»' A = i}] A = v = =^= c f. ^ - 33 3 = , = t' 5 = 1 — 4. : 3D 1 = r 1 = ■/ t ' 5 m 8 — 1 — — 1 f'H^. y M , ^' THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES ^/mf-<3/-ic^tCD €::> ^-^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this great observer ^ The Life and Works of Goethe ; with Sketches of his Age and Contemporaries, from published and unpublished sources.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