetic side 
 of the author's own mind, " that squeamish love of 
 the beautiful " (to use his own expressive phrase), 
 which is in him, when stripped of that cold con- 
 templative individuality which seems to me to be at 
 the centre of Hawthorne's literary genius and per- 
 sonality — is a fine study. 
 
 But one criticism more. The moral ideal which 
 Hawthorne keeps before himself and his readers 
 throughout his works is, on the whole, not only pure 
 but noble. It is defective, however, as we might 
 expect, on the same side on which his genius seems 
 to fail. He was, in political and social conviction, a 
 democratic quietist ; one might almost say a fatalist. 
 "Was it not a part of this fatalistic disposition to 
 encourage the cultivated and thinking portion of 
 society to resign to the masses the duty of forming 
 the political judgment of his nation, and to permit 
 himself to be quietly sucked in by that fatally fas- 
 cinating and overmastering tide swaying the Will of 
 democracy 1 However this may be, in political and
 
 48 i NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE IX 
 
 social life, he was one who deprecated all spasmodic 
 reforms, and attached little value to any reformatory- 
 efforts, except as the indispensable conditions of 
 generous hopes and youthful aspirations. Speaking 
 of such an experiment of social reform, he said, 
 " After all, let us acknowledge it Avise, if not more 
 sagacious, to follow out one's day-dream to its natural 
 consummation, although, if the vision have been 
 worth the having, it is certain never to be consum- 
 mated otherwise than by a failure." Again he said, 
 in another tale, and with much of true moral insight, 
 though it be the one - sided moral insight of the 
 quietist recluse, "the haughty faith Avith which he 
 [the enthusiastic practical reformer] began life would 
 l)e well bartered for a far humbler one at its close, in 
 discerning that man's best-directed effort accomplishes 
 a kind of dream, Avhile God is the sole worker of 
 realities." 
 
 Nor should I find fault ^Yith. him for his very 
 deeply-rooted conviction that, so far as any real and 
 deep reform is accomplished, it may in a certain sense 
 be said to accomplish itself, instead of being forced on 
 society by the enthusiastic patronage of crusading 
 philanthropists, had he but confined this theory 
 Avithin modest limits — had he not pressed it into the 
 service of what seems to me the grossest political im- 
 morality. I can sympathise Avith him Avhen he so 
 finely moralises at the end of The Blithedale Romance 
 on the dangers of philanthropy : — 
 
 " Admitting what is called philanthroi^y, when adopted 
 as a profession, to be often useful by its energetic impulses 
 to society at large, it is perilous to the indiA'idual whose 
 ruling passion, in one exclusive channel, it thus becomes. 
 It ruins, or is fearfully apt to ruin, the heart, the rich 
 juices of which God never meant should be pressed vio-
 
 IX NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 485 
 
 lently out and distilled into alcoholic liquor by an un- 
 natural process ; but should render life sweet, bland, and 
 gently beneficent, and insensibly influence other hearts 
 and other lives to the same blessed end." 
 
 Yet more ; I can even go with him, quite as far as he 
 ^nshes his readers to go, when he ironically prescribes 
 a universal slumber as the one only cure for the 
 ■world's overstrained nerves : — 
 
 " The world should recline its vast head on. the first 
 convenient pillow, and take an age-long nap. It has gone 
 distracted through a morbid activity, and while preter- 
 naturally wide awake is nevertheless tormented by visions 
 that seem real to it now, but would assume their true 
 aspect and character were all things once set right by an 
 interval of sound repose. This is the only method of 
 getting rid of old delusions and avoiding new ones, — of 
 regenerating our race so that it might in due time awake 
 as an infant out of dewy slumber, — of restoring to us the 
 simple perception of what is right and the single-hearted 
 desire to achieve it, both of which have long been lost in 
 consequence of this weary activity of brain, and torpor or 
 passion of the heart, that now aflHict the universe " ; — 
 
 to which he characteristically added, in a difterent 
 passage of his ^\^.'itings, his own personal yearning for 
 a long and profound sleep of at least a thousand years 
 between Death and Resurrection. 
 
 For none of these thoughts and sayings, however 
 depreciative of effort, or destructive of the sanguine 
 hopes with which effort spurs itself on, could I reproach 
 Hawthorne. It is fitting that, after the preacher of 
 one-sided action and over-strained vigilance has sjDoken, 
 this too restless age should also hear the invitation to 
 distrust its own " earnestness," and renew its highly- 
 strung energies by rest. Nay, the function of the 
 contemplative man, who keeps clear of the many
 
 486 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE ix 
 
 streams of human energy, and passes his solitary 
 criticisms upon their tendency from some nook of 
 seemingly selfish retirement, is justified in the scheme 
 of Providence by the very existence of the philan- 
 thropic class of one-sided workers. But it is when 
 Hawthorne came to apply his quietistic creed to the 
 actual political world in which he lived, that I find 
 his moral shortcomings painfully evident, and see that 
 he had permitted a mere theory to confuse " that 
 simple perception of what is right, and the single- 
 hearted desire to achieve it," of Avhich he speaks so 
 well, as grievously as ever a professional jihilanthropist 
 was deceived by his one dominant idea. 
 
 Little as Hawthorne #as disposed to mix in the 
 strife of the political arena, once at least he Avas not 
 Avilling to let that vox popidi in which he placed so 
 much confidence speak Avithout a suggestion from 
 himself. In the little electioneering volume on the 
 life of Franklin Pierce, who was then (in 1852) a 
 candidate, and as it proved a successful candidate, for 
 the Presidency of the United States, Hawthorne 
 offered his suggestion in the form of an application of 
 his theory to the subject of spasmodic philanthropy 
 as exhibited on the question of slavery. The contest, 
 at the time of General Pierce's election, turned, as all 
 the contests then did, chiefly on this question. 
 General Pierce represented the party of conciliation 
 to the South, — the party of union at almost any 
 sacrifice of Northern principles. The fugitive-slave 
 law had just passed, and the high-minded politicians 
 of the Northern States were eager to get a reversal 
 of that disgraceful Act. General Pierce had pledged 
 himself to sustain that Act and the whole system of 
 which it Avas a part ; and it was Hawthorne's object 
 to justify the policy of his friend. After condemning
 
 IX NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 487 
 
 the Northern men, Avho thought that the world stood 
 still except so far as the anti-slavery cause went for- 
 Avard, for their narrowness, he proceeded thus : — 
 
 " There is still another view, and probably as wise a 
 one. It looks upon slavery as one of those evils which 
 Divine Providence does not leave to be remedied by human 
 contrivances, but which, in its own good time, by some 
 means impossible to be anticipated, but of the simplest 
 and easiest operation, when all its uses shall have been 
 fulfilled, shall vanish like a dream. There is no instance 
 in all history of the human will and intellect having per- 
 fected any great moral reform by methods which it adapted 
 to that end ; but the progress of the world at every step 
 leaves some evil or wrong on the j^ath behind it, which 
 the wisest of mankind, of their own set purpose, could 
 never have found the way to rectify." ^ 
 
 Accordingly, Hawthorne's recommendation to the 
 people of the Northern States was to acquiesce in 
 the Southern encroachments, and trust to Providence 
 for the removal of this foul blot on American institu- 
 tions. He eulogised General Pierce as " the man 
 who dared to love that great and grand reality — his 
 whole united native country — better than the mistiness 
 of a philanthropic theory."'^ And he Avarned the anti- 
 slavery party, in General Pierce's name, that the evil 
 of disunion Avould be certain, Avhile the good was " at 
 best a contingency, and (to the clear practical foresight 
 Avith which he looked into the future) scarcely so 
 much as that, attended as the movement was, and 
 must be during its progress, with the aggravated 
 injury of those whose condition it aimed to ameliorate, 
 and terminating in its possible triumph, — if such 
 possibility there were, — Avith the ruin of tAvo races 
 Avhich noAv dwelt together in greater peace and affec- 
 1 Life of Franklin Pierce, pp. 113, 114. " Ibid. p. 31.
 
 488 NATHANIEL HAWTHOllNE ix 
 
 tion, it is not too mucli to say, than had ever else- 
 where existed between the taskmaster and the serf.'"^ 
 This is the most immoral kind of political fatalism. 
 It is true enough, and is often forgotten by philan- 
 thropists, that men can do little enough for each 
 other's highest good by any voluntary eflfort. Most 
 men who undertake such eftbrts fall victims, not, 
 perhaps, to the " mistiness " so much as to the narrow 
 definiteness "of philanthropic theory." They forget 
 that philanthropic tastes can only be safely humoured 
 by those who keep constantly before their inmost 
 hearts the exhortation, " Physician, heal thj'self." 
 But there is a A\'ide distinction between a philan- 
 thropic cause and a concession of the barest justice 
 to the oppressed. Measu.red by Hawthorne's standard, 
 there would be no criminal national custom, however 
 oppressive, with which it would be our duty to pro- 
 claim open war. He might denounce the political 
 advocates of any such war as sacrificing the national 
 peace to the "mistiness of philanthropic theory." 
 Was there, then, no distinction in moral sacredness 
 between the claims of schemes for doing good to 
 others, — little good of the deeper kind as Ave can 
 do for any but ourselves, — and the duty of removing 
 obstructions which entirely blotted out the proper 
 voluntary existence of other men ? Was the duty of 
 restorin"' moral freedom to a whole race to be classed 
 as one of the doubtful visionary philanthropies of 
 modern times 1 Is it not obvious that, little as we 
 may be able to organise mutual spiritual help of the 
 higher kind, we are most fearfully competent to 
 organise mutual moral injury of the lowest kind, and 
 that slavery was one of the grandest of diabolic 
 devices for that end ? 
 
 1 Life of Franlclin Pierce, p]). Ill, 112.
 
 IX NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 489 
 
 I do not say that Ha^ythorne Avas bound to be an 
 anti-slavery agitator. I do say that he prostituted 
 the noblest speculative faculties, when he attempted 
 to perpetuate a fearful national sin on the dishonest 
 plea that those who strove to resist its extension and 
 to limit its duration were endangering the Union for 
 the sake of a "misty philanthropic theory." The 
 fatalism which Hawthorne rather suggested than 
 advocated in Transformation, when he presented sin as 
 the necessary condition of moral groAvth, received a 
 terrible elucidation when he calmly deprecated all 
 impatient criticism of the providential " uses " of 
 slavery as if they were the affair of Providence alone. 
 In the great civil war, his sympathies, as might be 
 expected, were with the trimming Buchanans and 
 Douglasses of the hour, not -with Mr. Lincoln, of 
 whom he spoke slightingly as a man incapable of true 
 statesmanship. 
 
 I need scarcely apologise for treating Hawthorne 
 as something more than a mere writer of fiction. 
 His writings have a very Avide and justly deserved 
 influence in America ; for as a literary artist, if not 
 in mere rough genius, he may safely be considered 
 almost the first, and quite the highest, fruit of 
 American culture. He himself recognised the close 
 connection between the political and literary condi- 
 tion of nations, in his plea that America was too 
 happy, too prosperous, too free "from any pictur- 
 esque and gloomy Avrong," to be made the scene of a 
 romance. Let me sirni up my criticism on his literary 
 deficiencies in a single sentence, by expressing my 
 conviction, that if he had conceded less to his 
 "squeamish love of the beautiful," if he had culti- 
 vated a deeper sympathy AA^th action and its responsi- 
 bilities, he AA'ould not only have taken some interest
 
 490 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE IX 
 
 in the removal of AVTongs that were gloomy enough, 
 whether picturesque or not, but might have Avidened 
 greatly the range of his artistic power, and deepened 
 considerably the spell of the great fascination which 
 he Avaelded over his countrymen. 
 
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