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 QUEST AND VISION
 
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 THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. 
 
 A Young Man's Words to Young Men. 
 Sixth Thousand. Crown 8vo, cloth, 3s. 6d. 
 
 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH. 
 
 A Popular Handbook to the Greater Poets of 
 THE Century. 
 
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 A Social Story. 
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 A VISION OF SOULS: with other Ballads and 
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 Quest and Vision 
 
 Essays in Xife anb literature 
 
 BY 
 
 W. J. DAWSON 
 
 •'This music crept bj' me upon the waters, 
 Allaying both their fury and my passion 
 With its sweet air; thence I have followed it, 
 Or it hath drawn me rather: — but 'tis gone. 
 No, it begins again ! " — Tempest, Act /., Scene 2. 
 
 HODDER AND STOUGHTON 
 
 27, I'ATERNOSTER ROW 
 
 MDCCCXCII
 
 Printed by Hazell, Watson, & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury.
 
 PR 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 '' I "HIS little book was first published in the 
 -*- year 1886, and has long been out of print. 
 It is a temptation to an author when he sees 
 a book of his marked in secondhand catalogues 
 as " rare " and " scarce " to do what he can to 
 prevent the scarcity, in the public interest as 
 well as his own, but more particularly the latter. 
 I am the further attracted to this experiment 
 by the fact that the book has recently been 
 re-discovered in the United States, and has 
 there entered upon a new and fairly prosperous 
 career. This edition may claim to be almost 
 a new book, since the earlier essays have re- 
 ceived careful correction, and the book is a third 
 larger in bulk by the addition of the chapters 
 on "George Meredith: His Method and His 
 Teaching," and " The New Realism : Olive 
 
 2000279
 
 VI PREFACE. 
 
 Schreiner, Mark Rutherford, Rudyard Kipling, 
 and J. M. Barrie." I trust that in its new 
 form it may be fortunate enough to find many 
 new friends. 
 
 London, 1892. 
 
 W. T. Dawson.
 
 CONTENTS, 
 
 SHELLEY 
 
 WOKDSWORTH AND HIS MESSAGE 
 
 RELIGIOUS DOUBT AND MODERN POETRY 
 
 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW 
 
 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH .... 
 
 THE NEW REALISM: OLIVE SCHREINEK, MARK 
 RUTHERFORD, RUDYARD KIPLING, AND J 
 M. BARRIE 
 
 THE POETRY OF DESPAIR .... 
 
 PAGE 
 
 7 
 
 41 
 
 75 
 
 107 
 
 128 
 
 158 
 
 193 
 246
 
 ART AND TRUTH. 
 
 The weary years, the summer's gold, 
 Man's feverish joy and pain, 
 
 Pass like a dream, and all grows old : 
 Tell me, what things remain ? 
 
 Two names alone, and Truth is one : 
 
 A face inscrutable. 
 With lips that neither laugh nor moan, 
 
 Yet all tilings have to tell. 
 
 And Art the other : at the gate 
 
 Of her old Paradise, 
 Whoe'er shall come, or soon or late. 
 
 She opens to the wise. 
 
 We fade and pass : we fret our days 
 
 In barren love and strife ; 
 But happier he who only prays 
 
 Beneath the Tree of Life.
 
 M 
 
 SHELL RY. 
 
 R. RUSSELL LOWELL has used an 
 admirable phrase about Wordsworth 
 which is worthy of reproduction ; he has 
 spoken of his " ahnost irritating respectabihty." 
 Why respectabihty on the part of a poet should 
 be irritating it is difficult to say, unless it be 
 that the conventional tradition of poets is pre- 
 cisely the reverse of respectable. Poets, from 
 Homer downward, have been more or less at 
 variance with average society. They have not 
 belonged to the sober, tax-paying, ovve-no-man- 
 any-thing type of humanity. Respectable citi- 
 zens have habitually held them in suspicion, as 
 persons of uncertain character, and presenting 
 to the common eye no visible means of sup- 
 port. The Act of Parliament which reckoned 
 the actor a vagabond marked the apotheosis of 
 respectability, its concrete utterance, its defi- 
 nite and unalterable verdict upon all classes of 
 men who live by the exercise or cultivation of 
 the imaginative powers. One of the facts 
 which philosophic moralists have to deal with
 
 8 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 is that, more often than not, men of imagina- 
 tive genius have been open transgressors of the 
 received laws and traditions of society. One 
 has but to mention Burns, Byron, and Shelley 
 — the three most commanding influences in 
 the poetry of the century — in order to realize 
 how grave a problem this presents. In each 
 case we have the spectacle of immense genius 
 allied to imperfect morals, and in the latter 
 instances, not merely the outrage, but the 
 defiance of morals. It is surely, therefore, a 
 charming stroke of humor or satire that when 
 at last there is vouchsafed to us a poet of un- 
 questioned respectability, who actually knew 
 how to collect taxes as well as pay them, who 
 was in private life the most sober and decent 
 of citizens, we straightway rebuke him for not 
 being a chartered libertine, like the rest of his 
 craft. Society, having constructed an ideal of 
 what a poet is — namely, all that he should not 
 be — expects every poet to conform to that most 
 improper tradition. A poet without improprie- 
 ties has no piquancy, and his very respectability 
 becomes irritating. Thus is the poet impaled 
 upon the horns of a most unjust dilemma : if 
 vicious, he is a scandal ; if virtuous, a bore.
 
 SHELLEY. 9 
 
 We all remember the story of Theodore 
 Hook being asked at a dinner-party, by an 
 eager admirer of ten, when he was going to be 
 funny. The question must have probed deep 
 into the sore heart of Hook. There he sat, 
 weighed down with bitter thoughts and shame- 
 ful memories, in his brain madness, in his heart 
 blackness and decay, only too conscious of the 
 old age that made itself felt beneath the " pad- 
 dings and washings," of the eclipse that was 
 fast stealing upon his wit, of the hollownessof 
 that bubble reputation he had made ; and then 
 came this tiny questioner, with no cruelty in 
 his childish heart, asking him when he was 
 going to begin to be funny ! Was not that 
 dinner the price paid for his jests? Had he 
 not for years let himself out at that price to 
 whosoever would ? The jester must needs jest, 
 though his heart be breaking ; the actor who 
 has just looked into the open coffin must never- 
 theless rush hither and thither in the farce, and 
 say comic things in his funniest manner ; it is 
 no concern of society's that Hook is broken- 
 hearted. There is no tyranny so cruel, and 
 often so absurd, as the tyranny of tradition. 
 This little story about Hook has many wide
 
 10 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 and obvious applications. The man who is 
 celebrated as a wit must be funny on pain of 
 extinction ; a flash of silence is not permitted 
 him ; he is dragged at the heels of his own 
 reputation, and cannot escape. 
 
 The class of men society has been pleased to 
 identify as poets must, in similar fashion, abide 
 by the traditional ideal society has set up. 
 The actor may purge himself and his calling, 
 and live in perfect nobility of life ; but the mass 
 of men will still persist in regarding him as an 
 immoral person, whom the law recognizes as a 
 vagrant ; and to the vulgar mind the poet will 
 still remain a person of unsound and unsafe 
 life. You cannot persuade society that you 
 are not what the tradition of your calling says 
 you are ; and the attempt only results in irrita- 
 tion and defiance. 
 
 As there is nothing more tyrannous, so 
 there is nothing more unjust and even capri- 
 cious, than the action of society toward its 
 men of genius. It sets up one man and puts 
 down another without adequate reason, or 
 any reason at all. What it cheerfully con- 
 dones in one it shrieks itself hoarse over in 
 another. The temper of society toward social
 
 SHELLEY. 1 1 
 
 offences is an unknown quantity ; no one can 
 with safety calculate the chances. It is just as 
 likely that the daring social iconoclast will be- 
 come famous as infamous by his iconoclasm ; 
 between celebrity and ostracism there is but a 
 step. Society has no settled decalogue, no 
 Code Napoleon, no fixed standard of conduct 
 by which the iconoclast may measure his posi- 
 tion or estimate his peril. It is more often than 
 not governed by the fitfulness of chance opinion, 
 and is drifted along the tide of mere circum- 
 stance. No better instance of this peculiarity 
 can be found than in the relative treatment of 
 Byron and Shelley. Both poets outraged the 
 traditions of society in the same direction, but 
 with difference of degree. The balance of degree 
 would be in favor of Byron and against Shel- 
 ley. Byron never professed himself an atheist, 
 but Shelley did, and wrote a blasphemous 
 poem in favor of atheism. Byron never pro- 
 mulgated perilous doctrines of free love, but 
 Shelley dedicated his life to their promulga- 
 tion and shaped his conduct upon them. 
 Much as may be laid at Byron's door, nothing 
 baser can be alleged of him than the story 
 too well proved of Shelley's treatment of Har-
 
 12 QUEST AND VISION, 
 
 riet Westbrook. Byron's profligacy was the 
 coarse and commonplace sort of profligacy that 
 thousands of men of fashion in his own time 
 and our time are guilty of. It would have 
 passed unnoticed in a period so corrupt as the 
 period of the Regency but that he himself 
 chose to publish it, to magnify it, and to gloat 
 over it. Shelley was a sensualist, but not a 
 profligate. He was as eager to blazon his 
 sensualism as Byron his profligacy. In one of 
 his longest and finest poems he approves of 
 and glorifies incest. The difference between 
 Byron's and Shelley's treatment of passion is 
 that one treats it with coarse realism, while the 
 other invests it with a subtle glamour. Byron 
 knows he is wicked, and his transgression is 
 ever before him ; Shelley acknowledges no sin, 
 and stands naked but not ashamed in his mis- 
 doing. The verdict of society upon the pair is 
 one of the most anomalous in the history of 
 literature. Byron is dismissed as a monster; 
 Shelley has been recognized by one of his lat- 
 est students as one who, under favoring cir- 
 cumstances, might have been the saviour of 
 the world. 
 
 Not long since a poor woman, an habitual
 
 SHELLEY. 1 3 
 
 drankard, informed a magistrate that she be- 
 Heved she had no soul. She was an exception 
 to the entire human race ; she was destitute 
 of what every other human being possessed. 
 It was a flash of grim bitterness; the humiha- 
 tion of despair could sink no lower. Let us 
 for a moment try to conceive the possibility of 
 such error on the part of the Creator; what 
 sort of tragic abortion would this solitary soul- 
 less creature be ? Certainly no despairing creat- 
 ure. Not having a soul, she would not feel 
 the need of one, or be able to realize its exist- 
 ence. She would be destitute of conscience 
 and moral sense. Things morally abhorrent 
 would present no repulsiveness to such a be- 
 ing ; the foul would simply be a different sort 
 of fair ; good and evil, hallowed and unhal- 
 lowed, pure and infamous things would pre- 
 sent merely so many interesting phenomena, 
 and would be regarded with the same impas- 
 sive curiosity. The proportion of moral things 
 would be lost, or rather would never have ex- 
 isted. It would be vain to expect moral con- 
 duct from such a being ; impulse and desire 
 would be the only guides of conduct. The 
 just laws which regulated ordinary mortals
 
 14 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 would naturally appear a useless and cum- 
 brous tyranny. To admit such a being into 
 the society of ordinary creatures would consti- 
 tute a constant peril. What safeguard would 
 there be for the preservation of honor, truth, 
 or chastity in the presence of one who was de- 
 void of that primal sense which comprehends 
 what these abstractions mean? Thus one 
 might push the speculation in many direc- 
 tions, and arrive at various grotesque and 
 tragic deductions. A powerful imagination 
 might so treat this conception in the realms of 
 fiction as perhaps to make it one of the most 
 fascinating of literary studies. 
 
 It is far from me to describe Shelley as a 
 man without a soul, but if one can conceive a 
 great poet almost destitute of all but rudi- 
 mentary moral sense Shelley might very well 
 embody the conception. Let any one take the 
 extraordinary story of his conduct to Harriet 
 Westbrook, Mary Godwin, and Jane Clairmont, 
 or rather the portion of the story which be- 
 longs to the relation of the three women to 
 each other. He leaves Harriet for no tangible 
 reason except that he has discovered she is 
 only a " noble animal," who does not properly
 
 SHELLEY. 15 
 
 share his poetic sentiments. He then induces, 
 with great difficulty, Mary Godwin, a girl just 
 over sixteen, to leave her father's house with 
 him. When they fly he is not content to rob 
 Godwin of Mary, but actually takes Claire with 
 them also, apparently for no other reason than 
 that she would be an interesting companion. 
 rThen, to complete matters, when he has lived 
 a few weeks with Mary, and under the same 
 roof with Claire, he writes the forsaken Harriet 
 a long and loving letter, suggesting that she 
 shall join them, that they may all be happy to- 
 gether. On his return to London he visits 
 Harriet as if nothing had happened, and 
 thinks it would at least be a very admirable 
 arrangement for Harriet and Mary to know 
 each other. He aids and abets Claire in be- 
 coming the mistress of Lord Byron. Finally, 
 within less than three weeks after the body 
 of Harriet Westbrook has been found in the 
 Serpentine, Shelley has married Mary Godwin. 
 If such a net-work of episode as this were 
 introduced in fiction every critic in the king- 
 dom would declaim against the monstrous 
 improbability of the plot. One can very well 
 
 fancy the sort of review that would be written. 
 2
 
 1 6 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 *' Before the author of this volume takes an- 
 other flight in fiction," we can hear the wise 
 reviewer saying, " it will perhaps be well for 
 him to consider the following observations : 
 Seduction is unfortunately not uncommon, but 
 young men of two-and-twenty do not fre- 
 quently forsake their wives after two years of 
 marriage, under plea of incompatibility of lit- 
 erary taste, and straightway seduce girls of 
 sixteen while sharing their fathers' hospitality. 
 When a man is base enough to seduce a young 
 girl he does not usually invite her sister to 
 accompany her in her flight from her father's 
 house, that she may become a daily witness of 
 her shame. Neither is it common for such a 
 man to wish his deserted wife to live with his 
 mistress and to connive in bringing to shame 
 the sister of the mistress he has abducted. 
 And it may, perhaps, have come within the 
 knowledge of the author of this book, in his 
 observation of society, that even the most 
 hardened of profligates would be slow to out- 
 rage public decency to the extent of marrying 
 his mistress in less than three weeks from the 
 day on which his wife has committed suicide. 
 There is a secrecy in vice, a certain honor in
 
 SHELLEY. 17 
 
 passion, a decency in sensuality, which forbid 
 such acts as these. Only a delirious fancy 
 could invent them and a morbid mind conceive 
 them. We beg to assure the author that in 
 real life such things do not occur," etc. To 
 do justice to the novelists, it may be said that 
 no novelist has yet invented such a plot as 
 this. But this is the clear, truthful, and un- 
 biased statement of what Shelley actually did. 
 He does not appear to have realized that there 
 was any incongruity, any unreasonableness, or 
 still less any shamefulness, in his conduct. 
 There was no malicious wit in his letter to 
 Harriet ; he sincerely imagined he had invented 
 an admirable arrangement for the comfort of 
 all parties when he invited her to live with 
 Mary and Claire. On his part it was simple 
 obtuseness, the entire lack of common percep- 
 tion. There is no sign that he recognized 
 either the absurdity or wickedness of his pro- 
 posals, that he even experienced any contrition 
 or remorse for the wreck of Claire's life or the 
 death of Harriet. Byron had too keen a sense 
 of the ridiculous ever to have been involved in 
 such an imbroglio as this, and too great a fac- 
 ulty for remorse not to have suffered bitterly
 
 1 8 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 in its contemplation. But to all this Shelley 
 was indifferent ; he looked upon it, but there 
 was no speculation in those orbs. He went 
 placidly on his way wrecking and destroying 
 the lives of others as a child might amuse him- 
 self in a garden by trampling down the rarest 
 flowers, in pure gaiety, and with no knowledge 
 of the damage he was doing. Is not the most 
 charitable assumption in such a case that the 
 wrecker is morally insane, that he is deficient 
 in, or destitute of, all that constitutes the 
 moral sense ? 
 
 The most remarkable circumstance about the 
 moral errors of Shelley is not so much his own 
 indifference to them as the indifference of his 
 contemporaries and critics. In one sense his 
 contemporaries were not indifferent ; undoubt- 
 edly Shelley did enough to make many people 
 dread his influence and hate his name. He 
 tells us that in Rome he was regarded by all 
 who knew or heard of him as a rare prodigy of 
 crime and pollution, whose very look might in- 
 fect. But, nevertheless, there was a curious 
 purity about Shelley, the existence and depth 
 of which was recognized by those who knew 
 him best. Byron said he was the purest man
 
 SHET.LEY. 19 
 
 he ever met. Byron may not be the best wit- 
 ness on such a subject, but Leigh Hunt, at all 
 events, is a most respectable witness — a man 
 of conventional ideas on all subjects except 
 the financial obligations of literary men — and 
 there is plenty of evidence that Shelley im- 
 pressed him in precisely the same way. Haz- 
 litt did not like Shelley, but the worst thing 
 he can say about him is that he has a maggot 
 in his brain, a hectic flush, a shrill voice, and 
 the general aspect of a religious fanatic. With 
 all the new weight of evidence which Mr. 
 Jeaffreson has accumulated and the malicious 
 ingenuity v.'ith which he has applied it, it is 
 impossible to believe that Shelley was actuated 
 in his relations with women by the brutal self- 
 ishness and coarse passion of the ordinary bc- 
 guiler of the sex. He was as completely sin- 
 cere in his advocacy of the free contract and 
 his hatred of marriage as the Mormon fanatic 
 is in favor of polygamy. It is surely not un- 
 reasonable to suppose that a Mormon may be 
 a man of pure mind, of upright conduct, even 
 of pious spirit, in spite of his eccentricity of 
 having more wives than other people. Indeed, 
 it is a common statement that in Salt Lake
 
 20 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 City ordinary profligacy is unknown. Precisely 
 in the same way Shelley, while holding odious 
 opinions which in the estimation of most civil- 
 ized people would sap, if carried out, the very 
 foundations of society, was himself a man who 
 impressed others by the almost virginal purity 
 of his character. People who were horrified by 
 his writings could scarcely believe they saw the 
 man whose name was a portent, in the fair and 
 gentle youth, of almost girlish aspect, whose 
 ordinary speech was set to a higher music than 
 other men's, and whose ordinary life was un- 
 sullied by a single blot of common profligacy. 
 As we have already said, he was not a profli- 
 gate, and it is almost too much to call him a 
 sensualist. It would be truer to describe him 
 as morally insane upon certain subjects, the 
 chief of which was the marriage relation. This 
 was the maggot in his brain. Governed solely 
 by impulse, and reasoningentirely through the 
 imagination, he allowed himself first to invent 
 pernicious and unwholesome theories, and 
 then with the common fearlessness of mania 
 proceeded to put them into practice. Byron 
 simply took the old road of vice, but went 
 further along that way to everlasting burn-
 
 SHELLEY. 21 
 
 insf than most other men have dared. Like 
 most vicious men, he felt a morbid pride in 
 boasting of his base exploits, and his vanity 
 enjoyed the reputation of abnormal wicked- 
 ness, which he had done his best to justify. 
 There is no difficulty in classifying Byron ; he 
 was a brilliant rake. But Shelley was an en- 
 tirely new species, and his place is not yet set- 
 tled. He held vile views and yet impressed 
 men with a child-like purity. He cursed his 
 father, deceived his friend, and deserted his 
 wife ; yet every literary critic for sixty years 
 has hesitated to call him a bad man. His 
 poetry is full of a more subtle and perilous 
 poison even than Byron's ; yet its latest editor 
 has declared Shelley one who possessed the 
 qualifications necessary for a saviour of the 
 world. 
 
 Was Shelley mad? It seems an insult to 
 suggest such a question, and yet it is not so 
 wholly foolish to do so as may appear. Of 
 course, it would be a monstrous absurdity to 
 suppose Shelley mad in tlic ordinary significa- 
 tion of the term. The man whose career 
 was one brilliant and orderly development of 
 genius, whose works grew in splendor and
 
 22 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 magnificence, advancing with sure and steady- 
 power, to the very last, was not a man of 
 broken or deranged intellect. But, neverthe- 
 less, a mind may possess the highest qualities 
 and yet miss something of that perfect equi- 
 poise which we call sanity. Christopher Smart 
 was mad, and his stately "Hymn to David" 
 was actually composed while he was an inmate 
 of an asylum. His madness was local, so to 
 speak, and left his genius free. He was in- 
 sane upon certain questions of conduct, but 
 perfectly clear-headed on all other points. 
 The case is perfectly common, and Shelley 
 does seem, in some points, to approximate to 
 it. He was mild and gentle until certain sub- 
 jects were mentioned ; then the hectic flush, 
 which Hazlitt noted, appeared, and he shrieked 
 and gesticulated like a dervish. He ap- 
 proached the most hideous suggestions of 
 moral evil with a smiling nonchalance, and 
 seemed absolutely unconscions that any shame 
 could possibly attach to them. He had no 
 sense of sin. The most vicious man shrinks 
 from contemplating certain forms of vice, 
 which to him had no taint of vice about them ; 
 he was as far above such a man in his conduct
 
 SHELLEY. 23 
 
 as he was below him in his ideas. His wicked- 
 ness was philosophic wickedness. A man who 
 Avas temperate, self-denying, and chaste in his 
 daily life, in his philosophy of conduct he ut- 
 tered and propagated ideas which visit the 
 bulk of men, if at all, as the passing horror of 
 delirium or madness. He had the madman's 
 fear of being thought mad. One of his con- 
 stant illusions was that his father was seeking 
 to trap him into an asylum, and he declared 
 that attempts had been made to seize his per- 
 son. Indeed, the whole history of these illu- 
 sions — and there were many of them — lends 
 strong color to the proposition that Shelley 
 was not a perfectly sane man. A man who 
 circumstantially describes how his wife has 
 been wronged, how he has been shot at, how 
 the officers of an asylum have entered his own 
 house with orders to carry him off, Avhen there 
 is absolute evidence that nothing of the kind 
 ever occurred, and could not have occurred, 
 would certainly lie under the natural suspicion 
 of unsound intellect in most societies. That he 
 also wrote "Laonand Cyntha" Avould not dis- 
 pel such a suspicion ; indeed, the very manner 
 in which he advocates, with the most brilliant
 
 24 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 and alluring genius, immoralities which are not 
 so much as named among decent men, ap- 
 parently without the faintest idea that he is 
 doing any thing criminal or unusual, would 
 only serve to strengthen the belief. 
 
 The question of art and morals is a very 
 vexed one, and naturally suggests itself in re- 
 lation to Shelley. One reader, having followed 
 me so far, will cry out that a man who glorified 
 incest ought to be drummed out of the regi- 
 ment of genius, for no splendor of eloquence 
 or passion of poetry can afford proper apology 
 for the infamy of his thought. But another 
 will inevitably reply that Milton advocated 
 polygamy; and if you are to make men of 
 genius show a clean bill of moral health, or 
 sign a self-denying ordinance in regard to aber- 
 rations of opinion before you admit them to 
 the temple of fame, in truth your said temple 
 will remain a very solitary place. You will 
 have to reckon with the coarseness of Shakes- 
 peare, and the bestiality of Swift ; you must 
 convict Coleridge of criminal selfishness ; 
 Lamb's humor occasionally has a distinct 
 alcoholic flavor; and poor Burns smells so 
 strongly of whisky, and bears such obvious
 
 SHEI.LEY. 25 
 
 traces of the ravages of passion, that no re- 
 spectable custodian would dream of admitting 
 him, or even of allowing him to rest within 
 the porch without remonstrance, or possibly- 
 pious vituperation. That is how it ought to 
 be, and no doubt would be, if Respectability- 
 had her way, and could always rely upon the 
 faithfulness of the custodians she might nomi- 
 nate. She would have burned " Hamlet " to- 
 gether with " Lucrece," with much the same 
 indiscriminating horror as that of the pious 
 executor of Wesley, who discovered a much 
 annotated Shakespeare among the testator's 
 papers, and hastened to hide from the world 
 the evidence of such unparalleled backsliding 
 by consigning his master's manuscripts to the 
 flames. In fact, we should have had a pretty 
 regular series of bonfires of the vanities, on a 
 much more extensive scale than the compara- 
 tively humble conflagrations with which Savon- 
 arola startled Florence in the fifteenth cent- 
 ury. But fortunately, as one might show even 
 on the ground of morals itself, Respectability 
 docs not exercise the despotism in literature 
 which she does in drawing-rooms. She gives 
 her orders with unmistakable precision enough,
 
 26 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 and doubtless her custodians do their best to 
 obey them. They make an immense bluster, 
 as Jeffrey did about Wordsworth, and announce 
 in stentorian tones that "This wont do." 
 The Austrian general severely criticised Bona- 
 parte for his intolerable audacity in breaking 
 every rule of warfare, by fighting battles in the 
 winter. By every rule of the game the young 
 man was clearly wrong, yet somehow or other 
 he contrived to win it. It is so that genius 
 usually contrives to answer its assailants. The 
 door-keepers of literature have the very best 
 intentions, immaculate orthodoxy, alert dog- 
 matism, unlimited pugnacity, profound belief 
 in their mission, and yet even they hear the 
 voice of the charmer, charming never so 
 sweetly, and are beguiled. The music of the 
 advancing lyre floats like invisible enchantment 
 on their senses ; its divine cadences might well 
 make the trees rustle passionate response, or 
 follow in obedient choirs ; the warders try to 
 lift their hands to the unswung bolts, but 
 cannot, for the spell is on them ; they try to 
 frame the words of ban and doom, but are im- 
 potent, for a magical surprise holds their lips 
 dumb, disparted ; and then, without further
 
 SHELLEY. 2'J 
 
 parley, from the greenwood bursts the young 
 poet, with eyes aflame and face suffused in 
 rapture, and lightly, as though into a sleeping 
 palace, he leaps the golden threshold, and is 
 seated with his peers in immortal life and rev- 
 erence. From that secure throne he cannot 
 be dragged down ; and though the warders 
 still may suffer much uneasy scruple, yet even 
 they are fascinated, and obliterate the memory 
 of defeat by singing paeans to the victor. 
 
 No doubt this perpetual controversy on art 
 and literature is useful to the printer, but it is 
 hard to find any other class of persons who are 
 benefited by it. It is as futile as the endeavor 
 to build houses from the top, and as impossible 
 of demonstration as the squaring of the circle. 
 The plain case appears to amount to this : 
 that men will take their sides on such a ques- 
 tion according to the degree in which the aes- 
 thetic or the moral sense is developed within 
 them. Like I'llatc and Herod, the two may 
 become friends on the. day when the human 
 centre of their controversy has given up the 
 ghost ; but the truce will last no longer than 
 the thick darkness which covers the earth on 
 the day of irreparable loss and mourning. The
 
 28 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 disputants are irreconcilable, because they view 
 their subject from diametrically different stand- 
 points. Carlyle would have called Shelley " a 
 puir creature ; " and we have all had an oppor- 
 tunity of learning with what sickening revul- 
 sion and contempt he read the Life of Keats 
 on its first appearance. Had Carlyle, then, no 
 sense of beauty? Few men had a finer. A 
 great portion of his writing, and that the no- 
 blest portion, is poetry in every thing but the 
 form. Not even Wordsworth showed a ten- 
 derer love of Nature, nor Chaucer a finer fidel- 
 ity in depicting her, than Carlyle has manifested 
 in hundreds of rough jottings, sketches at first 
 hand, which are found in his diaries and let- 
 ters. But such passages spring rather from an 
 unparalleled power of minute observation than 
 from a keen aesthetic sense. The dominant 
 stratum of Carlyle's character was morality, 
 hard Scotch granite, out of which the sweetest 
 waters could break, and on whose top soil the 
 tendcrcst seedlings could thrive — humor, pa- 
 thos, poetr}'-, the most subduing gentleness, all 
 were there ; but the main formation of his 
 mind was all the same vehement sternness, 
 with more than a touch of the Pharisaism that
 
 SHELLEY. 29 
 
 metes and judges, and swears by the law 
 rather than the Gospel. He had little love of 
 music, no love of art, and considerable con- 
 tempt for any poetry but the poetry of action. 
 To him it was inconceivable that any human 
 creature should claim any dignity or reverence 
 as a minister of the beautiful. Man did not 
 live to write beautifully — Goldsmith, according 
 to Johnson, could have done that about a 
 broomstick — but to act beautifully. When, 
 therefore, you united in one life the art of 
 beautiful writing with the habit of infamous 
 conduct, you presented to Carlyle a monstros- 
 ity upon which all his bitter ire flamed forth, 
 and for \vhich his one remedy was instant an- 
 nihilation. The man of stern moral sense will 
 always side with Carlyle, and will think in his 
 heart — some might add, " with the fool " — that 
 it were better Byron and Shelley had never been 
 born. The man whose aesthetic sense is strong, 
 and wdiose moral sense is weak; to whom 
 poetry is an exhilaration, and music a passion ; 
 who can find the most exquisite of joys in a 
 perfect phrase, and thoughts too deep for tears 
 in the humblest flower that blows — will always 
 be ready to pardon any thing to the man who
 
 30 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 has baptized him into such delight and wrought 
 in him such silent rapture. And between 
 these two parties, who have a creed and be- 
 lieve in it, there will always troop certain dis- 
 consolate fugitives, who make the old futile 
 attempt to serve two masters, and perpetually 
 relieve their troubled consciences by casuistical 
 papers in the reviews on the relations of mo- 
 rality and art. 
 
 Much has been written about the intangibil- 
 ity of Shelley's poetry, but in truth it is no 
 more intangible than the man. I pause at 
 this point to consider what is written, and may 
 make free confession of certain uncomfortable 
 qualms. One looks toward that quiet ghost 
 which rises from the blue waters of Spezzia, or 
 glides like a sunbeam through the pine forests 
 of Pisa, or beside the glittering Serchio, and 
 cries with Marcellus, 
 
 " 'Tis gone ! 
 We do it wrong, being so niajestical. 
 To offer it the show of violence." 
 
 One might almost add the other lines, 
 
 '' For it is, as the air, invulnerable. 
 And our vain blows nialicious mockery." 
 
 Browning asks, " And did you once see Shelley
 
 SHELLEY. 31 
 
 plain ? " as though he too felt that Shelley was 
 an ethereal presence, a wandering voice, an 
 Ariel whose life was song, a most complex and 
 almost intangible personality. Other poets 
 have used the poetic fallacy, and made Nat- 
 ure weep with their grief, and transmute their 
 joy into bright sunlight and fragrant winds ; 
 but Shelley seems to have sunk himself in 
 Nature, and made himself the translator of 
 Nature's mute emotions. To use one of his 
 own favorite phrases, his being became " in- 
 woven " with the very life of the universe. 
 We find it hard to realize him as a bodily pres- 
 ence ; he is " as the air, invulnerable." He 
 did not live prose and write poetry ; he Avas 
 poet from, the crown of his head to the sole of 
 his foot ; a creature of imagination all com- 
 pact. Speaking after the manner of men, we 
 may doubt his sanity ; but we arc conscious, 
 not the less, that our diagnosis has not gone to 
 the heart of the case and plucked its mystery 
 out. It is this remoteness, this insubstantial- 
 ity of Shelley, which makes it so difficult to 
 understand him. We never seem to be at 
 home with him ; just when we have got our 
 finger on his pulse, and he stoops to whisper
 
 32 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 his secret to us, a luminous mist falls between 
 us and him, and we see him fade into air, thin 
 air. Sometimes he seems to us a creatui'e of 
 demonic origin, but oftener an eternal child. 
 Has any biographer, Mr. Jeaffreson included, 
 given us the real Shelley yet ? To give the real 
 Byron was a v^ery different matter. There a 
 biographer was treading on firm ground, and 
 dealing with flesh and blood ; for that matter, 
 with somewhat offensive flesh and blood. But 
 Shelley eludes all human touch. When all the 
 records are gathered into one, when Medwin 
 has blundered, and Hogg has blabbed, and 
 Mr. Jeaffreson disillusionized us ; when we 
 have honored his enthusiasm, and pitied his 
 errors, and wondered at his moral obtuseness, 
 and written all sorts of smart and malicious 
 and tender things about him, we somehow feel 
 like the old squire with the French wine, that 
 we have got " no forrader." The voice sings 
 on, in sweet passion and thrilling pathos ; it 
 loosens its silver notes and floods us with de- 
 light ; it is hidden in the clouds, or uttered by 
 the skylark, or lingers in the west wind and 
 the sea ; and it sings on as if in supreme con- 
 tempt for us and our poor judgments, the
 
 SHELLEY. 33 
 
 malicious mockery of our pointless repartee, and 
 stupid cleverness of our mean sarcasms, even 
 as a lark pouring out his soul against the sap- 
 phire sky of noontide thinks nothing of the 
 riot and wrong of man, but only of the bright- 
 ness of the sky and sweetness of the music, 
 and the joy and triumph of life. It is this 
 lack of robust flesh and blood in Shelley 
 which makes both himself and his poetry so 
 difficult of comprehension to the common peo- 
 ple. No man has so completely realized the 
 divine fury of the poet, the half-inspired and 
 half-frenzied utterances of the man who is 
 caught up into the seventh heaven, whether 
 in the body or out of the body we cannot tell, 
 and has become the witness of things which it 
 is not lawful for a man to utter. lie perpetually 
 produces the impression of visionary splendor 
 beyond all speech ; he strains at the barriers of 
 language till his voice rises in one long, languor- 
 ous, melodious wail, a lament for impotence, 
 a passionate invocation to the unattainable: 
 
 " Woe is me ! 
 Tlie winged words on which my soul would pierce 
 lulo the height of love's rare universe. 
 Are chains of lead around its flight of lire. 
 I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire."
 
 34 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 We listen entranced, as men do to the nightin- 
 gale, and hold our breath, as the deep mellow 
 notes bubble forth, and quicken in passion, and 
 rise in steady flight, higher and yet higher, 
 clearer and yet clearer, till we can well believe, 
 Avhen they cease suddenly at the utmost zenith 
 of rapture, it is because the very throat has 
 burst, and the very heart broken in excess of 
 over-mastering ecstasy. Who has read "Epipsy- 
 chidion" without at least some faint realization 
 of what this means ? Even Mr. Jeaffreson calls 
 it the finest love-poem in the universe, and he 
 is right. But it is no earthly love ; it is spiritual 
 passion, the rapture of a soul broken free of 
 the flesh, but yet using the symbols of fleshly 
 love, "confused in passion's golden purity." We 
 pause and think, "He can soar no higher; 
 mortal speech has done its utmost." We are 
 faint and flushed with the difficult air, and can 
 scarcely breathe. But Shelley is invigorated, 
 and again begins, and soars yet higher, and 
 sings in yet more piercing sweetness, till at last 
 the sense seems to swoon, and the solid world 
 slides from beneath our feet, and we, like the 
 singer, sink and tremble and expire. When 
 we wake it is like waking from delirium. We
 
 SHELLEY. 35 
 
 have been utterly bewitched in a dream of 
 sensuous beauty, and we rub our eyes to make 
 sure the common earth is still our home. The 
 spell of Shelley has been upon us, and there is 
 no other poet capable of such inimitable magic. 
 But there are few natures that can bear the 
 spell, even as it was a unique nature which pro- 
 duced it, simply because there are many nat- 
 ures capable of pleasure but few of rapture, 
 of pain, but not of agony, for whom indeed, by 
 the necessary limitations of their own character, 
 such words are too divine and deep, and savor 
 more of frenzy than of truth. 
 
 To men of an imaginative mind and hard mo- 
 rality Shelley will always appear a mere blas- 
 phemous presence. They will never pierce the 
 mist of intangibility and touch the real man. 
 They will find it a congenial task to catalogue 
 his errors and explain the sequence of his sins. 
 What they will not be able to do will be to 
 understand that nature sometimes produces 
 characters of strange complexity, which fall 
 into no category, and touch many classes but 
 belong to none. It is not possible to draw any 
 fixed line between the sheep and the goats at 
 our earthly judgment-seats, or to sc[iaratc the
 
 36 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 wheat from tlic tares in human character. It 
 is not possible to label and ticket men, as 
 phrenologists do the sections of the skull, and 
 say to precisely what class they shall be rele- 
 gated. It is difficult even to discern where 
 virtue grows warped and leans to vice, for the 
 golden threads are closely bound up with the 
 stained and blackened ones, and in destroying 
 one you sometimes spoil the other. Criticism 
 may be a very excellent employment in the 
 world of letters, but it is an exceedingly futile 
 one when it applies itself to character. Most 
 futile of all employments is it when it approaches 
 with its yard-measures and compasses a unique 
 nature, and affects to take its true dimensions 
 by rule of thumb, and explain its secret with 
 the offensive glibness of a self-complacency 
 which is " cock-sure of every thing." 
 
 But if to the bulk of men Shelley will never be 
 a very real presence, or a very lovable one, there 
 will always be those who will have enough 
 imaginative insight to discern the real man, 
 and they will love him with an unfailing devo- 
 tion. There is no more pathetic figure in 
 English literature. From first to last he is 
 solitary and isolated. We see him as a boy, with
 
 SHELLEY. 37 
 
 eager eyes and bright-flowing hair, alive with 
 fancy, thrilling his sisters and frightening him- 
 self by the grotesque visions of an undisciplined 
 imagination ; a frail wild slip of a child, need- 
 ing more than common children a sympathetic 
 atmosphere, and the kindliest training. But 
 such conditions were utterly denied him. He 
 is the slave of impulse, and with no judgment 
 to regulate that impulse. The benign influ- 
 ence of human goodness, not to say human 
 piety, never fell upon him. The only sort of 
 Christianity he was familiar with was the 
 grotesque distortion embodied in a father 
 whose chief articles of belief were the necessity 
 of orthodoxy and the divine rights of prop- 
 erty. The only elderly man who exercised 
 any real influence over his intellectual growth 
 was Dr. Lind, of Eton, and he was an atheist. 
 It is needless to follow the well-remembered 
 details of his expulsion from Oxford, his quar- 
 rels with his father, his poverty, his abstinence, 
 his generosity, his misfortunes. It is not won- 
 derful if the original morbid taint in his mind fed 
 upon such food as this, and in his almost frantic 
 love for liberty he advocated license. Life 
 must often have seemed a very sorry business
 
 38 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 to liim. He never had a public for his writ- 
 ings ; scarcely one of his poems had a sale, and 
 as he himself says, he wrote for himself and not 
 for the public. Yet it cannot be doubted he 
 desired a public, and keenly felt the contrast 
 between his own literary failures and Byron's 
 immense success. He tells us in lines of bittei 
 sweetness : 
 
 " Alas ! I have nor hope, nor health, 
 
 Nor peace within, nor calm around, 
 Nor that content surpassing wealth 
 
 The sage in meditation found, 
 
 And walked with inward glory crowned — 
 Nor fame, nor power, nor love, nor leisure. 
 
 Others I see whom these surround : 
 Smiling they live and call life pleasure ; 
 To me that cup has been dealt in another measure." 
 
 Not in that hour of dejection only when he 
 looked in utter sadness on the bright sea and 
 purple noon of Naples, but many times did he 
 feel that he could lie down, 
 
 " Like a tired child, 
 And weep away the life of care." 
 
 He could not solve the mystery of life — its 
 shame, its wrong, its anguish ; and like many 
 another pure and ardent spirit bruised him- 
 self in many a wild fluttering against the iron
 
 SHELLEY. 39 
 
 bars of insoluable problems. And then he 
 flew to Nature. In her freshness and grandeur, 
 in the hospitality of her silence, and the friend- 
 liness of her unchangingness, he took refuge, 
 and hid himself in her starry pavilion against 
 the windy tempest of life's futility and malice. 
 He becomes her high-priest and confidant. He 
 serves her with unquenchable devotion and 
 delight. He thirsts for her beauty, and toils 
 to mirror her glory in fit and perfect speech. 
 At thirty he is gray-headed, and his face h 
 lined and furrowed like an old man's. The 
 spirit of sorrow never leaves him ; his verse is 
 one long lament, and underneath its utmost 
 triumph the voice sobs quietly and the sick 
 heart aches. Then suddenly the end comes, 
 and Nature weaves her blackest tempest for a 
 pall and opens the door of rest in the dim 
 green depths of that unresting ocean he had 
 loved so well. He dies with purpose, charac- 
 ter, and work alike unfinished. We know 
 what he ditl, but know not what he might 
 have done or been. I'-ut life is only just be- 
 gun at thirty, and ended thus in its begin- 
 ning, surely merits the grace of charity, of 
 sympathy, of pity. That meed of reverent
 
 40 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 feeling has never yet been denied by any 
 Avho have drunk of the magic stream of his 
 poetry, and never will be wanting so long as 
 English literature endures, and with it the 
 name of Shelley.
 
 WORDSWORTH AND HIS MESSAGE. <^l 
 
 WORDSWORTH AND HIS MESSAGE. 
 
 IN the ordinary development of personal 
 culture there are certain usual and well- 
 defined stages. There are voices in literature 
 which appeal especially to youth and rouse its 
 strenuous impulses, and there arc voices that 
 do not effectually pierce the soul until the ad- 
 vent of sedater years and the more constant 
 mind. It is seldom that the literary friends 
 of youth are the friends of age, and rare and 
 memorable is that book which casts its gla- 
 mour over boyhood and has lost no portion of its 
 wizardry in the duller period of fading years. 
 There are few books which have this universal 
 charm, and they arc the greatest. They may 
 almost be numbered upon one's fingers, and 
 the names they bear are the peerage of liter- 
 ature. 
 
 In that august company Wordsworth cannot 
 be enrolled, for the spell of Wordsworth, ex- 
 quisite as it is, is limited and very far from 
 commonly felt. Scott is the poet of boyhood, 
 liyron the poet of youth, Shelley the inspira-
 
 42 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 tion of early manhood, while to the young 
 heart Keats is the very minister of sensuous 
 beauty, the thrilling voice that sings from the 
 lattices of 
 
 •' Magic casements opening on the foam. 
 Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn." 
 
 There is a time when the healthy chivalry of 
 Scott sets the boy's heart thrilling, just as later 
 the splendid bitterness of Byron quickens it to 
 revolt, or shadows it with morbid sorrow. 
 Shelley carries that revolt, as it were, into a 
 farther world, and fills the firmament with the 
 same war and passion that Byron breeds upon 
 the earth. It is the revolutionary note in 
 Shelley that secures him the ear of youth, and 
 according to the strength of the poetic fibre in 
 a youth will he choose either Byron or Shel- 
 ley as his singer. The shallower nature, or we 
 might say the grosser nature, will fall a prey 
 to Byron ; the more spiritual nature will kindle 
 with the ethereal fury and rebellion of Shelley. 
 But both, in their measure, will remain over- 
 mastering influences upon the heart of youth. 
 Against these Wordsworth has no chance. 
 There is no fury in his verse. He has no cyn- 
 icism, no quips and pranks of bitter humor or
 
 WORDSWORTH AND HIS MESSAGE. 43 
 
 bitterer blasphemy. He brings with him no 
 whirlwind, but a fresh and quiet air ; he rises 
 on us with no tumult of tempestuous clouds, 
 but with the ineffable serenity and strength of 
 that "sacred dawn " he loved so well to picture. 
 He has no brilliance wherewith to dazzle us ; 
 no mystery to fascinate our curiosity, no silent 
 anguish on his shut lips to move our sympathy. 
 He is not dramatic ; a more undramatic man 
 never hved. His voice is like the voice of a 
 ballad-singer following a fantasia ; so simple 
 that we fancy we may scorn it, yet so sweet 
 and clear that we begin to listen even in spite 
 of ourselves. The waves of endless storms 
 break in futile wrath upon the iceberg, but the 
 warm Gulf-stream comes at last and dissolves 
 what they could not shatter, and subdues that 
 which it could never carry by assault. The 
 influence of Wordsworth upon his time has 
 been the influence of the Gulf-stream ; it has 
 flowed silently and surely, and has conquered. 
 It is for reasons like these that Wordsworth 
 can afford to wait his time. He had to do so 
 while he lived in relation to his fame ; he has 
 to do so still in relation to his acceptation by 
 individuals. He wrote for nearly fifty years
 
 44 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 amid all but universal scorn, and yet suffered 
 no diminution of strength or hope, and over- 
 came at last. He will sing in vain still to the 
 heart of youth full of its first fire and fervor. 
 He will seem to be a singer of no account, an 
 aged bard who stands in the market-place and 
 pipes to those who will not dance. But inev- 
 itably there comes a time in the history of any 
 true personal culture when this quiet bard 
 draws us to himself, and grapples us with 
 hooks of steel. He becomes what no other 
 has become to us — the friend of our solitude, 
 the inspiration of our duty, the consoler of our 
 disillusions ; keeping full pace with us to what- 
 soever heights of thought or deed we may as- 
 pire, and remaining to the end a friend that 
 sticketh closer than a brother. 
 
 It is not to any detailed criticism of the 
 works of Wordsworth I would now address 
 myself; the libraries already groan with reams 
 of disquisition on that subject. Never has 
 poor mortal been so utterly routed and flouted 
 as Francis Jeffrey for that famous obiter dic- 
 iiun of his, that Wordsworth "wouldn't do." 
 Among all the unhappy ghosts of Hades none 
 can be much more perennially uncomfortable
 
 WORDSWORTH AND HIS MESSAGE. 45 
 
 than he. Every fresh cargo of critics ferried 
 over by Charon for the last fifty years have 
 brought news of the world-wide fame of the 
 man who " wouldn't do ; " and without doubt, 
 if they have not forgotten their old urbanity, 
 they have sought poor Francis out instantly 
 and given him a piece of their minds. Flay- 
 ing a poet must be quite a mild and humane 
 sport to this posthumous persecution of a king 
 of critics, as Francis has perhaps discovered to 
 his cost. The only question I have to ask 
 about the poetry of Wordsworth is, What is 
 the nature of his message to our age ? The 
 simpler and more interesting question is. 
 What was the nature of the man himself? 
 
 First of all, as regards the man, it may be said 
 that no one who has written fascinating poetry 
 has ever had less of the secret of fascination in 
 himself. He was destitute of wit, and his at- 
 tempts at humor in " Peter Bell " arc very like 
 the performances of that celebrated German 
 baron who thought humor was best attained by 
 jumping on the table. lie struck most people 
 as a remarkably prosaic man. TIic brilliant con- 
 versationalists of his day fouml him dull, and 
 the Westmoreland peasantry, among whom he
 
 46 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 lived, said he was not " lovable in his face, by 
 no means," and judged from his habitual reti- 
 cence that he was " a desolate-minded man." 
 One is tempted to say he lacks individu- 
 ality, though that would not be true, as we 
 shall sec ; but certainly he lacked those daz- 
 zling qualities which have made most great 
 men memorable. There are no enigmas in his 
 character ; he was a simple, just, and temper- 
 ate man, with no electric flash of wayward pas- 
 sion, no black depth of cynical melancholy in 
 his nature. In this he is the very opposite of 
 such a poet as Byron. It is difficult even now 
 to say whether it is Byron the man or Byron 
 the poet who exercises the strongest spell over 
 us. He endears himself by his frailties and 
 fascinates with his suffering. We think, for 
 instance, of such a story as that of Lady Caro- 
 line Lamb meeting by accident the hearse 
 that was turning northward with the body of 
 Byron, and on learning whose it was going 
 home with a shattered brain, to die ; and we 
 feel, in spite of all juster knowledge, that there 
 must have been something deep, something 
 wonderful and fine, in this man's nature that 
 women should have loved him with such pas-
 
 WORDSWORTH AND HIS MESSAGE. 47 
 
 sionate love. The incident is intensely dra- 
 matic, as a hundred incidents in the Hfe of 
 Byron are, and we are thrilled. That life of 
 Byron, with its strange speed and splendor, its 
 swift alternations of brightness and blackness, 
 its bitterness and baseness and tragic ruin, will 
 always fascinate mankind. It h a play they 
 will never tire of studying; it ihrills them. 
 Thus it will happen in the future, as it has 
 already happened in the past, that the individ- 
 uality of Byron will preserve his poetry from 
 decay ; the man is more than the poetry. In 
 the case of Wordsworth the converse is nearer 
 the truth ; the poetry is greater than the man. 
 This, upon the whole, is the general impres- 
 sion Wordsworth creates, and we simply make 
 note of it as an impression. It finds further 
 and amusing corroboration in the general ideas 
 the Westmoreland peasantry entertained about 
 him. They felt that, while his qualities were 
 of the sterling and durable type, yet there was 
 a total absence of geniality about him. He 
 did not stop and talk to children ; he took his 
 family out with him U>v long walks, but usually 
 went ahead and said nothing to them ; he 
 never laughed and seldom smiled; in fact, "a
 
 48 QUEST AND VIRION. 
 
 desolate-minded man." " You might tell from 
 his face his poetry would never have no laugh 
 in it," said one of them. " As for his habits he 
 had noan , niver knew him with a pot in his 
 hand or a pipe in his mouth," said another. 
 " He went a-bumming about — bum, bum, bum, 
 and stop; " " He had a rare deep voice ; chil- 
 dren sometimes heard it rising in some solitary 
 place and ran away scared " — are other remi- 
 niscences of his habits, or rather, according to 
 the Westmoreland code of life, his lack of 
 habits. It is curious to find how, in their 
 rough and blundering phrases, these West- 
 moreland peasants precisely discerned the car- 
 dinal defect of Wordsworth's nature — this lack 
 of geniality and fascination. Their ideal poet 
 was poor Hartley Coleridge. He had very de- 
 cided habits, and all of the wrong sort; one 
 fears the greatest part of that sad wasted life 
 of his was spent with a pipe in his mouth and 
 a pot in his hand. But he had this strange 
 secret of personal fascination : every body 
 loved him. His neighbors had great difficulty 
 in accepting the poetic claims of Wordsworth 
 — " he was a well-meaning, quiet, dacent man," 
 but they believed poor Hartley a very great poet
 
 WORDSWORTH AND HIS MESSAGE. 49 
 
 indeed. It was commonly supposed that Flart- 
 ley's relation to Wordsworth was that of the 
 unfortunate chief to his fortunate subordinate : 
 he " did the best part of his poems for him," 
 so the saying is. Opinion was slightly divided ; 
 some thought Dorothy Wordsworth wrote her 
 brother's poems for him, and some thought 
 Hartley wrote them, but very few gave Words- 
 worth himself the credit of them. In their 
 way these Westmoreland peasants confessed 
 that their ideal of a poet was very much akin 
 to the ideal set up by the morbid school of to- 
 day ; the poet was a frail wild creature, pas- 
 sionate, fascinating, wayward, addicted to pots 
 and pipes and other unholy indulgences — 
 somebody to be pitied by the charitable, hu- 
 mored by the pitiful, and taken to the heart 
 and loved forever by the sentimental. Their 
 ideal of the poet was the Byronic ideal in fact, 
 and that is, after all, the prevalent ideal in 
 middle-class minds ; and Wordsworth, witli his 
 silence, his self-absorption, his love of solitude, 
 his plain ways and undramatic history, is the 
 very opposite to this creature o( vicious and 
 unwholesome sentiment. 
 
 No doubt the world is very mad and very
 
 50 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 foolish, but undoubtedly it sets high store upon 
 this charm of personality of which Wordsworth 
 was so singularly destitute. It rates it above 
 steadfastness and honor, unsullied probity, un- 
 tarnished morals. As a weapon to win fame 
 with it has always proved supreme. Some of 
 the worst of men have been the idols of the 
 people by simple virtue of their power of fas- 
 cination. Probably no two men ever lived 
 with harder, narrower, more intensely selfish 
 natures than Bonaparte or Charles 11. , but see 
 how they fascinated men ! The old gray cloak 
 and cocked hat of Bonaparte were followed by 
 the adoration of millions ; their appearance 
 before a hostile city was sufficient to make 
 every soldier drop his arms and cry, " Vive 
 Napoleon ! " and before their magical approach 
 a throne tottered and a kingdom relented. 
 Charles II. was as shallow and graceless a 
 scamp as ever sullied the name of prince, but 
 men poured gold into his lap when he smiled, 
 and forgot the Dutch fires blazing at Sheerness 
 when he jested. The very gigantic nature of 
 the wickedness of such men has been a source 
 of fame, an element of success ; for men ad- 
 mire great sinners almost as much as they do
 
 WORDSWORTH AND HIS MESSAGE. 51 
 
 great saints. It is vain to appeal to the Byron- 
 Lytton school on behalf of Wordsworth. 
 Against these giaours and corsairs, these gen- 
 tlemen whose melancholy is permanent and 
 attractive, who reduce seduction to a science 
 and elevate despair into a fine art, these Cag- 
 liostros of poetry, who are most brilliant when 
 most Avickcd and increasingly famous as they 
 are increasingly depraved, William Wordsworth 
 has no chance. Men like to be dazzled, and 
 Wordsworth holds no such spell ; he is not 
 histrionic, he is not melancholy, he is not 
 wicked ; and the public which desires such 
 qualities in a poet will always hold the " quiet, 
 dacent man " of Rydal Mount in vast contempt. 
 It might very well be shown that this By- 
 ronic ideal of the poet is not merely false, but 
 is new. It was a fashion that came in with the 
 Revolution, for nothing was more shaken in 
 that wild whirl of tumult than the moral con- 
 victions of men. One can find no trace of this 
 diseased sentimentalism in the four greatest of 
 all poets — Homer, Dante, Shakespeare^ and 
 Milton. The peculiar virtue of Wordsworth is 
 that amid all that breaking up of laws and 
 customs he kept his sobriety, his serenit}-, and
 
 52 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 his faith. He fell back upon the essential facts 
 of the universe, and felt that, though all king- 
 doms were shaken, there was a kingdom that 
 must remain. His theory of poetry was the 
 conscious or unconscious outcome of that 
 calm conviction. What was that theory ? Put 
 in its briefest form it amounted to this : that 
 it was time for poets to return to nature, to 
 natural and simple themes, and to clothe such 
 themes in the plain language of the common 
 people. It asserted the dignity of common life 
 and the sacredness of the natural affections. 
 It was a protest against the diseased senti- 
 ment, the histrionic melancholy, the faithless 
 cynicism which had corrupted the life of En- 
 glish poetry, not less than a protest against the 
 meretricious glitter of the style in which such 
 poetry had been couched. His poetry was 
 meant to be a rebuke against a debased poetic 
 style, and his character and career were a yet 
 finer rebuke against a debased poetic life. 
 
 Added to this, Wordsworth claimed for 
 poetry a religious mission, and invested it with 
 the sanctity of a divine calling. The long 
 critical warfare waged against the Lakers was 
 not fought out upon the comparatively triv-
 
 WORDSWORTH AND HIS MESSAGE. 53 
 
 ial issue of pure or ornate style ; it touched 
 far deeper and more essential questions. The 
 poet was in his eyes a high-priest, and his art 
 was a ministration. This was not a new idea 
 in poetry ; it had already been asserted in the 
 splendid and energetic eloquence of Milton. 
 It is curious to notice that not even in Shakes- 
 peare, and still less in Homer, is there any 
 trace of this idea. In what are probably the 
 last lines Shakespeare ever wrote — the epilogue 
 to the " Tempest " — when, like Prospero's, his 
 charms were " all o'erthrown," he especially 
 defines his conception of his work, when he 
 says his art is to enchant, his project is to 
 please ; though he does indeed strike a note 
 of more solemn and pathetic significance when 
 he adds : 
 
 " And my ending is despair, 
 Unless I be relieved by prayei." 
 
 But apart from this mere hint at the diviner 
 height and aspect of his art he gives no sign. 
 In Milton alone, among the peers of earlier 
 English poetry, does this conceptit)n of the 
 poet's art find its full expression. Ikit with 
 J\Iilt(jn the idea has a risjidncss and Hiiiil.ilion 
 which arc iiotfuund in Wordsworth. In Milton
 
 54 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 it exhales the flavor of the noblest Puritanism ; 
 in Wordsworth it is of wider application, and 
 includes the noble paganism of lofty nature- 
 worship. The poet with him is again a seer, 
 an interpreter, a speaker of the deep things of 
 God ; but he is more : he is a natural man, 
 whose days are bound together by natural 
 piety, and whose spirit is lost in deep com- 
 munion with the spirit of the living universe, 
 lie serves before the everlasting altars of the 
 high mountains, and has passed into the holiest 
 place of the mystery of universal life. His 
 whole attitude is priestly ; the world is a living 
 temple roofed with splendor, and he has in his 
 gift absolution and peace for the souls of erring 
 men. He is no mere ephemeral person ; he is 
 in the great apostolic succession of truth, and 
 his diocese is as wide as the walls of heaven. 
 
 Let any one weigh such lofty claims as these 
 against the sensational cynicism of Byron, or 
 the light tintinnabulation of Mr. Thomas 
 Moore, and the uniqueness of Wordsworth's 
 position in the dawn of the nineteenth century 
 will be at once apparent. While all the poets 
 of his day were ransacking earth and heaven 
 for some new form of sensationalism, and were
 
 WORDSWORTH AND HIS MESSAGE, 55 
 
 busy blowing bubbles of brilliant froth in the 
 heated chambers of society, he had taken ref- 
 uge in the serenity and strength of nature, 
 and had found thoughts too deep for tears in 
 the humblest flowers that blew. While they 
 were swept along the wild mill-race of revolu- 
 tion, or whirled in the worse vortex of personal 
 or social debasement, he had stepped aside into 
 the clear light and solemn solitude of the ever- 
 lasting hills, and heard the broken thunder of 
 the mad world only like a distant undertone, 
 too distant to be terrible, but near enough to 
 bear witness to the tragic heart of life — " the 
 still sad music of humanity." While their 
 ideal of a poet was a miserable and misan- 
 thropic being, whose book was written within 
 and without with mourning and lamentation 
 and woe, Wordsworth had formulated his idea 
 of a poet thus — and the sketch is obviously a 
 portrait : 
 
 " But who is this with modest looks 
 
 And clad in sober russet gown ? 
 He murmurs by the running brooks 
 
 A music sweeter than their own ; 
 He is retired as noontide dew 
 
 Or fountain in a noonday grove." 
 
 What an apparition is that for the curled
 
 $6 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 darlings of the Byronic school to gaze upon 1 
 It is Chaucer, shorn of his humor and turned 
 philosopher ; it is Thomas a Kempis, worship- 
 ing Nature and changed to poet ! What won- 
 der that grave face and russet gown became 
 merely a target for ridicule amid the profligate 
 glitter of the Regency? What marvel that a 
 world which was going mad over the conjugal 
 infelicities of Byron had scant attention for a 
 man who brought them the crystal water of 
 simple joys rather than the delirious cup of 
 passion, and sung of running brooks rather 
 than the diseased secrets of an unhappy life ? 
 We do not ask nowaday which is the truer 
 ideal of the true poet. The world has left 
 Byron and come round to Wordsworth. It is 
 enough to remember that the final achieve- 
 ment of the one is " Don Juan ; " of the other, 
 " The Excursion." 
 
 Lovers of sensationalism will of course turn 
 from Wordsworth to the end of the story ; but 
 that is simply evidence of their own shame 
 and his glory. The select souls are given to 
 the singer with the russet gown. It must be 
 owned that the poet finds what he brings : the 
 sheep know his voice, and the voice of a
 
 WORDSWORTH AND HIS MESSAGE. 5/ 
 
 stranger do they not know. Wordsworth 
 knew this truth, and thus it was he had so 
 kirge a faith in time and so subhme a confi- 
 dence in himself. To every man of genius 
 the veiled angel of destiny makes offer of two 
 caskets and bids him choose. The one glit- 
 ters with jewels and is ablaze with gold, but 
 it is empty. The other is plain and undcco- 
 rated, but it endures when jewels are scattered 
 and gold lost in the miry roads along which 
 the weary armies of mankind march, and it is 
 full of the suftragcs of posterity. The first 
 casket is the prize of immediate notoriety ; the 
 second is the pledge of enduring fame. Many 
 there are who choose the first, and few are 
 they who trust their deeper instincts and 
 choose the second. Of those few we know 
 now, though sixty years ago none suspected it, 
 that William Wordsworth was one ; and this 
 was the victory that overcame the world, even 
 his faith. 
 
 We have noted some of the sterner features 
 of Wordsworth's nature which rendered liiin 
 unattractive — his self-absorption, his reticence, 
 his lack ot geniality — but it is ipiit<: possible to 
 construct, from the broken hints that have
 
 58 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 come down to us, a picture of the real Words- 
 worth which is as beautiful as it is true. What 
 a tender picture that is, for instance, which one 
 of the old female servants of Rydal Mount 
 draws of him humming the lines of a poem, 
 while " Miss Dorothy kept close behint him, 
 and she picked up the bits as he let 'em fall, 
 and took 'em down, and put 'em together on 
 paper for him." Dorothy Wordsworth is one 
 of the most memorable figures in literary his- 
 tory, and deserves more than passing mention. 
 It was she who met her brother when he re- 
 turned from France, with broken hopes, after 
 the terror of the Revolution, and led him back 
 to Nature, and taught him to attain that calm 
 insight which is the bliss of solitude. Her 
 greatness, and it is the divinest greatness, lay, 
 like Mrs. Carlyle's, in her self-renunciation ; 
 she was content to minister to her brother's 
 genius and to find her chief joy in the growth 
 of his mind. The love of the lake district was 
 hers before it was his, and it was she who 
 transmitted and fostered the passion in him. 
 How many a touch of felicitous energy or ten- 
 der truth she added to his poems we have no 
 means of knowing; but we cannot help sus-
 
 WORDSWORTH AND HIS MESSAGE. 59 
 
 pecting that it was she, and not Mrs. Words- 
 worth, who added those two most exquisite 
 lines to the poem of the Daffodils : 
 
 " They flash upon that inward eye 
 Which is the bliss of solitude." 
 
 Never had poet more fit companion for hi.s 
 lonely walks than Wordsworth had in this 
 woman, who knew what sociality there is in 
 silence, and never broke it with vain words, 
 and knew even better what suggestiveness 
 there is in heartfelt speech, and never spoke 
 save to gather up in memorable phrase the 
 rare and fleeting sensationsof visionary beauty. 
 The two most memorable literary companion- 
 ships of the first half of this century were 
 those between Charles and Mary Lamb and 
 William and Dorothy Wordsworth. The in- 
 effable pathos of the one is as lovely as the 
 calm and simple sentiment of the other. If 
 there is yet a great artist left among us who 
 desires two national themes for two immortal 
 pictures here arc the subjects to his hand. 
 For the first picture let him seize that moment 
 when Charles and Mary Lamb cross the last 
 meadow on the way to the asylum ; the pale, 
 stooping scholar hand-in-hand with the strange.
 
 6o QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 dark-eyed girl — both weeping, both weighed 
 down with an intolerable secret, both pilgrims 
 on the Via Dolorosa of infinite sacrifice and 
 sorrow, each clinging to the other with despair- 
 ing love and the anguish of foreboding fear. 
 For the second let him paint the tall figure of 
 Wordsworth, with the "round blue cloak and 
 big wide-awake, poorly dressed at the best of 
 times," followed closely, at the distance of 
 half a pace or so, by Dorothy Wordsworth, 
 with her eager face and clear eyes — busy not- 
 ing in her book the last stanza of such a poem 
 as " She dwelt beside the banks of Dove," 
 Avhile round both rise the mountains, chequered 
 by the April drift of light and shade, and in 
 the near distance lies the tarn of Further Gow- 
 barrow, beneath the shadow of whose shore 
 there gleam that 
 
 " Host of golden daffodils 
 Beside the lake, beneath the trees, 
 Fluttering and dancing in the breeze." 
 
 In one picture there would live the tragic an- 
 guish of life ; in the other, its solemn ecstasy. 
 In both there would be represented immortal 
 love. 
 
 Quite as fine in their way are other pictures
 
 WORDSWORTH AND HIS MESSAGE. 6 1 
 
 that might be drawn of the real Wordsworth. 
 Every one will remember his description of the 
 love of skating, and how, hissing along the 
 polished ice, 
 
 " Not seldom from the uproar lie retired 
 Into a silent bay, or sportively 
 Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng, 
 To cut across the reflex of a star." 
 
 What a fine picture that would make ! The 
 clear black ice of one of the lonelier mountain 
 tarns, the winter sparkle of the stars, the 
 solemn peaks buttressing the blue and windless 
 vault of heaven, the distant cry of some soli- 
 tary night-bird, and the long vibrating ring of 
 the lonely skater — for sounds can be hinted at 
 in a great picture and interpreted by the sub- 
 tle process of true art to the imagination — and 
 that lonely skater, flying like a winged shadow 
 hither and thither, the poet who has made 
 those solitudes his home, and has dedicated 
 his life to the interpretation of their m)-stcr}'. 
 The only word that strikes like false art in the 
 description is that word " sportively." We 
 are quite sure in such a scene Wordsworth 
 would be touched to solemnity rather than 
 sportiveness. In such a moment a mind like
 
 62 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 his would have kindled not so much with the 
 exhilaration of the sport as with the weird 
 beauty of the scene. His thought would be 
 of the swift rush and mystery of life, the im- 
 mensities that lie beneath it and above it, life 
 itself seeming but "a troubled moment in the 
 being of the everlasting silence." Given star- 
 lit midnight, and a belt of darkened mountains, 
 and we have the two great natural agencies 
 best able to produce solemn and searching 
 thoughts in the heart of man. It is a scene 
 in which the ode on " Intimations of Immor- 
 tality from Recollections of Childhood " might 
 have been conceived. It was a scene, as he 
 himself has reminded us, in which he recog- 
 nized " a grandeur in the beatings of the 
 heart," and felt the power of that 
 
 " Wisdom, and spirit of the universe ! 
 Thou soul, that art the eternity of thought ! 
 And giv'st to forms and images a breath 
 And everlasting motion ! " 
 
 I think, of all the many pictures full of 
 simple grace and beautiful serenity which 
 crowd upon the memory from the writings of 
 Wordsworth, there is none I would so readily 
 choose as a fit and noble setting for a true
 
 WORDSWORTH AND HIS MESSAGE. 63 
 
 portrait of him who has taught us more than 
 any other 
 
 " How exquisitely the individual mind to the external 
 
 world 
 Is fitted, and how exquisitely, too, 
 The external world is fitted to the mind." 
 
 Certainly there has ueen not merely no more 
 memorable figure in modern literature than 
 William Wordsworth, but no more memorable 
 figure in relation to modern life itself. Many 
 men feel in the first enthusiasm of youth that 
 they have a mission to fulfill, but few men have 
 the courage and fidelity to pursue their mis- 
 sion. " The world is too much with them;" 
 they are speedily seduced by its fascinations, 
 and enslaved by the overmastering force of its 
 conventionality. Wordsworth found his mis- 
 sion when he went to dwell among the lakes, 
 and he was heroically faithful to it through evil 
 and through good report. He turned aside 
 from the race for honor and place, not with the 
 spiteful cynicism of disappointment or the 
 bitter passion of contempt, but in obedience 
 to the mandate of a serious and simple spirit. 
 Few things in literary history arc more striking 
 
 than the retirement of Carljlc to the desolate 
 5
 
 64 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 isolation of Craigenputtock ; but Carlyle's re- 
 tirement was limited in time and imperfect in 
 renunciation. In his heart he never ceased to 
 covet the fuller and more passionate life of 
 cities, and felt that Craigenputtock was a 
 prison. It is, perhaps, all the more powerful 
 testimony to the strength of his unique char- 
 acter that he bore so great and painful an im- 
 prisonment of gigantic energies for so long. 
 But he never fully acquiesced in his severance 
 from more social life. He never regarded it 
 as final ; he never thought of it otherwise than 
 as a means to an end. When Wordsworth 
 turned his face northward he broke the last 
 bond that linked him to conventional life, and 
 he did it willingly. He knew that he was go- 
 ing to live as a peasant among peasants, and 
 he was content. He meant to dedicate his 
 great powers to a task that might be hope- 
 less, that must be prolonged, that could not 
 be other than hard and sacrificial in most of 
 its conditions; but he did it, and never re- 
 gretted it. In later days prosperity dawned 
 upon him ; but very few have clearly under- 
 stood what the world would call the " hard- 
 ships " of those earlier days. If ever " high
 
 WORDSWORTH AND HIS MESSAGE. 65 
 
 thinking and plain living " found not merely 
 an apostle, but an example, it was in him. 
 
 To the readers of to-day the old ideal of 
 poetry in a garret has become an obsolete 
 fiction. Our poets live in palaces ; they are 
 connoisseurs and patrons of art ; they flit with 
 the easy grace of wealth from country mansion 
 to town-house ; they no longer haunt the 
 patron's gate. Do they not sit cheek by jowl 
 with Dives ? Have they not even been known 
 to descend to the peerage ? And do they not 
 receive yearly cheques that run into the dig- 
 nity of four figures? 
 
 But Wordsworth was " a mean-livinrr man," 
 as the peasants say, living even more simply 
 than they. " Never wore a boxer in his life," 
 said another — always the round cloak and plain 
 raiment of the peasant. When he rode abroad 
 — we regret to mention so impolite a circum- 
 stance, but Mr. Rawnsley* says his neighbors 
 all aver it — it was in a dung-cart, with a board 
 across and a bit of clean bracken at the bottom. 
 His library had no choice editions or delicate 
 
 * Mr. Ravvnsley is the autlior of an excellent paper on the 
 *' Reminiscences of Wordsworth among the reasantiy," print- 
 ed in the Transactions of the Wordsworth Society. I am nuuh 
 indebted to him, and liereliy ackno\vledi;e my oMi^alion.
 
 66 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 bindings ; it was plain and scanty. In every 
 feature of his life this austerity of habit is visi- 
 ble. He had set himself to teach how few are 
 the real wants of man ; how deep and divine 
 are those common joys of the affections which 
 are within the reach of all ; how self-sufficing is 
 simplicity ; how false and fevered is the life of 
 man when it is withdrawn from the healing in- 
 fluences of nature and degraded into a wild 
 scramble for the soiled gold or tinsel glory of 
 ambition ; and that which he taught he practiced. 
 " We know only what we practice," was his 
 motto, as well as Savonarola's. The well-spring 
 of his philosophy was in the order of his own 
 life. That life thus became the finest sermon 
 ever preached to this hurried age of ours, the 
 finest and the most needful ; and its divine 
 lesson was : 
 
 "What an empire we inherit, 
 As natural beings in the strength of nature." 
 
 When we justly consider these things I 
 think we shall find a new William Words- 
 worth emerging from the shadows of the past, 
 and surely not an unlovable Wordsworth. We 
 shall forget his awkwardness and stiffness in 
 those brilliant circles of society which he
 
 WORDSWORTH AND I IIS MESSAGE. 6/ 
 
 visited now and again in the days of his latc- 
 davvning fame. Wc shall forgive him that his 
 poetry has so little of passion in it, and upon 
 the whole we shall be thankful for it. There 
 are many other poets who can give us passion ; 
 but who else can give us peace ? To whom 
 can we go so well in the hour when our hearts 
 are grieved and our nerves worn down by the 
 ceaseless harass of life amid a crowd ? I do 
 not say when our hearts are broken ; for then 
 wc ask for a teacher who has himself passed 
 into the sanctuary of sorrow, and trodden the 
 wine-press alone, and Wordsworth cannot claim 
 to have done that. It may be true, as Matthew 
 Arnold has exquisitely put it, that 
 
 " Wordsworth's eyes avert tlieir keu 
 From lialf of human fate ;" 
 
 but that is only saying that Wordsworth has 
 the defects of his qualities. But who else pre- 
 sents the same qualities and ministers to us 
 the same "sweet calm?" And even in the 
 hour of sorrow such serenity as his is some- 
 times even more welcome than the sympathy 
 of others. It is, in fact, a nobler sort of sympa- 
 thy — calm, godlike, healing. Not in vain, and 
 not with sacrilegious arrogance, did he esteem
 
 68 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 his art a ministration ; in the oldest and truest 
 sense the minstrel and the minister are one, and 
 such minstrelsy is his. He ministers to the 
 mind diseased, and his medicine has the whole- 
 some potency of nature. He brings the fresh- 
 ness of the mountain air in his presence, and 
 his voice is like the lark's. We love hini as we 
 do that winged " pilgrim of eternity," and we 
 can listen to him when all other soncrs distress 
 our jaded sense. Who has not fled from his 
 Label, vexed, troubled, worn out, and in the 
 blessed solitude of Nature felt his strength 
 renewed while he stood amid the open fields 
 and clothed himself with their silence as with 
 a garment, and felt again the breath of blue 
 sky over him and heard again the magic 
 whisper of the leaves and brooks ? Words- 
 worth has so perfectly absorbed that charm of 
 Nature that his poetry docs for us just what 
 Nature herself does in such hours as these : he 
 purges and refreshes us. If poetry is, as some 
 one has beautifully described it, the Sabbath 
 influence of literature, Wordsworth breathes 
 upon us the very Sabbath of poetry — its rest, 
 its devotion, and its healing calm. 
 
 Certain it is, no English poet has shown so
 
 WORDSWORTH AND HIS MESSAGE. 69 
 
 perfect a fidelity in his descriptions of Nature. 
 He may claim to have set a new fashion in 
 regard to her — the fashion of minute and ex- 
 quisite observation. His life was essentially 
 an out-door life, and that is the secret of the 
 perennial freshness of his charm. Nothing es- 
 caped those vigilant eyes of his ; and his sense 
 of sound was as perfect as his power of vision. 
 This wonderful precision finds an admirable 
 example — the best that I can think of— in 
 that terse and perfect picture which he gives 
 of the desolate, windy height of a lonely 
 mountain pass : 
 
 " The single blicep, and that one blasted tree, 
 And the bleak music of that old stone wall." 
 
 He was, moreover, what the peasants called 
 "a verra practical-eyed man." He hated to 
 see the slightest wrong inflicted on a land- 
 scape by the stupid folly of man. He used 
 his authority to secure the right building of 
 chimneys and in the prevention of the vulgar 
 use of colors. When a copse was cleared the 
 dalesman would leave a few trees standing 
 that his eye might not be offended. He insti- 
 tuted himself by common consent guardian of 
 that beautiful district which he had learned to
 
 70 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 love SO passionately, and he taught the dales- 
 men to take new pride and pleasure in its 
 preservation. This also was part of his mis- 
 sion, and not an inglorious part ; and for this, 
 too, I love him. In those long walks of his 
 he was guarding and securing one of the 
 choicest heritages of the English people ; and 
 all who are still left among that people, who do 
 not bow down and worship before the omnipo- 
 tence of the railroad, and whose chief aim is 
 not to spin a little faster than their neighbors 
 in the wild dervish-whirl of vulgar ostentation, 
 will thank God for William Wordsworth, and 
 thank William Wordsworth for what he did. 
 
 The gift, then, that Wordsworth brings to 
 us is serenity, and the message he delivers is 
 simplicity. We do not go to him to be ex- 
 cited but to be strengthened. He, in his turn, 
 does not pose before us in a dramatic attitude, 
 as a suppliant for sentimental pity ; he stands 
 before us as a wise teacher, in whose lips are 
 the words of everlasting life. Those who do 
 not love him must revere him ; but, for my 
 part, I find it easy to do both. If poetry be 
 something more than a pool of chaotic senti- 
 ment, that gives forth iridescent vapors, brill-
 
 WORDSWORTH AND 1 1 IS MESSAGE. 7 1 
 
 iant film.s and bubbles; if it be a healing 
 stream, flowing clear as crystal from the 
 throne of God and bordered by the trees of 
 liic ; if it be an inspired voice, '* a vision and a 
 faculty divine," then in Wordsworth I recog- 
 nize the noblest poet of our century. " This 
 wont do ! " O, Francis Jeffrey ! had you but 
 known it, this man spake the words that made 
 for your peace and ours ; he brought precisely 
 what would do, the book bitter in the lips to 
 critics like you, but sweet and healing to the 
 soul of our vexed, tumultuous generation ; 
 the one medicine, the one message that avc 
 most imperatively needed. It is precisely 
 such ministration as this that our age needs 
 still; and our house of literature will be left to 
 us desolate indeed when such sweet voices 
 shall have died out of it. What he meant to 
 do, and what he did, Wordsworth has severely 
 defined for us in four memorable lines: 
 
 " Tlic moving accident is not my trade. 
 To freeze the blood I liave no ready arts ; 
 
 'Tis my delight alone in summer shade 
 
 To pipe a simple song to tliinkiiig hearts." 
 
 " The moving accident " — no ; tor it w.is 
 Wordsworth's creed that life is not tletennined
 
 72 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 by its accidents but by its essence, and that 
 its divincst possessions are its simplest and its 
 widest characteristics and emotions. The freez- 
 ing of the blood — no ; for sensationalism is a 
 base and easy trick — the trade of the necro- 
 mancer, but not the function of the poet ; it is 
 his to make sunlight in a shady place ; to call 
 men back to their inalienable heritage of nat- 
 ural joys; to visit them with gifts of benedic- 
 tion and of peace ; to teach them the secret of 
 divine tranquillity in a life freed from haste 
 and lifted high above the unholincss of ava- 
 rice — 
 
 " To pipe a simple song to thinking hearts."
 
 RELIGIOUS DOUBT — MODERN POETRY. ^^ 
 
 RELIGIOUS DOUBT AND MODERN 
 POETRY. 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD, BROWNING, TENNYSON. 
 
 MR. W. E. II. LECKY, la liis learned 
 History of European Morals, has com- 
 mented, in a striking foot-note, upon the im- 
 mense growth and influence of the newspaper 
 press, and on the fact that it is chiefly di- 
 rected by lawyers and barristers. Mr. Lecky's 
 inference from the last-named circumstance is 
 that a "judicial" tone is thus introduced into 
 the daily press, and a "judicial" method of 
 thought consequently imparted to the public 
 mind. I'^rom this inference we totally dis- 
 agree ; for the lawyer-barrister mind is essen- 
 tially forensic, not judicial; and one very gen- 
 eral issue of newspaper press influence upon 
 the public mind is political and social parti^^an- 
 ship. A fir more important result of the 
 enormous growth of the press is the great im- 
 petus given to the taste fur reading; among
 
 ;4 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 the classes to whom at one tunc literature of 
 any kind was a scaled and sworded paradise, 
 whose trees of good and evil were jealously 
 guarded against the encroachments of the 
 multitude and the curiosity of the vulgar. At 
 the present moment it may almost be said 
 that the flaming swords wherewith intolerant 
 and exclusive legislation used to guard the 
 garden have burned them.selvcs out, and the 
 great domain, with its crowded and accumu- 
 lated growth, lies open, without toll or hin- 
 derance, to the poorest. Therein are to be 
 found trees of knowledge as stately as Milton's, 
 and founts of song as pure and deep as Words- 
 worth's; but the face of Villon leers in the 
 shadows, and the pestilent obscenity of Con- 
 greve, Sterne, and Swift has left many a livid 
 pool of poison on the verges of the greenest 
 lawns and at the roots of the mightiest forest- 
 growths of genius. In a word, such freedom 
 brings its natural peril, and the wayfarer finds 
 the serpent close beside the tree of knowledge 
 still. 
 
 Not merely has the reading public increased, 
 but, as a natural consequence, the writing pub- 
 lic has also steadily grown.
 
 RELIGIOUS DOUBT — MODERN POETRY. 75 
 
 " The mob of gentlemen who write with. 
 ease " was never so large as in the present 
 day. There is a vast number of minds en- 
 dowed with a mimetic gift which passes for a 
 literary instinct, and education and opportu- 
 nity conspire to kindle a literary ardor which 
 finds its vent in books that benefit nobody 
 but the trunk-maker, and between whose birth 
 and oblivion there is but a step. The mass of 
 so-called poetry which is published, and which 
 actually commands attention and numbers its 
 editions, is what Dominie Sampson might well 
 call " prodigious." Much of this successful 
 verse is the product of fine and cultured minds 
 who find in verse-making one of the many 
 pleasant and most easily acquired arts of liter- 
 ature. Much of it succeeds by following the 
 reigning fashion or by modeling its " silvery 
 see-saw of sibilants " upon the method of the 
 latest favorite ; much more is simply the ludi- 
 crous contortion of ambitious mediocrity, and 
 its whole vocation is endless and very indiffer- 
 ent imitation ; and therefore it is a question 
 of the highest importance, Who and what man. 
 ncr of models are the poets thus set up as ex- 
 amples ? Voltaire's barber hastened to assure
 
 76 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 Iiis master that he did not beh'evc in God any 
 more than the gentleman did ; and it is cer- 
 tain, in poetry as in every thing else, that the 
 master-mind finds itself mimicked and echoed 
 in every particular by the inferior. If the mas- 
 ter sing of Chloe and Phyllis, straightway the 
 chorus will sing in hundred-fold laudation of 
 Daphne and Sylvander ; if of blessed damosels 
 and anguished lilies, the chorus multiplies its 
 dirges of faded sunflowers and its raptures at 
 the moving vision of blue china ; and if the 
 master degrade his genius to chant the blas- 
 phemies of atheism and the swinish revels of 
 carnality, the chorus will sing in yet grosser 
 fashion the democratic upheaval and the apoth- 
 eosis of the brute. 
 
 Moreover, it must be remembered that the 
 chief ministry of poetry is a ministry of sug- 
 gestion. The poet is the interpreter, but not 
 the less the leader, of his age. His words may 
 not become the street-song of the multitude 
 or the solace of the poor man's hearth, but 
 often a higher and more strenuous fate is 
 theirs — they become the inspiration of the 
 thinker. The influence of a great poet on the 
 best minds of his generation is like the action
 
 RELIGIOUS DOUBT — MODERN POETRY. 'Jf 
 
 of the sunlight ; silently it gathers force and 
 spreads itself abroad and marks the fulness of 
 its power by the ripened bloom upon the fruit 
 and the depth of tint and color in the flower. 
 In like manner the highest prose-genius of a 
 time often takes its color from the highest 
 poetry of the period. Often the poet is con- 
 tent to leave his exposition in the hands of the 
 few whom he can trust, knowing well that 
 through the influence of those few his words 
 will not fail of reaching the widest audience of 
 his time. 
 
 Therefore, if it be said that the great bulk 
 of the people do not read poetr}', we can only 
 retort that every writer for the press in this 
 country does ; that the leaders of opinion on 
 every great social and religious question do ; 
 that the poet first moulds the fervid mind of 
 youth in our public schools, and overshadows 
 our universities with his presence, and meets 
 us in Protean fashion in every avenue of our 
 common literature. Civilization has advanced, 
 but as yet we have not seen any sign of the 
 fulfilment of Macaulay's prophecy in the de- 
 cline of poetry. At the crest of the far-rolling 
 wave of civilization \\\\\ always be fjund the
 
 78 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 highest outcome of the poet's " vision and 
 faculty divine." CiviHzation, so far from de- 
 stroying poetry, has really done very much to 
 intensify it ; but it has changed its methods. 
 It has robbed poetry of the old freshness and 
 simplicity of its utterance, the ancient force 
 and directness of its form, and has surcharged 
 it instead with the feverishness and satiety of a 
 complex modern life, full of many aims, throb- 
 bing with the pulse of large and eager pur- 
 pose, and saddened by the vain pursuit of a 
 perfect culture, which more and more proves 
 itself an unattainable and mocking dream. So 
 long as the human heart remains poetry will 
 not die nor the poet's mandate be withdrawn. 
 Man never yet has lived alone upon the bread 
 which the wealthiest civilizations have kneaded 
 for his use ; nor will any " ethics of the dust," 
 any applications of a marvelous science that 
 merely multiplies the conveniences of social 
 life, or claims his curious wonder at the price 
 of the denial of his religious instincts, suffice 
 him now any better than heretofore. Pascal 
 long since reminded us of the undying truth 
 that " the heart has reasons which reason does 
 not know," and poetry may be described as
 
 RELIGIOUS DOUBT — MODERN POETRY. 79 
 
 the reason of the heart. And it is because we 
 feel that our higher culture will rather indorse 
 and widen the poet's mandate than abridge it 
 that we think there can be no more serious 
 problem presented to the investigation of the 
 thinker, in the interests of the society of the 
 future, than the problem w^iich seeks to meas- 
 ure and define the influence of our modern 
 poetry. 
 
 Let it be granted, then, that a distinct new 
 note, or rather series of new notes, has been 
 struck in the poetry of the last fifty years, the 
 distinctive characteristic of which is the prob- 
 lem of religious faith. 
 
 The supreme question of the present day is 
 the attitude of the age toward religion, and 
 that question finds a hundred reflexes and 
 vain solutions in our poetic art. Of course, it 
 may be said the century opened with the fierce 
 strife of religious doubt and denial in the 
 poetry of Byron and Shelley, and that, there- 
 fore, this is no distinctly new feature of our 
 latter-day poets. But there are many respects 
 in which Byron and Shelley differ wholly in 
 their attitude toward religion from their lineal 
 
 descendants in poetic art. It was said of 
 6
 
 oO QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 Byron by Shelley that unfortunately he could 
 not help believing in a hell ; and this statement 
 admirably illustrates his habitual conduct in 
 dealing with matters of faith and piety. His 
 libertinism was ingrained, his infidelity was an 
 affectation. When he is throwing his wildest 
 doubts into the air he never loses self-con- 
 sciousness ; he has his eye upon the gallery, 
 and waits for its applause. He is so ill an 
 actor that whenever he strikes an attitude he 
 pauses to measure its effect. Whatever he says 
 against his beliefs he cannot help believing ; 
 and one cannot help feeling that he writes 
 profanity in much the same spirit in which he 
 talked of his desire to know the sensations of 
 a murderer merely that he might enjoy the 
 childish pleasure of watching the horror he 
 was certain to excite. Shelley's atheism, on 
 the contrary, is undoubtedly sincere. But it is 
 rather the frenzied scream of an excited boy 
 than the iconoclastic fury of a full-grown man. 
 It is not merely rebellion against orthodox 
 faiths, it is wild and unmeasured revolt against 
 every form of use and order which tradition 
 sanctions. And how different this is from the 
 sad wail of our modern agnostic poetry must
 
 RELIGIOUS DOUBT — MODERN POETRY. Sf 
 
 appear in the hastiest comparison. The key- 
 note, the very ground-tone of such poetry, is 
 poignant and unavaiHng regret. It touches its 
 deepest and most pathetic chords in dirges and 
 lamentings, in farewells to the dying faiths and 
 requiems for the dead. The air is full of such 
 notes of sorrow, the tremblings of unmistak- 
 able distress, the vague and wild vibrations of 
 a woe too deep for words. Its very sadness is 
 its fascination, for to many minds the holding 
 of a doubt seems a vastly finer thing than 
 the holding of a creed. And although it 
 must be distinctly acknowledged that doubt, 
 like other things, may become a fashion, 
 and poetic doubt may be the mere affecta- 
 tion of an affectation, yet it may be admit- 
 ted that the bulk of our agnostic poetry is 
 too evidently sincere : 
 
 " A fever in the pages burns 
 Beneath the cahn they feign ; 
 
 A wounded human spirit turns 
 Here, on its bed of pain." 
 
 And it is this very sincerity which makes it so 
 formidable and forcible an influence in mould- 
 ing the age. Sincerity and sadness, weldctl 
 together in high poetic achievement, must in
 
 83 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 any age of the world win hearing and alle- 
 giance ; for is it not too common a characteris- 
 tic of the race itself, full of unsatisfied desires 
 and instincts as it is, to listen rather to " the 
 still, sad music of humanity" than to the voice 
 that sings good cheer ? 
 
 Every generalization has its exceptions, and 
 there are exceptions here. The old revolu- 
 tionary note of Byron and Shelley still vi- 
 brates, and the old revolutionary hope still 
 burns. But for the most part we have grown 
 too familiar with revolutions to expect any 
 swift or bright millennium from the noblest 
 of conspirators or the most magnanimous of 
 patriots. 
 
 Mr. Swinburne still hurls Byronic defiance, 
 and cherishes the hope of Shelley ; he leaps 
 upon the altar he has made, and when he can 
 withdraw himself from singing in the Les- 
 bian orgies chants before the face of Baal in 
 democratic odes and vituperative sonnets. 
 But he stands alone. The latter poetic move- 
 ment has scarcely heart enough for joining in 
 any song so strenuous ; it is saddened with its 
 disillusions ; it is satiated with its gains ; it is 
 emasculated in its energies, and what offensive
 
 RELIGIOUS DOUBT — MODERN POETRY. 83 
 
 power it has left is mainly spent in small sneers 
 against the tyranny of creeds and sympathetic 
 lamentation over the decay of ancient faiths 
 and pieties. 
 
 The culmination of this spirit of sincere and 
 saddened doubt is found in the poetry of Mat- 
 thew Arnold, and a very brief analysis of a 
 very small portion of his writings is sufficient 
 to indicate its scope and character. He has 
 described himself as 
 
 " Wandering between two worlds, one dead, 
 The other powerless to be born," 
 
 as an exiled Greek on some far northern strand, 
 thinking of his own gods, 
 
 *' In pity and mournful awe might stand 
 
 Before some fallen Runic stone ; 
 
 For both were faiths, and both are gone." 
 
 Possibly it was a matter of sombre gratifi- 
 cation to know that the critical public generally 
 consented to accept him at his own esti- 
 mate, and that he is described as a modern 
 Greek oftcncr than by any other phrase ; just 
 as Goethe is rightly described as a modern 
 pagan. But between the Hellenism of Goethe
 
 84 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 and that of Matthew Arnold there are wide dif- 
 ferences. A great critic has described Goethe's 
 Hellenism as " the completeness and serenity 
 of a watchful, exigent intellectualism ; " and 
 Matthew Arnold's expressed admiration for 
 " the wide and luminous view of Goethe " 
 leads us to infer that there might be no de- 
 scription he would more earnestly covet or 
 endeavor to deserve. But Goethe's paganism 
 is simply indifferent to all forms of modern 
 faith, and is without moral predilection, while 
 Arnold's is full of wistfulness and yearning. 
 The mission which Arnold has to proclaim is, 
 that with the best desires and intentions to- 
 ward belief, unfortunately he cannot believe. 
 So far from being a modern pagan he has de- 
 scribed in lines of great strength and beauty 
 precisely where the cardinal failure and corrup- 
 tion of ancient paganism lay : 
 
 " On that hard pagan world disgust 
 
 And secret loathing fell; 
 Deep weariness and sated lust 
 
 Made human life a hell. 
 
 " Stout was its arm ; each thew and bone 
 
 Seenaed puissant and alive, 
 But, ah ! its heart, its heart was stone, 
 
 And so it could not thrive."
 
 RELIGIOUS DOUBT — MODERN POETRY. 8$ 
 
 He looks with wistful rapture backward to 
 the hour of the first victories of the Christian 
 faith, and cries : 
 
 " O, had I lived in that great day, 
 
 How had its glory new 
 Filled earth and heaven, and caught away 
 
 My ravished spirit too ! " 
 
 It is, perhaps, unnecessary to remark that 
 he who will not believe " Moses and the 
 prophets " is not likely to believe even if " one 
 rose from the dead." The poet who sings ag- 
 nosticism in the nineteenth century would 
 probably have sung any thing but Te Deums 
 in the first. Still, it is of painful interest to 
 note how faith, so long repressed, bursts forth 
 Into momentary triumphant assertion, and 
 cleaves to the Crucified when the cross is re- 
 moved to the second century. What cannot 
 be done iit a modern England corrupted by 
 " beer-shops " and " dissent," "■ what it is Im- 
 possible to accomplish with the eyes of Strauss 
 upon us, and agnostic reviews around us, might 
 perhaps have been attempted in that dim be- 
 
 * III his eloquent article on " Isaiah of Jerusalem " in the 
 Nineteenth Century, Mr. Matthew Arnold, in enumerating the 
 "hinderances with whicli religion in this country has to con- 
 tf-nd," places at the head of tlic list " beer-shciis, Dissent ! "
 
 26 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 ginning of years, when at least the great de- 
 lusion was new and beautiful : 
 
 "No thoughts that to the 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 passed too slow. 
 
 When I could hourly scan 
 Upon his cross, with head sunk low. 
 
 That nailed, thorn-crowned man." 
 
 Yet in the poetry of Matthew Arnold faith is 
 but an artistic freak. The voice of modern 
 denial speedily re-affirms : 
 
 " Now He is dead ! Far hence he lies 
 
 In the lone Syrian town ; 
 And on his grave, with shining eyes 
 
 The Syrian stars look down." 
 
 There is nothing left for it but to toil on In 
 
 a waste and weary world full of " forts of 
 
 folly" manned by coarse Philistines, or to 
 
 " let the long contention cease," and, like the 
 
 kings of modern thought, be dumb: "silent — 
 
 the best are silent now." Some vague and 
 
 visionary religion of humanity may still be 
 
 possible : 
 
 " He only lives in the world's life 
 Who hath renounced his own."
 
 RELIGIOUS DOUBT — MODERN POETRY. 8/ 
 
 Some vaguer pantheism may perchance ex- 
 plain the future ; in the last hour let not need- 
 less priest nor friend be near ; but rather let 
 the poet look forth from the open window on 
 " the wide aerial landscape bathed in the 
 sacred dews of morn," and rejoice to know he 
 will speedily be absorbed in " the pure eternal 
 course of life," and be one with that he gazes 
 on. For his father he shall sing the noblest of 
 dirges, for he was one of the strong souls who 
 led the wavering lines of humanity 
 
 " On to the bound of the waste, 
 On to the city of God," 
 
 and stood in the end of the day like a good 
 shepherd with his flock in his hand. But the 
 son is one of those who comes at last to the 
 inn of death alone, and is barely saved out of 
 the peril in which so many comrades have 
 fallen. Surely there can be no more desolate 
 intellectual outlook than this, and it is not 
 surprising that it is the source of the most 
 mournful poetry. 
 
 This is by no means the place to discuss the 
 actual condition of the Christian faith, and 
 did we dare to dissent from the verdict which 
 Matthew Arnold and his school have returned
 
 88 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 against it we should no doubt be immediately 
 catechized as Philistines who are blind to fects, 
 and as optimists who are what they are be- 
 cause they are ignorant. But we may at least 
 be permitted to remark that religious doubt 
 and modern poetry appear to have united 
 themselves in a most unhappy marriage, and 
 are in their most fascinating guise but an ill- 
 assorted couple. The greatest treasures of our 
 English poetry are the product of an age of 
 faith, and were scarcely possible without some 
 wise and deep belief. It was in an age when 
 religion was the paramount subject in English 
 politics and national thought that Spenser and 
 Shakespeare flourished ; it was at the conclu- 
 sion of the greatest war for conscience* sake 
 which any nation has known, and by the pen 
 of a man who more than any other embodied 
 in his own person the stern and holy ardors of 
 the period, that our greatest epic poem was 
 produced; and amid all the loud thunder 
 of the Revolution-time Wordsworth's spirit 
 caught the first rising music of the new age 
 of faith, and that new age of faith fitly inspired 
 his serene and pious strain. The fact is, re- 
 ligious faith is inextricably interwoven with
 
 RELIGIOUS DOUBT — MODERN POETRY, 89 
 
 our English poetry ; it has given it fuhiess 
 and serenity, and it will secure it permanence. 
 AVe have never yet written " Crush the In- 
 famous " upon the banners of our literature; 
 we have never clothed a harlot in the garb of 
 Reason and called her goddess ; w^e have never 
 yet consented, and never shall consent, to the 
 monstrous modern theory that art can know 
 no morals. We have been spared the demor- 
 alization of many alternate tyrannies and revo- 
 lutions, and so surely has our ordered freedom 
 grown out of our religious life that we may 
 well believe there is some force in hereditary 
 ideas which must ever make a faithless poetry 
 foreign to the English mind. Folk-lore tells 
 us how it is an ancient superstition that man- 
 drakes when torn from the ground shriek in 
 their every root and fibre like dumb living 
 things driven into sudden speech by anguish. 
 May we not apply the fable and declare that 
 poetry dragged from its immemorial rooting 
 in the soil of faith shrieks aloud and becomes 
 a thing of anguish and despair? It is a fatal 
 experiment ; it will not and it cannot come to 
 good. It is too late to try to turn the tide of 
 English literature; it has set too long i\[un\
 
 go QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 the sunny shores of faith to ebb at last toward 
 the icy sohtudes of agnostic indifference and 
 despair. The English mind will never yield a 
 wide attention to any modern Lucretius in the 
 person of a Matthew Arnold, singing his de- 
 spairing ode concerning " The Nature of 
 Things;" and still less will it "dance to the 
 piping of an educated satyr" in the person of 
 Mr. Swinburne. 
 
 Indeed, the more the matter is considered 
 the more evident does it become that religious 
 doubt has exercised nothing but a destructive 
 influence on English poetry. Edgar Allan 
 Poe, in one of the most weird and wonderful 
 of his extraordinary stories, pictures a per- 
 plexed and noble genius in the act of suicide. 
 As the clock strikes, and the clear day shines 
 into the perfumed and splendid chamber, the 
 suicide lifts a costly crystal goblet to his lips 
 and pledges his last hour in the fatal draught. 
 When the drained chalice is set down again, 
 behold it is cracked and blackened. In like 
 manner our modern genius sits in garish mis- 
 ery and fills the crystal cup of poesy, which 
 should be for the healing of the nations, with 
 its poison-draught of doubt ; but when the cup
 
 RELIGIOUS DOUBT — MODERN POETRV, ol 
 
 is set down again it is cracked and black- 
 ened. It is not wholly destroyed ; but it is 
 hopelessly disfigured by the base uses to which 
 the unworthy put it. To use a choice and 
 beautiful Venetian goblet to hold the black 
 draught of acrid poison is no greater prostitu- 
 tion than to make poetry, which is the hand- 
 maiden of faith, minister to denial. If the 
 light that is within the poet be darkness " how 
 great is that darkness ! " The very spring of 
 thought is broken, the very light of song is 
 quenched ; the i)oet is like a pianist who plays 
 with one hand and on few notes ; more than 
 half the chords are dumb, and the full compass 
 of the instrument he can never reach. 
 
 Let any student rise from the perusal of 
 such poetry as that which A. li. Clough has 
 written and say whether this be not the real 
 impression made upon his mind. Here is un- 
 doubted faculty for song ; but this note may 
 not be struck, for it is too high ; nor this, for 
 it is too divinely deep ; and so the poet veils 
 his face, and his voice is heard only in faint 
 whispers and warring thoughts and wailings of 
 an infinite distress. The poet can " only soar 
 in one direction," it has been said ; but if the
 
 92 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 blue heavens be closed and unattainable what 
 else can he do other than Hmp along the com- 
 mon earth, with trailing wings and wounded 
 heart, pouring out the sad wild notes of an 
 irremediable woe ? 
 
 It may of course be said that Tennyson and 
 Browning, incomparably the two greatest poets 
 of our time, have in nowise stood aside from 
 the great controversy of disputed faiths, and 
 that their poetry nevertheless is marked by 
 majestic strength and the noblest artistic com- 
 pleteness. Indeed, in both poets we have dis- 
 tinct and splendid poems wholly devoted to 
 the discussion of moral and religious doubt. 
 In such poems as " Easter Day " and " Christ- 
 mas Eve " Browning may be said to have 
 hunted certain forms of scepticism home to 
 their 
 
 " Inmost room 
 With lens and scalpel " 
 
 of the most acute and brilliant analysis. And 
 in poems like " The Two Voices," " The Palace 
 of Art," and above all the " In Memoriam," 
 which stands in unassailable fame above all 
 comparison, Tennyson has wrestled with the 
 toughest doubts that have strained the thews
 
 RELIGIOUS DOUBT — MODERN POETRY. 93 
 
 and sinews of the mind since the day when 
 Socrates, 
 
 " Fired with burning failli in Cod and right, 
 Doubted men's doubts away." 
 
 But it must at once appear that the discus- 
 sion of doubt is a very different thing from the 
 profession of denial. Lite will never cease to 
 be mysterious, and while life is full of mystery 
 doubt "will never cease. A gray under-roof of 
 mystery shuts us down ; a deep sea of mystery 
 moans and thunders at our feet. There are 
 awful moments of eclipse through which the 
 strongest spirit may be called to pass ; sorrows 
 come upon us not alone, but in companies, and 
 sweep all before them ; we move for a while 
 amid such starless desolation, and such waves 
 and billows have passed over us, that it may 
 well happen that our feet have almost slipped. 
 
 Let the Book of Job serve us for an illustra- 
 tion. The great drama of the trial of Job 
 opens with the scene of Job worshiping in the 
 very moment -when the last messenger lias 
 reached lihn with the bitterest of all his evil 
 tidings; and it closes with the victory of faith, 
 with the patriarch once more worshii)ing, so 
 that the latter end of Jub is more blessed than
 
 94 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 his beginning. Now, throughout the history- 
 doubt is only stated as the foil to faith ; it falls 
 with the blackness of eclipse for a little space, 
 but obeys the law of the eclipse and vanishes 
 at last, leaving the sun shining in his strength. 
 It is precisely in this spirit that both Tenny- 
 son and Browning deal with the problems of 
 religious doubt. There are two voices, but 
 the triumph of the great argument does not 
 remain with the mocking voice. There is a 
 "vision of sin," but its black and bitter cyn- 
 icism dies at last in a faint, mysterious dawn- 
 ing splendor ; and though the divine voice 
 speaks in a tongue no man can understand, 
 yet its final utterance is on the side of hope. 
 In the " In Memoriam" we have the dense 
 thunder-cloud, and even the rolling of the 
 thunder, but there comes at last a season of 
 clear shining, when a serene and holy light 
 fills earth and heaven. The great chords of 
 wailing die away, one by one, into the murmur- 
 ous joy of infinite hallelujahs ; the purposes 
 of loss arc seen, the chastening of bereavement 
 is achieved, the wine of sorrow has been drunk, 
 the heavens of song are purged and clear, and 
 in their unfathomable depths there gleam the
 
 RELIGIOUS DOUBT — MODERN POETRY. 95 
 
 dimly outlined walls of the city where He 
 dwells who has made all things new, and where 
 those lost from earth have larger life and 
 holier knowledge. It is true some " bitter 
 notes " his harp has given, but 
 
 " Hope has never lost its youth." 
 
 " If e'er when faith had fall'n asleep 
 I heard a voice, ' Believe no more,' 
 And heard an ever-breaking shore 
 
 That tumbled in the godless deep ; 
 
 " A warmth within the heart would melt 
 The freezing reason's colder part, 
 And like a man in wrath the heart 
 
 Stood up and answered, ' I have felt.' " 
 
 The reason of the heart has proved itself victor 
 over the reason of the intellect, for it was di- 
 viner. Wailings in the night there may have 
 been, and cryings after light, amid blind clamor 
 and doubt and fear — 
 
 " Then was I as a child that cries, 
 But crying, knows his father near ; " 
 
 and in the light of this great spiritual victory 
 the whole problem of the tangled world grows 
 clear ; the world is safe in God's hands, and 
 already there are prophetic signs and hcrald- 
 ings of its full redemption — 
 
 " That one far-off divine event 
 To which the whole creation moves."
 
 96 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 Not less unmistakably has Robert Browning 
 declared himself a singer upon the side of faith. 
 He is a stronger and deeper man than Tenny- 
 son ; an incompleter artist, but a greater poet ; 
 and his method of approaching doubt wholly 
 differs from Tennyson's. He loves to assault 
 it with sardonic humor, to undermine it with 
 subtle suggestion, even to break out into grim 
 laughter as it slowly disintegrates and falls into 
 a cloud of dust before his victorious analysis. 
 But not the less does he sympathize with what- 
 ever there may be of spiritual yearning, of 
 earnest but baffled purpose in it ; and no 
 poet has ever been quicker than he to place in 
 the fullest light of tender recognition the one 
 redeeming quality there may be latent in the 
 thing he hates. For faith, in Robert Brown- 
 ing, is a spiritual fire that never burns low. 
 Through whatever labyrinth of guilt or passion 
 he may lead his readers, God is ever the attend- 
 ing presence, in whose hands all the ravelled 
 skeins of life lie distinct and clear : 
 
 " He glows above, 
 With scarce an intervention, presses close and palpitatingly." 
 
 Human life is lived out in every instance 
 beneath the eye of God, and it is the failure to
 
 RELIGIOUS DOUBT — MODERN POETRY. 9/ 
 
 recognize this which is the beginning of all evils 
 in human character. The Hghtning which start- 
 les the guilty lovers hidden in the deep forest 
 is in truth God's sword, plunged again and again 
 through the thick cloud to find them, for they 
 cannot flee from him; and the prison-roof of 
 life that shuts the mourner in will assuredly 
 break some day, and " heaven beam overhead." 
 Whenever Browning walks amid the shadows of 
 human mystery — and darker glooms no poet has 
 moved through — he sees the star of faith shining 
 overhead, he hearsthe voice of God bidding him 
 be of good cheer. David, as he sings in the black 
 tent before Saul, bids him think of his mother 
 held up on her death-bed, and bids him again 
 
 " Hear her faiiU tongue 
 Juining in while it could to the witness, 
 
 ' Let one more attest 
 I have lived, seen God's hand through a life-time, and all was 
 for best.'" 
 
 I.ittle Pippa, as she passes out for her brief 
 holiday, her light feet moving innt)ccnt amid 
 all the crime and tragedy of life, sings: 
 
 " The year's at the spring, 
 
 Morning's at seven, 
 The hill-side's dew-pearled ; 
 
 God's in his heaven, — 
 All's right with the world."
 
 98 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 It is the poet's own soul that sings in little 
 Pippa ; this faith of his that all is right never 
 deserts him. He will discuss doubt, but as a 
 strong man who has overcome it ; he will admit 
 it to his temple of song, but he sternly relegates 
 it to its own place, and will allow it no suprem- 
 acy. Indeed, it is not too much to say that 
 the greatness of Robert Browning as a poet is 
 in no small measure due to his greatness as a 
 believer. 
 
 The first direct result of the presence of 
 doubt in modern poetry is found in that note 
 of weariness and sadness by which it is distin- 
 guished. Its household gods are too clearly 
 shattered ; it is beside the waters of Babylon 
 the poet sits and sings. We do not by any 
 means seek to prove that the element of sad- 
 ness which we find in all exquisite poetry in- 
 variably owes its origin to loss of faith, for no 
 ■conclusion could be more falsely partial. Per- 
 haps the noblest pages in the literature of all 
 •nations are the saddest. The spirit of Dante 
 moves between infinite light and gloom, wear- 
 ing ever a crown of sharpest sorrow ; the ma- 
 jestic woe of the blind and aged Milton has 
 jiot yet ceased to thrill upon the world's ear ;
 
 ■RELIGIOUS DOUBT — MODERN POETRY. 99 
 
 even the serene genius of Wordsworth finds 
 thoughts that " lie too deep for tears.' * Earthly 
 life is so full of incompletion, is so often baf- 
 fled in its highest purposes, is so often mocked 
 in the moment of its sublimest yearnings, and 
 has so many chapters in its book of years 
 steeped in deepest pathos that it may well be 
 
 " Our sweetest songs are those 
 Tliat tell of saddest thought." 
 
 But then life is not wholly sorrowful, and the 
 poetry misjudges life which interprets it alone 
 by tears. Dante has his beatific vision, his 
 " Paradiso " following close upon his " Purga- 
 tory ; " and out of the great blackness and de- 
 sertion of that blind old age of Milton rises 
 the sublime " cathedral music " of his " Par- 
 adise Lost " and the hopeful closing vision of 
 his "Paradise Regained." The exquisite sad- 
 ness of regret, of memory, of vanished hopes 
 and broken fellowships, will ever be one of the 
 noblest elements in any noble poetry. 
 
 Put all this is very different from that frr- 
 so7ia I noic of weariness and sad dissatisfaction 
 which is lieard so loudly in our later poctrw 
 The greater poets WTite little of themselves ; 
 the lesser modern poets write of little but
 
 100 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 themselves. Their chief inspiration Is too fre- 
 quently a sort of cynical melancholy. They 
 have been disillusioned ; there is nothing new 
 and nothing true — and no matter ! The most 
 morbid introspection is interwoven with the 
 saddest worldly wisdom. Few of them, indeed, 
 are there who 
 
 " Do but sing because they must, 
 And pipe but as the linnet sings." 
 
 What Matthew Arnold has called the " lyr- 
 ical cry " is genuinely heard ever and again, 
 but too often, while the weariness is sincere 
 enough, the verse falls into spasmodic affecta- 
 tions. We feci while we read that there is no 
 " natural piety " linking day to day in the lives 
 of such poets. The fresh and clear delights of 
 Nature are obscured ; the cheerful gospels of 
 the singing birds and sunny day are dumb ; 
 life is bred upon a hotbed of morbid thought, 
 i j passed in feverish turbulence, or creeps on 
 " wounded wing," and the poetry which ex- 
 presses it is a melodious spasm or a fitful and 
 exceeding bitter cry. How can it be otherwise 
 when the divine aspects of life are blotted 
 out ? What bird can sing in full-throated ease 
 beneath a threatening thunder-cloud ? Faith
 
 RELIGIOUS DOUBT — MODERN ROETRY. lOI 
 
 has ever been the inspiration of the grandest 
 human heroisms, the noblest human thoughts ; 
 what wonder that the clue of life is lost when 
 faith is lost ? Simplicity has always been the 
 crown of highest genius ; what marvel Is it 
 that when the simple heart is lost the whole 
 world of thought falls into mournful bewilder- 
 ment and weariness ? There are many pages 
 in Tennyson which teach us how dangerous it 
 is even for the strongest nature to drink long 
 and deeply of the bitter draught of doubt, 
 how even the final faith of later days cannot 
 wholly heal the old wounds that still " ache 
 and cry." 
 
 A second result from loss of faith in our 
 modern poetry is the undisguised and contam- 
 inating sensuality which has latterly infected 
 it. In both Tennyson and Browning we meet 
 every-where a profound moral sense. In the 
 poem of " The Palace of Art " we have a dis- 
 tinct and memorable sermon preached upon 
 the world-old text that the noblest culture and 
 the purest art become destroying forces when 
 divorced from moral fervor ; that even when 
 unstained by any breath of baser passion they 
 end inevitably in isolation and despair and
 
 I02 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 the broken-hearted cry of" All is vanity." The 
 need of some diviner salvation than art can 
 offer haunts with persistent bitterness the human 
 spirit sheltered in its selfish splendor ; at last it 
 falls, like Herod, " struck through with pangs 
 of hell ; " it is on fire within and howls aloud, 
 
 " What is it that will take away my sin, 
 And save me lest I die ? " 
 
 The " Palace of Art " is a sermon for which 
 the age owes Lord Tennyson profound grati- 
 tude. How much it is needed we can judge 
 when we remember how often of late years we 
 have heard high critical authorities insisting 
 that art must be loved for art's sake, and that 
 our common notions of morality are wholly 
 opposed to art. We could forgive Mr. Swin- 
 burne the frantic sound and fury of his revo- 
 hitionary odes, but we cannot forgive him 
 when he prostitutes his noble gifts to uphold 
 the monstrous thesis that the priceliest poetry 
 is that which deals in the prurient details of 
 " fleshly fever " and " amorous malady." The 
 laureate calls upon /as soul to 
 
 *' Arise and fly 
 The reeling Faun, the sensual feast ; 
 Move upward, working out the beast, 
 And let the ape and tiger die."
 
 RELIGIOUS DOUBT — MODERN TOETRY. I03 
 
 But it is precisely in the filthy carnival of 
 *' ape and tiger " that Mr. Swinburne has 
 chosen to sport. The whole subject is one 
 which will not bear handling, and, for our part, 
 we have no desire to publish any investigations 
 in putrescence. Such poetry can only be la- 
 beled as " unfit for human consumption." 
 Certain of its admirers have ventured to call it 
 " Greek ; " but it is not Greek, it is simply 
 bestial. It is the lowest and most revolting 
 phase of the evil wrought in literature through 
 lack of faith. That lack of faith inevitably 
 leads to such a depth of moral fall we do not 
 say, but we do say that such poetry is in itself 
 an awful illustration of how swiftly godless art 
 may become immoral art. 
 
 Here, then, we may fitly close this fragment- 
 ary study of one phase in modern English 
 poetry. It is a phase which must be full of 
 sad suggestion alike to the philosophic thinker 
 and the Christian. The fatal narrowing tend- 
 ency which attends the intellectual processes 
 of scepticism is nowhere seen in a more start- 
 ling light than in its action upon poetr}\ The 
 freshness and spontaneity of song is lost, the 
 lyrical cry becomes a lyrical wail, simplicity
 
 I04 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 and fulness of emotion become unknown, and 
 the imagination, having lost courage for any 
 thing like colossal effort, is frittered away and 
 wastes itself in spasmodic and often morbid 
 creation. There is no clearer lesson taught us 
 by the history of human thought and action 
 than that the greatest deed and utterance are 
 impossible without the serenity and courage 
 which spring from living faith in God. There 
 is no compensation for the loss of faith in 
 poetry. Doubt may sometimes lift its cup full 
 of the wine of misery to the poet's lips, and 
 he shall drink and find a certain bitter exhil- 
 aration in the draught which fires the mind 
 with brief poetic fervor, but that throb of 
 short and daring effort is all too dearly pur- 
 chased. The world asks that its poets shall be 
 prophets, that its singers shall be believers, 
 that their inspiration shall be drawn from 
 above, else it were better that their gift died 
 in them and their song were never sung. 
 
 The key-stone in the arch of life is God ; if 
 once the poet pluck that down what wonder 
 is it that all his life falls straightway into illim- 
 itable despair and ruin? What wonder that 
 the stars fade one by one above him, until at
 
 RELIGIOUS DOUBT — MODERN POETRY. 105 
 
 last he sits in cities of dreadful night and bows 
 his head, and only asks to die? In poetry, as 
 in philosophy, it is needful to insist upon the 
 abiding power and presence of the religious 
 instinct. All outrage done to that is outrage 
 upon that which is noblest in humanity. It 
 brings its revenges with it, and the Nemesis 
 which follows scepticism in poetry is confusion 
 and paralysis of power and effort. Nor is it 
 possible, as Tennyson has shown us, for any 
 man to be even indifferent to the religious in- 
 stinct and yet be a great poet. It is not given 
 lo the mightiest genius to 
 
 " Sit as god holding no form of creed, 
 But contemplating all." 
 
 In attempting to shun the most solemn 
 problems of the universe, and work out for 
 liimself a perfect intellectual culture, such a 
 poet simply builds a palace of art, whose 
 splendid corridors ring at last with his despair, 
 and all whose glory he is glid to barter for a 
 cottage in the vale where he may mourn and 
 pray. The religious instincts of the race have 
 always been the secret springs which have led 
 the great poetry of the world ; and the icono- 
 clast who would propose to himself tlie daring
 
 Io6 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 programme of eliminating faith in God from 
 the poetic literature of England would speed- 
 ily discover that his proposition meant the de- 
 struction of every thing which the common 
 consent of four centuries has voted best worth 
 preserving. 
 
 From Robert Browning we may take one 
 line which should be the first article in any 
 poet's creed: 
 
 "Eai-th changes, but thy soul and Cod stand sure." 
 
 From the verse of him " who uttered noth- 
 ing base," we may quote what seems to us as 
 beautiful a conception of the poet as poet ever 
 uttered, and one M'hich our generation were 
 wise in laying to heart : the true poet is 
 
 " One in whom persuasion and belief 
 Have ripened into faith, and faith beconift 
 A passionate intuition."
 
 HENRY WADSWORTII LONGFELLOW. lO/ 
 
 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 
 
 THE death of the poet Longfellow re- 
 moved a familiar name from the roll of 
 living celebrities, painfully reminding us how 
 fast the giants of our generation arc falling. 
 The round table of the Victorian age of fame 
 shows many empty seats, and there are already 
 significant signs that the old order changeth, 
 yielding place to new. The foremost workers 
 and thinkers of our day are old men, to many 
 of whom the award of fame has come tardily, 
 and from whom little more victorious achieve- 
 ment can be hoped for. The perfect work of 
 a poet is usually that of his middle-manhood, 
 and as seldom that of his latest as of his ear- 
 liest years. America cannot expect any further 
 important contribution to her literature from 
 the serene genius of the inheritor of Longfel- 
 low's fame, J. Greenleaf Whitticr, the "Her- 
 mit of Amesbury ; " and wc must confess that 
 neither England nor America has given any 
 sign at present of a great poet who is likely to 
 succeed tu the throne uf a Tennyson or a
 
 loS QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 Liownlng, a Longfellow or a Whittier. In 
 the moment of common loss, when the master- 
 hand falls into the long sloth of death, and the 
 work is fresh with the final touches of its 
 " cunning," it may be said we arc not likely to 
 form a just estimate of the powers of a de- 
 parted poet, such as future ages will indorse. 
 We can, however, seek to form some proxi- 
 mate idea of the value of the legacy be- 
 queathed to us; and it is both a graceful and 
 fitting thing that the hour of death should be 
 the signal for such a task. 
 
 The outward landmarks of the life of Long- 
 fellow arc few, and call for no special notice. 
 He was fortunate enough to obtain a profes- 
 sorship of modern languages in Bowdoin 
 College, Brunswick, at the age of twenty, ex- 
 changing it six years later for a similar post in 
 Harvard College, Cambridge, where he suc- 
 ceeded Mr. George Ticknor. This post he 
 held until 1854, when he retired to the quiet 
 country house where his last labors were com- 
 pleted and his last hours spent. He more 
 than once traveled widely on the continent of 
 Europe, leaving the beaten pathways of the 
 mere tourist and seeking the still waters and
 
 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. IO9 
 
 green pastures of national life and character in 
 its rural solitudes. On his last visit to En- 
 gland, in 1868, he was received with accla- 
 mation and awarded honorary degrees by both 
 the ancient universities. 
 
 His life was singularly tranquil, though not 
 unvisited by those sadder of God's angels, 
 against whom, as he reminds us, the strongest 
 cannot close the door, and the best would not 
 if they dared. It was never his lot to be the 
 target of controversy or the by-word of the 
 slanderer ; no foul-lipped or malicious criticism 
 has vexed the poet's soul ; on the contrary, 
 his claim as a poet has been heartily acknowl- 
 edged from the first, and his fame has been 
 wide and constantly increasing. When wc re- 
 member the long and painful struggles of 
 many of our older poets for standing-room and 
 hearing, and the slow and doubting recognition 
 awarded to our most famous living poets, it 
 should surely be accounted a happy thing that 
 there were quick cars in the world to catch the 
 earliest song of this singer, and generous 
 hearts to welcome and applaud it. Immediate 
 space to work, sincere and ungrudging praise, 
 a life of quiet literary toil, serenity and growth
 
 no QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 of intellect, length of days, an old age full of 
 honor, and the mourning of two continents — 
 all this reads like a young poet's idyllic dream 
 of life rather than the narration of prosaic facts. 
 Longfellow had reached the comparatively 
 stable age of thirty-two when his first modest 
 volume of original poems, Voices of the Night, 
 was given to the public. It is no detraction 
 from his great merit to infer that his power of 
 self-restraint must have been enormous, or 
 that he was wanting in the impetuous fire of 
 temperament which has marked the develop- 
 ment of some of the world's greatest poets. 
 At the age when Longfellow launched his first 
 skiff of song upon the wandering sea of opinion 
 Burns and Byron had produced their finest 
 work, and at even an earlier period Keats and 
 Shelley had written all that the world can judge 
 them by. Probably something may be traced 
 to both the above suggestive clauses. Long- 
 fellow has himself reminded us : 
 
 •' Art is long, and time is fleeting, 
 
 And our hearts, though stout and brave, 
 
 Still, like muffled drums, are beating 
 Funeral marches to the grave." 
 
 His lofty conceptions of the dignity of his 
 art would not permit him hastily to challenge
 
 HENRY WADSWORTII LONGFELLOW. 1 1 1 
 
 the verdict of the pubh'c ; least of all by any- 
 thing crude in form or unpolished in expres- 
 sion. The attentive student of English poetry 
 will have observed among the foremost signs 
 of our own times an exactitude of expression, 
 a delicacy and subtleness of phrase, and a de- 
 gree of reserve and suggestiveness in the 
 poetry of his own generation which may al- 
 most be taken as its distinguishing quality. 
 We do not mean that the older poets of the 
 century display no suggestiveness and finish 
 of phrase, because this is one of the most 
 marked accomplishments of all true poets, 
 and of none in higher degree than Shakespeare. 
 But in the older poets the apt and splendid 
 phrase seems to leap into being without effort, 
 while in the younger it is manifestly the re- 
 sult of patient, and even painful, effort. On 
 the one hand, we cannot but admire the con- 
 summate patience which holds back the poetic 
 genius until the fermenting crudities of youth 
 have worked themselves clear ; and we recog- 
 nize the result in poems which are as perfect in 
 form as they are chaste and polished in expres- 
 sion. On the other hand, we miss the Titanic 
 
 power that bursts the bondage of form, creating 
 8
 
 112 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 for itself new types in the unhewn granite of 
 
 its own originality. The truly great artist 
 
 obeys, but is unconscious of his art. 
 
 " He does but sing because he must. 
 And pipes but as the linnets sing." 
 
 It is pretty sure to follow that the young wings 
 will dare the ether before their strength is per- 
 fect, and will droop, and even fail disastrously ; 
 but it often follows that at last they soar into 
 a vaster heaven, whose heights and depths re- 
 main forever closed to spirits less daring. 
 
 And in truth Longfellow has always shown 
 a nice discernment of the limitation of his 
 own powers, and has not invited failure by at- 
 tempting too much. It is mere nonsense that 
 assigns to any genius the illimitable ; every 
 artist has boundaries which he may not cross, 
 and the truer the artist the more carefully doe:i 
 he abstain from any truant raid into another's 
 kingdom. Longfellow has carefully marked 
 out the frontiers of his domain, and within 
 these he has moved with ease as undisputed 
 lord. He is pre-eminently the poet of the 
 household and the affections. He has never 
 indulged in the slanderous wail of the pam- 
 phleteering or poetic pessimist ; and still
 
 HENRY WADSWORTII LONGFELLOW. II3 
 
 less has he pandered to the obscene delirium 
 of those modern singers whose heritage of in- 
 famy it is to have founded Avhat is termed 
 " the fleshly school." He has sung of virtue 
 and manliness, of self-restraint and self-sacri- 
 fice, the dignity of labor, and the hidden pur- 
 poses of suffering. He is not unconscious of 
 the sealed enigmas of life which have no per- 
 fect answer here ; he does not stifle those sol- 
 emn questionings which moan like an unquiet 
 wind through the chambers of the heart in the 
 darker moments of experience and thought • 
 but neither does he coquette with doubt or 
 probe the mystery with morbid interest and 
 sensational result. A genial wisdom, a health- 
 ful cheerfulness, a living faith in God's good- 
 ness and the wisdom of his purposes, pervade 
 his pages ; and of the harder riddles of this 
 life he has learned to say : 
 
 " Let us he patient! Tliese severe afflictions 
 
 Not from the ground arise; 
 But oftentimes celestial benedictions 
 
 Assume this dark disguise, 
 
 " We see hut dimly through tlie mist and vapors, 
 
 Amid these earthly damps: 
 What seem to us but sad, funereal tajjcrs 
 
 May be heaven's distant lamps."
 
 114 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 It is no lowly gift which enables a human 
 soul to sing forth in imperishable words the 
 sacred joys and sorrows of domestic life. The 
 world needs many poets to keep the fountains 
 of emotion fresh wdth the sweet troubling of 
 sympathy and sentiment ; but the poets of 
 the hearth and household are needed more 
 than any. Such poets may not quicken the 
 impulses of intellectual life, but they do as 
 needful and as great a work ; they purify the 
 atmosphere of the emotions and sweeten the 
 brackish waters of earthly discipline. We are 
 told in the preface of one of the latest and 
 most beautiful of the innumerable editions of 
 Longfellow's poems that the publishers have 
 found Longfellow more in request than any 
 poet save Shakespeare. Of course any attempt 
 to draw a parallel between Shakespeare and 
 Longfellow would be simply absurd. But men 
 cannot help asking on what is such an enor- 
 mous popularity based? If any poet, not a 
 hymnist, be found upon the cottage tables of 
 our artisans, and in the humble homes of our 
 peasantry, that poet is likelier to be Longfel- 
 low than any other; and there are probably 
 thousands of persons, not habitual students of
 
 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 1 1 5 
 
 literature, though otherwise well-informed and 
 intelligent, who scarcely know whether Long- 
 fellow was an Englishman or an American, 
 
 What marvelous combination of splendid 
 faculties has conspired to make this man the 
 most widely-read poet of two hemispheres of 
 English-speaking people ? The probable an- 
 swer is found in the household character, the 
 tender, Christian spirit of his poetry. More- 
 over, he is easily read. There are no obscure 
 passages, which might be construed baclovard 
 as intelligibly as forward. His verse is limpid 
 as a running brook, and as full of music ; it 
 glorifies, but does not drown the thought. He 
 writes in clear, strong, nervous English ; and 
 his lines have the power of clinging to the 
 memory. Few men have already told a story 
 in verse with a more simple directness, and 
 in lines so compact and ringing. And this 
 is the sort of poetry by which the universal 
 heart is always won. The scholar loves the 
 veiled meaning underlying classic form ; the 
 intellectual reader ponders on the subtle 
 beauty, the shadowy and suggestive grace of 
 lines that fascinate by their very indcfiniteness 
 of outline ; but the heart of the people will
 
 Il6 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 always turn to the troubadour, the story-teller, 
 the man whose clear and simple thought 
 chooses for its raiment the clearest and simplest 
 language. It is half a fashion in the present day 
 to admire obscurity, and value a poet accord- 
 ing to the number of utterly incoherent and 
 contradictory meanings which may be ex- 
 tracted from any given line. In the face of such 
 a fashion, which a coterie would fain persuade 
 us is the higher criticism, it is well to remem- 
 ber that the most popular poet of our own day 
 is one of the most lucid of English writers, and 
 owes his popularity in no small degree to the 
 definite directness of his style. 
 
 The great need in criticism is breadth and 
 sanity ; the power to distinguish justly the 
 thing that is good after its kind upon its 
 own merits ; and the great danger in criticism 
 is bigotry, subservience to the tyranny of 
 an isolated and perhaps false theory. Thus 
 the reproach against Longfellow, that he is 
 commonplace, is founded upon his manifest 
 lack of certain qualities which constitute the 
 greatness of his contemporaries. But because 
 he has not the mellow and sometimes over- 
 ripe sweetness of Tennyson, nor the subtlety
 
 HENRY WADSWORTII LONGFELLOW. II7 
 
 of Browning, it is not fair to forget that he has 
 certain gifts of his own whicli are not to be 
 despised. A cameo may be as fine a work of 
 art as a painting crowded with the angels of 
 Fra Angelico ; and the song of a thrush in the 
 fresh glory of an April morning may throb 
 with as real and beautiful a music as a great 
 organ " trumpeting " melodious thunder " from 
 its golden lips." The place that Longfellow 
 claims is the place of a singer in the great tem- 
 ple, and ifhis voice has not the resonant volume 
 of the great masters, it has the delightful flute- 
 like freshness of the choir-boy's unspoiled alto. 
 We have pointed out the absence of creative 
 originality in his poetry ; and we confess that 
 the artistic error which most easily besets him 
 is the proncness to moralize, appending to 
 every simple song of thought or action its ap- 
 propriate lesson, as the moral is appended to 
 the fable. ]5ut all that this proves is that he 
 is debarred from equality with the great crea- 
 tive poets; and it does not invalidate his right 
 to a place as honorable, if not as high, among 
 the second rank of pucts. Longfellow has 
 suffered fnun the very vastness of his popu- 
 larity, lie is reatl in the days of youth ; and
 
 Il8 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 books that arc read too early are apt to be for- 
 gotten in the later and maturer years of life. 
 Defoe and Bunyan build up their gleaming 
 wonderland round the steps of childhood, 
 and for that very reason arc seldom re-read, 
 until the distracted taste, wearied with novelty 
 and surfeited with the feverish brilliancy of 
 modern styles, is glad to turn again in the 
 evening of life to the immortal pages which 
 made the marvel and the heaven of life's morn- 
 ing. The common and almost inevitable result 
 is that such masterpieces arc underrated ; and 
 this has been the penalty of Longfellow's 
 enormous popularity with the young. But let 
 the reader take up again the pages so familiar 
 to his boyhood, and let him include in his sur- 
 vey the maturer works of the poet, and he will 
 probably be astonished at the sweetness and 
 grace, the power and inspiration, of poems 
 which he read in the holiday moments of a 
 school-boy's life or in the idle interval between 
 school and business. 
 
 What, then, are the special qualities by 
 which Longfellow will be known in the days to 
 come, and by the authority of which he may 
 claim the bays of the accepted poet ?
 
 HENRY WADSWORTII LONGFELLOW. II9 
 
 His greatest claim to the seat of earthly fame 
 will undoubtedly be that he is the first truly 
 American poet. But such a statement has im- 
 portant reservations, which must be remem- 
 bered before it can be discussed. It will have 
 escaped no one that a very large number of 
 Longfellow's poems arc cast in mediaeval 
 moulds. He lingers lovingly over the parch- 
 ment scroll written thickly with the fancies of 
 the days of yore ; he is familiar with " the great 
 cloister's stillness and seclusion ; " he watches 
 with a sympathetic eye the patient monk work- 
 ing amid the dusk on the emblazoned page, 
 and praying while he works, 
 
 " Take it, Lord, and let it be 
 Assomctliing I have done for thee." 
 
 He has adopted many a quaint turn of monk- 
 ish fancy, and is at home with the weird won- 
 ders of monkish superstition. And few poets 
 have translated from the songs and ballads of 
 other nations so largely as he. Admirable and 
 scholarly translations from the Frcncli, Ger- 
 man, Sp;inish, Swedish, and Norwegian lan- 
 guages are scattered thickly through his works, 
 while Dante has absorbed his constant atten- 
 tion and has found iu him a clear and truth-
 
 120 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 ful interpreter. But when we have made these 
 important reservations, when we have glanced 
 over the long hst of translations, the poems 
 with foreign titles and full of foreign yearnings, 
 the ballads drawn from the histories of all na- 
 tions, and bearing in their every fibre the stamp 
 of the Old World inspiration, the fact remains 
 that Longfellow is the author of the three most 
 distinctively American poems in the world. 
 In one of the interludes to the " Tales of a Way- 
 side Inn," when the "long murmur of ap- 
 plause " had died away — 
 
 " 'These tales you tell are one and all 
 
 Of the Old World,' the poet said, 
 
 ' Flowers gathered from a crumbling wall. 
 
 Dead leaves that rustle as they fall ; 
 
 Let me present you in their stead 
 
 Something of our New England eartli, 
 
 A tale which, though of no great worth, 
 
 lias still its merit, that it yields 
 
 A certain freshness of the fields, 
 
 A sweetness as of home-made bread. " 
 
 This is precisely what Longfellow has done for 
 the poetry of his country. Any English writer 
 with equal gifts, living in any English county, 
 might have Avritten the measured verse of 
 Bryant, or the serious poems of Lowell, or the 
 bulk of the poetry of Whitticr ; but no purely
 
 HENRY WADSWORTII LONGFELLOW. 121 
 
 English writer could have composed " Miles 
 Standish," " Evangeline," or " Hiawatha." 
 
 It has been said that America has every 
 thing but a past. Longfellow has shown that 
 his country is not deficient even in this item 
 of national wealth by successfully unsealing 
 the fountains of her early Puritan history and 
 weaving into the original cadences of one of 
 the longest poems of the century the strange 
 dreams and gospels of her ancient Indian 
 mythology. ** Hiawatha " exhales the very 
 fragrance of the broad prairie and illimitable 
 forest, and is steeped in an atmosphere pecul- 
 iarly and perfectly its own ; " Evangeline," the 
 " tale of Acadic," presents a lovely picture of 
 the idyllic side of Puritan existence, its sweet 
 homeliness, its purity and faith, its restrained 
 but tremulous and intense passion ; " Miles 
 Standish " is a rougher transcript of Puritan 
 life, but equally perfect in verisimilitude and 
 suppressed humor ; and each poem is one 
 which the world will not willingly let die. 
 "Whatever vast advances the literature of Amer- 
 ica may make in the future — and we have the 
 right to expect a marvelous development in 
 the literature of a nation so young, so strong,
 
 122 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 SO fertile in resource and eager in invention — • 
 ■\vc may safely prophesy that these three poems 
 will never sink into obscurity. They are three 
 great landmarks in the advancement of Amer- 
 ican history which can never be wholly sub- 
 merged. And If " Hiawatha " and " Miles 
 Standish " in any future age attract the atten- 
 tion only of the antiquary or the critical stu- 
 dent of his country's literature, " Evangeline" 
 will share the nobler fate of a sympathetic 
 welcome from all ages capable of understand- 
 ing a great poem whose highest charm is sim- 
 plicity, and especially in that land where its 
 writer lived and died, and from whose past its 
 history is drawn. 
 
 We have not space for any elaborate anal- 
 ysis of the purely literary characteristics of 
 Longfellow; it is rather to the high moral 
 value of his writings that we would draw at- 
 tention. But these literary characteristics may 
 be briefly indicated. Those who accuse Long- 
 fellow of mere prcttiness of phrase and com- 
 monplaceness of design must be singularly 
 blind to the exquisite fancy which is found in 
 all his work, and not infrequently the rare 
 power of a vivid and minute imagination. In
 
 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 1 23 
 
 such sea-songs as " The Wreck of the Hes- 
 perus," " The Phantom Ship," and especially 
 the " Ballad of Carmilhan," we detect the true 
 master's touch, the high and rare power of 
 painting a perfect picture in perfect words. It 
 would be hard to discover ten simple lines 
 which describe the bursting of a storm at sea 
 more perfectly than these from the lasi-men- 
 tioned poem : 
 
 " Eight bells ! and suddenly abaft 
 
 With a great rush of rain, 
 Making the ocean white with spaifie, 
 In darkness like the day of doom, 
 
 On came the hurricane. 
 
 "The lightning flashed from cloud to cloud, 
 
 And tore the dark in two ; 
 A jagged flame, a single jet 
 Of white fire, like a bayonet, 
 
 That pierced his eyeballs through." 
 
 So in the ballad of " Scanderbcg " there are 
 lines terse, powerful, and ringing, as ballad 
 lines should be, and instinct with the same 
 quality of casting into clear relief the bodiless 
 vision of the mind. And where there is not 
 the higher triumph of imagination there is al- 
 ways the delicate filagree-work of a pure and 
 tender fancy. Many an exquisite line, and
 
 124 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 more than one perfect lyric, has been written 
 on the lark, but Longfellow's lines may still be 
 uttered with delight : 
 
 " Up soared the lark into the air, 
 A shaft of song, a winged prayer. 
 As if a soul, released from pain, 
 Were flying back to heaven again." 
 
 Sometimes this power of fancy runs into 
 quaintness, as when he speaks of the cares of 
 the day folding their tents like the Arabs, and 
 as silently stealing away ; and sometimes it 
 approaches the grotesque, as when he speaks 
 of the moon shining on the snow which covers 
 a poet's grave, and the broad sheet of snow 
 
 " Written o'er 
 With shadows cruciform of leafless trees. 
 As once the winding-sheet of Saladin 
 With chapters of the Koran." 
 
 But far oftener the fancy casts light upon the 
 facets of some simple image, and causes them 
 to glow with a serene spiritual beauty, as in 
 the musings of the abbot in " The Golden 
 Legend : " 
 
 " Slowly, slowly up the wall 
 
 Steals the sunshine, steals the shade. 
 
 • • • • • 
 
 Upward steals the life of man 
 As the sunshine from the wall.
 
 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 12$ 
 
 From the wall into the sky, 
 From the roof along the spire ; 
 Ah ! the souls of those that die 
 Are but sunbeams lifted higher." 
 
 it is needless to quote where every retentive 
 memory can supply its favorite example. 
 There is scarcely a poem which does not man- 
 ifest the same delicate power of admirable 
 fancy, if not of fervid imagination. 
 
 And it would be still more impertinent to 
 quote examples of the sweetness and pathos 
 which have made so many of Longfellow's 
 poems household words. How many hearts 
 have thrilled to the subduing pathos of the 
 lines : 
 
 " There is no flock, however watched and tended, 
 
 But one dead lamb is there ; 
 There is no fireside, howsoe'er defended, 
 
 But has one vacant chair ! " 
 
 How many aged eyes have looked upon the 
 forms of little children with the same instinct- 
 ive forecast of the future which Longfellow ex- 
 presses in such lines as these : 
 
 " O little feet ! that such long years 
 Must wander on tlirough hopes and fears. 
 
 Must ache and bleed beneath your load ; 
 I, nearer to the w.iyside inn, 
 Where toil shall end and rest begin, 
 
 Am weary, thinking of your road I "
 
 126 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 It is one of the distinctive charms of Long- 
 fellow that he is the children's poet ; the fresh 
 grace, the agile hope, the dew-like purity of 
 the child's heart and mind perpetually fascinate 
 him. More than once he takes a little child 
 and sets him in the midst of the world's fever- 
 ish circle, preaching by the child's innocence 
 the highest of all lessons. To say that the 
 conception and thought of such poems as 
 " Resignation " is what any average man of 
 sentiment might feel is not to depreciate them, 
 but to confer the highest praise. It is virtually 
 to acknowledge the supremacy of the poet by 
 confessing that he has interpreted in melodious 
 verse and with just appreciation the sentiment 
 of millions. Such poems as " Excelsior" and 
 "A Psalm of Life" are world-poems and are 
 numbered among the "secular hymns" of 
 humanity. That they are hackneyed is the 
 highest compliment that can be paid them ; it 
 means that they have entered into the world's 
 heart and are on every tongue. Loftier praise 
 than this can sarcely be awarded any poet, for 
 it requires a rare adjustment of faculty to write 
 poems which have been so often parodied but 
 are yet unspoiled, and, used in the common
 
 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 12/ 
 
 utterance of two generations, are still as fresh 
 as ever. 
 
 But the highest and most enduring fame of 
 Longfellow must be based upon the calm and 
 happy trust, the noble moral influence of his 
 writings. Before his poetic career commenced 
 he said in his prose poem, " Hyperion," that 
 the surest blessedness was to do the thing that 
 most wanted doing without a thought of fame, 
 and he has assured us, in his poem on the de- 
 spoiled ambitions of Bclisarius, that 
 
 " The plaudits of the crowd 
 
 Are but the clatter of feet 
 
 At midnight in the street, 
 Hollow and restless and loud." 
 
 We can easily conceive that he has not worked 
 for fame ; but if fame be ever worth the hav- 
 ing, and if it can ever fill the heart with a gen- 
 uine and pure delight, surely it must be the 
 fame that is won by the exercise of rare gifts 
 lor the moral elevation and benefit of mankind. 
 Such a fame is Longfellow's. He has set to all 
 succeeding poets the noble example of greaf 
 gilts employed for great uses, and has left be- 
 hind him no soiled or evil page.
 
 123 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 THE traveller who stands at the very loot 
 of a mountain is never conscious of its 
 vastness. It is only as he leaves it behind 
 him that its true proportions reveal them- 
 selves. Then, as he journeys far and farther 
 from its base, for the first time he realizes the 
 grandeur and sublimity of those summits which 
 were concealed from him when he stood be- 
 neath the very shadow of their walls. With 
 every step he takes, bigger and bluer swims up 
 into the sky the mountain's crest, changin.or 
 with the shifting light and growing distance, 
 frowning under the shadow of the thunder- 
 cloud, or softened in the evening stillness. It 
 is even so that the great presences of human- 
 ity impress their personality upon the ages. 
 They are rarely measured rightly by their im- 
 mediate contemporaries, and one might add 
 by their earliest biographers. Boswells are 
 iew, and the Boswell instinct is almost unique. 
 Forster can only give us a Forsterized Dickens, 
 and suggest ingenious doubts as to whether
 
 GEORGE ELIOT. T29 
 
 he or Dickens really wrote Dombey and David 
 Copperficld. Froude certainly gives us Carlyle, 
 " warts and all ; " but the picture lacks balance 
 and proportion, and the warts are seen through 
 the magnifying-glass of an ultra-honesty which 
 very much resembles malice. Mr. Cross gives 
 us a bundle of letters and leaves George Eliot 
 still a shadow and a name. It is charitable to 
 assume that he has lived beneath her influence 
 too completely to realize her greatness, and 
 perhaps the same assumption may be true of 
 the entire age in which her life was lived. We 
 have not yet left the mountain far enough be- 
 hind to realize its grandeur. But if we do not 
 realize the grandeur we at least admit it ; and 
 how great was the place George Eliot filled in 
 modern literature we may measure by the im- 
 possibility of naming her successor. 
 
 The outline of George Eliot's early life is 
 tolerably familiar to the public, and very great 
 interest attaches to it. Her father was a re- 
 markable man, of great natural shrewdness, in- 
 dividuality, and force of character. He was 
 the son of a village carpenter, and many traits 
 of his character are embodied in Adam Bede 
 and Caleb Garth. His indomitable will, not
 
 130 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 less than his business talents, raised him to the 
 position of land agent to Sir Roger Newdigate, 
 and throughout the part of Warwickshire Adhere 
 he resided he was reverenced as a man of ster- 
 ling and invincible uprightness. Adam Bede 
 hated to see men drop their work the moment 
 the clock sounded, as though they grudged an 
 extra moment in their master's service ; and 
 the same proud and generous spirit animated 
 Robert Evans. He was incapable of mean- 
 ness and inflexible in duty. Yet in the granite 
 of that strong nature, as is common in men 
 noted for their usual sternness, many a gentle 
 rill of tenderness welled up. He was forty-six 
 when Marian was born, and " the little wench " 
 was very precious to her father. Her mother 
 is said to have had a touch of Mrs. Poyser in 
 her — a woman of fine administrative ability in 
 the household, with a faculty of incisive speech 
 naturally running into epigram and wit, and 
 not seldom, probably, lacerating softer natures 
 with its sharp criticisms. And there were un- 
 cles and aunts of the Glegg and Pullet type, 
 who no doubt thought the dreamy child a 
 very " strange little gell," and made her fly 
 with all the keener love to the refuge of the
 
 GEORGE ELIOT. I3I 
 
 strong father's affection. A very charming 
 picture is given us of Mr. Robert Evans driv- 
 ing round the country-side with " the httlc 
 gell " between his knees, the said little gell 
 silently absorbing many a glimpse of landscape, 
 or old gabled farm-house, and many a turn of 
 humorous speech, which were all to swim up 
 to the surface again in after years and be 
 woven into the texture of her books. The 
 most painful episode of the book is that which 
 relates to the division which occurred in after- 
 life between father and daughter on the subject 
 of their theological views, the widowed father 
 making up his mind to live alone rather than 
 with a dauglitcr who refused to go to church, 
 and she for a time preferring the prospect of 
 school-drudgery to submission. But the threat- 
 ened separation never happened. The picture 
 that glows before us in these early pages is of 
 quiet home at Griff, a charming red brick, ivy- 
 covered house on the Arbury estate — " the 
 warm little nest where her affections were 
 fledged." There George Eliot spent the first 
 twenty-one years of her life. 
 
 An excellent passage in I\Ir. Cross's intro- 
 duction puts before us vividly enough the
 
 132 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 condition of the times in 18 19, when Marian 
 Evans was born, and reminds us how far we 
 have moved : 
 
 " That Greater Britain (Canada and Austra- 
 lia) which to-day forms so large a reading 
 public was then scarcely more than a geo- 
 graphical expression, with less than half a 
 million of inhabitants, all told, where at present 
 there arc eight millions ; and in the United 
 States — where more copies of George EHot's 
 works are now sold than in any other quarter 
 of the world — the population then numbered 
 less than ten millions, where to-day it is fifty- 
 five millions. Including Great Britain, these 
 English-speaking races have increased from 
 thirty millions in 1820 to one hundred millions 
 in 1884; and with the corresponding increase 
 in education we can form some conception how 
 a popular English writer's fame has widened 
 Its circle. 
 
 As Mr. Cross justly observes, much of the 
 quality of George Eliot's writing is due to the 
 character of the times in which her youth was 
 lived. In 1819 the wheels of life ran slowly 
 along ruts of sweet, old-fashioned leisure, and 
 had not begun to break into flame with the
 
 GEORGE ELIOT. 1 33 
 
 speed of modern energy. There was leisure 
 to grow wise and shelter to grow ripe. The 
 imagination had time to absorb its materials, 
 and a large nature had space and peace m 
 which to develop its powers. " Her roots 
 were down in the pre-railroad, pre-telegraphic 
 period," and her genius was the outcome of 
 these conditions. Perhaps that is saying too 
 much, but it certainly indicates an important 
 truth. If solitude is necessary to the ease and 
 tranquil strength, occasionally rising into maj- 
 esty, and never destitute of force, which are 
 the distinguishing qualities of George Eliot's 
 style, it is easy to imagine how well such a 
 style could grow in the remote serenity of a 
 country house half a century ago, and how 
 much more difficult it would be for any such 
 style to take root and thrive amid the condi- 
 tions of to-day life. 
 
 Nothing which George Eliot has written is 
 so full of profound interest as the record of 
 her own early life. That life has, indeed, been 
 more than indicated in her own Maggie Tulli- 
 vcr. Wlicn she drew the picture of Maggie, 
 with her pride and her affection, the one lead- 
 ing her into perpetual revolt, the other bring-
 
 134 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 ing her back again humble and penitent, sub- 
 dued by the imperious need of being loved ; 
 when she painted the gradual wakening of the 
 spiritual nature in Maggie, the desire for self- 
 sacrifice in perpetual conflict with the needs 
 and yearnings of a sensuous nature, the rev- 
 erence for duty, the clear perception that 
 whatever failed that must be clung to, as with 
 a death-grip — in all this we have much of her 
 own spiritual portraiture. The young girl 
 who stands in the window of the old mill, ab- 
 sorbed in her first glimpse of Thomas a Kem- 
 pis, thrilled with a strange awe, as if " wakened 
 in the night with a strain of solemn music," 
 while the songs of that far-off voice echo for 
 the first time through her soul, saying, " For- 
 sake thyself, resign thyself, and thou shalt en- 
 joy much inward peace ; then shall all vain 
 imagi-nations, evil perturbations, and superflu- 
 ous cares fly away ; then shall immoderate 
 fear leave thee, and inordinate love shall die " 
 — this is Marian Evans at eighteen in the red 
 brick house at Griff. She, too, heard that 
 low penetrating music which has pierced and 
 soothed so many wayward hearts through the 
 long centuries, and drank it in as a draught of
 
 GEORGE ELIOT, 1 35 
 
 life from the wells of God. Like Maggie, she 
 read on and on in the old book, devouring 
 eagerly the dialogues of the invisible Teacher^ 
 the pattern of sorrow, the source of all strength 
 — with all the hurry of an imagination that 
 could never rest in the present ; and in the 
 ardor of first discovery renunciation seemed 
 to her the entrance into that satisfaction which 
 she had so long been craving for in vain. 
 
 George Eliot never wrote a passage pervaded 
 by more tender feeling than this passage de- 
 scribing how Maggie Tulliver, amid the miseries 
 of her young life, first saw that heavenly vision 
 of peace won out of sorrow and secret joy, 
 kindled in spite of outward conditions of dis- 
 tress. As we read these early letters we can 
 understand the spiritual emotion, the pathos 
 and power, of this passage ; it was drawn 
 straight from the deeps of the writer's own 
 most sacred experience. In that moment of 
 spiritual revelation to George Eliot, as to many 
 another, the secret of life seemed solved. She 
 was swept by a strong tide, stronger than she 
 knew, far away from her former conceptions of 
 life, and in the delicious sense of surrender 
 and renunciation never paused to ask whether
 
 136 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 she had not surrendered too much, whether 
 such a tide might not ebb, whether such self- 
 sacrifice as Thomas a Kern pis taught might 
 not be in fact self-effacement, and produce at 
 last as strong a recoil in the repressed individu- 
 ality. 
 
 In those days Marian Evans highly enjoyed 
 Hannah More's letters, and found the " con- 
 templation of so blessed a character as hers 
 very salutary." She who in after years was to 
 write that bitterly brilliant essay on " Other 
 Worldliness," in which the works of Young are 
 so mercilessly satirized, at eighteen is in love 
 with his genius and strongly commends cer- 
 tain passages of his writings to her friends. 
 There is a touch of asceticism in her thought 
 which leads her to look upon marriage as an 
 institution tending to dull the heavenly flame ; 
 and she ** can only sigh for those who are mul- 
 tiplying earthly ties which, though powerful 
 enough to detach their hearts and thoughts 
 from heaven, are so brittle as to be liable to be 
 snapped asunder at every breeze." Almost 
 every-wherc in these early letters such sen- 
 tences as these may be culled : " O, that we 
 could live for eternity ! that we could realize
 
 GEORGE ELIOT. 13/ 
 
 its nearness ! May the Lord give me such an 
 insight into what is truly good that I may not 
 rest content with making Christianity a mere 
 addendum to my pursuits, or with tacking it as 
 a fringe on my garments ! May I seek to be 
 sanctified w^ioHy ! " To her aunt, Mrs. Sam- 
 uel Evans — out of whose spiritual experience 
 and work as a Wesleyan preacher she fashioned 
 her Dinah Morris — she deplores her " lack of 
 humility and Christian simplicity, which makes 
 me willing to obtain credit for greater knowl- 
 edge and deeper feeling than I really possess." 
 Novels she has little taste for, and considers 
 hurtful, and says : " Religious novels are more 
 hateful to me than merely worldly ones ; they 
 are a sort of centaur or mermaid, and, like 
 other monsters that we do not know how 
 to class, should be destroyed for the public 
 good as soon as born. The weapons of the 
 Christian warfare were never sharpened at the 
 forge of romance." She complains that the 
 Oxford Tracts contain " a very confused and 
 unscriptural statement of the great doctrine 
 of justification," and " a disposition to frater- 
 nize with the mystery of ini([uity." ITcr fust 
 production ever clollicd with the glory of
 
 138 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 print is a poem on the death of St. Peter, 
 which appeared in the CJiristian Observer for 
 January, 1840, with an editorial note explaining 
 that " M. A. E." is quite wrong in supposing 
 that the Bible will be read in heaven. And in 
 a letter written in her eighteenth year we have 
 the germ of that tendency which in after-life 
 led her to choose as her heroes and heroines 
 common people, living homely lives and con- 
 tending with the sordid troubles of an insignifi- 
 cant existence, and which led her to lay such 
 eloquent stress upon the tragedy and passion 
 which dwell in what we are pleased to call 
 " common life." " I verily believe," she writes 
 to Miss Lewis, " that in most cases it requires 
 more of a martyr's spirit to endure with 
 patience and cheerfulness daily crossings and 
 interruptions of our petty desires and pursuits, 
 and to rejoice in them, if they can be made to 
 conduce to God's glory and our own sanctifica- 
 tion, than even to lay down our lives for the 
 truth." This is not merely a beautiful truth 
 expressed with all the force and finish of George 
 Eliot's maturest style, but is indicative of the 
 tone of mind with which she habitually re- 
 garded human life, and which made farm
 
 GEORGE ELIOT. 1 39 
 
 kitchens and carpenters' shops sufficient the- 
 atres for the noblest creations of her genius to 
 act out their simple heroisms or bitter trage- 
 dies. 
 
 In 1 84 1 that acquaintance with the Brays 
 of Coventry commenced which had such an 
 important effect on George Eliot's subsequent 
 life. Mr. Bray had married a Miss Hennell, 
 and her brother Charles had published a book 
 entitled An Inquiry into the Origin of Chris- 
 tianity, which, in some important respects, an- 
 ticipated the rationalistic criticism and method 
 of Strauss. The perusal of this book had a 
 great effect on her mind, and completely altered 
 her views of the Christian religion. It directly 
 led to her subsequent translation of Strauss's 
 Lcbcn jfesu, which was her first piece of real 
 literary work. But nothing is more remark- 
 able in these letters and the record of her 
 entire life than the abundant evidence we 
 have that, whatever she ignored in Christian 
 truth, religious feeling never ceased to animate 
 her. While translating the work of Strauss 
 she had an ivory crucifix hung over her desk ; 
 and to Miss Hennell she confesses " she is 
 Strauss-sick ; it makes her ill, dissecting the
 
 140 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 beautiful story of the crucifixion, and only the 
 sight of the Christ-image and picture make her 
 endure it." She writes thus of the journey to 
 Emmaus: 
 
 " That most beautiful passage in Luke's gos- 
 pel ! How universal is its significance ! The 
 soul that has hopelessly followed its Jesus — its 
 impersonation of the highest and best — all in 
 despondency : its thoughts all refuted, its 
 dreams all dissipated ! Then comes another 
 Jesus — another, but the same — the same high- 
 est best, only chastened — crucified instead of 
 triumphant ; and the soul learns that this is 
 the true way to conquest and glory. And then 
 there is the burning of the heart, which assures 
 that this was the Lord — that this is the inspira- 
 tion from above, the true Comforter that leads 
 into truth. But I am not a Methodist." 
 
 No, she was " not a Methodist ; " but she had 
 drunk so deeply of the wells of early Methodist 
 theology that not even Strauss could prevent 
 this outburst of emotion, this tender, sup- 
 pressed yearning of the lonely heart for some 
 more personal comforter than the " highest 
 best " of Positivism. It is a curious spectacle, 
 no doubt, the heart-sick translator of Strauss
 
 GEORGE ELIOT. I4I 
 
 only nerved to her work by the suspended 
 crucifix, with its tokens of triumphant sorrow. 
 We could more readily have understood the 
 symbol of that divine anguish arresting the 
 hand that was slowly reducing its reality to a 
 fable. But we must remember that in George 
 Eliot we have to do with a nature w^onderfully 
 complex and intricate ; a masculine intellect 
 allied to more than usually sensitive emotions ; 
 a mind capable of the severest study, the 
 subtlest strategies of thought, held in check by 
 all the clinging tenderness of a nature capable 
 of passionate attachments and perpetually 
 yearning for some responding love on which it 
 could repose — some object on which it might 
 lavish the wealth of its affections. 
 
 It is absolutely necessary to bear this in 
 mind if we are to hold any clue at all to the 
 nature of George Eliot and the motives of her 
 life. No one can read her letters without re- 
 marking on the facility with which she took up 
 new friendships and the almost girlish effusive- 
 ness which characterizes her letters, even when 
 she was in the last stage of life, to her recent 
 as well as her old friends. That hunger for love 
 which led Maggie Tullivcr into so many errors
 
 142 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 was precisely the master-passion in the heart 
 of her creator ; but while in George Eliot's 
 case the crowning mistake which Maggie nobly 
 fought down was actually committed, yet, by 
 virtue of that very tenderness, neither Strauss, 
 nor Frederick Harrison, nor G. H. Lewes, nor 
 any other creature could wholly close the door 
 of her heart against the exiled Christ of the 
 intellect. The woman who pictured Dinah 
 Morris preaching on the village green and 
 praying with the penitent Hetty Sorrel in 
 prison ; who, in the highest hour of her des- 
 tiny, makes Maggie Tulliver, amid the fierce 
 stress of mortal anguish, turn from the golden 
 future to the hard, bleak waste of life-long 
 renunciation, crying, " There are memories and 
 affections and longings after a perfect good- 
 ness that have such a strong hold on me I 
 couldn't live at peace if I put the shadow of a 
 willful sin between myself and God ; " who in 
 her greatest story makes the modern world 
 thrill again before the spiritual force and inten- 
 sity of Savonarola, as once all Florence thrilled 
 and trembled when the thunder of his voice 
 pealed through the Duomo — this woman had 
 tasted the mysteries of a religious experience
 
 GEORGE ELIOT. I43 
 
 foreign enough to the shallow amiability and 
 self-complacency of such a nature as that of 
 Mr. George Henry Lewes. She was " not a 
 Methodist ; " but like many other persons who 
 would disclaim the title both her life and her 
 art owed more than she supposed to those 
 religious influences which moulded her in early 
 days. 
 
 In any attempt to fix the place of George El- 
 iot among English writers it will be necessary 
 to lay stress upon this strange union in her of 
 what are often opposites. Every page of her 
 life gives evidence of the intensity of her emo- 
 tions, the space and energy of her intellect, 
 and the strength of her religious feeling. 
 Much might be written upon the enormous 
 capacity for work which she possessed, her 
 splendid grasp of abstruse sciences, her use of 
 scientific illustrations in her prose and poetry, 
 the delicacy, subtlety, and acumen of her mind ; 
 and these are the more remarkable not merely 
 because they existed in a woman with more 
 than ordinary susceptibility of nature anti 
 more than common tenderness of affection, 
 but because they were found in a woman who 
 
 had built up her culture in lonely isolation 
 10
 
 144 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 from great centres of thought, and amid dis- 
 tressing physical conditions which made it often 
 true that her address was, " Grief Castle, on 
 the River of Gloom, in the Valley of Dolor." 
 The unique position George Eliot holds in 
 English literature is due to this combination 
 of gifts, and is at once indicated by compari- 
 son. Take the three greatest names in modern 
 fiction — Scott, Dickens, and Thackeray — and 
 compare with them and their works George 
 Eliot and hers. In Scott is broad health and 
 freedom, breadth of sky, clearness of atmos- 
 phere, not less in the outlook and character of 
 his own mind than in his presentation of artistic 
 effects ; but nowhere does he show himself 
 penetrated by any sense of the mystery and 
 complexity of life. He writes with the good- 
 natured ease of a man blessed with an excellent 
 digestion and familiar with broad moors and 
 sweet country air ; who, in his own life, has 
 never sounded the deeper notes of tragedy 
 and never known the bitter throes of anguish. 
 Dickens is always a boy in his humor, and 
 exaggerates his tragedy, as a man would who 
 relies for his materials on imagination rather 
 than experience ; and, moreover, he seldom
 
 GEORGE ELIOT. 145 
 
 gives US any sense of intellectual resource. 
 Thackeray, perhaps, impresses us with the 
 greatest sense of intellectual powers ; and in 
 his best and most serious writing is most pene- 
 trated by religious feeling. Each is great in 
 his sphere, and a more or less interesting per- 
 sonality. 
 
 But George Eliot is much more. She is a 
 great thinker and a great scholar who chooses 
 to write tales, but who might as readily have 
 written histories and philosophies. It is 
 characteristic that she was thirty-seven before 
 she attempted fiction, and then — in spite of 
 Mr. Lewes's opinion that she lacked imagina- 
 tion and dramatic power — with such success as 
 to place her instantly in the rank of great 
 masters. Her popularity only deepened in her 
 mind her sense of responsibility, a sense which 
 latterly became a burden very heavy to be 
 borne, for she never regarded herself in any 
 other light than that of a teacher. She brought 
 to the novelist's art wide scholarship, splendid 
 intellect, and profound experience, and held it 
 in trust as a ministry. One fails anywhere to 
 discern personal vanity in her in relation to her 
 own works; evcry-whcre one docs discern this
 
 146 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 intense sense of responsibility. The result is 
 that she is so much more than a novelist that 
 occasionally she is less than one ; the burden 
 of her teaching is too great for the resources 
 of her romance, and it is the voice of the 
 prophet which is sometimes heard instead of 
 the cunning music of the story-teller. But 
 another consequence is that her fiction is 
 wrought with a majesty and power which give 
 it a category of its own and secure for it a 
 noble place in English literature. It is superb 
 fiction ; but it is much more than fiction. 
 
 George Eliot seldom spoke of her own 
 works even to intimate friends, but in the last 
 year of her life she once asked Mr. Cross a 
 question concerning their general effect upon 
 his mind, which led him to reply that he felt 
 the general effect to be profoundly sad. She 
 was grieved and disappointed with the answer. 
 In spite of endless physical depressions she 
 herself possessed an indomitable cheerfulness, 
 and she naturally supposed she had communi- 
 cated some portion of that cheerfulness to her 
 writings. Yet unquestionably Mr. Cross was 
 right. The dominant chord, sometimes almost 
 lulled into a distant murmur but never silent,
 
 GEORGE ELIOT. I47 
 
 and continually swelling up into tragic passion 
 and pain, is sadness. Her humor passes like a 
 ripple of swift sunshine or laughter, but the old 
 gray sky closes up again and the smothered wail 
 of pain makes itself heard. The central point of 
 her philosophy is that there is a continuity in 
 actions which cannot be broken, and that noth- 
 ing but an inflexible regard for duty and a 
 perpetual willingness to sacrifice our own hap- 
 piness to supreme moral purposes, br the 
 happiness of others, can save the individual 
 life from shipwreck or mutilation. She never 
 shows us good springing out of evil ; mere 
 optimistic folk may teach that comforting doc- 
 trine ; but she walks in the light of common 
 day and in the presence of the unvarnished 
 realities of life, and prefers to enforce the more 
 terrible truth that evil springs out of evil, and 
 can produce nothing but evil. There are no 
 arresting angels in the path ; healing and com- 
 forting angels there may be, but the bitter 
 consequences of wrong-doing must be paid to 
 the uttermost farthing notwithstanding. With 
 an almost cruel insistency, or an insistency 
 which would be cruel but for the sympathy 
 and pity of the writer, she follows the clue f)f
 
 148 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 the first evil step in its unwinding, and forces 
 us to admit the inevitable recompense, the ir- 
 reparable pain. Every book she has written is 
 charged with this stern truth, and its plot ulti- 
 mately reaches this d/nouemeiit. Hetty Sor- 
 rel's vanity and shallowness, her disregard for 
 those homely traditions which have their roots 
 in the dim past and make a code of duty for 
 homely people, with all the hard selfishness 
 which lay under that pretty childishness, work 
 out inevitably the tragedy of her Hfe, and are 
 in fact the very elements out of which that 
 tragedy springs. Godfrey Cass's first error, in 
 concealing what he ought to have confessed, 
 brings a whole string of errors with it, stretch- 
 ing over a life-time, until, after twenty years, 
 the bitter revelation has to be made, and the 
 cry is wrung from him : " There's debts we 
 can't pay like money debts, by paying extra 
 for the years that have slipped by. Marner 
 was right in what he said about a man turning 
 away a blessing from his door ; it falls to some- 
 body else. I wanted to pass for childless once ; 
 I shall pass for childless now against my wish.'" 
 But it is in Romola and in the character of 
 Tito Melema that this lesson is driven home
 
 GEORGE ELIOT. I49 
 
 with the most merciless force. The smooth 
 young Greek, with his beautiful face and happy 
 smile — who could think of him as Judas? 
 Yet perchance Judas 
 
 " Had eyes of starry blue, 
 And lips like thine, that gave the tiaitor-kiss." 
 
 It is one of the minor lessons George Eliot is 
 fond of teaching, that faces can be masks as 
 well as mirrors ; it is the heart and not the 
 face that makes the traitor. Tito shrinks from 
 inflicting pain as from suffering it ; he wishes 
 to be happy himself, and has the most benevo- 
 lent desires for the happiness of the whole hu- 
 man race. But ho is thoroughly resolved to 
 be happy at all costs ; and while he deplores 
 the necessity of making the anguish of others 
 part of that cost, yet he accepts the necessity. 
 It is unpleasant ; he would much rather have 
 gained his base Paradise without injury to any 
 body ; but he is quietly resolved not to forego 
 it on that account. From the moment he re- 
 fuses his first obvious duty of rescuing the old 
 scholar who had lived for him the wrong step 
 is taken which leads onward through an in- 
 creasing maze of difficulties. As a direct con- 
 sequence of his first prevarication he finds
 
 150 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 himself under the unpleasant necessity of de- 
 nouncing his foster-father as a madman, of 
 sending him in chains to prison, and, by an- 
 other series of events springing from the first, 
 of becoming a traitor to his wife and the be- 
 trayer of his party. There is no more pro- 
 foundly subtle portrait in English literature 
 than Tito's ; and its artistic truth is as absolute 
 as the technical skill with which it is perfected. 
 Its moral power is even more wonderful. To 
 the last Tito has never succeeded in becoming 
 a hardened and thorough-paced villain ; the 
 ill he does is repugnant to him, and he would 
 much rather not have done it. But his only 
 guide is desire, and his only principle of action 
 present ease and pleasure. And he forgets, or 
 has never recognized, that grim, indefeasible 
 truth which George Eliot makes the soul of 
 her teaching in this as in so many books : 
 " Our deeds are like children that are born to 
 us ; they live and act apart from our will. 
 Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds 
 never ; they have an indestructible life both in 
 and out of our consciousness." 
 
 For this moral teaching the world owes a 
 great debt of gratitude to George Eliot. But
 
 GEORGE ELIOT. 15I 
 
 it was inevitable that a series of books all 
 more or less permeated with such teaching, all 
 striking this deep chord of the irreparable, all 
 omitting, or else including but faint, far-off 
 snatches of that sweeter music of a divine 
 hope, a divine restoration, should be pro- 
 foundly sad. Even the humor of George 
 Eliot is tinged with this sadness ; it is bitter- 
 sweet, and is akin to pity. It springs from the 
 active contact of a high and broad mind with 
 narrow and confined intelligences, reading their 
 dim thoughts by a wider light and measuring 
 their homely ways by a larger standard. If 
 Dickens had painted the Gleggs and the Pul- 
 lets we should have felt that he himself en- 
 joyed the fun he made, and we should have 
 caught our contagion of laughter straight from 
 his own lips. But George Eliot's humor is a 
 boomerang ; it makes the circle of laughter 
 and ends in pit}'. We feel that she is not 
 really laughing herself at all. She is thinking 
 how sad a si^_;ht it is to look upon people im- 
 prisoned in such small traditions and unable to 
 perceive the larger life that throbs around 
 them ; and while she cannot help describing 
 the "ways of tlic Dodsun family" with evi-
 
 152 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 dent relish she is full of gentle pity and regret. 
 She herself was, probably, quite unconscious 
 that this understrain of deep feeling made it- 
 self felt through her humor, and hence her 
 disappointment when more than one intimate 
 friend confessed to the realization of this sense 
 of general sadness produced by her works. 
 But it is an unquestioned element, and it may, 
 perhaps, be said that no writer who has done 
 so much to move our laughter has written so 
 much to make us sad. 
 
 And though it is not a pleasant thing to say, 
 yet it must be confessed that we rise from the 
 perusal of this life with the consciousness that 
 the sombreness was in the life itself, and in the 
 result of a wrong step which casts its shadow to 
 the end. At the most crucial point of her own 
 career George Eliot did what the whole bulk 
 of her teaching condemns with such majestic 
 sternness: she forgot the inexorable regard for 
 duty, the imperious necessity of purchasing no 
 personal joy by the grief of others or her own 
 errors; the clear need of sacrificing personal 
 joy to the wise traditions of universal law and 
 order which that teaching every-where enforces 
 as the first condition of a truly noble life.
 
 GEORGE ELIOT. 153 
 
 It has been said that from that wrong step 
 sprang the real development of her life, and 
 that by it was wrought the new intellectual 
 force which gave the world her novels. But 
 there is no evidence of this, and we think 
 George Eliot herself would have been the first 
 to resent such an infei"ence with scorn. She 
 would have said that better no such books 
 were written than written at the price of 
 wrong, and we can readily imagine with what 
 force and eloquence of noble sentiment she 
 would have treated such a position had it 
 found a place in her fiction. As it was she did 
 say, through the lips of Maggie Tulliver, 
 "Many things arc difficult and dark to me; 
 but I can sec one thing quite clearly, that I 
 must not, cannot seek my own happiness by 
 sacrificing others. Love is natural ; but surely 
 j;ity and faithfulness and memory are natural 
 too. And they would live in me still, and 
 punish mc if I did not obey them. I shoukl 
 be haunted by the suffering I had caused. 
 P'aithfulness and constancy mean something 
 else besides doing what is easiest and pleasant- 
 est to ourselves. They mean renouncing what- 
 ever is opposed to the reliance others havi; in
 
 154 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 US — whatever would cause misery to those 
 whom the course of our Hves has made depend- 
 ent on us." Is it too much to suppose that 
 liere it is George EHot herself who speaks — 
 that in spite of all intellectual sophistries with 
 which she might impose upon the moral sense, 
 that sensitive and noble nature, that delicate 
 and shrinking womanliness felt the sting, and 
 was indeed haunted by the suffering one wrong 
 step had caused ? It is true there is no evi- 
 dence of any remorse in her published letters, 
 but there is abundant evidence in her stories. 
 The constant reiteration of one painful theme 
 is proof of how large a place it filled in her 
 own experience. Whenever she approaches it 
 her tone deepens into solemnity, and her mes- 
 sage is delivered with intense, even anguished 
 moral earnestness. No v/riter of fiction has 
 treated the temptations of passion with a no- 
 bler moral force or insight, and none has dwelt 
 upon them more persistently. But this very 
 fact is in itself an indication of that con- 
 cealed suffering which confesses itself by sym- 
 pathy with the suffering of others, and it is 
 impossible to dissociate the sadness of George 
 Eliot's books from the error of her life.
 
 GEORGE ELIOT. I 55 
 
 The whole life of George Eliot was pervaded 
 by her intellectual energy and devoted to in- 
 cessant intellectual toil. She said she began 
 " Romola" a young woman, and it left her an 
 old one. She spared no effort to make her 
 work complete ; and her sense of responsibility 
 to the public, after their first recognition of her 
 great powers, led her to cultivate those powers 
 to the utmost for the public service. The 
 very completeness of that culture reacted dis- 
 astrously upon her later novels ; but just as it 
 has been said no other poet but Milton could 
 have moved under the immense weight of 
 classical learning contained in the " Paradise 
 Lost," so it maybe asserted any other novelist 
 than George Eliot would have been stifled un- 
 der the trappings of so encyclopedic a culture 
 as hers. Her physical sufferings were not less 
 than Carlyle's, but her views of life were never 
 jaundiced by them, nor her tongue envenomed. 
 There is a dignity about her last days which 
 reminds us of the last days of Milton. Like 
 Milton, she always began her day with some 
 chapters from the l>ible, and particularly de- 
 lighted in reading aloud the finer passages of 
 Isaiah, Jeremiah, and St. Paul. Her voice had
 
 156 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 " organ-like tones " in it, and when she read 
 the Bible, and the elder English poets, its deep 
 sadness added greatly to the solemnity and 
 majesty of the rhythm. In Shakespeare and 
 Milton, and latterly in Wordsworth, she found 
 constant companionship ; and four lines from 
 the "Samson Agonistes " she was accustomed 
 to repeat with a fullness of effect not to be for- 
 gotten: 
 
 " But what more oft, in nations grown corrupt. 
 And by their vices brought to servitude, 
 Than to love bondage more than liberty. 
 Bondage ^^"ith ease than strenuous liberty ? " 
 
 She keenly watched the social life of her time, 
 and with all its intellectual movements she was 
 intimately acquainted. In her the thirst for 
 knowledge was never slaked, and the ardor of 
 the intellect never dimmed. To the last no 
 shadow fell across that spacious mind ; no fac- 
 ulty lost its edge, no function of thought gave 
 intimation of decay. There was no darkening 
 of the stage before the curtain fell — it fell 
 silently and swiftly upon a brilliant intellect at 
 the very culmination of its powers. At her 
 death there was found within reach of the 
 lifeless hand one pathetic memorial of the
 
 GEORGE ELIOT. 15/ 
 
 past, which neither change of creed nor state 
 could exile ; it had accompanied her through 
 all the strange ways which lay between the 
 obscure girl-life at Griff and the famous years 
 of mature womanhood in London — it was a 
 well-worn copy of Thomas a Kempis.
 
 I5B QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH: 
 
 HIS METHOD AND HIS TEACHING. 
 
 T READ the other day, in an article 
 -■- which professed to be critical, the some- 
 what remarkable statement that there were at 
 least fifty novelists who could have written 
 Oliver Twist better than Dickens wrote it. I 
 was sincerely glad to hear it, for I had no 
 notion that English fiction was so liberally en- 
 dowed in these latter days, and I wish I could 
 believe it. As a matter of fact, unfortunately, 
 every one who knows any thing will know that 
 this statement is ludicrously false, and he will 
 know how it came to be made. It is the re- 
 sult of the new method of criticism, which 
 writes its " appreciations " or " depreciations " 
 at random, and bases its judgments entirely 
 on the comparison of things between which 
 there is no likeness, and therefore ought to be 
 no comparison. Criticism without comparison 
 is impossible, but under such a system it be- 
 comes necessary to depreciate one author in
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH. 1 59 
 
 <iider to " appreciate " another, and the main 
 result is wholesale confusion of thought and 
 utter blindness of judgment. 
 
 Now, Mr. Meredith is at the present mo- 
 ment in great peril from this species of writing. 
 There is a Meredith-cult in progress, and every 
 one who loves literature will rejoice that this is 
 so, in so far as it means that after thirty years 
 of scandalous neglect the public has at last 
 discovered that there is a writer of first-rate 
 genius in its midst. But is it really necessary 
 to sneer at Dickens and disparage Thackeray 
 and George Eliot in order to convince us of 
 the excellence of George Meredith? Why 
 make comparisons which bring no light, but 
 rather make confusion worse confounded, 
 which not only do not help us toward a true 
 interpretation of Meredith, but destroy the 
 very means by which any true interpretation 
 becomes possible? It is perfectly true that 
 Dickens could not have written the Ordeal of 
 Richard Fevcrcl, but it is equally true that 
 Meredith could not have written Oliver Tzvist \ 
 and again it is true that each is a work of 
 genius. The fifty gentlemen who could have 
 written Oliver T%vist arc of strangely retiring
 
 l6o QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 and modest disposition, for up to the present 
 moment we have had no sign of the presence 
 of any one of them. When any one of them 
 has written a half-dozen pages as deeply tragic 
 as the murder of Nancy and the death of Bill 
 Sikes we shall hear of him without fail ; and 
 if we have not heard of him it is surely be- 
 cause he has not yet accomplished that re- 
 markable feat. No ; we shall not arrive at the 
 truth about any body by simply disparaging 
 his neighbors. George Meredith must be taken 
 upon his own merits, and in no possible case 
 that might be suggest-ed is the comparative 
 method of criticism more futile. lie stands 
 by himself, a strong and lonely figure, on a 
 coign of vantage all his own, uncompanied and 
 unclassed, impressive by his very loneliness not 
 less than by his strength, a man supremely in- 
 different to the world and its cackle of praise 
 or disparagement, who from the first has 
 waited for the world to come up to him, and 
 has never sought to descend to the world. 
 He has the majestic isolation of the mountain 
 peak that does not appear to belong to any 
 range, a Matterhorn, sharply divided from its 
 fellows, serrated and solitary, rejoicing in its
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH. l6l 
 
 own splendors of dawn and sunset, starry emi- 
 nence and glory, while other peaks share a 
 common day and night. If such a man is to 
 be understood it can only be by patient study of 
 his style and teaching, and this can only be 
 undertaken and accomplished by free minds — 
 by minds that are open to receive new impres- 
 sions without prejudice and to register them 
 without reference to older standards. 
 
 Having said so much it is natural to ask, 
 How is it that it has taken so long for George 
 Meredith to become known ? Matterhorns 
 cannot very well be hid. Why have so few 
 persons noticed such a presence in so long a 
 period as thirty years? If we take th« date 
 of his first book, the Poems of 185 1, the period 
 is really forty years; but it is sufficient for our 
 purpose to take the date of his first great novel, 
 Ric/iard Fez'cn/, which appeared in 1859. Since 
 that date he has published nine complete novels, 
 besides various short talcs and poems. How is 
 it that they have made comparatively so little 
 impression on the public mind? To revert to 
 my image for a moment, I may reply that 
 it by no means follows that because there 
 is a Matterhorn every one will know it. Great
 
 l62 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 peaks, like all other great things, after all, have 
 to be discovered, and for centuries travellers 
 may pass the mouth of some valley which 
 holds a Matterhorn without any impulse to 
 penetrate its solitude or any notion that it is 
 the pathway to a splendor. It counts for 
 little, as a detraction from genius, that men 
 have had to wait long for recognition. In our 
 own generation Wordsworth and Browning 
 wrote for thirty years without earning enough 
 money to buy them porridge, and Carlyle 
 was on the very brink of ruin before the 
 tide turned. But perhaps these names in 
 themselves are sufficient to explain the phe- 
 nomenon. Each brought something new for 
 which the world was unprepared, a new teach- 
 ing and a new style. When this happens the 
 only consolation of the author is to reflect that 
 his writing 
 
 " Is not meat 
 For little people and for fools," 
 
 and to await with patience the hour when those 
 who are wiser, the true ** aristocracy," will rec- 
 og^nize the truth, and force its recognition 
 upon the dull mind of the world. 
 
 The delay of recognition with George Mer-
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH. 163 
 
 edith is due irst to the novelty of his style. 
 It is brilliant beyond example, but at times ob- 
 scure in almost equal degree. It is, however, 
 far oftener brilliant than obscure. To those 
 who love splendor, subtlety, and felicity of 
 diction, combined with the most penetrating 
 and suggestive thought, the writing of George 
 Meredith is an unboundaried paradise. Roam 
 where you will, a profusion of things dear to 
 the delicate and discerning palate arc found. 
 Or, to change the figure, never was there so 
 coruscating a style. The page perpetually 
 breaks in star-sparkles ; it flashes with all sorts 
 of pyrotechnic displays, it is volcanic witii 
 eruptive radiance. Sometimes it is almost mis- 
 chievously coruscating, as though a boy ex- 
 ploded crackers under you for the mere pleas- 
 ure of seeing you jump. But one never knows 
 how soon or suddenly the fire may go out, and 
 you may find yourself plunged into the darkest 
 by-ways of obscurity. Mr. Meredith has de- 
 scribed Carlyle's style, and in doing so has par- 
 tially described his own : 
 
 " A style resembling cither early architect- 
 ure or utter dikipidation, so loose and rough it 
 seemed ; a \\ ind-in-the-orchard style, that turn-
 
 164 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 bled down here and there an appreciable fruit 
 with uncouth bluster ; sentences without com- 
 mencements running to abrupt endings and 
 smoke, like waves against a sea-wall, learned 
 dictionaries giving a hand to street-slang, and 
 accents falling on them haphazard, like slant 
 rays from driving clouds; all the pages in a 
 breeze, the whole book producing a sort of 
 electrical agitation in the mind and joints." 
 
 Neither of Carlyle nor Meredith is this de- 
 scription wholly true ; but, as Carlyle might 
 have said, " it is significant of much " in both. 
 To complain of too great brilliance is, no doubt, 
 a novel complaint, yet in Mr. Meredith's case 
 it is a very real one. Conceive a concert 
 wherein all the music is allegro, or a gallery 
 entirely full of Turner's most gorgeous sunsets, 
 and you have a not inapt illustration of the 
 effect produced by a continuous reading of 
 George Meredith. The most brilliant thing 
 suffers by a want of contrast. The last mar- 
 vellous movement in a great sonata is all the 
 more striking by contrast with that which has 
 preceded it ; the finest Turner is yet finer if 
 we see it after having seen some study of soft 
 and tender grays. We miss the point of rest
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH. l6$ 
 
 almost altogether in Mr. Meredith's work. He 
 is so infinitely vivacious, versatile, and witty, 
 so fertile in jest and epigram, so agile in the 
 leaps and glances of his thought, so wayward 
 and surprising, so conspicuously acute and 
 clever, that less nimble minds pant breathless 
 behind him, and even the nimblest have a dif- 
 ficulty in keeping pace with him. " She ran 
 ahead of his thoughts like nimble fire," he 
 says in one place of Mrs. Caroline Grandison. 
 It is a just description of his own treatment 
 of his readers ; and sometimes the fire we have 
 followed with panting eagerness suddenly 
 dances a will-o'-the-wisp fantasy of mirth and 
 leaves us knee-deep in the bog. When once 
 we become used to his method no writer can 
 afford so much intellectual exhilaration ; but it 
 is little wonder, when we consider it, that the 
 regular novel-reader is bewildered by so un- 
 common a guide and prefers some one much 
 duller and safer. Intellectual gymnastics, how- 
 ever brilliant, are not what that patient and 
 somewhat dull creature, " the general reader," 
 looks for in a nf)vel. 
 
 It is altogether too late to enter upon the 
 question so often raised in connection with
 
 l66 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 Mr. Meredith's work, whether science ought 
 to find place in novels ; the question is rather 
 how large a space ought science to occupy. 
 If this is a scientific age, and if the novel holds 
 the mirror up to the age, science must needs 
 be adequately reflected in it. Moreover, as 
 one of Mr. Meredith's critics has truly said, 
 the way of advance in English fiction lies 
 through George Eliot and George Meredith — 
 that is, through the only two novelists of our 
 time who have come to their task with a com- 
 plete scientific equipment. Is their work the 
 better or worse for this equipment ? It may 
 be answered that it is both. After all, the 
 novel is not a psychological, and still less a 
 physiological, treatise, and there are moments 
 in the writing of both George Eliot and 
 George Meredith when it becomes this and 
 nothing more. The more a novelist knows the 
 better will he write ; but when he pauses in his 
 story to display his knowledge he becomes a 
 pedant and ceases to be a novelist. The worst 
 fault of Browning also lies in this ; there are 
 times when his poetry runs into pedantry, and 
 the reader of the "Paradise Lost" will note the 
 same tendency in Milton. But it is possible,
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH. 167 
 
 and it is common, to exaggerate these blem- 
 ishes, and people who do not care to be at any- 
 trouble in their reading triumphantly push 
 these blemishes forward as an excuse for their 
 intellectual indolence. To such people, I sup- 
 pose, poetry and fiction are simply ingenious 
 relaxations for the idle moments of life, of 
 which they have too many, and they naturally 
 demand the old commonplaces of pursuing 
 love and ultimate marriage-bells as the begin- 
 ning and end of fiction, and resent a style of 
 fiction which is charged w^ith the gravest mat- 
 ter and is meant to make men think. Toward 
 such readers George Meredith, and not less 
 George Eliot and Browning, take up an atti- 
 tude of irreconcilable defiance. They do so 
 because they regard their art as a serious busi- 
 ness. They are of ]\Iilton's temper, and ap- 
 proach their task with a solemn invocation 
 that what is dark in them may be illumined, 
 what is weak strengthened, that they may rise 
 to the height of their great argument. A 
 sacred fire burns in them, for they are prophets, 
 not hirelings; voices, not echoes; artists, not 
 artificers. Milton, George Eliot, and Brown- 
 ing have already triumphed and compelled the
 
 1 68 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 world to listen ; will not George Meredith also 
 triumph in due season ? 
 
 I have stated the defects of George Meredith, 
 but I am bound to add that they are the 
 defects of great qualities, and that they have 
 been greatly exaggerated by people incapable 
 of recognizing the qualities. If I am sometimes 
 wearied with the constant dazzle of the style, 
 on the whole I am only too glad to find a style 
 that is capable of dazzling, and I may add that 
 I am seldom wearied. If I mention its occa- 
 sional obscurity, I emphasize the fact that the 
 obscurity is only occasional, and that as a rule 
 the style is absolutely lucid. Nothing can be 
 more unjust than to say that George Meredith 
 cannot tell a story or that his style is consist- 
 ently obscure. The bulk of his stories are 
 admirably conceived and executed, and for the 
 most part the style is marvellous in its supple- 
 ness, its unflagging force and grace, its subtlety 
 of flavor and suggestion, its flashes of inspira- 
 tion, its intense concision, its actual splendor 
 and poetry of phrase, its searching directness 
 and nervous strength. He is a prose Brown- 
 ing, and his phrases are even more haunting 
 than Browning's. He is the comrade and sue-
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH. 169 
 
 cesser of George Eliot, but is George Eliot's 
 master both in force of intellect and poetic 
 magnificence of diction. 
 
 Why, then, we ask again, has it taken thirty- 
 years for Mr. Meredith to be known, and even 
 now not widely known ? The real reason lies 
 in the fact that he was not the universal note 
 of the great popular writers. 
 
 Dickens, in his best work, and in spite of 
 much that was tawdry, had that note ; and 
 George Eliot, also, in spite of much that was 
 stiff and scholastic, at least in her earlier 
 volumes. David Coppcrficld has a charm for 
 the least and most cultured, and so has Adam 
 Bedc. The shopman and ths student alike 
 read them, and each feels the charm, though it 
 may be through widely differing channels. 
 But great as arc Tlic Ordeal of RicJiard Fcvcrcl 
 and The Egoist, they are not conceived on that 
 broadly human scale which is bound to draw 
 all eyes, to move all hearts. They have height 
 rather than breadth, a quality that is Miltonic 
 rather than Shakespearean. They appeal irre- 
 .sistibly to the cultured, but scarcely at all to 
 the crowd. Style, whether too brilliant or too 
 obscure, science, whether too obtrusively or
 
 I/O QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 too frequently thrust to the front, would not 
 be sufficient barriers to dismay the mass of 
 readers if the story itself struck the universal 
 note and appealed to the deep heart of hu- 
 manity. 
 
 To recur again to a name which is insepara- 
 ble from Meredith's, we may say that he and 
 Browning stand in the same category. It is 
 impossible to suppose that either can be widely 
 read. Browning is not a people's poet, nor is 
 Meredith a people's novelist. But in spite of 
 this Browning, in histeaching and his influence, 
 stands at the back of all the most influential 
 teachers of our day, and is daily being re-in- 
 terpreted by a thousand lips to ten thousands 
 of persons who are ignorant of his poetry. In 
 the same way Meredith is a fruitful force, 
 working not directly but indirectly on the 
 mass of readers, not in his own person so 
 much as in a far wider degree through the 
 persons of others who have received the impact 
 of his teaching. It is perhaps not as we could 
 wish it, and not as he could wish it. But if it 
 be for the present a thing inevitable there is 
 this compensation, that as the race progresses 
 he will become more and more visible in the
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH. 171 
 
 general life, and may be read together with 
 Browning by new generations, when those who 
 had their reward in this life are utterly for- 
 gotten. 
 
 The two great weapons in which Meredith 
 excels are satire and humor. The satire is 
 never less than excellent, for in the mere literary 
 finish of his biting epigrams he is unsurpassed 
 by any writer of English, either past or present. 
 The fault of the satire is that it is not kindly, 
 and it can be cruel. It is as keen as a surgeon's 
 knife, and as cold. It lays bare all the hidden 
 disease of the human soul, and cuts relent- 
 lessly, almost savagely, through the interven- 
 ing filaments. Not in all literature is there to 
 be found so terrible an exposition of selfish- 
 ness as in the character of Sir Willoughby Pat- 
 terne, the Egoist. If it were possible to light 
 up a human body from the inside, so that it 
 should become transparent to us, like a glass 
 bee-hive, in which we see every movement of 
 busy wing or tentacle, so that in like manner 
 we might discern every little beating nerve of 
 man, every throb and palpitation of remotest 
 vein and artery, it would be an apt figure of 
 how Meredith treats the soul of man. He
 
 1/2 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 conceals nothing ; he concedes nothing ; he 
 simply flashes his terrible search-light into the 
 secret places of the heart, and things explain 
 themselves. Coiling one inside the other, rest- 
 less with vehement and loathsome vitality, we 
 see the mass of serpentine motives, the mean 
 and wicked impulses, which lurk in the bottom 
 of the human ego. Pleasant? — no, it is not 
 pleasant ; but how true it is! How wholesome 
 it is for us to be driven sometimes into this 
 searching analysis of ourselves ! We pause a 
 hundred times in the reading of the Egoist 
 and shudder, for we have found out something 
 about ourselves which we did not suspect, or 
 of which we were fearfully and faintly con- 
 scious, as of a skeleton in the cupboard, known 
 to us, but judiciously and gratefully ignored. 
 Mr. Meredith refuses to be our accomplice in 
 any such deception. He forces us to face the 
 ghastly secret of the human cupboard. " Sacred 
 reality," he tells us, is the goddess he worships; 
 and he argues that it cannot be wise or right for 
 any of us to go about in ignorance of what we 
 really are. His satire is the child of relentless 
 truth ; it is indeed truth itself, naked, severe, 
 uncompromising. When wc close the Egoist
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH. 1 73 
 
 we feel as if we have already stood before the 
 judgment-seat of God. 
 
 No more striking example of this rigid satir- 
 ical analysis is to be found than in Mr. Mere- 
 dith's exposure of what Sir Willoughby's de- 
 sire for purity in woman really means. He 
 demands of his betrothed that she should be 
 cloistral. " Women of mixed essences, shad- 
 ing off the divine to the considerably lower, 
 were outside his vision of women." lie 
 demands "purity infinite, spotless bloom." 
 The commonplace observer will at once say. 
 Of how admirable and clean a nature must be 
 this man who can be content with nothing less 
 than " purity infinite " in woman. Not at all, 
 says Mr. Meredith ; entirely the reverse. It is 
 nothing but a " voracious aesthetic gluttony." 
 " It has its foundation in the sensual," and this 
 vast and dainty exacting appetite is lineall)' 
 " the great-grandson of the Hoof" Why 
 does he frantically demand this immaculate, 
 this more than human bloom? It is the exac- 
 tion of a gluttonous, sensual appetite. It is 
 more than that ; for him there must needs be 
 fashioned " a perfect specimen designed for 
 the elect of men." There the secret is out;
 
 174 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 the demand is but another tentacle of that ink- 
 spitting cuttlefish Egoism, which works un- 
 easily in the mud of the human heart, and 
 stretches itself on all sides in insatiable crav- 
 ing. "And," adds Mr. Meredith, "the capa- 
 ciously strong in soul among women will ulti- 
 mately detect an infinite grossness in the 
 demand for purity infinite, spotless bloom." 
 What you have supposed the demand of aus- 
 terity is the passionate shriek of voluptuous- 
 ness, and the strong-souled among women will 
 find you out. 
 
 Mr. Meredith's satire allied to analysis is 
 sometimes cruel, but when it is allied to humor 
 it is delightful. It is then the smack of the 
 sea-salt that gives edge to the sunny breeze. 
 He can be droll, quaint, genial ; he can jest 
 and gambol like a boy or shout with Homeric 
 laughter. He who has not read Evati 
 Harrington has before him several hours of 
 unmitigated laughter. For broad humor — in 
 one or two instances a trifle too broad for good 
 taste — it would be hard to surpass that mem- 
 orable cricket supper at the Green Dragon, 
 Fallowfield, and the eccentric behavior of 
 John Raikes thereat. The hat of John Raikes
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH. 1 75 
 
 alone is provocative of infinite mirtli. " I 
 mourn my hat. He is old — I mourn him yet 
 Hving. The presence of crape on him signi- 
 fies he shall ne'er have a gloss again. The 
 fact is my hat is a burden in the staring crowd. 
 A hat Hke this should counsel solitude." In 
 another spirit, but as genially humorous, is the 
 famous description of Mrs. Caroline Grandison, 
 in Richard Fcverel. " She was a colorless lady, 
 of an unequivocal character, living upon drugs, 
 and governing her husband and the world from 
 her sofa. Woolly Negroes blessed her name 
 and whiskered John Thomases deplored her 
 weight." She had rapidly produced eight 
 daughters, and felt the solemnity of woman's 
 mission. A son was denied her. Her hus- 
 band, the quite unobjectionable gentleman, 
 lost heart after the arrival of the eighth, and 
 surrendered his mind to more frivolous pur- 
 suits. After that disappointing eighth she also 
 lost heart and " relapsed upon religion and 
 little dogs." But to give samples of Mr. 
 Meredith's humor were an endless task. It 
 runs through a hundred variations, from the 
 keenest to the broadest ; it smacks of Jingle 
 and of Falstaff ; it is sometimes roaring farce,
 
 176 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 at others finished comedy ; it is acute, genial, 
 caustic ; it is now hilarious with boyish buoy- 
 ancy and good spirits, now the product of mas- 
 culine good sense and piercing insight, now a 
 shaft of laughter playing round a fountain of 
 tears ; and, widely as it differs, running through 
 the gamut from the verbal quip to the pro- 
 foundly human delineation, from merely comic 
 to half-tragic laughter, it is a pervasive ele- 
 ment, with which all his books are lavishly en- 
 dowed. As a mere humorist Meredith is as 
 superior to those ephemeral writers who pass 
 as such to-day as is Shakespeare to Douglas 
 Jerrold. 
 
 To Meredith, as to Thackeray, and with 
 equal ignorance and lack of insight, the term 
 cynic has been generally applied. If the 
 cynic is he Vvho sneers at good, then no man 
 has less deserved the reproach. But when 
 such terms are used no one stops to consider 
 what they imply, and to call a man a cynic is 
 the only refuge of Philistine mediocrity, which 
 above all things dreads satire, and is afraid of 
 being laughed at for not understanding what 
 breeds laughter in others. I am willing to ad- 
 mit that there is sometimes a disagreeable flavor
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH. 177 
 
 in some of Meredith's scenes and phrases. One 
 knows not how to define it, except to say that 
 in such cases his robust mascuHnity touches in 
 a fugitive fashion the verge of grossness. But 
 of cynicism, of the spirit which mocks and 
 derides, he has no trace ; on the contrary, one 
 is struck by the broad humanity of his writings, 
 their essential buoyancy and good humor. 
 And this is the more remarkable when we 
 recollect that he has been condemned by the 
 public to thirty years of almost total neglect, 
 during which period he has had the mortifica- 
 tion of seeing a score of writers with not a 
 tithe of his genius press to the front and be- 
 come the acknowledged representatives of En- 
 glish fiction. The Ordeal of George Meredith 
 will make one of the most surprising chapters 
 of that history of literature which our sons will 
 write one day. For him, as for Browning, 
 has been ordained a quarter of a century of 
 deaf ears and mocking mouths ; and how 
 much does it say for the genuine greatness of 
 each that they were able to keep a tranquil 
 soul, an uncmbittered mind, and emerge from 
 the cloud of neglect as the groat optimists of 
 their generation !
 
 178 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 If we will take the trouble to analyze this 
 so-called cynicism we shall see at once that its 
 component elements are really moral intensity 
 and love of " sacred reality." To tell the 
 plain truth is often to say a bitter thing, and 
 for a good many people any thing bitter is 
 called cynical. And the supreme moral value 
 of George Meredith's writing is its absolute wit- 
 ness to truth. He glosses over nothing. He 
 sees clearly " the reddened sources " from 
 which even the noblest passions spring. He 
 is profoundly convinced that we can gain 
 nothing in the long run by ignoring any 
 element of truth about ourselves. To leave 
 the body out of consideration in our epitome 
 of man is as fatal a blunder as to ignore the 
 soul. To collect only the finest qualities of a 
 man or woman into a sort of odorous nosegay 
 and call that human nature is to commit an 
 outrage on justice. The earth grows weeds as 
 well as flowers, and so does human nature. 
 Let us have then the whole truth, and nothing 
 but the truth ; it will do us less harm to know 
 every thing than to know only what it will 
 please us best to know. That is the great les- 
 son of his greatest book, Richard Feverel, and
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH. I79 
 
 never was a lesson taught with more impress- 
 ive power. The system, as he derisively calls 
 it, that marvellous system which is to produce 
 a perfect youth by picking and choosing among 
 the elements of things, by building walls here 
 to close up dangerous paradises, and opening 
 gate-ways there into sterile moral Saharas, by 
 twisting this proclivity into grotesqueness, like 
 a bruised vine upon a pole, and diverting the 
 natural course of that taste or passion till it 
 makes for itself feculent puddles instead of 
 flowing purely in its natural bed — tliis system, 
 carefully pieced together, mechanical, rigid, 
 meant to mutilate life at every point, and pro- 
 duce perfection by mutilation, in the end works 
 nothing but havoc, ruin, and death to all whom 
 it concerns. And the secret of its failure lies 
 in the fact that it is not based upon the truth 
 of things, "Great is truth, and must prevail," 
 is the constant chant of George Meredith ; 
 and not less passionately than Carlylc docs he 
 perpetually affirm that truth is always whole- 
 some, and a half-truth is the worst of lies. 
 
 The moral intensity of Meredith often be- 
 comes almost prophetic in its passion. "You 
 cannot cheat nature," he insists over and over
 
 l8o QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 again. Nowhere in fiction is there a more 
 tremendous sermon on the inevitable conse- 
 quences of sin than in that chapter of Richard 
 Feverel cdXled "The Wild Oats Plea." Every 
 youth should read it; it is a prophet's scroll 
 to be thrust into his hand as he steps over the 
 threshold of boyhood into the fullness of man- 
 hood. Sir Austin Fevercl calls upon two an- 
 cient intimates, Lord Heddon and Darley 
 Absworthy, " useful men though gouty, who 
 had sown in their time a fine crop of wild oats, 
 and advocated the advantage of doing so, see- 
 ing that they did not fancy themselves the 
 worse for it." He found one with an imbecile 
 son and the other with consumptive daughters. 
 "So much," he wrote in his note-book, "for 
 the wild oats theory ! " . 
 
 Darley was proud of his daughters' white 
 and pink skins. Beautiful complexions, he 
 called them. The eldest was in the market, 
 immensely admired. There was sometiiing 
 poetic about her. She intimated that she was 
 robust, but toward the close of their conversa- 
 tion her hand would now and then travel to 
 her side, and she breathed painfully an instant, 
 saying, "Isn't it odd? Dora, Adela, and my-
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH. l8l 
 
 self, \vc all feel the same queer sensation — • 
 about the heart ; I think it is — after talking 
 much." 
 
 Sir Austin nodded and blinked sadly, ex- 
 claiming to his soul, " Wild oats ! wild oats ! " 
 
 Lord Heddon vehemently preached wild 
 oats also. He was of opinion that a lad is all 
 the better for a " little racketing when he's 
 green." He had always found the best fellows 
 were wildish once, etc. 
 
 " How's your son ? " asked Sir Austin. 
 
 " O, Lipscombe's always the same," replies 
 the gouty advocate of wild oats. " He's quiet — 
 that's one good thing; but there's no getting 
 the country to take him, so I must give up 
 hopes of that." 
 
 Lord Lipscombe entering the room just 
 then. Sir Austin surveyed him, and was not 
 astonished at the refusal of the country to take 
 him. 
 
 " Wild oats ! wild oats ! " again thinks the 
 baronet, as he contemplates the headless, de- 
 generate, weedy issue and result. 
 
 He was content to remark that he thought 
 the third generation of wild oats would be a 
 pretty thin crop.
 
 1 82 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 The Ordeal of Richard Fevcrel is a great 
 book because it is a profoundly wise book. 
 The wise books of the world, the books which 
 embalm the deepest lessons of experience and 
 thus attain to a sort of sacred value, are few, 
 and thus become of necessity the classics of 
 literature. This is such a book, and it is not 
 only wise but witty, and is throughout exe- 
 cuted in Mr. Meredith's most brilliant manner. 
 There are sayings in it which cannot be for- 
 gotten : they are as memorable as the sayings 
 of Gautama or Confucius, of Marcus Aurelius 
 or Augustine, and might be the fit texts for 
 great sermons. 
 
 Take, at random, some half a dozen sen- 
 tences from that half-tragic note-book of Sir 
 Austin's, TJie Pilgrim's Scrip, a book in which 
 every record has the diamond's worth and 
 lustre, and, let us hope, the diamond's unchang- 
 ing endurance, too. 
 
 How profoundly religious are these aphor- 
 isms: 
 
 " Expediency is man's wisdom. Doing right 
 is God's." 
 
 " Until he has had some deep sorrow he 
 will not find the divine want of praj'er."
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH. 1 83 
 
 " Who rises from prayer a better man, his 
 prayer is answered." 
 
 " For this reason so many fall from God 
 who have attained to him, that they clini^ 
 to him with their weakness, not with their 
 strength." 
 
 And how keenly do these cut : 
 
 " Nature is not all dust. Through nature 
 only can we ascend. St. Simeon saw the Hog 
 in Nature, and took Nature for the Hog." 
 
 " It is the tendency of very fast people to 
 grow organically downward." 
 
 " O, women, who like and will have for hero 
 a rake! how soon arc you not to learn that 
 you have taken bankrupts to your bosoms, 
 and that the putrescent gold that attracted 
 you is the slime of the Lake of Sin ! " 
 
 Or, to conclude with three that touch a sun- 
 nier height: 
 
 "The compensation for injustice is that in 
 the darkest ordeal we gather the Avorthicst 
 round us." 
 
 " There is for the mind but one grasp of 
 happiness ; from that uppermost pinnacle of 
 wisdom, Avhence we see that this world is well 
 designed."
 
 184 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 And this most perfect of lovers' petitions: 
 "Give me purity to be worthy the good in 
 
 her, and grant her patience to reach the good 
 
 • >> 
 
 in me. 
 
 And these are but the chance gleanings of a 
 book which it has taken all these years to lift 
 into even moderate eminence, and which be- 
 yond its wisdom and its humor has every 
 quality of art and genius which can make a 
 novel great. The one consolation in the re- 
 membrance is that in this long ordeal of injus- 
 tice George Meredith has not failed to gather 
 the worthiest round him. 
 
 To catalogue qualities and speak of pathos, 
 humor, and imagination, and make quotations 
 is an easy task, but one feels that after all it 
 amounts to little. The real greatness of George 
 Meredith lies in something deeper and more in- 
 clusive ; it Is that he is a great poet who has 
 chosen chiefly to work in prose. His poetic 
 force is behind all he writes ; it is the animat- 
 ing soul of all. It is perpetually thrusting 
 aside the heavy garments of prose and flash- 
 ing out upon us in thought and phrases which 
 startle and fascinate us as only poetry can. 
 How exquisite is that whole picture of Rich-
 
 . GEORGE MEREDITH. 185 
 
 ard reading the diary of the dead Clare, with 
 its secrecies of unconfessed affection, its pa- 
 thetic humbleness, its meek reproach ! " He 
 could not read for tears. It was midnight. 
 The hour seemed to belong to her. The aw- 
 ful stillness and the darkness were Clare's. 
 Clare Doria Forey ! He knew the music of 
 that name. // soimdcd faint and viellozv now 
 behind the hills of death." Is not this poetry, 
 too — " He pronounced love a little modestly, 
 as it were, a blush in his voice ? " 
 
 When Sandra's song is finished the stillness 
 settles back again " like one folding up a pre- 
 cious jewel." And where are there any pas- 
 sages in the whole realm of fiction so full of 
 lyric rapture, so intoxicating in their charm of 
 perfect beauty, as those which describe the first 
 waking of love in Richard Feverel ? George 
 ]\Ieredith's greatest moments are in the inter- 
 pretation of young love and nature, and here 
 he does both. 
 
 "The little sky-lark went up above her, all 
 song, to the smooth southern cloud lying along 
 the blue ; from a dewy copse standing dark 
 over her nodding hat the blackbird flitted, 
 calling to her with thrice mellow note ; the
 
 1 86 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 kingfisher flashed emerald out of the green 
 osiers; a bow-winged heron travelled aloft, 
 seeking solitude ; a boat slipped toward her 
 containing a dreamy youth." 
 
 • • • • • • 
 
 " Stiller and stiller grew nature, as at the 
 meeting of two electric clouds." 
 
 • ••••• 
 
 " To-morrow this place will have a memory 
 — the river and the meadow, and the white 
 falling weir. His heart will build a temple 
 here, and the skylark will be its high-priest 
 and the old blackbird its glossy-gowned chor- 
 ister, and there will be a sacred repast of dew- 
 berries. . . 
 
 " Golden lie the meadows, golden run the 
 streams, red gold is on the pine-stems. The 
 sun is coming down to earth, and walks the 
 fields and the waters. 
 
 " The sun is coming down to earth, and the 
 fields and the waters shout to him golden 
 shouts. He comes, and his heralds run before 
 him and touch the leaves of oaks and planes 
 and beeches lucid green, and the pine-stems 
 redder gold, leaving brightest footsteps upon 
 thickly weeded banks, where the foxglove's
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH. 1 8/ 
 
 last upper-bells incline, and bramble shoots 
 wander amid moist rich herbac^c." 
 
 " For this is the home of enchantment. 
 Here, secluded from vexed shores, the prince 
 and princess of the island meet ; here, like 
 darklincj nightingales, they sit, and into eyes 
 and ears and hands pour endless ever-fresh 
 treasures of their souls." 
 
 • « • • • • 
 
 " Out in the world there, on the skirts of the 
 woodland, a sheep-boy pipes to meditative eve 
 on a penny whistle. Love's musical instru- 
 ment is as old, and as poor; it has but two 
 stops, and yet you see the cunning musician 
 does thus much with it." 
 
 " The tide of color has ebbed from the upper 
 sky. In the west the sea of sunken fire draws 
 back, and the stars leap forth and tremble and 
 retire before the advancing moon, who slips 
 the silver train of cloud from her shoulders, 
 and with her foot upon the pine-tops surveys 
 heaven. 
 
 " Young as when she looked upon the lovers 
 in paradise, the fair Immortal journeys onward.
 
 1 88 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 Fronting her it is not night, but veiled day. 
 Full half the sky is flushed. Not darkness ; 
 not day; but the nuptials of the two. 
 
 " A soft beam travels to the fern covert under 
 the pine-wood where they sit, and for answer 
 he has her eyes — turned to him an instant, 
 timidly fluttering over the depths of his, and 
 then downcast ; for through her eyes her soul 
 is naked to him. 
 
 " * Lucy ! my bride ! my life ! ' 
 
 " The night-jar spins his dark monotony on 
 the branch of the pine. The soft beam travels 
 round them and listens to their hearts. Their 
 lips are locked. 
 
 ** Pipe no more, Love, for a time ! Pipe as 
 you will, you cannot express their first kiss ; 
 nothing of its sweetness, and of the sacredness 
 of it nothing. St. Cecilia up aloft, before the 
 silver organ-pipes of paradise, pressing fingers 
 upon all the notes of which Love is but one, 
 from her you may hear it." 
 
 Much more might be said, but here it be- 
 comes necessary to obey the limits of space, 
 since this is an essay and not a treatise. The 
 women - characters of George Meredith are 
 worthy of an essay to themselves. They are
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH. 1 89 
 
 intensely living, and intensely human. It was 
 one of Lord Byron's fads to pretend disgust 
 at seeing women eat. It has been well said of 
 George IMeredith's women that they cat and 
 are not ashamed. Woman is to him no senti- 
 mental abstraction, no impossible deity; it de- 
 lights him to show us that she is flesh and 
 blood, and none the Avorse for it ; that in intel- 
 lectual power she is mate of man, and in moral 
 power his superior, because she lives closer to 
 the heart of nature ; that in fact the angel is as 
 false a description as the animal, and that in 
 any case the correcter our estimate of her the 
 higher will be her honor. He will have nothing 
 to do with the doctrine that woman is but 
 "undeveloped man," and he roundly denounces 
 it as a lie. The masculine and feminine are 
 forever different in scope, sphere, and es- 
 sence ; yet men " who have the woman in 
 them without being womanized are the pick 
 of men. And the choicest Avomen are those 
 who yield ncjt a feather of their womanliness 
 for some amount of manlike strength — man's 
 brain, woman's heart." She needs no spurious 
 daintiness to recommend her. Let her come 
 to us in native naturalness, antl she will save
 
 190 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 US ; for " women have us back to the condi- 
 tions of primitive man, or they shoot us higher 
 than the topmost star." Again and again 
 does George Meredith insist, as Mr. Le Gal- 
 lienne admirably puts it, that '' a man's rela- 
 tions to woman, how he regards her, how he 
 acts toward her, are the most significant things 
 about him." And for the man who misap- 
 prehends or misuses her there is tragic venge- 
 ance ; " for women are not the end but the 
 means of life, and they punish us for so per- 
 verting their uses. They punish society." But 
 this theme can only be indicated, not elab- 
 orated. 
 
 The chief thing, from the moral point of 
 view, which fills the mind after a thorough pe- 
 rusal of George Meredith's works is their ro- 
 bust hopefulness. He has gone down to the 
 sources of life ; he has uncovered its worst se- 
 crets ; he has surprised the unsuspected and 
 dragged into light the ignored elements of con- 
 duct ; he has been utterly true in his fealty to 
 ''sacred reality," but he has retained, in and 
 through all, his geniality, his faith in God and 
 man, his hope for the world. He has told us 
 that the only chance of happiness is the belief
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH. 191 
 
 that this world is well designed, and this is his 
 own belief; and he adds through the lips of his 
 Diana of the Crossways, " Who can really think 
 and not think hopefully ? " Like so many of 
 his aphorisms, this is one that goes to the root 
 of things and expresses a philosophy. It would 
 seem to teach that pessimism is the disease 
 of shallow minds, a surface complaint which 
 attacks mainly the less forceful and efficient 
 natures of the race ; the wider and deeper 
 natures have too strong a vitality to be its vic- 
 tims. Go deep enough, he says, and you will 
 find that the sources of hope and vital joy are 
 not dried up. You will find the world on the 
 whole well designed. You will find no chaos, 
 but a most Divine Kosmos, to know which is 
 to rejoice in life. Despair is a disease; the 
 sane and sound nature must needs be hopeful. 
 A little thought, like a little knowledge, is a 
 dangerous thing, and may breed pessimism. 
 A little more thought takes one out of the 
 storm-belt into the far-reaching sunlight. "/ 
 tJnnk it al'ays the pla7i in a dielemmer," says 
 the wise Mrs. Berry, " to pray Cod and walk 
 forward." Nor can any better plan be in- 
 vented for the guidance of bewildered souls.
 
 192 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 There is, of course, a thoughtless optimism, as 
 there is a thoughtless pessimism — the optim- 
 ism of those who recognize no problems or 
 dilemmas in life, and whose gaiety is the mere 
 frisking ebullience of the happy animal. But 
 the glory of George Meredith's optimism is 
 that having seen the worst he believes in the 
 best. Having touched the lowest depth, he 
 has still had eyes to discover the starry height, 
 and has had ears to hear the music of the 
 spheres. In this resolute and intelligent op- 
 timism he and Robert Browning once more 
 find themselves akin ; nor can I better express 
 the spirit of Meredith's work than by putting 
 into his lips the well-known verse of Browning : 
 
 " I have gone the whole round of creation ; I saw and I 
 
 spoke ; 
 I, a work of God's hand for that purpose, received in my 
 
 brain 
 And pronounced on the rest of his handwork — returned him 
 
 again 
 His creation's approval or censure : I spoke as I saw, 
 I report as a man may on God's work— a//V love^ yet alTs 
 
 law, '
 
 THE NEW REALISM. 1 93 
 
 THE NEW REALISM; 
 
 OLIVE SCIIRLINIlR, MARK RUTHERFORD, RUD- 
 YARD KIPLING, AND J. M. BARRIE. 
 
 ■piCTION must necessarily be realism or no- 
 J- thing. It holds the mirror up to life, and 
 according to the accuracy of its reflection is the 
 measure of its art. It is only possible, therefore, 
 to speak of a "new realism" in the sense that 
 new thoughts, a new life, an age of new sensa- 
 tions, must needs give us a new type of realism, 
 simply because fiction does not create conditions 
 but obeys them. 
 
 The new conditions we have, and out of them 
 the new fiction is arising. The growth of the 
 scientific spirit has imparted not merely accuracy 
 but quickness of observation to all classes of 
 literary workers ; the shrinkage of the world has 
 indefinitely broadened the area of vision, and has 
 multiplied the possible sensations of life even for 
 the humblest. In spite of the surface-cynicism 
 of the over-sensitised writers who are city-lovers, 
 it may be doubted if Englishmen have ever lived
 
 194 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 their life with such a passion and virility since 
 the days of Elizabeth. We feel the throb of life, 
 and it thrills us. We are shaken by the immense 
 thoughts that themselves seem to shake the 
 foundations of all things. We suffer and enjoy 
 with vehemence. And in this direction, if any- 
 where, we may detect the notes of the new 
 realism. It is fearless in recording its sensations, 
 and its sensations, whether of soul or body, are 
 full of this strange vehemence, this " rage of 
 living." The older novelist set himself to tell 
 a story, to invent characters and incidents ; the 
 new novelist sits down to expose his life, to 
 exploit his soul. 
 
 In Olive Schreiner we have a realist of this 
 new type, and one of the most remarkable. The 
 passion of living quivers in every line which she 
 has written, and it seizes on us from the first. 
 When the Shry of an African Farm first ap- 
 peared, it excited little attention. Its title did 
 not arouse interest, and its author was unknown. 
 The bulk of readers are not careful to inform 
 themselves on matters which relate to the dis- 
 tant dependencies of the empire, and the title of 
 the book suggested colonial statistics rather than 
 romance. People imagined that it had some-
 
 THE NEW REALISM. 1 95 
 
 thing to do with ostrich-farming, possibly with 
 gold-discoveries or diamond-mining, and the 
 average novel-reader let the book severely 
 alone. 
 
 But little by Httle it made its w^ay, and its 
 charm began to be felt. Criticism, at first cold, 
 became discriminating, and then enthusiastic. 
 Presently it became known that its author was a 
 woman, and that the book was one of the most 
 notable additions made to modern literature by 
 the genius of woman. Miss Olive Schreiner had 
 been brought up among the scenes which she so 
 vividly depicts. It was the passion of her own 
 intellect and heart which vibrated in this strange 
 book. A stronger note of passion had not been 
 struck since Charlotte Bronte died. For it is 
 with Jane Eyre that this book is to be rightly 
 classed. Both books are the product of solitary 
 lives, shut in by a narrow environment ; both arc 
 intensely individual and egoistic in their mould ; 
 both are written with fervid intensity of temper, 
 with daring originality, with a resolute determi- 
 nation to defy current taste in the effort to 
 express the mind of their writers. Each book 
 has an enduring value as an exposition of a 
 v/oman's nature.
 
 196 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 With writers like Charlotte Bronte and Olive 
 Schreiner the keynote of everything is that they 
 have loved and suffered, thought and struggled ; 
 and thus their books are autobiographies, and 
 their creations are the mouths through which 
 their own souls find utterance. Of all great 
 writers who deeply move us this must be largely 
 true ; in the pages of George Eliot, for example, 
 how often are we sensible of some fragrance of 
 softened reminiscence, which is carried by the 
 winds of the past from those early fields where 
 her austere childhood was passed ! But it is 
 different with writers like Charlotte Bronte and 
 Olive Schreiner : they are poets, and with all her 
 genius George Eliot was not a poet. They see 
 everything in the light of their own passionate 
 thoughts, and interpret it by their own passionate 
 experience. It is a piece of living, breathing, 
 ardent womanhood that is given to the world in 
 such books. The personal note dominates every- 
 thing. When we listen to Jane Eyre, it is the 
 voice of Charlotte Bronte which we recognise; 
 when Lyndall thrills us with her strange elo- 
 quence, we are listening to Olive Schreiner. 
 
 So much is this the case with the Story of an 
 African Farm, that as we read it we entirely lose
 
 THE NEW REALISM. 1 97 
 
 sight of the vagueness and indeterminate convo- 
 lutions of the plot, and are simply overpowered 
 by the spirit of the book. We cease to care 
 about the plot. The figures move hither and 
 thither, like figures in a luminous mist ; they 
 emerge ever and again into dazzling distinctness, 
 and then are lost, and become mere shadovv^y 
 outlines. But the fascinating music of the speech 
 goes on all the time, and the atmosphere is 
 tremulous with passion. One of the charges 
 which criticism has brought against the book is 
 this very vagueness of plot. We- do not quite 
 know how the tragedy of folly falls on Lyndall, 
 or what becomes of Waldo. It is said Waldo 
 goes out to sleep in the sunshine, and presently 
 the chickens begin to climb upon his breast un- 
 disturbed. Em brings him a cup of milk, and 
 seeing that he is asleep, sets it silently by his 
 side and withdraws. 
 
 " The mother-hen was at work still among the 
 stones, but the chickens had climbed about him, 
 and were perching on him. Ohe stood upon his 
 shoulder, and rubbed its little head softly against 
 his black curls ; another tried to balance itself 
 on the very edge of his old felt hat. One tiny 
 fellow stood upon his hand, and tried to crow;
 
 198 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 another had nestled itself down comfortably on 
 the old coat-sleeve, and gone to sleep there. 
 
 " Em did not drive them away; but she covered 
 the glass softly at his side. ' He will wake soon/ 
 she said, * and be glad of it.' 
 
 " But the chickens were wiser." 
 
 Surely it is a very blunt imagination indeed 
 that does not know what became of Waldo after 
 a perusal of this passage. It is the poetry of 
 death — the whole irony and humiliation of it 
 concentrated in that one phrase : " But the 
 chickens were wiser." People who have not 
 enough imagination in them to complete that 
 most pathetic suggestion ought not to read the 
 African Farm. It is a poem, and needs a 
 touch of poetry in the reader, if it is to be 
 fully comprehended. 
 
 It is the old ever-recurring note that resounds 
 throughout the book : the irony and mystery of 
 life, and the yet keener irony and deeper mys- 
 tery of religion. Olive Schreiner might have 
 said with Heine, "The irony of God lies heavy 
 on me." The great African solitude is her effec- 
 tual "mattress-grave," from which she harangues 
 the Almighty with endless winged words of 
 bitterness and passion. The note of revolt is
 
 THE NEW REALISM. IQQ 
 
 struck with the first pages of the book, which 
 depict the desolate childhood of Waldo. Waldo 
 is a child-idealist, to whom the Bible facts are 
 literally true. He reads in the Bible that what- 
 soever we ask we shall receive, and he believes 
 it with unquestioning faith. He reads of altars 
 erected, on which lay the gift man had prepared 
 for God, and of God answering the man by 
 assuring fire from heaven. He prepares his little 
 altar, and lays upon it his simple gift. He prays 
 aloud : — 
 
 " ' O God, my Father, I have made Thee a 
 sacrifice. I have only twopence, so I cannot buy 
 a lamb. If the lambs were mine, I would give 
 Thee one ; but now I have only this meat : it is 
 my dinner-meat. Please, my Father, send fire 
 down from heaven to burn it. Thou hast said, 
 *' Whosoever shall say unto this mountain. Be 
 thou cast into the sea, nothing doubting, it shall 
 be done." I ask for the sake of Jesus Christ. 
 Amen.' 
 
 " He knelt down with his face upon the ground, 
 and he folded his hands upon his curls. When 
 he looked up he knew what he should see — the 
 glory of God ! 
 
 *' He looked up — nothing broke the intense
 
 200 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 stillness of the blue overhead. He looked round 
 in astonishment, then he bowed again, and this 
 time longer than before. 
 
 * * * * ?■: » 
 
 *' He walked home behind his flock. His 
 heart was heavy. He reasoned so : * God can- 
 not lie. I had faith. No fire came. I am like 
 Cain — I am not His. He will not hear my 
 prayer. God hates me.' '"' 
 
 So the boy tries to reconcile the miracles of 
 the Bible with the unalterable facts of nature, 
 and at length he cries, " I love Jesus Christ, but 
 I hate God." 
 
 We have had women theologians in plenty 
 during the last decade — Edna Lyall, Mrs. Ward, 
 and the authoress of Johi Ward, Preacher — but 
 the saddest of them all is Olive Schreiner. For 
 her the riddle of things shows no sign of solution, 
 and the " burden of this unintelligible world " is 
 never lifted, even for a moment. And yet the 
 essence of Christianity is unmistakably hers, and 
 the bias of her nature is toward faith. Her 
 temper is the temper of the man in the Gospels 
 who said, " I believe ! help Thou my unbelief." 
 Perhaps the most memorable thing about the 
 whole book is that it is the story of an isolated
 
 THE NEW REALISM. 20I 
 
 life, trying to find out for itself the solution of 
 age-long problems, omitting no difficulty, ignoring 
 no hope, but honestly resolute to stand its ground 
 in the agonising search for truth. It is not un- 
 likely that the home-life of Olive Schreiner's 
 childhood did much to give this mould to her 
 mind. Her father was a simple German mission- 
 ary, her mother a woman of brilliant mind, to 
 whom the problems of theology presented endless 
 fascinations. And if it be true, as it is stated, 
 that the mother became a Catholic, how much is 
 revealed by the statement, of that atmosphere of 
 controversy, of spiritual inquiry, of simple faith 
 in constant conflict with scientific fact, in which 
 the sensitive mind of this child grew. Calvinist, 
 Catholic, Agnostic — all beneath one roof — all 
 bound together in the communism of blood ! Is 
 it any wonder that a theological novel should 
 grow in such soil, that between father and mother 
 the daughter should not know where her faith 
 might find a resting-place for the sole of its foot ? 
 But perhaps the noblest part of the book is 
 the passionate advocacy of woman's rights which 
 is uttered by th(> lips of Lyndall. The chapter 
 wliich is called by her name is from beginning to 
 end one of the most striking pieces of writing in
 
 202 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 modern fiction. It is a woman's protest on behalf 
 of woman, intensely felt, and spoken with infinite 
 energy and eloquence. Pathos, wit, humor, epi- 
 gram, dialectic ; tenderness and scorn, sarcasm, 
 irony and banter, things original and things 
 indisputable, touches of poetry and pleading, fol- 
 lowed instantly by the bitterest invective, — all 
 these are here, and all are expressed with 
 masterly ease and vigor. Take at random some 
 half-dozen passages. 
 
 " Finishing schools finish everything but imbe- 
 cility and weakness, and that they cultivate." 
 
 " It is dehghtful to be a woman, but every man 
 thanks the Lord devoutly that he isn't one." 
 
 " The less a woman has in her head, the lighter 
 she is for climbing." 
 
 "They bring weighty arguments against us 
 when we ask for the perfect freedom of women," 
 she said. "They say that women do not wish 
 for the sphere and freedom we ask for them, and 
 would not use it. If the bird does like its cage, 
 and does like its sugar, and will not leave it, why 
 keep the door so very carefully shut ? Why not 
 open it, only a little ? " 
 
 " We bear the world, and we make it. The 
 souls of little children arc marvellously delicate
 
 THE NEW REALISM. 203 
 
 and tender things, and keep for ever the shadow 
 that first falls on them, and that is a mother's, 
 or at best a woman's. There was never a great 
 man who had not a great mother — it is hardly 
 an exaggeration. The first six years of our life 
 make us ; all that is added later is veneer : and 
 yet some say, if a woman can cook a dinner, or 
 dress herself well, she has culture enough." 
 
 "The meanest girl who dances and dresses 
 becomes something higher when her children 
 look up into her face and ask her questions. It 
 is the only education we have, and which they 
 cannot take from us." 
 
 "They say, 'Your highly cultivated women 
 will not be lovable, will not love.' Do they see 
 nothing, understand nothing ? It is Tant' Sannie 
 (the Boer-woman) who buries husbands one after 
 another, and folds her hands resignedly — 'The 
 Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away ' — and 
 looks for another. It is the hard-headed, deep 
 thinker who, when the wife who thought and 
 worked with him goes, can find no rest, and 
 lingers near her till he finds sleep beside her." 
 
 And what a lesson in chivalry is that little 
 story she tells in this same chapter of the men in 
 the coach who all made room for her because she
 
 204 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 was pretty, and refused a place to an old woman 
 who cried, — 
 
 " ' My son-in-law is ill, and I must go and see 
 him.' 
 
 " I got up and gave her my place. 
 "Oh no, no!' they cried, 'we will not allow 
 that.' 
 
 "'I will rather kneel,' said one, and he crouched 
 down at my feet : so the woman came in. 
 
 "There were nine of us in that coach, and only 
 one showed chivalrous attention — and that was a 
 woman to a woman. 
 
 " I shall be old and ugly, too, one day, and I 
 shall look for men's chivalrous help, but I shall 
 not find it." 
 
 In her later collection of sketches, called 
 Dreams, Olive Schreiner has given full rein to 
 her idealism, v/ith not altogether perfect results. 
 There is great eloquence, powerful imagination, 
 occasionally an almost antique severity and im- 
 pressiveness of outline, many deep and many 
 noble things; but the air is thin, the intensity is 
 lacking. She is intense and moving precisely as 
 she keeps her grip on common life, and it is the 
 vital reality of the African Farm that gives it 
 its power. The Story of an African Farm is a
 
 THE NEW REALISM. 205 
 
 human document of first-rate importance. It is 
 not the work of a maker of books ; it is the 
 utterance of a soul that feels, " Woe is unto me 
 if I preach not this message ! " It glows, throbs, 
 palpitates ; it is a piece of life, and hence is full 
 of significance and interest for every student of 
 life. It is not a book from which any great 
 example of conduct may be drawn ; but it makes 
 one think. It sets forth human frailty and aspi- 
 ration with equal sincerity — the folly of the one, 
 the divine height of the other. It is, as it calls 
 itself, a romance. It is common life glorified by 
 an atmosphere of poetry. Consider what all this 
 means, and then think of the immense accumu- 
 lation of novels around us — how dreary they are, 
 how insipid, how hackneyed in incident, how 
 vulgar in thought, how tawdry in style 1 When 
 we have effected this comparison, we shall be 
 able to understand how truly memorable a book 
 is the Slory of an African Farm. 
 
 Of the same class as Olive Schreiner's African 
 Farm is the so-called AnfobiograpJiy of Mark 
 Rutherford. I say "so-called" because it is 
 excessively difficult to determine where per- 
 sonal narration ends and fiction begins,— whether
 
 206 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 indeed it is in truth an autobiography or a novel. 
 Olive Schreiner's brilliant book is frankly called 
 a romance, but is largely a moral autobiography. 
 Mark Rutherford is called an autobiography, but 
 may be a romance. The bond between the two 
 books is that both are human documents of first- 
 rate importance. Both deal with the deepest 
 things of the heart and mind, and the chief 
 characteristic of each is moral intensity. 
 
 I prefer to assume that Mark Rutherford is a 
 real history, at least in its main features ; for if 
 it be fiction, we must go to Defoe himself to find 
 anything approaching it in the art of intricate 
 realism. It is simply the story of a dissenting 
 minister who is confronted with modern doubt, 
 who passes step by step into the dreary realm 
 of negation, and who is delivered by processes 
 which do not appear very clear or decisive. This 
 is as commonplace a story as could be invented. 
 Mrs. Humphry Ward has told essentially the 
 same story, and has pictured her somewhat 
 weak-kneed hero finally abandoning Christianity 
 because the authenticity of the Book of Daniel is 
 doubtful. In her way of putting the problem, 
 the cause is so ludicrously inefficient for the 
 effect that it is marvellous that any first-rate
 
 THE NEW REALISM. 20/ 
 
 religious critic thought it necessary to deal 
 seriously with the book, and the whole book 
 bears the witness of invention rather than expe- 
 rience. In Mark RutJierford nothing strikes one 
 as invented. The story bears the impress of 
 absolute truth. The smell of fire has passed over 
 the book; the pages seem scorched with agony; 
 the words seem to actually ring and vibrate on 
 the ear with the intensity of a personal cry. 
 Mark Rutherford's troubles go far deeper than 
 the authenticity of the Book of Daniel. He 
 uncovers the very roots of faith and doubt. He 
 dissects his own heart with a ruthless dialectic 
 surgery. He tells us everything about himself, 
 and is unsparing in the revelation of his own 
 weaknesses. He appeals for no pity — even from 
 himself. In short, it is a Soul's Tragedy which 
 he paints, and as it has scarcely ever been painted 
 before in English literature. The only book with 
 which it can be compared is De Quincey's Con- 
 /essi'ons of an Opium Eater, and in sustained 
 realism and the iron note of tragedy which 
 resounds throughout its pages it is worthy of 
 the comparison. 
 
 ft 
 
 This may seem extraordinary praise, and no 
 doubt it is. The fact that the book has had a 
 U
 
 2o8 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 comparatively limited circulation may seem to 
 many to render such praise more than doubtful. 
 But it is not in the nature of things that such a 
 book should win rapid fame. It is not a brilliant 
 romance like the African Farm^ and it is un- 
 relieved by more than the faintest touches of 
 humor, which fall across its gloom like pulses of 
 sunset light upon a thunder-cloud. It relies for 
 its effects upon simplicity and sincerity — simpli- 
 city of style, which occasionally reaches almost 
 to sublimity, but by the most natural means; 
 sincerity of spirit, which assumes that the real 
 story of a human soul cannot but make its appeal 
 felt by kindred souls. As a mere study of English 
 it has few rivals. Page after page is absolutely 
 flawless in style, and on every page it is possible 
 to select sentences which are marvels of expres- 
 sion. If Mark Rutherford is not literature, I do 
 not know what is. If this is not a Dook that has 
 come to stay, that will grow in appreciation 
 slowly but surely year by year, and be quoted 
 when the history of our time is written as one of 
 the notable productions of this century's literature, 
 I do not know any book that is likely to attain 
 such fame. 
 
 It may always be assumed that whon a book
 
 THE NEW REALISM. 209 
 
 exercises a great power over a reader, there is 
 something in the reader corresponding to the 
 author; some similarity of vital sympathy, of 
 experience, or of thought. It is only fair that 
 this should be remembered in order to under- 
 stand why this book moves us. It is possible 
 that it may not move others. There may be no 
 chord in them that responds to the distress of 
 Mark Rutherford. It is even possible that they 
 may esteem it a dull or a dangerous book. It is 
 undoubtedly a sad book, and, like Olive Schreiner's 
 romance, it is a book that makes you think. If 
 the reader is one who requires cheerfulness and 
 jocularity to make any sort of reading acceptable 
 to him, he will not like this book. If he is easily 
 swept away by the influences of doubt, and has 
 never learned to think, to measure reasons, to 
 weigh conclusions, perhaps he had better leave 
 this book alone. But if he has been touched 
 with the spirit of his time, if he has wrestled in 
 darkness, and dwelt in uncomprehended loneli- 
 ness of soul, and pondered thoughts too deep for 
 him, and felt all the cruel drudgery, the callous- 
 ness, the solitude of life in great cities, he will 
 hail this book as the voice of a friend in the 
 wilderness. For one man only to be able to say
 
 210 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 to anotner, " I too have suffered as 3^ou do," is 
 in a sense for him to be the healer and helper of 
 his brother. It is an assurance, at least, that no 
 suffering we endure is really special or unique. 
 And thus Mark Rutherford says, "There is no 
 saviour for us like the hero who has passed 
 triumphantly through the distress which troubles 
 its. Salvation is the spectacle of a victory by 
 another over foes like our own. The story of 
 Jesus is the story of the poor and the forgotten. 
 Every one who has walked in sadness because 
 his destiny has not fitted his aspirations ; every 
 one who, having no opportunity to lift himself 
 out of his narrow little town or village circle of 
 acquaintances, has thirsted for something beyond 
 what they can give him ; everybody v/ho, with 
 nothing but a dull, daily round of mechanical 
 routine before him, would welcome death, if it were 
 martyrdom for a cause ; every humblest creature 
 in the obscurity of great cities or remote hamlets, 
 who silently does his or her duty without recog- 
 nition — all these turn to Jesus, and find them- 
 selves in Him." The mission of Mark Rutherford 
 is to tell thousands of struggling souls that he 
 has passed through the distress which troubles 
 them. He does not pretend to have been v/holly
 
 THE NEW REALISM. 211 
 
 triumphant, but he has endured to the end, and 
 he thus becomes the comrade-soul of all the 
 doubtful, the lonely, and the unhappy. 
 
 The noblest characteristic of this book is its 
 utter honesty, and this constitutes its special 
 value. How few of us are willing to tell all the 
 truth about ourselves ! How few of the great 
 autobiographies of the world unveil the deepest 
 things, and the most secret, of the soul. Mark 
 Rutherford never attempts to conceal from us 
 any element either ot weakness or folly which 
 may explain his own life. And in similar fashion 
 he tells the exact truth about the persons and 
 things which compose his life. He often touches 
 them with the lightest but most piercing irony, 
 but always fairly. Who does not see at once the 
 Theological College of twenty years ago, presided 
 over by "an elderly gentleman with a pompous 
 degree of doctor of divinity — a gentleman with 
 lightish hair, with a most melHfluous voice and 
 a most pastoral manner, reading his prim little 
 tracts to us, directed against the shallow infidel ? 
 About a dozen of these tracts settled the infidel 
 and the whole mass of unbelief from the time 
 of Celsus downward." In this place, where 
 ministers were trained, forsooth, " German " was
 
 212 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 a word of vague but awful reproach. To have 
 "German" tendencies in theology was almost 
 as bad as to have atheistic leanings. And adds 
 Mark Rutherford grimly, "the President's task 
 was all the easier because he knew nothing of 
 German literature." 
 
 There is an extraordinary vividness about 
 every portrait in this book ; each is clearly from 
 the life, and full of force, which is the more 
 noticeable because they are often mere vignettes, 
 indicated in a few vigorous strokes. " The blonde 
 youth, with greyish eyes, a mouth not quite shut, 
 and an eternal simper on his face," who reads 
 only denominational newspapers and helps to 
 sermonising, and is great at tea meetings; 
 M'Kay, with his fierce resentment against the 
 immedicable suffering of London ; Ta3dor, with 
 his absolute daily serfdom, raging and weeping 
 in secret over insults which he dared not resent ; 
 John, the waiter, " crushed out of all shape " by 
 the hardness of life ; Cardinal, the Yorkshireman, 
 with his intolerable home-life : these, and many 
 more, are not so much portraits as living crea- 
 tures whom we know and have met. Especially 
 perfect is every sketch of female character. In 
 the few lines which describe the depressed,
 
 THE NEW REALISM. 213 
 
 unresisting servitude of M 'Kay's wife, we have 
 the whole tragedy of a commonplace woman's life 
 enacted for us. Perfect, too, is the sketch of old 
 Wollaston, the atheistic publisher, proud of ideas 
 which were acquired long ago, and which " never 
 fructified in him, but were like hard stones which 
 he rattled in his pocket " ; and of his daughter 
 Theresa, with her calm brain and austere lips, 
 who permits herself one moment of tenderness 
 and then disappears out of the life of Rutherford 
 forever. And is there anywhere a more striking 
 picture than that of the child Marie, who seems 
 so dull, so stupid, whose nature cannot be un- 
 locked, but who is transformed instantly by the 
 crisis of sorrow into a child-heroine ? Rutherford 
 had not loved Marie because he had not under- 
 stood her. Now, when his wife lies at the door 
 of death, when Marie has suddenly become the 
 most perfect of nurses, he sa3''s, " My love to 
 Marie was love of God Himself as Me is— an 
 unrestrained adoration of an efflux from Ilim, 
 adoration transfigured into love, because the 
 revelation had clothed itself with a child's form. 
 ... I had seen the kingdom of God through a 
 httle child." Mark Rutherford has no need to 
 describe a charactt r ; he has the rare art of using
 
 214 QUEST AND \ISION. 
 
 precisely the right word, the pregnant phrase, 
 which makes it at once instinct with hfe. We 
 do not read his history so much as Hve his hfe 
 with him. 
 
 One element which makes this book so fasci- 
 nating is the intense sympathy that breathes 
 through it. The sympathy of Rutherford is 
 always streaming out toward every species of 
 hurt, maimed, or sorrowful life. There is a per- 
 petual hunger for love in him, which finds only 
 a late satisfaction. How m.any will recognise 
 their own youthful sensitiveness in his cry that 
 he could never find an ideal friendship, that he 
 always called twice for his friend's once, that 
 he always seemed to be obtruding his love, that 
 at length the conviction grev/ upon him that 
 "there was nothing in him." And how finely 
 does he say of love when once he has found it, 
 " If a man wants to know the potency of love, he 
 must be a menial ; he must be despised. Those 
 who are prosperous and courted cannot under- 
 stand its power. Let him come home after he 
 has suffered worse than hatred — the contempt of 
 a superior, who knows that he can afford to be 
 contemptuous, seeing that he can replace his 
 slave at a moment's notice ; let him be trained
 
 THE NEW REALISM. 
 
 - J 
 
 by his tyrant to dwell upon the thought that he 
 belongs to the vast crowd of people in London 
 who are unimportant, almost useless, to whom it 
 is a charity to oifer employment, who are con- 
 scious of possessing no gift which makes them of 
 any value to anybody, and he will then compre- 
 hend the divine efficacy of the affection of that 
 woman to whom he is dear. God's mercy be 
 praised evermore for it ! I cannot write poetry, 
 but if I could, no theme would tempt me like that 
 of love to such a person as I was — not love, as I 
 say again, to the hero, but love to the Helot." 
 
 If in any sense it can be said that he is at 
 last dehvered from doubt, the deliverance comes 
 simply through the development of a Christ-like 
 love for others. He found, poor drudge as he 
 was, that he still had in him the power of helping 
 others. He gathered round him in Drury Lane 
 men like Taylor the porter and John the waiter. 
 He aimed at doing something practically to im- 
 prove their lot, and of making them content with 
 it. "That was our religion," he says; "we 
 admitted nothing Vvhich did not help us in that 
 direction, and everything which did help us." 
 The old struggle between fear and doubt gra- 
 dually wore itself out. Indeed, the main lesson
 
 2l6 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 of the book is meant to be that it is useless to 
 pursue inquiries for which we have not strength, 
 to break ourselves against the relentless barri- 
 cades of problems which we have no power to 
 solve or assail. His deliverance comes not by 
 the solution of the old difficulties, but by their 
 evasion. He gets to see that no perfect theory 
 of the universe is possible, and he learns to 
 accept life as it is. It is thus that he becomes 
 the helper of the troubled soul after all. He not 
 merely inflicts on us the story of his sorrows; 
 he makes us the sharers of his aspirations. "I 
 should like to add," says he, in one of the most 
 memorable passages of the book, "one more 
 beatitude to those of the Gospels, and to say, 
 'Blessed are they who heal us of our self- 
 despisings.' Of all services which can be done 
 to man, I know of none more precious." In some 
 degree, it may be said that he has earned his 
 own beatitude ; he has comforted the despised. 
 
 There are many other elements in this extra- 
 ordinary book on which I have no space to dwell. 
 One of the most remarkable is the deep poetry of 
 its love for nature. Every description of nature 
 is perfect ; especially when it is the sea or the 
 starry sky that is pictured. And here also the
 
 THE NEW REALISM. 21/ 
 
 prevailing literary habit is seen ; the descriptions 
 are perfect not by the accumulation of language, 
 but by the use of precisely the right language. 
 There is not a word too much, and each word is 
 felt to be the one right word. It is by such a 
 test that the literary value of a book is best 
 judged. It is only the supreme literary artist 
 who makes language so thoroughly his servant, 
 that he can secure perfect effects by the simplest 
 words. The language of this book fits the thought 
 with marvellous precision, and this is part of its 
 charm. It is only part, however. The charm 
 lies deeper than this, in its moral, religious, and 
 humanitarian fervor. The book is, in fact, the 
 product of a combination of qualities and circum- 
 stances which render it unique in modern fiction, 
 and while it is unique, it is still typical of the new 
 realism. 
 
 Of a very different order is the work of Mr. 
 Kipling and the fortune of his books. One might 
 apply to Mark Rutherford the words that were 
 uttered of that brilliant man of genius Henri 
 Frederick Amiel, " At twenty he was proud, 
 timid, and melancholy ; discouragement took 
 possession of him very early." In thinking of
 
 2l8 QUEST AND VISION, 
 
 Mr. Kipling I am reminded of one of Amiel's own 
 sayings, that " the world has two ways of ruining 
 us, by granting us everything we desire and by 
 denying us everything. It is hard to say which 
 inflicts the more terrible discipline upon the man 
 of genius. To awake and find oneself famous is 
 a dream dear to the heart of youth. But it may 
 be doubted if his is not the happier lot who has 
 had time to lay the foundations of character sure 
 and steadfast before the searching light of fame is 
 flashed upon him. 
 
 "No record Art keeps 
 Of her travail and throes. 
 There is toil on the steeps ; 
 On the summits, — repose." 
 
 Mr. Kipling has not gained the summits, and 
 fame has surprised him while yet upon the 
 steeps. 
 
 There is assuredly no touch of discouragement 
 or timidity about Mr. Kipling. He is irritat- 
 ingly cocksure of everything. He writes with 
 perfect self-assurance. The youth who went to 
 India at sixteen, with no journalistic experience, 
 to sub-edit an important daily paper, was clearly 
 not the sort of person to fail in anything through 
 timidit3\ When Robert Brovv'ning was once asked
 
 TPIE NEW REALISM. 219 
 
 where he had graduated, he replied, " In the 
 University of Italy." Mr, Kipling might reply 
 to a similar question, " In the University of 
 India." He has had the best of all trainings 
 for the novelist, a rough and various experience 
 of hfe. But in that strenuous tussle vv'ith the 
 world something is lost as well as gained, and 
 there can scarcely be a more perilous experiment 
 for genius than to find itself suddenly lifted 
 from an obscure Indian newspaper office into the 
 publicity which the adulation of two continents 
 can confer. Mr. Kipling has shown his strength 
 by the coolness with which he has taken fame. 
 It says something for his energy of character 
 that he should disappear in the height of the 
 London season, and toil through weeks of soli- 
 tude at the rate of twelve hours a day ; and 
 that he should refuse with disdain vast financial 
 offers to give readings from his works in Australia. 
 But the artistic temper which will not permit 
 scamped work is needed as well as the cool 
 head which is not turned by sudden fame, if 
 Mr. Kipling is finally to find the summits. There 
 is a vivid passage in The Light that Failed, in 
 which Dick, who has painted a bad picture and 
 knows it is bad, excuses himself by saying that
 
 220 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 it will bring in "the very desirable dollars." 
 " You've no notion," he says, " what the certainty 
 of cash means to a man who has always wanted 
 it badly. I've worked for this, I've sweated and 
 starved for this, line on line and month after 
 month. And now I've got it, I'm going to make 
 the most of it while it lasts. Let them pay. 
 They've no knowledge." "Unless you take pre- 
 cious good care," his friend grimly retorts, " you 
 will fall under the damnation of the check-book ; 
 and that's worse than death." And that is pre- 
 cisely Mr. Kipling's own special peril. In reading 
 some of the flimsier of his newspaper work we are 
 reminded of another sentence which Dick's friend 
 addresses to him, " Why do you want to work 
 on a weekly newspaper? It's a slow bleeding 
 of power." 
 
 In nothing has Mr. Kipling been more fortu- 
 nate than his themes. He has opened up a new 
 and almost absolutely unknown vein. India has 
 been formally an appanage of the British crown 
 for a considerable number of years, but the real 
 annexation of India has been accomplished by 
 Mr. Kipling. What Burke could not do by his 
 eloquence, nor Macaulay by his immense pictorial 
 skill, nor generations of writers and statesmen by
 
 THE NEW REALISM. 221 
 
 their histories, novels, and orations, has been done 
 at a stroke by this youth of five-and-twenty. For 
 the first time India has become a real world to 
 the home-staying Englishman. The secret of 
 this new wizardry lies in the astonishingly 
 brilliant power of observation which Mr. Kipling 
 has brought to bear on Indian life. He has 
 concerned himself not at all with the problems 
 of the soul, and has never allowed us to pene- 
 trate for an instant into the secrets of his own 
 being. No author of wide fame has given us 
 fewer glimpses of his real self in his writings. 
 Perhaps this impersonal character of his work 
 is one of the things that strikes the reader most. 
 If Miss Amelia Edwards is right in her verdict 
 that the didactic novelist is a nuisance, and that 
 the only duty of the novelist is to paint life as 
 he sees it, then this must be conceded to Kipling 
 for artistic righteousness. He holds the mirror 
 up to nature, and simply reflects what he sees. 
 He does this with astonishing truth and daring. 
 In vivid power of observation there is hardly 
 any writer of fiction who can compete with him. 
 He takes note of all the insignificant details, as 
 well as the larger aspects of things, and he puts 
 them all down, lie knows that they tar the
 
 222 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 mouths of cannon, that you cannot taste tobacco 
 in the dark, that charwomen patronise three 
 kinds of soap, "yaller, an' mottled, an' disin- 
 fectink," and a hundred other absurdly insigni- 
 ficant trivialities of common life. He puts down 
 the conversation of people as they do really talk, 
 and omits nothing out of regard to good taste. 
 He is brutally photographic and phonographic in 
 his methods of procedure. He has no care to 
 conceal the seamy side of things ; Vv^hat he has 
 seen he is determined you shall see too in all its 
 nakedness, its "palpitating actuality." He can 
 give you a character in a phrase. Mrs. Jennett, 
 in The Light that Failed, occupies no space in the 
 story, but we know her through and through 
 with all her suave cruelty, her smooth hypocrisy, 
 her cat-like deceit. Still more clever is the 
 figure of " the red-haired impressionist girl." 
 She has no name. This phrase is all we know 
 her by ; yet so vividly is her figure drawn that I 
 think I should know her if I met her in the 
 street. These are great gifts, and no one who 
 has given any attention to Mr. Kipling's stories 
 can doubt that he possesses them. His power 
 of observation is extraordinary, and is of the 
 highest order.
 
 THE NEW REALISM. 223 
 
 The quickness of his eye is matched by the 
 quickness of his ear. He has a genius for pick- 
 ing up the trick of phrases. Nothing in Soldiers 
 Three is more remarkable than this. We have 
 Learoyd the Yorkshireman, Mulvaney the Irish- 
 man, and Ortheris the Cockney, In each the 
 dialect is perfectly rendered. To confuse one 
 with another for a single instant is impossible ; 
 their speech bewrayeth them. So too in Badalia 
 Herodsfoot the vernacular of low life is unmis- 
 takable. And this is a much rarer power than 
 is supposed. Even Dickens sometimes failed to 
 catch the right accentuation of the provincial 
 dialect. Kipling never fails in matters like these. 
 His ear catches the trick without effort, and he 
 reproduces it with an almost startling vividness. 
 He carries the art almost to excess. His spelling 
 becomes occasionally so intricate that we have to 
 consider it twice before we know what it stands 
 for. This mastery of dialect is again evidence 
 of the alertness of his perceptions. He sees 
 his subject with searching distinctness ; and 
 while he is thus intensely realistic, yet he pos- 
 sesses great imaginative power. The Record of 
 Badalia Herodsfoot is a fine instance both of 
 imaginative sympathy and observation. It is, I 
 15
 
 224 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 think, the finest study of low London hfe which 
 I have ever read. I do not know anything quite 
 equal to it in fidelity, completeness of depiction, 
 truth of observation, and tragic power. This, at 
 least, is something that Dickens would have been 
 proud to have written, and perhaps no one else 
 could have written it ; and the touch of mournful 
 irony with which the curtain is rung down on 
 poor, ignorant, martyred Badalia has genuine 
 poetry in it too. " It was a seven pound fifteen 
 shilling funeral, and all Gunnison Street turned 
 out to do it honor. All but two ; for Lascar 
 Loo's mother saw that a Power had departed." 
 
 Take, again, the seven stories called Soldiers 
 Three. How vivid is the whole picture ! The 
 material is commonplace enough, and is even 
 repulsive at times, but we feel that here is the 
 truth of things. Tommy Atkins, the poor private 
 soldier, by whose unconsidered suffering and un- 
 rewarded valor the greatness of the empire has 
 been built up ; Tommy Atkins, in his ignorance, his 
 coarse environment, his low temptations, his hard 
 lot, his simple heroism, his redeeming nobleness 
 in the hour of peril, is here painted as no human 
 hand has ever painted him before. With what 
 sympathy docs Kipling handle him ! He is true
 
 THE NEW REALISM. 225 
 
 to his method ; he is brutally photographic still ; 
 but he attains to the higher art of showing us 
 the very worst of his three heroes, and yet of 
 leading us rather to remember their best — the 
 real, virile, heroic manliness that is hidden under 
 the coarse exterior of his very questionable pro- 
 teges. But in all that he has to do with war and 
 soldiers his dehneation is masterly. Let any one 
 read the story called With the Main Guards or 
 the account of the fight in the desert in The Light 
 that Failed, and he will see what I mean. It is 
 war indeed, but not in its glory ; not in its mere- 
 tricious splendor as presented for home con- 
 sumption ; but in its brutality, its hideous lust 
 of slaughter, its barbarism and blackguardism, 
 and in its infinite courage too. The realism is at 
 times too powerful. The thick human steam of 
 the mass of struggling men, writhing and tramp- 
 ling and stabbing in the "gut between two hills, 
 as black as a bucket, an' as thin as a girl's 
 waist," is too much for us, and makes us sick 
 with disgust. The picture of the Englishman 
 gouging out the eyes of his Arab assailant, and 
 coolly wiping his thumbs on his trousers, inspires 
 revulsion, horror. Nevertheless this is war, and 
 it is painted in its grim reality. I can conceive
 
 226 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 of nothing more likely to help the propaganda of 
 the Peace Society than that these passages should 
 be read everywhere. We look, as we read, on 
 the unleashing of every savage passion in man, 
 " the dogs of war " indeed. It is a saturnalia 
 of brutality. Mulvaney accurately describes it 
 when he cries, "They was mad — mad — mad! 
 Crook sits down in the quiet that fell when we 
 had gone down the valley, an' covers his face 
 wid his hands. Prisintly v/e all came back again 
 according to our natures and dispositions, for 
 they, mark you, show through the hide av a man 
 in that hour." And yet amid it all we never lose 
 sympathy with the poor private soldier who spills 
 his blood so readily in the quarrels of others. 
 Equally of the savage and of the heroic deeds of 
 the battlefield, and particularly of the share that 
 Tommy Atkins has in the latter, the words of 
 Mulvaney are worth memory : " By my faith, 
 there's a dale more done in the field than iver 
 gets into field ordhers ! " 
 
 The famous Barrack-Room Ballads are marked 
 by the same quahties, and the same defects of 
 qualities, as the prose stories. In power, sheer 
 masterful literary power, they are superb. 
 They compel admiration. They have in them
 
 THE NEW REALISM. 22/ 
 
 something of that quah'ty which " stirs the heart 
 like a trumpet." Who can read the Ballad of the 
 Bolivar without a sudden quickening of the blood, 
 an almost physical sensation of victorious struggle 
 with the blind fates ? Revolt seizes us as we 
 read. We almost wonder whether a new age of 
 poetry has come, a new hour struck ; whether 
 this means that our children will put away the 
 Idylls of the King, and hail the brilliant barbarism 
 of Mr. Kipling's Ballads. For we seem to grow 
 more alive as we read. The cobwebs of the 
 brain are swept away, the refinements of over- 
 civilised civilisation are broken, and the naked 
 man leaps up. Mr. Kipling puts his finger down 
 on that great brute nerve which throbs in all of 
 us and sets it vibrating. We feel with him — 
 
 " The days are sick and cold, and the skies are grey and old, 
 And the twice-breathed airs blow damp ; 
 And I'd sell my tired soul for the bucking beam-sea roll 
 Of a black Bilbao tramp." 
 
 He fills us with the joy of action, the "rage 
 of living." And once more the soul of the 
 common soldier, and almost equally of the sea- 
 man, is laid bare, and his life is described with 
 a fidelity, a rough and even brutal realism, and 
 yet with an insight and compassion which must
 
 228 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 appeal to all classes of readers. In two-thirds of 
 these poems Mr. Rudyard Kipling's hand is sure 
 and strong, and the result is perfect art. In the 
 other third his characteristic faults appear : a 
 tendency to violence, exaggeration, meretricious 
 rhetoric, histrionic cynicism, shouting bombast. 
 But against these faults there are many great 
 qualities to be weighed. He has the true lyric 
 lilt, and his refrains have music in them. Feel- 
 ing, passion, and imagination are everywhere, 
 and often fused into their highest forms. His 
 power of finding the one right word is more 
 conspicuous in the ballads than the prose stories ; 
 it is in this that his secret of expression lies. 
 And, above all, he is a humorist. When was 
 the fatuous obstinacy of the camel ever so well 
 described as thus ? 
 
 '• The 'orse 'e knows above a bit, the bullock's but a fool, 
 The elephant's a gentleman, the battery mule's a mule ; 
 But the commissariat cam-u-el, when all is said an' done, 
 'E"s a devil an' a ostrich an' a oiphan child in one." 
 
 Fuzzy-Wuszy, Vv'hich sings the virtues of the 
 
 fanatical soldier of the Soudan, is equally 
 
 humorous : — 
 
 " 'E rushes at the smoke when we let drive, 
 
 An', before we know, 'e"s 'ackin' at our 'ead; 
 'E's all 'ot sand an" ginger when alive, 
 An' 'e's generally shammin' when 'e's dead.
 
 THE NEW REALISM. 229 
 
 " So 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, at your 'ome in the Soudan ; 
 You're a pore benighted 'eathen, but a first-class fightin' man ; 
 An' 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, with your 'ayrick 'ead of air — 
 You big black bound in' beggar — for you broke a British square." 
 
 To say that Mr. Kipling has proved himself a 
 great poet is to say too much : but no one can 
 read these poems without anew acknowledging 
 his astonishing genius. 
 
 The finest element in Kipling's work is this 
 understanding sympathy which interprets the 
 best side of bad natures, and brings into promi- 
 nence the noble qualities which may accompany 
 great defects, infirmities, and vices. I once heard 
 a lady declare that Rudyard Kipling's sympathy 
 with the common soldier was a Christ-like 
 sympathy, and one of the noblest things in 
 modern literature. I am not inclined to dispute 
 the saying. It is to me the most beautiful 
 element in his work. Perhaps he carries it to 
 excess occasionally, as Bret Harte does, but the 
 excess never occurs in relation to the common 
 soldier. Tommy Atkins is drawn to the life, and 
 the curious thing is that this soldier of reality, 
 with all his glaring faults, his coarseness and 
 profanity, is nevertheless a more noble figure 
 than the idealised soldier of romance. There 
 is no poem in the Bmrack-Room Balla(h more
 
 230 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 remarkable in its combined realism and sympathy 
 than that called Gentlemen-Rankers. It is dedi- 
 cated to the "legion of the lost ones, to the 
 cohort of the damned," the men of broken hope, 
 with the touch of better days still visible on them, 
 the echo of better days still perceptible in their 
 speech, who take refuge in the army, and in 
 many a far country hide their shame under the 
 uniform of the private soldier. Dickens has 
 painted such an one in his Richard Doubledick, 
 and nothing Dickens ever wrote is steeped in a 
 truer pathos. And here is Mr, Kipling's version 
 of the tragedy : — 
 
 " When the drunken comrade mutters and the great guard- 
 lantern gutters, 
 And the horror of our fall is written plain, 
 Every secret self-revealing on the aching whitewashed ceiling, 
 
 Do you wonder that wc drug ourselves from pain ? 
 We have done with Hope and Honor, we are lost to Love 
 and Truth, 
 We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung, 
 And the measure of our torment is the measure of our youth — 
 God help us, for we knew the worst too young I " 
 
 I am not sure that this is not the finest touch 
 of poetry in the whole volume. It is the most 
 moving. It is the cry from the depths, and it 
 shakes the heart. 
 
 On the other hand^ we are bound to admit that
 
 THE NEW REALISM. 23 1 
 
 Mr. Kipling's sins against good taste, and even 
 against good art, are many. Is it really necessary 
 to put down all a man's oaths in order to teach us 
 that he is profane ? Is there no more artistic way 
 of conveying to us the fact that he is a man of 
 unclean lips ? Does not really fine art deal with 
 these things by implication rather than by the 
 method of naked, unabashed reporting ? Some- 
 times, too, the way in which the thing is put is 
 unnecessarily disgusting. It is an offence against 
 good art as well as good taste to tell us that the 
 man who has been drunk overnight feels next 
 morning as though a cat had littered in his 
 mouth. No wonder people who are most desirous 
 of doing justice to Mr. Kipling's powers say that 
 he is vulgar, and recognise the aptness of Oscar 
 Wilde's epigram, that Mr. Kipling's stories are 
 "life read by flashes of vulgarity." And the 
 cynicism of Rudyard Kipling is frequently un- 
 pleasant also. He writes too often in the blase 
 fashion of the used-up voluptuary. It is rarely 
 that he sketches a really fine and pure character. 
 He would fain have us believe that the world he 
 knows is throughout "bitterly bad." Perhaps 
 this is the shallow cynicism of extreme youth, 
 which a wider experience will correct. There
 
 232 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 are multitudes of good men and pure women in 
 the world, and it is time that Mr. Kipling showed 
 us he was not unaware of their presence. And 
 though it may be the highest art to be impersonal 
 in fiction, yet I confess that I should like to get an 
 occasional glimpse of the real heart of the writer. 
 I should like to know whether he himself has any 
 intelligible theory of life, any moral conviction, 
 any religious faith. I do not think that his 
 writings would suffer by the introduction of this 
 personal note here and there. We cannot read 
 Dickens, or George Eliot, or especially Thackeray, 
 without feeling the throb of the writer's heart 
 behind the creatures of fiction, and the personal 
 element in these writers is not a loss but a gain 
 to the general effect of their writings. But we 
 may fairly hope that time may teach Mr. Kipling 
 many things. At five-and-twenty the finest 
 genius has not altogether made the round of 
 creation, nor found the best methods of artistic 
 expression ; and with a writer who shows so 
 much genuine power much may be expected from 
 the "years that bring the philosophic mind." 
 
 For, whatever defects Mr. Kipling may mani- 
 fest, one thing he incontestably possesses, and 
 that is power. He has copied no one, he is
 
 THE NEW REALISM. 233 
 
 individual, and he has genius. Here and there, 
 apparently by accident, he manages to strike 
 the highest note- of art. There is a wonderful 
 chapter in the Sfory of the Gadsbys called The 
 Shadow of Death. I have read it carefully more 
 than once, and I think it one of the most 
 pathetic things which any modern novelist has 
 produced. In the thrilling pathos of the sick 
 woman's incoherent words there is an echo of 
 the Shakesperian method, a delicacy of insight 
 and a largeness of literary handling which recalls 
 the madness of Ophelia. One feels in reading 
 such a passage that there is no knowing what 
 such a writer may achieve, that indeed the very 
 greatest things are possible to him. But it is 
 much too early to form any definite judgment, 
 and prophecy is the most gratuitous form of 
 error. If Mr. Kipling is not intoxicated by his 
 sudden fame, if he knows how to purge himself 
 of his faults, if he has sufficient moral fibre to 
 turn aside from the adulation of the public to 
 the study of the artist, and there, in seclusion, 
 in fruitful silence and resolute painstaking, set 
 himself to the vigilant development of his powers, 
 writing not for fame, nor money, but for art, 
 toiling not to win ephemeral applause, but to
 
 234 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 make his work as perfect as he can, — if he can 
 do these things, he has a genius which may carry 
 him very far. He strikes true note of the serious- 
 hearted thinker when he cries — 
 
 " If there be good in that I wrought, 
 
 Thy hand compelled it. Master, Thine ; 
 Where I have failed to meet Thy thought 
 
 I knew, through Thee, the blame was mine" ; 
 
 and again in the touching LEnvot to SoMicrs 
 
 Three — 
 
 " At Thy feet Hay 
 My wares, ere I go forth to sell : 
 The long bazar will praise ; but Thou, 
 
 Heart of my heart, hast Thou done well?" 
 
 No one knows better than he the temptations of 
 the artist. It is for him to show us that he also 
 knows how to overcome them. 
 
 Mr. Barrie stands with Mr. KipHng as a reahst, 
 but his reaUsm is united to a humor more suave, 
 genial, and penetrating. His early newspaper 
 training has given him a general alertness of 
 thought and style. He is a master of phrases. 
 His humor has the rare charm of apparent 
 spontaneity. It breaks upon you when least 
 expected. Whimsicality is part of the charm. 
 He can pick up the most insignificant clue and
 
 THE NEW REALISM. 235 
 
 follow it into fields of laughter. He delights in 
 writing about trifles, and as a humorous essayist 
 might almost challenge Charles Lamb. Like his 
 own Mr. Noble Sims, in When a Man's Single, he 
 can write admirable sketches on sealing-wax or 
 the knobs of walking-sticks ; or, to be more pre- 
 cise, on the history of lost umbrellas or the 
 manifold possible interpretations of an editor's 
 illegible commands. Nothing comes amiss to 
 him ; in the brief sketch, the essay in miniature, 
 he has few rivals. If we are inclined to find 
 fault at all, we must confess that sometimes the 
 cleverness is too conscious. We wish he would 
 not tumble into the arena with so vivacious a 
 smirk. We object to take him for a funny man, 
 because we know by this time how very much 
 more he is, how much higher and greater. A 
 collection of funny essays on the uses of tobacco 
 is well enough in its way, but not for Mr. Barrie ; 
 he is too truly a man of genius for such work as 
 this. No doubt the plea that a man must live is 
 sound enough in his case, and the early fight of 
 a man who comes to London to live by his pen 
 is so severe that the pen must needs be diligent 
 and various if it is to keep its master. But by 
 this time Mr. Barrie has won the standing ground
 
 236 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 of success, and should be free to produce only the 
 very best work. 
 
 Mr. Barrie's first book is dated 1887, and was 
 a shilling brochure entitled Better Dead. It has 
 a faint resemblance in plot to Mr. Stevenson's 
 powerful story of the Suicide Club. It relates 
 the doings of a society called the S.D.W.S.P., 
 which, being interpreted, signifies The Society for 
 Doing Without Some People. It is an excellent 
 bit of fooling ; more than this, Mr. Barrie himself 
 would not call it. But slight as it is, it shows 
 throughout the cunning hand of the literary artist, 
 and has precisely those qualities of style which 
 distinguish Mr. Barrie's more mature works. 
 There is no mistaking such little touches as 
 these : — 
 
 " Riach (his Scotch hero) had two pounds with 
 him when he came to London, and in a month 
 they had almost gone." 
 
 " Here was a young Scotchman, able, pure, of 
 noble ambition, and a first medallist in meta- 
 physics. Genius was written on his brow. He 
 may have written it himself, but it was there." 
 
 He suffers from " a determination of words to 
 the mouth." He gets his living in various ways : 
 " He shot himself in the coat in Northumberland
 
 THE NEW REALISM 237 
 
 Street, Strand, to oblige an evening paper (five 
 shillings). 
 
 " He fainted in the pit of a theatre to the 
 bribe of an emotional tragedian (a guinea). 
 
 " It got into the papers that he had fled from 
 the wax policeman at Tussaud's (half-a-cro\vn)." 
 
 He calls upon Mr. Labouchere on a Sunday 
 forenoon, " on such a sunny day as slovenly men 
 seize upon to wash their feet and have it over," 
 with a view to persuading the astute editor of 
 Truth that he was one of the persons Society 
 could Do Without. 
 
 The S.D.W.S.P. does not kill actors: " Theatri- 
 cal people constitute a sex by themselves — like 
 curates." 
 
 As one reads the book, it becomes clear enough 
 that Mr. Barrie is a man with a style. He has 
 the art of frugality in language. He says what 
 he has to say in the most sententious and epi- 
 grammatic manner. He is mannered, but the 
 manner is his own. His wit is what the Scotch 
 call pawky: dry, ironical, restrained, and owing 
 much of its charm to its slyness and apparent 
 suppression. And while the book is pure fun, 
 without a single touch of that pathos which is 
 as marked a feature of his later writings as their
 
 238 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 humor, yet a serious and true thought shows 
 itself once or twice, as when he says, " What is 
 Radicalism ? It is a desire to get a chance." 
 
 Of course this book does not do anything like 
 justice to Mr. Barrie's powers, and is noticeable 
 only in relation to his subsequent achievements. 
 His two next books, Atdd Licht Idylls and A 
 Window in Thrums, are removed from it by a 
 hemisphere. In these he writes with the power, 
 restraint, and certain touch of a master. It may 
 be doubted if he will ever surpass, or indeed 
 need wish to surpass, the finest pages of these 
 books. Books like these can only spring from 
 experience ; they have the raciness and flavor of 
 the soil in them. Here pathos and humor blend 
 and intermingle with infinite subtlety ; you are 
 alternately surprised into tears and laughter ; his 
 hand is upon the heart-strings all the time, and 
 he moves you as he will. They have been justly 
 compared with Dr. John Brown's Rab and His 
 Friends, for it is the same species of humor : 
 laughter that is always trembling on the verge 
 of tears, pathos that is poignant, sudden, pene- 
 trating ; and all constructed out of the humblest 
 materials, and with an art that appears so simple, 
 that knows so little of artifice, that you are almost
 
 THE NEW REALISM. 239 
 
 deceived into thinking it easy — till you attempt 
 to copy it. How little there is to tell, yet with 
 what fascinating realism it is told ! Thrums — a 
 poor Forfarshire village, a group of rude weavers, 
 a company of half-forgotten sectaries — forgotten 
 almost in Scotland, and never known at all in 
 England — a bare cottage covering the simple 
 tragedy of a sick mother whose heart is with her 
 dead first-born son, and whose other son leaves 
 Thrums to take the road to ruin — that is all ; but 
 with what sympathy, charity, piety, with what 
 quick discernment and exquisite heart-searching 
 pathos is the story told ! Sympathy — the real 
 keynote of all true genius — is Mr. Barrie's most 
 lavish endowment. You forget the literary artist 
 while you read ; you are conscious only of the 
 poet. You are face to face with eternal things 
 alone — eternal love, pain, hope, tragedy, romance. 
 You rise from reading purified and ennobled 
 because you have witnessed the divine worth of 
 human nature. This one little bit of obscure 
 earth, this unknown, unvisited Thrums, is better 
 known to you than the street in which you live, 
 and its people are more actual and vivid to you 
 than the folk you meet at dinner. We may dis- 
 pute as we will as to what distinctions separate 
 IG
 
 240 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 genius from talent, but we know instinctively 
 what this is. It is genius of a rare order, and 
 it impresses and moves us as only genius can. 
 It is eminently dramatic, sane, noble ; it refreshes 
 and exalts us ; it is indeed, by whatever literary 
 name we choose to call it, poetry, the work of 
 one who is in spirit as true a poet of common 
 life as Wordsworth. 
 
 The hopes excited by these books were great, 
 but they have been more than justified in Mr. 
 Barrie's last book and first real novel, The Little 
 Minister. When I saj' his first real novel, I do 
 not forget the merits of When a Man's Single ; 
 but this is rather an admirable story than a 
 novel. In The Little Minister we are in Thrums 
 again, and we are glad to be there, because we 
 know that Mr. Barrie will be at his best among 
 these austere simplicities of laborious village life, 
 and under the solemn silences of these wide 
 northern skies. From the first word of the story 
 to the last the charm is perfect. We have the 
 same quaintness, the same subtle humor, irony, 
 and racy wit, the same fresh unstrained pathos 
 and wide sympathy, but something more — a pro- 
 found seriousness, a sense of power, and in the 
 closing chapters of the book a noble tragedy.
 
 THE NEW REALISM. 24 1 
 
 The book has been compared with Lorna Doone, 
 though upon what ground it is rather difficult to 
 say. Its feehng for nature is equally strong, and 
 its romance is as fine, but beyond this there is 
 no resemblance. With the one exception of the 
 fair " Egyptian," all the characters are homely 
 enough. But that is just where Mr. Barrie's art 
 is seen at its best ; as in his previous volumes, 
 he tre-ats the commonplace in so original a spirit 
 that in his hands it becomes great and tragic. 
 
 It has been objected that the plot is weak, and 
 fails from over-cleverness ; that it is least con- 
 vincing where it is most elaborate. This is partly 
 true, no doubt ; and most readers will close the 
 book with the feeling that Lord Rentoul is we&kly 
 sketched, and that the fascinating, baffling Babbie 
 defies all the probabilities. Babbie, in spite of all 
 possible toning down, is hardly possible as the 
 wife of an Auld Licht minister, and we cannot 
 conceive her as the mistress of a sober Scotch 
 manse. By so much the plot fails in the first 
 element of successful plot — probability. But this 
 is merely saying that the book has blemishes, and 
 against them how many excellencies may be 
 set ! With what unflagging vivacity the dialogue 
 flashes on, how inimitable are the little touches of
 
 242 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 tenderness, with what a hght and sure hand the 
 subsidiary characters are sketched. We know 
 by a sentence that cunning hypocrite who is a 
 member of two congregations, because he shrewdly 
 judges that when he's not with the one they will 
 suppose he is with the other, and thus he can 
 spend his Sabbath in bed undisturbed. We don't 
 see much of Wearywarld, the policeman, who is 
 saddened by his unpopularity ; but he affords us 
 mirth whenever we think of him. " Nobody feels 
 the shame o' my position as I do mysel'," he 
 remarks ; " but this is a town without pity " — a 
 town, in fact, where the use of a " police " is 
 doubtful, since evil-doers will not come to the 
 lock-up after Wearywarld lays hands on them, 
 but prefer giving this " sociablest man in Thrums 
 a wap into the gutters." The art of these little 
 vignettes is great, and the comparative failure 
 of the presentation of Lord Rentoul only proves 
 what has been proved often enough in fiction, that 
 the greatest artist owes more to observation than 
 invention. Mr. Barrie is greatest among the 
 humble men and women of Thrums ; these people 
 he knows to the very core, while Lord Rentoul is 
 a mere invention. But the crown of the whole 
 book is the little minister himself. Mr. Dishart
 
 THE NEW REALISM. 243 
 
 henceforth takes his place with the heroes of 
 fiction. His simpHcity, honesty, courage, and final 
 heroism are painted with a master hand. He is 
 a genuine creation, at once original and noble, 
 and is not to be denied a place among the 
 immortals. Whether the book is perfect as a 
 novel, that is to say in mere constructive art, we 
 do not care to ask, when we take our farewell of 
 Mr. Dishart ; we know, at least, that it is a book 
 of genius. 
 
 The best and most hopeful thing that can be 
 said of Mr. Barrie is, that while he is both realist 
 and humorist, yet in both domains he is restrained 
 from excess by the moral basis of his genius. 
 There is a seriousness in his character which 
 preserves him from vulgarity ; he is deep-hearted 
 as well as light-hearted, and therefore rarely 
 drifts into farce ; he has a firm hold on funda- 
 mental truths, and therefore is no cynic ; he is 
 genial, and his sharpest satire has humanity in it ; 
 he is quaint, but never merely grotesque ; and in 
 and through it all is a large-natured sanity, a fine 
 lovablcness, a poetic imagination and sympathy. 
 His humor is a lambent atmosphere which 
 envelops thought, feeling, passion, principle. It 
 is restrained, and is never irresponsible. He is
 
 244 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 the master of it, and is not mastered by it. There 
 is, in a word, the breadth and wholesome sanity 
 of the true artist in Mr. Barrie. To such a 
 writer there must be reserved a great future. 
 Like Mr. Kiphng, he has so far been engaged 
 upon a series of brilUant experiments ; he has by 
 no means found the true measure of his pov/er. 
 We know pretty accurately by this time the 
 dimensions of the art of Mr. Meredith, Mr. Hardy, 
 and Mr. Black. But Mr. Kipling and Mr. Barrie 
 are something of enigmas still. They have 
 attained the happy fortune of persuading the 
 critics of two hemispheres that they may do any- 
 thing, that the greatest prizes of their art arc not 
 impossible to them. The larger touch is with 
 Mr. Kipling, the more delicate art with Mr. Barrie; 
 the one is the greater force, the other the keener 
 artist. In Venice one sees almost side by side 
 the barbaric magnitude of Tintoret and the ex- 
 quisite finish of Bellini ; and something of the 
 same comparison is suggested by the work of 
 Mr. Kipling and Mr. Barrie. Yet both are truly 
 realists: the one working amid masses of glowing 
 color, flung upon the canvas with infinite daring 
 and natural opulence of conception ; the other 
 working with calmer ze-al, upon a smaller canvas,
 
 THE NEW REALISM. 245 
 
 but with finer finish, and often with an equal 
 glow of color. It is in their hands that the 
 immediate future of English fiction lies. The gift 
 of youth is for them the gift of the future. They 
 are the leaders of that brilliant band of young 
 men who are shaping the new fiction, and their 
 present achievement encourages us to hope that, 
 while the method may be new, the final results 
 may not be unworthy, in spirit and achievement, 
 to rank with the great masterpieces of the past.
 
 ?46 THE POETRY OF DESPAIR. 
 
 THE POETRY OF DESPAIR. 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD AND JAMES THOMSON (B. v.). 
 
 A LITTLE more than sixty years ago Lord 
 -^^^ Byron remarked to Medvvin, in the course 
 of those memorable conversations which passed 
 between them at Pisa, that if a cry of blas- 
 phemy was raised against him on account of 
 his drama of '* Cain " it would be interesting 
 to know what the Methodists at home would 
 say to Goethe's " Faust." " What would they 
 think of the colloquies of Mephistopheles and 
 his pupil, or the more daring language of the 
 Prologue, which no one will ever venture to 
 translate ? " It is curious and significant to 
 remember how completely this prophecy has 
 been falsified. At the very moment when 
 Lord Byron was telling Medwin that the Pro- 
 logue would never be translated Hayward was 
 meditating his translation, and probably no 
 poem has been so repeatedly rendered into 
 English, or is more widely read to-day, than
 
 QUEST AND VISION. 247 
 
 the " Faust " of Goethe. Nor can it be said 
 that any very violent shock was inflicted on 
 the susceptibilities of British taste by either 
 the grim pleasantry of the colloquies or the 
 daring breadth of the Prologue. On the con- 
 trary, the publication of his rendering of 
 '* Faust " immediately won for Hayward at- 
 tention and reputation, and those who had 
 clamored loudest against Byron were wholly 
 silent in the presence of Goethe. Nor was 
 this strange silence to be attributed wholly, or 
 indeed in any large degree, to the caprice of 
 opinion or public indifference ; it resulted 
 rather from the great revolution which had 
 taken place in the attitude of the age toward 
 subjects of faith. 
 
 In no respect is this revolution more accu- 
 rately reflected than in the new current of 
 thought and feeling which is found in the 
 poetry of the last half-century. It is the very 
 nature of the poet that his finer sympathies 
 .should thrill with the first vibration of change, 
 and that he himself should be at once the her- 
 ald and the minister of change. He possesses 
 the intellectual counterpart of that intensely 
 sensitive physical organization which perceives
 
 24S THE POETRY OF DESPAIR. 
 
 instinctively the earliest and slightest atmos- 
 pheric indications of breaking weather, the 
 moment when the summer breathes its first 
 sick sigh of death or the spring first stirs and 
 quickens in the frozen earth. Where he is ab- 
 solutely true to himself and his instincts the 
 poet thus becomes the most authentic voice of 
 his age ; he condenses its spirit into concrete 
 utterance, he interprets its truest yearnings, 
 he catches the meaning of its deepest need, 
 and so holds the mirror up to its inmost nat- 
 ure that in him coming generations recognize 
 the true index to its character. The history 
 of England is the history of its poetry, because 
 its poetry is the quintessence of its real life. 
 In it the rough kindliness and valor, the shal- 
 lowness and lust, the ferment and bitterness, 
 the confused doubt and yearning of any given 
 epoch find their perfect reflection ; and a per- 
 fect acquaintance with the literature of a gen- 
 eration will afford a more accurate idea of its 
 character than any narrative of parliamentary 
 policies or warlike strategies. 
 
 No more striking illustration of such a truth 
 as this can be furnished than by the entirely 
 new vein of poetry which may be said to have
 
 QUEST AND VISION. 249 
 
 been opened up during the last fifty years in 
 the direction of religious and theological prob- 
 lems. The beginning of the nineteenth cent- 
 ury not merely witnessed the breaking up of 
 political and social life throughout Europe, but, 
 to a very large extent, a revolution against 
 formulated theology, whose first effect was a 
 quickened interest in the grave problems of 
 human destiny. Byron himself is a case in 
 point. The outcry against " Cain " and 
 " Heaven and Hell " was aroused by the free 
 and daring handling of such questions which 
 those poems contained. It was in vain that 
 Byron protested he had only followed in the 
 steps of Milton, and that Milton neither at- 
 tended divine service nor accepted the ortho- 
 dox creeds of his day. It was instinctively 
 felt that the fermenting leaven of an entirely 
 new religious movement was at work in the 
 mystery-plays of Byron. They were not the 
 work of a great poetic artist who had found 
 his inspiration in the " Paradise Lost," but the 
 outcry of a living man in whom the spirit of 
 the age was speaking, and who was inspired 
 by the restless misery of religious doubt. The 
 same spirit animated Shelley, whose professed
 
 250 THE POETRY OF DESPAIR. 
 
 atheism was a mere form which masked the 
 uncontrollable yearnings of one who 
 
 " Stood between two worlds, one dead, 
 The other powerless to be born." 
 
 The Tractarian movement of 1830 presaged 
 and hastened the culmination of this unsettle- 
 ment in belief, and, by proposing the Church 
 as the one authority in faith, practically split 
 the world of thought into two hostile camps. 
 From that moment theological problems have 
 had a paramount interest in English thought, 
 and have deeply colored the whole course 
 of modern literature, and most of all modern 
 poetry. For the first time controversial points 
 of faith, speculation, doubt, and despair have 
 afforded themes for poets. Arthur Hugh 
 Clough, who describes himself as for a long 
 while drawn like a straw up the draught of a 
 chimney by the force of the Oxford move- 
 ment, came out of it completely lamed and 
 wrecked, and uttered the wail of thousands 
 
 when he wrote : 
 
 •'Oh, might we for assurance' sake 
 Some arbitrary judgment take, 
 And wilfully pronounce it true." 
 
 The " Festus " of Bailey was charged to the
 
 QUEST AND VISION. 
 
 2^1 
 
 very brim with the like unrest and heart- 
 wearied yearning. The melodious languors of 
 Tennyson's early poems soon gave way to the 
 deep-centred activities of thought which were 
 every-where rending men's lives apart, and the 
 golden clime in which the poet was born was 
 speedily vexed with the rolling cloud and tem- 
 pest of the great upheaval. The " In Memo- 
 riam " is the nineteenth century's Book of 
 Job, and is inseparably inwoven with the his- 
 tory of the century because it is woven out of 
 the sentiment of the century. The best poetry 
 which Matthew Arnold has written is saturated 
 with the same sentiment, but in its weariness 
 is the saddest of all the lyrical cries which 
 have pierced the times. In Robert Browning, 
 above all, the movement has found its climax, 
 for no EngHsh poet has so consistently used 
 poetry as the vehicle of theological speculation, 
 and few out of darkness and perplexity have 
 sung so high and clear a song. 
 
 Together with the effect of the religious 
 movement on poetry we have to take into 
 consideration the character of modern life in 
 itself. Is there any thoughtful man who is not 
 conscious of the enormous overstrain, the fever-
 
 2 5-2 THE POETRY OF DESPAIR. 
 
 ish and almost diseased activity which compe- 
 tition of all kinds has imported into human 
 life ? One of our poets has painted his vision 
 of the world as seen from some point of central 
 
 calm: 
 
 " Like a vast wheel that spins through humming air, 
 And time, life, death, are sucked within its breath, 
 
 And thrones and kingdoms like sere leaves are hurled 
 Down to its maelstrom ; for its wind of death 
 
 Sweeps the wide skies, and shakes the flaring suns, 
 
 So fast the wheel spins, and the gloiy runs." 
 
 Might not the immense whirl and speed of 
 modern life be represented as the blind spinning 
 of a huge wheel, or a maelstrom sending forth 
 deep thunder, into whose fatal circles life, and 
 all that is best in life, are being rapidly swept ? 
 It is Matthew Arnold who tells us of the two 
 desires that toss about the poet's blood : 
 
 " One drives him to the world without, 
 And one to solitude." 
 
 But where is this healing solitude ? Or how in- 
 deed can the simple tastes which thrive best 
 in its seclusion and its silence be preserved 
 amid the growth of cities, the haste to be rich, 
 the competition of trade, the pressure and 
 overstrain to which it seems inevitable that all 
 classes of society must submit in this day of
 
 QUEST AND VISION. 253 
 
 ours ? Here there is a double process, produc- 
 ing more and more with each decade that 
 note of deep despair which is now beginning 
 to be apparent in poetry. On the one hand 
 we have the wide disturbance of faith, produc- 
 ing confusion and sterility in poetry; on the 
 other hand we have the diseased activity of 
 modern life communicating itself to literature 
 and revenging itself in that cry of hopeless 
 weariness and incommunicable sadness which 
 is almost the foremost, and certainly the most 
 distressing, quality of modern poetry. It is 
 one of the axioms of pessimism that " devel- 
 opment of culture is development of sorrow," 
 and indeed, finally, that all things lead up to 
 the transcendental misery of the Absolute him- 
 self. Is this the grim goal toward which 
 modern poetry is drifting? Is culture without 
 faith proving itself only the development of 
 sorrow, and are we thus being led through 
 agnosticism to despair? 
 
 It has been said that poetry is faith, and 
 though something of accuracy may have been 
 sacrificed to the exigencies of epigram, yet we 
 may accept the definition as at least high and 
 noble. Without faith no man shall see God,
 
 254 THE rOETRY OF DESPAIR. 
 
 and without that vision of God no poet can 
 accompHsh aught of noble or divine. He 
 must make his hfe a poem, he must live ever 
 as in his great Task-master's eye. Whoever 
 else may be disquieted in vain, he who sings 
 must know in whom he has beh'eved. I have 
 shown that the greatest periods of English 
 poetry have been the periods of religious 
 faith ; it is worth pondering that the earliest 
 forms of poetry are essentially religious. Have 
 we forgotten this unalterable relation between 
 poetry and religion ? Have we forgotten the 
 rock from which were hewn the noblest forms 
 of poetry, the trees of life whose leaves have 
 been for the healing of the nations ? Or at 
 least, it may be urged, have we invented, or 
 discovered, or evolved any poetic ideal half so 
 noble as this that lives forever in the stern and 
 simple speech of Milton ? It is quite certain 
 that he who forgets these things forgets the 
 things that are for his peace. The greatest 
 poets are unanimous against him. The min- 
 strel strikes deep heart-notes because he has 
 high visions ; the mightiest singers have been 
 made mighty by their faith. He cannot 
 weave imperishable singing raiment from the
 
 QUEST AND VISION. 255 
 
 broken woofs of faithlessness ; he cannot pour 
 the poet's highest music, nor any music other 
 than a discord or a wail, through the thin reed 
 of contemporary agnosticism. For the high- 
 est art calmness and sanity of spirit are need- 
 ed ; indeed, these are its most stringent and 
 unalterable conditions. There must be unity 
 of thought in the poet; there must be a 
 divine centre round which the thought may 
 gather. If it be otherwise, if there be nothing 
 true and nothing sure, if the blood is always 
 at fever-heat and the thought in a perpetual 
 flux, what song he shall sing will have at best 
 only the piercing sweetness and sad incoherence 
 of a snatch of music sung by wild lips in a de- 
 lirium. For the strenuous and abiding tasks 
 of the highest art, for a " Paradise Lost " or 
 an " Excursion," the mind will have no vigor 
 and impulse of sustained effort. And it was 
 this that Shelley felt when he wrote to God- 
 win : " I cannot but be conscious, in much of 
 what I write, of an absence of that tranquil- 
 lity which is the attribute and accompaniment 
 of power." It is this which is felt and unwit- 
 tingly confessed by the poets of our own day. 
 
 They arc too far removed from a secure basis 
 
 17
 
 256 THE POETRY OF DESPAIR. 
 
 of faith, and too much disturbed by the fierce 
 haste of life, to possess that tranquillity which 
 is the attribute and accompaniment of power. 
 How, indeed, can tranquillity be the possession 
 of men whose confession rather than whose 
 creed is : " Here we drift, like white sail across 
 the wild ocean, now bright on the wave, now 
 darkling in the trough of the ^ea. But from 
 what port did we sail ? Who knows ? Or to 
 what port are wa bound ? Who knows ? There 
 is no one to tell us but such poor weather- 
 tossed mariners as ourselves, whom we speak 
 as we pass. . . . But what know they more 
 than we ? " 
 
 There is another clement which has contrib- 
 uted to the creation of a poetry of despair, 
 namely, the failure of modern culture as a 
 substitute for religious faith. Here pessimism 
 comes much nearer the truth than positivism, for 
 Hartmann, in his PJidnonienologie dcs sittlichen 
 Bewusstscins, shows that the augmentation of 
 happiness by culture has been "dearly pur- 
 chased by an overwhelmingly greater amount 
 of sorrow, necessarily called into being by the 
 process." It has been said that culture 
 has " invaded even the nurseries of young
 
 QUEST AND VISION. 257 
 
 children ; and the culturists rejoice at the 
 sight of crowds of little wretches, of eight 
 years old and under, cramming for competitive 
 examinations." At all events, it is true enough 
 that the zeal for culture, either in the limited 
 sense of these passages, or in the larger mean- 
 ing of the word, has become a devouring pas- 
 sion in the late decades of the nineteenth 
 century. Now, no one will doubt that there is 
 a broad and noble culture perfectly consonant 
 with a devout and spiritual faith. In point of 
 fact there can be no breadth or nobility in a 
 culture which does not include the spirit and 
 the character as well as the intellect. Such 
 culture is not purchased by an overwhelmingly 
 greater amount of sorrow ; rather it adds 
 " sunshine to daylight," it completes and en- 
 larges the circle of being, it is the golden stair 
 up which men climb to a place but little lower 
 than the angels. But this is not the culture 
 of which Hartmann speaks ; it is not the culture 
 whose arrogant and self-sufficient spirit breathes 
 in our literature to-day. Modern culture knows 
 nothing of a place a little lower than the 
 angels; it dismisses with contempt what it 
 chooses to call unvcrifiable beliefs ; it has no
 
 258 THE rOETRY OF DESPAIR. 
 
 spiritual vision, and is the antagonist rather 
 than the handmaiden of faith. It has endeav- 
 ored to fill a part too vast for its powers, by 
 substituting itself for faith, and it has failed. 
 Could the result be otherwise? What does 
 culture without faith do but create with each 
 step in its progress fresh needs, and so aggra- 
 vate its thirst and multiply its sorrows — • 
 surely, in a very striking sense, the sorrows of 
 those that seek after a strange God ? For the 
 experiment is not new ; it has been made 
 many times, and once at least, on a scale of 
 unparalleled tragedy, by a certain king who 
 was wisest among men, and a great poet 
 withal, who had houses and treasure more than 
 all they that had been before him in Jerusa- 
 lem, and had delights of knowledge, and of 
 art, and of pleasure, and knew wisdom and 
 madness and folly, and so came at last to say 
 that all was vanity, and the one supreme peace 
 and wisdom was found in the remembering of 
 the Creator. But the lesson has not yet sunk 
 deep into the ears of his generation ; and so 
 the failure of culture as a substitute for relig- 
 ious faith has worked like a bitter leaven in 
 the poetry of the age, and has produced despair.
 
 QUEST AND VISION. 259 
 
 Let us turn to Matthew Arnold again. His 
 poetry is virtually the confession that his cult- 
 ure has failed. In him the personal note is 
 supreme ; it is the problem of his own life 
 which fascinates us. He can strike chords of 
 great power and sweetness, and sometimes 
 of deep tenderness, but he is greatest as a poet 
 when he expresses his own heartfelt mournful- 
 ness and yearning. The two worlds he stands 
 between are the old world of faith which is 
 dead, and the new world of culture which is 
 " powerless to be born." He cannot hide his 
 sorrow, it is ever before him ; he cannot dis- 
 guise the fact that his culture has failed to 
 satisfy him. He cries with an exceeding bitter 
 cry after that cross which he has declared a 
 vanished myth and that assured creed which 
 he has dismissed as a beautiful imposture. He 
 confesses the cruel conflict that is within him, 
 the devoutncss which has survived his doubts, 
 the religious yearnings which arc not quenched 
 by his denials. In this respect his position is 
 unique ; he sings as one believing in his unbe- 
 lief, and he is only saved from utter despair by 
 this devoutness which he has not dared to 
 destro}'. I'.ut be \-(Mu1 that the most nicmora-
 
 26o THE rOETRY OF DESPAIR. 
 
 ble feature of his poetry is its acknowledg- 
 ment — wrung from him rather than confessed 
 — that his lack of faith has sapped the very- 
 courses of his thought, and that culture in its 
 utmost beauty and refinement has proved 
 itself but shifting sand when the storms have 
 beaten and the winds of trouble blown. He 
 sees with dismay and despair the hopeless tangle 
 of the age, and is as one without hope. He is 
 smitten with the intellectual fever of the times, 
 and cries : 
 
 " What shelter to grow ripe is ours, 
 What leisure to grow wise ? " 
 
 The failure of faith, the failure of culture, 
 the unrest and haste of life, find perfect 
 expression in his pages ; for he is too true a 
 poet, and too real a man, not to deal sincerely 
 with those to whom he appeals. And so the 
 music of his speech, in spite of its exquisite 
 charm and tenderness, deepens more and more 
 into the lyric wail of immeasurable distress, 
 and it is with wistful yearning he looks back to 
 the stronger poets of the past, and cries: 
 
 " Too fast we live, too much are tried, 
 
 Too harassed to attain 
 Wordsworth's sweet calm, or Goethe's wide 
 
 And luminous view to gain."
 
 QUEST AND VISION. 26 1 
 
 That is to say, he has not the impassivity and 
 selfishness of Goethe, which makes mere per- 
 sonal culture an all-sufficing purpose ; and still 
 less has he the undisturbed and simple faith of 
 Wordsworth, which makes tranquillity a natural 
 consequence. 
 
 And since Matthew Arnold himself has 
 pointed us to Wordsworth, and indicated him 
 as one of the only two who in our troubled day 
 have attaiived "to see their way," it may be 
 well to ask what preserved Wordsworth from 
 the disease of pessimism, which had already 
 tainted English poetr}', while he lived and 
 thought? IIow was it that amid the fever of 
 the age he continued to live — to quote his own 
 exquisite words — 
 
 " With heart as calm as lakes that sleep, 
 
 In frosty moonlight glistening ; 
 Or mountain rivers where tha;^' creep 
 Along a channel smooth and deep 
 
 To their own far-off murmurs listening." 
 
 It was because he preserved his faith in God, 
 his simple tastes, his love of nature. He was 
 content to lose his life that he might save it ; 
 or, in other words, to be true to the things 
 unseen and eternal at whatever sacrifice of the 
 things seen and temporal. It may be that he
 
 262 THE POETRY OF DESPAIR. 
 
 provokes ridicule by his occasional triviality of 
 theme ; but this is one of the penalties of fame 
 — that the tares are bound up with the wheat 
 of genius, and that the shallow and the unwise 
 will never learn how to discriminate between 
 them. It may be true that the more turbulent 
 and volcanic passions of human nature find 
 no reflection in his waitings ; but the nobler 
 aspects of human destiny continually absorb 
 him, and in this the poet has chosen that 
 " better part " which shall make his best poetry 
 immortal. What he has succeeded in doing 
 is the rare and difficult task of uniting the 
 Christian and the philosophic genius in poetry 
 which, at its best, is full of charm, simplicity, 
 and sublimity. He has preserved that faith 
 in God which is the secret of all tranquillity, 
 and without which the greatest poetry cannot 
 be. He has turned aside with a noble disdain 
 from the strifes of secular ambition, the greed 
 for gold, the race for fame, and so has preserved 
 " the harvest of a quiet eye," and found that 
 
 " Impulses of deeper birth 
 Have come to him in solitude." 
 
 And because he did this he also preserved the 
 clearness and sanity of his spirit ; he was kept
 
 QUEST AND VISION. 263 
 
 ill peace, he was tainted with no morbid dis- 
 quietudes ; he sang no dirges of despair, but 
 a sweet high strain of purest song which has 
 been for the heahng and the inspiration of his 
 country, and which will endure in gathered 
 power when the bitter cries of our modern 
 singers are lost in oblivion or are remembered 
 only with sorrowful disdain. Just as Milton 
 has been pictured standing like a colossal 
 statue of Apollo, watching the arrow-flight of 
 his Immortal song, while round his feet, uncon- 
 scious of his presence, dance the wine-stained 
 satyrs of the court of Charles, so we may figure 
 Wordsworth standing on the threshold of this 
 perturbed generation of ours, clothed in his 
 simplicity, rebuking its fretful strife with his 
 serenity and its despairing voices with his 
 faith. 
 
 How far we have removed from Words- 
 worth, and how foreign the spirit of our later 
 poetry is to the spirit which animated his, 
 we can judge by one of the latest contributions 
 made to our literature, the poetry of James 
 Thomson, long known as " Vk V." In the 
 " City of Dreadful Night" despair has reached 
 its apotheosis. The ultimaluni of pessimism is
 
 264 thp: poetry of despair. 
 
 universal suicide, and that is precisely the 
 doctrine propounded In this remarkable poem. 
 I will not attempt to determine with critical 
 dogmatism the position of Thcwnson as a poet ; 
 it would be easy to exaggerate or underrate 
 his importance ; but the significance of such a 
 poem, dedicated to LeopardI, approved by 
 George Eliot, widely read, full of 
 
 " Infections of unutterable sadness. 
 Infections of incalculable madness. 
 Infections of incurable despair," 
 
 it is at least well to indicate. And the signifi- 
 cance of Thomson's poetry is that it pushes to 
 logical fulfillment those conditions of religious 
 disturbance and intellectual unrest which we 
 have already noted. Here, at last, is a man 
 too high-minded to chant the praises of the 
 " Goddess of Lubricity " because he has lost 
 religious assurance, and too terribly sincere to 
 be content with mere wailings of regret for a 
 faith whose poetry fascinates him, but whose 
 authenticity he derides ; he therefore strikes 
 the iron harp-string of the completest pessim- 
 ism, and not merely announces his conclusion 
 that life is not worth living, but that it ought 
 not to be preserved.
 
 QUEST AND VISION. 265 
 
 When Thomson called the " City of Dreadful 
 Night " an atheistical poem he spoke with a 
 perfect appreciation of its scope and purpose. 
 There could be no other word for a poem 
 whose climax of horror is found in the picture 
 of that black-draped cathedral crowded with 
 human shadows, with its swart preacher whose 
 eyes burn beneath his sombre cowl, proclaim- 
 ing as the best of all good tidings : 
 
 " O, brothers of sad lives ! that are so brief, 
 A few short years must bring us all relief, 
 
 Can we not bear these years of laboring breath ? 
 But if you would not this poor life fulfill, 
 Lo, you are free to end it when you will, 
 
 V/ithout the fear of waking after death." 
 
 But Thomson is, nevertheless, a memorable 
 example of how difficult and even impossible 
 it is to construct poetry out of pure negation. 
 We are reminded of the caustic epigram of 
 Voltaire, that if God did not exist we should 
 be obliged to invent him, and of the saying 
 of Coleridge, that a poet is always a religious 
 man. In spite of all avowed atheism Thom- 
 son finds himself writing in fierce condemna- 
 tion of — 
 
 " The poets who sing their own lusts 
 Instcail of tlie hvnins of the I.ord."
 
 266 THE rOETRY OF DESPAIR. 
 
 and declaring with more of a prophet's fervor 
 than a pessimist's stoicism — 
 
 " No wealth can bribe away the doom of the living God ; 
 No haughtiest strength confront the sway of his chastening 
 rod." 
 
 God refuses to be exiled from the heart, 
 though shut out from the brain of the poet ; 
 and ever and again a gush of pure faith, like 
 the song of a thrush heard between the thun- 
 der-claps of a dying storm, rises through the 
 darkness of his despair. Especially is this the 
 case when his stormy anguish of revolt against 
 social and theological order gives place to the 
 sadness of personal regret. His eyes then fill 
 with tears when looking on life's autumn fields 
 and thinking of the davs that are no more. 
 With inimitable pathos, and scarcely less in- 
 imitable daring, he recalls the one spirit he 
 loved upon earth ; and, as in the poem of 
 " Vane's Dream," alternately thrills the reader 
 with his tenderness and offends him with his 
 coarse realism. And, indeed, in this respect, 
 Thomson resembles Heine, for whom he enter- 
 tained a deep affection, and from whom he has 
 manifestly caught inspiration. His satire and 
 tenderness follow each other with swift strokes:
 
 QUEST AND VISION. 267 
 
 the secret of his own life-long agony is often 
 guarded by a spirit of mocking laughter, and 
 when we least expect it a turn of the page flashes 
 sudden sunlight through the gloom. As with 
 Heine so with him, there is often something 
 sadder in his laughter than his weeping, and his 
 very irony pains us with suggestions of the tears 
 that are behind it. We know while we read 
 many poets that their sweetest songs spring 
 from saddest thought; that, like the Pot of 
 Basil, celebrated in Boccaccio's story and 
 Kcats's poem, the sweet bloom and foliage 
 which astonish Florence owe their fulness to 
 the secret death that lies below. But in 
 Thomson the sense of pain often becomes 
 overmastering; and, for pity's sake, we pray 
 to hear no more. It must ever be a startling 
 paradox that such bitterness and pathos, such 
 denial and failh, can exist in the same nature ; 
 that the " Mater Tencbrarum," whose cry after 
 the dead is worthy of comparison with Burns's 
 wail to his " Mary in Heaven," should be writ- 
 ten by the same hand as " The Doom of a 
 City," and " The City of Dreadful Night." 
 
 It would be interesting to point out how 
 Thomson, without being imitative, occasion-
 
 268 THE POETRY OF DESPAIR. 
 
 ally can almost rival Shelley and surpass Blake 
 upon their own ground. In such poems as 
 " The Naked Goddess," with its mysterious 
 symbolism and spiritual reticence, and " Virtue 
 and Vice," with the satiric simplicity of its 
 short and epigrammatic lines, Thomson has 
 caught the very spirit of Blake's method and 
 utterance. In his longest poems the influence 
 of Shelley is unmistakable, and it is a grave 
 error of judgment that the editor of the posthu- 
 mous volume should have omitted Thomson's 
 poem on Shelley, which could not but be of 
 biographic interest at least, and have included 
 such clever rubbish as " The Pilgrimage of St. 
 Nicotine," which was only written to sell. In 
 the love of cloud-scenery, and the faithful 
 painting of it ; in all those large effects of 
 weirdness and solemnity which make sunrises 
 and sunsets so full of awe and mystery ; in the 
 poetry of wonder and desolation, Thomson is 
 a master, and he has studied Shelley to good 
 purpose. Shelley himself has not painted a 
 sunset with a finer apprehension of those large 
 effects of light and meaning, as opposed to 
 those exquisite touches of minute observation, 
 in which Tennyson, for instance, abounds, than
 
 QUEST AND VISION. 269 
 
 has Thomson in the following extract from 
 " The Doom of a City : " 
 
 " And so, at lengtli, we entered it, and faced 
 The thin, dark lines of countless masts, all traced 
 Upon the saddest sunset ever seen — 
 Spread out like an interminable waste 
 Of red and saffron sand, devoured by slow 
 Persistent fire ; beneath whose desolate glov/ 
 A city lay — thick-zoned with solemn green 
 Of foliage massed upon the steeps around. 
 Lctween those mast-lines flamed the crystal fires 
 Of multitudinous windows, and on high 
 Grand marble palaces and temples, crowned 
 AVith golden domes and radiant towers and spires, 
 Stood all entranced beneath that desert sky, 
 Based on an awful stillness." 
 
 But Thomson has sufficient original force 
 to stand by himself, and to be judged alone. 
 What that judgment will be it is of course 
 difficult to predict. But if it be a true axiom 
 of criticism that a poet's greatness is in precise 
 proportion to his power in pure imagination, 
 then he must take a very high place in con- 
 temporary poetry. The greatest master of 
 the poetry of pure wonder which English lit- 
 erature has ever had is undoubtedly Coleridge. 
 There is a subtle charm and magic, a witchery 
 of sound and vision, in such poems as " Khubla 
 Khan "and " Christabcl " which has never been
 
 270 THE POETRY OF DESPAIR. 
 
 approached by any other English poet ; and 
 " The Ancient Mariner " still remains the most 
 splendid effort of pure imaginative poetry in 
 modern literature. There has, indeed, been an 
 attempt to claim for Keats the place next to 
 Coleridge in the poetry of wonder, on the 
 strength of his fragment called " The Eve of St. 
 Mark's," and his single ballad " La Belle Dame 
 Sans Merci." But we fail entirely to perceive 
 any indications in either of these poems of that 
 clear and vivid faculty of intense imagination 
 which is indispensable in romantic or super- 
 natural poetry. The second place must clearly 
 be assigned to Dante Gabriel Rossctti, whose 
 " Blessed Damozel," whether considered in it- 
 self according to its qualities of intense passion, 
 spirituality, and imaginativeness, or as the work 
 of a youth of eighteen, may be said to stand 
 alone in modern poetry. And after these two, 
 at a great distance, and as a poet of wholly 
 different temper and method, v/e should be 
 compelled to name James Thomson. Com- 
 pared with either Coleridge or Rossetti he 
 falls very short in the qualities where they are 
 supreme ; but he possesses an imaginative in- 
 tensity, a Dantesque power of vision, and a
 
 QUEST AND VISION. 2/1 
 
 mastery over the imagery of gloom and fear, 
 which is a distinct and rare endowment. At 
 his word magic curtains of inwoven darkness 
 rush down out of the brightest heavens, and 
 every chord of sense vibrates with secret dread. 
 Let any one read such a poem as " In the 
 Room," with its dreadful reahsm and gradual 
 terror, or the poem called " Insomnia" in the 
 posthumous volume, and he will know what 
 we mean. The vision we see through the eyes 
 of the sleepless man — and here the sufferer Avas 
 Thomson himself — of the slant moonh'frht on 
 the ceiling thrown, mixed with the faint and 
 broken lamp-gleam ; the Hours standing one 
 by one at the bed's foot, each one — 
 
 " Still, as a pillar of basaltic stone, 
 
 And all enveloped in a sombre shroud, 
 
 Except the wan face, drooping, heavy-browed ; " 
 
 and the weary space between the tolling bells, 
 like an awful desert to be crossed in fear and 
 pain — has the distinctness and the haunting 
 memory of nightmare. And here, as in " The 
 City of Dreadful Night," he proves himself a 
 master of metre and of a sort of deep, in- 
 toned, inward music, like the heavy rise and 
 
 fall of immense seas, which is perhaps the 
 
 18
 
 2/2 THE rOETRY OF DESPAIR. 
 
 secret of the indefinable charm which lures us 
 on in spite of our aversion. 
 
 Thomson has spoken in " The Doom of a 
 City" of the mysteriousness of his own life, 
 and has said ; 
 
 " The chords of sympathy, which should have bound me 
 In sweet communion with earth's brotherhood 
 
 I d«-ew in tight and tighter still around me, 
 Strangling my best existence for a mood." 
 
 The implication is that he was not unconscious 
 of that growth of melancholy which shrouded 
 his whole life in gloom, and that he deplored 
 it. At times, too, he must have overcome it. 
 There are times when the very spirit of joy 
 sings through his lips and his verse has the 
 swift rush and sweetness of a bird's song. He 
 possessed lyrical power of no common order, 
 and had the rare faculty of writing songs 
 which sing themselves to their own music. 
 And in one lovely poem in his last volume, en- 
 titled " He Heard Her Sing," he manifests a sus- 
 tained power and volume of lyrical sweetness 
 such as it would be hard to match among any of 
 the younger writers of the day. No more im- 
 passioned song of love and spring has ever been 
 sung in our times ; and this poem alone would
 
 QUEST ^ND VISION. 273 
 
 stamp Thomson as a poet of very high order. 
 But such moods are rare, and are all too brief. 
 They are signs of what he might have done 
 had his life been happier, and had that mood, 
 of which he speaks, not tightened round him 
 its strangling death-cord ; as it is he stands in 
 modern literature like his own vision of the 
 sleepless hour — 
 
 " Still, as a pillar of basaltic stone, 
 And all enveloped in a sombre shroud," 
 
 Here then is the acutest form of that faith- 
 lessness which is the malady of the age ; here 
 is its latest and, let us hope, its ultimate devel- 
 opment. Thomson has produced and be- 
 queathed to the world a genuine poetry of 
 despair, which in power, splendor, and earnest- 
 ness is entirely unique. We emphasize its 
 perfect genuineness because it is not to be 
 confounded for a moment with that fashionable 
 poetic agnosticism which appears unto men 
 to fast, and is never so happy as when per- 
 suading every body else that it is exquisitely 
 miserable. Thomson's poetry is too terribly 
 sincere, and its profound gloom and bitterness 
 are too manifestly the product of despair in its 
 most forlorn and hopeless phase. The bound-
 
 274 THE rOETRY OF DESPAIR. 
 
 ary of doubt is long since left behind, and the 
 city of dreadful night which he has reached is 
 the realm of pure negation. It might be said 
 in defence of what Tennyson has called honest 
 doubt that the sincere questioning of ac- 
 cepted formulas is not without service to the 
 cause of truth. Had Galileo never doubted 
 the scientific deductions of his day, nor Co- 
 lumbus the. accepted geography, nor Luther 
 the conventional dogmas of the Church, the 
 world might have gone on for another century 
 or two without a true astronomy, an America, 
 or a Reformation. Such scepticism doubts its 
 way toward certainty, and comes at length to 
 find a stronger faith its own. But Thomson 
 is not one of the great world-teachers who, 
 "fired with burning sense of God and right," 
 doubts men's doubts away. He is a man who 
 has broken down in the quest, who has sought 
 the Holy Grail in vain, who at last, hopeless 
 of seeing any divine light " starlike mingle 
 with the stars," has laid himself down in the 
 unending forest, and is choked with the thick 
 drift of darkness which every way falls upon 
 him like the black snow of death. He has no 
 questions to put to the oracle of doom ; he
 
 QUEST AND VISION. 275 
 
 has received his answer, and here records his 
 belief that Hfe is 
 
 " Darkness at the core, 
 And dust and ashes all that is." 
 
 The accent of regret, which makes the poetry 
 of Arnold so pathetic in the very calmness of 
 its hopelessness, is almost wanting. Thomson 
 does not tell us how 
 
 "The sea of faith 
 Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore 
 I-ay like the folds of a bright girdle furled ; 
 
 But now I only hear 
 Its melancholy long-withdrawing roar. 
 
 Retreating to the breath 
 Of the night-wind down the vast edges drear 
 
 And naked shingles of the world." 
 
 Regret is a still sad music, whose key-note is 
 plaintiveness; but the predominating quality 
 in Thomson's verse is a sort of sonorous 
 thunder, an awful and majestic music, which 
 might aptly be likened to the long-withdraw- 
 ing roar of breakers on the naked shingles of 
 the world, when the mood of ocean is mighty 
 rather than melancholy. 
 
 In one brief poem, entitled "A Recusant," 
 he has indeed touched a tender aiul regretful 
 chord, and, looking at the church-spire " lifted
 
 276 THE POETRY OF DESPAIR. 
 
 mysterious through the twihght glooms," has 
 
 cried : 
 
 " How sweet to enter in, to kneel and pray 
 
 With all the others whom we love so well, 
 All disbelief and doubt might pass away, 
 All peace float to us with its Sabbath bell." 
 
 But this is a rare and casual mood, a moment 
 of tenderness after long weeping, -which in no- 
 wise represents his habitual thought. For 
 equally wanting in him is that accent of for- 
 lorn faith which every-where quivers through 
 the conflict of the " In Memoriam," and rises 
 to its sublimest utterance in the famous fifty- 
 fifth section, where the believing but bewil- 
 dered doubter cries : 
 
 " I falter where I firmly trod, 
 
 And fall with all my weight of cares 
 Upon the world's great altar-stairs 
 
 Which slope through darkness up to God." 
 
 For him there are no sloping altar-stairs gleam- 
 ing upward through the darkness, and the 
 darkness is impenetrable and past all hope of 
 morning. He himself, as we have shown, 
 clearly apprehended and rightly described the 
 purpose of his most remarkable poem, when 
 he called " The City of Dreadful Night " an 
 atheistical writing. Those who knew him
 
 QUEST AND VISION. 277 
 
 best fully understood the completeness of that 
 despair which consumed him, when they printed 
 on his funeral card his own lines, full of the 
 bitterest pathos and hopelessness : 
 
 "Weary of erring in this desert life, 
 
 "Weary of hoping hopes forever vain, 
 ■\Vcary of struggling in all-sterile strife, 
 
 Weary of thought which maketh nothing plain, 
 I close my eyes and calm my panting breath, 
 And pray to thee, O, ever-quiet death ! 
 
 To come and soothe away my bitter pain." 
 
 Thomson may be described as the Poc of 
 English poetry, and in many respects there is a 
 singular likeness between the two men. Both 
 were lonely and embittered, both knew the 
 early loss of love, both chose to dwell on the 
 weird borderland of imaginative terror, both 
 were victims of intemperance, both died in 
 hospital, and both were smitten with the same 
 immeasurable hopelessness. 
 
 It may be added that in both Foe and 
 Thomson there is not merely the same distinc- 
 tion of style, the same power of melody and 
 vein of weirdncss, but the same remoteness 
 and intangibility of theme. It might easily 
 be shown, and as regards Thomson it i> obvi- 
 ous enough, that it is quite possible fur a poet
 
 278 THE POETRY OF DESPAIR. 
 
 to be at once a master of realism and super- 
 naturalism ; but in both poets the supernatural- 
 ism is in excess. For this reason neither will 
 ever appeal to mankind at large. It is the fault 
 and almost the disease of modern poets that 
 they perplex themselves to discover abstruse 
 themes, and recondite fragments of history, as 
 proper subjects for the exercise of their art, 
 when in truth the finest of all themes for 
 poetry, like the flowers, lie at their very feet, in 
 the actual human life which beats its music 
 out around them. Judging Thomson from a 
 purely critical stand-point, we are bound to own 
 that his poetry will assuredly suffer at the 
 hands of time through this defect of theme ; 
 although, on the other hand, it may be said 
 that the personal interest which attaches to 
 all that he has written will do much to allure 
 those whom his remoteness will repel. 
 
 There, however, likeness between Poe and 
 Thomson ceases and difference begins. Thom- 
 son has none of Poe's heartless insincerity. 
 He does not trade in anguish. He is utterly 
 incapable of the vanity Poe manifested when 
 he strove to prove the music of his " Raven " 
 a mere artistic trick, and, by inference,
 
 QUEST AND VISION. 279 
 
 his despair a mere histrionic feat. Moreover, 
 while Poc is simply a meteoric genius, a wan- 
 dering star, a man cursed and ruined by his 
 own follies, and without significance as regards 
 his times, Thomson's great claim to notice is 
 the fact that he is a portent, full of grave sig- 
 nificance to those who study the character of 
 the times in the character of their literature. 
 He began his lessons in pessimism while a 
 mere lad under the tuition of Mr. Charles 
 Bradlaugh ; he graduated in despair under the 
 life-long influences of secularism. Poverty and 
 misfortune may have had much to do with the 
 souring of his nature and the ruin of his life. 
 But there have been many men of loflier 
 genius than his who have borne the full weight 
 of both, and have come out of the discipline of 
 sorrow not merely chastened, but strengthened. 
 He himself has sung in praise of William 
 Blake, the poet-painter, who 
 
 " Came to the desert of London town, 
 
 Mirk miles broad ; 
 He wandered up, and he wandered down, 
 
 Ever alone with God." 
 
 iJid he remember wiiile he wrote tlic poem 
 that the man he praised never earned more
 
 280 THE POETRY OE DESPAIR. 
 
 than daily bread during all his long hard life, 
 and yet died singing rapturous hymns? 
 Did he remember how men before and after 
 Blake's time had borne the same slings and 
 arrows of outrageous fortune? how Samuel 
 Johnson had taken fifteenpence for a day's 
 v.-ork in literature, and Goldsmith had drudged 
 in Grub Street all his life, and Carlyle had 
 lived and thought on oatmeal for many a 
 month in a Scotch garret, and yet had none cf 
 them cursed God and died? 
 
 It was not the misfortune and hardship of 
 Thomson's life v.'hich produced his pessimism. 
 Others have borne as much, and yet have come 
 out victorious. It was because in all that 
 desert of London town he was not alone with 
 God ; because he had settled it with himself 
 that " there was no hint of good " throughout 
 the universe; because, in fact, for him there 
 was no God, that the darkness closed down 
 upon him while it was yet day, and out of that 
 mist of thick blackness the only voice which 
 reached his fellows was a voice of heart-broken 
 misery, of complete and tragic failure. 
 
 To such a point, then, in one direction, have 
 we conic in the development of modern poetry.
 
 QUEST AND VISION. 28 1 
 
 Goethe in his day foresaw and foretold the 
 growth of a "Uterature of despair," and his 
 prediction is fulfilled. The causes for this 
 perilous development I have endeavored to 
 indicate ; they are to be found in the new cur- 
 rent of theological speculation which affected 
 poetry in the beginning of the century, in the 
 wide disturbance of faith which ensued, in the 
 failure of culture as a substitute for religious 
 faith, and, finally, in the overstrain of life 
 which is characteristic of the times in which 
 we live. Simplicity and sanity are qualities 
 which have been gradually dying out of En- 
 glish poetry for many a year, and the morbid, 
 the sensational, the exaggerated, have taken 
 their places. The pages of even our greatest 
 poets bear evidence of the influence of religious 
 disquiet, and it is rare that the query of doubt 
 is not stated with far greater force and effect 
 than the rejoinder of faith. If poetry has any 
 ministry at all in the world, if it be not a merely 
 ornamental art, if it be at all what Milton 
 said it was, and what Wordsworth proved it 
 was, a gift of God, capable of great and holy 
 service for manlcind, it must be c\'i(lcnt that \\ c 
 have shamefully misused the gift, or that our
 
 282 THE POETRY OF DESPAIR. 
 
 conception of its uses and Milton's are very- 
 different indeed. At all events, there can be 
 no question which estimate has resulted in the 
 noblest poetry, from whose lips has come the 
 deathless singing. When Milton told his 
 friends how he lay awake at night, waiting for 
 God to touch his thoughts to music, he revealed 
 the only source of great poetry ; for if inspira- 
 tion is not given to modern seers and singers, 
 illumination is, and from God descends every 
 good and perfect gift. That is the lesson 
 which wc need to learn to-day. The way of 
 reform is in the direction of Milton and Words- 
 worth. We must regain our lost simplicity of 
 life, the old and fruitful discipline of ''plain 
 living and high thinking." We must refuse to 
 barter solitude and calm for any glittering 
 baubles which may be snatched from the fierce 
 race of life lived at fever-heat. In a word, our 
 poets must return to Nature, must return to 
 God ; and when the old sweet faith grows 
 strong again the new despair will vanish and 
 the garments of heaviness give place to the 
 singing-robes of praise. 
 
 For the whole secret of the restlessness and 
 bitter thought of our times is that their moral
 
 QUEST AND VISION. 283 
 
 attitude is one of blind and arrogant revolt 
 against the sacred ancient order of the world. 
 We have scorned the limitations of human in- 
 telligence, as we are now scorning the very 
 limitations of wholesome human life itself. It 
 is time we were reminded that there are points 
 of knowledge beyond which we may not go, 
 and laws of life which we dare not violate. 
 What shall it profit us that we have swept the 
 skies with our telescopes and counted the 
 stars of heaven on our charts if in the intoxi- 
 cation of our knowledge we forget that those 
 golden fires of night were lighted by One who 
 is manifold in j3ower, and that in wisdom he 
 hath made them all ? It is a right proud boast 
 that we have beckoned the lightning and it 
 has come, running our errands and bearing 
 our messages on wings swifter than the wind ; 
 but small gain is ours if our days are hence- 
 forth devoured with haste, and the stolen 
 fire of Jupiter becomes a perilous possession, 
 and is well avenged upon the hands that stole 
 it. What recompense is there for the loss of 
 reverence ? What gain is worthy to be counted 
 against that immense disaster which has up- 
 rooted the sobriety and calm of life, which has
 
 284 THE POETRY OF DBSPAIR. 
 
 robbed us of our leisure and destroyed the 
 very power of contemplation ? Quest and 
 ViswH I have ventured to call this little book, 
 because life itself is a perpetual quest, and the 
 noblest results of life and literature are but so 
 many visionary glimpses into the solemn mys- 
 tery and beauty which lie inscrutable around 
 us and fold us like an atmosphere. But in all 
 such quest there must be reverence, and not 
 less there must be room for rest and silence. 
 There must be knowledge of ignorance as well 
 as thirst for wisdom ; space for thought as well 
 as time for speech ; bowers of greenwood 
 where Sir Galahad may rest and pray, as well 
 as erim wastes where the foul foe hovers and 
 the battle waits; and the Holy Grail floats 
 nearest when the world is hushed, and the 
 secret of God is manifest alone to those who 
 do his will. That divine vision is not revealed 
 to the presumptuous pride of half-enlightened 
 ignorance, nor to the irreverent haste of trivial 
 and pretentious curiosity. We want, as Mrs. 
 Browning said forty years ago, the touch of 
 Christ's hand upon our poets, that their dead 
 forms of art may live and that they may 
 know how to expound "agony into renova-
 
 QUEST AND VISION. 285 
 
 tion." But that divine hand is not upon our 
 poets, they have not found rest unto their 
 souls; and hence the agony of the age has 
 been expounded, but not the renovation. 
 
 Meantime let us be sure that we are just 
 now only pausing in an interval. The fountain 
 of high poetry is not dried up for England. 
 Its volume as it flows within our view is less- 
 ened and contracted, but it only runs low for 
 a time, after the manner of intermittent 
 springs. Even now under ground — unknown 
 as yet by us — it may be gathering up its sup- 
 plies. In the days of Byron and Shelley, some 
 seventy years ago, Wordsworth was held in 
 contempt, and it seemed as if impiety ruled 
 the realm of poetry. Yet how much since 
 then of deep religious utterance, of pure and 
 reverential meditation and aspiration, has been 
 poured forth in high, rich strains of verse ! 
 Tennyson's day is not quite gone, and his has 
 not been the music of despair. Browning's 
 perplexities and paradoxes have opened forth 
 into fruit of faith and worship. Myers is a 
 true and high poet, whose work outshines in 
 beauty the lurid splendors of the poetry of de- 
 spair. Lewis Morris may not be a great poet,
 
 286 THE rOETRY OF DESPAIR. 
 
 but he Is in the true poetic succession, and may 
 well be joined with Myers as showing the ©on- 
 tinuity of the tradition of faith among our 
 contemporary poets. Yet a little while and 
 greater names will prolong through after years 
 the still growing galaxy of the poets of faith 
 and holy awe, of reverence and hope and love. 
 It cannot be that the great music of English 
 poetry shall end only In despair. The heav- 
 enly sweetness of the song of Ariel seems lost ; 
 but we mourn not as those without hope, for 
 even while we cry with Ferdinand, " 'Tis gone," 
 behold the air thrills again with magical vibra- 
 tion, and there is heard the faint prophetic 
 cadence of a new song, divine and glorious as 
 the olden, heralding the coming ages, and we 
 cry also with Ferdinand, " No : i> begins 
 
 THE END.
 
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