3amc9 Ik. fIDofHrt PAULINE FORE MOFFITT LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA GENERAL LIBRARY. BERKELEY ESSAYS-MODERN ^ ESSAYS MODEEN BY F. W. H. MYERS iLontron MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited NEW YORK : THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1897 All rights reserved First Edition (Crmvn Zvo). Reprinted (Globe ivo) 1897 ^ Add to Lib, GIFl Printed ly R. & R. Clark, Limitkd, Edinhirgh CONTENTS Giuseppe Mazzini George Sand . Victor Hugo Ernest Renan Archbishop Trench's Poems George Eliot Arthur Penrhyn Stanley A New Eirenicon Rossetti and the Religion of Beauty PAQK 1 70 105 163 235 251 276 289 312 905 GIUSEPPE MAZZINI. *• Fuss' io pur lui ! C a tal fortuna nato Per r aspro esilio suo, con la virtute, Dare' del moudo il piu felice stato." Michael Angelo. The Eisorgimento, or Eesurrection of Italy, one of the noblest themes which our century has offered, still awaits the philosophic historian. The writings of the friends or disciples of one or other of the three leading characters in the great drama introduce the reader into a world of contradictions more befitting a solar myth than a serious history. Grave biographies have been written of Cavour as the regenerator of Italy, in which Mazzini is mentioned only with an incidental sneer. Noble poems ^ have been dedicated to Mazzini as the regenerator of Italy, in which Cavour is not men- tioned at all. And there is a whole Garibaldian literature in which Mazzini stands quite in the back- ground, while Cavour plays indeed a prominent part, only he is no longer the hero but the villain of the tale. ^ For example, Mr. Swinburne's magnificent Song of Italy and Super Flumina Babylonis, and the pathetic poems called The Disciples, by Mrs. Hamilton King. VOL. II. & B o MODERN ESSAYS. [i. I propose to attempt a less one-sided estimate of the least conspicuous but not the least interesting of the tliree — a man wlio may be said to have been at once more known and more unknown than almost any man in Europe, whose designs were discussed in eveiy Cabinet, and his words welcomed in every " upper room " of political or religious reformers on the Con- tinent, while at the same time his writings and him- self were proscribed in every country except our own, and he lived in lodgings of which not a dozen persons knew the address. Giuseppe Mazzini, son of a professor of anatomy, w^as born in Genoa in 1805, and died at Pisa in 1872. The years in which he grew up to know Italy were among the most perplexing and desperate of her long decline. Tlie year 1*700 has been sometimes fixed as the darkest moment of her second night — the night between the Eenaissance and the Eisorgimento — but such revival as had come since then had consisted rather in a wakening consciousness of her shame than in any effort to remove it. A few figures appear amid the gloom — figures, some of them, which we may take as typical of the tliree aspects of ruined Italy — her unabashed sensualism, her rebellious passion, her vanishing and mournful soul. We see Casanova, the gaudy fiower of decay, conciliating by the intensity of hLs corruption tyranny itself, and flaunting through Europe his triumphant charlatanism and his greedy amours. We see Al fieri — his republicanism strangely I.] GIUSEPPE MAZZINI. 3 complicated by an intercurrent passion for high-born dames — making of his whole strong life a kind of tragic protest and declamation, living melodrama and thinking in heroics. And we see Leopardi wandering iinrestingly among " the arches and deserted towers," appealing for a visionary sympathy to an impalpable mistress, for a visionary honour to an unassembled host of war, till " not the last liope only of beloved illusions, but the last desire, had flown." The " last illusion " in the sphere of politics which Italy underwent was the French invasion of 1796. For a time the word Francese was used by ardent Italians as synonymous with patriot. But unfortun- ately the armies of the French Eevolution were admirable only till they were successful ; and it has been remarked that the proclamation in which Napoleon held out Italy to his troops, not as a nation to deliver, but as a prey to seize, marked the first step in the metamorphosis of the soldiers of the Eepublic into the soldiers of the Empire. The French yoke was thrown off for a few years, but Austria was an equally brutal master. Napoleon's second rule, after Marengo, with its juster codes, its sounder finance, its pubHc works and education, seemed at first a relief; but under ISTapoleon good government itself became the instru- ment of tyranny, and his equalising institutions served but to level all pre-existing rights beneath a single will. And he was not content with exacting money or pictures — he needed men. Thirty thousand Italians 4 MODERN ESSAYS. [i. were carried ofr to Spain, forty thousand to Russia. I'iedniont, Genoa, Tuscany, Rome itself, were annexed to the French Empire. Italy was not even the subject of France, but her slave. Napoleon fell ; Austria again overran Lombardy ; the petty princes returned. Murat from Naples made a vain attempt to unite Italy under himseK ; then he too fell, and Naples was restored to Bourbon rule. The Congress of Vienna, ignoring nationality or national wishes, and preoccupied wdth a system of guarantees against France, confirmed Austria in the possession of Lombardy and Venice, and gave her, through her archdukes, a preponderating influence in Central Italy. The statesmanship of the Congress of Vienna belongs to a past era, both of politics and of humanity ; but it must be noted that no counter-propositions were urged with authority, no powerful voice from Italy protested against the restoration of these foreign masters, and the common people, who still were strongly Catholic, received with satisfaction the return of princes and pope. The restored rulers brought with them all the errors of restorations in a form at once exaggerated and paltry. A r>ourbon on the throne of France carries with him a historic majesty to which mucli that is not royal may be forgiven, but it was hard for Modena or l*arma to idealise the petty poltrooneries of a grand duke, or tlie gallantries of a dowager empress. There is no need to r(!])eat the long indictment against the rulers of Italy. AVhilt; liberal tongues were still I.] GIUSEPPE MAZZINI. 5 being torn out with pincers in Eome, — while innocent women were still being flogged in batches through the streets of Milan, — while, in the dungeons of Naples, the " cap of silence " was still being pressed on the head of any man who showed himself more than a slave, — no words were too strong to use ; but as things are now, we may be content with noticing how surely from each of these powers has been exacted the penalty of a false position. Austria, once the favourite, as it were, of unjust Fates, the " felix Austria " of a theory of territorial aggrandisement which ignored all rights but those of kings, has suffered more severely than any nation in Europe from the crumbling of errors which she shared with them all, and scarcely knows even yet how far she must contract her imperial struc- ture before she can find it founded on the rock. The Papacy itself is learning to regret the worldly ambition which confounded the things of God and Caesar and added a perishable coronet to the triple crown. And in Naples the irony of fate has been yet more personal and bitter. Seldom was so grotesque a sport of fortune as that which gave the absolute rule over millions of lives to " Bomba" and his kin. And seldom, as Plato would say, have the souls of slaves been laid bare so shamefully from beneath the vesture of a great king. It was in Naples, in 1820, that the long series of revolutions began. This first insurrection founded a type which became common to many Neapolitan in- surrections. The people demanded a constitution and 6 MODERN ESSAYS. [i. marched on Naples. Tlie king's troops ran away. The king granted a constitution, and swore on tlie crucifix that he would be true to it, invoking the instant vengeance of God if he had a lie in his heart. The Austrians marched on Naples. The parliamentary troops ran away. The king tore up the constitution and hung whom he chose. Tliis revolution aimed at internal reform, — always the most urgent preoccupation of Neapolitan patriots. But in 1821 an insurrection broke out in Piedmont, having for its object not merely the grant of a consti- tution to Piedmont, but the liberation of Ijombardy from Austrian rule. Betrayed by Prince Charles Albert, tliis rising collapsed for want of leaders, and Austria was harsher than before. Ten years later the French revolution of 1830 spread excitement through Italy. Eisings in Bologna, Parma, and Modena, revealed the same lack of leaders and of programme, and were repressed by Austrian intervention. These failures made the cause of Itahan liberties seem more hopeless than ever. It was plain that there was no organising bond of union, no leader, no definite plan or idea round which the lovers of Italy could rally ; while Austria was always on the watch to resent not only overt revolts against herself, but even constitutional reforms in the other Italian States. Puling by right of conquest, she chose that the smaller princes, who were in effect her vassals, should keep the liberties of their subjects duwn to the same level. I.] GIUSEPPE MAZZINI. 7 In one direction only was there any sign of hope. The educated class was beginning to recover from the confusion and stupor produced by the French invasions, and to interest itself in patriotic causes. In Tuscany especially a literary movement began — cautious and tentative, but important as accustoming men to speak, and giving them some reason to trust and respect each other. Science, agriculture, — every pursuit, from astronomy to whist, which can unite mankind — was soon used for the same end, and professors or land- owners meeting from different parts of Italy learned to feel that they had a common country. In their various discussions the question really at issue was never mentioned, but never forgotten. But means like these could scarcely reach the mass of the people. A more outspoken influence, a new moral force, was needed, and when Charles Albert succeeded to the throne of Piedmont in 1831, a Letter to the King, hy an Italian, showed that the new force was there. " The people," said this stirring appeal, " are no longer to be quieted by a few conces- sions. They seek the recognition of those rights of humanity which have been withheld from them for ages. They demand laws and liberty, independence and union. Divided, dismembered, and oppressed, they have neither name nor country. They have heard themselves stigmatised by the foreigner as a helot nation. They have seen free men visit their country and declare it the land of the dead. They have 8 MODERN ESSAYS. [l drained tlie cup of slavery to the dregs, but they liave sworn never to fdl it again." The letter pointed out to the king how, by appeal- ing to the whole of Italy, he might unite her people in the struggle for independence. " There is a crown brii^hter and nobler than that of Piedmont — a crown that only awaits a man bold enough to conceive the idea of wearing it, resolute and determined enough to consecrate himself wholly to the realisation of that idea, and virtuous enough not to dim its splendour with ignoble tyranny." This letter, written at the age of twenty -six, was the first manifesto of principles which ]\Iazzini afterwards more fully expressed, but which he retamed unchanged through life. The pro- blem with which he had to deal was a complex one. How were moral and political unity and strength to be won for Italy, partitioned as she was between Austria and semi- Austrian princes, and morally divided into the ultramontane and materialist camps ? A brief statement of his political creed, elicited from his various ^mtings, will show to what extent he was at first alone in the views which he held, and to what extent lie was in unison with other patriots. His programme, then, reduced to its sim})lest expression, may be stated as follows : — (1) l^irst of all the Austrians must be driven out of Italy. (2) This must be attempted at once, and constantly. (.".) All Italy must unite into one nation. I.] GIUSEPPE MxVZZINI. 9 (4) The form of her government must then be submitted to her deliberate choice. (5-) A republican government must be recommended to her by fair argument. (6) It is useless to expect help from Catholicism in regenerating Italy. (7) A purer religion must be preached from Eome ; and Eome must once more assume the moral leader- ship of the world. (1) The first of these propositions was controverted by some of the best men in Italy — for instance, by Eomagnosi, Eicasoli, and Mayer. They held that in- ternal reforms should first be achieved, and that then Austria, whom it was impossible to dislodge, would soften her rule as well. Had Austria taken advan- tage of this suggestion she might possibly have kept Lombardy and Venice to this day, or at least have sold them to Italy without war. If Francis II. had not flogged so many innocent women through Milan and Verona, if he had not chained so many innocent men to the walls of the Spielberg, and fed them on bread and tallow, Europe might long have looked coldly on Italian claims to independence. But he showed plainly that he preferred to rule Lombardy as a con- quered country, and, moreover, that he would allow no chauGjes in the neic^hbouriuLj Italian States. Men who saw Eadetzky making it the regular business of his life to put down revolutions could not long deny that 10 MODERN ESSAYS. [i. the expulsion of the Austrians was the prerequisite of all other reform. (2) The second point was much more controvertible. The great mass of patriotic Italians, not only the Moderates but the Carbonari, believed that Italy ought to wait for the chapter of accidents, that the expulsion of the Austrians was more than she could manage alone. They pointed to the failures of 1821 and 1831, afterwards to the failure of Mazzini's expedition into Savoy in 1834, and said that it was cruel to lead men on to perish when there was no hope. Among the many men who bitterly blamed Mazzini on this ground one name only need be mentioned, that of Cavour. But in the way in which Cavour treated this accusation may be found the key to its true meaning. Cavour's object, though perfectly patriotic, was patri- otic in a different sense from Mazzini's. He wished to liberate Lombardy and Venetia, and to add them, and the small States of the North of Italy, to the Sardinian kingdom. He did not wish to touch Eome or Naples, nor to see Lombardo- Venetia liberated to the profit of a republic. He was, in short, a Piedmontese patriot before he was an Italian patriot. His first object, therefore, was to acquire for Piedmont such a reputa- tion that all that was gained from Austria might fall into her grasp. He wished to make her known as a model constitutional monarchy, equally aloof from Austrian despotism and from republican anarchy. In this plan he completely succeeded. He added its 1.1 GIUSEPPE MAZZINI. 11 finishing touch by despatching Piedmontese troops to the Crimea, where his was not the only government which sought and found a needed advertisement. And when he met the representatives of the Great Powers on equal terms at the Congress of Paris it was felt that his. tone on Italian matters was greatly changed. Till then he had always spoken with horror and con- tempt of the isolated outbreaks of the revolutionary spirit, and had begged that Piedmont might not on their account forfeit the sympathy of the Powers. But now, in that famous note to which the Austrian plenipotentiary refused to reply, he vehemently alleged those constant and irrepressible uprisings as a proof of the intolerable character of Austrian, Papal, and Nea- politan rule. It was then that the opinion of Europe — Count Walewski speaking for France, and Lord Claren- don for England — ranged itself definitely on the side of Italian freedom ; the Austrian occupation was ad- mitted to be an abnormal, therefore a transitory thing, and the Pope and the King of Naples received hints to set their houses in order, which it was their own fault if they ignored. It was seen by all, as it had, no doubt, been seen by Cavour all along, that the con- duct which gains sympathy for oppressed peoples is neither tame endurance nor empty declamation, but heroic, even if unavailing, courage. For the success of Cavour's projects it was as necessary that the people of Lombardy, Parma, Modena, should show this courage, as that Piedmont should show herself fitted by consti- 12 MODERN ESSAYS. [i. tutionalisni and good order to reap the harvest of which the blood of " Young Italy " had been the seed. We cannot doubt, then, that these recurrent revolu- tions were of service to Italy, even if her independence was to be ultimately attained on Cavour's plan — by awaiting a series of happy conjunctures and alliances with other Powers. But to defend Mazziui's policy thus would be to shirk his main issue; for he did Twt wish to call in the help of other nations — he did not intend his risings simply as demonstrations, but as a mode of warfare which, if persisted in, would gradually make the Austrian position untenable. No one can say with certainty how this plan would have worked if it had not been superseded by Cavour's. But what is doubtful is not so much the feasibility of the plan in itself, if the Italians acted up to it, as the possibility of eliciting from them as much heroism and patience as the plan required. If all Italy had made common cause with Lombardy and Venetia, if each of her cities had fought like the Romans under Mazzini, or the Venetians under Manin, if there had been twenty such guerrilla bands as that " thousand " with which Gari- baldi conquered a kingdom, Austria could not have held her giound for long. The dis})arity between her strength and that of Italy was after all by no means overwlielming, smd to occupy a mountainous and bitterly hostile country needs overwhelming force. The inter- vention of foreign powers might have complicated the l)rubleni, but if, as IMuzzini wished, tlie war had been I] GIUSEPPE MAZZINI. 13 conducted with strict respect for Catholicism, and the question of form of government deferred for the con- sideration of United Italy, foreign powers, in the grow- ing coldness with which the treaties of Vienna were regarded, would have had no adequate reason to inter- fere. Still, they might have interfered ; the spirit of Italy might have given wayj and her freedom might have been deferred for generations. On Mazzini's, as on Cavour's plan, there was a chance of failure ; and Mazzini's plan was sure to cost more blood, though it might gain more ItaKan territory than Cavour's. Our preference for one or the other plan will, in fact, depend upon the objects for which we desire the existence of Italy as a nation. If we care mainly for her material prosperity and peace, for the " white flocks of Clitum- nus," for the " heavy-hanging harvests and Bacchus in his Massic flow," we may feel that Cavour led Italy along her surest way. But if we desire first of all that the " Saturnian land " should once again be the mighty mother not only of fruits but of heroes, if self-respect and constancy seem to us things worth purchase at the cost of any pain, then we may feel that it had been better for her if " fire-breathing bulls had ploughed the soil and dragon's teeth been sown, and helm and javelin had bristled in a crop of men." " Italy will never live," said Emilio Bandicra, " till Italians have learnt to die." No word need be uttered in disparagement of a people to which the whole world wishes well, which men of so many nations have loved 14 MODERN ESSAYS. [i. the next to their own. But are not the best Italians themselves the first to say that their redemption has been too often received as a gift from others instead of being worked out by themselves ? that there might be something more of nobility, distinction, power, in Italy's bearing among the nations now, if she had felt within her more of the spirit of that other people of the past, who (in Thucydides' words) " dared beyond their strength, and hazarded against their judgment, and in extremities were of an excellent hope " ? (3) "All Italy must unite into one nation." Now that all Italian soil (except Nice, Corsica, and the Trentino) is, in fact, united under one government, this proposition needs no defence. It is plain that there was no reason for leaving out any part of Italy, and that her independence and progress depend in even an exceptional degree on her status as a great power. She has a danger which other powers have not ; she has to face the Ultramontanism of the world. And, in fact, no exclusion of any integi'al part of Italy, of Eome or Naples, could have been long main- tained. The history of the struggle shows that the resolution to achieve Italian unity was the one strong popular fcHiliiig on which either republicans or mon- archists could count. This was a surprise to both parties ; for the lesson of combination and self-restraint was one which it had seemed that no suffering could teach to Italy. Wlien, after tlie internecine struggles of her rci»ul>lics, she sank into her second night, she I.] GIUSEPPE MAZZINI. 15 was still passionately attached to small civic units and to the very extravagance of self-government. But when her new day dawned she was found to be bent above all things on national unity, and so indifferent to her form of government, that this was decided almost wholly by Cavour's genius and by the accident of Garibaldi's admiration for the personal courage of Victor Emmanuel. Garibaldi was a more typical national hero than either Mazzini or Cavour, and his eagerness to seize on Naples for Italy, with his gro- tesque perplexity as to what to do with it when he had got it, represents well enough the national ardour for union, and the national irresolution as to anything beyond. But, however necessary the union of the whole of Italy may seem to us now, Mazzini at first was almost alone in preaching it. In 1831, and for long after, alliances between the princes, the formation of three Italian States, or an Amphictyonic council under the presidency of the Pope, were the alternatives most often urged. It was an alliance of constitutional States tliat was desired by Cesare Balbo, Eomagnosi, Massimo d'Azeglio. It was an alliance of aristocratical States that was the ideal of Alfieri, Gioberti, Botta. And even so late as 1859 it was the extension of the Sar- dinian kingdom over North Italy which was the limit of the aspirations of Cavour. But in this case also IMazzini's programme was based not only on political foresight, but on what was 16 MODERN ESSAYS. [i. to him a religious principle. The principle of nation- alities was one which he deduced directly from his conception of the moral universe. The nation, he said, is within humanity wliat the family is within the nation — a divinely -constituted group with a special mis- sion of its own, to be pursued independently, though in association with the groups around it. To break up a nationality — a group set apart by race and tongue — was to deny to it the only right which an individual or a society can possess, the right of developing itself freely along its appointed patli. And much of his energy was spent in insisting on this view ; not in the case of Italy alone, but on behalf of the Greeks, the Belgians, the Slavs, the Eoumanians, the Magyars. The principle, as these names suggest to us, is a hard one to apply. It is subject, perhaps, to more limitations than !Mazzini supposed. But no one can deny him the credit of having been its first systematic, persistent, and inlhi- ential supporter. And it is a commonplace to remark that in the liistory of the last half century in Europe the principle of nationalities has been superseding the old system of territorial compensations and dynastic claims as irresistibly as the Natural system of botany has superseded that of Linnasus. (4) The next point in ]\Iazzini's programme — that united Italy should be left to choose her own govern- ment — seems plainly just. In his view each party and province ought to lielp every otlier in the attain- ment of the common end, but witliout pledging any I.] GIUSEPPE MAZZINI. 17 illy to the acceptance of its own scheme of rule. On two occasions Mazzini was strongly urged, from oppo- site quarters, to give way on this point. In 1848 Charles Albert, fighting against Austria in alliance with revolted Lombardy, wished to enrol all Lom- bard and other volunteers in his own army. His ob- vious preference of Piedmontese to Italian interests had in other ways much injured the movement, and this proposal had the effect of gTeatly checking the influx of soldiers. Mazzini stood out, and the Lom- bard volunteers were incorporated in regiments of their own, though officered by Piedmontese. He thus protested, not against the union of Italy under a king, but against a king's assumption of a right to rule over Italy, made in a manner which lessened the chances of Italian union. The other occasion when his firmness in this matter was tested was when he spoke to Italy in the name of the Eepublic of Eome. Men whose hopes, like his own, were fixed on a Eepublic of Italy urged him to use the unique opportunity to found at least in title the unique ideal. But he refused to prejudge in any way the decision of the rest of the country, and in his brief hour of triumph he did not derogate from the prin- ciples of his long defeat. (5) The next article of his belief is far more open to debate. The question whether a monarchy or a republic is indicated by history as the government best fitted for a united Italy, may be plausibly argued VOL. II. c 18 MODERN ESSAYS. [r. on botli sides. If we consider Italy simply as one of llu; provinces of tlie dismembered Roman empire, analogy is in favour of monarchy. Speaking generally, each of the principal provinces of that empire associ- ated its fortunes sooner or later with some family of Germanic princes, and the hereditary succession of these princes served as a nucleus for the newly-formed State. The prince's power was from the first limited by the riglits of minor chieftains and heads of families, and from these limitations the civil liberties of Europe sprang. Italy alone rejected consolidation under a northern prince ; she refused the hereditary dominion of a Gothic or Lombard family ; she preferred an anarchic liberty modified by external Powers, whose indefinite pretensions she vaguely admitted, and whose incursions her factions or her patriotism alternately invited and repelled. This system of municipal self- government broke down, and Italy was parcelled out under foreign rulers, identified not with her interests, Ijul witli the interest of the reigning families of other countries. It might seem, therefore, that the surest way of guaranteeing the continued existence of a united Italy would be simply to replace her in tlie road whicli slie should never have quitted — to identify lier with the fortunes of some family of northern origin, and to trust that the stability and progressive constitutionalism wliicli had on the whole followed on such a course in France, Austria, England, Spain, and Portugal, might result in Italy as well. In tlie I.] GIUSEPPE MAZZINI. 19 latest instance of the revival of a nation of Soutlicrn Europe this j)lan was tried : Greece was placed under a northern family ; and, if the experiment has not been fully successful, there has at least been no sign that a republic, or a federation of republics, would have answered even as well. The house of Savoy fulfilled the necessary condi- tions ; and there was a kind of historic propriety in giving the leadership of Italy to Piedmont, the pro- vince of Italy as yet least distinguished in history. Even so had each plain and promontory of Greece in turn held the hearthfire of her national existence ; in each in turn that fire burnt low ; and her last renewal came to her from the unexhausted byways of her people, from villages unnoticed by Thucydides, and goat-pasturing islets almost unnamed amid the sea. These, in one view, are the analogies of history, and these analogies history has confirmed. Italy has been remade into a nation in the easiest way. Few historical problems, however, are so simple as to admit of only one solution by analogy, and the same broad facts of Italian history may be read into a very different meaning. We miss, it may be said, the very lesson which the exceptional character of Italy's history should teach us if we attempt to force her destinies into the vulgar mould. At a time when monarchy was essential to the very existence of other States she refused monarchy — refused it on account of her excess, not her defect, of national life ; — because 20 MODERN ESSAYS. [i. the patriotism of her sons lies in devotion to a country and not to a king ; because each group of Italian men and women, each sacred shrine and hill, was enough to give scope to all human faculties, to form a centre of heroism, art, and love. Meantime other nations grew strong by their very subjection, by the want of individuality in their units, by the joyless discipline which made the State a machine of war. Then came the time when small States could exist no longer, and the Italian communities were delivered over to northern tyrants. But now that Italy was to rise again, she ought surely to retain her old strength while avoiding her old weakness. Her strength was in her democracy, in the vivid sense of participation in the national life which animated the least of her citizens. Pieprosentative government, — unknown to the ancient or the mediaeval world, — makes possible the existence of large republics with all the institutions of local freedom, and without the perils of federation. It is in this direction that the civilised world tends. Even the old monarchical States of Europe are being republicanised now. The only great new State which the modern age has produced is the republic of North America. If Italy is to head tlie world she must range herself on the winning side. Balanced in this way, the argument leaves much to the bias of individual minds. And it was not in reality from a comparison of historical analogies that Mazzini was a republican. It was because " to the I.] GIUSEPPE MAZZmi. 21 unhappy he felt himself near of kin," because his sympathies moved most readily with the hopes of the masses, and the upward struggles of toiling men. In men who have risen to wide-reaching power we generally observe an early preponderance of one of two instincts — the instinct of rule and order, or the instinct of sympathy. The one instinct may degener- ate into bureaucracy, the other into sentimentalism. Eightly ordered, they make the master or the leader of men. The earliest anecdotes told of Cavour and Mazzini will illustrate my meaning. Wlien Cavour was about six years old he was taken on a posting journey. On one stage of this journey the horses were unusually bad. The little boy asked who was responsible for the horses. He was told it was the postmaster. He asked who appointed the postmaster. He w^as told it was the syndic. He demanded to be taken at once to the syndic to get the postmaster dismissed. Mazzini as a child was very delicate. When he was about six years old he w^as taken for his first walk. For the first time he saw a beggar, a venerable old man. He stood transfixed, then broke from his mother, threw his arms round the beggar's neck and kissed him, crying, " Give him something, mother, give him something." " Love him well, lady," said the aged man ; " he is one who will love the people." The tendency of recent thought has been to dwell rather upon the hierarchy than upon the unity of 22 MODERN ESSAYS. [i. mankind. And as the race develops, the difference between man and man, already vast, may perhaps grow not less, but greater. We can place no limit to the ascendency which may be exercised by the mere intellect of some epoch-making man. But we may safely prophesy that no one will ever uplift his fellow- men from within, or leave a name which draws tears of reverence from generations yet unborn, who has not himself, as it were, wept over Jerusalem, and felt a stirring kinship with even the outcast of mankind. " God and the People," Mazzini's watchword, was no mere phrase to him. It represented the two streams of adoring and of compassionate sympathy which make a double current in the generous heart, unless fate sends an object around which both can flow, and mingles either effluence in a single love. There is, indeed, no reason whatever why God's worship or the people's welfare should be bound up with a republican form of government. The danger of modern societies comes from plutocracies rather than from kings or nobles ; and against the power of money republics offer no safeguard of their own. Mazzini, perhaps, hardly realised this. Or rather, what he desired was hardly what we call democracy ; for he defines democracy as " the progress of all through all, under the leadership of the best and wisest." And what he desired was, in Irutli, tlie common weal, was rul)lic Virtue, and it was because the monarchies around him gave liini no sufficing I.] GIUSEPPE MAZZINI. 23 image of lier rule that he pictured her re-arisen in her ancient vesture and called by her Eoman name. (6) " No help in the deliverance of Italy is to be looked for from the Catholic Church." This principle also has been proved to be sound by the march of events. But it was opposed to some of the strongest currents of popular feeling in Italy, and to the aspira- tions of some of her noblest minds. The political programme of the " new Guelph movement " may seem to us plainly futile ; its political leaders, — Gioberti or Eossi, — may be little to our taste. But behind them there was a force which was even trai^ic in its intensity, — the passionate reluctance of men who have entrusted their souls to a spiritual guide to admit to themselves that that guide betrays, — the determination at any cost to reconcile Catholicism with patriotism, the creed of the fathers with the duty of the sons. The real knot of the situation was in the temporal power, which throughout this century, at least, has been a very millstone round the neck of the Papacy. The recent Popes, in fact, have been in a false position, in which their predecessors were seldom placed. In the days of the great Popes of the Middle Ages the temporal power was an almost nominal or at least a slightly-regarded thing. The policy of a Gregory or an Innocent was Catholic, not Italian. After the return of the Popes from Avignon the character of their aspirations changed : tliey sank into petty in- 24 MODERN ESSAYS. [r. triguing princes like the princes around them. Tlie policy of an Alexander or a Leo was Italian, and not Catholic. But the time came when each of these terms might be interpreted in two ways. An Italian policy might mean a policy by which the Pope aimed first of all at preserving his position as an Italian prince, or a policy by which he placed himself at the head of the national aspirations of Italy. A Catholic policy might mean a policy by which he conciliated the despotic governments of Austria and Naples in return for material support, or a policy which kept him the spiritual leader of that great religious move- ment which is proceeding, quite independently of forms of civil government, in the old and the new world. Attachment to the temj)oral power has led the recent Popes in each case to choose the narrower alternative. How much the Catholic Church has lost through the endless series of compromises and con- cordats which the interests of the temporal power have necessitated, it is hard to say. In such traffic the rate of exchange rises all too rai)idly against the vendor of impalpable wares. And now that the struggle is over and the temporal power gone, it is felt by the wisest Catholics themselves that a new independence is breathed into the Vatican counsels. Jf, then, it has been well for the Popes even to be forcibly deprived of the temporal power, what might they not have gained by its voluntar}' refcjrm ; — nay, even by its dignified and timely surrender ! No party I.] GIUSEPPE MAZZINI. 25 in Italy deserves a deeper sympathy than the men, Catholics at once and patriots, who watched with powerless regret the loss of this unique opportunity. What chivalry in d'Azeglio, unable to the last to conceive of a severance between reliiiion and honour ! what pathos in Tosti, as he called to the marching patriots from the sanctuary of his Benedictine hill, " Sitting among the ruins of a day that is gone, I follow you witli my love from far ! " This great problem of the relation of regenerate Italy to Catholicism was at once a personal and a public one to every Italian. Cavour and Mazzini solved it in their different ways. For his own part, Cavour especially retained a devoted priest to absolve his last hour, and made his way into heaven itself by a stroke of diplomacy. And his solution of the general question was of a similarly diplomatic kind. The Free Church in a Free State is a political and not a moral remedy for the deep division of the Italian people ; it is all that statesmanship can offer, but it is no more than a modus vivencli between two halves of a nation. To Mazzini, on the other hand, the spiritual unity of Italy seemed far more necessary, though far harder to achieve, than the political. He could more easily endure that Italian labour should enrich foreign rulers, than that in Italian hearts there should be any impulse of truth or virtue which did not unite in that full current of spiritual influence which it was Italy's 26 MODERN ESSAYS. [i. mission to pour upon the world. And yet how was this unity to be attained ? A moral force can be absorbed or modified only by a stronger force of the same kind. And he who would offer to Catholics an ideal higher than the Catholic Church must needs resemble tliat Indian hermit of whom M. Renan tells us, who, expelled from the heaven of Indra, created, by the force of his meditation and the intensity of his merits, another Indra and a new Jvcaven. (7) And this brings us to the last article of Mazzini's programme : " Eome must give Europe a new religion — must a third time head and regenerate the world." It is enough for the present to say that this has not been done. AVlien we discuss ^lazzini's own springs of action we shall be better able to estimate the value and the future of his religious ideas. But in the world of public action these hopes have failed. And here, at last, we come upon a point which seems to justify the common view of ^Mazzini as a visionary and a Utopian. In using these words, however, we must beware of confusion of thought. In dealing with men there are two distinct questions — IIow can we improve their condition now ? and, ITow far may that condition be improved ultimately ? If a man through holding en- thusiastic views as to the future of the race mistakes or neglects the measures which they need now, it is just to censure him as a fanatic. But it is ])ossil)lc to I.] GIUSEPPE MAZZINL 27 combine glowing hopes for the future with cautious sagacity in the present. The founders of the United States believed that tlieir republic would be a moral pattern to mankind ; but this did not prevent them from constructing a business country on business principles. Hardly Plato himself was in the world of theory more visionary than Bacon ; and yet Bacon was the Apostle of Experiment, and in his conduct of the Court of Chancery was found to err even from excess of practicality. If we are to call men like Washington and Bacon Utopians the word has lost its sting. And, like these men, Mazzini had two aspirations, the one practical and the other visionary. The first was the unity of Italy; the second the establishment therein of a religion and a republic. But the line which he took with reference to these two objects was essentially different. As to the first he accepted no compromise. He forgave no dereliction of this end, no halt on the road to its attainment. But his second object, though he held it the higher one, was never suffered to interfere with the first. Althoudi nothincf O O was done for Italy in the way that he would have chosen, there was nothing done for Italy that he did not support. For proof of this assertion there is no need to appeal to any controverted matter. His public manifestoes, which extend over his whole career and determined the action of liis party, are e\ddence enough. This surely is all that we have a right to 28 MODERN ESSAYS. [i demand of a roformer, that lie sliall set before him some actually attainable ideal, and secure it at what- ever cost of self-suppression or compromise. If he does this, we need not blame him if he would have liked to do more. We need not blame him if in his desire for the happiness and virtue of others he refuses to be satisfied with the attainment of any given step upon an upward progress whose limit is unknown; if in reviewincj his own work he will call nothinc: jijood which might have been better. These, then, were the leading principles which Mazzini upheld through life by every line of thought, every form of action, which circumstances allowed. At first his influence was mainly through the press and correspondence. In literary and critical essays he gave to his views on life and duty a clear and digni- fied expression. By the association of " Young Italy " — so called from no fantastic preference for youth, but because hardly any grown men remained to Italy who still dared to hope — he spread these views through the length and breadth of the land. Another nssocia- tion, " Young Europe," brought the revolutionary element in other nations into sym})athy witli Italian freedom. And in a host of articles and pamphlets he afforded the impulse necessary to evoke the spark of patriotism in many a hesitating company of men, to " beat the twilight into flakes of Are." It is of course impossible to define witli exactness the amount of inlhieiice thus exerted; but it is; notice- I.] GIUSEPPE MAZZINI. 29 able that we seldom fmd an Italian patriot ascribing his first ardour of public spirit to any other source ; nor does any other source seem to have existed from which the rising people of Italy could draw their necessary and sustained inspiration. Giusti gave them trenchant satire. Guerrazzi gave them a mass of vigorous polemic. Gioberti offered such incitement to Gfreatness as can be drawn from volumes of o panegyric of a type which we are more accustomed to see addressed to the people of Paris. But Mazzini almost alone gave them what they needed most, a strain of manly virtue. " I love you too well," he wrote in the preface to his treatise on The Duties of Man, " either to flatter your passions or caress the golden dreams by which others seek to gain your favour. My voice may sound too harsh, and I may too severely insist on proclaiming the necessity of virtue and sacrifice, but I know, and you will soon know also, that the sole origin of every right is in a duty fulfilled." The short treatise to which these words are prefixed should be read by those who have been accustomed to think of Mazzini as a violent revolutionary. Their first impression will probably be one of surprise at the subordination of political to religious dogma. The author has plainly more in common with Huss or Savonarola than with Eobespierre or Mirabeau. It will then be observed that, if we except his pre- ference for a republic as the logical form of govern- 30 MODERN ESSAYS. [r. iiient by the people, there is little in liis opiuious which would have disqualified him (for instance) from forming a member of an ordinary English liberal ministry. Even on questions of political economy — the great crux of the reformer — it may surprise us to find him both sound and inventive. Co-operation is his leading economical doctrine, and some of the practical measures by which he would encourage this are already at work in some towns of Italy, and are likely enough to spread farther. On one point alone economists will agree in pronouncing him mistaken ; — in his wish to raise the public revenue almost wholly by an income-tax. This is an extreme view, but it is still far enough from socialism or anarchy. His literary work was much broken by the active business of insurrections. He took a personal part in all the movements which he originated, as well as in many which he disapproved as immature, but was unable to arrest.^ He was remarkable for his cool courage in the presence of danger, and Colonel Medici has described his conduct as a private in the disastrous campaign of Garibaldi's Volunteers near ]\Iilan in 1848 in terms which recall the well-known story of tlie constancy of Socrates in the retreat from Potidiea. His skill as a tactician was thought highly of by his party. We know too little of the chances which were seized or missed to enable us to form an independent opinion, but it is ])l;iiii that he applied to tlie art of * Seo Joseph Mazziui, a Aluiiioir, l»y K. A. V. I.] GIUSEPPE MAZZINI. 31 war the same liiimble and painstaking spirit which led him to shrink from no duty as paltry or uncongenial if it could serve Italy. We read his Catechism of Guerilla Warfare, and find the delicate student who began life with an Essay on a European Literature applying his mind to the right rules for lighting delu- sive camp fires and firing at the enemy's legs. And then in the intervals of these adventures we find tlie dangerous outlaw spending almost every evening for seven years (1841-48) in teaching a night-school of Italian organ -boys in his shabby lodgings in Hatton Garden. Work such as this may seem a waste of time in a political leader. But the potency of Mazzini's sym- pathies was much increased by his coming thus to Italy as one that ministered — by his being, like Dominic, the amoroso drudo of a lofty and absorbing faith. And time was preparing for him a culminant opportunity when no fragment of knowledge, influence, reverence, which he had won, should be forgotten or in vain. The things which he had done in secret were to be proclaimed openly, and the banner of " God and the People " was to fly from the capitol of Eome. II. The first years of the pontificate of Pius IX. can be remembered with satisfaction by no party. Seldom has history shown a more curious complication of false posi- 32 MODERN ESSAYS. [i. tions and inextricable dilemmas. The main points of the situation are well known. The new Pope took from the first a lofty view of his spiritual prerogative, but began his reign without a definite temporal policy. He was kindly and simple-minded, but accessible to flattery and wanting in wisdom, and rather obstinate than strong. The liberal party took advantage of an amnesty which he issued on his accession — in itself a very ordinary act — to credit him with liberal tendencies, and to exalt him as the heaven-sent patron of Italian unity and freedom. He promised reforms, and was rewarded by calculated acclamations. There was something contemptible in this mode of cajoling a ruler, and there was something undignified in the way in which the flatteries were swallowed and the reforms postponed. The war of Piedmont witli Austria in 1848 put an end to this child's play. At first, indeed, the demagogues pretended that the Pope had gone to war with Austria, and there was much debate as to whether he had or had not blessed the banners of the volunteers, and, if he had, whether his blessing would still be valid if they crossed the Po. But on April 29, 1848, the Pope published an allocution in which he definitely took the Austrian side. Prom that moment his popularity was gone. Alarmed at its loss he temporised agahi. In the autumn of 1848 lie i^laced liossi at the head of affairs. Eossi tried to steer a middle course. The task Wdn impossible ; his own harshness and I.] GIUSEPPE MAZZINI. 33 pedantry embittered the enmities on both sides which his policy evoked, and he succeeded in uniting the contending factions only in the single object of assassi- nating himself. On November 15 he was stabbed at the door of the parliament. The cowardly Assembly held its session without alluding to the fact that the prime minister had been killed on the stairs. Both parties welcomed this crime. The liberal papers spoke of it without reprobation ; the ultra-papal commandant of gendarmes refused to make any attempt to punish the assassins. The terrified Pope fled to Gaeta in disguise, and surrendered himself to the influence of Antonelli, who had pretended to join in the constitu- tional movement, but now showed his true colours, and kept his power till he died. It was now AntonelU's object that Eome should fall into anarchy. Com- missioners were appointed to govern in the Pope's name, who refused to do anything except protest against the assumption of power by any one else. The deadlock was complete. Gradually a demand arose that Mazzini and Garibaldi should be sent for. Both accepted the call, Mazzini writing sternly of what had passed, and advising the convocation of a constit- uent assembly and the proclamation of a republic. This advice was followed, and on March 20, 1849, Mazzini and two Eomans were chosen triumvirs. In the deliberate absence of any ruler the Eomans had no choice but to create a republic, but it was clear from the first that the fortunes of that republic were VOL. ir. D 34 MODERN ESSAYS. [l almost desperate. Three of the four Catholic powers, Austria, Naples, and Spain, were certain to attack it. From two quarters only was help possible, from the rest of Italy or from France, the fourth Catholic power, but a power which was at that time republican also. As regarded help from the rest of Italy, the moment for seeking it had gone by. A year before Eome would have found all Italy, almost all Europe, in revolu- tion, but now the flame was dying out. The defeat of No vara, on March 23, put an end to hope from Piedmont. An earnest attempt, made by Mazzini before his arrival in Rome, to secure co-operation from Tuscany failed, and the ill-conducted Tuscan con- stitutional movement expired with the return of the grandduke on April 13. Venice remained in arms; her heroic defence against Austria was adding the last glory to her famous name. But she could spare no help to Rome. From France Mazzini never hoped much, though neither he nor the French nation were prepared for what actually took place. France was undergoing a reaction from the exaggerated enthusiasms of 1848, in a dark hour of apathy and fears in which more than one sinister ambition was finding a con- genial air. M. Thiers ^ has related with cynical frankness the secret history of the despatch of the French expedition to Rome. Without his express authority we might have suspected, but should hardly have allowed ourselves to * Conversations with Mr. Senior, Fortnightly Review, October 1877. I.] GIUSEPPE MAZZINI. 35 assert, that the expedition was from beginning to end a deliberate fraud upon both the French and Italian peoples ; that almost every word uttered by the French ministers in the Assembly and the French general in Italy was a conscious falsehood; that, as M. Thiers says, " It was not for the sake of the Eoman people, it was not for the sake of Catholicism, that we went to Eome, it was for the sake of France ; " and for the sake of France in what way ? In the first place to gain for the Prince-President the support of the clerical party, and in the second place to assert the influence of France in Italy in opposition to that of Austria, since, said M. Thiers, " rather than see the Austrian eagle on the flagstaff that rises above the Tiber, I would destroy a hundred constitutions and a hundred religions." This seems a needless energy of resolve, but M. Thiers tells us that we ''can hardly conceive the interest which France takes in Eome," not only on vulgar grounds which all may share, as the centre of Catholi- cism, art, and history, but " as having long been the second city of the French Empire." From any less exalted point of view it was certainly hard to find a reason why France should interfere in Eome in 1849. As a Catholic country she could not be expected to help the Eoman republic against the Pope. Still less did it befit her, as a republic, to stifle a sister repubhc which had in many ways a stronger right to existence than herself. But although France was a republic, her ministers were not republicans ; 36 MODERN ESSAYS. [l tliey were paving the way, as fast as tliey dared, for an ultramontane empire; tliey were resolved to crush the Roman republic, and to help them to deceive the Assembly which they led they counted upon their countrymen's vanity, on their desire to pose as heroes on every stage which the world's history offers. M. Odilon Barrot rested his proposal for the despatch of troops to Italy on " the expediency of maintaining the French influence in Italy, and the wish to be instru- mental in securing to the Eoman people a good govern- ment, founded on liberal institutions." The Assembly consented, and a body of troops under General Oudinot was sent to Civita Vecchia. Before them went an aide-de-camp to anjiounce " that the wish of the majority would be respected, and no form of govern- ment imposed which the Eoman people had not chosen." Won by fair words, the municipality of Civita Vecchia allowed the French to land. The triumvirs remon- strated, but it was too late. They then sent to Oudinot a dignified protest, stating that this invasion was a violation of the law of nations, and declaring their intention to resist. Oudinot replied with a proclama- tion, written by M. Drouyn de Lhuys, which repeated that the French " had no wish to exercise an oppressive influence, or to impose a government contrary to the wish of the Romans." He then declared Civita Vecchia in a state of siege, disarmed the garrison, and forbade the municipality to meet. The prefect protested, and Oudinot put him in prison. 1.] GIUSEPPE MAZZINI. 37 The French Assembly had authorised Oudinot to enter Eome " if he were likely to meet with no serious resistance, or were invited thither by the wish of the population." The triumvirs repeatedly told him that any attack on Eome would be strenuously resisted. He did, however, attack Eome on April 30, and was driven off by Garibaldi, leaving many wounded and prisoners. The wounded were carefully tended by a band of Eoman ladies, who were afterwards described in the French Assembly as courtesans. The prisoners were released by the triumvirs, who refused to keep captive republicans who had been deluded into a fratricidal war. They thus expressed their belief in the brotherhood of all free men, just as Callicratidas, by releasing Greek prisoners, expressed his belief in the brotherhood of all Hellenes. The news of this attack on Eome caused great discontent in France. M. Barrot disavowed Oudinot's action, but sent him reinforcements instead of recalling him. The general displeasure, however, compelled the ministers to send some man of high reputation as diplomatic agent, " to devote himself to negotiations and the relations to be established between the Eoman authorities and the Eoman people." M. de Lesseps, then one of the first of diplomatists, as he is now the first of engineers, was despatched with full powers. The mas- terly State-paper in which he afterwards defended his mission, supplemented as it is by the original documents, remains the unanswered history of these transactions. 38 MODERN ESSAYS. [l. Reaching Rome on May 10, M. do Lesseps found that the French position was an entirely false one, that the Romans were by no means in a state of anarchy, but resolute, united, and in no need of French arbitra- tion. The most alarming element in the situation was the wounded vanity of the French officers, who wished to wipe out the memory of their defeat before Rome by a second assault upon that friendly city. Wliile M. de Lesseps negotiated they prepared their attack. In spite of the armistice they threw a bridge of boats across the Tiber, and cut the communication between Rome and the sea ; they seized the church of St. Paul- without-the- walls ; they occupied ]\Ionte Mario — a most important position. There was a peculiar perfidy in this last act, since M. de Lesseps himself was deceived into informing the Roman government that this occupation was a mere " misunderstanding," and intended to guard Rome against the advance of foreign foes. The triumvirs, justly impressed with M. de Lesseps' honour, took pains to quiet the natural anger of the Roman people, who thus saw one point after another seized by the French troops. Meantime M. de Lesseps and the triumvirs concluded a conven- tion as follows : — The Romans, welcoming the French as friends, allowed them to take up such positions out- side Rome as health and the defence of the country required. This arrangement was in no case to be put an end to, except at a fortnight's notice. M. de Lesseps signed this convention, as he was I.] GIUSEPPE MAZZINI. 39 fully empowered to do. But General Oudinot refused to be bound by it. He went farther; he broke a promise of his own, given in writing to General Koselli, that he would defer the attack on Eome at any rate till June 4c, and began the attack on June 2. Almost at the same moment — on May 29 — M. de Lesseps was recalled. The fact was that on that very day the Con- stituent had given place to the Legislative Assembly, there was a shifting of power at Paris, and M. Barrot and those behind him could do as they pleased. We may pause here to consider the internal con- dition of Eome. At the time when the Eepublic was proclaimed there was much to justify the contempt which was widely felt in Europe for the new govern- ment. The Eomans seemed to be acting only be- cause they could not help it ; and the debates in the Assembly showed little except aimlessness and terror. Suddenly this temper changed. A mass of men in imminent danger may be sobered by it or maddened, according to the impulse given, and the Eomans were like the crew of a sinking ship whose captain comes on deck and takes the command. A diplomatic despatch ^ has preserved for us an account of Mazzini's arrival in the Assembly, and the transformation of a scene of confused recrimination into a scene of enthusiasm and vigorous action. His influence on the troops was of the same kind. On his election as triumvir the officers of the National Guard told him that most of the guard * Bianchi's Diplomazia Europea, vol. vi. p. 452. 40 MODERN ESSAYS. [r. would refuse to defend the city. " It seemed to me," he says, " that I uuderstood the Eoman people far better than they, and I therefore gave orders that all the battalions should defile in front of the Palace of the Assembly, that the question might be put to the troops. The universal shout of war that arose from the ranks drowned in an instant the timid doubts of the leaders." It is, however, to Garibaldi that the credit of the heroic military defence of liome must be mainly ascribed. We must look to the internal management of the city, its finances, order, religion, for definite traces of Mazzini's government. And here M. de Lesseps must first be heard. After speaking of a suspicion which he at first entertained that Mazzini was influenced against France by Protestant missionaries, he adds : — " I have the less hesitation in making known the opinion which I then held of Mazzini, with whom I was in open conflict, inasmuch as throughout our sub- sequent negotiations I have nothing but praise for the loyalty and moderation of his character, which have won my entire esteem. Now that he has fallen from power, and is doubtless seeking a refuge in some foreign country, I owe an expression of homage to the nobility of his feelings, the sincerity of his convictions, his higli ciipacity, his integrity, and his courage." When the triumvirs assumed power the state of the public finances was such tliat their first act was to debate whether government could be carried on at all. Under the papal rule the treasury had been entrusted l] GIUSEPPE MAZZINI. 41 to a dignified person who could not be called upon to show accounts, and was only removable by being made a cardinal. During the three perilous months of the triumvirate the finances were thoroughly put in order, and a large reserve of money collected, which was duly appropriated by the papal functionary on his return. The republican leaders left office poorer than when they accepted it. Mazzini, as triumvir, dined for two francs a day ; Garibaldi, less provident than when, in 1860, after conquering a kingdom, he found that he had still nearly thirty pounds, left Eome in absolute penury. More surprising was the unwonted honesty of the lowest of the people. Some families whose houses were endangered by the French bom- bardment were quartered in the empty palaces of Eoman nobles who had fled to Gaeta, leaving money and jewel- lery lying about their rooms. Not so much as a brooch was stolen. Crime, in fact, was for the time almost unknown. Some assassinations were committed at Ancona, which Mazzini instantly punished with terrible severity, threatening to send half the forces of the republic to Ancona if such crimes were repeated. If order, honesty, courage, are tests of civic life, it is not too much to say that Eome had never been so Eoman since the Punic Wars. This spirit found a fit expres- sion in Mazzini's State-papers, which show the charac- teristic Eoman dignity, the absence of flattery or exaggeration, the stern assumption that the aim of every Eoman is to live and die for Eome. 42 MODERN ESSAYS. [i. The accusations brought against Mazzini's govern- ment elude for the most part precise examination. To call liim a communist, a bandit, a " modern Nero," was merely to use conventional language in describing a republican chief. There was more force in the com- plaints of some of his own party that by his Quixotic regard for the property and life of enemies, he threw away advantages which Eome coidd ill spare, — as when he exempted the rich men who had fled to Gaeta from taxation because they had not consented to be taxed, — or forbade Garibaldi to follow up the flying French army on April 30 because the Eomans could not believe themselves to be at war with a friendly republic, except when they caught the French in the act of try- ing to enter Eome. On a more serious matter Mazzini's government provoked fears in many quarters. It was suspected that he meant to disestablish Catholicism in favour of Protestantism, or of some other schismatic communion. It is worth while to consider what position he actually took up. He seems to have interfered with nothing which he did not think absolutely immoral, but rather to have laid stress on those acts of common worship or reverence which have the same force for all. Thus, on the one hand, he turned the Inquisition into a lodging-house for poor families, and protected monks and nuns who wished to re-enter the world. But when the people took some confessionals to strengtlien barri- cades he ordered them to be instantly replaced, and T.] GIUSEPPE MAZZTNI. 43 warned the Eomans to shun even the appearance of an outrage against the religion of their fathers. Easter, which fell in the time of the triumvirate, was celebrated with the accustomed solemnity. It is not the Pope whom Christians worship, and his absence need not stop a Christian feast. A priest blessed the people from the balcony of St. Peter's, and Mazzini, as representative of the republic, consented to stand there too, — a prophetic figure intercalated among so many pontiffs more strangely than Cromwell among the English kings. Eome was defended long and bravely, but on June 30 the French were masters of the bastions and all the heights, and it was plain that the end was near. Mazzini then proposed a scheme which recalls " the oath of the Phocaeans," and one of Horace's noblest odes. He proposed that the triumvirs, the Assembly, the army, and such of the people as chose, should leave Eome, and create in the Campagna a centre of desperate resistance to Austria and France. But the Assembly refused. " The singular calmness," adds Mazzini with some naiveU, " which they had shown until that moment had induced me to believe that they would have hailed the proposition with applause." This voluntary exile of the whole State — this carry- ing, as it were, into the desert of the fortune and the fame of Eome — would doubtless have created a pro- found impression throughout Italy and Europe. The men who made that expedition would probably all 44 MODERN ESSAYS. [i. have been killed — as almost all the men who did actually go out with Garibaldi were killed — but if they had maintained themselves even for a few months, it is still conceivable that Italy might have risen. The Assembly were not ready to do this ; but what they did has won them the praise of heroism from judges less stern than the triumvir. Through all the perils of the siege they sat unmovedly — such of them as were not needed on the walls — perfecting the new constitution ; and when the French were in the city, when once again — " Galli per dumos aderant, arcemque tcnebant, Defensi tenebris et done noctis opacoe," — on that last morning the Assemljly — destined, every man of them, to exile, imprisonment, or death — pro- claimed upon the Capitol the Statutes of Republican Eonie. Like the Eoman who bought the field on which Hannibal was encamped, they testified to their belief that the enemies of the Eternal City should perish and that she should endure. The French entered Eome. Garibaldi marched out with a handful of brave men, meaning to fight his way to Venice, which was still in arms. Mazzini remained in Eome to watch for any chance of renewing the struggle ; but he knew in his heart that no such chance would come. It is hard to lose the dream ol' a life ; and \\\wn that dream has drawn all its lustre from virtue, when I.] GIUSEPPE MAZZINI. 45 joy has been conceived only in the loving service of the noblest being, the highest ideal we know, then if a man sees his ideal crushed before his eyes, and feels that honour itself has turned against him, and that because he has disdained base things he has lost all — then shall it be known whether his virtue is a deriva- tive and conquerable thing, or has in it an inbred energy that is incapable of despair. If he can raise his head to fight anew, he will find all fighting easy now. The worst has come to the worst ; henceforth can no man trouble him ; he bears in his spuit the tidemark of its highest woe. Through such an hour Mazzini passed, sitting among the ruins of his Eome. He waited for friends to rally round him, but none dared to rally — for foes to slay him, but no man dared to slay. At last he passed through the midst of them and went his way, and as for the last time he saw the sun set on Eome, he might surely have said with more truth than any Cato of tragedy, " Son Eoma i fidi miei, Eoma son io." And here, if it were cast into a drama, the tale of Mazzini's life would close ; for there are careers which culminate in defeat, as others in victory, and the labours of another score of years gave no second chance to face unshaken such a crash and ruin of a world. The year 1849, in spite of its crushing de- feats, was in fact a turning-point in Italian fortunes. 46 MODERN ESSAYS. [l Men had measured themselves with the enemy ; they liati learnt to dare ; and the movement throughout Italy was never wholly checked again. In each on- ward step Mazzini aided. His words, his \mtings, gaining fresh authority as advancing years confirmed their wisdom in the past, were the fountain-head of that clear and continuous manifestation of the national will which impelled and enabled the Piedmontese government to take advantage of each opportunity tliat offered for the unification of Italy. Of the way in which this was done, however, he often disapproved. Nothing, for instance, could be more distasteful to him than the French alliance on which Piedmont depended in 1859. He foretold, and truly, that it would be bought at an extravagant price. And had it been granted without sinister end, he yet could not endure that Lombards or Venetians, the descendants of Livy and Dandolo, should owe their Liberty to a foreign despot's gi-ace, should accept from an unclean hand *' A gift of that which is not to be given By all the blended powers of earth and heaven." After the peace of Villafranca he used all his influence to induce the small States of Central Italy to annex themselves to the Piedmontese monarchy — unity, as ever, being his first aim. It was lie again who pre- pared, and urged Garibaldi to undertake, the revohi- tion in Sicily and Naples, promising that if it succeeded he would claim nothing of the glory, and tliat if it I.] GIUSEPPE MAZZINI. 47 failed it should be accounted a " Mazzinian dream." After Garibaldi's splendid success in Naples in 1860 Mazzini's eyes were turned to Venice and Eome. The liberation of Venice was marred by the same interven- tion which had marred the liberation of Lombardy. The deliverance of Eome was long, and, as Mazzini thought, needlessly delayed; and when it came in 1870 it came only to show him that the Eome of his aspira- tion, the religious republican Eome, which was a third time to head the world, was not to be built in a day. He felt, too, a sorrow which came not from Italy alone — the sorrow of seeing the cause of liberty and progress in Europe defiled by anarchy and divorced from religion — tyranny and bigotry opposed not by free co-operation and deeper faith, but by communistic outrages and materialistic unbelief And of all this his religious isolation weighed on him the most. "The religious question," he wrote in 1865, "pursues me like a remorse ; it is the only one of any real import- ance." And although to the last, and through the long decay of a terrible disease, he continued his active work of all kinds, and died by inches in harness, toil- ing without haste or rest, yet his increasing preoccu- pation with religious ideas becomes plainly evident. This is accompanied by a melancholy wonder that others cannot see as he sees, by a painful yearning for the progress of kindred souls. Yet with this there is that serenity which often comes to those to whom youth has been a generous struggle, and manhood a 48 MODERN ESSAYS. [i. disciplining pain. There is a disengagement as of a spirit which has ah-eady borne all ; and wliich, like one who awaits a solemn ceremony, is making ready for the Sacrament of Death. And surely, when Mazzini's story shall have passed into Italian legend and song, men will say, in old Greek fashion, that it was " not without the will of heaven " that it was appointed to this man to die not in Genoa, turbulent nurse of heroes, where in dark days he had been born ; not in Kome, where he had ruled in manhood, more royal than a king ; but in that still city upon Arno's stream, to which, after all her tumults, it has been given to become the very sanctuary and image of peace, — " To body forth the ghostliness of things In silence visible and perpetual calm." Even so, will their poets answer, Apollo souglit the body of Sarpedon, " best-beloved of men," and carried liim far from the battle, and washed him in Scaman- der's wave, and gave him to two mighty ministers to bear him home, — "Yttvo) Kttt 6ava.T(a StSr/taoati', oi pd fitv S)Ka KdrOea-av iv Avko/s evpeiip ttlovl Syfi(^, 111. In discussing a public life we naturally consider it first as the public saw it — its struggles or weaknesses concealed beneath at any rate an external strength I.] GIUSEPPE MAZZINI. 49 and consistency. But when the character is so ex- ceptional as Mazzini's, we desire also to know some- thing of its springs of action, of the natural instincts which transformed themselves into so unusual a vigour of public virtue. And Mazzini has himself told the story of the chief inward crisis of his life, after the failure of his first insurrection and the death of many of his friends. A few quotations will indicate the sources alike of his weakness and of his strenjith : — " Were I to live for a century I could never forget the close of that year (1836), nor the moral tempest that passed over me, and amid the vortex of which my spirit was so nearly overwhelmed. I speak of it now with re- luctance, and solely for the sake of those who may be doomed to suffer what I then suffered, and to whom the voice of a brother who has escaped from that tempest — storm-beaten and bleeding indeed, but with re-tempered soul — may, perhaps, indicate the path of salvation. " It was the tempest of doubt, which I believe all who devote their lives to a great enterprise, yet have not dried and withered up the soul, hke Robespierre, beneath some barren intellectual formula, but have retained a loving heart, are doomed, once at least, to battle through. My heart was overflowing with and greedy of affection ; as fresh and eager to unfold to joy as in the days when sus- tained by my mother's smile ; as full of fervid hope, for others at least, if not for myself. But during those fatal months there darkened around me such a hurricane of sorrow, disillusion, and deception, as to bring before my eyes, in all its ghastly nakedness, a foreshadowing of the VOL. II. E 50 MODERN ESSAYS. [l old age of my soul, solitary, in a desert world, wherein no comfort in the struggle was vouchsafed to me. " It was not only the overthrow, for an indefinite period, of every Italian hope ; the dispersion of the best of our party ; the series of persecutions which had undone the work we had done in Switzerland and driven us away from the spot nearest Italy ; the exhaustion of our means, and the accumulation of almost insurmountable material obstacles between me and the task I had set myself to do ; — it was the falling to i:)ieces of that moral edifice of faith and love, from which alone I had derived strength for the combat ; the scepticism I saw rising around me on every side ; the failure of faith in those who had solemnly bound themselves with me to pursue unshaken the path we had known at the outset to be choked with sorrows ; the dis- trust I detected in those most dear to me as to the motives and intentions which sustained and urged me onward in the evidently unequal struggle. Even at that time the adverse opinion of the majority was a matter of little moment to me ; but to see myself suspected of ambition or any other than noble motives by the one or two beings upon whom I had concentrated my whole power of attach- ment, prostrated my spirit in deep despair. And these things were revealed to me at the very time when, assailed as I was on every side, I felt most intensely the need of comforting and re-tempering my spirit in communion with the fraternal souls I had deemed capable of comprehend- ing even my silence, of divining all that I suftered in deli- berately renouncing every earthly joy, and of smiling in suffering with me. It was precisely in this hour of need that these fraternal souls withdrew from mo. "When I felt that T was indeed alone in the world — alone, but for my poor mother, far away and unhappy also for my I.] GIUSEPPE MAZZINI. 51 sake — I drew back in terror at the void before me. Then, in that moral desert, doubt came upon me. Perhaps I was wrong and the world right 1 Perhaps my idea was indeed a dream 1 Perhaps I had been led on not by an idea but by my idea ; by the pride of my own conception, an intellectual egotism withering the spontaneous impulses of my heart, which would have led me to the modest virtues of a limited sphere, and to duties near at hand and easy of fulfilment. " I will not dwell upon the effect of these doubts on my spirit. I will simply say that I suffered so much as to be driven to the confines of madness. At times I started from my sleep at night and ran to the window, in delirium, believing that I heard the voice of Jacopo Ruffini calling to me. The slightest incident, a word, a tone, moved me to tears. Whilst I was struggling and sinking beneath my cross I heard a friend, whose room was a few doors dis- tant from mine, answer a young girl — who, having some suspicion of my unhappy condition was urging him to break in upon my solitude — by saying, ' Leave him alone ; he is in his element — conspiring and happy.' " He goes on to narrate how the conviction came to him that his sufferings were the temptations of egotism, and arose from a misconception of life, from some remaining influence exercised on him by the theory which proposes to each man the search after happi- ness as the aim of his existence here. " I had combated the evil in others, but not sufficiently in myself. In my own case, and as if the better to seduce me, that false definition of life had thrown off every baser stamp of material desires, and had centred itself in the 52 MODERN ESSAYS. [l. affections, as in an inviolable sanctuary. I ought to have regarded them as a blessing of God, to be accepted with gratitude whenever it descended to irradiate or cheer my existence, not demanded them either as a right or as a reward. I had unconsciously made of them the condition of the fulfilment of my duties. I had been unable to realise the true ideal of love — love Avithout earthly hope — and had unknowingly worshipped, not love itself, but the joys of love. When these vanished I had despaired of all things ; as if the joys or sorrows I encountered on the path of life could alter the aim I had aspired to reach ; as if the darkness or serenity of heaven could change the pur- pose or necessity of the journey. . . . " I came to my better self alone ; without aid from others, through the help of a religious conception, which I verified by history. From the idea of God I descended to the conception of progress ; from the conception of progress, to a true conception of life ; to faith in a mission and its logical consequence — duty, the supreme rule of life ; and having reached that faith I swore to myself that nothing in this world should again make me doubt or forsake it. ... I dug with my own hands the grave, not of my affections — God is my witness that now, grayheaded, I feel them yet as in the days of my earliest youth — but of all the desires, exigencies, and ineffable comforts of affection ; and I covered the earth over that grave, so that none might ever know the Ego buried beneath. From reasons — some of them apparent, some of them unknown — my life was, is, and were it not near the end, would remain unhappy ; but never since that time have I for an instant allowed myself to think that my own unhappincss could in any way in- fluence my actions. AVhether the sun shine with the serene splendour of an Italian morn, or the leaden corpse- I.] GIUSEPPE MAZZINI. 53 like hue of the northern mist be above us, I cannot see that it changes our duty. God dwells above the earthly heaven, and the holy stars of faith and the future still shine within our own souls, even though tlieir light con- sume itself unreflected as the sepulchral lamp." Is not this what the poet means when he speaks of Virtue like a household god promising empire ? — this return upon itself of the resolute spirit, beginning, as it were, an inward epoch with a Hegira from all earthly joy, and proclaiming an unknown triumph in the very extremity of disaster and defeat ? I have quoted this passage because of all his writings it best explains the man ; because it shows that the passion of love in its loftiest meaning was the guiding energy of his whole career, so that if Garibaldi is "one of Plutarch's men," Mazzini is one of Plato's ; he is the ipcoTCKOf; fxera (f>iXo(TO(j)La<;, the man who has carried down with him the instincts of love and of philo- sophy from the heaven where he has looked on truth; he mounts from step to step that chain of high affections along which Plato teaches that a soul can rise from the love of its human counterpart to the love of God. The intermediate passion between these two is the love of country — the love, as Plato has it, of institutions and of laws — the devotion to great ideas which widely influence the welfare of mankind. For the patriot too is enamoured ; he is enamoured of his conception of a great multitude of kindred souls, leadino: the life which he deems noblest after the 54 MODERN ESSAYS. [r. fashion which he can picture best, happy amid the scenes inwoven with Ms earliest and his inmost joy. This parallel between the lover, the patriot, the samt, might be carried far. It will be enough here to notice some analogies between Mazzini's love for Italy and that love which the world has agreed to take as the loftiest type of individual passion, the love of Dante for Beatrice. Both loves were wholly free from self-assertion and jealousy, both were intensified and exalted by sorrow. Mazzini's whole public career was a series of self- abnesjations. He sowed the harvest which another statesman reaped ; the people for whom he had toiled the first and the hardest made its idol of another hero. But for this there is not in his most intimate corre- spondence the shadow of a regret. The only solicitude which he shows is for the memory of some of his ear- liest friends — the Euffini, the Bandiera — whom he thinks in danger of missing the reverence which is their due. To his own acts he rarely alludes; and but for the pressure which induced him to write some autobiographical notes towards the close of his life, there would already be great difficulty in retracing his career. It is owing to the care of others that his writings have not been dispersed and lost. Wliat need was there for him to put on record his love for Italy ? What could other men's knowledge or ignorance of it add to it or take away ? That Italy, as he conceived her, should exist, would have been enough for hiiu. I.] GIUSEPPE MAZZINI. 55 Another form of jealousy leads the lover to dis- parage all loves except his own, from his uneasy fear lest she may not in truth be so unique as he wishes to believe her. From this also the truest lovers, the truest patriots, are free. Like Dante, they desire that Monna Vanna should walk with Monna Bice on the flowery way, that Lucia should stand beside Beatrice in the height of heaven, that all fair women should grow to their best and fairest, and keep thereby the sweeter company with her whom they never can excel ; or their patriotism is like Mazzini's, who desired that all other nations also should be free and grow, that each should express to the full the divine idea which is the centre of her strength, being assured that the place of Italy could none other take, nor city in either hemisphere diminish the name of Eome. Consider again the influence, on lover or patriot, of exile, severance, sorrow. There are some, indeed, who have called human love an importunate and perishable thing, which must be fed with such food as earth can give it, lest it pine and die; but a love like Dante's is not so, but grows more pervading through self-control, and more passionate through the austerity of honour, and only draws a stronger aliment from separation, anguish, and death. And similarly the intensification of Mazzini's love for Italy, through her sorrows and his own, is manifest in all his works. Loving Italy in every phase of her existence, he " less loves her crowned than chained ; " his passion is the passion of 56 MODERN ESSAYS. [i. a chivalry wliicli at once compassionates and adores. And we see it strengthen in his own yearning solitude ; we feel it in many a mournful sentence, whose im- mediate impulse we can now no more retrace than the anatomist can retrace the pang which has given birth to a tear. Few natures could have derived more suffering than Mazzini's from a life of conspiracy and exile. Com- pare him, for instance, with his fellow- townsman Bixio, the true type of the Genoese revolutionaiy. Bixio needed for his happiness nothing but adventure and storm. When the last despot in Italy was overthrown, " the second of the thousand " of Garibaldi's heroes could find no peace till he went out to struggle with the elements and an unsailed sea. Men like Bixio, like Garibaldi, are at ease in revolutions. Mazzini was differently wrought. The beautiful melancholy countenance, the delicate frame, the candid and yearn- ing heart, — all these indicated a nature born for thouglit and affection, not meant for suspicions and controversies and the bitterness of a life-long war. Courage, indeed, was easy, conspiracy was endurable, but exile broke his heart, Dante was exiled, but Dante could still look on Italian faces and hear Italian speech, and know that the city of his love and hatred lay beneath the same arch of heaven. With this other exile it was not so. It was in London — the visible type of a universe hastening confusedly to unknown ends and careless of individual pain — that Mazzini I.] GIUSEPPE MAZZINI. ' 57 must regret that land whose name, even to men born far off, seems to make a part of all soft desire, — the land whose very air and memory invite to unworldly amotion and to passionate repose. And in that inward exile of the heart it was easy in comparison for Dante to sustain long life upon the brief possession of what no soul can forget. Mazzini's was a harder lot. No eyes were to promise him his peace, — noi darem 'pace a voi diletto ; he must imagine for himself the unknown delight ; he must recognise, as he said, those for whom he cared most deeply rather by the pain they could give him than the joy. Even as for the sake of Italy he must endure to be exiled from Italy, so for love's sake he must renounce love ; his affections must be the more ardent because imper- sonal ; he must foster them only to forego. It does not seem, however, that Mazzini considered himself as entitled to any special pity. Had he chosen his own lot on earth it is likely that he would have desired that some great cause should absorb his ener- gies and teach him to make life one effort of virtue, and to adventure his all unreservedly upon the instinct of duty which he carried in his heart. It is likely that he would have purchased this temper at the cost of life-long pain, if he could make of unselfish sorrow his initiation into the mystery of human fellowship, his needed impulse to an impersonal hope. For indeed tenderness is as necessary as courage if a life of sorrow is to be made wholly heroic. The very unselfish- 58 • MODERN ESSAYS. [i. ness of such a nifin's work for others is in danger of brin<]:in<:j witli it sometliinix of isolation as well as of sympathy. Against his will a certain sternness and aridity will infuse itself into his manner and liis style ; by silence rather than by speech his self-suppression will be too plainly seen. It is against such an impression of Mazzini as this that his friends are at most pains to guard. They wish us to imagine him as a man kept in deep peace by aspiration only, and by such simple pleasures as are inseparable from the child-like heart. They tell us of his playful humour, of the mild brightness of his friendly eyes, of his delight in birds, in flowers, in child- ren — of moments when the yearning exile was over- heard singing softly to himself at dead of night, while his guitar " spake low to him of sweet companionships." They would have us believe that " there is nothing which a spirit of such magnitude cannot overcome or undergo " — that the storms which beat on such a head can only give a new depth to tenderness, a new dignity to the appealing look, die par sorriso ed d dolore. And what then, we may ask, were the beliefs from which this constancy was born ? On what conception of the universe did he sustain this impregnable calm ? The answer to this question, which has already been given in effect in Mazzini's own words, is some- what singular. Without appeal to revelation, with only the afterthought of an appeal to history, he as it were discovered and lived by a theology of his own. I.] GIUSEPPE MAZZINI. 59 He became the apostle and martyr of a view of the sum of things which simply occurred to him, of dogmas which no one taught him, and which, though he con- stantly preached them, he scarcely attempted to prove. Before we consider the dogmas themselves, we may pause to inquire whether there can be any justification for this prophetic attitude in an age which may be sup- posed to have learnt to attain truth by organised methods, and independently of individual enthusiasms. In this age of profound modification of received beliefs it would seem that a man's duty with regard to religion may be of three kinds. There are some who, though almost hopeless of arriving at any convictions as to an unseen world, seem strong enough to dispense with hope ; who can labour for their own progress, though they believe it ended in the tomb, — for the pro- gress of the race, though they doubt whether man will ever raise into any greatness or worthiness his " transi- tory and perilous " being. The duty of these is clear. They are the champions of a forlorn adventure ; their mission is to show by their lives that Virtue can never be a paradox ; that she can approve herself by the mere fact of her existence even in a world where the truth is bad. But these, above all men, must be strong. Cato and Brutus were men of iron ; but these men must be made of sterner stuff than Brutus or Cato. They must be able to meet unflinchingly the most ini- quitous ruin, the last defeat; and not despair, like Cato, of the Ptepublic ; nor fall, like Brutus, exclaiming 60 MODERN ESSAYS. [l in death's disillusionment, " Ah, wretched Virtue ! thou wert then notliing but a name." There are others, again, who, while they do not assert that religious tradition suffices to meet the wider view and keener scrutiny of tlie advancing time, consider, nevertheless, that there is something premature, some- thing almost impatient, in already abandoning, as in- soluble, problems of such import to mankind. So variously may history be read that, while to some minds we may seem the empty-handed heirs of all the ages, who have asked every question and found every answer vain, to others it appears that those ages have been but the infancy of man ; that he has hardly as j^et formulated the question which he would ask of the Unseen ; that as yet he can neither estimate the value of such answers as have been given nor anticipate those which are to come. For Socrates, too, prided himself on having brought philosophy down from heaven to earth, from unprovable speculations about the firma- ment to debates upon the nature of man, while in reality the speculations of Thales and Anaxagoras, though premature, were not useless ; and meantime Euclid was writing, as it were, upon the dust the first letters of that learning which should weigh and analyse the very stars of heaven. Men who take this view, also, have their duty clear. If they surmise that it may not be impossible to know something of the des- tinies of man, they must pursue that searcli, tliough it be by means which bear as humble a relation to tlie I.] GIUSEPPE MAZZINI. 61 moral universe as the diagrams of Euclid bore to the sidereal heaven. There are others, again, to whom a certain view of the universe appears axiomatic ; who seem to them- selves to be speaking that which they do know, testi- fying that which they have seen, when they describe the character and counsels of the Eternal. Such men the world tests by a rough standard of its own ; if it holds them for prophets it suffers itself to be swayed by them, even if they produce no evidence of what they affirm. Such was Mazzini's case. He appealed, indeed, to history ; but who has not appealed to that echo of our own voices from the past ? In reality he rested his doctrine upon the convictions of his own heart. Nor need this defect of evidence make us refuse to consider his creed. For we know that even in ages when proof was very readily admitted, religious feeling rested far less upon proof than upon intuition. Some religions scarcely appeal to proof at all ; in almost all religions the religious instinct is presupposed and the alleged proofs do but direct its manifestation. And as the world advances, this subjectivity of religion becomes increasingly apparent. For the mass of religious feel- ing increases while at the same time alleged proofs are more vigorously tested and more freely overthrown. The result is that the old revelations, while they remain sacred, tend gradually to affect mankind in a new way — less as an external evidence of an unseen world 62 MODERN ESSAYS. [i than as a venerable confirmation of what is felt within. It may, indeed, be urged that if in an exact age we are to attain to any conclusive knowledge of an unseen world we must attain it by an increased power of accurately apprehending unseen forces — by experiment rather than by tradition, by scientific ratlier tlian historical inquiry. This is not the prophet's business ; and he may fairly assume that in the meantime reli- gious conviction must be held instinctively if it is to be held at all, and that nothing would be gained by invoking defective evidence to supplement imperfect intuition. This absolute and prophetic tone, commending itself irresistibly to many minds as the vehicle of lofty truth, was the source of much of Mazzini's influ- ence in the political as well as in the religious sphere. And hence the effect which he produced was within its own limits more intense and pervading than the effect — powerful though this was — produced by Gari- baldi or Cavour. A physical analogy will serve to illustrate my meaning. We are apt to pass through somewhat similar stages in our contemplation of Nature and of Man. The child or savage takes the common course of things for granted, and is impressed only by the abnormal and prodigious ; he reverences the tempests and not tlie tides, tlie thunderbolt rather than tlio dew. With the birth of Science our view changes. We Iciirn to see in Order the liighest Force, to recog- I.] GIUSEPPE MAZZINI. 63 nise the highest Will in adherence to unchanging Law. The sense of power which this conception gives is such that the mind seems capable of coping with the sum of things ; we are tempted to believe that there is no room in the universe for phenomena that transcend our analysis. But in the face of certain problems the inquirer is forced to change his tone once more. For he finds that the laws and operations which can be known liave no finality ; that they afford him a subtle, almost a visionary, perception of operations beyond his ken, of laws of which our highest generalisations may be but the specialised case or the incidental aspect. Standing on the shore of the sea of truth, he divines a universe alive and restless as the sea — the storm of inconceivable energies, and the stress of an unknown control. And thus it is with our judgment of the lives of men. Our first admiration is for heroic impulse : great cities surge around the progress of a deliverer, whose deeds have overpassed the common measure of humanity, and confronted him with death and fame. Later comes our reverence for statesmanship and wisdom — the reign of Law without, the reign of Eeason within ; it seems clear that all other ideals can be but distortions or mutilations of this. Nor does the great statesman ignore the faiths and im- pulses which most men dimly feel : he accepts their validity up to a certain point, and the fact that he 64 MODERN ESSAYS. [i. goes no farther seems to prove that there is no farther to go. In our sense that such a man is a microcosm, we half forget that even our cosmos is an island in an infinite sea. It may well be that nothing leads us to change our ideal again. Men have few aims which cannot be com- passed by a Garibaldi or a Cavour. But a sterner stress may come. For ourselves, or for a whole people, we may need a courage which no chivalrous eagerness can sustain, nor wisdom of this world justify, which shall be at once persistent as deliberate habit, and unhesitating as the impulse of one crowning day. Then we learn that the lever which moves the earth has its fulcrum in the unseen, that the maximum of human energy can only be evoked by one whom we may call as we please enthu- siast or prophet. The indications of a Higher Law to which a preacher like Mazzini appeals may always seem to us inconclusive, may sometimes seem illusory : but whether the cause of his faith and hope be real or unreal there is reality in their effects ; the very aspect and rumour of lofty conviction carries a sovereignty among men, and to those who have had close cognisance of such a soul it will seem to have been raised up like a god's statue facing eastward in the market-place, ut claws spedaret in ortus — to look towards the dawn of day — to make " a precursory entrance into the must holy place, by a divine transportation." I.] GIUSEPPE MAZZINI. 65 Such, at least, was the impression which Mazzini produced upon minds attuned to his message — upon men who died, like Quadrio, affirming their belief in " God, Mazzini, and Duty." And what Mazzini preached was God and Duty — God, indwelling, just, and good ; Duty that prompts to endless effort, rewarded by endless progress, while the soul mounts through ascending existences to an inconceivable one- ness with the Divine. There is nothing new in such a conception of man's destinies as this. It descended in a mystery from the East, and before it was preached by Plato and Virgil, the prophets of the Greek and Eoman world, it had been through infinite sorrows the consolation of unnumbered men. Nay, more — Mazzini believed that Christ Himself, looking with an unique foreknowledge beyond the horizon of His earthly age, had foretold the progressive revelation of a faith whose teaching should embrace His own ; He had said that it was expedient that He should depart from us that the Paraclete might come ; He had promised us the Spirit of Truth, who should guide us into all truth, who should show us the things to come, who should abide with us for ever. And Mazzini — continuing that controversy between prophet and priest which is as old as the Jewish Theocracy — believed that religion is not a tradition maintained by rites, but an inspira- tion renewed by the Spirit ; and that the Holy Ghost is with us now ; and that chosen souls express the message, as the whole world works out the thoughts of VOL. II. F 66 MODERN ESSAYS [i. God. Each quickening of the higher life, each pure strain of reverence for God, for Nature, for Humanity, which science or art, or solitary musing, or the collec- tive action of nations could teach, he held as a gift from the same hand which had already given our all. And it was his passionate impulse to "incarnate in humanity," as he said, " that portion of eternal truth which it is granted to us to perceive — to convert into an earthly reality so much of the kingdom of heaven, the Divine conception permeating life, as it is given us to comprehend," which " haunted him like a remoi'se," which controlled him as a mission, which bade him speak as one having authority, and confront the (Ecumenical Council with a theology more august than their own. "The arch of the Christian heaven," he said to thcm,^ " is too narrow to embrace the earth. Beyond that heaven, across the fields of the infinite, we discern a vaster sky, illumined by the dawn of a new dogma ; and on the rising of its sun your own heaven will disappear. We are but the precursors of that dogma — few as yet, but earnestly believing ; fortified by the collective instincts of the peoples, and sufficiently numerous to convince you — had you sense to comprehend it — that when the tide of materialism shall recede, you will find yourselves confronted by a far other foe. God, the Father and Educator — the law prefixed by lliin to life — the capacity, inborn in all men, to fulfil it — free-will, the condition of merit — progress upon the ascent ^ Letter to the CKcumunical Council. Furtnijhtli/ Review, Juiio 1, 1871. I.] GIUSEPPE MAZZINI. 67 leading to God, the result of right choice — these are the cardinal points of our faith. "You believe — thus depriving yourselves of every basis of intellectual certainty and criterion of truth — in miracles; in the supernatural ; in the possible violation of the laws regulating the universe. " We believe in the Unknown, in the Mysterious — to be one day solved — which now encompasses us on every side ; in the secrets of an intuition inaccessible to analysis ; in the truth of our strange presentiment of an Ideal, which is the primitive fatherland of the soul ; in an unforeseen power of action granted to man in certain rare moments of faith, love, and supreme concentration of all the faculties towards a determinate and virtuous aim ; but we believe all these things the preordained consequence of laws hitherto with- held from our knowledge. " You believe in a heaven extrinsic to the universe ; in a determinate portion of creation, on ascending to which we shall forget the past, forget the ideas and affections which caused our hearts to beat on earth. " We believe in One Heaven in which we live, and move, and love ; which embraces — as an ocean embraces the islands that stud its surface — the whole indefinite series of exist- ences through which we pass. We believe in the continuity of life ; in a connecting link uniting all the various periods through which it is transformed and developed ; in the eternity of all noble affections ; in the progressive sanctifi- cation of every germ of good gathered by the pilgrim soul in its journey upon earth and otherwhere. " We reject the possibility of irrevocable perdition as a blasphemy against God, who cannot commit self-destruction in the person of the creature issued from himself — as a negation of the law prefixed to life, and as a violation of I 68 MODERN ESSAYS. [l the idea of love which is identical with God. We believe that God called us, by creating us ; and the call of God can neither be impotent nor false. Grace, as we understand it, is the tendency or faculty given to us all gradually to incarnate the Ideal ; it is the law of progress which is His ineffaceable baptism upon our souls." It is plain that he who believes these things has nothinsj left to desire. What can we ask of the sum of things but an eternity of love, an eternity of virtue, — to mount upwards to the utmost limits of the con- ceivable, and still be at the beginning of our hope ? And yet we need not wonder that Mazzini was mourn- ful. High thoughts bring a deep serenity ; but whQe his brother men were so suffering and so imperfect the yearning for their progress was to him an ever-present pain. His mind had taken so strong a bent that he conceived the future always for himself as duty, and only for others as joy. Such an one must " see of the travail of his soul and be satisfied ;" it must be enough for him — " That to him too the high fates gave Grace to be sacrificed and save." And is there any life which on reflection seems to us more desirable than this ? Is there not something within us whicli even exults at the thought that Mazzini's years were passed in imprisonment and exile, in solitude and disappointment, in poverty and pain ? Are we not tempted to feel a proud triumph in the contrast between such a man's outer and his inward I.] GIUSEPPE MAZZINI. 69 fortunes, in the obloquy or indifference which sur- rounded so high a soul ? And this feeling, though exaggerated, has in it a germ of truth. For we may rejoice for any one that for him life has been stripped of its tinsel, that things have been shown him as they are, that there has been nothing to disguise or darken the chief concerns of man. And as in the case of some private heroism, dear to our hearts, we may be well content that it has run its fair course unnoted, and in silence passed away, so we may be glad, even for a public and national hero, that he has missed the applause of the unworthy and all that is vulgarising in a wide renown. Yet all are bound, so far as they may, to use the memory of a good man's life as he used the life itself, as an example to whom it may concern ; and for this reason, perhaps, those who can speak of Mazzini with better right than I, may pardon this imperfect picture of one whom we would not willingly that base men should so much as praise : o-vSpos., bv ovS' alvctv TOLcrt KaKotcn Oefiis. GEOEGE SAND. 3)d€ yap Kparei ywaiKbt audpo^ovKov iXirl^ov K^ap, A GREAT spirit has passed from among us ; and many, no doubt, have of late been endeavouring to realise distinctly what kind of pleasure they have drawn, what lessons they have learnt, from the multitudinous writ- ings of the most noteworthy woman, with perhaps one exception, who has appeared in literature since Sappho. To estimate the general result and outcome of a series of romances like George Sand's is no easy task. For while on the one hand they contain implicitly what amounts to a kind of system of philosophy and theology, yet on the other hand the exposition of this system is so fluctuating and fitful, so modified by the dramatic necessities of varied plots, that it is hard to disentangle the operative and permanent from the inert and accidental matter. Yet it is distinctly as a force, an intluence, a pro- mulgation of real or supposed truths, rather than as a repertory of graceful amusement, that these books claim consideration. AYe know that the moral leadership of II.] GEORGE SAND. 71 the mass of the reading world has passed to a great extent into the hands of romance-writers. Voltaire, Rousseau, Bernardin de St. Pierre, Chateaubriand, are some of the names which at once occur of Frenchmen who have found in j)rose fiction a powerful means of influencing the ideals and the conduct of their con- temporaries. George Sand and Victor Hugo have succeeded to this power, and these two have, for nearly two generations, been the most popular authors in France. Long ago Sainte-Beuve placed George Sand and Lamennais at the head of living French writers ; but the fame of Hugo has waxed ; the fame of Lamen- nais has waned ; George Sand's continues to shine with a steady lustre. Inferior, perhaps, to Balzac in the power of accurately reproducing the society around her, George Sand chooses by preference subjects which she can approach, not so much from without as from within ; her works are the outcome of a meditative nature which lives in imagina- tion through many lives, and applies to all the same guiding conceptions of man's duty and his fate. It is somewhat strange, therefore, though the anomaly might be paralleled in the case of some more formal teachers, — that while every one agrees that George Sand's stories are pre-eminently novels with a purpose — " Tendenz-Novellen " — yet there is by no means the same concurrence as to what that purpose is, down what stream of tendency they do actually flow. Her name was for many years " a word of fear "in 72 MODERN ESSAYS. [il. British households, where she was known chiefly from secondhand accounts of Indiana, and was pictured as the semi-masculine assailant of marriage and Christian- ity. Some German critics, on the other hand, less keenly interested in the maintenance of propriety all over the world, have preferred to view in her " the exponent of the ideas of 1830," the representative of that shadowy alliance between aristocracy, intellect, and the working man, as opposed to the bourgeoisie and the juste milieu, which ended in 1848-51 with the temporary triumph of the working man and the ulti- mate downfall of everybody. And there is some truth in both of these views. From Indiana (1831) till Mauprat (1836), in what may be called the Eomances of Search, there is a tone of indignant protest against the structure of French society which amounts at times to revolt and bitterness. And from Simon (1836) till Ze Pdch4 de M. Antoine (1845), there are frequent traces of the political influence exercised over her by Michel de Bourges, Barbes, Louis Blanc, and Pierre Leroux. These strains of feeling correspond to well- marked but passing epochs of her life — the first to her married wretchedness, the second to her absorp- tion, under Michel's ascendency, in the constitutional struggles of a few hopeful but troubled years. But an attentive study of her works, or of her autobiography, reveals a life -long preoccupation of a very difterent kind. " Elle a toujour s 4t6 tourmentde des chases divines.'* Such are the words in which she sums up the true, the II.] GEORGE SAND. 73 inner history of her life — words well expressing the unrest of a ceaseless search, and the pain of a never- satisfied desire. " Ceci est I'histoire de ma vie" she says ; " ma veritable histoire." The passages in her books which indicate this per- petual preoccupation are in a certain sense so obvious as to escape notice. That is to say, they are so numer- ous and so long that the general reader has for the most part acquired the habit of skipping them. He shares the feelings of the able editor of the Bevue des Betcx Mondes : " Pour Dieu, m'^crivait souvent Buloz, pas tant de mysticisme ! " It is George Sand's gravest artistic fault that she overloads her stories with such a mass of religious reverie. " C'est bien possible," she replies, " mais je ne vois pas trop comment j'eusse pu faire pour ne pas ecrire avec le propre sang d^ mon coeur et la propre flamme de ma pens^e." The defect in art is obvious : it goes so far as to make some of her books almost unreadable, except to religious inquirers (e.g. Sjpiridion, Mile, la Quintinie) ; but, on the other hand, the heartfelt sincerity of her sermons is equally undeniable. In the earlier romances, the Eomances of Search, we hear her appealing with passionate earnestness for light and revelation to an irresponsive heaven. And in the Romances of Exposition, which constitute the great bulk of her works, we have the scheme of the universe, at which she ultimately arrived, enforced upon us in a hundred different ways. This scheme is 74 MODERN ESSAYS. [ii. nothing new ; it has even come by this time to possess a kind of orthodoxy of its own ; but forty years ago it was less widely held, and its adoption by one who had passed through the extreme phase of Catholicism indi- cated, in the then state of religious parties, no little breadth and moderation of mind. Briefly stated, it is much as follows : — There is a God, inconceivable and unknown, but approachable by prayer under the aspect of a Father in Heaven; there is a Holy Spirit, or ceaseless influx of grace and light, receivable by sincere and ardent souls : and among the beings who have been filled fullest with this divine inspiration the first place belongs to Jesus Christ, whose life is the highest model which humanity has known. Progi-ess is the law of the universe; the soul's progress, begun on earth, is continued through an infinite series of exist- ences ; nor is there any soul which may not ultimately rise to purity and happiness. Unselfish love is the best and most lasting of earthly experiences, for a love begun on earth may endure for ever. Marriage affords the best and the normal setting for such love ; but under exceptional circumstances it may exist outside the married state. Eeligious aspiration and unselfish love should form, as it were, the spirit of life ; its substance is best filled out by practical devotion to some impersonal ideal, — the scientific or meditative observation of Nature, the improvement of the condi- tion of the people, or the realisation of our visionary conceptions in a sincere and noble art. II.] GEORGE SAND. 75 There is nothing original in this : " Ce que je suis," says George Sand, " tout le monde pent I'etre : ce que je vois, tout le monde pent le voir : ce que j'espere, tout le monde pent y arriver. II ne s'agit que d'aimer la v^rite, et je crois que tout le monde sent le besoin de la trouver." Perhaps the reader will best be able to test the accuracy of this synopsis of George Sand's teaching if we consider in detail, and with as many extracts as space will allow, her relation to each of these fundamental topics, the People, the Sexes, Art, Nature, Religion. This mode of dividing a complex subject will admit of the introduction of a few reflections upon the events of Mme. Dudevant's life, considered as originating or modifying her opinions ; and in the course of our analysis we shall perhaps arrive almost insensibly at some more general estimate of her magnitude as an author. I. To begin, then, with her relation to " the people," under which vague word we mean to include the whole mass of social and political phenomena which have in her time overloaded the French calendar with so many mysterious allusions : the Hundred Days, the revolu- tion of February, the state trials of April, the days of June, the revolution of July, the events of December — landmarks emerging, as it were, from the mingled and turbid under-current of Legitimism, Orleanism, Bona- partism, Saint-Simonism, and the terrible " doctrine of Babeuf." 76 MODERN ESSAYS. [ii. It has often been remarked that her strangely-mixed ancestry seems to have fitted her in an especial manner for comprehending the most widely-separated classes of society. On one side she was descended from Augustus the Strong, King of Poland, whose gigantic and almost mythical figure towers above a weltering chaos of lust and war ; and the blood of the great Maurice de Saxe ran with indelible nobility through the veins of her father, a gallant officer in Napoleon's army. Her mother was the daughter of a bird-catcher, and a true specimen of the grisette of Paris in all her ignorance, her excitability, her frailty, and her charm. Her father died early, and the care of her childhood was divided between her father's mother, a refined and stately lady of the old regime, and her own mother, who could not live away from the bustle of the Boule- vards and the petty quarrels and trifling pleasures of a woman of the people. The mutual antagonism between these two guardians taught the girl many a lesson on the relation of class to class ; and the affec- tion which she felt for both combatants helped to give to the works of her later life that catholicity of view which enabled her to enter with equal ease into the essential feelings of every rank of life, to compose both Ze Marquis de Villemer and Francois le Champ i. And it is a noteworthy result of this origin and this education that although George Sand is sometimes coarse and often fantastic in her descriptions of what is called " high life," she is never vulgar in the way in II.] GEOKGE SAND. 77 which so many French authors, since the First Empire, have been vulgar, — with the vulgarity of a literary class revelling in the luxury and fashion into which intellectual power has raised them. Th^ophile Gautier, for instance, with all his wealth of imagination and grace of style, obviously does not possess what we in England call " the instincts of a gentleman." Now George Sand always has " the instincts of a gentleman," though she may not always have those very different instincts which we call " the instincts of a lady." Through all her dealings with the ordinary literary and political world around her, this difference between her and them is discernible. She is free from their effusive self-assertion, their uneasy vanity ; she is indifferent to luxury and to fame ; there is about her a tranquillity like that of the Sphinx, to which her baffled admirers so often compared her — something steadfast, disdainful, and serene. The very length and vigour of her life seemed to attest the potency of her race. She had, as it were, the power of living down everybody and everything — enemies, partisan- ships, scandals, loves — whole schools of thought and whole generations of men. These pass away and leave her in great old age sitting beneath the roof that sheltered her earliest years, and writing for her grandchildren stories in which her own childhood lives anew. Let us consider, then, in what way this largeness and serenity of view which we claim for George 78 MODERN ESSAYS. [ii. Sand's mature works manifests itself in her dealings with public questions. It will be found, we think, that while inspired by a strong and steady love of liberty and progress, she was free from the obvious faults of ordinary French reformers : their violent party spirit, their extravagant doctrines, and their tendency to expect the salvation of society from without rather than from within ; to imagine that a rearrangement of institutions can actually raise a man, whereas it can do no more than give him a better chance of raising himself. Now George Sand, as her fellow- liberals often complained, had no party spirit, none of that " fi^vre d'espoir et d'angoisse " which a generous but one-sided man feels in the crash of revolutions. French revolutions are short cuts which are apt to take the lover of liberty a long way round ; and in the preface to her Fetite Fadette, a story written in 1848, George Sand expresses the profound and hopeless pity which led her at such moments to take refuge in the stillness and sanctity of Nature from the confusion of raving tongues. " Dans les temps oil le mal vient de ce que les hommes so m^connaissent et se ddtestent, la mission de I'artistc est de cel^brer la douceur, la confiance, I'amitie, et de rappeler ainsi aux hommes endurcis ou d6courag6s, que les moeurs pures, les sentiments tendres, et I't^quit^ primitive sent ou peuvent etre encore de ce monde. " Prccher Tunion quand on s'6gorge c'est crier dans le desert. II est dcs tomps oil les Times sont si agitrcs qu'clles sont sourdcs ii toute exhortation directe. D<}})uis II.] GEORGE SAND 79 ces journ^es de juin dont les 6v6nements actuels sont rin6vitable consequence, I'auteur du conte qu'on va lire s'est impost la tache d'etre aimable, diit-il en mourir de chagrin. II a laiss6 railler ses hergeries, comme il avait laiss6 railler tout le reste, sans s'inqui6ter des arrets de certaine critique. II sait qu'il a fait plaisir a ceux qui aiment cette note -la, et que faire plaisir k ceux qui soufFrent du meme mal que lui, a savoir I'horreur de la haine et des vengeances, c'est leur faire tout le bien qu'ils peuvent accepter : bien fugitif, soulagement passager, il est vrai, mais plus r^el qu'une declamation passionn6e, et plus saisissant qu'une demonstration classique." Again, George Sand keeps wonderfully clear of extravagant doctrines. Horace, a book which pro- cured for her, she tells us, " une douzaine d'ennemis bien conditionnes," contains a scathing exposure of the egoism, folly, and conceit which inflate the legitimate aspirations of poor but clever young Frenchmen into so bombastic an unreaKty. Horace was for a certain class in France what The Booh of Snohs was for a certain class in England, a castigation after which the same meannesses could hardly be repeated in the same way. Le P4cM de M. Antoine is the book in which she deals most freely with the question of property. But her ideal remedy for the inequalities of its distribu- tion turns out to be not communism, but co-operation, "communaut^ par association" — an idea which it was well worth while to preach in France, and which may yet have a great future before it if the existing re- 80 MODERN ESSAYS. [ii. lations between Capital and Labour should ultimately break down. Again, we remark that the characteristic moral of George Sand's books — the doctrine that every eleva- tion, whether of a class or of an individual, must be effected primarily from within — is as strongly insisted on in the case of the working classes as in the some- what similar case of the female sex. " Dans cette longue serie," she says, "plusieurs ouvrages (je puis dire le plus grand nombre) ont ^t^ inspires par le d^sir d'^clairer le peuple sur ses devoirs autant que sur ses droits." And, in fact, few of her books are without some example of a working man (or woman) whose self- reverence and self-control end by placing him on an acknowledged equality with those whose original station was far above his own. And, like the author of Felix Holt, George Sand is always anxious to show that a true rise in life does not necessarily consist in a man's quitting the class in which he was born, but rather in his rendering the appropriate work of that class worthy of any class by thoroughness, honesty, artistic or scientific skill. One book, Le Compag7ion du Tour de France, avowedly draws an ideal portrait, — suggested by the character of Agricol Perdiguier, " cabinetmaker and representative of the people," — of what the working man may be, and although we may think that this ideal artisan has somewhat the air of having been bathed in rose-water, we must acknowledge that the soundest method of beneiiting II.] GEORGE SAND. 81 any class is to try to raise tlieir own conceptions of what they ought eventually to become. " Pourquoi," she asks in her preface to the book in question — " Pourquoi, en supposant que men type fiit trop id6alis6, n'aurais-je pas eu le droit de faire pour les hommes du peuple ce qu'on m'avait permis de faire pour ceux des autres classes 1 Pourquoi n'aurais-je pas trac6 un portrait, le plus agr6able et le plus s6rieux possible, pour que tous les ouvriers intelligents et bons eussent le desir de lui ressembler ? Depuis quand le roman est-il forc6ment la peinture de ce qui est, la dure et froide r6alit6 des hommes et des choses contemporaines 1 II en pent ^tre ainsi, je le sais, et Balzac, un maltre devant le talent duquel je me suis toujours inclin6, a fait la Com6die humaine. Mais, tout en (^tant 116 d'amitie avec cet homme illustre, je voyais les choses humaines sous un tout autre aspect, et je me souviens de lui avoir dit, a peu pres k I'epoque ou j'6crivais le Compagnon du Tour de France : ' Vous faites la ConUdie humaine. Ce titre est modeste ; vous pourriez aussi bien dire le drame, la tragidie humaine. Oui, me r6pondit-il ; et vous, vous faites I'epop^e humaine. Cette fois, repris-je, le titre serait trop relev6. Mais je voudrais faire Viglogue humaine, le jpohme, le roman humain. En somme, vous vouiez et savez peindre Thomme tel qu'il est sous vos yeux, soit ! Moi, je me sens porte a le peindre tel que je souhaite qu'il soit, tel que je crois qu'il doit etre.' " This unconscious repetition of the well-known criticism of Aristotle upon Sophocles and Euripides illustrates not only the relation of George Sand to Balzac, but the manner in which she consciously VOL. II. G 82 MODERN ESSAYS. [ii. modified or selected from the realities around her under the influence of a meditative idealism and an ethical purpose. II. Passing on to the cognate topic of George Sand's treatment of the duties and position of women, we find that the distinction between the two periods of her writings, between what we have called the Eomances of Search and the Eomances of Exposition, is very marked. Her first few books were written when the world seemed crumbling around her, when distressing doubt had succeeded to Christian ecstasy, and a most unsuitable and painful marriage to the tranquil affections of her convent and her country home. These books, of which Ldia is the type, are the cry of a bewildered child for the light ; they are the dizzy and Byronic phase of a nature essentially just and serene. Their style gave them a popularity which their author did not anticipate, and which she hardly desired. But it is not from these immature and dreamy productions that she ought to be judged. In the Romances of Exposition, of which Coiisuclo is one of the earliest, and one of the best, examples, we find the question of Women's Eiglits treated in an eminently sound spirit ; that is, we find a series of im- pressive but temperate protests against such injustices towards women as are sanctioned in France by society and law, but coupled herewith a continual encourage- ment to women to begin by develo^iing and respecting II.] GEORGE SAND. 83 themselves — to deserve at any rate the respect of men, and to be confident that the state of any class of human beings will ultimately conform itself to their intrinsic deserts. This is the chief lesson of Consuelo's history ; the child of an unknown father and of a gipsy tramp — the struggling singer at the opera of licentious towns — she rises by the sheer force of her own modest self-respect to a position of acknowledged moral greatness which attracts the affection and rever- ence of all classes of men. In a series of works, one of whose main themes is the power which women possess of elevating theii character, and rectifying the injustices of their position by the exercise of " self-reverence, self-knowledge, self- control," it is painful to observe the frequent recur- rence of the pervading fault of French literature — even of much of that literature which is meant to have, and has, a direct moral tendency — namely, a want of reticence and delicacy in matters connected with the relation between the sexes. Probably this disagreeable characteristic of so many of the best French books should in great measure be considered simply as a branch of that general want of dignity and reserve to which the French character is so un- fortunately prone. That character is, of course, as capable of purity and refinement as the English, but a Frenchman who lacks these qualities is more likely to show it than an Englishman ; because he degener- ates in the direction, not of sullen stolidity, but of 84 MODERN ESSAYS. [ii. complacent effusiveness — a. " Trunkenheit ohne Wein " which leads him to interlard, his life and literature with uninteresting teai-s, needless embraces, and re- marks in the worst taste. George Sand is capable of maintaining a level of lofty and militant purity; many of her books are wholly free from any kind of taint ; but in others we feel the need of that instinctive incapacity to dwell on anything gross or morbid which is the glory of the best English literature, and of that Hterature almost alone. It should be observed, however, that one accusation, which has been brought against George Sand's novels, that they tend to bring the institution of marriage into contempt, can certainly not be main- tained. Few authors have more convincingly insisted on the paramount excellence of a single, a permanent, a wedded affection. Few have more unshrinkingly exposed the misery which follows on the caprices of selfish and transitory passion. There are, indeed, passages in her works, where certain incidents of marriage which French opinion tolerates, and especi- ally the infidelity of the husband to the wife, too lightly regarded in that country, are assailed with indignant eloquence. But shall we in England be concerned to defend a social state in which the old conception of the sanctity of marriage is retained just so far as to render indissoluble a union contracted without love, and maintained without fidelity ? does not an institution like tliis need some purification il] GEOKGE sand. 85 before it can be justifiably acquiesced in as unalterable or preached as divine ? George Sand's own life forms a curious commentary on many social questions. To put the kernel of the position in a few words, she was greatly superior to almost all the Frenchmen of her time both in char- acter and intellect, while at the same time she was subject to many weaknesses characteristic of the feminine mind. The result is, that when we con- sider any controversy, speculative or emotional, be- tween her and the men about her, we are for the most part constrained to take her view, while yet we feel this view to be in some way unfamiliar to us, and in itself incomplete. The lioness has succeeded in imposing upon us her picture of the subjugated man ; we cannot deny its vraisemUance ; we can only say that we are not accustomed to see the gTOup drawn in that position. And perhaps there is some poetical justice in the fact that the French, with their per- petual talk about women, and pursuit of them, should at last, as it were, have fallen in with a woman so very much too strong for each and all of them. I believe that one single characteristic of George Sand's, as admitted by herself, is enough to explain the painful series of collisions between her and some of her once dearest friends. The fact is that she was apt to idealise people for a time, and then to cease to idealise them. It is obvious that nothing is more dis- agreeable than this. We can endure a want of 86 MODERN ESSAYS. [n. appreciation — reflecting that it is not given to all to be able to appreciate us — but that a woman who has taken an enthusiastic and emotional view of our character and abilities should suddenly begin to judge us in a calm manner, and indicate obvious defects, this is, indeed, enough to lash our self-love into fury. And if anything could make it worse, it would be to see the woman in question, whose intellectual superiority to us seems already a breach of the implied contract between the sexes, move on tranquilly occupied with the accomplishment of her destiny, reserving merely the right of describing us fictively in the Revue des Deux Mondes. A feminine Goethe is more than man- kind can endure, and there is much that is like Goethe in the emotional history of George Sand. Wlien, however, we consider in a more general way the treatment of love in her romances, we do not find any parti pris, or one-sidedness of view, interfer- ing with her power of developing the history of that passion under the most diverse forms. In this respect, indeed, she seems to me unsurpassed. It so happens that most of our great English novelists — Miss Austen, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray — have had but a thin vein of experience or imagination in this direction. Cliar- lotte Bronti'. in the past, George Meredith, and the greatest name of all, George Eliot, in the present, afford better examples of the light in which love presents itself to an English artist. But English dignity and reticence form an ever-present and inipas- II.] GEORGE SAND. 87 sable limit to their descriptive skill. In George Eliot, for instance, with all her profound knowledge of the heart, there is always a certain austerity and reserve, a subordination of amatory to ethical situations ; there are no dSbordements, no cris cC amour et d'angoisse ; nay, the only love letter which I can recall in her works was written by Mr. Casaubon. I believe that this spirit of dignity in literature makes the highest and best literature now existing in the world ; but in this, as in other ways, noUesse oblige, and it is plain that a French author has a much wider field to work in. The names of Eousseau, Benjamin Constant, Mme. de Stael, Balzac, Victor Hugo, occur at once as those of authors who have not merely described love in its commoner forms, but have done something to extend our conception of its variety and power. But George Sand seems to me to take a wider range than any one of these. The NouvelU Hilo'ise is scarcely fuller of mournful and philosophic sentiment than the Lettres dun VoyageuT or the Lettres a Marcie. Adolphe is not more intense or hopeless than Ze Dernier Amour. Corinne and Belphine, with all the eloquence and enthusiasm of their passion, are not more eloquent or more enthusiastic than Za Daniella. Za Cousine Bette is not more true or more terrible than Zeone Zeoni. Nor can any of Victor Hugo's contrasts between stain- less innocence and environing evil outdo the simplicity and dignity of Consuelo. We might extend this list much farther ; but we 88 MODEliN ESSAYS. [ii. are here only concerned to show that George Sand is before all things catholic in lier conception of human passion ; that her romances are not mere illustrations of some favourite theory or special pleadings in defence of some personal cause. There is no doubt one form of love which occurs oftenest in her books, especially where a woman is telling her own story — namely, the protective and admiring compassion which a woman of strong nature may feel for a gifted but weak or faulty man. This form of affection was abundantly illustrated by George Sand's own history; and seems to be allied to that eager maternal instinct which was the dominant emotion of her life ; yet we may perceive in her also a capacity, which her career on earth was not per- mitted to develop, of feeling love in its more normal and satisfactory form, in which the instinct of the woman is to absorb herself in a reverent devotion to the man, while his corresponding instinct is to rever- ence this very devotion in lier, as a token of her worthiness rather than of his own. The conclusion of Mademoiselle Mcrquem, a novel whose heroine much resembles George Sand herself, illustrates what I mean. ]\Ille. Merquem, won at length after a long and respectful courtship, is address- ing the husband of her choice, wlio here repeats her words and adds his comment thereupon. " ' N'ouhliez pas,' she says, 'que j'ai ct6 longtemps une ptrsonne raisonnablc, et suiivencz-vous (jiie la raison com- II.] GEORGE SAND. 89 mande d'etre absolument d6voue et soumis a ce que Ton aime par-dessus tout. J'ai accept6 Tamour, non comme un egarement et une faiblesse, mais comme une sagesse et une force dont, apres quelque doute de moi-meme, j'ai 6te fiere de me sentir capable. Chaque jour qui s'est 6coul6 depuis ce premier jour de confiance et de joie m'a rendue plus stire de moi-meme, plus fike de mon choix, plus reconnaiss- ante envers vous. A present, commandez-moi ce que vous voudrez, puisque je ne connais plus qu'un plaisir en ce monde ; celui de vous ob6ir.' " Je dus accepter cet abandon absolu, continuel, irrevoc- able de sa volont^. Le refuser ett et6 le m6connaitre. Je lui ai jur6 et je me suis jur6 a moi-meme que je me ser- virais de cette possession de son ame pour faire d'elle la plus respectee et la plus heureuse des femmes. Je me m^priserais profond6ment le jour ou je croirais y avoir le moindre m6rite. Avec une telle compagne la vie est un reve du ciel. Jamais pareille egalite d'ame ne fut le partage d'une creature humaine. J'ai trouv6 en elle un ami s6rieux, solide dans toutes le 6preuves, spontanement gen^reux et prudent, comme si son doux et profond regard embrassait a la fois les deux faces du vrai dans I'appr^cia- tion de toutes les choses de la vie. . . . Peut-etre ne sait- on pas a quel degr6 de charme et de m6rite pourrait s'61ever la femme bien dou6e, si on la laissait murir, et si elle-meme avait la patience d'attendre son developpement complet pour entrer dans la vie complete. On les marie trop jeunes, elles sont m^res avant d'avoir cess6 d'etre des enfants, on les 6leve, d'ailleurs, de maniere a prolonger cette en- fance toute la vie ; aussi ont-elles perdu toute puissance r^elle et toute action legitime dans la soci6t(i" Nor is George Sand unable to rise to that highest 90 MODERN ESSAYS. [il form of earthly passion in which its personal elements seem to fade and disappear, and it becomes not so much a desire as a revelation, an inlet into some supernal world, approachable only through the annihilation of self. In the Comtesse de Rudolstadt,- — an ill-constructed but a noble story, — there is a passage w^here Consuelo is called upon to choose, as she supposes, between love and duty. She has been led by the priests of a secret society through subterranean halls filled with the implements and memorials of all tortures and tyran- nies that have been practised upon men ; the misery of the world has been manifested to her with one appall- ing shock, and she has resolved to renounce all personal happiness for a life-long devotion to the cause of the wretched and oppressed. After a noble appeal to her lover not to hinder but to strengthen her in her high resolve, the fusion between earthly emotion and religious aspiration effects itself in a burst of song, and the long story of her fortunes leaves her with the same words upon her lips which first revealed to her- self and to the world of music that music was the passion of her soul. " L'enlhousiasme de Consuelo etait port6 aucomble; les paroles ne lui suffisaient plus pour I'exprimer. Une sorte de vertige s'empara d'elle, et, ainsi qu'il arrivait aux pythonisses, dans le paroxysme de leurs crises divines, de so livrer a des cris et k d'6trangos fureurs, elle fut cntraln^o a manifester remotion qui la dcbordait par rexpression qui II.] GEORGE SAND. 91 lui 6tait la plus naturelle. EUe se mit a chanter d'une voix 6clatante et dans un transport au moins 6gal a celui qu'elle avait 6prouv6 en chantant ce meme air a Venise, en public pour la premiere fois de sa vie, et en presence de Marcello et de Porpora : " ' I cieli immensi narrano Del grande Iddio la gloria ! ' " Le chant lui vint sur les levres, parce qu'il est peut-etre I'expression la plus naive et la plus saisissante que la musique ait jamais donn6e a I'enthousiasme religieux. Mais Consuelo n'avait pas le calme n6cessaire pour contenir et diriger sa voix ; apres ces deux vers, I'intonation devint un sanglot dans sa poitrine, elle fondit en pleurs et tomba sur ses genoux." III. The mention of Consuelo may serve as our point of transition from George Sand's treatment of Love to her treatment of Art. For the aesthetic his- tory of Consuelo, as contrasted v^ith that of Gorilla and Anzoleto, is perhaps the best example of the lesson which in these romances is so often repeated, that Art, like everything else which is worth having or worth doing, is the result and outcome of a certain inward and spiritual state ; that to good Art moral qualities are as necessary as intellectual; that those who fail in Art fail oftenest through egoism and ambition, through license and vanity ; while those who succeed succeed through delight in their work and devotion to an impersonal and lofty aim. To take instances almost at random ; the art of acting is treated much in this way in the Chdteau des 92 MODERN ESSAYS. [n. DSserfes, and (incidentally) in Narcisse ; authorship in Hm^ace ; mosaic-work in Les Maitres Moswistes ; por- trait-painting in Le Chdteau de Pictordu; landscape- painting in La Daniella and 3fl!e. Merquem ; and, to end with a characteristic example from one of her latest books, the art of bird-stuffing, in that capital child's story Zes Ailes de Courage. George Sand, in fact, insists as constantly as Mr. Kuskin on the gi^eat maxim which lies at the root of art ; that in order to represent anything well we must love to look at it, in order to do anything well we must love to do it, quite apart from all thought of rivalry, or profit, or fame. Her own artistic history was as consistent with her convictions as the tyranny of circumstances would allow. That is to say, she was indifferent to Jame, — greatly disliking its concrete form, general recognition and notoriety, — and she at no time shaped or modified her published opinions with a view to profit. But she was forced to write much faster than she liked that she might earn money — not in order to enjoy wealth or luxury, for which she felt a singular indiffer- ence — but in order to secure her own independence and the education of her children. She had also a feminine bias towards almsgiving, which went so far that in later life she denied herself the pleasure and instruction of travel that she might have more to give away. The results of this excessive haste arc most marked in her earlier writings. She has not had time to make II.] GEORGE SAND. 93 them short. The grace of her language never fails, but she is often tedious and full of repetitions, and before she has gained experience of life she tends to be fantastic and unreal. Much of L6lia, though the book created so great a sensation, seems now unread- ably dull. As time goes on her style improves ; its dignity and melody remain ; its longueurs gradually disappear. From Consuelo onwards she seems able to say whatever she wishes in admirable form. Her tendency to religious disquisition continues often to interfere with the march of her romances, but in the diction itself there is little which either Frenchman or foreigner has censured. With maturity she gained simplicity; her pastoral romances are models of pas- toral speech ; and her latest works, Flamarande, La Tour de Percemont, etc., are almost as concise and clear as Voltaire himself. But certain characteristics remain unchanged through the five-and-forty years of her literary life. In almost all the books there is the same air of unlaboured spon- taneity and irresistible inspiration ; in almost all there is the same subordination of the verisimilitude of minor events to the development of one central character, one dominant idea, one absorbing passion. And the defects of a class of romances which aim so high are almost inseparable from their merits. Some novelists, like some painters, have preferred to confine themselves to effects of twilight or candlelight, that so their colour within these limits may be wholly natural and true ; 94 MODERN ESSAYS. [n. a wider range of light and shade brings added difficul- ties of harmonious representation ; and those who would " set the blazing sun in heaven " must be content to sacrifice much truth of local colouring if they would maintain, with the imperfect means at their disposal, some likeness of the irreproducible gradations between Nature's blackness and her glow. IV. I have been endeavouring so to arrange these remarks as to proceed as it were from without inwards in our review of George Sand's life and work. From considering her relation to the political world about her, to the other sex, and to the small confraternity of art, we pass now to the subjects on which her reverie habitually dwelt — nature first, and then all which lies beneath nature for a reverent and meditative mind. She approached nature from many sides. As the owner of a country property, which for many years she managed herself, she was able to give to her rustic pictures a vivid reality, which a Parisian like Balzac could not by any study achieve. All the world knows La Petite Fadette, and the rest of that series of gentle idylls, of which La Mare au Didble and Nanon are, perhaps, the most touching. They form the nearest French parallel to Wordsworth's Waggoner and Pder Bell. George Sand has also what Wordsworth liad not — a subtle feeling for the charm which lies in the transformation of meditative observation into definite science : the moment when one, who has long pored over some fragment of nature for his delight, discovers II.] GEORGE SAND. 95 that he has learnt something which few or none have learnt before him. I know no French novel in which science is treated with a profounder sympathy than in Valvklre, — a work which supplies a corrective to all of morbid that Valentine and Indiana contain, — so full is it of matter and wisdom, so natural and complete is the triumph which science, simplicity, and virtue gain over immoral and egoistic languor. And, to pass over a host of similar instances, one of the last and simplest of her stories, Marianne, culminates in a moment at which the girl's gentle and joyous observation of nature is found to have laid for her the basis of a more scien- tific knowledge of the plants which she loves. This last sketch is so slight that I feel half ashamed to dwell on it ; and yet it has a peculiar charm ; a picture drawn in great old age by the world-famous writer, of a girl riding about the country as she herself had done in youth, and entering, in the same simple and pro- found fashion, into the teaching of nature and her joy. There is something touching in this "link of natural piety," which connects the youth and age of one, whose ardent genius had impelled her in the meantime into forms of life so remote from quiet Berry and the shades of the Vallee Noire, and who yet returned to that still home, and spent life's long declension among the gar- dens where she had played as a child. More, perhaps, than any author of our century, save Wordsworth him- self, she deserves Claudian's praises of that ancient and home-keeping man — 96 MODERN ESSAYS. [ii. " Ingentem meminit parvo qui germine quercnm, Aequaevumque videt consenuisse nemus." And lier books, in many places, show how deeply this life-long refuge of Nohant had tranquillised her soul — how often the cares and loves of life fell from her in the presence of Nature's slow consolations, and her abidincj calm. \. It was, then, in a life which, though often pro- foundly agitated, had yet a certain unity and back- ground of peace, that George Sand experienced that series of religious changes and awakenings which, as she herself has told us, constitute her essential history and her true career. The first stage was an unusual one. She was brought up by a grandmother and a tutor who held Voltairian views, but did not wish to impress them upon a child. Consequently they left her with no religious teaching at all. Some stories, impartially told her, about Christ and Jupiter, were all the theo- logy that was impressed on the blank paper of her mind. Thereupon she did what a philosopher might have expected her to do. Not being told that there was a God, she found it necessary to invent one. Few passages in literature are more touching than the pages where she describes how she felt, at the age of ten, the need of some Divine Being to love and worship ; and liow, in her uncertainty between Christ and the gods of Greece, she feared that all were alike unreal ; and liow, in some half-waking vision, her inner need clothed II.] GEORGE SAND. 97 itself in a deity whom she imagined for herself, to worship him ; and Coramhd — neither male nor female, neither human nor quite divine — hovered between heaven and earth in her day-long dream, willingly in- carnating himself sometimes to assuage some misery of men, or sometimes punished at the hands of a supreme power by an enforced sojourn among the unhappy mortals to whom he had shown too much mercy. To him, upon a secret and woodland shrine, she sacrificed not by slaying but by setting free ; and when a bird released upon his altar lingered for a moment among the branches of the shadowing maple-tree, she took the sign as a token of Corambe's acceptance of the benign and bloodless offering : — and those who like may fancy that some Power was there to welcome the unblemished gift, and to fill with gladness that inno- cent sanctuary in the heart of a child. But the little Aurore grew older, and was sent to the convent of the Anglaises at Paris, where Catholi- cism was presented in its most winning form by the religious English ladies, to whom the education of some of the best-born girls in France and in our own islands was at that time entrusted. For a long time Aurore withstood their inliuence ; she became the riugleader of all such wild and innocent mischief as the convent knew ; she was enrolled among the dictbles ; she seemed as far as possible from becoming sage. VOL. II. H 98 MODERN ESSAYS. [ii. But her hour came — the hour wliich in some fonn or other probably comes to every ardent ond reverent soul — the hour of the dedication of self to a new-felt and absorbing power. In a fit of weariness, after some long frolic, she had strayed into the convent chapel. She sat through the evening service in a state of strange abstraction and serenity. What followed shall be described in her own words : — "L'heure s'avan9ait, la pri^re etait sonnee, on allait fermer 1 eglise. J'avais tout oubli6. Je ne sais ce qui se passait en moi. Je respirais une atmosphere d'une suavity indicible, et je la respirais par I'anie plus encore que par les sens. Tout k coup je ne sais quel 6branlement se 2)roduisit dans tout mon etre, un vertige passe devant mes yeux comme une lueur blanche dont je me sens envelopp^e. Je crois entendre une voix murmurer h mon oreille : Telle, lege. Je me retourne, croyant que c'est Marie Alicia qui me parle. J'6tais seule. "Je ne me fis pas d'orgueilleuse illusion, je necrus point a \m miracle. Je me rendis fort bien compte de I'espoce d'hallucination oil j'6tais tombec. Je n'en fus ni enivr6e ni effray6e. Je ne cherchais ni k I'augmenter ni k m'y soustraire. Sculemcnt, je scntis que la foi sVmparait de moi, comme je I'avais souliait6, par le coeur. J 'en fus si reconnaissante, si ravie, qu'un torrent de larmes inonda mon visage. Je sentis encore que j'aimais Dieu, que ma pens6e embrassait et acceptait pleinement cot ideal de jus- tice, de tcndresse et de saintet6 que je n'avais jamais revoque en doute, mais avec lequel je ne m'etais jamais trouvee en communication dirccte; jc sentis cnfin cette communication n.] GEORGE SAND. 99 s'6tablir soudainement, comme si un obstacle invincible so ftit abim6 entre le foyer d'ardeur infinie et le feu assoupi dans mon ame. Je voyais un cliemin vaste, immense, sans bornes, s'ouvrir devant moi ; je briilais de m'y 61ancer. Je n'etais plus retenue par aucun doute, par aucune froi- deur. La crainte d'avoir a me reprendre, a railler en moi- meme au lendemain la fougue de cet entrainement ne me vint pas seulement a la pensee. J'6tais de ceux qui vont sans regarder derri^re eux, qui h^sitent longtemps devant un certain Rubicon a passer, mais qui, en touchant la rive, ne voient d6jk plus celle qu'ils viennent de quitter." Her conversion was complete. It was followed by months of ecstatic happiness and self-denial, and only the wise reluctance of the nuns in charge prevented the enthusiastic girl from insisting on taking the veil. At last her grandmother removed her from the con- vent. But her faith and her wish to become a nun persisted long. Her first shock arose from the perusal of Chateaubriand's G4nie dio Christianisme, a book recommended to her by her confessor, but which she found to be in so direct an opposition to the Imitatio Christi, on which her devotion had long been fed, that she was led to doubt the truth and unity of a system which could thus be authoritatively expounded in two such different senses. But she seemed to be cjlidinsj gently into a tranquil Theism, when all at once her troubles came. Her grandmother died. Her home at Nohant was broken up. Her fatlier's family were alienated by her mother's temper. Her mother was worse than no guardian to the sensitive and inexperi- 100 MODERN ESSAYS. [u. enced girl. In her distress and loneliness she allowed a M. Dudevant to persuade her that he would be a solid and lasting friend. She married him, and thus committed the greatest blunder of her life, not through excess, but through defect of emotional sensibility. For she should never have married M. Dudevant. She never loved him, and he never loved anybody. He drank ; he kept low company ; he was openly un- faithful to his wife. After years of miserable union, and years of informal separation, the wife procured a judicial separation, and the custody of the children was left in her hands. But during the wretched years, from 1826 to 1836, — years during which other sins besides those of M. Dudevant disturbed her inward peace, and, enlightened by her own sorrows, her eyes opened upon the sorrows of the world, — her faith was deeply shaken ; she lost her trust in the moral govern- ment of the universe ; her spiritual life became a mere voice of protest and cry for light to a sealed and un- answering heaven. Slowly the answer came. "By-and-by [says Mazzini] hor thoughts elevate and clear themselves : her looks turn oftener to the future ; the religious sentiment, so prominent in George Sand, becomes more and more developed and intense. The turbid stream purifies itself in mounting towards lieaven, and falls again in dew. Calm succeeds to storm ; the very shallow of scepticism has disappeared before faith ; faith, sad and with- out the spring of youth, for its torch does not shine on this side of the tomb ; but strong, and unsliakeable as all II.] GEORGE SAND. 101 religious conviction. Our earthly life is not the Right to happiness, it is the Duty of development ; sorrow is not Evil, since it stimulates and purifies : virtue is constancy in devotion j all error passes away ; truth is eternal, and must, by a law of Providence, triumph sooner or later in the individual as in humanity. George Sand has learnt these things, and repeats them to us with the sweet and impressive voice of a sister. There is still, as in the sound of the ^olian harp, an echo of a past agony ; but the voice of the angel preponderates." Mazzini here has merely stated the change which took place, without attempting to assign its reason. Perhaps this silence is wise. In a universe which is of so mixed a character that optimism and pessimism are both of them plausible views, it seems almost futile to try to determine what thought or fact it is which makes for each man the transition from despair to faith. There are plenty of phenomena to lead any- body to any conclusion. It is enough to give her own account of the means by which this change was effected ; which means she believed to be divine grace, sent in answer to pro- longed and earnest prayer : — " Je crois encore a ce que les chretiens appellent la grace. Qu'on nomme comme on voudra les transformations qui s'op^rent en nous quand nous appelons ^nergiquement le principe divin de I'infini au secours de notre faiblesse ; que ce bienfait s'appelle secours ou assimilation ; que notre aspiration s'appelle priere ou exaltation d'esj^rit, il est cer- tain que Tame se retrempe dans les (jilans religieux. Je I'ai 102 MODERN ESSAYS. [ii. toujours (5prouv6 d'une manierc si (^ividente pour raoi, que j'aurais mauvaise grace k en mat^rialiser rexpression sous ma plume. Prier comme certains divots pour demander au ciel la pluie ou le soleil, d'est-a-dire des pommes de terre et des ^cus, pour conjurer la grele ou la foudre, la maladie ou la mort, c'est de I'idolatrie pure ; mais lui demander le courage, la sagesse, I'amour, c'est ne pas intervertir Tordre de ses lois immuables, c'est puiser a un foyer qui ne nous attirerait pas sans cesse si, par sa nature, il n'dtait pas capable de nous r^chauflfer." Through whatever agency, the change took place. For the rest of her long life George Sand was not strictly a Christian, but one of those who must be ranged along with Christians in any reckoning of the spiritual forces of the world. For we know that the true controversy is no longer between those within and those without the walls of any given church, but ou a wider scale and involving profounder issues. It is a controversy between Spiritualism and Materialism, be- tween those who base their life upon God and immor- tality, and those who deny or are indifferent to both. And the spiritual cause has the more need of cham- pions now that a distinct moral superiority can no longer be claimed on either side. Perhaps the loftiest and most impressive strain of ethical teaching which is to be heard in England now comes from one who invokes no celestial assistance, and oilers to virtue no idtimate recompense of reward.^ The Stoics arc again ^ This Essay apitcarcd iu Gcorgo Eliot's lil'ctiiue. II.] GEORGE SAND. 103 among lis ; the stern disinterestedness of their " coun- sels of perfection " is enchaining some of our noblest souls. But the moral elevation of any portion of man- kind tends to the elevation of all. And although to those who rest tranquil in their belief in immortality this stoical view will appear extreme, one-sided, hope- less, impossible to man, it will yet teach them no longer to speak as if virtue were to be rej)aid with pleasures which it needs no virtue to enjoy. They will rather claim that a spirit of ceaseless aspiration shall be satisfied with a ceaseless progress ; that virtue shall be rewarded by her own continuance, " the wages of going on, and not to die." Few writers have dwelt on this prospect with a more sustained and humble aspiration than George Sand. I quote one of numberless passages : — " Saintes promesses des cieux ou Ton se retrouve et ou Ton se reconnait, vous n'etes pas un vain r^ve. Si nous ne devons pas aspirer a la beatitude des purs esprits du pays des chimeres, si nous devons entrevoir toujours au-dela de cette vie un travail, un devoir, des epreuves et une organ- isation limit^e dans ses facult^s vis-4-vis de I'infini, du moins il nous est permis par la raison, et il nous est com- mando par le coeur de compter sur unc suite d'existences progressives en raison de nos bons desirs. Les saints de toutes les religions qui nous orient du fond de Fantiquit^ de nous d^gager de la matiere pour nous 6lever dans la hi^rarchie celeste des esprits ne nous out pas tromp6s quant au fond de la croyancc admissible a la raison moderne. Nous pensons aujourd'hui que, si nous sommes immortels, 104 MODERN ESSAYS. [ii. c'est a la condition dc revetir sans ccsse des organes nou- veaux pour completer notre etre, qui n'a probablement pas le droit de devenir un pur esprit ; mais nous poiivons regarder cette terre comme un lieu de passage et compter sur un r6veil plus doux dans le berceau qui nous attend ailleurs. De mondes en mondes, nous pouvons, en nous d^gageant de Tanimalitdi qui combat ici-bas notre spiritual- isme, nous rendre propres k revetir un corps plus pur, plus appropri6 aux besoins de Tame, moins combattu et moins entrave par les infirmites dc la vie humaine telle que nous la subissons ici-bas." With some such thoughts as these we should close our contemplation of the earthly career of a strong, a militant, an eager soul. To one who traces the vic- tories of such a soul, in this dimness of her captivity, that which she hath done will seem " but earnest of the things that she shall do ;" we imagine her delivered from the bewildering senses, the importunate passions of the flesh, no longer " tormented," but satisfied, with the things of God ; glad in those spiritual kinships and that inward calm towards which " her continual longing has been her continual voice." VICTOE HUGO. "Ocrcrav iir' Ov\v/inr(p jiifxaaav O^jxev, avrap eir "0(T<jri lli^Xiov elvocricpvXKov, IV ovpavbs d/j-lSaTos €L7], "Dans le domaine poetiqne," says the sternest of French critics, "I'autorit^ de I'Angleterre ne vaiit pas moins que I'aiitorite de la Grece dans le domaine de la sculpture." And we may fairly accept this dictum of Gustave Planche's as just, and maintain that in no country of modern Europe has so much good poetry or good criticism on poetry been produced as in Eng- land. The more important, then, is the fact that an Englishman who, like Mr. Swinburne, stands in the very foremost rank both of our poets and of our critics, should have proclaimed with all his eloquence that M. Hugo is the greatest of living poets — nay, more, " the name that is above every name in lyric song " — a Master after whom our age will be called, as Shake- speare's age is called after Shakespeare. And Mr. Swinburne, though he may write extravagantly, never writes at random. We feel that in his wildest flights he has yet a grasp upon the very spirit of poetry, a wide, exact, and penetrating knowledge of the greatest 106 MODERN ESSAYS. [iir. achievements of the human imagination, which may well make us pause where we cannot follow him, and believe that he sees more than we. His judgment of M. Hugo has prompted me to a long and careful study of that author's works, in the course of which I have seemed to understand how Mr. Swinburne's aboundincj poetical power runs over, as it were, upon the poets whom he criticises, and glorifies them with his own glow. Such criticism is generous, eloquent, suggestive ; yet it leaves room for a soberer estimate, which shall refer the works in question as much to a moral as to an artistic standard. I think, then, — to begin by a broad expression of views which I hope to develop in some detail, — that M. Hugo's central distinction lies in his unique power over the French language, greatly resembling Mr. Swinburne's power over the English language, and manifesting itself chiefly in beauty and inventiveness of poetical form and melody. In prose the same power supplies an endless fertility of rhetoric, and a countless store of epigrams which evince the faculty of manipulating rather than of originating thought. Moreover, a singular vividness and intensity of ini- jigination, with a command over the striking incidents of life and the broad outlines of character, somewhat akin to the generalship with which he marshals his stately words and phrases, render M. Hugo a great master of scenic effect — of that shock and collision of pathos, horror, and surprise, to which in plays and romances we give the name of melodrama. III.] VICTOE HUGO. 107 In Lis moral nature we shall find much that is strong, elevated, and tender ; a true passion for France, a true sympathy for the poor and the oppressed, a true fondness for children. Farther than this it will be hard to go ; so plain will it be that the egoism which penetrates M. Hugo's character is a bar to all higher sublimity, and has exercised a disastrous effect on his intellectual as well as on his moral career. In calling M. Hugo egoistic I am far from accusing him of vulgar self-seeldng — of an undue regard for any tangible form of personal advantage. What I mean is that he seems never to forget himself; that whatever truth he is pursuing, whatever scene he describes, his own attitude in regard to it is never absent from his mind. And hence it results that all other objects are unconsciously made secondary to the great object of making an impression of the kind de- sired. From the smallest details of style up to the most serious steps in political conduct this preoccupa- tion is visible. It was the same spirit which prompted the poet to begin one of his most solemn elegiac poems with the repeated assertion " that it should never be said that he kept silence, that he did not send a sombre strophe to sit before his children's tomb " — and which prompted the politician to resign in a moment the trust wdiicli Paris had committed to him because the Assembly w^ould not listen to him with the respect which he thoucjht his due. o 108 MODERN ESSAYS. [iir. The sources of this self -absorption — this "auto- theism/' as a French critic lias called it — are to some extent obvious, and M. Hugo has but yielded more openly than some others to a temptation which has come to him with unusual force. Among the dangers of advancing culture lies a fact which at first sight appears wholly an advantage — namely, the increased respect and attention paid to intellect — to artists, men of science, and men of letters. In England the importance of this class has of late grown rapidly, owing not only to the increase in the number of persons able to appreciate them, but to the tranquillity of the country, which has afforded few impressive careers to the warrior or the statesman. In France the man of letters has long held a position of unnatural prominence. For the artificial equality wliich the Revolution produced has left so few leaders to whom the people can naturally look, that the liter- ary guild has in some sense replaced both priesthood and aristocracy, and in times of stress and tumult poets and pamphleteers have more than once been called to the helm of the State. A career like Lamartine's may well justify Comte's insistence on a separation between the functions of the man of thought and the man of action. But the danger which here concerns us is of a more general kind. It consists in tlie fact tliat the artist and i)oct are much more easily injured by deference than by neglect. The more in- ward and intimate is the merit for which we praise a III.] VICTOR HUGO. 109 man, the harder is it for us to praise him with good taste, or for him to receive the praise with dignity. We can applaud the great actions of a general without injuring his capacity for war ; but if we dwell too much on the delicate thoughts of a poet — of a man whose claim to represent his fellow-men is mainly that his sensibilities are more exquisite than theirs, his ideal higher, his moral sense more true — there is much fear lest we injure in him what we admire, lest his emotions no longer seem to flow spontaneously into music, and to be overheard, but rather to be adjusted to the expectations of his admiring public. Other intellectual fields have cognate dangers. In the domain of music we are the grieved spectators of the enormous self-applause of the most conspicuous com- poser of our time. And science herself — once the type of lofty and impersonal labour — has learnt some- times to speak with brazen lips, and to defame all sanctities but her own. On living examples of the contrary temper it would be indecorous to dwell. It is enough to recognise that the evil of which I have spoken is not universal; that England has not lost her tradition which couples modesty with greatness ; that in this age of desecrating publicity it is still possible for a man, with ears open to the world's in- finite voices, to be ignorant only of the praises which salute his name.^ 1 The allusion to Mr. Darwin may be made explicit now that he is no lonf:cer amon^ us. 110 MODERN ESSAYS. [iil How confidently, on the other hand, M. Hugo has arranged all voices of lieaven and earth in a cantata to liis own glory may be seen from the following passage on tlie duties of the poet : — " Dans ses poemes il mettrait les conseils au temps pre- sent, les esqiiisses reveuses de Tavenir ; le reflet, tantut (^blouissant, tantot sinistre, des (5v(^^nements contemporains ; les pantheons, les tombeaux, les ruines, les souvenirs ; la charity pour les pauvres, la tendresse pour les mis6rables ; les saisons, le soleil, les champs, le mer, les montagnes; les coups d'oeil furtifs dans le sanctuaire de Tame ou Ton aper9oit sur un autel myst^rieux, comme par la porte entr'ouverte d'une chapelle, toutes ces belles urnes d'or : la foi, resp6rance, la po(isie, ramour ; enfin il y mettrait 3ette profonde peinture du moi, qui est peut-etre I'oeuvre la plus large, la plus gdnerale et la plus universelle qu'un penseur puisse faire." There is a sense in which these last words may be true. A man like Wordsworth, on whom unique sensibilities have bestowed as it were a new revela- tion, may perceive that his life's object must be to explain to others what he sees and feels ; he may justi- fiably be wrapped up in this ; he may without rebuke even exaggerate the importance of the boon which lie has to bestow. For it is not on himself that his heart is set, but on that of which he is the interpreter. ]>ut M. Hugo's first thought is almost always of his own greatness ; his first care for his own glory. His teaching shifts from pole to pole ; the only lodestar to which it always turns is the poet himself. I do not III.] VICTOR HUGO. Ill care to accumulate proofs of this. I will not quote from William Shakespeare, with its almost insane pas- sages of inflated self-esteem, where the poet seems to intimate that the fourteen men whom he deims to honour in former ages have been previous incarnations of himself. I will take a poem, in metrical form among our author's best, where the poet is expressing himself as plainly as the sublimity of his theme allows. The Ode d, Olympio (a barbarous name intended to imply M. Hugo's analogy to Jupiter) is obviously, and one may say avowedly, an address by the poet to him- self. The address is put into the mouth of a nameless friend, and is thus introduced : — " Un jour I'ami qui reste k ton coeur qu'on d6chire Contemplait tes malheurs, Et tandis qu'il parlait ton sublime sourire Se melait a ses pleurs." One hardly knows which to admire most, the servile tears of the man of straw, or the poet's description of his own sublime smile. " Te voila," says the friend — " Te voila sous les pieds des envieux sans nombre Et des passants rieurs, Toi dont le front superhe aecoutumait cc Vomhre Les fronts infdrieurs / " After further allusions to " ton front calme et tonnant," " ton nom rayonnant," etc., the friend continues — 112 MODERN ESSAYS. [iii. " Tous ceiix qui de tos jours orageux et sublimes S'approclient sans effroi, licviennent en disant qu'ils ont vu ties abimes En se pencliant sur toi ! " Mais peut-etre, a, travers I'eau <le ce gouffre immense Et de ce cocur profond, On verrait cette perle qu'on appelle innocence, En regardant au fond ! " On s'arrcte aux brouillards dont ton Time est voilee ; Mais moi, juge et temoin, Je sais qu'on trouverait une voUte dtoilee Si Ton allait plus loin ! " The critics naturally come in for a mild rejoinder. " lis auront bicn toujours pour toi toute la haine Dcs demons pour le dieu, Mais un souffle eteindra leur bouclie impure, pleine De paroles de feu. " lis s'(3vanouiront, et la foule ravie Verra, d'un ceil pieux, Sortir de ce tas d' ombre amass6 par renvio Ton front majestueux ! " After this we find it difficult to be much interested in the universal benevolence of the poet's abstract views. Critics have admired a prophetic passage in which, in the general rehabilitation of everybody, ])elial grows so angelic that the Almighty is })uzzled to distinguish him from Christ. But universality of appreciativeuess is, in this nineteenth century, no longer surprising. III.] VICTOR HUGO. 113 Many of us will feel that our sympathies have expanded so widely that we can enter into the point of view of the very devil, — so long as he says nothing unpleasant about ourselves. And surely never was amour propre more watchful than M. Hugo's. To keep silence about him is almost as dangerous as to criticise him. Any suspicion of lukewarmness is met with the vigorous expression of a pain about which poets have perhaps said enough — the pain which they derive from the stupidity and jealousy of mankind. There is no doubt much truth in such complaints. A man of any emotional force and originality will be often misunderstood. Over- valued, perhaps, by some, he will be undervalued by others. The many forces that fight on the side of commonplace will unite to exaggerate his faults and to explain his virtues away. All this is a matter of course. Everything that is exceptional has its incon- veniences. But troubles like these should be borne in silence ; to dwell on them before the world is both unmanly and arrogant. He who sings of grief should sing of griefs which others also feel, and to which his song can bring consolation. There are, indeed, some cases, like Byron's or Shelley's, in which the poet's lot has been made so tragic by causes closely connected with his genius that we cannot wish him to keep silence. But M. Hugo's literary troubles have never been of this kind. They have rather been such as are naturally provoked by the assumption of the VOL. IT. I 114 MODERN ESSAYS. [iii. leadership of a militant school in literature. A man who claims to rule by right of conquest must expect that the conquered persons will call him an usurper. AVe will not dwell on the petty histories of cabals and jealousies, alliances and discipleships, which have oc- cupied too often the literary world of France. But we may well question whether either French literatui-e or French society has really gained by the abolition of the old pre-eminence accorded to the accident of birth. Have wealth and talents shown themselves to be worthier objects of deference ? Are they found to be more frequently united with that moral elevation to whicli we all desire to pay our chief respect ? A plutocracy we may take to be an admitted evil, em- bodying the self-indulgence whicli is the weakness of an aristocracy without the sense of responsibility which ought to be its strength. And surely we are intro- ducing a still worse element into our reconstructed society if we erect poets or dramatists into the heads of factions, each witli his band of janissaries, who salute him in newspaper or theatre with preconcerted applause. There is no surer way of ruining a man than to thrust upon him a counterfeit greatness, and he who would play the part of Napoleon in the re- public of letters can suffer no evil so disastrous as his own success. Ill what terms an <»ffeii(lcd potentate vaui resent im- ])artial opinion may be judged from the following lines, among the most forcible which ]\I. Hugo has ever III.] VICTOR HUGO. 115 written, and whose application is fixed, by an in- genuity of insult, upon one of the most just and scrupulous critics whom France has known ; — " Jeune homnie, ce m6chant fait une lache guerre. Ton indignation ne I'^pouvante guere. Crois-moi done, laisse en paix, jeune homme au noble cceur, Ce Zoile a I'oeil faux, ce malheureux moqueur. Ton mepris 1 mais c'est I'air qu'il respire. Ta haine 1 La haine est son odeur, sa sueur, son haleine. II sait qu'il pent souiller sans peur les noms fameux, Et que pour qu'on le touche il est trop venimeux. II ne craint rien: pareil au champignon difforme Pouss6 dans une nuit au pied d'un chene 6norme, Qui laisse les chevreaux autour de lui paissant Essayer leur dent folle a I'arbuste innocent ; Sachant qu'il porte en lui des vengeances trop sures, Tout gonfle de poison il attend les morsures." Literature has few expressions of rage and hatred more concentrated than this. But worse remains. Self is an idol to which a man must sacrifice not only his critics but his deities, and not only the present but the past. Eetrospective jealousy knows no limitations. As M. Hugo has advanced in his self-worship the objects of his reverence have become fewer and fewer, and those noble admirations which make the very sub- stance of our spiritual being have dropped one by one from his soul. In most cases his judgments are worth noticing only as illustrating his own moral decline. That M. Hugo, after admiring Virgil, should 2)Ostpone 116 MODERN ESSAYS. [iii. Virgil to Juveual (because he can more easily pretend that he was once Juvenal himself), matters little to any one except M. Hugo. But when his faint praise falls upon authors who, though superior, are com- parable to himself— r when Eacine and Corneille, for instance, are indicated as the mere forerunners of the author of Cromwell and Buy Bias — a more serious pro- test is needed. I am no blind admirer of the great French tragedians. No English critic is likely to overlook their obvious faults and limitations. But I surely still have the best French judgments with me in believing that the moral world in which those classical poets have their being is one of such refine- ment and loftiness as M. Hugo has never known. How crude, how strained, in a word how melodramatic, are the ethical struggles and triumphs of his Marion, his Tisbe, his Hernani, compared with Eacine's gentle magnanimities, and pure compassions, and cadences of delicate distress ! We might as well compare a picture by Dore or Wiertz to a picture by Andrea del Sarto. And Corneille's strain is in a still higher mood. No other French dramatist has written a play "beau comme le Cid," because no other French dramatist has had a nature like Corneille's — a nature grave, re- served, and solitary, but cherishing as it were a hidden fervency and a secret habit of honour, and linding at last its longed-for outlet in that ringing tale of chivalry and war, ol' the ecstasies ol' lii'roic passion and the counterchange of love and death. m.] VICTOR HUGO. 117 The society- in which these men's genius was fostered may have been artificial, transitory, unjust. It may have been based upon the slavery of the Com- mons of France. But it contained within it certain ideals which France has lost and hardly has regained. A truer religion, a sounder polity, than Catholicism and Divine Eight, may yet enlighten the eyes of French singers with a wider vision than of old. But M. Hugo is "singing before sunrise," and his horizon is lit rather with some shifting radiance of the northern lights than with a steady promise of the day. Let us attempt to give distinctness to our mingled judgment of M. Hugo's character and powers, first by a short examination of the literary form of his poems, dramas, and romances ; and then by considering his political career, his personal emotions as revealed to us in his works ; and, lastly, his position with regard to the profoundest problems which affect mankind. II. The literary form in which M. Hugo's work, and especially his poetry, has been cast, presents much of interest. For we may take him as the leading represent- ative of the romantic school so conspicuous in France during the first half of this century. And this school, beginning with wide pretensions, has ended, like some other revolutions in cognate arts, in little more than an improvement in technical procedure. Those re- 118 MODERN ESSAYS. fnL forms alone are permanent wliicli are based on a thorough knowledge of the matter in hand, and it was to Frencli versification that tlie Eomanticists gave their most serious attention. Their professed study of the history and literature of other countries was seldom much more than a search for sensational incidents or novel themes for declamation. But their mastery of old French poetry led to a real re-discovery of disused metrical effects, and a real invention of new ones. And it is in these matters that M. Hugo was most truly the heir of this literary revolution; his naturally fine ear was taught and stimulated by the technical discussions which surrounded liis early years. It is worth while to dwell in some detail upon the improvements in versification which M. Hugo has suc- cessfully adopted, and of which he is in some degree himself the author. These improvements consist mainly in an increased richness of rhynu and an in- creased variety of rhytlim} First as to rhyme. Frenchmen, as we know, designate as poor rhymes most of such rhymes as English verse allows — namely, collocations of similar syllables beginning with different consonants, as page and rage, nuit and instruit. They give the name of rich rhymes to collocations of similar syllables beginning with the same consonant, as d}}crihiment and firmament, vile and r?7/c, which in English would not count as rhymes at all. This difference of taste seems partly to depend on llie more intimate liaison existing in 1 Soo Note A, p. 335. III.] VICTOR HUGO. 119 French pronunciation between the consonant and the syllable which follows it — which syllable will often consist of a vowel sound very rapidly pronounced, like the terminations in the accented 4, or very indeter- minately pronounced, like the nasal terminations in m and n. If the consonant, which gives the whole char- acter to terminations like these, differs in the two rhyming lines, there seems to be hardly enough sub- stance left in the rhyme to satisfy the ear's desire for a recurring sound. This view is illustrated by such English rhymes as alone and floivn, where an additional richness seems sometimes gained from the presence of the I in both the rhyming syllables. Mr. Smnburne affords a brilliant instance of this wealth of assonance in the following lines : — " As scornful Day represses Night's void and vain caresses, And from her duskier tresses Unwinds the gold of his ; " where the persistence of the r sound gives to the stanza a cumulative force which could hardly have been otherwise attained. This so-called richness of rhymes is found in M. Hugo's poems in wonderful profusion. In a page of his taken at random I find eleven rich rhymes to three poor ones ; in a page of Eacine taken at random, seven rich rhymes and seven poor ones. A difference like this implies a wonderful command over language. But this is not all. A rhyme, 120 MODERN ESSAYS. [rir. to give the greatest pleasure, sliould seem fortunately accidental ; it must not depend too visibl)^ upon a similarity of grammatical termination. Thus in English tlie words me and sea make a more satisfac- tory rhyme than me and tlice, because we feel that mc and thee are words formed in the same way, and that the poet is taking advantage of a coincidence which contains no element of surprise. Airow and narroio make a better rhyme than salvation and condemnation, because in the latter pair of words we feel that a Latin termination supplies a consonance ready-made, and dwelling, so to speak, not in the essence of the words, but in their uninteresting accretion of final syllables. These considerations are still more important in French, where many large classes of words exist which have the same final syllables. I have not space for examples, but the most cursory comparison of M. Hugo with (for instance) Eacine will show the admirable in- genuity of the romantic poet in this respect. It is strange indeed that, after the way in wliich the French and English tongues have been ransacked for centuries past, M. Hugo and Mr. Swinburne should have been able to introduce new rhymes by dozens, and not merely grotesque rhymes, which arc easy to multiply, but rhymes which can be used in lofty poetry. M. Hugo's prodigious wealth of vocabulary, manifest throughout his works in many ways, is in notliing more manifest than in this. The question of metre is a much more c(tni]>lt'x one. III.] VICTOR HUGO. 121 Some attempt at explanation must be made, though the subject can only be treated here in the broadest and most elementary manner. Speaking generally, then, we know that among the Greeks and Eomans accent and quantity both existed, but the structure of classical Greek and Latin poetry was determined almost entirely by quantity, a certain number of long and short syllables, in one of certain arrangements, being needed to make up a verse. The poetry of modern Europe is for the most part formed on this model, with the substitution of accent for quantity ; that is to say, the definite arrangement of feet is retained, but accented syllables fill the places formerly occupied by long ones. In modern English poetry there is always a definite skeleton of metre, containing a definite number of accents, from which the lines may somewhat vary, but to which they always tend to recur. We can never be in doubt, for instance, as to whether an English poem is written in iambic or anapaestic rhythm, that is to say, whether the accent normally falls on every second or on every third syllable. A definite metrical structure, however, is not absolutely necessary to poetry. Its absence has been supplied, for example, by antithesis among the Hebrews, by alliteration among the early English. And the trotcvdres of northern Erance, from whom, rather than from the more Latinised trouhadours of the south, French poetry mainly descends, seem to have gradually acquiesced in a still simpler scheme of poetical requirements. Many 122 MODERN ESSAYS. [iir. of them thought it enough to divide tlieir words into rhyming lines containing an equal number of syllables, though not necessarily an equal number of accents. Perhaps this course was suggested to them 1.)y an unusual difficulty which French accentuation presents to the poet. The tendency, common to all the Romance languages, to drop the syllables which suc- ceed the accented syllable has been carried to its extreme in France. For in the French tonjnie the accent always falls on the last syllable of a word except when that syllable has a mute c for its only vowel, when the accent falls on the syllable before it. This uniformity of accentuation makes any regular metre more difficult to manage, as (neglecting the mute c) a word must end wherever an accent is wanted. It is perhaps mainly from this cause that it has come to pass that in a line of French poetry (unless specially written for music) the thing which in English poetry is fixed — namely, the number of accents — is variable, and tlie thincj which in English is variable — namely, the number of syllables — is fixed. There is no normal arrangement of feet to which a French alexandrine tends to recur. All that is necessary is that there should be an accent (and consequently the end of a word) in the sixth place, and again in the twelfth place, at the end of the line. It is therefore a mistake to try to read French alexandrines as if they were to be referred to an iambic type. The number of accented syllables in a Frencli alexandrine varies, and III.] VICTOR HUGO. 123 their position varies also. Sometimes the line has no marked accents except in the sixth and twelfth places; sometimes it has a marked iambic character, sometimes an anapcestic character. Oftenest, perhaps, it is a loose arrangement of anapsests interspersed with iambi. Take this couplet as an example — " Sacha'nt qu'il po rte en lui' des vengea'nces trop sA'res, Tout gonfle de poison il atten'd les morsu'res." The first of these lines begins in an iambic rhythm, and ends in an anapaestic rhythm. The second line is anapaestic throughout. It would take too much space to develop this theme. The important point to notice is the latitude which is thus given to the poet. The structure of the verse neither much confines nor much assists him ; whatever metrical charm it is to have he must himself supply. And it is the great glory of M. Hugo that he has supplied this charm in such variety — has so far sur- passed the elder poets in the number and complexity of his metrical effects both in lyric, epic, and dramatic verse. There is indeed one point for which he is often praised, but in which his success is less complete than at first sight a]3pears. He has taken great pains to avoid the chevilles, or otiose adjectives, etc., introduced by the tragedians at the ends of lines in order to secure a rhyme. But the exigencies of rhyme have forced him often to introduce half a line or a whole line which looks as if it had a meaning of its own, but 124 MODERN ESSAYS. [iii. proves on examination to be no better than a preten- tious cJievillc. Let us take as an example the well- known couplet — " Ce si^cle avait deux ans ; Rome remplarait Sparto, D(^j^ Napoldon per9ait sous Bonaparte." Here the words " Eome remplarait Sparte " have a faux air of epigram. But when we discover that all they mean is that the extremely slight resemblance of Paris to Sparta in 1793 was succeeded by its still slighter resemblance to Eome in 1802, and that the word " Sparte " has been dragged in at any cost for the rhyme's sake, we feel that a cheville, like some other concessions to the intractable nature of things, is least offensive when it asks for no admiration. On the other hand, M. Hugo's use of cnjamhcmcnt — the interlacing of one line with the next — which the tragedians avoid, and his habitual use of the mot proprc, or really descriptive word, instead of the insipid paraphrases once in fasliion, are conspicuous instances of the skill with which he has extended the conven- tional limits of versification. And this extension was much needed in France. Few nations have had to contend with a language less poetically flexible, a syntax more infertile, a vocabulary more confined. And few nations have laid upon themselves laws of poetical dignity so rigorous and arbitrary — laws im- posed not by rhythmical instinct, but l)y a tyrannical spirit of symmetry and ]i()m]) ; laws whose fullilment III.] VICTOR HUGO. 125 could bring little pleasure, while their infraction was punished with a bitterness of censure such as in most countries is kept for moral faults alone. The changes adopted by M. Hugo, therefore, have been almost wholly advantageous. Where it was well to make the old rules more stringent, as in the case of rhymes, he has done so ; where it was well to relax them, as in the case of the cnjamhement, he has relaxed them ; where a wholly new life and variety were needed — namely, in the rhythmical structure of the three main classes of poetry — he has infused that life. He has revived what was good in early French poetry, and has added new artifices of his own. And he has outlived the opposition to his innovations, and is now himself an accepted model of French versification. It must not be supposed that M. Hugo is the only modern French poet who has achieved results of this kind. The works of Lamartine and De Musset, for instance, contain examples of metrical charm which it would be hard to surpass. But M. Hugo covers more ground than they. His works form an unfailing repertory both of metrical and of rhetorical artifices; and it is not extravagant to say that he has shown a more complete command over the resources of the French language than any previous author. If we are asked to what rank among French poets M. Hugo is entitled by his possession of this unique power over the vehicle of poetry, we find it hard to reply. The analogy of Mr. Swinburne at once occurs. 126 MODERN ESSAYS. [in Most persons wlio take this kind of virtuoso interest in language and metre Avill probably consider that ^Ir. Swinburne has shown a power of handling the Englisli tongue which no other poet has ever surpassed. And, on the other hand, in M. Hugo, as well as in the English poet, there is something of that unreality which, as it has been well said, often makes it necessary for the reader of Mr. Swinburne's most impassioned poems to contribute the sincerity of feeling himself. And if in ]\I. Hugo there is some- times a greater weight and force — if Lcs Chdtimcnts is on the whole a stronger book than Songs hcfore Sim- rise, yet there is surely nothing in M. Hugo to equal Mr. Swinburne's highest flights — no elevation like that of the lines Super Flumina Babylonis, which show us once more with what a glory of inspiration a great poet can praise a great hero. The poetical sujoeriority of the English language to the French tells both ways in this comparison. On the one hand, the lack of richness, majesty, and glamour in the French tongue will sometimes seem to leave M. Hugo's best poetical artifices naked, as it were, before our eyes — will make us think in half-disgust that this, after all, is what poetry as poetry comes to. On the other hand, the very jejunencss of tlie language fits it for the produc- tion of a peculiar class of ell'ects — effects of crystalline clearness and triumphant simplicity, which give us perhai)S a more magical sense of art which has con- cealed its art than any English versification can olfer. III.] VICTOR HUGO. 127 But I must content myself with indicating this parallel, without attempting to adjudge a poetic rank which must depend so largely upon what it is with which the reader desires that poetry should supply him. That potency of imagination in M. Hugo to which I have already referred — his power of projecting him- self, as it were, into some strange and strong situation with all his ordinary intellectual resources still about him — is of course visible not only in his poems, but in his plays and romances. These, however, are so familiar to English readers, and have received such ample appreciation, that I do not propose to discuss them at length, especially since they seem to me to constitute rather the outworks than the central citadel of their author's fame. For the imasjinative realisation which is so admirable in certain crowning moments of these stories has hardly been extended to their general conduct or their inner consistency. And an historical novel can hardly be quite satisfactory unless it be, like Scott's, the outcome of a life which has identified itself from childhood with the scene, and almost with the age, described. At the least it ought, like Bomola, to be the flower which blossoms from a study as accurate and profound as would be needed for an indej)endent history. In the picture in Les MisiraUcs of Paris early in this century, M. Hugo's art fulfils these conditions. But when he describes scenes or places more remote, he rapidly loses verisimilitude, till L Homme qui rit, the scene of which professes to be laid in Queen Anne's 128 MODERN ESSAYS. [m. Enirland, would have won more credence if it had been given out as an episode occurring in the island of Barataria. The interest, therefore, of these romances is in great measure independent of their historical framework. It is the interest which we feel in seeing life treated by a man who can deal with emotion in large masses and move freely among great ideas. The literary artifices employed may be sometimes unworthy of high art. We may be often reminded of the crude touches by which Dickens, or certain authors much inferior to Dickens, produce their powerful general effects. But at any rate the effect is produced, and Esmeralda, Bishop Myriel, Fan tine, Valjean, Gilliatt, Gavroche, have entered definitively into that gallery of strongly- realised characters whose substantive existence seems almost to be demonstrated by the " permanent possibili- ties of sensation" which their names evoke in our hearts. M. Hugo's dramas, again, exhibit his strong and his weak points in a concentrated form. His mastery over rhythm and rhyme, his wealth of declamation and epigram, are seen at their best in Hcrnani and Lc Boi s'amusc ; and his instinct for all that is stirring, grandiose, and emphatic in human ailiiirs, aijds him in the presentation of scenic effects and the conduct of rapid action. The more must we regret to iind tluit these striking dramas contain, one may almost say, no truth whatever ; neither truth to liistory nor truth to nature. It is not worth while to analyse the plot of iir.] VICTOR HUGO. 129 each play. A glance at Cromioell or Marie Tudor will be enough to show an English reader that M. Hugo can hardly have made any serious attempt to maintain historical probability. But the unreality of the per- sonages in themselves is still more disappointing, as being in such direct opposition to the precepts of M. Hugo's own school. Eacine and Corneille create, for the most part, characters which are typical rather than individual. A few leading qualities are given, and the action of circumstances is made to illustrate these qualities in a simple and massive manner, with no attempt to place before us, as Shakespeare does, a living personage conceived from within, and presenting a personality in itself indefinable, but capable of holding together a complex web of mental and moral charac- teristics. But the Eomanticists professed to imitate Shakespeare rather than Eacine in this respect ; and the modern school of French drama has produced many realistic and many delicate sketches. M. Hugo claims more loudly than any one that it is thus that he understands drama ; but the very words in which he describes his way of going to work are enough to explain its comparative failure. " Eh bien ! qu'est-ce que c'est que Lucrezia Borgia % Prenez la difFormite morale la plus hideuse, la plus repous- sante, la plus complete ; . . . et maintenant melez a toute cette difformit6 morale un sentiment pur, le plus pur que la femme puisse 6prouver, le sentiment matemel ; dans voire monstre mettez une mere ; et le monstre interessera ; VOL. II. K 130 MODERN ESSAYS. [m. et le monstre fera pleurer, et cette creature qui faisait pcur fera pitie, et cette ame difforme deviendra presque belle a vos yeux. Ainsi, la paternity sanctifiant la difformite physique, voila Le Roi s' amuse ; la maternity purifiant la difformit6 morale, voil^ Lacrke Borgia." This system of predetermined paradox, of embodied antithesis, is surely not likely to produce figures which will seem to live before us. Imagination is thrown away when it devotes itself to imagining what is so grotesquely impossible. How differently does a real knowledoje of the human heart clothe itself in fiction ! Take, for instance, the way in which the fraternal affection between Tom and Maggie Tulliver is treated in TJte Mill on the Floss ; its half-animal growth, its dumb persistence, its misunderstandings and repulsions, and then its momentary self-revelation in the ecstasy of death. These primary emotions are not simply spells to conjure by, magical ingredients which we can throw into the cauldron of human passions and change it in a moment from blood-red to sky-blue. They are the simple impulses of complex action ; they are life- long forces which modify the character as a partial access to liQ;ht modifies the ijrowth of a tree. No doubt it is difficult to imply all this within the narrow limits and amid the thronging incidents of a play ; difficult to paint an emotional history which shall be catastrophic without being discontinuous. ^M. Hugo's catastrophes are too apt to snap the thread of his story. Tribuulet as a spiteful court fuol is despi- III.] VICTOR HUGO. 131 cable ; Triboulet as an injured father is almost sublime ; but there is little more connection between his speeches in the two characters than is involved in the appear- ance of the same name at their head. The want of any real conception of the interaction of human beings upon each other is felt throughout. The most potent genius cannot create other personalities wholly out of its own : the greatest like the least of us, if he would understand his fellows, needs laborious observation, patient analysis, and, above all, that power of sym- pathy which steals like daylight into the heart's hidden chambers in whose lock no key will turn. It is the want of knowledge, the want of truth, which has left M. Hugo no " reincarnation of Shake- speare," but only the most magnificent of melo- dramatists. The want of truth ! It is hardly credible how this moral defect, this reckless indifference to accuracy of assertion, has infected M. Hugo's works. We could forgive an absence both of the historical and the scientific instinct, if our author at least took care to be correct in details. We could forgive carelessness in details if a true instinct for history or for science determined the general effect. But too often all is wrong together, and, worse still, this quagmire of falsity is surrounded with placards emphatically announcing that every inch of the ground is firm. I have neither the knowledge nor the space to go through the hundredth part of M. Hugo's blunders. 132 MODERN ESSAYS. [in. Nihil tetifjit quod non confiulcrit. Engineers and j^hysicists will explain the absurdity of the engineering and the physics which make up so large a part of Les Travailleurs de la Mer. Men familiar with the languages of Brittany and of Guernsey have shown how M. Hugo has transferred dozens of words from a Guernsey dictionary to put into the mouths of Breton peasants. Men who know the slang and the ruffians of Paris will bear witness to the gratuitous arrogance of his pretentions to this unsavoury lore, in which he is, as compared with Gaboriau or Zola, as a child to a professor. We can all judge of his etymology of the name of that famous Scotch " headland," " The First of the Fourth." We can all estimate the verisimilitude of the tale of the fortunes of that great peer, Lord Lin- na3us Clancharlie, a voluntary exile from his truly British country-seats of Hell-kerters, Homble, and Gumdraith. Yet, if we are to take M. Hugo's word for it, he knows more about every country in Europe than the natives themselves. " II est bien entendu," he says in a note to Buy Bias, on w^hich M. Blanche's sarcasm has fixed, " il est hien entendu que dans Euy Bias, comme dans tons les ouvrages precedents de I'auteur, tons les details d'erudition sont scrupuleusement exacts." Methinks M. Hugo doth protest too much. For in support of his assertion that he is intimately acquainted with the language, literature, and secret history of Spain, he deigns only to furnish us with an explanation of tlie word Almojarifazyo. Almojarifazgo! III.] VICTOR HUGO. 133 One is tempted to embark upon a " key to all mytho- logies " on the strength of a sound acquaintance with the etymology of Abracadabra. There is one subject — his own ISTotre-Dame — on which we might have trusted that M. Hugo would have been safe from attack. But when we come on a de- scription of this sanctuary as consisting of " deux tours de granit faites par Charlemagne " our confidence vanishes with great suddenness. For it is certain that there is not an ounce of granite in the towers of Notre- Dame, and that Charlemagne had just as much to do with building them as Caligula. It is of course on the moral side that these inac- curacies are most important. There is no question as to M. Hugo's powers of acquisition, comprehension, memory. He might easily have become a real savant, a real historian, if he had given to other subjects the same kind of attention which he has given to versifica- tion and grammar, if he had cared as much for what he said as for the style in which he said it. But here once more his self- adoration has interfered. It has taught him that he is sujpra scientiam, that neither ]N"ature nor History can possibly have any secrets hidden from him, that a royal road has taken him to the very source and fount of things. And when he asserts that some preposterous misdescription of nature, some staring historical blunder, is absolutely correct, we must not think that he is wilfully trying to deceive us. We must remember how easy a man finds it to 134 MODERN ESSAYS. [iii. forget that external facts have any existence independ- ent of his own mind ; how soon the philosopher's ipse dixit becomes convincing to the philosopher himself. From the literary let us turn to the political side of M. Hugo's career. And here especially we shall find him " French of the French," summing up in one life the conflicting tendencies of his time. The Frenchmen whose youth fell early in this cen- tury were born into a moral chaos. They awoke, as it were, in a desecrated temple, with a shattered Dagon stretched across its floor. It was plain that Napoleon had ruined France, and yet there was no idol to set up in his stead. The Bourbons, brought back by strangers, seemed to symbolise only the humiliation of France — the loss even of that military glory which she had accepted as a substitute for the freedom and virtue which the Eevolution had proclaimed so often, but had never enthroned. Aspiring youths were hard put to it to create an ideal. It was almost a chance whether they became Ultramontane and Eoyalist, or dreamt of a far-off republic, too often discounted at the barricades. But the mass of men throughout the first half of the century were slowly falling back into the Napoleonic illusion ; they had not virtue enough to save them from admiring what was without virtue, and thus from ultimately expiating their worship of ignoble glory by fellowship in ignoble ruin. Victor Hugo's political attitude was determined mainly by personal sympathies. He was brought up by a Eoyalist mother,. rii.] VICTOR HUGO. 135 and spent his early youth with the young Eomanticists, who were, for the most part, EoyaUst and Catholic. The Odes et Ballades and some later poems express this phase of his life. The death of his brother Eugene recalled his father from a kind of voluntary exile. The Comte Hugo had been a Bonapartist general, always in semi- disgrace for his republican opinions — the Baron de Pontmercy of Lcs MisdraNes, where Marius represents the author himself. From his father the young poet learnt Kepub- licanism, and added of his own motion a worship of the gTcat conqueror whose character in some points resembled his own — " Napoleon, soleil dont je suis le Memnon." We need not condemn this change of front. Young men will often veer round rather abruptly on their first contact with actual life. For each set of views has a poetry of its own, which may attract the imagination of youth, but which is apt to appear unreal when con- fronted with this mixed world. And a reaction from ideals which we can no longer idealise is responsible for no small share of our working principles. It is more important to notice how superficial has been M. Hugo's grasp, whether of the monarchical or of the republican conception of society. Charles the Tenth may not have been an inspiring person. But the relation between France and her kings, one of the most imposing themes in history, might have suggested something better than the hanaliUs of the " Funeral 136 MODERN ESSAYS. [in. Ode " in the Voix InUricurcs. And if the shallowness here be ascribed to immaturity, it must be replied that we find the same vague and empty rhetoric in M. Hugo's praises of the Eepublic. And yet there is no subject on which a political preacher in France needs to be more explicit. For under the name of Eepublic are included two forms of government as dissimilar as forms of government can be. A republic may be con- structed, like the American Eepublic, on individualistic principles, reducing the action of government to a minimum, and leaving every one undisturbed in the pursuit of private well-being. Or it may be con- structed on socialistic principles, such as those which Fourier or Saint-Simon laid down, involving a profound reconstruction of society and a levelling of ranks and fortunes. A republic of the first type may yet be permanently established in France. But its danger lies in its failure to satisfy the enthusiasts of any party. For it is the second type of Eepublic towards which the eager spirits of the great French towns seem in reality to tend. But this socialistic democracy has never yet been able to manifest itself in a practicable form, or to avoid even such obvious roads to ruin as political economy can point out. Surely the preacher of the Eepublic in France should say which of these types or what modification of them he desires — should explain how far the United States answer to his idi'al, or to what extent and with wliat safeguards he tliinks Ills country prepared to accopt a communistic scheme. III.] VICTOK HUGO. 137 No real instruction on these points can be got from M. Hugo's writings or speeches. Poets are not bound to be politicians. But when a poet claims also to be a statesman and a prophet, he ought to give a reason for the faith that is in him ; he ought to show some sign of having loosened the political knots by reflection before he cuts them by epigram and imagery. If he merely boxes the rhetorical compass — if he merely gives us a series of declamations on the glories of the Bourbons, of Napoleon, of the EepubHc which is to be — we cannot attach much value to his professed inspiration. It may be said that there is at least one social reform on which M. Hugo has dwelt consistently through all his phases — the abolition of the punish- ment of death. Like those branches of mathematics which involve infinite quantities, any question con- cerned with human life and death is a favourite lurk- ing-place of fallacies. We will speak here only of M. Hugo's ground of objection, which lies in the cruelty of the punishment. So far as the cruelty consists in the pain of anticipation, that pain is divisible into two factors — regret at leaving a family unprovided for, and actual terror. The first factor, if felt at aU, is felt equally by the convict who is going to the galleys for life. And the second factor we may surely neglect. If a man has left his neighbour's family mourning, we need not be tender over a few days of selfish terror for himself. Then comes, according to M. Hugo, the 138 MODERN ESSAYS. [iii. crowning cruelty of removing him from this workl. We may reply that if we remove him from his home to a prison for life we are pretty sure that we are doing him an injury. But if, instead of this, we remove him from the earth altogether, we have no means of knowing whether we are doing him an injury or not. Surely there are plenty of other benevolent causes to be taken up which, if less susceptible of pathetic advo- cacy, are also less dependent on a turn of metaphysics. But in fact, during the years preceding the coup d'etat, M. Hugo was increasingly in want of something to say. His style continued to improve ; his mastery over rhythm and rhyme grew more magical than ever. But each succeeding volume of verse — Zes Voix Inte- rieures, Zes Bayons et les Omhres — was weaker than the last. It was supposed that he had written him- self out. The Eevolution of 1848 did not bring him to the front. But in July 1851 he delivered in the Assembly an impassioned speech against Louis - Napoleon, who, till his treasonable designs on the Ee- public became manifest, had been the poet's intimate friend. After the coup d'Uat and a few days of futile counterplotting, which all the literary artifices of the Histoire d'un Crime can hardly make impressive, M. Hugo made his escape from France. From Jersey and Guernsey he despatched that marvellous series of songs and satires which were passed secretly from hand to hand in Paris, and read with tears and cries of rage during that national paralysis which ended in the III.] VICTOR HUGO. 139 Second Empire. Les Chdtiments is perhaps M. Hugo's best work. Sarcasm, declamation, song, all his powers culminate and are concentrated there. Can anything be more melodious, simpler, more touching, than these last words of a dying exile ? — " Un proscrit, lass6 de soufFrir, Mourait ; calme, il fermait son livre ; Et je lui dis : ' Pourquoi mourir ? ' II me r6pondit : ' Pourquoi vivre ? ' Puis il reprit : ' Je me d6livre. Adieu ! je meurs. N6ron-Scapin Met aux fers la France fl^trie.' . . . — On ne pent pas vivre sans pain ; On ne pent pas non plus vivre sans la patrie. — '■ • • • * Je meurs de ne plus voir les champs Ou je regardais I'auhe naitre, De ne plus entendre les chants Que j'entendais de ma fen^tre. Men ame est ou je ne puis etre. Sous quatre planches de sapin, Enterrez-moi dans la prairie.' — On ne pent pas vivre sans pain ; On ne pent pas non plus vivre sans la patrie. — " Has sarcasm ever barbed itself with bitterer em- phasis than in the following song ? — " Sa grandeur ^blouit Thistoire. Quinze ans, il fut Le dieu qui trainait la victoire Sur un affut ; 140 MODERN ESSAYS. [ni. L'Eiirope sous sa loi guerriere Se d6battit. — Toi, son singe, marche derri^re, Petit, petit. " Napoleon dans la bataille, Grave et serein, Guidait k travers la mitraille L'aigle d'airain. II antra siir le pont d'Arcole, H en sortit. — Voici de Tor, viens, pille et vole, Petit, petit. " Berlin, Vienne, ^taient ses maitresses ; II les for9ait, Leste, et prenant Ics forteresses Par le corset ; II triompha de cent bastilles Qii'il investit. — Voici pour toi, voici des filles, Petit, petit " II passait les monts et les plaines, Tenant en main La palme, la foudre et les renes Du genre humain ; II etait ivre de sa gloire Qui retentit. — Voici du sang, accours, viens boire, Petit, petit. " Qnand il tomba, lachant lo monde, L'immense mcr III.] VICTOR HUGO. 141 Guvrit a, sa chute profonde Le gouffre amer ; II y plongea, sinistre archange, Et s'engloutit. — Toi, tu te noiras dans la fange, Petit, petit." Finally I must quote the song which seems to me the best of all, expressing as it does with a sound so ringing, with so passionate an intensity, that strange antithesis in the " twy-natured " French — their capa- city at once for base materialism and for ecstatic ideality — the way in which the whole nation will seem suddenly to cast its slough as a serpent does, and to leap to life at a word. " II est des jours abjects oil, seduits par la joie Sans honneur, Les peuples au succes se livrent, triste proie Du bonheur. " Alors des nations que berce un fatal songe Dans leur lit, La vertu coule et tonibe ainsi que d'une eponge L'eau jaillit. *' Alors devant le mal, le vice, la folie, Les vivants Imitent les saluts du vil roseau qui plie Sous les vents. " Alors festins et jeux ; rien de ce que dit Tame Ne s'entend ; On boit, on mange, on chante, on danse, on est inf^me Et content. 142 MODERN ESSAYS. [iii. ** Le crime heureux, servi par d'immondes ministres, Sous les cieux Kit, et vous frissonnez, grands ossements sinistres Des aieux. " On vit honteux, les yeux troubles, le pas oblique, H6bet6 ; Tout-^-coup un clairon jette aux vents : Rupublique ! Liberie ! " Et le monde, 6veill^ par cette apre fanfare, Est pareil Aux ivrognes de nuit qu'en se levant eflfare Le soleil." A volume could not paint more vividly than these magnificent lines that characteristic shock and awaken- in cr — that divine and unreasonable fire — which seems to run through Paris in time of revolution like Rumour through the Hellenic host in the crisis of victory. But where the song ends the story has too often ended. How often has some noble protest, some just and armed appeal, sounded along the streets and Boulevards like the angel's trump, and has been followed by no Great Assize, no new and heavenly order, but by uncertain voices, angry eyes, confusion worse confounded, and the old round of frauil and tyranny begun anew ! It is guidance, not awakening, which France needs ; wisdom, not impulse ; a sincere self-condemnation for the sins of the past before she builds her castles in the future air. til] victor HUGO. 143 Few persons will now be concerned to defend Napoleon the Third, that most inglorious representa- tive of glory. Thus far it is easy to sympathise with Les Chdtiments and NapoUon le Petit. But we in England cannot consent to throw, as M. Hugo too often throws, the blame of the establishment of this base empire wholly on those who profited thereby. We must hold that every town, every village, every adult in France were sharers to some degree in the shame of such an overthrow at the hands of such men. Least of all can those be absolved who made the ignoble crimes of the Second Empire possible by their adoration of the splendid crimes of the First. When " the Memnon of Napoleon " complained that " Ce voleur de nuit alluma sa lanterne Au soleil d'Austerlitz," he should have asked himself whether he had done well in helping to keep the sun of Austerlitz alight. This and much other fault might be found with the temper of M. Hugo's exile. We miss the high self-forgetfulness, the resolute justice, of Mazzini banished and defamed. But the great fact remains. M. Hugo, in scorn of amnesties and invitations, lived out nineteen years of exile ; his voice did not fail nor his heart falter ; he stood on his rock in the free British seas like Elijah on Carmel, spokesman and champion of all those who had not bowed the knee to Baal. It is this exile that has given dignity to liig 144 MODERN ESSAYS. [in. life ; it is banishment from France that has made liiiii one of her heroes. Ferierat, nisi periisset. And when at last that evil empire set in blood the exile's triumph came. From Brussels, on the eve of re-entering Paris, he wrote some of his most splendid verses — verses in which all that there is of ardent in his spirit, of majestic in his personality, seems to lift and carry us along with him as in a chariot of fire. " Alors qu'on entendait ta fanfare do fete Retentir, Paris, je t'ai fui comrae le noir proph^te Fuyait Tyr. " Quand I'empire en Gomorrlie avait chang6 Lut^ce, Morne, amer, Je me suis envole dans la grande tristcsse De la mer. " La, tragique ; c^coutant ta chanson, ton delire, Bruits confus, J'opposais k ton luxe, a ton reve, h. ton lire, Un refus. " Mais aujourd'hui qu'arrive avec sa sombre foulo Attila, Aujourd'hui que le nionde aiitour de toi sV'croule, Me voila. " France, etre sur ta claie k I'hcure oh Ton te tratne Aux chcvcux, O nui mere, et porter uion anneau de ta cliaiiio, Je le veux ! III.] VICTOR HUGO. 145 " J'accours, puisque sur toi la bombe et la mitraille Ont crache. Tu me regarderas debout sur ta muraille, Ou couch^. *' Et peut-etre, en ta terre ou brille I'esp^rance, Pur flambeau, Pour prix de mon exil, tu m'accorderas, France, Un tombeau." M. Hugo's career since his return to Paris need be but briefly recounted. He remained in Paris during the siege, and his poems served as a rallying-point of patriotism, hatred of the Prussians, and hope of re- venge. L Annie Terrible, it is true, gives a most crude and violent expression to the heated feelings of the time. Its contrast with M. Eenan's writings of the same date shows all the difference between the patriot who is before all things a philosopher and the patriot who is before all things a rhetorician. Where the one seeks to prove how contrary to the true interests and instincts of Germany as a whole is the Prussian spirit of military conquest, the other out-herods Herod in his comparisons of the German Emperor to every pickpocket and cut -throat in history. Of course M. Hugo's method of treatment was the more popular of the two. At the close of the siege the Parisians elected him second only to M. Louis Blanc on the long list of members for the Department of the Seine, February 8, 1871. He resigned his seat at Bordeaux on the 8 th of March because the Assembly would not VOL. II. L 146 MODERN ESSAYS. [m. listen to a speech from him in honour of Garibaldi. The sudden death of his son on the 13th of March sent him on family business to Brussels, where he remained during the Commune, ^^^lile he was in Brussels the Belgian Government announced that it would not receive escaped Communists as political exiles. M. Hugo wrote to a newspaper to say that he would receive them in his house at Brussels. On this his windows were broken by a mob of young Belgians " flown with insolence and wine," who raised the singular cry of " A bas Lord Clancharlie 1 " but were unable to beat in the door, which the nursery-maid had wisely bolted. Expelled from Belgium, M. Hugo returned to Paris. He was made a Senator, and has spoken repeatedly in the Senate and elsewhere. Most of the measures which M. Hugo has during these years recommended — the rejection of the treaty of peace, the retention in the Assembly of the members for the ceded provinces, the recognition of the " riglit to labour," with its accompanying " State workshops," and the issue of bank-notes bearing interest, hillcts de hanque a rcvenu — have been such as to inspire in English politicians little confidence in his judgment. But, in truth, his work during this critical period has lain less in the advocacy of any particular measures tlian in the delivery of stirring and liighly-wrouglit discourses on tlie text that Paris is supreme; Paris is holy ; Paris is the capital of the world, and includes witliin luTsclf the progress and tlie hopes of man. III.J VICTOR HUGO. 147 Outside France we need hardly discuss the truth of these propositions ; a more practical question is whether in France's deep depression it might possibly have been wise to proclaim them — whether, in Plato's words, it can ever be well for a public man to play the part of the confectioner rather than of the physician. On this delicate point a French and an English critic will be apt to differ ; but both must admire the extra- ordinary vigour of style and thought, the contagious enthusiasm and ardour of spirit, which enable this " old man eloquent " to lead at will " that fierce de- mocracy" in any direction except into the secrets of their own bosoms and the sins of their own past. " French of the French ! " Our sober English maxims fail us when we would take counsel for a nation which can unite so much that we think despi- cable with so much that all must think great, which can keep her hope high through ruin, through chaos, and through shame, and which, when she least is leading the nations, will never quit her claim to the primacy of the world. Let us say with M. Eenan that when a nation brings forth a Universal Idea it is at the cost of much shattering of her own frame, much exhaustion of her separate life; that it was by cen- turies of national humiliation that Greece expiated her creation of science and of art, and Italy her foundation of the Empire and the Papacy, and Germany h^r assertion of the freedom of the thought of man ; and that the French Kevolution, though a lesser thing 148 MODERN ESSAYS. [m. than these, was great ; and therefore that till the echo of the thunderpeals which announced that birth has died away, we shall see the strongest sons of France still staggering blindly beneath " the too vast orb of her fate." III. Turning from M. Hugo's political career to such of his personal emotions as he has chosen to reveal to us in his poems, we shall find the same rich and puis- sant nature shut in by the same moral barriers which we have already defined. He who cannot w^illingly take any but a central place may have friendships and loves in plenty, but there will be a point where all these will cease. The self-w^orshipper may not enter the shrine of another soul. He can never know an in- timate and absolute comradeship, a second conscience in the heart of a friend. Still less can he experience that rarest joy of a man and a woman's love, when the man feels with a proud triumph her stainless spirit outsoar his own, and bear him with her to a paradise which she both creates and reveals. These things, to such as have known them, are the very substance and dclitrht of Hfe. Yet much remains. All that is bene- volent, protective, paternal — compassion for the poor and the suffering, loving joy in childhood and infancy, loving remembrance of the dead — all this a man may feel without comi)romising the dignity of tlie idol III.] VICTOR HUGO. 149 seated in his breast. And all this — pressed down, as it were, and running over — is to be found in M. Hugo's works. It is with him as we often see it with very vain but kindly people, who pour themselves with a prodigality of warm-heartedness into those affections where no equality can be claimed or desired. Valjean the convict, Gilliatt the fisherman, Gavroche the gamin de Paris, divide the honours of his romances. And the. poems to his baby grandchildren are the true crown and glory of his age. His amatory poems have not carried the world with them. More tact, perhaps, than he has deigned to nse is necessary if we would touch on our own suc- cesses. He has naturally wished to descant on the being (or beings) who watch with mute devotion the thinker's brow, or kindle into rapture at the occasional largess of his smile. But he has forgotten that the heart of the male reader, unless it be skilfully sur- prised, is apt to be hardened by an obscure instinct which tells him that there is something almost shock- ing in the notion of a woman's adoring any man but himself The truth is that the pleasures of love, like all pleasures, require a certain element of self-sup- pression before they can be made typical in art ; the want which separates patronage and desire from chivalry and passion is more easily felt than described ; nor can we make the lover's fortunes our own till his love has dethroned him from his own heart. And yet perhaps this is to moralise overmuch. Some 150 MODERN ESSAYS. [in. love-poems there must be in which these serious con- siderations find no place — some careless bird-songs of an emotion which existed before morality had its birth. " Si tu veux, faisons un r^ve, Montons sur deux palefrois ; Tu m'emmenes, je t'enl^ve. L'oiseau chante dans les hois. " Je suis ton maitre et ta proie ; Partons, c'est la fin du jour ; Men cheval sera la joie. Ton cheval sera I'amour. " Nous ferons toucher leiirs tetes ; Les voyages sont aises ; Nous donnerons a ces betes Une avoine de baisers. " Allons-nous-en par la terre, Sur nos deux chevaux charmants, Dans I'azur, dans le mystere, Dans les 6blouissements ! " Tu seras dame et moi comte ; Viens, mon coeur s'(5panouit, Viens, nous conterons ce contc Aux 6toiles de la nuit." These exquisite stanzas from Eviradnus may fairly be compared with Mr. Swinburne's If you were ApHVs lady J and I were lord in May, in the sense which they give of all the dash of playful adventure, the amorous eagerness of a flying and irresponsible joy. The love of Marius for Cosette in Les Mis6rahlcs III.] VICTOR HUGO. 151 attempts a higher flight, and reflects the poet's most fervent days. And here there is much that is pas- sionate and sweet. But there is, too, a strong element of selfishness in the lovers' conduct towards every one but each other. And the attempted delineation of delicate innocence suggests the effort of an imperfect memory. " Le pur et seraphique Marius," we are told, " eut ^t^ plutot capable de monter chez une fille pub- lique que de soulever la robe de Cosette k la hauteur de la cheville." A sentence like this somehow fails to convey the impression of seraphic purity. We need not dwell on tliis topic. But I must allude to one scene in L Homme qui rit which Mr. Swinburne has highly praised. This is the scene where Josiane offers herself to the distorted and outcast Gwynplaine. Surely to admire this scene is to confound monstrosity with power. It is no new idea that a woman may have vile impulses and yet dally on the verge of vice ; it is not hard to draw a staring picture of this unlovely self-restraint. Nor is Josiane's morbid desire for utter debasement in any degree novel; the sixth satire of Juvenal would furnish forth a hundred Josianes. But in the sixth satire of Juvenal the words which describe vicious instincts are written, as it were, with a brand on the offender's flesh. In L Homme qui rit the in- decency is decked out with rhetoric, and presented to us as a psychological revelation. Surely MM. Gautier, Feydeau, and Zola might be left to supply us with such revelations as this. 152 MODERN ESSAYS. fin. Connected perliaps with this defect is another form of want of sensibility even more repugnant to a healthy mind. We mean the taste which delights in dwell- ing not only on physical ugliness, but on physical horroi-s, which, without any wish to be crueb pleases itself in realising the details of torture, filth, and cor- ruption. M. Hugo's readers are not always safe from outrage of this kind. He has written, for instance, a poem called Ze Grapaud, which I regret having read, and must decline to transcribe. Suffice it to say that it describes minutely certain acts of hideous cruelty perpetrated on a toad by the young Victor and his schoolboy friends — described as "blonds, charmants," " I'aube dans les yeux," " le printemps sur la joue," and so forth. Before comparing a French boy's behaviour with that of an Etonian or a Wykehamist, we ought to make allowance for the system of French education, which is said to foster a certain unmanliness for which the boy himself is hardly to blame. But such excuses can avail little here. The sport of these children "with the morning in their eyes" consisted in a kind of loathsomeness of cruelty for which an English National School boy would have been kicked. And half a cen- tury afterwards the great poet puts this shameful story into a poem in order to point a copy-book moral to the effect that beasts are sometimes kinder than men ! We need not be sentimental with regard either to pain or to death. Many reasons may make it desirable to inflict or to suffer either. But when we find a man III.] VICTOR HUGO. 153 who can derive a literary pleasure from enlarging effectively upon the details of torture, then, however philanthropic his general aims may be, we cannot pardon him ; we must assert that his mind is tainted with a disease more hateful than obscenity itself. Let us turn rapidly from these horrors to the poems which treat of the loveliness and mystery of childhood. Here M. Hugo is always at his best. Never does the exile's regret appear so noble as when he laments above all things that he is exiled from his daughter's tomb ; never is the gray head so venerable as when it bends over the cradle or the memory of a child. " Jeanne ! Georges ! voix dont j'ai le coeur saisi ! Si les astres chantaient ils b6gaieraient ainsi. Leur front tourn6 vers nous nous 6claire et nous dore. Oh ! d'ou venez-vous done, inconnus qu'on adore ? Jeanne a Fair etonne ; George a les yeux hardis. lis tr6buchent, encore ivres du paradis." I would gladly linger on these charming poems. But they have been praised already more eloquently than I could praise them. I will not attempt to vie with the force and abundance of Mr. Swinburne's style. But while I would refer the reader to these cflowinsr and generous criticisms I must in fairness add some words of caution. The limits within which M. Hugo can preserve truth and pathos are somewhat narrow. While he talks only about children he can bring tears into our eyes. But the least allusion to himself or to 154 MODERN ESSAYS. [m. God is immediately disastrous. In the elegiac poems, for instance, the picture of the vanished child is grace itself: — *' IClle ^tait pale et pourtant rose, Petite avec de grands cheveux ; EUe disait souvent : Je n'ose, Et ne disait jamais : Je veux." But when the mourner attempts a higher strain the old unreality recurs. It would need all the simplicity of the saints to keep us in sympathy with an address to God couched in terms like these : — " Je sais que vous avez bien autre chose k faire Que de nous plaindre tous, Et qu'un enfant qui meurt, dt^sespoir de sa mere, Ne vous fait rien, k vous ! " Not can we think it dignified for a man thus to urge liis own merits on the Almighty : — " Consid6rez encor que j 'avals, d^s Taurore, Travaill6, combattu, pens6, march6, lutt6, Expliquant la nature a rhomme qui I'ignore, Eclairant toute chose avec votre clart6 ; " Que j'avais, affrontant la haiiic ct la colore, Fait ma taclie ici-bas, Que je ne pouvais pas m'attendre a ce salaire," etc. etc. There is something which provokes a smile in the notion of M. Hugo's demanding special consideration from the Author of Nature on account of tlio very original cxplauatiuns whicli he has given from time to III.] VICTOR HUGO. 155 time of natural phenomena. But had his achieve- ments in this line been all that he imagines them, can we sympathise with a man whose mind in this hour of deepest bereavement reverts irresistibly to his own merits ; whose first feeling is that he is not as other men are, and ought not to suffer as they ? Is not this a strange contradiction to the noble idea which lies at the root of Christianity — that he alone can become representative of humanity who has borne to the utter- most the sorrows of men ? The same defect of the higher instincts appears strikingly in the poem in memory of Charles Vac- querie, the husband of M. Hugo's daughter, who com- mitted suicide after vainly attempting to rescue his drowning wife. This young man left behind him a mother " pale et perdant la raison," and, we may suppose, the ordinary duties and responsibilities of life. M. Hugo, however, considers no explanation necessary ; he treats the deliberate suicide of sane persons under the pain of bereavement as an act which deserves unquahfied praise, and has adopted it as the crowning glory of more than one of his imaginary heroes. " Oh ! s'immoler, sortir avec I'ange qui sort, Suivre ce qu'on aima dans I'horreur de la mort, Dans le s6pulcre ou sur les claies, Donner ses jours, son sang et ses ilhisions ! J6sus baise en pleurant ces saintes actions Avec les l^vres de ses plaies." 156 MODERN ESSAYS. [ni. All easy heroism ! To yield to the first impulse of anguish, to enter ^\'ith Eurydice among the shades, to follow from a world grown desolate some beloved and incomparable soul ! Jesus, and that code of cour- ageous virtue which the name of Jesus represents, teach us a different lesson. They teach us that the way to reunion with the best and dearest lies not through defection and despair, but through work and hope, and that those alone can expect the reward of great hearts who have borne with constancy all that great hearts can bear. " 'Tls better tlutt our griefs should not spread far ." TV. Before we close our survey of this puissant and many-gifted nature it is natural to ask ourselves wliether we can discern any guiding conception which has regulated the exercise of all these powers — any individual and consistent view of the sum of things which reveals itself from time to time amid these labyrinths of song. Certain principles we can plainly discern, a belief in France, a belief in democracy, a true sympathy with the weak, the outcast, the oppressed. To some of us the exaggeration of his patriotism may seem to fit it rather for boys than men. To some of us an admiration for republics as such may seem rather fanciful than sublime, unless it be, as in Mazzini, simply the form in which a profound craving for public III.] VICTOE HUGO. 157 virtue finds, from historical causes, its readiest channel. But at any rate these are living watchwords : France, the Republic, Childhood, the Oppressed — these are worthy themes for a great poet to sing. And here we would stop, but that it is plain that these are not all that he has aimed at singing. He claims to speak to us not only as a Frenchman and a philanthropist, but as a preacher and a seer. Vision, revelation, mission, apostolate — words like these are ever on his lips. He would have us believe that he has gazed deeply into the Infinite, that he has heard the words which issue from the " Mouth of Shade." As confidently as any " God- intoxicated " mystic, he invokes as his authority and inspiration the Eternal Name. Is there any reality in all this ? Is there any har- monising truth about the universe, any illuminating conception of the Divine, which this great poet has received, and has been sent to teach us ? With real, with deep regret I answer that I believe that there is not. Eeluctantly T say that long study of his works has revealed only a wild and whirling chaos — a cloud- land which reflects no figure grander than the poet's own. Friends of M. Hugo's have indeed affirmed that he has given us the clue to his inner meaning — that he has in many ways indicated that the central point of his system, his true kernel of belief, is that religion within religions which we associate with the name of Pythagoras, which reappears under ditl'erent semblances 158 MODERN ESSAYS. [iii. in many ages and many lands, and which, it is hinted, some mysterious revelation has impressed with special force on this poet's mind. But I cannot say that these visions of his seem to me to bring us any light, or that his mystical and transmigi-ational poems (from Ce qiic clit la houche d'Omhre to Le Po'eme du Jar din des Plantcs) are written with a truer accent of convic- tion than a thousand other pages embodying a hundred other faiths. For all faiths are there. Theism, pan- theism, atheism, every mood from a glowing optimism to a cynical despair — all these appear in turn and are used alike as the vehicle of the accustomed rhetoric, the old self-praise. Even when words are put into God's own mouth we cannot help feeling that no alias is more transparent than M. Hugo's God. How deep an irreverence is here ! We are shocked by the Dieu des Bmines Gens of Beranger, the Dicfit devant qui Von sHTwline le verre en main, the vulgar patron of ignoble pleasures. But at least a God like Beranger's is hardly meant to be taken seriously ; he is the offspring of an imagination bound and rooted in this world and amid the shows of things. M. Hugo has profaned a higher light — has driven astray a chariot which miglit, in l*lato's words, have followed with the company of gods across the vault of heaven. He has sought first his own glory, and the glory of the Invisible has been hid from his eyes. And thus it has come to pass that in this age of faith's fomuition and of faitli's decay, which feels above all things its III.] VICTOR HUGO. 159 need of the sincere expression of all shades of reasoned belief and unbelief, of heartfelt confidence or despair — in this age, when a harmony as yet unknown is shaping itself, as it were, audibly from the cry and shock of souls, this great singer's strain has no part in that attuning choir ; his voice that fain had filled in- finity dies out into the void. I might double the length of this essay with pas- sages illustrative of my meaning here. I will quote one alone, a passage in which the Almighty does not escape the fate which befalls every one whose name M. Hugo mentions — the fate of being employed as a foil and contrast to the greatness and goodness of M. Hugo. To understand the lines in question a few words of introduction are required. Most men who think at all, whatever their creed may be, have at one time or another faced the terrible possibility that after all there is no hope — that there are no " gods who prefer the just man to the unjust " — that our loves and aspirations do but mock us with an ever unattainable desire. And the poets who have been the voices of humanity have given utterance to this dark fear in many a passage which has sunk deeply into human hearts — from the stern realism of Achilles among the shades down to the visionary de- spair of the end of Alastor — from the bitterness of the Hebrew preacher down to the melodious complain- ings of " the idle singer of an emj)ty day." Often, 160 MODERN ESSAYS. [in. indeed, we measure the elevation of the poet or of the race to which he sings by noting the nature of the regret on which he chiefly dwells — whether it be, as often with the Greeks, mainly for the loss of our own joy in life and sunlight, or, as in the sadder Psalms, resentment at the outrage of Death against Justice, or the still nobler agony of the thought that the claim of Love to its own continuance shall be made in vain. By what indeed are we to judge a man if not by the way in which he meets this problem ? Be his speculative conclusions what they may, if there be any unselfishness in him, if any heroism, if any holiness, he will show them in the face of these extreme possibili- ties, this one hope worth hoping, this only formidable fear. In one of the last poems of VAntiAe Terrible ]\I. Hugo paints at great length and with startling rhetoric the possibility that God may at last be found to have deceived us all along — that " the moral cosmos may be reduced to a chaos," and man, the sport of destiny, expire in a ruined universe. What, then, is the central point of this poem ? what is the idea which stands out for our strength or solace from this profusion of rhetoric and metaphor ? It is — I blush with shame for M. Hugo in writing it down — it is that M. Hugo himself may be relied upon to chase and catch the recalcitrant Deity, like a wolf in the forest, and to overawe Him by the majesty of liis personal appearance and the eloquence of liis rebuke : — III.] VICTOR HUGO. IGl " J'irais, je le verrais, et je le saisirais Dans les cieux, comme on prend un loup dans les for^ts, Et terrible, indigno, calme, extraordinaire, Je le d6noncerais k son propre tonnerre." M. Hugo, forsooth, would be terrible ! M. Hugo would be calm ! M. Hugo would be extraordinary ! It seems likely that at the crack of doom even M. Hugo might see something more terrible and extra- ordinary than himself. Can the force of egoism farther go ? Can we accept as a teacher or a prophet a man who sees on the whole vault of heaven only the Brocken-spectre of his own soul ? Must not all our admiration for this man's talents enclose within itself an ineffaceable core of contempt ? Or rather let us say that this, like all contempt, must ultimately resolve itself into a profound compas- sion. Must we not pity the man, however great his genius or his fame, who has not found in this or the other world one love or one worship which could teach him to forget himself ? Let him call his works moun- tains, himself a Titan, if he will : the Titans with their heaped-up mountains could never scale the sky. But we will not accept his metaphor. We will not part from him except with a comparison which has in it at once less of arrogance and more of hope. For when we ponder on that keen but troubled vision, that soaring but self- captive spirit, we recur to Plato's charioteer, who has indeed in times foregone driven VOL. II. M 162 MODERN ESSAYS. [iii. upwards to feast and festival with tlie blessed gods — who has looked, indeed, for a moment on very Justice, very Beauty, very Truth, but in the midst of the thunder of rebellious horses and a storm and confusion of the soul, — till he crashes downwards to the earth, and feeds upon the semblances of things, and half forgets and half remembers what that true world has shown. For him, in Plato's myth, there yet is a glorious hope ; there remains for him some needful draught of self- forgetfulness, some purifying passage beneath the earth ; and then again he may look with the gods on Truth, and stand with firmer footsteps upon the heavenly way. EENEST EENAN. I. Zev irdrep, dWct <x^ pvcrai utt' 7]^pos vlas 'AxaLwp, Iloirjcrov 5' aWprr)v, 56s 5' otpddXfjLocatv ISiadai, 'Ei' 5^ (paeL Koi SXecraov, iirei vij tol evaSeu oCtws. The little town of St. Eenan in Cornwall, and various springs and waters in other Celtic regions, preserve for ns the memory of an anomalous and a formidable saint. Eonan or Eenan, indeed, seems properly to have been one of those autochthonous divinities, connected with earth and the elements, who preceded almost everywhere the advent of more exalted gods. He was received, how- ever, after some hesitation, into the Christian Pantheon, and became the eponymous saint of a Celtic clan. This clan of Eenan migrated from Cardiganshire to Ledano on the Trieux in Brittany, about the year 480, and have ever since lived in honourable poverty, engaged in tilling the ground and fishing on the Breton coast; one of the families who there form an unexhausted repository of the pieties and loyalties of the past. From this simple and virtuous stock, in this atmo- 164 MODERN ESSAYS. [iv. sphere of old-world calm, Ernest Renan was born sixty years ago. In a charming series of antobiograpliical papers he has sketched his own early years ; his child- hood surrounded by legends of the saints and of the sea; his schooling received from the pious priests of Tr(3guier; and then his sudden transference, in 1836, as the most promising boy of his district, to the Petit Seminaire Saint Nicolas du Chardonnet at Paris, where for three years he was one of M. Dupanloup's most eager pupils. Thence he was sent for four years to Issy, the country establishment of the Seminaire Saint- Sulpice, to receive his final preparation for the priest- hood. For to that life he had always aspired, and had he been left beneath the shadow of his Breton cathe- dral he might have become a learned and not an unorthodox priest. But now his education had gone too far; sojourn in Paris, even in a seminary, had awakened his critical and scientific interests, and he began to feel that such a career was impossible to him. He left it with hesitation and much self-questioning, but without bitterness and without subsequent regrets. Much pain naturally followed on this disruption of life-long affections and ties. There were material hardships, too, but his sister's devoted care solaced and supported him till he had made friends of his own and reached an independent position. His attainment, in 1847, of the Volney Prize for a treatise on the Semitic languages, afterwards developed into a general history, may be taken as the first step in a long career of IV.] ERNEST RENAN. 165 successful literary and scientific labour. To one episode in that career — his professorship of Hebrew at the College de France — we shall have to recur again ; but with this exception we may confine our attention to his published works alone ; always the most satisfactory course in the case of a yet living man whose writings, and not his actions, have made him a public character. The subjects of these works are so various, and they indicate so far-reaching a study of the develop- ment of the human mind, that some brief sketch of their scope is essential if we would understand on how wide an induction the views of this great historical critic are based. It is in the garden of Eden that M. Renan makes his first appearance on the field of his- tory, and his localisation of that cradle of the Semitic, — perhaps also of the Aryan race, — in the Beloortag, near the plateau of Pamir, at the junction of the Beloortag with the Himalayas, forms one of the most interesting discussions in his history of the Semitic languages.^ It is at this point in the world's career that he is inclined to place the beginning of articulate speech ; and his treatise on the origin of language^ embodies a theory of great ingenuity, but which, however, our increasing knowledge of primitive man is daily render- ing less plausible. From the great delicacy and com- plexity of some of the oldest idioms which have reached us, and from the fact that the history of ^ Hidoire Geniralc des Langues Simitiques. 2 De I'Origine du Langage. 166 MODERN ESSAYS. [iv. language, almost everywhere that we can trace it, is a history of simplification and dissolution, M. Kenan argues that language appeared at once in a highly- organised state, as the suddenly projected image of the mental operations of families of mankind far removed from barbarism. Comparative philology has entered on a different phase since this treatise appeared, and should it ever be re- written its author will have to take into account many further observations on the pheno- mena of savage speech, many new conceptions as to the development of the mind of primitive man. From these prehistoric questions we pass on to the great settled civilisations, Cushite, Chamite, or Turanian, of the early world. On China,^ Nineveh,^ Egypt,^ M. Renan has published admirable essays, but essays which show power of generalisation rather than any specialised acquirement. A brilliant paper on Berber Society,^ and some pages on the Soudan,^ come under the same category. At Babylon he enters the field as an independent investigator. His tractate " On the Book of Nabathsean agriculture" (which survives for us in an Arabic form), is held to have disposed of Professor Chwolson's theory that a literary civilisation existed at Babylon 3000 years before our era. Coming now to the Semitic stem we find the traces of M. Kenan's labours on every member of this group ^ L' Tnslrticlion Publique en Chine. ^ La DicouvcrU de Ninivt. ^ LAncieniic ^tjijpte. * La SocUU BcrUre. ° La Dhert el le Soudan. IV.] ERNEST RENAN. 167 of languages. His Comparative History — a standard work — has been already referred to. The Phoenicians are his especial province. His work on the mission to Phoenicia/ a government expedition of archseological survey in which he took part in 1860, is recognised as the highest authority on that ancient people ; and he has completed the Phoenician department of the great collection of Semitic inscriptions.^ On the Arabs he has written much which carries great weight. His exhaustive monograph on Averroes^ is a complete guide to one of the most complex byways of philosophical history. His essay on Mahomet/ and his articles on Hariri, Ma9oudi, Ibn-Batoutah,^ compress into a short compass the very spirit of Arab literature and life. It is, however, on the history and literature of the Jews that he has expended most time and thought. With- out dwelling on minor performances, in the Journal de la Societe Asiatiqite and elsewhere, we may notice first his translations of Job^ and of Solomon's Song,'^ as admittedly equal to any German work for thoroughness and accuracy, while showing in their style and in the introductions prefixed to them a literary grace and in- sight which are M. Eenan's own. The preface to the Book of Job, in particular, may well lead us to look forward with a peculiar interest to that History of the Jewish People by which it is understood that M. Eenan 1 Mission de PMyiicie. ^ Corjms InscHptionum Semiticarum. * Averrohs et V Averroisme. ^ In the Etudes d'Histoire Rcligieuse. ^ In the Melanges d'Histoire et de Voyages. * Le Livre de Job, etc. ^ Le Gantique des Caniiques, etc. 168 MODERN ESSAYS. [iv. purposes to complete his account of the origins from which Christianity sprang. In the meantime it is with the birth of Christ that his systematic treatment of Jewish history and literature begins. The Vie de J^siis, which forms the first volume of the Origines clu Chris- tianisme, owes both to its merits and its defects a celebrity which has tended to cast into the background other works of its author, w^hich possess at least equal value. The Vie de J^sics has been followed by Lcs Apotres, Saint Paul, VAnteclirist, les Evangiles, L^Eglise Chr^tienne, and the series has now been concluded by Marc Aurdle, which last volume leaves the Christian Church an establislied power in the full light of day. M. Eenan's labours, however, have not been con- fined to the Semitic race. Turning to the Aryan stock we find to begin with an essay on the Primitive Grammar of India, and for the Persian branch, an article on the Schahnameh.^ On the Greco-Roman branch of the family he has written much of interest, though not often in a separate form. Essays on the Greek grammarians, on the philology of the ancients, on the Secret History of Procopius, indicate unlooked- for stores of learning held in reserve. The volumes on the Origin of Christianity deal with the history of the earlier Empire with a vividness and mastery unequalled ])y any other historian of that age. Tii ^farcus Aimluis, e8])ecially, he has found a hero on wlium lie can dwell willi all tlie eln(|uence of complete sympathy. ^ In the MdaiKjcs (Vllistoirc ct de Voyages. IV.] ERNEST RENAN. 169 Descending now to the Latin nations of modern times, we find an interesting essay on Mussulman Spain, and two on the Eevolutions of Italy, and Dom Luigi Tosti/ the second of which will be recognised as a master- piece by all who are familiar with the great story of Italy's resurrection. French history may conduct us from the Latin to the Celtic branch of the Aryan stock. And here, too, M. Eenan fills a leading place. He has been an important collaborator in the great Benedictine history of French literature, which, begun a century and a half ago, is still far from completion. In conjunction with M. Victor le Clerc, he supplied the history of the fourteenth century, taking the pro- gress of the fine arts as his especial department. His history of Gothic architecture is full of learning and originality, though suggesting (were this a fitting occasion) many topics of aesthetic controversy. Minor essays on the cause of the decline of mediaeval art, on the sources of the French tongue, on the farce of Patelin, etc., indicate how completely he has made this period his own. The numerous essays on Frenchmen of more modern date, Thierry, de Sacy, Cousin, Lamennais, Beranger, Villemain, belong rather to literature or to philosophy than to history proper. To conclude, then, with the Celtic stock, to which M. Eenan himself belongs. Nothing that he has written is better than his essay on the poetry of the Celtic races,^ a model of * In Essais dc Morale ct de Critique, " In the same volume. 170 MODERN ESSAYS. [ IV. that kind of conij^osition, erudite without ostentation, and attractive in the highest degree without loss of dignity or of precision. I will not extend the list farther. It will be obvious that M. Eenan has not spared his pains ; that his opinions are not founded on a narrow historical in- duction, on a one-sided acquaintance with the develop- ment of the mind of man. We must now inquire what are the main lines of the teaching which he can support, if necessary, by so varied an appeal to the lessons of the past. This teaching resolves itself into three main branches — educational, political, and religious. I might add the heading of philosophy, under which one at least of his most attractive works would seem naturally to fall.^ But his own view, as indicated in his essay on the Future of Metaphysics, is less ambitious, and prefers to regard philosophy rather as a comprehensive term for the mere aggregate of the highest generalisations than as forming a distinct and coherent department of human study. M. Kenan's educational convictions do not need any elaborate historical support ; nor will they be openly disputed in this country. They arc, briefly, that the higher instruction should be untrammelled, and that it should be thorough. That the most competent teachers should be appointed, irrespective of any con- siderations of sect or party ; that tliey should tlien be ^ Dialogues ct Fragvunts Philosophiques. IV.] ERNEST KENAN. 171 allowed to exercise their functions without interference from Church or State ; and, on the other hand, that it is their imperative duty to follow truth with their hest efforts whithersoever she may lead ; these are the substantive themes of many essays of M. Eenan's, whether he is praising the Institut for its catholicity, or the College de France for its independence, or the Academy for its permanent and stable power. These topics, indeed, may seem little more than truisms, but truisms may acquire a certain dignity when a man is call'^d upon to suffer for their truth ; and it so hap- pens that M. Eenan's own career contains an episode which well illustrates the dangers to which honest and candid teaching may still sometimes be exposed, and the spirit in which such dangers should be met. In the year 1857 the death of M. Quatremere left vacant the chair of " the Hebrew, Chaldaic, and Syriac languages " at the College de France. The College de France was founded by Francis I. expressly for the pur- pose of providing a lay and independent arena for the exposition of studies which were treated by the Sor- bonne under closer restrictions, and in accordance with traditional rules. There is at the College de France no theological chair, nor has the institution ever been connected with any Church. The functions of its Hebrew professor are in no way hortatory or polemical ; on the contrary, it is the place above all others in France where real philological teaching, unbiassed by considerations external to philology, may fairly be 172 MODERN ESSAYS. [iv. looked for. The appointment virtually rests with the other professors and with the members of the Academy of Inscriptions, whose recommendation, addressed to the Minister of Public Instruction, is ratified as a matter of course. Perhaps through some timidity as to the result of either the appointment or the non-appointment of M. Renan to the vacant chair, the Emperor did not fill it up till 1861. In that year the Minister of Instruction inquired, according to custom, what candidate the ex- isting professors propose to nominate. These professors and the Academy of Inscriptions nominated M. Renan, and his appointment was confirmed in January 1862. It is customary at the College de France, as in most other academical lecture-rooms, that a newly-elected professor, of however special and minute a character his subsequent teaching is to be, should take in his inaugural discourse a wider scope, and give some general sketch of the manner in which he conceives his subject. To have evaded this custom in this special instance would have been to abandon, on the threat of personal inconveniences to follow, the right and duty of those to whom the higher education of their country is entrusted to speak with frankness, though of course with moderation, on all such topics as fall within the competence of their chair. M. Renan did not thus shrink. He gave a masterly sketch of the function of the Semitic peoples in the history of civilisation, and needing to toucli on the IV.] ERNEST RENAN. 173 greatest Figure whom those races have produced, he described him as " un homme incomparable — si grand que, bien qulci tout doive ^tre juge au point de vue de la science positive, je ne voudrais pas contredire ceux qui, frappes du caractere exceptionnel de son oeuvre, I'appellent Dieu." " Jesus of Nazareth," said St. Peter, " a man approved of God among you ; " and if M. Eenan had been willing by a turn of phrase to use the Apostle's words for his own, it would have been hard for the orthodox to find an occasion of censure. As it was, the demonstration which had been prepared against him was held in check by a large body of students who maintained order during his lecture and accompanied him home. He had announced that his future lectures were to be purely grammatical ; but the imperial government, which was at that time much under the influence of the clerical party, pronounced that a continuance of the course would be dangerous, and closed his lecture-room. M. Eenan lectured for two years in his own apartments. The government then announced to him his appointment to a post in the Imperial Library, a post which he could not fill so long as he held the professorship, at the same time abolishing the emolument of his professorship by an ingenious meanness of administrative detail. M. Eenan refused to accept the post in the Library, or to resign the professorship. Another professor was appointed, held the post for a few years, and died. On his death in 1870 M. Eenan was again selected by the 174 MODERN ESSAYS. [iv. College de France and the Institut as the fitting candi- date. And now the Emperor consented, but M, Ollivier shuffled, and the war came. It was the Government of National Defence which, in November 1870, signed the decree which re-established the dispossessed pro- fessor in the chair which he now fills. The Grand Inquisitor, like Pope and Pagan, has in our age lost most of his teeth. There can hardly be a surer way, and this episode shows it, of conferring a benefit on a man of learning and virtue than by persecuting him for his opinions' sake. He gets all the advantage of adversity without disablement, and obloquy without disgrace. He has the opportunity (too rarely occurring in the savant's quiet career) of showing courage, sincerity, and dignity of character. And meantime his influence is not impaired but in- creased ; his books become more widely known, his personality is invested with greater interest. Tlie time, moreover, is past when anything can be done for opinions accounted orthodox by raising those who hold them to posts for which they are otherwise unfit. These are not days when income can give influence, or official precedence make proselytes. Attempts of this kind, to make conformity with received opinions rather than intellectual competence the first requisite in a teacher, have, in fiict, theu* origin in a mood of mind of which religious intoler- ance is only one manifestation. They spring from a deep-rooted infidelity as to the princii)les themselves IV.] ERNEST KENAN. 175 on which all higher education rests. Those principles are, that it is good to have a mind as active and open as possible, and to know all the truth about the universe which can be known. But though these principles are seldom openly contested, many men, — most even of those whose business in life it is to apply them, — hold them in reality in a quite different form. They hold that it is good to have a mind well trained for puiposes of work or enjoyment, and to know enough about the universe to enable us to live well and happily. Now this second view, though it may in some minds be almost identical with the first, may also drop in other minds to a level at which mental training becomes little more than a repertory of artifices, and knowledge than an accomplishment. The tendency to keep the mind shut and to be contented without knowledge is so strong that it is only by steadfastly regarding knowledge as an end in itself that we can be safe against its gradual limitation, till even the arts which affect our material well-being are starved by its decay. The force with which Germany has grasped this principle has been, it need hardly be said, one of the main elements in all her successes. She has had more scientific curiosity, more interest in truth for truth's own sake, than any other nation, and she has reaped her reward in the serious and painstaking habit of mind, open to new information, and resolved to see things as they are, which has in its turn led her to 176 MODERN ESSAYS. [iv. military and political greatness. It has been one of M. Eenan's life-long tasks to hold up to his countr}'- men the example of Germany, to insist on the need of laborious thoroughness in study, on the nobility of the self-forgetfulness which makes a man neglect his own fame in the interest of his subject. Some of his most striking essays, — those, for instance, on Creuzer, Eugene Burnouf, J. V. le Clerc, — are devoted to the setting forth of such a life with a kindred enthusiasm. And both in France and England such exhortations are greatly needed. Physical science, indeed, is in both countries ardently pursued. But the philological and historical sciences are apt in France to form the mere material for rhetoric, in England the mere machinery of education. One of the main directions in which the influence of M. Eenan's historical-mindedness is felt is in his utterances on politics. There, at any rate, the study of history has saved him from any tendency to rash- ness or idealism. It has taught liim, above all, the doctrine of compensations, — the application, as one may say, of the law of the conservation of energy to states and nations, which assures us that more than a certain sum of efficiency cannot be extracted from any one race, and that, after gross errors have been avoided, what is gained in force by the body politic in one direction is likely to be lost in another. On the examples of this thesis M. Eenan delights to dwell, from the Berljers, enjoying absolute social eiiuality and IV.] ERNEST RENAN. 177 government by commune at the cost of all national or even tribal coherence, to the German Empire, its collective strength based on a fusion of bureaucracy and feudalism which, in M. Eenan's view, must neces- sarily involve the painful self-abnegation of the mass of men. One may say, indeed, that the greatness of a nation depends on her containing a certain amount, but only a certain amount, of unselfishness ; on her keeping her spiritual life neither above nor below a certain tem- perature. She can achieve no powerful collective existence if public virtue in her have grown so cold that she contains no class ready to make serious sacrifices for the general good. And on the other hand, if the popular devotion to some impersonal idea be raised to too glowing a pitch, the nation loses in concentration what she gains in diffusion ; her idea takes possession of the world, but she herself is spent in the effort which gave it birth. Greece perishing exhausted with her creation of art and science ; Eome disappearing, like leaven in the mass, in her own universal empire ; Judaea expiating by political nullity and dispersion the spiritual intensity which imposed her faiths, in one form or another, upon civilised man ; such are some of the examples with which M. Kenan illustrates this general view. And such, to some extent, is his conception of the French Eevolution. In the spiritual exhaustion and unsettlement which have followed on that crisis, France has felt the reaction VOL. II. N 178 MODERN ESSAYS. [iv. from that fervour of couviction and proselytism with which she sent forth her " principles of '89 " to make the circuit of the world. But those principles were not wholly salutary nor wholly true ; they were the insistence — exaggerated by the necessary recoil from privilege and inequality — on one side only of the political problem, on the individual right to enjo}^TQent without regard to those ties and subordinations which make the permanence and the unity of states. The French Eevolution, indeed, was but the mani- festation, in a specially concentrated form, of a phase through which the awakening consciousness of the masses must needs conduct every civilised nation in turn. Its characteristic assertions of the independence, the essential equality of men, are apt to lead, if rashly applied, not to any improved social structure, but to sheer individualism, to the jealous spirit of democracy, which resents the existence of lives fuller and richer than its own. This spread of an enlightened selfish- ness is in the moral world, as M. Eenan has remarked, a fact of the same nature as the exhaustion of coal- fields in the physical world. In each case the exist- ing generation is living upon, and not replacing, the economies of the past. A few words of explanation will make this view clearer. As a general rule, we may roughly say that the self -regarding im])ulses of brutes and men are limited in the last resort by the need of a certain amount of social instinct, if tlieir family or tlieir species is to be preserved at all. And IV.] ERNEST RENAN. 179 this instinct, if it may be said without paradox, is often more moral than choice. For reasoning powers, though probably acquired as the result of highly social habits, sometimes partially destroy the very habits out of which they arose, by suggesting that more immediate pleasure can be obtained by reversing them. For instance, male monkeys are not systematically cruel to female monkeys. Instinct teaches them to divide the work of the family in the way best suited to the attainment of healthy offspring. But in Australian savages the family instinct is interfered with by a reasoning process which shows them that men are stronger than women, and can unite to make them their slaves. They enslave and maltreat their women, with the result that they injure their progeny, and maintain so low a level of vigour that a slight change in their surroundings puts an end to the race. Some- thing of the same kind is the contrast between the feudal peasant of the middle ages and the self-seeking artisan of the present day. The mediaeval peasant owed his very existence to the high development of certain social instincts, — fidelity, self-abnegation, courage in defence of the common weal. And thus in a Highland clan, for instance, the qualities which enable a society to hold together existed almost in perfection. The sum of social instincts with which each of its members was born far exceeded any such self-seeking impulses as might (for instance) have led him in time of war to enrich himself by betraying his chief. 180 MODERN ESSAYS. [iv. Instinctive virtue of this kind, however, can hardly be maintained except by pressure from without. As civilisation develops, the need for it becomes less ap- parent. The self-abnegation which in a rude society was plainly needed to prevent the tribe's extinction now seems to serve only to maintain a pampered and useless court or aristocracy. The proletariat gra- dually discover that they are the stronger party, and their instinctive reverence for their hereditary leaders dies away. If circumstances are favour- able they devote themselves to pleasure and money- making ; if not, they rise, perhaps, as in 1789, and " decapitate the nation," leaving themselves incapable of self-government, and certain to be made the prey of military force, the only power left standing among them. Meantime it is not only the proletariat whose coherence in the body politic is loosened by the dictates of an enlightened selfishness. The feudal leader, quite as much as his retainer, subsisted by virtue of his possession of certain social instincts, — courage in de- fending his clan, and a rude identification of his inter- ests and pleasures with theirs. Even amid the more refined scenes of the Eenaissance the noble had still much in common with the peasant. The young aristo- crat (to take M. Kenan's illustration), whose marriage procession defiled through the streets of Gul)bio or Assisi was delighting the populace and himself by the same action. His instinct was to share his pleasures IV.] ERNEST RENAN. 181 thus with the commonalty, and he enjoyed them tlie more for so doing. But as civilisation becomes more assured there is no longer anythmg which the nobleman feels plainly called on to do for the common people, who are pro- tected by law without his aid. And moreover, as numbers get vaster, and differences of wealth more extreme, the rich man finds his pleasure more and more aloof from the poor. His instincts, both of leadership and of companionship, tend to decay ; he lives in some luxurious city, and converts his territorial primacy into a matter of rents. Individualism, in short, as opposed to active patriot- ism, becomes increasingly the temptation of rich and poor alike. Questions as to forms of government, rivalries of dynasties, are of small importance as com- pared with the progress of this disintegrating tendency, which forms a kind of dry-rot in all civilised states. The reserve forces of inherited and instinctive virtue (to return to the simile of the coal-fields) are becoming exhausted, and while we live in a society which has been rendered possible by the half-conscious self-devo- tions of the past, we have not as yet discovered a souVce of energy which shall maintain our modern states at the moral temperature requisite for organic life. Eeflections of this nature, long familiar to M. Eenan, were forced upon all Frenchmen by the Franco- German war. That contest, as has been often observed, repeated the old histories of tlie incursions of the bar- 182 MODERN ESSAYS. [iv. barians into the declining Roman empire in its con- trast between tlie naive and self-devoted unity of the one force, and the self-seeking apathy which ruined the other. The main difference was that the Germans, having applied their patient efforts to self-education as well as to warfare, united in a certain sense the advantages of a civilised with the advantages of a barbarous people. The war passed by, and M. Eenan's was perliaps the wisest voice which discussed the maladies of France. France seemed to have before her then the choice of two paths ; the one leading through national self- denial to national strength, the other through demo- cratic laxity to a mass of private well-being, likely to place its own continuance above all other aims. In a collection of political essays,^ published in 1871, M. Renan advocates the sterner policy in a series of weighty suggestions too detailed for insertion here. Yet he feels the difficulty of carrying out tliis regime of penitence and effort without the help of a commanding central power. He regrets (for he had already fore- seen) the impossibility of placing at the head of France a strong dynasty, capable of direction to serious ends. All her dynasties have fallen ; the experience of 1830, 1848, 1870, has shown that not one of them can sur- vive a single blow ; nor can the departed instinct of loyalty be revived by partisans wielding the weapons of su])erstition, corruption, insolent bravado. Already when M. Renan wrote there seemed no choice but a ^ La Riformc Inicllcditellc ct Morale dc la France. IV.] ERNEST EENAN. 183 Eepublic ; and a striking passage (put, it is fair to say, into the mouth of an imaginary speaker) will indicate with how mixed a hope he regarded that prospect : — "Des r6formes, supposant que la France abjure ses pr6- jug^s d6mocratiques, sent des r6formes chim6riques. La France, croyez-le, restera un pays de gens aimables, doux, honnetes, droits, gais, superficiels, pleins de bon coeur, de faible intelligence politique ; elle conservera son adminis- tration m6diocre, ses comites entet^s, ses corps routiniers, persuad6e qu'ils sont les premiers du monde ; elle s'enfon- cera de plus en plus dans cette voie de mat6rialisme, de republicanisme vulgaire vers laquelle tout le monde moderne, except(§ la Prusse et la Eussie, parait se tourner. " Such a state, in M. Eenan's view, can never hope to rival Prussia's strength in the field, — a strength founded on a social organisation which can transform itself into a military organisation when need is, with- out shock, unwillingness, or delay. The revenge of France, he thinks, is likely to be rather of that insidi- ous kind which saps the enemy's robust self-denial by the spectacle of ease and luxury, and gradually draws down its neighbours to a self-indulgent impotence like its own. The events of the dozen years which have elapsed since this prophecy was uttered may seem to have tended towards its fulfilment. On the one hand there is visible in Germany an increased impatience of the hardships of the Prussian rSgime, a growing exodus of the lower class to states which demand less of risk and 184 MODERN ESSAYS. [iv. self-sacrifice from their constituent members. And on the other liand the prestige of Paris as the city of pleasure has revived ; the wealth of France, and her eagerness in the pursuit of wealth, are greater than ever before. Her habits and institutions (as M. Renan predicted) are undoubtedly assimilating her not to Germany, but to the United States. The example of the United States, — capable, under strong excitement, of putting forth such military energy from the midst of a society apparently so self-seeking and incoherent, may well prevent us from asserting that democratic France can never wage a successful war with Germany. But such strong impulses will be rare, and for the most part it would seem that we must look on France as swelling that dominant current of the modern world which sets in the direction of mere wealth and luxury, and threatens to dissolve the higher aims and unity of nations in its enervating flow. " Without war," says Von Moltke, " the world would stagnate, and lose itself in materialism." The problem is to prevent this ; to secure that as the world gradually changes from a place of struggle into a place of enjoyment the change shall not sap the roots of virtue or the structure of society. As the old social superiorities, defined by birth, and resting ultimately on force and conquest, tend to disappear, we must create new social superiorities, marked enougli to com- pel the respect of the multitude to their fitting leaders, and attained by enougli of effort to give to the cliaracter iv.J ERNEST REN AN. 185 of those leaders the same force and self-confidence which were previously won in war. In pursuing this train of thought M. Eenan sur- prises the English reader by his apparent want of acquaintance with the similar speculations of Comte. Yet these two greatest thinkers of modern France traverse to a considerable extent the same ground. Fully to note their points of agreement and of differ- ence would demand a separate essay. They agree in the spirit, — historical, scientific, positive in the best sense of the term, — in which they approach these social problems, and which guarantees them alike against revolutionary vehemence and against the mere sentimentality of reaction. On the other hand, Comte's confident dogmatism, and the prophetic and hieratic pretensions of his later years, are little in accord with M. Eenan's gentle and sceptical irony, his strain of aristocratic nonchalance. In their respective views as to the nature of the government of the future these divergences are plainly marked. Comte's hierarchy of bankers is the conception of a complacently industrial, a frankly optimistic age ; while in M. Eenan's fastidi- ous attitude towards material prosperity we discern a certain loss of moral prestige which wealth has tended to undergo even while its practical predominance in the world has increased. Wealth is, of course, the form of superiority which the multitude tend more and more exclusively to respect as the traditional reverence for birth declines. And, in some cases, wealth is a 186 MODERN ESSAYS. [iv. tolerable criterion of merit, as indicating diligence and ability in those by whom it is made, liabits of refine- ment in those by whom it is inherited. But, unfortun- ately, it becomes increasingly evident that the criterion is too rough ; there is too much ill-gotten wealth in the world to allow us to respect it without inquiry ; and the dishonest rich man is not merely not better, but is more actively mischievous than his neighbours. America, in short, has become our type of a country which has sought wealth with success ; and America is not a country where kings are philosophers and philoso- phers are kings. Virtue, again, (the criterion which we should all prefer), is not easy to recognise on a public arena, and its genuineness is not recommended to us when it loudly claims recognition. We are driven back upon intellectual superiority ; and here the pro- blem is to find that disinterested wisdom which is, in fact, a part of virtue, and not the mere plausibility of skilful egoism. There is no certain method of attain- ing this, but the method which looks most promising is to raise a considerable number of the citizens to a pitch of knowledge and culture which ought, at least, to teach them to look on human affairs as philosophers, and not as adventurers or as partisans. And this, at least, we can do ; by the thoroughness of our higher education we can create a new aristocracy, an aristo- cracy which will not press its services on tlio multitude, but will constitute a weiglity court of ai)peal from popular passion and prejudice. Some such position, IV.] ERNEST REN AN. 187 indeed, has long been held by men of talent in France, owing to the inadequacy of the French noUesse, which never performed important political functions, and has now practically disappeared. And in other countries, too, the public is learning to recognise a sort of senate in one group of learned men, — in the professors, namely, of the physical sciences. Their superior knowledge can be palpably proved and is readily believed in ; their advice is urgently needed about many matters, and the decisiveness of utterance natural to men much occu- pied with definite and soluble problems is in itself con- vincing to those who wish for guidance. But to the devotees of the historical sciences the world has hitherto paid less attention. Philologists cannot hit upon lucra- tive inventions ; rival critics cannot demonstrate their historical insight by a crucial experiment. The his- torian is not so convincing as the physicist, nor does he labour so manifestly for the practical good of man- kind. Comte, indeed, claimed to have done away with both these distinctions. He claimed to have given to the science of society a precision which enabled it to be at once applied as an art, and he was eager to subordinate even the highest speculations to the actual needs of men. M. Eenan, on the other hand, while desiring no such direct dogmatic influence, is not dis- posed ■ to shape the course of his researches according to their immediate bearing on the common weal. That "passion for truth in itself, without any mixture of pride or vanity," which Comte condemns as " intense 188 MODERN ESSAYS. [iv. egoism," is the very breath of M. Eenan's being ; and, as is wont to be the case when truth rather than utility is aimed at, there are many matters on which he is unwilling to preach any very definite doctrine. " La vdrit^ est dans une nuance," he says ; and again, " Qui sait si la finesse d'esprit ne consiste pas k s'abstenir de conclure ?" It is the part of men like this to pro- test against all extreme views, all patriotic illusions, to sit dispersed amid the countries of civilised men, and to try their hopes and creeds by an appeal to the laws of their own being, and to their own forgotten past. " Ex necessitate est," the old saying runs, " ut sit aliquis philosophus in specie humana." In order that humanity may be fully conscious of itself there must, we instinctively feel, be somewhere on earth a life disengaged from active or personal aims, and absorbed in the mere exercise of intellectual curiosity. And such a life, which sometimes seems to us to lie outside all human interests and emotions, will sometimes also appear as the centre of them all. For the universe in which man is placed so far transcends his power to grasp it, — the destinies amidst whicli his future lies are so immense and so obscure, — that the most diverse manners of bearing ourselves among them will in turn occupy our full sympathies, satisfy our changing ideal. Sometimes a life of action seems alone worthy of a man ; we feel that we exist in vain unless we manage to leave some beneficent trace of our existence on the world around us ; unless we enrich it with art, civilise IV.] ERNEST KENAN. 189 it by education, extend it by discovery, pacify it with law. Sometimes, again, our relations to the Unseen will take possession of the soul ; thought is lost in love, and emotion seems to find its natural outlet in spiritual aspiration and prayer. But there is a mood, again, in which all action, all emotion even, looks futile as the sport of a child ; when it is enough to be a percipient atom swayed in the sea of things ; when the one aim of the universe seems to be consciousness of itself and all that is to exist only that it may at last be known. There was a time when all these strains of feeling could co-exist effectively in a single heart. Plato, "the spectator of all time and of all existence," was also the centre of the religion of the world. And if this can rarely be so now, it is not necessarily or always that saints and philosophers in themselves are smaller men, but rather that man's power of thought and emotion has not expanded in proportion to the vast increase of all that is to be felt and known. There has been a specialisation of emotions as well as of studies and industries ; it has become necessary that what is gained in extension should in some degree be lost in intensity, and that the wisdom that compre- hends the world should cease to be compatible with the faith that overcomes it. Let us not, then, expect all things from any man. Let us welcome the best representative of every mood of the mind. And if the philosophic mood can scarcely 190 MODERN ESSAYS. [iv. find expression without some pitying consciousness of the ignorance and error which envelop the multitude of men, let us remember that this compassion- ating tone, though it can hardly be made agreeable to the mass of men, may nevertheless be most salutary. For so much knowledge is now diffused amon^^ men of ordinary education that it is difficult to remain steadily conscious how small a fraction this is of what it imports us to know. It is not that we fail in admiration for eminent talents ; never, perhaps, has eminent talent been more admired. But we cannot habitually realise to ourselves our incapacity to form true opinions ; we decide where doctors disagree ; we rush in where a Goethe has feared to tread. We have to make up our minds, we say, for we have to act. Be it so, but we must be content to be reminded that in tliat case our decision proves nothing, except that we were anxious to decide. In the domain of the physical sciences we are less tempted thus rashly to dogmatise, and the blunders to which our dogmatism leads us are more easily seen. It is when we deal with questions affecting the inner being, the profounder beliefs of men, that we are able contentedly to forget tliat these beliefs repose ulti- mately on historical and philological considerations with which we have made no eilbrt to acquaint our- selves. Yet as the conception of science broadens and deepens, this apathy must pass away ; and already during recent years there has been a marked awaken- IV.] ERNEST RENAN. 191 ing in the European mind, a growing perception that the historical sciences will prove to be as essential to our guidance through life as the physical sciences have already shown themselves to be. " L'union de la philologie et de la philosophic," says M. Eenan, "de 1 erudition et de la pens^e, devrait etre le caractere du travail intellectuel de notre epoque." And again, "C'est aux sciences de 1' humanity qu'on demand- era desormais les elements des plus hautes specula- tions." But desisting from further summary of discussions whose fulness and subtlety make them alrriost impos- sible to summarise, let us test, by a few concrete instances, the value of this philosophical outlook on contemporary history. M. Eenan has lived in close contact with the French and German people, and with the " Bretons bretonnants " who linger around his early home. Let us inquire if there be anything in his way of regarding these nations which indicates a mind accustomed to an impartial weighing of the fates of men ; anything beyond the conventional glorifi- cation of France, the conventional bitterness against Gerniany ; anything which penetrates beneath surface characteristics to a race's true genius and essential power. And inasmuch as pliilosophy is an aroma which should penetrate every leaflet of the tree, I will take my illustration of M. Eenan's insight into the character of his own countrymen from a short article on the 192 MODERN ESSAYS. [iv. Theology of Beranger,^ called forth by the appearance of a family edition of the works of the poet of Lisette and Chambertin, at first sight so ill-adapted for domestic perusal. " 'De toutes les parties du systeme po6tique de Beranger,' says M. Renan, after some admirable comments on the moral side of his poems, 'celle qui me surprit le plus, quand je le lus pour la premiere fois, ce fut sa theologie. Je connaissais pen alors I'esprit fran^ais ; je ne savais pas les singulieres alternatives de legerete et de pesanteur, de timidity 6troite et de foUe t6merit6, qui sent un des traits de son caractere. Toutes mes id^es furent troubl6es quand je vis que ce joyeux convive, que je m'etais figur6 mecreant au premier chef, parlait de Dieu en langage fort arrett^, et engageait sa maitresse a * Lever les yeux vers ce monde invisible Ou pour toujours nous nous reunissons.' *" La naivet6 toute bourgeoise de cette th(^ologie d'un genre nouveau, cette fa^on de s'incliner le verre en main devant le Dieu que je chcrchais avec trcmblement, furent pour moi un trait de lumiere. A I'indignation que me causa rid6e d'une confraternity religicuse avec ceux qui adorent de la sorte se mdla le sentiment de ce qu'il y a de fatalement limite dans les mani(!!res de voir et do ^entir de la France. L'incurable m^diocritc religicuse de ce grand pays, orthodoxe jusque dans sa gaiete, me fut r6vijl<^e, et le Dieu des bons gens m'apparut comme IV'ternel dieu gaulois contre lequel lutterait en vain toute tentative de philosophic et de religion 6puree.' " And from this text he argues how closely akin arc ^ In Qucdiuu^ Contcmpovaiiics. IV.] ERNEST RENAN. 193 licence and bigotry ; how it is the same spirit of con- tented shallowness which in each direction is impatient of modest self-restraint ; which leads to easy vulgarity in the domain of morals, empty rhetoric in the domaui of literature, ready and confident dogmatism in the domain of religion. To protest against each of these in turn has been the mission of M. Eenan, and surely by no other example or exhortation could he have de- served better of France. It is needless to say that he can also praise his country with grace and enthusiasm, though never with that monstrous adulation to which she is sometimes too willing to lend her ear. More remarkable is the generous candour with which, in the very shock and crisis of the war, when nothing was heard on either side but outrage and execration, the French philosopher did justice to the impulse which urged Germany to assert her unity and her place among great nations.^ " S'il y a une nationality qui ait un droit Evident d'exister en toute son ind6pendance, c'est assur6ment la nationality allemande. L'Allemagne a le meilleur titre national, je veux dire un role historique de premiere importance, une ame, une litt6rature, des hommes de g^nie, une conception particuliere des choses divines et humaines. L'Allemagne a fait la plus importante revolution des temps modernes, la Eeforme ; en outre, depuis un siecle, I'Allemagne a produit un des plus beaux d6veloppements intellectuels qu'il y ait ^ Lettre a M. Strauss. VOL. II. ^ 194 MODERN ESSAYS. [iv. jamais eu, iin d^voloppement qui a, si j'ose le dire, ajout6 un degr6 de plus k I'esprit liumain en profondeur et en 6tendue, si bien que ceux qui n'ont pas particip6 a cette culture nouvelle sont k ceux qui I'ont travers6e comme celui qui ne connait que les mathematiques 6l6mentaires est k celui qui connait le calcul diff6rentieL" He proceeds to draw a picture of what united Ger- many might become, the Prussian leaven disappearing when it has leavened the whole lump, and leaving a nation open, perhaps, beyond any other, to the things of the spirit; more capable, perhaps, than any other of founding a State organisation on a scientific and rational basis. And he concludes with a dignified appeal to the moral intervention of Europe in the present extremity, a dignified protest against the dis- memberment and degradation of France. On reading the letter to M. Strauss from which this passage is taken — a letter full of large general views and scrupulous candour — one is tempted to think that it must be an easy thing for a professed philosopher to retain his philosophy even, as the ancients said, " when earth is mixed with fire." A curious incident to which this correspondence gave rise may be quoted, however, as showing how difficult it is in these moments of excitement, even for the controversialist whose arguments are supi)orted by thirty legions, to maintain a tone on which he can afterwards look back witli satisfaction. The corre- spondence in question was begun by M. Strauss, who IV.] ERNEST REN AN. 195 addressed a letter to M. Eenan in the Augsburg Gazette of the 18th of August 1870. M. Eenan caused a translation of this letter to appear in the Journal des Ddbats of the 15 th of September, — no easy matter, as may be supposed, in that fury of rage against Ger- many ; and on the 16 th of September appeared M. Eenan's own reply. The Augsburg Gazette refused to insert this reply of M. Eenan's ; and perhaps no one circumstance was more significant than this of the temper of Germany at the time. There was not a word (it is needless to say) in M. Eenan's letter which could give just offence ; but, nevertheless, the organ of the victorious nation, having itself challenged a dis- cussion, refused to insert the courteous reply of the vanquished party. It might have been thought that under these circumstances M. Strauss would withdraw with displeasure from his connection with a newspaper which took this view of what was fair and honourable. But it was not so. On the contrary, he wrote a reply to M. Eenan's letter, and inserted it in the Augsburg Gazette on the 2d of October 1870, at a time when the Prussian blockade of Paris of course prevented M. Eenan from receiving the newspaper. By this ingenious method of controversy M. Strauss was able to appear to challenge a champion of the opposite side to an impartial discussion ; then to permit the suppres- sion of that champion's reply; then to write to him again in a still more violent tone (with misrepresenta- tions on which I need not dwell), and to choose a 196 MODERN ESSAYS. [iv. moment for this rejoinder when his antagonist could not possibly receive or reply to it. All this he did as one philosopher communing with another philosopher, and with the consciousness that he belonged to an entirely virtuous nation, which was justly chastising a nation sunk in ignorance and corruption. I have said that M. Strauss permitted the suppres- sion in the Augsburg Gazette of M. Eenan's letter. He chose, however, to give it to the world in another fashion. He translated it into German, and published it, arong with his own two letters, for the benefit of a German military infinnary. The Nouvelle lettre a M. Strauss (September 1871), in which M. Eenan gently recounts these transactions, and indicates some particulars in which the great German people may seem still to faU short of perfec- tion, affords perhaps as good an instance as this century has to show of the sarcastic power of the French language in hands that can evoke its subtleties and manoeuvre its trenchant blade. The paragraph which I quote below appears as if its only tinxiety were to make excuses for M. Strauss. But it would be hard to find any passage since Pope's Atticus which it would be more disagreeable to have addressed to one. "II est vrai que vous m'avez fiiit ensuite un honneur auquel jc suis sensible conmie jo le dois. Vous avez traduit vous-meme ma r6ponse, et I'avez reunie dans une broclmre a vos deux Icttres. Vous avez voulu (jue cette brochure se vendit au profit d'un (itabhssement d'invalides IV.] ERNEST KENAN. 197 allemands. Dieu me garde de vous fairc ui.o chicane au point de vue de la propri6t6 litt6raire ! L'oeuvre k laquelle vous m'avez fait contribuer est d'ailleurs une oeuvre d'humanit6, et si ma chetive prose a pu procurer quelques cigares k ceux qui ont pill6 ma petite maison de Sevres, je vous remercie de m'avoir fourni I'occasion de conformer ma conduite a quelques-uns des pr^ceptes de J6sus que je crois le plus authentiques. Mais remarquez encore ces nuances l^geres. Certainement, si vous m'aviez permis de publier un ecrit de vous, jamais, au grand jamais, je n'aurais eu rid6e d'en faire une edition au profit de notre Hotel des Invalides. Le but vous entralne ; la passion vous empeche de voir ces mievreries de gens blasts que nous appelons le goCit et le tact." From the temper of mind which calls forth M. Kenan's strongest expressions of repulsion, — this temper of domineering dogmatism and blind conceit, — let us pass to the opposite extreme. Let us turn to the race from which M. Eenan sprang, the race whose character is traceable in all that he has written. The nationality of the romantic, emotional, unpractical Celt, surviving in his western isles and promontories from an age of less hurrying effort, less sternly-moulded men, has fallen into the background of the modern world. Yet every now and then we are reminded — by some persistent loyalty, as in La Vendee, to a de- throned ideal ; by some desperate incompatibility, as in Ireland, with the mechanism of modern progress — that there exists by our side a nation whose origin, language, memories, differ so profoundly from our own. 198 MODERN ESSAYS. [nr. M. Eenan is a Celt who has become conscious of his Celtic nature; a man in whom French savoir-vivre, German science, are perpetually contending with alien and ineradicable habits of mind, — " comme cet animal fabuleux de Ctesias, qui se mangeait les pattes sans s'en douter." This mixed nature, the residt, as one may say, of a modern intelligence working on a temperament that belongs to a far-off past, and making of him " un romantique protestant contre le romantisme, un utopiste prechant en politique le terre-^-terre, un idealiste se donnant inutilement beaucoup de peine pour paraitre bourgeois," has rendered M. Eenan's works unintelligible and displeasing to many readers. " Twy-natured is no nature " is the substance of many a comment on the great historian's union of effusive sympathy and destructive criticism. But there is a sense in which a man may be doubte-minded without being hypocritical, and the warp and woof of his nature, shot with different colours, may produce for this very reason a more delicate and changing charm. In his essay on Celtic poetry M. Eenan has abandoned himself to his first predilections. Nowhere is he more unreservedly himself than when he is depicting that gentle romance, that lialf humorous sentiment, that devout and pensive peace, which breathe alike in Breton, in Welsh, in Irish legend, and which, after so many a journeying into the imaginary or the invisible world, find their truest earthly ideal in the monasteries of lona or Lindisfarne. Here it is that we discern IV.] ERNEST REN AN. 199 liis spiritual kin ; among these saints and dreamers whose fancy is often too unrestrained, their emotion too femininely sensitive, for commerce with the world, these populations who to the faults inherent in weak- ness have too often added the faults that are begotten of oppression, but yet have never wholly sunk to commonness, nor desisted from an unworldly hope. There have been races whieh have had a firmer grasp of this life. There have been races which have risen on more steady and soaring wing when they would frame their conceptions of another. But there has been no race, perhaps, which has borne witness more unceasingly, by its weakness as by its strength, to that strange instinct in man's inner being which makes him feel himself as but a pilgrim here ; which rejects as unsatisfying all of satisfaction that earth can bring, and demands an unknown consolation from an obscurely encompassing Power. " ' freres de la tribu obscure,' exclaims M. Kenan, ' au foyer de laquelle je puisai la foi a I'invisible, humble clan de laboureurs et de marins, a qui je dois d'avoir con- serve la vigueur de men ame en un pays 6teint, en un siecle sans espt^rance, vous errates sans doute sur ces mers enchant6es oii notre pere Brandan cherchait la terre de pramission ; vous parcouriites avec saint Patrice les cercles de ce monde que nos yeux ne savent plus voir. . . . Inutiles en oe monde, qui ne comprend que ce qui le dompte ou le sert, fuyons ensemble vers I'Eden splendide des joies de Tame, celui-Ia meme que nos saints virent dans leurs songes. Consolons-nous par nos chimeres, par notre noblesse, par 200 MODERN ESSAYS. [iv. notre d^dain. Qui salt si iios reves, a nous, ne sont pas plus vrais que la r6alit6 1 Dieu m'est t^moiii, vieux p^res, que ma seule joie, c'est que parfois je songe que je suis votre conscience, et que par moi vous arrivez a la \'ie et a la voix.' '' Enough, perhaps, has now been said to give a gene- ral conception of the sum of powers and tendencies which M. Eenan brings to bear on the complex pro- blems of man's life and destiny. We have seen that his mind is stored with wide - reaching knowledge, thoroughly penetrated with the scientific spirit. We have seen at the same time that he is by instinct conservative ; that his sympathies are aristocratic rather than democratic ; but aristocratic in the highest sense, as desiring to fortify or replace the aristocracy of birth by an aristocracy of unselfish wisdom, which may serve as a barrier against the ignoble deference too often paid to wealth alone. We have seen, again, that this philo- sophy which he preaches is in liimself no merely nominal or idle thing ; but has enabled him not only to bear himself with dignified firmness under the mild persecution of modern days, but also — a harder achieve- ment — to recognise, though a Frenchman, the faults of France, and in the crisis of an embittered struggle to admit with generous largeness the essential worth and mission of the foe. Lastly, we have traced his sym- pathies to their deeper roots, and have discerned in his vein of emotion — ever between a smile and a sigh — the Litest self-ex})ression of a gentle old-world race, the dreamy prophesyings of the Merlin of a later day. IV ,] ERNEST RENAN. 201 We shall thus, it may be hoped, be better qualified to estimate M. Eenan's views on those great matters to which his thoughts have mainly turned ; man's position, namely, in the spiritual universe, as he has himself in different ages regarded it, or as to us it may now appear ; and especially the story, full of ever new interest and wonder, which tells how one conception of man's Creator and his destiny has overcome the rest, and one life of perfect beauty has become the model of the civilised world. II. Whether or no this modern age be in its actual practice manifesting an increased regard for morals and religion, there seems at least to be no doubt that those subjects occupy now a larger space in its thoughts than has been the case since the Eeformation. Discussions of this kind pervade all schools of opinion, and Goethe himself could scarcely in our days maintain his antique impassiveness amid the problems of man's life and destiny. To students of the historical sciences these questions are necessarily of the first importance. A language and a religion are the legacies of every race, and these two things are for the most part indistin- guishably fused together into a single record of the minds of far-off men. In Germany and Holland, and less markedly in France and England, the current of research has for some time set strongly in the direction 202 MODERN ESSAYS. [iv. of the history of religions. And no book of this kind has attained a greater fame, as none has dealt with a theme more important, than M. Kenan's Origines du Christianisme, now concluded by the volume entitled Marc-AurHe, after occupying twenty years of its author's labours. Detailed criticism on a learned work of this magni- tude would be hardly in place here. It must suffice to indicate some general points of view, often over- looked amid the desultory and acrimonious comment to which a work of such scope and novelty, on themes of such close concern to all, is not unnaturally exposed. We may remark, in the first place, that M. Kenan's great work almost exactly fills up the gap between the two most considerable histories of ancient times to which modern erudition has given birth. Between the foundation of the Koman Empire, where Mommsen ends, and the reign of Commodus, where Gibbon begins, the main event in the world's history is the rise of Christianity, and of this, with much reference to con- temporary occurrences, M. Kenan treats. Better examples than these three writers it would be hard to find of the various tempers of mind in which the historian may approach the facts and personages with which he has to deal : — examples of philosophic indifference, of strong and clear convictions, of many- sided sympathy. Gibbon's method lays him least open to criticism, but it is suited only for a Byzantine abase- ment of human things. Many tracts in liis thousand IV.] ERNEST RENAN. 203 years of history still seem as if they had been made to suit him ; but wherever extraordinary characters or impulses of strong life and passion claim a place on his canvas we feel that all his learning does not save him from being superjScial. Mommsen, on the other hand, is by far the most effective as a teacher. A third, if one may so say, in the intellectual triumvirate, with Bismarck and Von Moltke, he hurls upon his readers a greater mass of knowledge with a greater momentum than any of his rivals. Yet through the garb of the historian is sometimes visible the pamph- leteer; and the unimpassioned Gibbon would scarcely have repudiated Eenan's Jesus so decisively as Momm- sen's Csesar. The chameleon sympathies of M. Eenan, his criticsil finesse, his ready emotion, again have both advantages and dangers of their own. On the one hand, they enable him to see more of truth than ordinary men ; for insight requires imagination, and the data of history cannot always, like the data of physical science, be best investigated in a " dry light." Eather may we say — if it be allowed to specialise the metaphor — that they often need to fall upon some mind which, like a fluorescent liquid, can give lumi- nosity to rays which were dark before, and extend by its own intimate structure the many-tinted spectrum of the past. On the other hand, he who attempts to descend so deeply into the springs of human thought and feeling cannot but unconsciously lay open also the limitations of his own being. Gibbon may dismiss all 204 MODERN ESSAYS. [iv. events alike with majestic indifference or a contented sneer. The definite and straightforward judgments of Mommsen give little grasp on their author's idiosyn- cracy. But M. Eenan, — explaining his characters from within, indicating their subtler interrelations and intimate desires, — attempts much that is usually left to the poet or dramatist ; and, like the poet or dramatist, whatever else he is depicting depicts himself. And thus it is that one defect in him — a defect, it is fair to say, in which he does not stand alone among his countrymen — has appeared so conspicuously, and has been so readily seized on by opponents, that it has come to colour the popular conception of him to a quite unjust extent. This is his want — one cannot exactly say of dignity , for the master of a style so flexible and so urbane cannot but be dignified when- ever he pleases — but of the quality to which the Eomans gave the name of gravitas, the temper of mind which looks at great matters with a stern sim- plicity, and which, in describing them, disdains to introduce any intermixture of less noble emotion. Such, at least, has undoubtedly been our English verdict. Yet it is so hard to say in what manner a history which many centuries have held for sacred is to be retold in the language of historical science, that it is only just to intpiire whether otliers have been more successful, and in what points precisely M. llenan's deficiency lies. We may admit then — it is impossible to deny it IV.] ERNEST RENAN. 205 — that a great part of the so-called orthodox scheme of Bible interpretation is a tradition of the least trust- worthy kind, a tradition of mistakes and misrepresent- ations, which have come down to us from an uncritical and unscrupulous age. We may admit that the Ger- man school of theology — more persuasively represented by M. Kenan than by any one among their own num- ber — have performed a task of urgent necessity, and have left Biblical exegesis no longer one of the oppro- bria of historical science. But along with these large admissions large reservations also must be made. The student, whatever his speculative opinions, who is really imbued with the spirit of the New Testament, will assuredly deny — will be tempted to deny even with a touch of indignant scorn — that this recent school of criticism has reproduced that essential spirit with anything like the potency and profundity which may often be found in the comments of an equivo- cating father or an ill -educated saint. Around the productions of Leyden or Tubingen there hangs the rawness of a revolutionary scheme of things ; one feels at every turn that to treat these matters aright there needs not only patience, accuracy, ingenuity, which these men give us, but depth of feeling and width of experience, which they have not got to give. We are impressed, for instance, by Strauss's air of laborious thoroughness as he explains away the wonder and beauty of the Christian story with an arid logic which its very aridity seems to make more convincing. But 206 MODERN ESSAYS. [iv. our regard for his opinion drops rather suddenly when, as at the close of his Old and New Faith, he takes a constructive, an edifying tone. One feels, at least, tliat it takes a very thorough -going Germanism to enable him to indicate Goethe's Elective Affinities, or the libretto of the Magic Flute, " wliich no less a man than Hegel has long ago demonstrated to be a very good text," ^ as a sample of the consolations to which mankind, disabused of ancient errors, will always be enabled to cling. Et^ tiXJieX' 'Apyov<i fMrj hiaTrrdcrOai (TKa.(f>os KoA^wv €<s aTav Kvaveas ^vfi7rXt]ydSa<s — Would that the band of adventurous critics had never sailed between the clashing rocks of Tradition and Authority in quest of truth, if the golden treasure is to be set forth for worship by hands like these ! In F. C. Baur, again, the combination of sagacity and naivete is German in a more agreeable way. Much of his work commands our adhesion, all of it deserves our respect. Never was there a more ingeni- ous professor. But his outlook on life has not en- abled him to imagine any early Christian writer less ingenious or professorial than himself. To keep well informed of each other's favourite doctrines, and tlien promptly to issue TcTidcnz- Schriften, or academical programmes, designed, beneath an appearance of amity, to put those doctrines down — such, it seems, was the ^ TIlc Old Faith and tlic Nnr, j). 118, Eii«ilisli tninshition. IV.] EENEST RENAN. 207 leading preoccupation of these holy men. Nay, to such a pitch of subtlety did they push, in Baur's view, their damning insinuations, that surely the worst fate which pseudo-Paul could have wished for pseudo-Peter, or pseudo-Peter for pseudo-Paul, would have been that he should be called on to explain his own sons-entendus to the satisfaction of the Tiibingen school. M. Eenan's danger certainly does not lie in the direction of narrowness or pedantry. And indeed French tact, French elegance, French propriety of thought and expression, are so often and so justly proposed as models to our English bluffness and crudity, that there seems some presumption in taking to task, for faults of taste, the greatest living master of French prose. Yet it is surely no insular coldness that makes us shrink, for instance, from the phrase " Toulant d'extases en extases," as descriptive of the ideally religious man, or dislike the constant repeti- tion of such words as ravissant and ddicieux in con- nection with the person and teachings of Christ. And when we find M. Eenan suggesting that Jesus at Gethsemane may have looked back with a sigh on the young girls of Galilee who, under other circum- stances, might have made his bliss, we feel that from the point of view of art alone — supposing that he were telling a tale like that of Prometheus on Caucasus or Hercules on (Eta — the expression is a blunder worse than a blasphemy. A mistake like this brings its own retribution with it, and it would be almost unkind to 208 MODERN ESSAYS. [iv. wish M. Renan to be fully aware of the extremity of bad taste which almost all his readers find in tliis un- lucky passage. ^// his readers, I was going to say, but I remembered hearing of a sympathetic lady who laid down the Vie de Jesus with a sigh, exclaiming, " Quel dommage que tout 9a ne finit pas par un mariage ! " A few excisions would remove this sentimental taint, which indeed seldom appeal's except in the Vie de Jesus, as an element in the quasi-poetical tone in which that volume is written ; a tone which, to Eng- lish taste at least, is on M. Renan's lips entirely mis- taken and disadvantageous — a gratuitous divergence into a realm which is beyond his mastery. Another element in M. Eenan's " personal equation" may be noticed as sometimes modifying his historical views. I mean his exclusively contemplative life, and the mood of gentle irony which such a life has begotten. In dealing with almost all subjects this disengagement of temper is an unmixed advantage. When the theme is one of the heroes of philosophy — a Marcus Aurelius or a Spinoza — the reader reaps the full benefit of this similarity between author and subject ; their kinship in wise elevation and disen- chanted calm. r>ut M. Renan's favourite subjects are chosen from a race of men of nature, as he has himself remarked, as different as possible from his own. It is the founders of religions whose career he loves to trace; and it is always perceptible how fur his spontaneous sympathy carries him with them, and where his ad- IV.] ERNEST EENAN. 209 miration for them becomes almost pity in that they had so little conception of the relativity of truth, the limitations of virtue, the vanity of all things be- neath the sun. The Book of Job is the theme of the finest of his Old Testament expositions ; the mournful Preacher is in his eyes " the most inspired of the sacred writers." < In a well-known passage he has given a half hum- orous expression to the kind of provocation excited in his mind by St. Paul's confident self-assurance and dominating force of faith : " Certes, une mort obscure pour le fougueux apotre a quelque chose qui nous sourit. Nous aimerions a rever Paul sceptique, naufrag6, abandonn6, trahi par les siens, seul, atteint du d6senchanteinent de la vieillesse ; il nous plairait que les ^cailles lui fussent tombees une seconde fois des yeux, et notre incredulity douce aurait sa petite revanche si le plus dogmatique des hommes 6tait mort triste, d6ses- p6r6 (disons mieux, tranquille), sus quelque rivage ou quel- que route de I'Espagne, en disant lui aussi, * Ergo erravi ! ' " It would, however, be grossly unfair to speak as if M. Eenan's peculiar temperament — emotional at once and philosophic — were productive, in his historical pictures, only of distortion and melodrama. So far is this from being the case that there is hardly a page of his history where there may not be found some touch of feeling which has real beauty, some connection of deep significance between early Christian faith and practice and the meditations of other times and men. VOL. IL p 210 MODERN ESSAYS. [iv. In his account of the resurrection, for instance, amidst much which may well seem to us merely futile, he has brought out, as few before him had ever done, what is in one sense the profoundest lesson which the life of Jesus has to teach. He has described, that is to say, the absorbing power with which one high affection may possess the soul ; and most of all where wrongs nobly borne have added to reverence a solemn com- passion, and given its last intensity to love. The object of that affection fades from our bodily sight, but stands forth more plainly revealed in its essential beauty ; succeeding life is guided and glorified by the transcendent memory, and love is transfigured into worship in the deep of the heart. M. Eenan has had the skill to make us feel how glorious a lot was theirs, who through all perils carried in their bosoms this ineffaceable joy ; how true were the words which said that " kings have desired to see the things which ye see, and have not seen them." Again, a kindred spirit of unworldhness has enabled M. Eenan to interpret with wise conviction the beati- tude of the poor. He has dwelt on the tie which unites all those whose aim it is to subserve the spirit- ual welfare of men, and who turn with indiHerence or distaste from the rewards which the workl bestows on its material benefactors. Speaking of the sect of tliose who took this evangelic poverty in its strictest sense he says : — " Lion que vitu drpassc et oubhe, I'dibionisine laissa dans IV.] ERNEST REN AN. 211 toute I'histoire des institutions chr^tiennes un levain qui ne se perdit pas. . . . Le grand mouvement ombrien du XIIP siecle, qui est, entre tous les essais de fondation re- ligieuse, celui qui ressemblait le plus au mouvement galil^en, se fit tout entier au nom de la pauvret6. Frangois d' Assise, riiomme du monde qui, par son exquise bont6, sa commun- ion delicate, fine et tendre avec la vie universelle, a le plus ressembl6 k Jesus, fut un pauvre. . . . L'liumanit6, pour porter son fardeau, a besoin de croire qu'elle n'est pas completement pay6e par son salaire. Le plus grand ser- vice qu'on puisse lui rendre est de lui r6p6ter souvent qu'elle ne vit pas seulement de pain." And again : — " La noblesse et le bonbeur de la pauvret^, — c'etait peut- etre la plus grande v6rit6 du christianisme, celle par la- quelle il a r6ussi et par laquelle il se survivra. En un sens, tous, tant que nous sommes, savants, artistes, pr^tres, ouv- riers des ceuvres d6sint6ress6es, nous avons encore le droit de nous appeler des 6bionim. L'ami du vrai, du beau et du bien n'admet jamais qu'il touche une retribution. Les choses de I'ame n'ont pas de prix ; au savant qui I'^claire, au pretre qui la moralise, au poete et k I'artiste qui la char- ment, rhumanit6 ne donnera jamais qu'une aumdne, totale- ment disproportionn^e avec ce qu'elle regoit." It is thus indeed. The evangelic poverty is not so much a deliberate as an unconscious abstinence from that which most men desire ; or if conscious, then conscious not with self-applauding effort, but with the glad indifference of one who has liis treasure other- where. 212 MODERN ESSAYS. [iv. It is needless to multiply instances to show that in M. Kenan's case, as in all others, the law prevails that to eyes which read aright the book reveals the author, so that the recounters of a history which holds a place for all of greatness and goodness to which man's soul can reach may give, indeed, artistic expression to much which is beyond their ken, but convincing reality to such things only as they themselves have known. A more perplexing topic remains behind, a topic which it is difficult to discuss briefly, but which cannot be passed over in silence in any serious attempt to estimate the value of M. Eenan's work : I mean his treatment of the miraculous element in the Gospel history. I must begin by saying that I do not think that it can be maintained that he is ever consciously unfair. He is not animated, as so many free-thinkers have been, by a spirit of malignity against the Chris- tian faith. On the contrary, his expressed sympathies are always with that faith ; and those who cannot understand so vigorous a criticism conducted in so mild a spirit are apt to think him hypocritically enthusiastic and offensively patronising. The fact is that the whole gist of his controversy is included in a single frank assumption. He begins his history by avowedly exclud- ing all that is miraculous or m/pcniatural from the domain of the scientific historian. Wlien a story is told, he says, which includes such elements as these, we simply know that it is told incorrectly. We may not always be able to give a plausible account uf our IV.] EENEST RENAN. 213 own of the events in question. But if we cannot explain the miraculous story we may simply let it alone, and feel certain that there is some explanation to it which it is now impossible to recover. It is obvious that a wholesale assumption of this kind relieves the sceptical historian from much polemic in detail. He takes, once for all, the full advantage which the present commanding attitude of Science gives him, and he is not obliged, as Voltaire or Gibbon were obliged, to meet each miracle separately with argument or sarcasm. He is not therefore tempted, as they were tempted, to minimise the importance of his theme, or to emphasise its less dignified aspects. On the contrary, he will be disposed to bring out all its meaning, and to show, if he can, that the story possesses a truer grandeur and impressiveness when narrated in the scientific rather than in the theological temper. To this line of argument we shall best reply, not by controverting his treatment of individual points, but by some such careful definition of the disputed field as may (if this be possible) reduce the conflict between science and orthodoxy from the shape which it too often assumes of a sheer and barren contradic- tion to some form in which an ultimate reconcilement may be at least conceivable. Let us attempt, therefore, to give the view of each party in its most moderate and non-polemical form. And first let us reject all question- begging terms — all phrases such as " violation of the order of Nature," or " direct interposition of tlie Deity," 214 MODERN ESSAYS. [iv. which are not mere descriptions of recorded facts, but descriptions coloured, the first by anti-theological, the second by theological feeling. Phrases such as these have often been felt as repugnant both by the deeply religious and by the calmly scientific mind. " God," says St. Augustine in a well-known passage,^ " does nothing against Nature. When we say that He does so we mean that He does something against Nature as we know it — in its familiar and ordinary way — but against the hidiest laws of Nature He no more acts than He acts against Himself." Following this weighty hint, let us altogether dis- pense with unproved assumptions and merely polemical antitheses. Let us not oppose law and miracle, for whatever abnormal phenomena may have occun^ed must (as we shall all now feel with St. Augusthie) have occurred consistently with eternal law. Let us not oppose the natural and the supernatural, for " God does nothing against Nature," and all that these two terms can mean is " what we expect to see in nature," and " what we do not expect to see." Avoiding, then, these verbal fallacies, let us con- sider with what various prepossessions the study of the Gospel records is usually approached. On each side of the controversy we find a reasonable prepossession pushed too often to an unreasonable extreme. The 1 Contra Famtum, xxvi. 3. On this passage see (for instance) Archbishop Trcncli in tlio preface to liis treatise On tfic Miracles, as an example of modern ortliodoxy enforcing St. Augustine's view. IV.] ERNEST REN AN. 215 Christian begins by saying : " Many facts point to the existence of a beneficent Kuler of the Universe. If there be such a Euler, it is probable that he would wish to make some revelation of himself ; and such a revelation would probably be accompanied with un- usual phenomena." This may well be thought reason- able ; but it is not reasonable to go on to affirm : *' This revelation is in fact contained solely in a certain set of men, called the Church, or a certain set of books, called the Bible ; these teach absolute truth, and all soi-disant revelations elsewhere are absolutely untrust- worthy." There is no basis admissible by historical science on which such assertions as these can rest. On the other hand, the savant begins by saying : " Unusual events, alleged to have happened in un- critical times, and not observed to recur in critical and scientific times, are unworthy of credence." This may well be thought reasonable ; but it is not reason- able to go on to affirm : " Alleged phenomena, which cannot be repeated at pleasure, nor explained by the known laws of nature, must be referred to illusion or imposture." There is no scientific basis on which such an assertion as this can rest. For our knowledge of the laws of nature is in its infancy ; many observed phenomena are admittedly as yet inexplicable, and among explicable phenomena there are a countless number which we cannot repeat at will. Dismissing, then, the extravagances of either side, our position seems to be this. It is not unreasonable 216 MODERN ESSAYS. [iv. to suppose that such a life and work as Christ's upon earth was accompanied by some abnormal phenomena. But the age in which these occurred, if they did occur, was so uncritical, and the accounts which have reached us are so surprising, that we are bound to suspend our acceptance of the wonders until some confirmatory evidence can be adduced from later times as to the possibility of such occurrences. And we find that substantially this is the position of the Catholic and the Orthodox Cliurches, which corroborate evangelical by ecclesiastical miracles, alleged by Eome especially to have continued in unbroken series down to the pre- sent day. Protestants, disgusted by the fraud and folly which they discern in connection with some of these ecclesiastical miracles, reject them in toto, but since the evidence for some among them is, according to ordinary historical canons, much stronger than for some of the evangelical ones, the Protestant position is maintained with difficulty against Catholic assaults. Science, on the other hand, classes all such abnor- mal events, whetlier recorded in the Gospels, in the " Acta Sanctorum," or elsewhere, in the same category of error. She points to the fact that the tendency to credit them diminishes with the spread of enlighten- ment, and she shows a marked reluctance to enter on their discussion in detail. It is easy to see that this reluctance is natural, and up to a certain point salu- tary, but also that there are transient circumstances in the position of science wliich dispose lier at j)resent to IV.] ERNEST EENAN. 217 push to an unphilosophical extent her aversion to such forms of inquiry. Her reluctance is natural : for the subject is beset with difficulties of a baffling and dis- tasteful kind. The observer, like Franklin waiting for his thunderstorms, must catch his abnormal phenomena when and where he can. Like an ethnologist classi- fying savage religions on the strength of the reports of traders or of missionaries, he must often depend on the accounts of witnesses who are wholly unaccustomed to observe, or who are accustomed to observe in precisely the wrong way. Like the registrar of hysterical cases, he will have to extract his history of symptoms from persons whose whole energies are devoted to deceiving him. He will be tempted to pronounce Simon Magus the only wonder-worker who has left successors, and to retire in disgust from the task of discriminating the shades of fraud and systematising the stages of folly. These causes of scientific repulsion, moreover, are reinforced (as above intimated) by another, which belongs to a less philosophical side of the savanfs nature. Science, like all strong forces which have been too long repressed and are now asserting themselves in triumph, must necessarily be at first intolerant of the power which persecuted her. In the disdainful dis- missal of all such evidence in favour (for instance) of aj)paritions after death as might be supposed to hang together in some sense with the Gospel narrative, there is more to be seen than a mere cool scientific scepti- cism. There is a requital of decaying tyranny with 218 MODERN ESSAYS. [iv. strengthening scorn ; tliere is a tacit rejoinder to the sentence on Galileo. But from whatever source it has arisen, this reluc- tance of science to examine into these alleged abnor- malities has probably been thus far of advantage to mankind. It was primarily essential that the idea of unvar3dng law should get possession of men's minds ; that Malebranche's doctrine, " Dieu n'agit pas par des volont^s particulieres," should descend from the lecture- room into the street. And in order to establish or to popularise a great generalisation it may be desirable to keep out of sight for a time some few apparent excep- tions, which will be better dealt with when the general principles of the subject shall have become familiar and easy to handle. It may be said, I think, that this is now the case with the doctrine of the fixity of natural laws. That this doctrine has fairly taken possession of the pubKc mind is proved — and it is the only thing which is proved — by the rapid decline in the general belief in the reality of such phenomena as have been popularly held to be violations of law, to be miracles. In times when miracles were thought to be probable things, abnormalities were readily credited, and set down as miraculous. But now that miracles are looked on as impossible things, abnormalities, if they occur, will find no disposition in the popular mind to accept them in spite of their abnormality. The report of them will die away in its battle with the resisting medium, — the IV.] ERNEST RENAN. 219 belief that Nature is uniform, and that her laws are mostly known. " Phenomena of this kind," it is sometimes said, " need not now be disproved, for they are disbelieved without formal disproof." Precisely so ; they are dis- believed because they are traditionally supposed to be violations of natural law, and we know now that natural laws are never violated. But this argument has a flaw in it. Por until such phenomena are not only disbelieved, but weighed and sifted, we cannot tell whether they are in truth violations of natural law or not. Moreover, as soon as these abnormalities are con- ceived as possibly reducible to law, it is seen how un- philosophical it is to mass them all together. When they were looked upon as violations of law, there was certainly a kind of absurdity in claiming " moderation " for the Gospel miracles. But if the Gospels be taken as a humanly inaccurate record of unusual but strictly natural phenomena, it is but reasonable to sift these phenomena among themselves. All the causes alleged as working for the distortion of the history may in fact have worked, and may have had their share in shaping the account ; and yet there may be a residuum highly important both to science and to religion. Historical criticism shows us that some of these phenomena are supported by better evidence than others. Scientific criticism tells us that some of them come nearer than others to known analogy. The scientific way of deal- 220 MODERN ESSAYS. [nr. ing with them, then, will be — not to ignore all of them equally — but to begin with those which are most strongly affirmed, and for whose subsequent repetition there is also most evidence, and to examine in detail what that evidence is worth. For instance ; none of these wonders are more strongly affirmed than that Christ healed the sick with his touch, and appeared to his disciples after death. Can it be said, or rather would it be said, if no professional pedantry intervened, that the action of one human organism on another is thoroughly understood ? that the phenomena called hypnotism or mesmerism have been explained? that the physiological doctrine as regards what is styled the influence of mind on body is settled or complete ? Can it be said, or rather would it be said, if no polemi- cal passion were involved, that the widely - spread accounts of apparitions seen at the moment of death, or soon after death, have been collected and scrutinised as they would have been had the testimony related to any other class of facts ? Notoriously they have not been so collected and so weighed. And the reason for this is perhaps to be sought in a want rather than an excess of confidence felt by men of science in the strength of their own central position, — the immutable regularity of the course of Nature. They have shunned all mention of such phenomena from a vague fear that if they were established the spiritual world would be found to be intruding on the material world; that, as they have sometimes naively expressed it, " iin incal- IV.] ERNEST REN AN. 221 culable element would be introduced which would interfere with the certainty of all experiments." The scientific answer to this of course is, that whatever worlds, whatever phenomena exist, are governed by rigid law, and that all elements in all problems are incalculable only till they are calculated. The true disciple of science should desire to bring all regions, however strange and remote, under her sway. They may be productive in ways which he can little imagine. Some of the outlying facts whose production Aristotle tranquilly ascribed to " chance and spontaneity " have proved the corner-stones of later discovery. And the bizarre but obstinately recurring phenomena which thus far have been inadequately attested and incompletely disproved, which have been left as the nucleus of legend and the nidus of charlatanerie, may in their turn form the starting-point for wider generalisations, for unexpected confirmations of universal law. A his- tory of primitive Christianity which sets them altogether aside may be the clearest and most consistent history of which existing knowledge admits, but it can only be a provisional one. It can hardly be expected, for instance, that the common sense of the public will permanently accept any of the present critical explana- tions of the alleged appearances of Christ after death. It will not accept the view of Strauss, according to which the " mythopoeic faculty " creates a legend without an author and without a beginning ; so that when St. Paul says " He was seen of Ce^Dhas, then of 222 MODERN ESSAYS. [iv. the twelve," he is repeating about acquaintances of liis own an extraordinary assertion, which was never origin- ated by any definite person on any definite grounds, but which somehow proved so persuasive to the very men who were best able to contradict it that they were willing to suffer death for its truth. Nor will the world be contented with the theory according to which Christ was never really killed at all, but was smuggled by some unknown disciples into the room where the Twelve sat at meat, and then disappeared unaccount- ably from the historic scene, after crowning a divine life with a bogus resurrection. Nor will men continue to believe — if anybody besides M. Kenan believes it now — that the faithful were indeed again and acjain convinced that their risen Master was standing visibly among them, but thought this because there was an accidental noise, or a puff of air, or even an Hrangc miroitement, an atmospheric effect. An Strange miroitc- ment ! l*aley's Evidences is not a subtle book nor a spiritual book. But one wishes that the robust Paley with his " twelve men of known probity " were alive again to deal with hypotlieses like this. The Apostles were not so much like a British jury as Paley im- agined them. But they were more like a British jury than like a parcel of hysterical monomaniacs. And if, as we must hold, the common sense of mankind will insist on feeling that the marvels of the New Testament history have as yet neither been ex- plained away nor explained, so also will it assuredly IV.] ERNEST RENAN. 223 refuse to concur with the view, often expressed both in the scientific and the theological camps, according to which these marvels are after all unimportant, the spiritual content of the Gospels is everything, and religion and science alike may be glad to get rid of the miracles as soon as possible. According to the cruder view of the Gospel wonders, indeed, this would be reasonable enough. To wish to convert men by magic, to prove theological dogmas by upsetting the sequence of things, this is neither truly religious nor truly scientific. But if these Gospel signs and wonders are considered as indications of laws which embrace, and in a sense unite, the seen and the unseen worlds, then surely it is of immense importance to science that they should occur anywhere, and of immense importance to Christianity that they should occur in connection with the foundation of that faith. It is indeed true that Christianity — understood in our days, it may perhaps be asserted, more profoundly than ever before — has brought to us inestimable bless- ings which no possible view of the wonders narrated in the Gospels could now take away. It has given us a conception of the universe which most minds accept as at once the loftiest and the most intelligible to which the spirit of man has attained ; it has taught us a temper — the temper as of a child towards an unseen Father — which alone, as we now feel, can bring peace to the heart. It is true, moreover, that the best men of all schools of thought are ever uniting more closely 224 MODERN ESSAYS. [iv. in the resolve to be practically Christian — to look on the labouring universe with this high affiance, to shape life after this pattern of self-sacrificing love, whatever the universe and life may really be — though the uni- verse be a lonely waste of ether and atoms, and life a momentary consciousness which perishes with the brain's decay. So far will philosophy carry good and wise men. But even the best and the wisest men would prefer to rest their practical philosophy upon a basis of ascertained facts. And for the " hard-headed artisan," " the sceptical inquirer," the myriads of stubborn souls to which Christianity has a message to bring — for such men facts are everything, and philosophy without facts is a sentimental dream. They will never cease to desire actual evidence of another world which may develop the faculties, prolong the affections, redress the injustices of this. And they will feel more and more strongly, as the scientific spirit spreads, that such evidence cannot come to us conclusively, either through lofty ideas generated within our own minds, or through traditions which reach us faintly from an ever-receding Past. Science rests not on intuition, nor on tradition, but on patiently accumulated observations which on a sudden flash into a law. One of the most interesting of M. Eenan's essays ^ treats of the religious future of the civilised world. He indicates therein, witli a delicacy wliich it would be unfair to epitomise, which parts of existing religion are 1 VAvcnir liclitjicux dcs SocieUs Modcrncs. IV.] ERNEST RENAN. 225 destined to survive and which to disappear. Tie pre- dicts on the whole an increase of reKgious sentiment, expressing itself in a " free Christianity," whose pliant dogmas, selected by each mind as its need may prompt it, will leave room for the development of man's spirit- ual nature in many different ways. But he allows for the growth of no new element, the foundation of no surer faith. He assumes rather that mankind will resign themselves to the long uncertainty, and will confront at last the eternal problems with scarce an effort for their solution. Even such was the spirit in which Socrates, — the genuine, the characteristic Socrates, shrewdest of mortal men, — looked out on the various theories of the constitution of the visible universe which he found in favour around him. Convinced of the arbitrariness of the explanations, of the inaccessibility of the pheno- mena, he insisted that nothing more could be known, or should be inquired, concerning the visible universe save that its substance and operations were august and divine; and he summoned the attention of men to matters where improvement was urgent and knowledge possible, the conduct and the laws of their moral being. The parallel is an instructive one. For we shall find, perhaps, on examination, that the old philosopher's despair of discovering the truth about the physical world, and the modern savant's despair of discovering the truth about the spiritual world, are the reactions against precisely the same form of error on the part VOL. II. Q 226 MODERN ESSAYS. [iv. of those who have taken in hand to expound the mysteries of tlie visible universe or of that which is unseen. For the founders of religions have hitherto dealt in the same way with the invisible world as Tliales or Anaximander dealt with the visible. They have attempted to begin at once with the highest generalisations. Starting from the existence of a God, — the highest of all possible truths, and the least capable of being accurately conceived or defined, — they have proceeded downwards to explain or justify his dealings with man. They have assumed that the things which are of most importance to us are there- fore the things which we are most likely to be enabled to know. Some inquirers have boldly avowed them- selves unable to believe anything inconsistent with their notions of absolute right. Others have accepted with resignation some mysterious message of wrath and doom. But all alike have agreed in disdaining any knowledge of things unseen save such as is of a lofty character, and capable of throwing direct light on the destinies of man. It is possible that in all this mankind have begun at the wrong end. The analogy of physical discovery, at any rate, suggests that the truths which we learn first are not the liighest truths, nor the most attractive truths, nor the truths which most concern ourselves. The chemist begins witli tlie production of fetid gases and not of gold ; the physiologist must deal with bone and cartilage before he gets to nerve and brain. Tlie IV.] ERNEST RENAN. 227 more interesting to us anything is, the less, and not the more, are we likely to know about it. We must learn first not what we are most eager to learn, but what fits on best to what we know already. Let us apply this analogy to the spiritual world. Let us consider how along that strange road also we may proceed systematically from the most complex of the things which we have learnt already to the simplest of those which we have yet to learn. And here we must first reflect that although it is possible, indeed, that any number of worlds, or of states of being, may exist, differing from our world or from each other in inconceivable ways, yet the only difference which we can take account of, — the only line of de- marcation which science can draw, — is between things which can, or which cannot, be cognised by our existing faculties ; or, to speak more accurately, between things which have become a part of our common knowledge, and things which as yet can only be imagined or supposed ; — though this imagination may indeed sus- tain the intensest faith and hope. And this line of demarcation is not a permanent and immovable one : experience shows us no broad gulf between the sensible and the super-sensible, the seen and the un- seen. On the contrary, it is the continual work of science to render that which is incognisable cognisable, that which is unperceived perceptible, that which is fitfully seen and uncontrollable habitually manifest and controlled. In this process she is constantly 228 MODERN ESSAYS. [iv. encroaching on the domain of old religions, and bring- ing things which once seemed so unearthly that they must needs be divine into her ordinary categories of observation and experiment. A subtler ether than ever hung round the windless Olympus is now the sub- ject of differential equations. And man — Kepawov Kpelaaov €vpr]Kco<; ^\6ya — has tamed for his use and fixed for his illumination the very flash and bolt of Jove. There is no need to multiply instances. Science, while perpetually denying an unseen world, is per- petually revealing it. Meantime we are unavoidably subject to the same illusion as our fathers. We too fancy that a great gulf surrounds our field of vision ; there must be void or mystery where we cease to see. Aristotle, having done more than any one before or since to explain the affairs of this planet, relcG^ated liis unknowable to the fixed stars. The nature of the stars, he says, is eternal, and the first essences which they represent divine.^ Our standpoint now is not the same as Aristotle's. But we have no more reason than he had to take our mental horizon for an objective line. If, then (apart from the inspirations of the in- dividual soul), we are asked in what manner we can hope to obtain definite knowledge about spiritual things, the answer which we shall be forced to give will seem, like the prophet's saying, Wash in Jordan and he clcari, at once a disappointing platitude and a ^ Mcluph. xii. 8. IT.] ERNEST RENAN. 229 wild chimera. For we can reply only : In the same way as we have obtained definite knowledge about physical things. The things which we now call sensible or natural we have learnt by following scientific methods up to a certain point. The things which we still call supra-sensible or supernatural we shall learn by following those methods farther still. But while we thus commit ourselves to science with loyal con- fidence, we shall call on her to assume the tone of an unquestioned monarch rather than of a successful usurper. All phenomena are her undoubted subjects ; let her press all into her service, and not ignore or proscribe any because ignorance may have misrepre- sented them, or theology misused. Let her find her profit where she may, without contempt and without prepossession, in the superstitions of the savage as in the speculations of the sage. But this has yet to be. And even if, more doggedly persistent herein than M. Eenan, we cannot bring ourselves to allow that religious aspiration and emotion are all that can be ours, and that the effort after a systematic knowledge of the unseen world must be abandoned in despair, we may nevertheless feel a strong sympathy with the attitude in which he con- fronts the deep spiritual unsettlement which divides the modern world. " ' La plus rude des peincs/ he says,^ ' par lesquelles 1 Etudes d^Histoire Jlcligiezcsc (preface). 230 MODERN ESSAYS. [iv. rhomme arrive a la vie r6fl^chie expie sa position excep- tionnelle est sans doute de se voir ainsi isol6 de la grande famille religieuse, oti sont les meilleures ames du monde, et de songer que les personnes avec lesquelles il aimerait le mieux etre en communion morale doivent forc6ment le regarder comme pervers. II faut etre bien stir de soi pour ne point se troubler quand les femmes et les enfants joignent leurs mains pour vous dire, Croyez comme nous ! On se console en songeant que cette scission entre les parties simples et les parties cultiv^es de I'humanit^ est une loi fatale de I'^tat que nous traversons, et qu'il est une region sup6rieure des ames 61ev6es, dans laquelle se recon- trent souvent sans s'en douter, ceux qui s'anath^matisent ; cit6 id6ale que contempla le Voyant de I'Apocalypse, oh se pressait une foule que nul ne pouvait compter, de toute tribu, de toute nation, de toute langue, proclamant d'une seule voix le symbole dans lequel tous se rt^imissent : ' Saint, saint, saint, celui qui est, qui a 6t6, et qui sera ! " " Again he says ^ (and the few lines that I quote contain the upshot of almost all his teaching) : — " Ja'i cru servir la religion en essayant de la transporter dans la region de I'inattaquable, au-deL\ des dogmes particuliers et des croyances sumaturelles. Si celles-ci viennent k crouler il ne faut pas que la religion croule, et un jour viendra peut-etre oh ceux qui me reprochent comme un crime cette distinction entre le fond imj^^rissable de la religion et ses formes passag^res seront lieureux de chercher un refuge contre des attaques brutales derri^re I'abri qu'il s ont d6daign6." Passages of this kind may surely be welcomed even * Essais de Morale ct dc Critique (profaco). IV.] ERNEST REN AN. 231 by those who feel the fullest confidence in the ultimate victory of a more definite form of faith. They show, at least, the nobler aspect of an age of transition, the real advantage which times of doubt and hesitancy may bring to many men in calling out, as it were, the reserve forces of their nature, in compelling them to confront the great problems and to realise what it is that they hold most dear. One might too often be led to think, by the tone of its defenders, that the Christian religion was a kind of transcendental insur- ance company ; that its object was merely to enable men to enjoy this temporal life without anxiety as to the eternal. But this is not so. The object of all true religion is not the tranquillity, but the life of the spirit ; and our modern days have seen this life grow strong and vigorous in regions where it has re- ceived no conscious sustenance from an environing Power. It would be rash to turn aside from fellow- ship with such men because their language jars on orthodox tradition. " Le blaspheme des grands esprits," as M. Eenan has said in words that recall the deepest thoughts of Pascal — " le blaspheme des grands esprits est plus agr6able k Dieu que la pri^re int6ress6e de rhomme vulgaire ; car, bien que le blaspheme r6ponde k une vue incomplete des choses, il renferme une part de protestation juste, tandis que I'^goisme ne contient aucune parcelle de v6rit6." I must draw to a conclusion. Yet lest, amid criticism and controversy, I may seem to have rendered 232 MODERN ESSAYS. [iv imperfectly the substantive character and lessons of one above whose voice, for width and wisdom, it were hard to place the voice of any living teacher. I must yet find room for two passages which represent him at his best. The first was written at a crisis of private sorrow and public contention, and spoke out, in answer to a swift emergency, the inward habit of his soul. " 'J'ai vu la mort,' ^ he said, * de tres-pr^s. J'ai perdu le gotit de ces jeux frivoles oil ron peut prendre plaisir quand on n'a pas encore souflfert. Les soucis de pygmies, dans lesquels s'use la vie, n'ont plus beaucoup de sens pour moi. J'ai, au contraire, rapport6 du seuil de I'infini une foi plus vive que jamais dans la r^alit6 superieure du monde id6al. C'est lui qui est, et le monde physique qui parait etre. Fort de cette conviction, j 'attends I'avenir avec calme. La conscience de bien fair sufiit k mon repos, Dieu m'ayant donn6 pour tout ce qui est stranger a ma vie morale une parf aite indifi'^rence. ' " The last passage which I shall quote is one written in calmness, not in exaltation." It seems to me to contain thoughts as lofty, in language as clear and noble, as any meditation on these eternal things wliicli our age has known. " 8i hi religion n'6tait que le fruit du calcul naif par loquel rhommc veut retrouvcr au dela de la tonibo le fruit dcs placements vertucux qu'il a faits ici-bas rhomme y serait siirtout portc dans ses moments d'egoismc. Or, c'est dans ses muilleiirs moments quo I'homme est ruligieux, 1 La Chairc iVlUhrcu au ColUgc de France. 2 From VAvcnir Jieligicux dcs SocUtis Modcmcs. IV.] ERNEST RENAN. 233 c'est quand il est bon qu'il veut que la vertu corresponde a im ordre 6ternel, c'est quand il contemple les choses d'une maniere d6sint6ress6e qu'il trouve la mort r6voltante et absurde. Disons done hardiment que la religion est un produit de rhomme normal, que riiomme est le plus dans le vrai quand il est le plus religieux et le plus assur6 d'une destinee infinie; mais ^cartons toute confiance absolue dans les images qui servent k exprimer cette destinee, et croyons seulement que la r6alit6 doit etre fort sup6rieure k ce qu'il est permis au sentiment de d6sirer et a la fantaisie d'imaginer. On crut que la science allait diminuer le monde. En r^alit^ elle I'a infiniment agrandi. La terre semblable k un disque, le soleil gros comme le P6loponese, les 6toiles roulant a quelques lieues de hauteur sur les rainures d'une votite solide, un univers ferm6, entoure de iiiurailles, cintre comme un cofFre, voila le systeme du monde le plus splendide que Ton eut pu concevoir. . . . Croyons hardiment que le systeme du monde moral est de meme superieur a nos symboles. . . . Qui sait si la meta- physique et la th^ologie du pass6 ne seront pas a celles que le progres de la speculation r6v61era un jour ce que le cosmos d'Anaximene ou d'Indicopleust6s est au cosmos de Laplace et de Humboldt 1 " And now, perhaps, enougli indication has been given of the temper in which this subtlest of seekers after God approaches the mystery on whose skirts we dwell. The value of his reflections it must be left in great part for the succeeding age to determine. All that can be claimed for him, — that must be claimed now and ever by honest men for honest men, — is that disagreement should carry with it no detraction ; that 234 MODERN ESSAYS. [iv. there should never be anything but honour paid to the search for truth. " Things are what they are," said Bishop Butler, " and their consequences will be what they will be ; why, then, should we wish to be deceived ? " EI? o'lwvo<; apiaro^ — the one best of omens is that we our- selves be brave and true. " Light ! though thou slay us in the light !" is the aspiration of all noble souls. Nor was it in vain that that prayer of Ajax was uttered beside Scamander's shore. The cloud-veil was withdrawn at his bidding, and light was given indeed ; but it was not destruction which it pleased Zeus to send for the sons of the Achaeans, but entry into sacred Ilium, and a return to their immemorial home. ARCHBISHOP TRENCH'S POEMS. 6\j3los oaTLS Idibv eKeiva Kol\av elcTLV viro xQova.' olSeu fiev ^iov Kelpos Tekevrav, oWev 5k 5l6(x8otov dpxdu. Even in these days of eager appreciation, of ready eulogy, one living Englishman who may fairly lay claim to the title of poet seems as yet to have received but inade- quate recognition. Yet he is of all English poets the one whose position in the world is the most conspicu- ous and considerable. But Dr. Trench's poems have in no wise depended upon his status as an ecclesiastic ; they have appealed to no party in the Church ; they have made their way by no organised praise or factiti- ous diffusion, but by slow pervasive contact with earnest and lonely minds. His public has been gradually won, and is gradually increasing ; there are many for whom his words have mingled themselves with Tennyson's in hours of bereavement, with Wordsworth's in hours of meditative calm. For there are many who have found in these poems the fit expression of a spirit by nature mournful, by conviction and courage serene ; dwelling, as it were. 236 l^IODERN ESSAYS. [v. beneath the pressure, but in the light, of Eternity ; a spirit stirred, indeed, by romance, and alive to martial adventure, but occupied chiefly with the profounder symbolism and occult significance of the world, and finding its congenial nourishment wheresoever Greek, or Persian, or Arabian, German or Spaniard, Jewish rabbi or mediaeval saint, has set wisdom in hidden apologues and has mingled mystery with song ; a spirit whose own utterances come rarely and with effort, and express for the most part only a massive wisdom, a jjnomic and sententious calm : but which under the stimulus of strong poetic sympathy, or of desolating bereavement, or merely of the more closely realised imminence of the unseen, will sometimes become as it were slowly enkindled from within, and for a while find grace and power to mix with those who through the weight and confusion of earthly things have fought upwards into the spiritual universe " their practicable way." I have mentioned poetic sympathy as one of the impulses which have most powerfully stimulated Dr. Trench's powers. The strongest instance of this is the influence of Pindar. And it is strange to reflect how subtle must that connection be between verbal melody and deep-seated emotion which enables not merely the thoughts and imaginations, but the very mood and temper of IMndar on some given day to reproduce themselves with such awakening intensity in the breast of a man so remote in language, nation, and faith. It v.] AEOHBISHOP TRENCH'S POEMS. 237 is strange to think that when Pindar had written down the words beginning Toy 81 TrajXTreiOrj yXvKvv r^^iOeoKTiv ttoOov TrpoaSauv "Upa — he had made it practically certain that whatever might befall Greece or her gods, in every generation of men who should thereafter be born there should be some at least to whom those words should carry a shock and exaltation hardly to be equalled by any personal de- light ; to whom they should sound as the very charter of heroism, the trumpet-call of honour and of joy. " Hidden are the keys," to use his own words, of the art which so wrought the fourth Pythian ode as that it should outlast the Parthenon : — " Seeing it was built To music, therefore never built at all, And therefore built for ever." In his Orpheus and the Sirens Dr. Trench gives us the peculiar pleasure which is afforded by a poem which is not a translation but a transmutation of some great remembered song ; melted afresh in the crucible of an understanding heart, and poured into a new shape which recalls without imitating the old : — • " High on the poop, with many a godlike peer, With heroes and with kings, the flower of Greece, That gathered at his word from far and near, To snatch the guarded fleece, " Great Jason stood, nor ever from the soil The anchor's brazen tooth unfastened, 238 MODERN ESSAYS. [v. Till, auspicating so his glorious toil, From golden cup he shed " Libations to the gods, to highest Jove, To Waves, and prospering Winds, to Night and Day, To all by whom befriended he might prove A favourable way." There is something in this stately opening, in the " ample pinion " of tliis high and manly strain, which recalls at a distance the sailing glory of the great original : — dpxos Iv Trpv/iva Trare/s' OvpavLSav lyyiiKipavvov Z-tjva^ KaC OiKVTTOpOVs Ki'/xarwv fUTTas dvefxo)v r cKaAet, vvKTas re nal ttuvtov KcXevOovs tt/xara t' ev(f)pova Kal (^iikiav vocttoio fioipav. But as the poem proceeds Dr. Trench quits the track of Pindar, and describes the encounter of the returning Argonauts with the Sirens in a passage which should be compared with Mr. Morris' beautiful treatment of the same situation in the Life and Death of Jason. " The winds, suspended by the charmed song, Shed treacherous calm about that fatal isle ; The waves, as though the halcyon o'er its young Were always brooding, smile ; " And every one that listens, presently Forgetteth home, and wife, and children dear, All noble enterprise and purpose high. And turns his pinnace here, — v.] ARCHBISHOP TRENCH'S POEMS. 239 " He turns his pinnace, warning taking none From the plain doom of all that went before, Whose bones lie bleaching in the wind and sun, And whiten all the shore. ".The heroes and the kings, the wise, the strong, That won the fleece with cunning and with might, They too are taken in the net of song. Snared in that false delight ; " Till ever loathlier seemed all toil to be. And that small space they yet must travel o'er Stretched, an immeasurable breadth of sea, Their fainting hearts before. " ' Let us turn hitherward our bark,' they cried, ' And, bathed in blisses of this happy isle, Past toil forgetting and to come, abide In joyfulness awhile ; " ' And then, refreshed, our tasks resume again, If other tasks we yet are bound unto. Combing the hoary tresses of the main With sharp swift keel anew.' " They are on the point of yielding to the charm when Orpheus sings : — " He singing (for mere words were now in vain. That melody so led all souls at will). Singing he played, and matched that earthborn strain With music sweeter still. " Of holier joy he sang, more true delight. In other happier isles for them reserved. 240 MODERN ESSAYS. Who, faithful here, from constancy and right And tnith have never swerved ; * ' How evermore the tempered ocean gales Breathe round those hidden islands of the blest, Steeped in the glory spread, when daylight fails Far in the sacred West ; *' How unto them, beyond our mortal night. Shines evermore in strength the golden day ; And meadows with purpureal roses bright Bloom round their feet alway ; " And plants of gold — some burn beneath the sea. And some, for garlands apt, the land doth bear. And lacks not many an incense-breathing tree, Enriching all that air. " Nor need is more, with sullen strength of hand, To vex the stubborn earth, or plough the main : They dwell apart, a calm heroic band, Not tasting toil or pain. " Nor sang he only of unfading bowers, Where they a tearless, painless age fulfil, In fields Elysian spending blissful hours, Remote from every ill ; " But of pure gladness found in temperance high. In duty owned, and reverenced with awi', Of man's true freedom, that may only lie In servitude to law ; " And how 'twas given through virtue to aspire To golden seats in ever-calm abodes ; — Of mortal men admitted to the choir Of lii'di imnioital (Jods." v.] ARCHBISHOP TEENCH'S POEMS. 241 It will be seen that Pindar's second Olympian Ode has furnished much of the inspiration of these noble stanzas. And it is a noticeable fact that Dr. Trench, himself the very type and norm of Christian and Anglican orthodoxy, has yet by the intensity of his pondering on the things unseen been led to feel the profound afi&nity which has existed between the hopes and creeds of such men in all times and countries as have set themselves to seek after God, and has thus been upheld in one of his highest moments by the Vision of the Pindaric Apocalypse, the tale told in the Mysteries of the blessedness of the just, Kelvav irapa hiairav, " in the life that is to be." The Poems from Eastern Sources afford many illustrations of this ten- dency of an inward and meditative faith to identify itself with the diverse but convergent imaginations of remote and ancient men. And in the Monk and Bird we may see how strongly this brooding spirit has been drawn towards that element in European life which has most resembled the monotony of the East, — the life of monks and hermits in the middle ages, — a life closed about with narrowing cloister-walls, yet having as it were a single opening on the infinite, like the chink which serves for the astronomer's outlook upon the abysses of heaven. In the Monk and Bird Dr. Trench has treated one of the profoundest of mediseval parables, — an apologue which deals with a real difficulty and suggests a real, though not a novel, solution. The difficulty lies in VOL. II. R 242 MODERN ESSAYS. [v. conceiving that our Unite faculties can be capable without weariness of infinite delight; the answer is the Platonic one, that the limitations of our faculties can even now by an occasional insight be discerned to be accidental and temporary, and not inherent in the percipient soul itself. Such insight, as Plato has urged, comes to us mainly through the passion of Love, which in its highest form refuses to conceive of its own satisfaction in less than infinite time. The author of this legend, if such legends have an author, has chosen a simpler experience through which to in- timate the spirit's essential power, and has imagined his Paradise in the unwonted prolongation of a single and elementary joy. The story is of " a cloistered solitary man," vowed to poverty and celibacy, and debarred from the ordinary interests and pleasures of mankind. " Yet we should err to deem that he was left To bear alone our being's lonely weight, Or that his soul was vacant and bereft Of pomp and inward state. " Morn, when before the sun his orb unshrouds, Swift as a beacon torcli the liglit has sped, Kindling the dusky summits of the clouds Each to a fiery red ; — "The slanted columns of tlie noon-day light, Let down into the bosom of the hills, Or sunset, that with golden vapour luight Tile piii'ple mountains lills, — v.] ARCHBISHOP TRENCH'S POEMS. 243 " These made him say : ' If God has so arrayed A fading world that quickly passes by, Such rich provision of delight has made For every human eye, '■ ' What shall the eyes that wait for Him survey, AVhere His own presence gloriously appears In worlds that were not founded for a day. But for eternal years T " But gradually a spiritual anxiety undermined this spiritual calm : — " For still the doubt came back, ' Can God provide For the large heart of man what shall not pall, Nor thro' eternal ages' endless tide On tired spirits fall? " ' Here but one look toward heaven will oft repress The crushing weight of undelightful care ; But what were there beyond, if weariness Should ever enter there V" How in this mood of mind he wanders in the woods, how he hears a bird singing and listens with rapt attention, and turns homeward with a dim sense of strangeness when the song is done, I must leave the reader to learn from the poem itself. I can only quote the concluding stanzas : — " Yet was it long ere he received the whole Of that strange wonder — how, while he had stood Lost in deep gladness of his inmost soul Far hidden in that wood. 244 ]^[ODERN ESSAYS. [v. " Three generations had gone down unseen Under the thin partition that is spread — The thin partition of thin earth — between The living and the dead. " Nor did he many days to earth belong, For like a pent-up stream, released again, The years arrested by the strength of song Came down on him amain ; " Sudden as a dissolving thaw in spring ; Gentle as when upon the first warm day Which sunny April in its train may bring The snow melts all away. " They placed him in his former cell, and there Watched him departing ; what few words he said Were of calm peace and gladness, with one care Mingled — one only dread — " Lest an eternity should not suffice To take the measure and the breadth and height Of what there is reserved in Paradise — Its ever-new deliirht." These stanzas will give an idea of Dr. Trench's characteristic style ; equally remote from convention and from extravagance, keeping as it were in the main track of the English language, and giving to simple and natural forms of speech a grave distinction and a melodious power. From the poems which derive their motive from external sources I pass on to the more purely subjec- v.] AECHBISHOP TRENCH'S POEMS. 245 tive pieces. The keynote of these is given in two weighty stanzas : — " Ufe, death, world, O time, grave, where all things flow, 'Tis yours to make our lot sublime With your great weight of woe. " Though sharpest anguish hearts may wring, Though bosoms torn may be. Yet suffering is a holy thing ; Without it what were we T' Elevation through sorrow is as distinctly the lesson which Dr. Trench has to teach as elevation throudi spiritual oneness with Nature is Wordsworth's lesson. And the sorrow with which this poet deals, which he so wholly vanquishes in the triumphant joy of the lines which he has called " The kingdom of God," is not merely such isolated grief as may fall upon an alert a^nd buoyant spirit, to be shaken off with a quick rush of hope, or with the life-bringing recurrence of the years. Eather it is that inbred and heavy gloom, that sense of oppression and of exile, of punishment and fall, which may be said to form the darker side of our " intimations of immortality," and which has made the lives, not of monks or recluses only, but of some of the best and most active men whose fates history records, one long struggle between the indomitable effort of courage and the paralysing relapse of pain. The Ode to Sleep, of which I quote the two last 24f5 MODERN ESSAYS. [v. stanzas, will illustrate this temper of mind ; and will show that the confident and deliberate hope which is the sum and outcome of this volume is something more than the easy optimism of tempem- ment or convention. " And therefore am I seeking to entwine A coronal of poppies for my head, Or wreathe it with a wreath engarlanded By Lethe's slumberous waters. Oh ! that mine Were some dim chamber turning to the north, With latticed casement, bedded deep in leaves, That opening with sweet murmur might look forth On quiet fields from broad o'erhanging eaves. And ever when the Spring her garland weaves Were darkened with encroaching ivy-trail And jagged vine-leaves' shade ; And all its pavement starred with blossoms pale Of jasmine, when the wind's least stir was made; Where the sunbeam were verdurous-cool, before It wound into that quiet nook, to paint With interspace of light and colour faint That tesselated floor. " How pleasant were it there in dim recess, In some close-curtained haunt of quietness, To hear no tones of human pain or care, Our own or others', little heeding there If morn or noon or night Pursued their weary flight. But musing what an easy thing it wcro To mix our opiates in a larger cup. And drink, and not perceive v.] ARCHBISHOP TRENCH'S POEMS. 247 Sleep deepening lead his truer kinsman up, Like undistinguished Night darkening the skirts of Eve." Surely there can be no question as to the profound charm of these lines, the charm of the slowly-falling syllables, the strong and lingering rhythm, which paint the gradual eclipse of the last faint joy in light and form and colour, and the whole soul's abeyance in an unstirred and unawakening gloom. One more quotation shall illustrate the contrasting form of self-abandonment ; a dissolution which is not into the night but into the day ; the last renunciation of egoism, the absorption of individual effort and rebellion in the Infinite Home of men. " Tf there had anywhere appeared in space Another place of refuge, where to flee, Our souls had taken refuge in that place, And not with Thee. " For we against creation's bars had beat Like prisoned eagles, through great worlds had sought Though but a foot of ground to plant our feet Where Thou wert not. " And only when we found in earth and air, In heaven or hell, that such might nowhere be, — That we could not flee from Thee anywhere, — We fled to Thee." But it is by his Elegiac Poems that Dr. Trench has won his almost unique position in many hearts. For it is the especial privilege of Poetry that by her 248 MODERN ESSAYS. [v. close intermingling of ethical and artistic sentiment she can bring definite consolation to some of the deepest sorrows of men. Painting can fill our minds with ennobling images, but in the hour of our tribula- tion these are apt to look coldly at us, like dead gods. Music can exalt us into an unearthly and illimitable world, but the treasures which we have grasped there melt away when we descend from that remote empyrean. Poetry can meet our sorrows face to face, can show us that she also knows them, and can trans- form them into " something rich and strange " by the suggestive magic of her song. And since there does without doubt exist a kind of transference and meta- stasis of the emotions, since the force of any strong feeling can to some extent be led off into other channels, the work of Art in the moral world, like the work of Science in the material world, is to transform the painful into the useful, the lower into the higher forms of force ; to change scorn and anger into a generous fervency, and love that is mixed with sorrow into a sacred and impersonal flame. And of all sor- rows the sorrow of bereavement needs this aid the most. For to some troubles a man may become indifferent by philosophy, and from some he may become through virtue free, but this one sorrow grows deeper as the character rises and tlie lieart expands ; and an object more unique and loveable is mourned with a more inconsolable desire. And to such mourn- ers those who trust in an ultimate reunion may often v.] AECHBISHOP TRENCH'S POEMS. 249 speak with an effective power. For on whatever evidence or revelation men may base this faith for themselves, it does yet unconsciously in great part rest for each man upon the faith of those around him, upon the desire of great hearts and the consenting expectation of the just. It is a belief which only in a certain moral atmosphere finds strength to grow ; it is chiefly when the conviction of spiritual progress through sorrow is dominant and clear that men are irresistibly led to believe that in this crowning sorrow also courage must conquer, and constancy must be rewarded, and love which as yet has known no bar or limit shall find no limit in the grave. Be this per- suasion well founded or not, to those " who have intelligence of love " human life without such hope would be itself a chaos or a hell. A nature like Dr. Trench's, full of clinging affections, profound religious faith, and constitutional sadness, was likely to feel in extreme measure both these bereavements and these consolations. The loss of beloved children taught him the lessons of sorrow and of hope, and the words in which that sorrow and that hope found utterance have led many a mourner in his most desolate hour to feel that this grave writer is his closest and most consoling friend. For although these poems deal so largely with the poet's sorrow and yearning, it is not compassion only, nor compassion chiefly, which they inspire in our hearts. Eather we feel that for one whose hopes are 250 MODERN ESSAYS. [v based so firmly and raised so high we can desire notliing but what he already possesses ; no " treasures," no " friends," as another poet has told us, except such treasures as are his indefeasibly, and those " Three firm friends, more sure than Day or Night, Himself, his Maker, and the Angel Death." GEOEGE ELIOT. " Homo lioraini deus est, si suum officium sciat." — C^ecilius. It is no easy task to write for the public eye an account of a deeply-venerated friend whom death has newly taken. It is a task on wliich one might well shrink from entering, save at the wish of those whose desire in such a matter carries the force of a command. He who makes the attempt can scarcely avoid two opposite perils. Strangers will be apt to think his admiration excessive. Friends more intimate than himself, on the other hand, will find a disappointing incompleteness in any estimate formed by one less close than they, — one who, seeing only what his own nature allowed him to see, must needs leave so much unseen, untold. Between these conflicting dangers the only tenable course is one of absolute candour. To fail in candour, indeed, would be to fail in respect. " Obedience is the courtesy due to kings," and to the sovereigns of the world of mind the courtesy due is truth. The world has already been made acquainted with 252 MODERN ESSAYS. [vi. most of the external facts of George Eliot's life. Mary Ann Evans, youngest child of Robert Evans, land agent, was born at Arbury, near Nuneaton, in War- wickshire, on November 22, 1820. Her birthplace was thus only some twenty miles from Shakspeare's, and the " rookery elms " of her childish memories, survivors of the Forest of Arden, may have cast their shadow also on the poet of Jaqiics and Rosalind. Arbury Hall, the seat of Sir Eoger Newdigate, her father's principal employer, is reproduced as the Cheverel Manor of Mr. GilfiVs Love-Story. So, also, does Chilvers Coton Church appear as Shepperton, Astley Church — Tlie Lantliorn of Arden — as Knebley, and Nuneaton as Milby, while many of the inliabitants of that quiet region are painted in Scenes of Clerical Life, as they were, or as they might have been. Her education was mainly self-acquired. For a short time — before she was ten years old — she was at school in Nuneaton, afterwards at the Miss Franklins' in Coventry. " I began at sixteen," she says, in a letter which lies before me, " to be acquainted with the imspeakable grief of a last parting, in the death of my mother." After this loss, and the marriage of her brothers and sisters, she lived alone with her father, and in 1841 they removed from Griff House to Foles- hill, near Coventry. During all these early years, as, indeed, during all the years whicli followed them, religious and moral ponderings made the basis of George Eliot's life. To VI.] GEORGE ELIOT. 253 her, as to most of the more serious spirits of her generation, religion came first after the Evangelical — for a time even after the Calvinistic — pattern. The figure of Dinah Morris is partially taken from her aunt, Elizabeth Evans, whose simple goodness had much attraction for the earnest, self-questioning girl. And in other well-known characters she has shown her deep realisation of those forms of faith and piety which rest, not on outward ceremonies, but on the direct communion of the heart with God. The story of the spiritual growth of Maggie Tulliver — in great part, no doubt, autobiographical — has been felt by many readers to be almost unique in its delineation, of passionate search, of an eager, self-renouncing soul. But there are those who seek and cannot find, who knock and to whom it is not opened. There are those, the very intensity of whose gaze seems to dim the great hope on which it rests ; who, while the kingdom of heaven fulfils itself within them, cease to discern it before them and afar. Such was the case with George Eliot. After a few years spent at Foleshill m close study, aided by the Charles Brays and other intelligent friends at Coventry, we find her coming first before the world, though anonymously, in 1846, with a translation of Strauss' Life of Jesus. This was followed by a translation of Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity, and a translation, as yet unpublished, of Spinoza's Ethics. Her mind had taken its ply, and while her nature, eminently 254 MODERN ESSAYS. [vi. constant and conservative, retained always a deep reverence and affection for whatever names itself by the name of Christ, she never sought again the old means of grace, nor felt the old hope of glory. Her father died in 1849, and for some time before his death she was mainly absorbed in attendance on him. She told me once that for the last year of his life she had read Scott's novels aloud to him for many hours almost daily ; and thus, we may suppose, amid her severer studies, she was imbibing something of the method of one to whom she always looked up as a master. After her father's death she went abroad with the Brays, and remained for some eight months en pension near Geneva, and afterwards at M. d' Albert's house in the town. This was to her a time of intense delight in the external world. The shock of bereave- ment had left her spirit open to those consolations with which Nature is ever ready tb soothe a generous pain. She returned to England in 1850, and in 1851 she became sub-editor of the Westminster Review, a periodical which has often been the first to welcome the contributions of writers who have afterwards risen to fame. She lodged with the editor, Dr. Chapman, and liis wife, in a large house in the Strand, which was the centre of a literary group, penetrated for the most part witli strongly scientific tendencies, and esi)ecially witli the philosophy of the Comtist school. Among the articles in the Review wliicli have since been VI.] GEORGE ELIOT. 255 pointed out as hers, that on " Worldliness and Other- Worldliness " (Jan. 1857), is especially characteristic and noteworthy. This course of placid self-culture was interrupted by personal events which increased the perplexity, deep- ened the significance, of life. A long tragedy unrolled itself before her ; her pity, affection, gratitude, were subjected to a strong appeal ; a path was chosen over which, amidst much of happiness, a certain shadow hung. It is enough to say here that if ever her intimate history is made more fully known to the world it will be found to contain nothing at variance with her own unselfish teaching ; no postponement of principle to passion ; no personal happiness based upon others' pain. In 1854 Mr. and Mrs. Lewes went to Germany, and spent a year mainly at Weimar and Berlin. They saw much of the most intellectual society of Germany, and it was, perhaps, in this stimulating companionship that the earnest student first became strongly conscious of original power. It was, at any rate, soon afterwards that she discovered the means of self-expression by which she was best able to move mankind, in a form of literature whose freedom of plan renders it specially fitted to reflect the complexity of modern life and thought. She preluded with one or two short tales, which indicate that her power was only just ripening. Then Scenes of Clerical Life ap- peared in 1857, Adam Bcde in 1859, and TJie Mill on the Floss in 18 GO. 256 MODERN ESSAYS. [vi. The author's identity was soon discovered under her nom de plume of " George Eliot," and the publica- tion of these first books made a sudden change in her life and surroundings. She awoke and found herself famous. From an obscure sub-editor of an unfashion- able review, she rose at a bound to the first place among the imaginative prose writers of her time. Her remaining twenty years of life were such as the spirit conscious of a message to deliver might most desire. Her mind was fed by strenuous and constant study, — scientific, linguistic, literary, — by frequent travel in those historic lands whose air quickens spirit as well as body, and by habitual intercourse with many of the foremost minds of the age. She never had much connection with the political — still less, of course, with the merely fashionable — world, but nearly all who were most eminent in art, science, literature, philanthropy, might be met from time to time at her Sunday afternoon receptions. There were many women, too, drawn often from among very differ- ent traditions of thought and belief by the unfeigned goodness which they recognised in Mrs. Lewes' look and speech, and sometimes illumining with some fair young face a salon whose grave talk needed the grace which they could bestow. And there was sure to be a considerable admixture of men not as yet famous — probably never to be so — but whom some indication of studies earnestly pursued, of sincere eflbrt for the good of their felluw-nien, had recommended to " that VI.] GEORGE ELIOT. 257 hopeful interest which " — I quote the generous words of a letter which lies before me — " the elder mind, dis- satisfied with itself, delights to entertain with regard to the younger, whose years and powers hold a larger measure of unspoiled life." It was Mr. Lewes who, on these occasions, contri- buted the cheerful bonhomie, the observant readiness, which are necessary for the fusing together of any social group. Mrs. Lewes' manner had a grave sim- plicity whicli rose in closer converse into an almost pathetic anxiety to give of her best — to establish a genuine human relation between herself and her inter- locutor — to utter words which should remain as an active influence for good in the hearts of those who heard them. To some of her literary admirers this serious tone was distasteful ; they were incKned to resent, as many critics in print have resented, the prominence given to moral ideas in a quarter from which they preferred to look merely for intellectual refreshment. Mrs. Lewes' humour, though fed from a deep per- ception of the incongruities of human fates, had not, except in intimate moments, any buoyant or contagious quality, and in all her talk, — full of matter and wis- dom and exquisitely worded as it was, — there was the same pervading air of strenuous seriousness which was more welcome to those whose object was distinctly to learn from her than to those who merely wished to pass an idle and brilliant hour. To her these mixed, VOL. II. S j^ 258 MODERN ESSAYS. [vi. receptions were a great effort. Her mind did not move easily from one individuality to another, and when she afterwards thought that she had failed to understand some difficulty which had been laid before her, — had spoken the wrong word to some expectant heart, — she would suffer from almost morbid accesses of self-reproach. Perhaps to no imaginative writer — to no writer, at any rate, of what is commonly called " light literature " — has fame ever presented itself so unmixedly as responsibility. Each step that she gained in popular favour drove her into a more sedulous con- scientiousness, — a conscientiousness which probably injured her later books, by the over-elaboration to which it Led. Aware of this danger of a too sensitive care, she abstained almost wholly from reading reviews of her works. She had no appetite for indiscriminate eulogy. " Vague praise," she writes to a friend, " or praise with false notes in its singing, is something to be endured with difficult resignation." And censure, or criticism which called on her for what she could not give, would, she felt, only serve to embarrass and depress her. In this matter, as in all, Mr. Lewes stood between her and the world without, with tlie loyal care with which he repaid tlie priceless benefit which his character drew from hers. Thus passed a score of years. Then came his sudden death ; her heavy sorrow ; her faithful effort to preserve for ever tlie memory which she held so dear. She edited his last book with scrupulous care, and VI.] GEORGE ELIOT. 259 founded the " George Henry Lewes Studentship " in Physiology ; providing, with a loving minuteness, that his full name should be for ever associated with a wisely- planned scheme for the fostering of his chosen study. And then, beyond expectation, it came about that fate reserved for her yet seven months of a new happiness ; and she reached unawares the term of earthly life in the midst of unslackening intellectual activities, of ever-deepening loves. Nothing, indeed, was more remarkable in this last period of her life than her intense mental vitality, which failing health did not seem in the least to im- pair. She possessed in an eminent degree that power which has led to success in so many directions — which is ascribed both to Newton and to Napoleon — of keeping her mind unceasingly at the stretch without conscious fatigue. She would cease to read or to ponder when other duties called her, but never (as it seemed) because she herself felt tired. Even in so complex an effort as a visit to a picture-gallery implies, she could continue for hours at the same pitch of earnest interest, and outweary strong men. Nor was this a mere habit of passive receptivity. In the intervals between her successive compositions her mind was always fusing and combining its fresh stores, and had her life been prolonged, it is probable that she would have produced work at least equal in merit to anything which she had already achieved. I may perhaps be allowed to illustrate what has here been 260 MODERN ESSAYS. [vr. said by a few words as to the occupations of her last days on earth. On the Friday night before her death Mrs. Cross witnessed a representation of the " Agamemnon," in Greek, by Oxford undergraduates, and came back fired with the old words, thus heard anew, and planning to read through the Greek dramatists again with her husband. On Saturday she went as usual to the concert of classical music, and there, as it seems, she caught the fatal chill. That evening she played through on the piano much of the music which had been performed in the afternoon ; for she was an admirable executant, and rendered especially her favourite Schubert with rare delicacy of touch and feeling. And thus, as her malady deepened, her mind could still respond to the old trains of thought and emotion, till, all unexpectedly to herself and those who loved her, she passed into the state of unconsciousness from which she woke on earth no more. The story of George Eliot's life, it will be seen, is a simple and unsuggestive one. It is merely the record of the steady development of a strong and serious mind. There is not much in her which we can trace as inherited ; not much which we can ascribe to the inlluence of any unusual circumstances in her journey through life. Yet from her father, — the carjienter who rose to be forester, the forester who rose to be land-agent, — whose modified portrait appears both in Caleb Gartli and in Adam Bede, — she derived, nu VI.] GEORGE ELIOT. 261 doubt, that spirit of thoroughness, that disdain of all pretentious or dishonest work, that respect for con- scientious effort, however mistaken and clumsy, which were so distinctive of her in later life. And it must also be considered as a most fortunate thing, — more important, perhaps, for a female novelist in England than for an author of any other type, — that the posi- tion of her family, while sufficiently comfortable to allow of her being liberally educated, was humble enough to bring her into close and natural contact with the quaint types of rural life, — as much superior in picturesqueness to the habitues of literary drawing- rooms as Mrs. Poyser is to Theophrastus Such. At the time when impressions sink deepest, it was among the TuUivers, the Silas Marners, the Bartle Masseys of this world that George Eliot's lot was cast. And thus in the shy and quaint, but affectionate and observant child, grew up the habit of discerning worth and wisdom beneath rugged envelopes, of feeling that "keen experience with pity blent" of which she speaks in one of her poems — " The pathos exquisite of lovely minds Hid in harsh forms — not penetrating them Like fire divine within a common bush Which glows transfigured by the heavenly guest So that men put their shoes off ; but encaged Like a sweet child within some thick-wallcd cell, Who leaps and fails to hold the window-bars, But having shown a little dimpled hand, 262 MODERN ESSAYS. [vi. Is visited thenceforth by tender hearts, AAHiose eyes keep watch about the prison walls." This sympathy with imperfection, this skill in interpreting the signs by which dumb and baffled creatures seek to show their love and need, was at the root of much both of her humour and of her pathos. Her gaze did not invest the world around her with " the light that never was on sea or land," but seeing men and women without idealisation, she still could love them as they were. This gave to her sympathy a peculiar quality which made it less flattering to the recipient, though in one sense of greater value. It was full and penetrating, but it seemed rather to be bestowed on principle, and as to a human being in difficulty or distress, than to be prompted by any such momentary glow as could induce her to forget what she calls " The twists and cracks in our poor earthenware, That touch me to more conscious fellowship (I am not myself the finest Parian) With my coevals." She contemplated, indeed, her own powers and character with a gaze of the same impartial scrutiny. Her natural candour of self-judgment had perhaps been fostered by the tardiness of her success, which liad worked in her the best effect which long obscurity can produce on strong and humble natures. It had accustomed her to conceive of herself as of one who VI.] GEORGE ELIOT. 263 must still strive, who sees Ms work before him, whose ideal is not yet attained. And it was noticeable that in any casual allusion to her own faulty tendencies she seemed to have felt less need to guard against those which go with success than against those which go with failure. Mr. Lewes and she were one day good-humouredly recounting the mistaken effusiveness of a too-sym- pathising friend, who insisted on assuming that Mr- Casaubon was a portrait of Mr. Lewes, and on condol- ing with the sad experience which had taught the gifted authoress of Middlemarch to depict that gloomy man. And there was indeed something ludicrous in the contrast between the dreary pedant of the novel and the gay self-content of the living savant who stood acting his vivid anecdotes before our eyes. " But from whom, then," said a friend, turning to Mrs. Lewes, " did you draw Casaubon ? " With a humorous solemnity, which was quite in earnest, nevertheless, she pointed to her own heart. She went on to say — and this one could well believe — that there was one other character — that of Eosamond Vincy — which she had found it hard to sustain ; such complacency of egoism being alien to her own habits of mind. But she laid no claim to any such natural magnanimity as could avert Casaubon's temptations of jealous vanity, of bitter resentment. No trace of these faults was ever manifest in her conversation. But much of her moral weight was derived from the impression which 264 MODERN ESSAYS. [vi. her friends received that she had not been l)y any means without her full share of faulty tendencies to begin witli, but that she had upbuilt with strenuous pains a resolute virtue, — what Plato calls an iron sense of truth and right, — to which others, also, however faulty, by effort might attain. A few months since there were still living in England three prophets : for by what other name, as distinguished from our poets and statesmen, can we so fitly call them ? Two have passed away ; the third still lives to complete his mission. Carlyle's was the most awakening personality. To Euskin is given the most of revelation. But for the lessons most impera- tively needed by the mass of men, the lessons of deliberate kindness, of careful truth, of unwavering endeavour, — for these plain themes one could not ask a more convincing teacher than she whom we are com- memorating now. Everything in her aspect and presence was in keeping with the bent of her soul. The deeply -lined face, the too marked and massive features, were united with an air of delicate refine- ment, which in one way was the more impressive because it seemed to proceed so entirely from within. Nay, the inward beauty would sometimes quite trans- form the external harshness ; there would be moments when the thin hands that entwined themselves in their eagerness, tlie earnest figure that bowed forward to speak and hear, the deep gaze moving from one i'ace to another with a grave ai)peal, — all these seemed tlie VI, ] GEORGE ELIOT. 265 transparent symbols that showed the presence of a wise, benignant soul. But it was the voice which best revealed her; — a voice whose subdued intensity and tremulous richness seemed to environ her uttered words with the mystery of a world of feeling that must remain untold. "Speech," says her Don Silva to Fedalma, in The SjMnish Gypsy, " Speech is but broken light upon the depth Of the unspoken : even your loved words Float in the larger meaning of your voice As somethinor dimmer." And then again, when in moments of more intimate converse some current of emotion would set strongly through her soul, when she would raise her head in unconscious absorption and look out into the unseen, her expression was not one to be soon forgotten. It had not, indeed, the serene felicity of souls to whose child -like confidence all heaven and earth are fair. Eather it was the look (if I may use a Platonic phrase) of a strenuous Demiurge, of a soul on which high tasks are laid, and which finds in their accomplishment its only imagination of joy. " It was her thought she saw : the presence fair Of unachieved achievement, the high task, The mighty unborn spirit that doth ask With irresistible cry for blood and breath Till feeding its great life we sink in death." I do not wish to exaggerate. The subject of these 266 MODERN ESSAYS. [vi. pages would not tolerate any words which seemed to present her as an ideal type. For, as her aspect had greatness but not beauty, so, too, her spirit had moral dignity but not saintly holiness. A loftier potency may sometunes have been given to some highly- favoured woman in whom the graces of heaven and earth have met ; moving througli all life's seasons with a majesty which can feel no decay ; affording by her very presence and benediction an earnest of the supernal world. And so, too, on that thought-worn brow there was visible the authority of sorrow, but scarcely its consecration. A deeper pathos may some- times have breathed from the unconscious heroism of some child-like soul. It is perhaps by thus dwelling on the last touches which this high nature was dimly felt to lack — some aroma of hope, some felicity of virtue — that we can best recognise the greatness of her actual acliievement, of her practical working-out of the fundamental dogma of the so-called Eeligion of Humanity — the expansion, namely, of the sense of human fellowship into an impulse strong enough to compel us to live for others, even though it be beneath the on-coming shadow of an endless niiilit. For she held that there was so little chance of man's immortality that it was a grievous error to Hatter him with such a belief; a grievous error at least to distract him by promises of future recompense from the urgent and obvious motives of well-doing, — our love and pity for our fellowmen. VI.] GEORGE ELIOT. 267 She repelled " that impiety toward the present and the visible, which flies for its motives, its sanctities, and its religion to the remote, the vague, and the unknown," as contrasted with " that genuine love which cherishes things in proportion to their nearness, and feels its reverence grow in proportion to the intimacy of its knowledge." These words are from the essay on "Worldliness and Other- Worldliness," which has been alluded to, and which contains a forcible condemnation of the view — advanced by the poet Young in its utmost crudity — according to which the reason for virtue is simply the prospect of being rewarded for it hereafter. So far as moral action is dependent on that belief, so far, she urges, " the emotion which prompts it is not truly moral — is still in the stage of egoism, and has not yet attained the higher development of sympathy." And she adds to this a moving argument, which in after life was often on her lips and in her heart. "It is conceivable," she says, " that in some minds the deep pathos lying in the thought of human mortality — that we are here for a little while and then vanish away, that this earthly life is all that is given to our loved ones and to our many suffering fellowmen — lies nearer the fountains of moral emotion than the conception of extended existence." It was, indeed, above all things, this sadness with which she contemplated the lot of dying men which gave to her convictions an air of reality far more impressive than the rhetorical satisfaction which is 268 MODERN ESSAYS. [vi. sometimes expressed at the prospect of individual annihilation. George Eliot recognised the terrible probability that, for creatures with no future to look to, advance in spirituality may oftenest be but advance in pain ; she saw the sombre reasonableness of that grim plan which suggests that the world's life -long struggle might best be ended — not, indeed, by indi- vidual desertions, but by the moving off of the whole great army from the field of its unequal war — by the simultaneous suicide of all the race of man. But since this could not be; since that race was a united army only in metaphor — was, in truth, a never-ending host " Whose rear lay wrapt in night, while breaking dawn Roused the broad front, and called the battle on," she held that it befits us neither to praise the sum of things nor to rebel in vain, but to take care only that our brothers' lot may be less grievous to them in that we have lived. Even so, to borrow a simile from M. Eenan, the emperor who summed up his view of life in the words Nil cxpedit, gave none the less to his legions as his last night's watchword, Lahorcmus. This stoic lesson she would enforce in tones which covered a wide range of feeling, from the grave exhor- tation which disdained to a])peal to aught save an answering sense of right, to the tender words wliicli offered tlie blessedness of self- forgetting fellowshii) as the guerdon won by the mourner's pain. I remember how, at Cambridge, I walked willi lier VI.] GEORGE ELIOT. 269 once in the Fellows' Garden of Trinity, on an evening of rainy May ; and she, stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her text the three words which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet-calls of men, — the words God, Immortality, Duty, — pro- nounced, with terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third. Never, perhaps, have sterner accents affirmed the sovereignty of im- personal and unrecompensing Law. I listened, and night fell ; her grave, majestic countenance turned toward me like a Sibyl's in the gloom ; it was as though she withdrew from my grasp, one by one, the two scrolls of promise, and left me the third scroll only, awful with inevitable fates. And when we stood at length and parted, amid that columnar circuit of the forest-trees, beneath the last twilight of starless skies, I seemed to be gazing, like Titus at Jerusalem, on vacant seats and empty halls, — on a sanctuary with no Presence to hallow it, and heaven left lonely of a God. This was the severer aspect of her teaching. How gentle, how inspiring a tone it could assume when it was called upon to convey not impulse only but con- solation, I must quote a few words to show. Writing to a friend who was feeling the first anguish of bereave- ment, she approaches with tender delicacy the themes with which she would sustain his spirit. " For the first sharp pangs," she says, " there is no comfort ; — whatever goodness may sun-ound us, darkness and 270 MODERN ESSAYS. [vi. silence still hang about our pain. But slowly the clinging companionship with the dead is linked witli our living affections and duties, and we begin to feel our sorrow as a solemn initiation preparing us for that sense of loving, pitying fellowship with the fullest human lot which, I must think, no one who has tasted it will deny to be the chief blessedness of our life. And especially to know what the last parting is seems needful to give the utmost sanctity of tenderness to our relations with each other. It is that above all which gives us new sensibilities to ' the web of human things. Birth and the grave, that are not as they were.' And by that path we come to find for ourselves the truth of the old declaration, that there is a difference l)etween the ease of pleasure and blessedness, or the fullest good possible to us wondrously mixed mortals. . . . All the experience that makes my communion with your grief is summed up in a ' God bless you,' which represents the swelling of my heart now as I wiite, thinking of you and your sense of what was and is not." It is on reading words like these that one's thoughts recall the apophthegm of old Ca3cilius prefixed as a motto to this paper — "If each for each be all he can, A very God is man to man." Every one of George Eliot's works might be road as a commentary on that text. In each there is a moral crisis, which depends on some strong elllux of the VL] GEORGE ELIOT. 271 feeling of human fellowship — sometimes pouring forth unchecked, but with unwonted energy, and sometimes overcoming the counter impulses of egoistic pleasure or pain, — some selfish craving, some angered pride, some wounded and bleeding love. I need not recall each individual instance. Throughout the earlier novels, where there is less of visible purpose and more of mere humorous portraiture than in the later ones, this lesson nevertheless is always recurring. Romola, the most laboriously executed of all her works, — the book which, as she said, " she began a young woman and ended an old one," — is almost from first to last one strain of grave insistence on the human bond. Or consider especially her poems ; for these, though often failing in that instinctive melody which is the indis- pensable birth-gift of poets, are yet the most concen- trated expression of herself which she has left behind her. The poems move through more ideal scenes, but they enforce the self-same lesson; they teach that as the mounting spirit becomes more conscious of its own being, it becomes more conscious also of the bonds which unite it to its kin ; that thus the higher a man is, the closer he is drawn to the lowest, and greatness is not an exemption, but a debt the more. Tlie Legend of Jiibal is, as it were, the sublima- tion of all she had to say. It is in that mytliic tale that the benefit conferred is most far-reaching, the self-effacement most absolute, the absorption into the universal good most satisfying and sacred. 272 MODERN ESSAYS. [vl " Would'st thou have asked aught else from any god — Whether with gleaming feet on earth he trod, Or thundered through the skies — aught else for share Of mortal good, than in thy soul to bear The growth of song, and feel the sweet unrest Of the world's spring-tide in thy conscious breast ? No, thou hadst grasped thy lot ^vith all its pain, Nor loosed it any painless lot to gain Where music's voice was silent ; for thy fate Was human music's self incorporate : Thy senses' keenness and thy passionate strife Were flesh of her flesh and her womb of life." Few passages could so completely lift us into the region where Art melts into Virtue ; where they are discerned as twin aspects of the spirit's unselfish earnest- ness, which would fain lose itself in a larger joy. The visible Jubal perishes forsaken and alone, but he lives on in the life of Music, his deathless gift to mankind. In the well-known lines which begin, " may I join the choir invisible," the ardent ^vriter has given voice to her own aspirations. This poem received its fittest commentary when it was read above her grave : " May I reach That purest heaven, be to other souls The cup of strength in some great agony, Enkindle generous ardour, feed pure love, Beget the smiles that have no cruelty." To tliose who knew her these words are her very self Language has never expressed with more directness the innermost of a noble soul. VI.] GEOEGE ELIOT. 273 Yet, in this realm of high speculation, to admire is not necessarily to feel complete agreement. There were some to whom these consolations seemed all too shadowy, this resignation premature ; some whose im- pulsion to a personal life beyond the grave was so preoccupying and dominant that they could not readily acquiesce in her negations, nor range themselves un- reservedly as the fellow-workers of her brave despair. Those, especially, to whom life's most impressive ex- perience had been the spectacle of some tragedy without an issue, of some unmerited anguish driven in storms upon an innocent soul, — such men might well have scarcely heart enough to work for the future, with thoughts for ever turning to an irredeemable injustice in the past. Eather they would still recur to the ancient hopes of men ; they would urge that great discoveries follow on great needs ; that problems which have resisted a hundred keys may yield to yet one key more : that in some field of knowledge there may yet be that to know which shall not, indeed, diminish life's effort, but shall establish its felicity, — shall not relax duty but add hope. To one who thus, amid great sorrow, could not abandon this anchor of the soul, she used words some of which I quote, since they may serve to bring her nearer to some minds which may have shrunk at times from the despondency discernible beneath her bravest speech. She wrote : — " I have no controversy with the faith that cries out and clings from the depths of man's need. I only long, if it VOL. II. T 274 MODERN ESSAYS. [vi. were possible to me, to help in satisfying the need of those who want a reason for living in the absence of what has been called consolatory belief. But all the while I gather a sort of strength from the certainty that there must be limits or negations in my own moral powers and life- experience which may screen from me many possibilities of blessedness for our suffering human nature. The most melancholy thought surely would be that we in our own persons had measured and exhausted the sources of spiritual good. But we know how the poor help the poor." Those whose own faith is most assured can, I think, " have no controversy " with such a temper as this. The faithful servant, — we may reverently suppose, — will not be met with condemnation because, like her own Fedalma, she vjotdd not count on aught hut heing faithful Nor can it be ours to blame her because, in the presence of solemn issues, she was resolved to keep within the limits of what she did certainly feel and know, and — a sterner Prometheus — at least to omit " vain hopes " from the gifts which she brought to men. She gave us of her best ; she gave us all her best ; she had no wish, no pleasure, but to give. "This was thy lot, to feel, create, bestow, And that immcasureable life to know From -wliich the fleshly self falls shrivelled, dead ; A seed primeval that has forests bred. Thy gifts to give was thine of men alono: 'Twas but in giving that thou could'st atono Fur too much wealth amid their poverty" VI.] GEORGE ELIOT. 275 For what she gave to the world the world has not been slow to thank her. But what she gave of private amity ; — of companionship which never knew that it was condescending, of sympathy the more salutary for its sternness, of encouragement which pointed to duty only as the goal : — the thought of these things can come to few without some self-condemning tinge in their res^ret. Who is there that has drawn from an ennobling friendship all the blessing which he might have won ? Wisdom is everlasting ; early or late we apprehend her still the same. But " Wisdom herself," as Plato says, " we cannot see ; — or terrilDle had been the loves she had inspired." And the living forms in which she is in some wise embodied, the eyes through which there looks some parcel of her eternal fire, — these pass suddenly from our sight, and we have hardly recognised them, hardly known. For those who thus lament there is a stern consolation. Let them draw near by faith ; what they missed in presence let them recover by contemplation ; what is wanting to memory let them reserve for hope.^ 1 See Note B, p. 335. AETHUE PENEHYN STANLEY. A MAN of many gifts and graces has passed away ; a man so singularly central in English society and amid English schools of thought, so individual and yet so multiform, that among the wreaths which bestrewed his tomb in Henry VII.'s chapel, — the offering of all nations, from Ireland to Armenia, of men of all opinions, from dignitaries of the Church to scientific materialists, of all classes of society, from the Queen of England to the poor children of Westminster, — it would be hard to say which tokens were the most natural, the most appropriate, the most sincere. A man so many-sided should be described by many men ; a man of such wide and active sympathies should be commemorated not by his intimates alone, but by others who have looked up to him as to a source of life and light ; who have enjoyed, perhaps, some amities of a hereditary friendship, some encouragement of his cordial smile. Without repeating what has been already said, or anticipating what may be more fitly said by others, there is room for some such reflections on his work and character as will be suggested here. VII.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 277 The outward life of Arthur Stanley was so ordered from childhood upward as to enable him to mature and exercise his powers in the most favourable way, and to lead his receptive nature through scene after scene of sterling virtue or of old renown. The happy Eectory- home at Alderley gave to his after years the inestim- able background of childish memories of unmingled brightness and peace. His intercourse with Dr. Arnold at Rugby showed the relation of teacher and pupil in its ideal form. At Oxford the three great colleges of Balliol, University, Christ Church, welcomed him in turn, and each upbuilt some part of the fabric of his being. The ancient shrine of Canterbury fostered at once his historic instincts and his deep sense of the greatness of the English Church. And finally West- minster received him to an office so congenial to every aspiration of his heart that all else seemed to have been but a prolusion to those stately duties and an antechamber to that famous home. He was blessed, too, in father and mother, in family and friends ; blessed most of all in the wife whose presence doubled both his usefulness and his felicity, and whose loss gave to his latest years the crowning dignity of sorrow. One incongruity alone was sometimes felt in this harmonious career, — a certain discrepancy between Stanley's habits of thought and those of the clerical world around him. Scruples of this kind had led him to hesitate as to taking orders, but they had then been brushed aside vnih rough vigour by Arnold's friendly 278 MODERN ESSAYS. [vii. hand. But as Stanley rose into prominence his sup- posed laxity of dogmatic view gave umbrage to many members of his profession ; he experienced " that diffi- culty " which, in his own words, " is occasioned not so much by the actual divergence of opinion amongst educated, or amongst uneducated men, as by the com- bination in the same religious and the same social community of different levels of education," — and it may be added of original temperaments so diverse, that their professors, however educated, must needs construe tliis perplexing universe in many varying ways. Dean Stanley's view of his own position in the Church is given in a striking passage in the preface to his Essays on Church and State : — " The choice is between absolute individual separation from every conceivable outward form of organisation, and continuance in one or other of those which exist, in the hope of modifying or improving it. There are, doubtless, advantages in the former alternative. The path of a tlieo- logian or ecclesiastic, who in any existing system loves truth and seeks charity, is indeed difficult at tlic best. Many a time would such a one gladly exchange tlie thank- less labour, the bitter taunts, " the law's delay," the " in- solence of office," the waste of energy, that belong to the friction of pul)lic duties, for the hope of a few tranquil years of independent research or studious leisure, wliere he need consult no scruples, contend with no prejudices, entangle himself with no party, travel far and wide over the earth, with nothing to check the constant increase of knowledge which such exi)eriencc alone can iully give. But there is a counterbalancing attraction, which may well vil] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 279 be felt by those who shrink from sacrificing their love of country to a sense of momentary relief, or thiB hopes of the future to the pressure of the present. To serve a great institution, and by serving it to endeavour to promote within it a vitality which shall secure it as the shelter for such as will have to continue the same struggle after they are gone, is an object for which much may be, and ought to be, endured which otherwise would be intolerable." This passage is interesting, moreover, as distinctly indicating Stanley's conception of the functions of a National Church. A National Church may be regarded as aimino; at either of two somewhat different ends. We may say that it is meant to promulgate that body of spiritual truth which has, at a given historical epoch, approved itself to a given nation. Or we may say that it is meant to promulgate such spiritual truth as may from time to time approve itself to that nation as it lives and grows. On the first theory, the Church must represent a fixed code in the midst of a changing world, as the Greek and Eoman Churches profess to do. On the second theory, it must modify its teaching, as the Eeformed Churches actually did, when the great mass of thinking men in a nation are seen to have modified their belief. Such changes can have no finality ; and if a violent wrench like the English Eeformation w^as justifiable, it must be still more justifiable, in those who now wish to maintain the National Church, to in- troduce as gently as possible such changes as may keep her in sympathy with the advancing knowledge of the 280 MODERN ESSAYS. [vii. time. And these changes, thougli initiated by laymen, must be adopted by Church dignitaries if they are to become a part of the established creed of the nation. It is noticeable, indeed, that in past centuries the same men have often been first denounced as heretics, and afterwards accepted as pillars of the Church, having carried through at their own risk some reform which was ultimately felt by all to be beneficial. It is need- less to say that the recent rise of science, physical and historical, has effected an even greater alteration in men's mental outlook than was effected by the revival of learning, which led almost necessarily to the Eefor- mation. If, then, the English Church is to maintain her position as national, she must be prepared to modify her teaching with little delay, and such modification can best be carried through by men of Stanley's com- prehensive sympathies and strong common sense. There remains, however, the question whether reli- gious unity is really strongly desired by many men ; whether the different sections of the English Church or the English nation are disposed to make much effort to preserve the idea of a National Church. And the answer commonly given is that such union is not strongly desired, that, on the other hand, men tend to liold views more divergent, and to express them with more distinctness, than ever before. It might, ])er- haps, have been expected that as the conclusions of science become more definite, as it grows easier to make men understand the same demonstrations and VII.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 281 obey the same laws, it would also grow easier to unite them in the same religion. But this is not so ; for religion is a matter of tastes and emotions, as well as of reason. Along with what is deepest and most uni- versal its sphere includes all that is most individual and variable in man. It includes points on which classes of men at different mental levels — nay, even differ- ent individuals on the same level — cannot possibly be expected to agree. On the one hand, as fresh bodies of men wake up to religion they inevitably pass through stages of thought and feeling which many of their con- temporaries have already outgrown. And, on the other hand, learning and intellect, so far from securing uni- formity, will, when combined with certain tempera- ments, only serve to make the cases of reversion to an older type, or of divergence into an individual type, more marked and impressive. So long, in short, as the evidence as to an unseen world remains much where it is, that evidence will probably be interpreted as variously as heretofore. An accession of new evidence might, no doubt, lead to a greater unity of creed; but the possibility of such an accession of evidence is just what all sects unite to deny. From the theological point of view, therefore, it may seem neither possible nor very important to maintain the Church of England. On the other hand, the political and the philanthropical arguments for a National Church are strong. It is, or it may be made. 282 MODERN ESSAYS. [ VII. the safest bulwark against sectarian bigotry, the most efficient macliinery for supplying the moral needs of the community. And there is also a historical point of view of which Stanley was tlie best representative. It seemed to him a childish, almost an impious thing, that our disagreements on questions which, for the most part, we can neither solve nor comprehend, should lead us rashly to destroy that august institution which so many names have adorned, so many memories hal- lowed, which has spread wide arms from pole to pole, and has embodied for centuries tlie spiritual life of a mighty people. How premature were such a dis- solution ! For no one knows what direction opinion will ultimately take; and the Church of England, which is committed to so much less than the Church of Itome, and which, with her allied churches in both hemispheres, stands already second in importance to the Church of Eome alone — the Church of England, it may well be said, has a better chance than any other religious corporation of finding herself erect after the general reconstruction, and constituting, in some sense or other, the Churcli of the Future. Should such a fate be hers, she will be grateful to those whose his- torical instinct saved her from disruption, who did not despair of the spiritual republic in times of inward conflict and dismay. Descending from general principles to details we iind tlie j)eculiar type of Stanley's historical instinct, — liis deliglit in striking anecdote, in u]il()()k(Ml-lor ]iaral- VII.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 283 lels. in tlie picturesqueness of the past, — well illustrated by his treatment, in his latest book, of the rites and symbols of the early Church. To the mystic these symbols seem still instinct with spiritual truth. To the philosopher they suggest a field of unexhausted inquiry ; they lead back the mind to the Seven Kivers of the Indus valley, to the worships of our Aryan ances- tors in Persia or Babylon, to the remote and essential unity of the creeds of men. Stanley is not attracted in either of these ways. He does not deal with thought and emotion in their subterranean currents, but rather in their dramatic manifestation on the great theatres of the world. And he is never better pleased than when by some quaint juxtaposition he can show the irony of men's pretensions to dogmatic infallibility, or to the authority of immemorial tradition. In Chris- tian Institutions it delights him to point out that the only true Sabbatarians are to be found in Abys- sinia ; that the kiss of peace was " one of the most indispensable of primitive practices," but is now pre- served only by " the Glassites, or Sandemanians " ; that although the Coptic Church alone retains the original form of the Lord's Supper, some vestige of the true position is retained by the Presbyterians and the Pope. The Pope, in fact, is for Dean Stanley a perfect museum of paradoxes. While reflecting with regret that " Augustine would have condemned him as an unbaptised heretic," he is pleased to find, in the peculi- arities which surround liim, " a mass of latent Primi- 284 MODERN ESSAYS. [vii. tive Protestantism." He traces with interest the origin of his white gown, his red shoes, his peacock fans ; while he is careful to remind us that the only ecclesi- astical vestment recognised by the early Fathers con- sisted of trousers. The breadth, and also the limitations of Stanley's view, are well exemplified by his essay on the pictures in tlie catacombs of Kome. He draws out admirably from these figures the ayaWlao-L^ and d(f)e\6Tr]<;, the joy and simplicity of the primitive Church. There is found there no crucifix, no cypress, no death's-head, no dance of skeletons, no martyrdom of saints, but the young shepherd carrying the lamb amid green pastures, and dove-like souls that soar to heaven, and the mysterious gladness of the vine. All this he sees in that ancient imagery, but he does not attempt to ex- plain its strange anomalies by any reference to a yet remoter past. He has no word of comment (for instance) on the view of those in whose eyes an occult tradition mingles here with the new-risen faith ; who see in the ci^ux ansata, with its recurved extremities, the cross of wood from whose central hollow our Aryan forefathers made spring the friction-fire ; who discern in Aynus the mystic Agni, and in the lamb's luminous aureole the transmuted symbol of that Vedic flame. We can, indeed, hardly claim for Stanley the title of an original investigator on any subject, save only the very diiticult and interesting one of the geograi)hy of Sinai and I'alcstine. Ihit it would be equally unfair VII.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 285 to speak of such popularisations as his Jewish Church as though they were slight or easy productions. Crude knowledge must be digested and re-digested before it can enter vitally into the intellectual system of man- kind, and rightly to assimilate such nutriment may often be as difficult as to collect it. The Englishman, especially, writing, as Stanley did, for two hemispheres and some half-dozen nations, must needs feel that the form in which he gives his results to this enormous public is a matter of no slight concern. Of this Dean Stanley, with his keen interest in America, his vivid sense that " westward the course of empire takes its way," was certain to be fully conscious. And he remembered it most of all when he dealt with that subject whose world-wide diffusion has given to it its chief importance. For the history and literature of England may be said to have had greatness thrust upon them. They have not been selected for universal study on account of their intrinsic interest and per- fection, as have been the history and literature of Greece. But they belong to a race which happens to have just those qualities which enable it to overrun the earth. Whatever the history of such a race may be, the world must know it ; whatever its literature, the world must study it. And in recounting the English Past no tone could be fitter than Dean Stan- ley's, — a tone indicating at once a glowing sense of the dignity of the story, and an honest conscious- ness of its many blots and imperfections. Long 286 MODERN ESSAYS. [vii. before Stanley was made Dean of Westminster it was felt that the memories which hallow English ground appealed to no man more vividly than to him. And when he was placed, as it were, in official connection with English history, — when he was made the guardian of that pile of buildings which is to the British Em- pire, — nay, to all English-speaking lands, — almost what the Capitol was to Kome, — then indeed the thought of him became so inseparable from the thought of the Abbey that one knew not whether the man magnified the office, or the office the man. It is there, in some part of that vast irregular pile, that the memory of all who knew him will choose to imacjine him stilL Some will best recall him as he dispensed hospitality in the Deanery, or stood in that long library which seems immersed in silence and antiquity within a bow -shot of earth's busiest roar. These will remember his talk, its vivacity and simpli- city, its tone as of a man accustomed to feel tliat his words carried weight, yet never grasping at an undue share in the conversation, nor failing to recognise tlie least contribution which those who spoke with him might bring. To those who recall such scenes he may well appear as the very type of civilisation, of the manners to which birth and breeding, mind and char- acter, add each their charm ; which can show feeling without extravagance, and power without pride ; wliich can convince men by comprehending them, and control with a smile. VII.] ARTHUR TENRHYN STANLEY. 287 To some, again, his image will present itself as lie stood in Ms pulpit in the nave of Westminster, or hj the tomb of some great man departed, or before the altar on the rare occasions v^hen the solemn Abbey opened its portals to a scene of marriage joy. These will recall the voice of delicate resonance, the look of force and dignity enhanced by the contrast with a body so small and frail ; and, above all, that efflux of vivid human fellowship which all men felt when he was near, the sense of the responsive presence of a living soul. He lies where he had most truly lived. Beside him, in the niche of Henry VII. 's chapel, is laid the wife to whom, in his own solemn words, the earthly union was but designed to link him " till death us join " in some bond more sacred still. Above him float the banners of his knightly Order of the Bath, whose ideal chivalry and purity have never found an earthly em- bodiment more chivalrous or more pure. The chapel opens into the mighty Abbey, solemn and noble as work of men's hands can be, yet iilled with tombs and tablets miscellaneous as life, incongruous as history. Many a strange shape is there : Eodney's captains, and Admiral Tyrrell rising from the sea, and the monstrous image of Watt ; but, in the midst still stands the shrine of the Confessor, and the fifth Henry's hebn, with the dints of Agincourt, hangs in the dusky air. It may be that, in ages to come, tliose who tell the roll of England's worthies in the aisles of Westminster 288 MODERN ESSAYS. [vii. may think that Stanley's name stood higher with his contemporaries than any definite achievement of his could warrant. We cannot correct the judgments of posterity ; but we may feel assured that if it had been allowed us to prolong, from generation to generation, some one man's earthly days, we could hardly have sent any pilgrim across the centuries more wholly wel- come than Arthur Stanley to whatever times are yet to be. For they, like us, would have recognised in him a spectator whose vivid interest seemed to give to this world's spectacle an added zest ; an influence of such a nature as humanity, howsoever it may be per- fected, will only prize the more ; a life bound up and incorporated with the advance and weal of men; a presence never to be forgotten, and irreplaceable, and beloved. A NEW EIEENICOK Some sixteen years ago the English-speaking world was startled by a treatise which discussed the well- worn theme of the mission of Christ in a tone of such freshness and originality that it threw into confusion the ranks of established party ; and w^hile one great orthodox statesman denounced the book as " vomited from the jaws of hell," another, greater still and equally orthodox, did not disdain to call attention to that same work in a subsidiary volume of his own, full of sym- pathy, exposition, and eulogy. The distinguished author of Ecce Homo, whose thin veil of anonymity criticism is still bound to respect, has now published a part of the promised sequel to his earlier speculations in a volume which may not, perhaps, prove so widely popular as its predecessor, but which undoubtedly indicates a marked advance in power, and which ought to exercise a strong and salu- tary influence on the conduct of the great controversies of our day. Yet Natural Eeligioii is not (it may be said at once) a book which attempts to deal with the speculative points at issue among the schools or the VOL. II. U 290 MODERN ESSAYS. [viii. churclies. Still less does it profess to cast any fresh light on the old problems of whence and whither, or to supply to morality that independent standing-point for which she still is vainly feeling in the void. The task which it attempts is a lesser one, but great nevertheless, and within the power of man. It is to prove to the earnest but divergent schools of modern thought, to the artist, the Positivist, the man of science, the orthodox Christian, that their agreement lies deeper than their differences, that the enemy of all is the same ; that for the most part they are but looking at different sides of the shield, whether they worship the Unity of the Universe by the cold silver light of His power and reality, or in the golden radiance of His love. And thus the author claims for all forms of enthusiastic admiration of truth, beauty, goodness, the title of religion, which he deems theirs by right both of logic and of history, and urges all parties to march side by side, so far at least as they may, in the self-elevating culture which is itself a worship — in the actively beneficent civilisation which is the missionary aspect of the higher life. The treatise is too full of matter to be easily summarised. Perhaps we may get the clearest idea of our author's position in respect to the various schools around him if we transpose abstract terms into concrete in some homely apologue. Starting, then, from the metaphor which compares religion to " hid treasure," let us compare mankind, with tlieir varied efforts to VIII.] A NEW EIRENICON. 291 grasp the lueaning of the world around them, to a body of shareholders originally established as a " General Mining Company," and working a large estate with mixed success. Suddenly a charter is presented to them conferring a title to an enormous gold-mine in Central Africa ; the Gospel, to wit, with its promise of eternal life. For a time nothing else is thought of ; but gradually the samples of gold sent home are lost, and the validity of the charter, and the real existence of the mine, begin to be disputed. The Company, however, has traded largely on the credit of this gold- field, and when its existence is denied, some share- holders (the Pessimists) urge that the Company is bankrupt, and had better be dissolved as soon as may be. Others (Positivists and Stoics) maintain that the old mines can still be made to give returns sufficient to satisfy reasonable men. And many shareholders do actually continue mining on their own account. But the directors (the rulers of the existing Churches) have already changed the Company's title to that of the "Gold Mining Company of Central Africa," and now stand resolutely on their charter, ignore all operations on their old estates, and prohibit the use of the Com- pany's funds and appliances (Church organisation) in any mining except for gold. They engage in constant law-suits, in which the old testimony as to the value of the samples of gold now lost, and as to the existence of a potentate capable of granting their charter, is thrashed out with little visible progress. Some of the 292 MODERN ESSAYS. [viii. directors, indeed, assert that they still possess some specimens of ore (the modern Eoman Catholic miracles), but these specimens are discredited by other members of the board. Here our author intervenes. He does not abandon hope in the disputed charter. He even doubts whether the concern can be kept permanently going unless it somehow gets hold of gold. But he reminds the directors that the Company was originally formed for mining of every description before gold was hoped for ; for religion, even religion as lofty as Isaiah's, did exist without definite hope of immortality. And he points out the rich results actually obtained by those ener- getic shareholders who are digging for other metals, who are worshipping God by science. Nature by art, Humanity by civilisation. These men are using the very machinery with which the Company started; the instincts, namely, of unselfish reverence, admiration, fellowship, which seem innate in man. And they are finding (he insists) in unlooked-for abundance the very ores which the Company was first incorporated to supply ; for most religions begin as rude attemj)ts to explain and unify the natural phenomena which science now fits with more exactness into that very concep- tion of a unity in Nature, which is the essence botli of all science and of all Monotheistic systems. He urges on the directors to recognise and incorporate these independent efforts, and advises the leaders of the opposition not to separate from the Company, but viij.] A NEW EIRENICON. 293 to get themselves gradually put on its direction, and to utilise its existing rights and good-will for their own purposes, which were comprised, at any rate by implication, in its original scheme of under- takings. This rude sketch may help to show the drift of arguments which must now be considered rather more in detail. Our author begins by dwelling on the points of similarity between the attitude of science and that of religion towards the secular world. Both sides alike " agree in denouncing that pride of the human intellect which supposes it knows everything, which is not passive enough in the presence of reality, but deceives itself with pompous words instead of things, and with flattering eloquence instead of sober truth." Still more bitter is the contempt which both feel for that torpid conventionalism whose thoughts cannot rise to great generalisations, but are embedded in the petty cares and pleasures of the day. And he maintains that Atheism does not consist in the denial either of the absolute benevolence or of the miraculous interferences of the Being held supreme (since many religions have existed in which these beliefs were absent), nay, nor even in the refusal to acknowledge a personality in that ultimate power ; since personality is, after all, a metaphysical conception difficult to define in our own world, and still harder to realise with any distinct- ness when the imagined personality has no boundary or limit of being. In some respects the God of science 294 MODERN ESSAYS. [vrii. is more omnipresent, more pervading, more mighty, than God has ever yet appeared to men. " ' In Him,' may the worshipper of this Deity say with intimate conviction, ' in Him we live and move and have our being.' When men whose minds are possessed with a thouglit Uke this, and whose lives are devoted to such a contemplation, say, ' As for God, we know nothing of Him ; science knows nothing of Him ; it is a name belonging to an extinct system of philosophy ; ' I think they are pla}dng with words. By what name they call the object of their contemplation is in itself a matter of little importance — whether they say God, or prefer to say Nature, the import- ant thing is that their minds are filled with the sense of a power to all appearance infinite and eternal, a power to which their own being is inseparably connected, in the knowledge of whose ways alone is safety and well-being, in the contemplation of which they find a beatific vision." Atheism, then, is not the belief in such a God as this, but the denial of Him ; it is to be without a practical belief in the Order of the Universe, to dash one's self wildly against its laws in wilful revolt, or to shut one's self up with cautious feebleness in a paltry and sensual peace. To have a theology, on the other hand, is to know something of the relation in which human life stands to the Universe ; of the degree of possibility which the laws of that Universe have accorded to our best ideals. The man who has no ideals, or who believes that the Universe has forbidden their realisation, sinks into baseness or despair ; but he whose imagination has assimilated some noble ideal, viil] a new eirenicon. 295 whose activity urges him to its realisation, this, man has begun to possess not a theology only, but a religion. " The words religion and worship are commonly and conveniently appropriated to the feelings with which we regard God. But those feelings — love, awe, admiration, which together make up worship — are felt in various com- binations for human beings, and even for inanimate objects. It is not exclusively, but only par excellence, that religion is directed towards God. When feelings of admiration are very strong they find vent in some act ; when they are strong and at the same time serious and permanent, they express themselves in recurring acts, and hence arise ritual, liturgy, and whatever the multitude identifies with religion. But without ritual religion may exist in its elementary state, and this elementary state of religion is what may be described as habitual and ^permanent admiration." And, apart from Christianity, this admiration still may be, and still is, directed towards other objects which have made the essence of many of the religions of the past. Some men are returning to a higher Paganism — to the religion of the world's childhood, the worship of natural forms — purified now and rationalised, and capable of elevating such a spirit as Wordsworth's into a sacred and untroubled peace. And some men, approaching Nature from a different side, can hardly tell whether to call themselves Theists or Pantheists, as not knowing whether the Unity which they reverence be immanent in, or distinct from, the sum of things. They worship they laiow not 296 MODERN ESSAYS. [viii. what ; and yet the word Nature is too narrow to formulate the power which such men revere. "Nature, as the word has hitherto been used by scien- tific men, excludes the whole domain of human feeling, will, and morality. Nevertheless, in contemplating the relation of the Universe to ourselves and to our destiny, or again in contemplating it as a subject of admiration and worship, the human side of the Universe is the more important side to us. Our destiny is affected by the society in which we live more than by the natural con- ditions which surround us, and the moral virtues are higher objects of worship than natural beauty and glory. Accordingly the word Nature suggests but a part, and the less important part, of the idea for which we are seeking an expression. Nature presents itself to us as a goddess of unweariable vigour and unclouded happiness, but with- out any trouble or any compunction in her eye, without a conscience or a heart. But God, as the word is used by ancient prophets and modern poets, God, if the word have not lost in our ears some of its meaning through the feebleness of the preachers who have undertaken to inter- pret it, conveys all this beauty and greatness and glory, and conveys besides whatever more awful forces stir within the human heart, whatever binds men in families, and orders them in states. He is the Inspirer of kings, the Kevealer of laws, the Reconciler of nations, the Redeemer of labour, the Queller of tyrants, the Reformer of churches, the Guide of the human race towards an unknown goal." But let us ask ourselves wliat tlic piactical efficacy of a religion like this will be ? What front will it be able to offer to secularity ? To what extent can it vm.] A NEW EIRENICON. 297 inspire an active life, an independent virtue ? The first instance that suggests itself is not wholly re- assuring. The central maxim of this comprehensive faith, the injunction " to live resolutely in the whole, the good, the beautiful," is offered to us by Goethe imbedded in a kind of amorous drinking-song ; and although the great German poet may, no doubt, have " felt the whole six days' work go within him," yet (as our author frankly admits) " morality itself, as it is commonly understood, was not much favoured in his writings, nor perhaps in his life." To objections of this kind our author replies with an eloquent re-statement of that cardinal truth of morals whose proclamation has given to every moral reformer, from Jesus Christ downwards, something of the air of an antinomian : — the subordination, namely, of works to faith, of letter to spirit, of law to grace. " According to the view here taken too much is said by modern rationalists of morality, and too little of art and science, since these are related no less closely to religion, and must be taken with morality to make up the higher life. This view, indeed, regards the very word morality, and the way of thinking which leads to a fre- quent use of the word, with the same sort of impatience which the Pauline writings show towards the law. In any description of an ideal community which might be given in accordance with this view not much stress would be laid on its moral purity. This woukl rather be taken for granted as the natural result of the healtliy working of the higher life. The pecuHarity most strongly marked would 298 MODERN ESSAYS. [viii. be rather that what we call genius would be of ordinary occurrence in such a community. Every one there would be alive. The cares of livelihood would not absorb the mind, taming all impulse, clogging all flight, depressing the spirit with a base anxiety, smothering all social inter- course with languid fatigue, destroying men's interest in each other and making friendship impossible. Every one would worship, that is, every one would have some object of habitual contemplation, which would make life rich and bright to him, and of which he would think and speak with ardour. Every one would have some supreme in- terest, to which he would be proud to sacrifice every kind of help, and by which he would be bound in the highest kind of friendship to those who shared it. The higher life in all hearts would be a soil out of which many fair growths would spring ; morality would be one of these ; but it would appear in a form so fresh that no such name would seem appropriate to it." The inhabitants of this ideal commonwealth, as it appears, would not be inclined to look on morality either as a direct supernatural law, or as the outcome of laborious philosophical inquiry. They would look rather to the religion which underlies morality ; to the Natural Christianity which, as the thing in the known universe most manifestly worshipful, chooses the goodness and nobleness of men. " As virtue can oidy show itself in our relations to our fellowmen, the religion that leads to virtue must be a religion that worships men. If in God Himself we did not believe qualities analogous to the human to exist, the worship of Him would not lead to virtue." And this strenuous viil] a new eirenicon. 290 admiration, carrying with it the desire to imitate and to associate with the thing admired, while in private relations it is private virtue, becomes patriotism when it is directed towards a united community of men. It is a common view of the universe, a common ideal of conduct, which collects tribes into nationalities, and ripens nationalities into states. " Eeligions are com- monly what may be called nationalities in an idealised form," an idealisation which is apt to start into con- trolling reality at the shock of danger, or even in the throes of what might well seem death. Thus it was "by the waters of Babylon that Jewish nationality was transformed into Judaism ; " and Eome became the religion of Eegulus, and Italy of Mazzini, and Sparta of those who bade the passer-by bear news of how they lay at Thermopylae " in obedience to her precepts." And as the great nations of the world emerge gradually from their isolation and enmity into the consciousness of a deep community of ideals and aims, so also, says our author, should the Churches broaden too ; till the several National Churches, being each of them no narrower than the whole spiritual aspect or content of each individual State, unite and gather in a Church more Catholic than was ever the Eoman, even in the Universal Church, which is uni- versal civilisation. With its united influence this Church will teach to the barbarous races all that the civilised have learnt — science, humanity, delight and confidence in nature. 300 MODERN ESSAYS. [viii. And to each several nation her National Church will hold up the higher aspect, the inner meaning, the renowned exemplars of her own character and cor- porate life ; demanding of her preachers nothing more than intelligence and sincerity, and shrinking above all- things from binding them to fixed historical con- ceptions which the very march of history itself is certain in some sort to overthrow. " Suppose," says our author, in one of his most brilliant passages, " suppose we had formulated in the sixteenth century the principles or beliefs which we supposed to lie at the basis of our national Constitution. Suppose we had made a political creed. Perhaps the doctrine of divine right and the power of kings to cure disease, perhaps the whole legend of Brute and the derivation of our State from Troy, would have appeared in this creed. Once formulated, it would have come to be regarded as the dogmatic basis upon which our society rested. Then in time criticism would have begun its work. Philosophy would have set aside divine right, science would have exploded the belief about the king's evil, historical criti- cism would have shaken the traditionary history, and each innovation would have been regarded as a blow dealt at the Constitution of the country. At last it would have come to be generally thought that the Constitution was undermined, that it had been found unable to bear the light of modern science. Men would begin publicly to renounce it ; officials would win great applause by resign- ing tlieir posts from conscientious doubts about the person- ality of King Arthur. It would be generally agreed that the honest and manly course was to press the controversy VIII.] A NEW EIRENICON. 301 firmly to a conclusion, to resist all attempts to confuse the issue, and to keep the public steadily to the fundamental points. Has the sovereign, or has he not, a divine right 'i Can he, or can he not, cure disease by his touch ? Was the country, or vras it not, colonised by fugitives from Troy 1 And if at last the public should come by general consent to decide these questions in the negative, then it would be felt that no weak sentiment ought to be listened to, no idle gratitude to the Constitution for having, perhaps, in past times saved the country from Spanish or French invasion ; that all such considerations ought sternly to be put aside as irrelevant ; that as honest men we are bound to consider, not whether our Constitution was use- ful or interesting, or the like, but whether it was true, and if we could not any longer say, with our hands on our hearts, that it was so, then, in the name of eternal truth, renounce it and bid it farewell ! " Hell certainly could have " vomited from its jaws " few passages better calculated than this to undermine the orthodoxy of established churches. This is the in- vitation, of which we spoke, to the leaders of reaction against the Christian Church to become the leaders of progress within it ; it is the appeal addressed (in the terms of our homely simile) to the shareholders who are mining independently of the Company to try to get elected among its directors. The invitation seems so persuasive that there must be strong arguments on the other side, or the coalition would have been already effected. And in fact we can imagine some plain men among the shareholders who might think that only philosophers or renegades could enter on such an 302 MODERN ESSAYS. [vm. amalgamation as this. " The advice," they might say, " is precisely such as might have been expected from an eminent counsel who considers our past discussions as mere fruitless folly, and thinks only of what course of conduct will increase the dividends of the Company. But the difference has gone too far. The directors have borrowed too largely on the strength of their ofold-field, and are far too sure of it still to be able to unite with men who have pronounced it a sheer illusion. They will not alter their prospectus, in which that famous charter fills the leading place. And if the opposition leaders, with their known views, were to sign that prospectus, it would be the destruction of all confidence among business men." Nay, even after these projects of practical union have been dismissed as too probably chimerical, there remain two theoretical objections to our author's defini- tion of religion which many men will find it hard to get over. In the first place, can that be called religion which offers nothing of personal, of spiritual intercourse between the soul and God ? Our author's reply to this is the hint that personality in an Infinite Being can be little more than a metaphor, that when we are dealing with the eternal, the all-embracing, then in- deed, — " dextrae juiigerc dcxtram Non datur, ac vcras audirc et rcddere voces." Our spiritual intercourse must lie in the evocation of the memory of our great predecessors, as when we ask VIII.] A NEW EIRENICON. 303 ourselves, would Socrates, would Marcus Aurelius, have approved what I am doing now ? It is needless to say that the Christian, however undogmatic, will never be satisfied with this. He will never call it religion to keep, like Septimius Severus, a bust of Christ in his private chapel, " along with Virgil, Orpheus, Abraham, and other persons of the same kind." He claims to address himself to a Being: made human enough to give our love a place to cling, but remaining divine in His perfection, in His illumi- nating and responsive power. Nor is this intense impulse towards a sj)iritual union with something that is at once above and within us confined to Christians alone, or necessarily associated with any form of traditional belief whatever. For while it may be the fact that the belief in any definite superhuman personality becomes harder to maintain as men's minds become subtler and their scrutiny of evidence more exacting, yet, on the other hand, we see the craving for divine communion, divine forgiveness and blessing, satisfying itself with a spiritual answer which it shrinks from defining, and growing (as in Plotinus) the more absorbing as its object grows more incognisable to man. Not science alone, but mysticism, has shown itself ready to become the heir of all religions ; and the churches of Christendom may be destined to dissolve away, not into civilisation only, but into ecstasy. If, then, man's spiritual nature should not wither 304 MODERN ESSAYS. [viir. before the growth of his intellectual nature, but grow witli it to tlie end, it is likely tliat the distinction between pliilosophy and religion will not be obliterated, and that it will continue to be only by a stretch of language that science, patriotism, culture, can be in- cluded under the latter and more sacred name. And, in the second place, even apart from such speculations as these, there is, for plain men, here and now, an inadequacy in the very idea of natural religion, as defined in this book, wdiich our author has not indeed concealed, to which he has given earnest and forcible expression, but which to minds less philosophic or less hopeful than his own will present itself like the Sphinx's riddle, which palsied all inquiry into things remote or speculative with the urgency of an instant fear. y^ TTOtKtAwSoS ^<fily^ TO, TT/OOS TTOtrt O^KOTeil/ /xe^evras ry/xa? rdcfiavrj TrpocryjyeTO. "When the supernatural," says our autli or, "does not come in to overwhelm the natural and turn Hfe upside down, when it is admitted that religion deals, in the fii-st instance, with the known and the natural, then we may well begin to doubt whether tlie known and the natui-al can suffice for human life. No sooner do we try to tliiiik so than pessimism raises its head. The more our tlioughts widen and deepen, as the universe grows ni)()n us and we liccome accustomed to boundless space and time, the more p(;trifying is the contrast of our own insignificance, tlie more conteni[)tible become the pettiness, shortness, fragility of the individual life. A moral paralysis creeps upon us. VIII.] A NEW EIRENICON. 305 For awhile we comfort ourselves with the notion of self- sacrifice ; we say, What matter if I pass, let me think of others ! But the other has become contemptible no less than the self; all human griefs alike seem little worth assuaging, human happiness too paltry at the best to be worth in- creasing. The whole moral world is reduced to a point ; the spiritual city, ' the goal of all the saints,' dwindles to the ' least of little stars ' ; good and evil, right and wrong, become infinitesimal, ephemeral matters, while eternity and infinity remain attributes of that only which is outside the sphere of morality. Life becomes more intolerable the more we know and discover, so long as everything widens and deepens except our own duration, and that remains as pitiful as ever. The afi'ections die away in a world where everything great and enduring is cold ; they die of their own conscious feebleness and bootlessness." This passage falls upon the reader with a shock of disenchantment. " What, then," he exclaims, " did our author mean by so confident, so encouraging a tone ? Has he not been masterfully persuading us that at bottom we are all agreed, and that the inward satisfac- tion which belongs to the foi du charbonnier may somehow be shared also by the severest sage ? And now the hand which raised the fabric dashes it to the ground — the digestive energy which dissolved away so many a stubborn morsel ends by dissolving away the organism itself." Alas ! this book is no exception to the rule which bids the writer of every Theodicy break off his demonstration with some abruptness when he reaches the question whose answer it concerns us VOL. II. X 306 MODERN ESSAYS. [viii. most to know. We may be carried beyond ourselves by our teacher's eloquence and enthusiasm, yet we are always dimly conscious that eloquence and enthusiasm will after all leave us where we were, with everything depending on a single point which neither our teacher nor we have the data to determine. But here let us make an end of controversy. Wliether we call our author's utterances by the name of religion or of philosophy, they contain, at any rate, sublime ideas, vast generalisations, far-reaching hopes. As a mere model of simple and noble style tliis work is likely to be widely studied and to be remembered long. Nowhere, perhaps, could we find a more signal example of the characteristic excellences of the English prose of the present era, of its mingled subtlety and trenchancy, of its flashes of impassioned feeling seen through an atmosphere of steady self-control. It is instructive to compare our author's style with M. lienan's. The Frenchman seems like the very spirit of the age whispering in our ear. We gradually get to think all other voices partial or foolish, and though we may never once feel in cordial agreement with him, we end by admitting to ourselves that we cannot get nearer to the truth than he. The English- man, on the other hand, does not shrink from startling, almost offending us. His arguments often seem one- sided, his aims impracticable. But even his paradoxes have a kind of combative cogency, and when some veritable truth " swims into his ken," then, indeed, he VIII.] A NEW EIRENICON. 307 speaks like a captain calling to the onset, and declares in tones of trumpet clearness the chief concerns of man. And whatever may be the event and upshot of our present perplexities, there must at any rate be need of this spirit of earnest catholicity which strives to raise all the elements of our spiritual being to a heat so glowing that they may fuse and combine themselves in one. If we are always to remain uncertain as to any life save that of earth, then it will be to these eager and dominating spirits that we shall have to look for much of the impulse that is to keep us from stagnating in despair. And even if some clearer con- viction of immortality be yet reserved for men, such exhortations as these should keep us from the com- placent quietism which thinks that it is enough to be "saved." They should remind us that the Natural Eeligion of this life may continue to be the Natural Eeligion of another, and that " the Eternal and the Infinite and the All-embracing " may need to be approached by many pathways which priestly tradition has never known. And surely the more we are persuaded that a belief in a life to come may be the most potent of all agencies in repressing vice and stimulating virtue, the more must we recognise that this belief, as presented in the popular theology, has crystallised into a shape which much needs some salutary concussion. We do not want a languid belief in the reversion of a sinecure 308 MODERN ESSAYS. [vin. acquirable by conformity to a test; we want a con- viction sucli as may make death even welcome, that death is but the entrance to a career of more joyful, because more strenuous, virtue. We need a widened and invigorated ideal of the spiritual universe through which we may one day wander. We need prophets, bold as the Hebrew, to secularise a conception of eternity wliich has become too exclusively hieratic ; to illustrate with cogent vividness the solidarity of all attainable fragments of truth, to prepare that ultimate syncretism of all genuine faiths toward which, if we hope at all, we must hope that the world is tending. Even those who still hold to Paul's watchword of " Christ and Eesurrection " may feel, perhaps, that this process of expansion is a gain to all forms of religion alike, — and yet that it would scarcely have been urged forward so earnestly had not the faith in Christ and Eesurrection been for a time impau-ed. They may admit that this also may be in the Provi- dence of God, and that a temporary doubt as to the everlasting arms upholding us may be needed to teach us to put forth all the strength which is our own. Virgil compares the human race and its destiny to a rower struggling hopelessly against an opposing stream. Those who believe that the boat which carries man and his fortunes is in reality towed onwards by an unseen Power should listen, not with resentment, but with attentive interest, to their comrades who maintain that the tow-rupe is swaying idly in the water, ])iit viii.] A NEW EIRENICON. 309 who yet feel confident that they can themselves propel the vessel. Perhaps that confidence is vain, but at least we should note how they apply their force, and unite in the strenuousness of their endeavour. And how large a part of the most deeply-religious thought of recent years has been directed toward some such endeavour as this ! How often will it be needful to seek the characteristic, the vital points of the theo- logy of this century (as of many that have preceded it) in the writings of men who formed in their lifetime the standing targets of orthodox zeal ! What future history of man's higher life can ignore that revival and systematisation of the instinct of human brother- hood which we owe to Comte and his disciples? What theory of man's duty to his Maker can forget Mill's noble conception of a Divinity whoUy good, completely wise, but who nevertheless, as being not all-powerful, does actually need and rejoice in the help of His creatures towards the attainment of His glorious ends ? What religious poetry of our century will sway men more profoundly than George Eliot's hymn of the Choir Invisible, whose impassioned expression of the absorption of personal in universal hope is not alien assuredly from the spirit of the apostle who was almost willing, for his converts' sake, himself to become a castaway ? The list might easily be prolonged. But it could contain few voices better adapted to present needs than that of the author of Natural Mcligion, proclaiming that whether our eternal hope 310 MODERN ESSAYS. [viii. is to subsist or fail, we must at any rate absorb as culture, reproduce as worship, the truths of science, the ideals of art, the sum of slowly- won and ever-spread- ing humanities which make for each nation severally its national and corporate soul and being, and con- stitute in the world at large the world-wide Church of civilisation. It is true that those who cling to immortality as the world's one hope may naturally find something depressing in the visible spread of these efforts to con- duct human life without it. Like Adam, at the first approach of night, they well may " tremble for this lovely frame," and cry aloud with terror at the advanc- ing veil of shade. But to Adam, as we know, the dark- ness became revelation. " Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame Hesperus with the host of heaven came, And lo ! creation widened in man's view." The lights that rule the night may bestow no warmth with their illumination. Art, perhaps, may seem to us but a moonlight halo ; Science and Stoicism — the resolve to learn and to endure — may be but as noctis signa severa — night's austere constellations, enthroned in a frozen heaven. And yet that nocturnal outlook is the pre-requisite of almost all we know ; nor with- out the sun's witlidrawal and obscuration could men truly have conceived the sun. if the belief iu a life to come should ever regain as VIII.] A NEW EIRENICON. 311 firm possession of men's mind as of old, that belief will surely be held in a nobler fashion. That life will be conceived not as a devotional exercise nor as a passive felicity, but as the prolongation of all generous energies, and the unison of all high desires. It may be that till we can thus apprehend it its glory must be hid from our eyes. Only, perhaps, when men have learnt that virtue is its own reward may they safely learn also that that reward is eternal. EOSSETTI AND THE EELIGION OF BEAUTY. Among those picturesque aspects of life which the advance of civilisation is tending to reduce to smooth- ness and uniformity we may include that huhbub and conflict w^hich in rougher days used to salute the appearance of any markedly new influence in science, literature, or art. Prejudice — not long since so for- midable and ubiquitous a giant — now shows some- times little more vitality than Bunyan's Pope or Pajran ; and the men who stone one of our modern prophets do it hurriedly, feeling that tliey may be interrupted at any moment by liaving to make arrange- ments for his interment in Westminster Abbey. Now, while it would be absurd not to rejoice in this increasing receptivity of cultivated men — absurd to wish the struggle of genius sharper, or its recogni- tion longer deferred — we may yet note one incidental advantage which belonged to the older r^gwu. While victory was kept longer in doubt, and while the conflict was rougher, the advocates of a new cause felt a stronger obligation to master it in all its aspects, IX.] ROSSETTI AND THE RELIGION OF BEAUTY. 313 and to set it forth with such exposition as mi^lit best prepare a place for it in ordinary minds. The merits of Wordsworth (to take an obvious instance) were long ignored by the public ; but in the meantime his admirers had explained them so often and so fully that the recomition which was at last accorded to them was given on those merits, and not in mere deference to the authority of any esoteric circle. The exhibition of Dante Eossetti's pictures which now (February 1883) covers the walls of Burlington House is the visible sign of the admission of a new strain of thought and emotion within the pale of our artistic orthodoxy. And since Eossetti's poetry ex- presses with singular exactness the same range of ideas as his painting, and is at any rate not inferior to his painting in technical skill, we may fairly say that his poetry also has attained hereby some sort of general recognition, and that the enthusiastic notices whicli appeared on his decease embodied a view of him to which the public is willing to some extent to defer. Yet it hardly seems that enough has been done to make that deference spontaneous or intelligent. The students of Eossetti's poems — taking their tone from Mr. Swinburne's magnificent eulogy — have for the most part rather set forth their artistic excellence than endeavoured to explain their contents, or to indicate the relation of the poet's habit of thought and feeling to the ideas which Englishmen are accustomed to trust or admire. And consequently many critics, whose 314 MODERN ESSAYS. [ix. ethical point of view demands respect, continue to find in Eossetti's works an enigma not worth the pains of solution, and to decry them as obscure, fan- tastic, or even as grossly immoral iu tendency. It will be the object of this essay — written from a point of view of by no means exclusive sympathy with the movement which Eossetti led — to show, in the first place, the great practical importance of that movement for good or evil ; and, further, to trace such relations between this Eeligion of Art, this Worship of Beauty, and the older and more accredited mani- festations of the Higher Life, as may indicate to the moralist on what points he should concentrate his efforts if, hopeless of withstanding the rising stream, he seeks at least to retain some power of deepening or modifying its channel. From the aesthetic side such an attempt will be regarded with indifference, and from the ethical side with little hope. Even so bold a peacemaker as the author of Natural Religion has shrunk from this task ; for the art wliich he admits as an element in his Church of Civilisation is an art very different from Eossetti's. It is an art manifestly untainted by sensuousness, manifestly akin to virtue ; an art which, like Wordsworth's, finds its revelation in sea and sky and mountain rather than in " eyes wliich the sun- gate of the soul unbar," or in "Such fire as Lovo's soul-winnowing hands distil, Even from his inmost ark of light and dew." IX.] ROSSETTI AND THE RELIGION OF BEAUTY. 315 Yet, however slight the points of contact between the ethical and the sesthetic theories of life may be, it is important that they should be noted and dwelt upon. For assuredly the " aesthetic movement " is not a mere fashion of the day — the modish pastime of nincom- poops and charlatans. The imitators who surround its leaders, and whose jargon almost disgusts us with the very mysteries of art, the very vocabulary of emotion — these men are but the straws that mark the current, the inevitable parasites of a rapidly -rising cause. We have, indeed, only to look around us to perceive that — whether or not the conditions of the modern world are favourable to artistic excellence — all the main forces of civilisation are tending towards artistic actimty. The increase of wealth, the diffusion of education, the gradual decline of the military, the hieratic, the aristocratic ideals — each of these causes removes some obstacle from the artist's patt or offers some fresh prize to his endeavours. Art has outlived both the Puritans and the Inquisition; she is no longer deadened by the spirit of self-mortification, nor enslaved by a jealous orthodoxy. The increased wealth of the world makes the artist's life stable and secure, while it sets free a surplus income so large that an increasing share of it must almost necessarily be diverted to some form of aesthetic expenditure. And more than this. It is evident, especially in new countries, that a need is felt of some kind of social distinction — some new aristocracy — based on 316 MODERN ESSAYS. [ix. differences other than those of birth and wealtli. Not, indeed, that rank and family are likely to cease to be held in honour ; but, as power is gradually dissociated from them, they lose their exclusive predominance, and take their place on the same footing as other cjraces and dimities of life. Still less need we assume any slackening in the pursuit of riches ; the fact being rather that this pursuit is so widely successful that in civilised capitals even immense opulence can now scarcely confer on its possessor all the distinction which he desires. In America, accordingly, where modern instincts find their freest field, we have before our eyes the process of the gradual distribution of the old prerogatives of birth amongst wealth, culture, and the proletariat. In Europe a class privileged by birth used to supply at once the rulers and the ideals of other men. In America the rule has passed to the multitude; largely swayed in subordinate matters by organised wealth, but in the last resort supreme. The ideal of the new community at first was Wealth ; but, as its best literature and its best society plainly show, that ideal is shifting in the direction of Culture. The younger cities, the coarser classes, still bow down undisguisedly to the god Dollar ; but when this Pliilistine deity is rejected as shaming liis worshippers, (fisLlietic Culture seems somehow the only Power ready to iiistal itself in the vacant sln-ine. And all over the world the spread of Science, the diffusion of Morality, tend in this same direction. IX ] EOSSETTI AND THE RELIGION OF BEAUTY. 317 For the net result of Science and Morality for the mass of men is simply to give them comfort and leisure, to leave them cheerful, peaceful, and anxious for occupation. Nay, even the sexual instinct, as men become less vehement and unbridled, merges in larger and larger measure into the mere aesthetic enjoyment of beauty ; till Stesichorus might now maintain with more truth than of old that our modern Helen is not herself fought for by two continents, but rather her etScoXov or image is blamelessly diffused over the albums of two hemispheres. It is by no means clear that these modern condi- tions are favourable to the development either of the highest art or of the highest virtue. It is not certain even that they are permanent — that this aesthetic paradise of the well-to-do may not sometime be con- vulsed by an invasion from the rough world without. Meantime, however, it exists and spreads, and its leading figures exert an influence which few men of science, and fewer theologians, can surpass. And alike to savant^ to theologian, and to moralist, it must be important to trace the workings of a powerful mind, concerned with interests which are so different from theirs, but which for a large section of society are becoming daily more paramount and engrossing. " Under the arch of Life," says Eossetti in a sonnet whose Platonism is the more impressive because prob- ably unconscious — 318 MODERN ESSAYS. [ix. " Under the arch of Life, where love and death, Terror and mystery, guard her shrine, I saw- Beauty enthroned ; and though her gaze struck awe, I drew it in as simply as my breath." Eossetti was ignorant of Greek, and it seems doubt- ful whetlier he knew Plato even by translations. But his idealising spirit has reproduced the myth of the Phccdrus — even to the Tpe(f)6TaL koX eviradel — the words that affirm the repose and well-being of the soul when she perceives beneath the arch of heaven the pure Idea which is at once her sustenance and her lord : — " Hers are the eyes which, over and beneath. The sky and sea bend on thee ; which can draw, By sea or sky or woman, to one law, The allotted bondman of her palm and wreath." For Beauty, as Plato has told us, is of all the divine ideas at once most manifest and most loveable to men. When " Justice and Wisdom and all other things that are held in honour of souls " are hidden from the worshipper's gaze, as finding no avenue of sense by which to reach him through the veil of llesh, Beauty •has still some passage and entrance from mortal eyes to eyes, "and he that gazed so earnestly on what things in that holy place were to be seen, he when he discerns on earth some godlike countenance or fashion of body, tliat counterfeits lieauty well, first of all lie trembles, and there comes over him something of the IX.] ROSSETTI AND THE RELIGION OF BEAUTY. 319 fear which erst he knew ; but then, looking on tliat earthly beauty, he worships it as divine, and if he did not fear the reproach of utter madness he would sacrifice to his heart's idol as to the image and presence of a god." " This is that Lady Beauty, in whose praise Thy voice and hand shake still — long known to thee By flying hair and flattering hem — the beat Following her daily of thy heart and feet, How passionately and irretrievably, In what fond flight, how many ways and days ! " There are some few hearts, no doubt, in which " sky and sea " and the face of Nature are able to inspire this yearning passion. But with this newer school — with Eossetti especially — we feel at once that Nature is no more than an accessory. The most direct appeals, the most penetrating reminiscences, come to the worshipper of Beauty from a woman's eyes. The steady rise in the status of women ; that constant deepening and complication of the commerce between the sexes which is one of the signs of pro- gressive civilisation ; all this is perpetually teaching and preaching (if I may say so) the cluirnis of woman- hood to all sections of the community. What a difference in this respect has the century since Turner's birth made in England ! If another Turner were born now — an eye which gazed, as it were, on a new-created planet from the very bedchamber and outgoing of the sun — can we suppose tliat such an 320 MODERN ESSAYS. [ix. eye would still find its most attractive feminine type in the biimboats of Wapping ? The anomaly, strange enough in Turner's day, is now inconceivable. Our present danger lies in just the opposite dh-ection. We are in danger of losing that direct and straightforward outlook on human loveliness (of which Mr. Millais may serve as a modern example) which notes and represents the object with a frank enjoyment, and seeks for no further insight into the secret of its charm. All the arts, in fact, are returning now to the spirit of Leonardo, to the sense that of all visible objects known to us the human face and form are the most complex and mysterious, to the desire to extract the utmost secret, the occult message, from all the phenomena of Life and Being. Now there is at any rate one obvious explanation of the sense of mystery which attaches to the female form. We may interpret it all as in some way a transformation of the sexual passion. This essentially materialistic view is surrounded with a kind of glamour by such writers as Gautier and Baudelaire. The tone of sentiment thus generated is repugnant — is some- times even nauseating — to English feeling ; but this tone of sentiment is certainly not Kossetti's. There is no trace in him of this deliberate worship of Baal and Aslitoreth ; no touch of the cruelty which is the char- acteristic note of natures in which the sexual instincts have become liaunting and dominant. It is, indeed, at the opposite end of the scale — IX.] ROSSETTI AND THE RELIGION OF BEAUTY. S21 among those who meet the mysteries of love and womanhood with a very different interpretation — that Eossetti's nearest affinities are to be found. It must not be forgotten that one of his most exquisite literary achievements consists in a translation of the Vita Nuova of Dante. Now, the Vita Nuova, to the vulgar reader a childish or meaningless tale, is to those who rightly apprehend it the very gospel and charter of mystical passion. When the child Dante trembles at the first sight of the child Beatrice ; when the voice within him cries Ecce dens fortior mc, qui veniens dominabitur mihi ; when that majestic spirit passes, at a look of the beloved one, through all the upward or downward trajectory between heaven and hell; this, indeed, is a love which appertains to the category of reasoned affections no more ; its place is with the visions of saints, the intuitions of philosophers, in Plato's ideal world. It is recognised as a secret which none can hope to fathom till we can discern from some mount of unearthly vision what those eternal things were indeed to which ^ somewhat in human nature blindly perceived itself akin. The parallel between Eossetti and Dante must not be pushed too far. Eossetti is but as a Dante still in the selva oscura ; he has not sounded hell so pro- foundly, nor mounted into heaven so high. He is not a prophet but an artist ; yet an artist who, both by the very intensity of his artistic vision, and by some inborn bent towards symbol and mysticism, stands on the VOL. II. Y 322 MODERN ESSAYS. [ix. side of those who see in material things a spiritual significance, and ntters words of universal meaning from the fulness of his own heart. Yet he is, it must be repeated, neither prophet, philosopher, nor saint. The basis of his love is the normal emotion — " the delight in beauty alloyed with appetite, and strength- ened by the alloy;" — and although that love has indeed learned, in George Eliot's words, to " acknow- ledge an effect from the imagined light of unproven firmaments, and have its scale set to the grander orbit of what hath been and shall be," this transfiguration is effected not so much by any elevation of ethical feel- ing, as by the mere might and potency of an ardent spirit w^hich projects itself with passionate intensity among things unreachable and unknown. To him his beloved one seems not as herself alone, " but as the meaning of all things that are ; " her voice recalls a prenatal memory, and her eyes " dream against a dis- tant goal." We hear little of the intellectual aspects of passion, of tlie subtle interaction of one character on another, of the modes in which Love possesses liim- self of the eager or the reluctant heart. In these poems the lovers have lost their idiosyncrasies ; they are made at one for ever ; the two streams have mingled only to become conscious that they are being drawn together into a boundless sea. Nay, the very passion which serves to unite them, and which is sometimes dwelt on with an Italian emphasis of sensuousness which our English reserve condemns, tends oftencr to IX.] EOSSETTl AND THE RELIGION OF BEAUTV. 323 merge itself in the mystic companionship which holds the two souls together in their enchanted land. " One flame-winged brought a white- winged harp-player Even where my lady and I lay all alone ; Saying : ' Behold, this minstrel is unknown ; Bid him depart, for I am minstrel here ; Only my strains are to Love's dear ones dear.' Then said I : ' Through thine haut-boy's rapturous tone Unto my lady still this harp makes moan, And still she deems the cadence deep and clear.' "Then said my lady : ' Thou art Passion of Love, And this Love's Worship ; both he plights to me Thy mastering music walks the sunlit sea ; But where wan water trembles in the grove. And the wan moon is all the light thereof, This harp still makes my name its Voluntary.' " The voluntaries of the white- winged harp-player do not linger long among the accidents of earth ; they link with the beloved name all " the soul's sphere of infinite images," all that she finds of benign or won- drous " amid the bitterness of things occult." And as the lover moves amid these mysteries it appears to him that Love is the key which may unlock them all. For the need is not so much of an intellectual insight as of an elevation of the whole being — a rarefaction, as it were, of man's spirit which Love's pure fire effects, and which enables it to penetrate more deeply into the ideal world. In that thin air Love undergoes a yet further 324 MODERN ESSAYS. [ix. tiaiisformation. The personal element, already sub- limed into a mystic companionship, retires into the background. The lover is now, in Plato's words, eVt to TToXif 7re\ayo<; TeTpafJifievof; rov koXov ; he has set sail upon the ocean of Beauty, and Love becomes the epfivvevov koI ScaTropOfjuevov, the " interpreter and mediator between God and man," through whom the true prayer passes and the true revelation is made. *' Not I myself know all my love for thee : How should I reach so far, who cannot weigh To-morrow's dower by gage of yesterday ? Shall birth and death, and all dark names that be As doors and windows bared to some loud sea, Lash deaf mine ears and blind my face with spray ; And shall my sense pierce love — the last relay And ultimate outpost of eternity 1 " For thus, indeed, is Love discerned to be something which lies beyond the region of this world's wisdom or desire — something out of proportion to earthly needs and to causes that we know. Here is the point where tlie lover's personality seems to be exalted to its V highest, and at the same moment to disappear ; as he perceives that his individual emotion is merged in the flood and tideway of a cosmic law : — " Lo ! what am I to Love, the lord of all 1 One murmuring shell he gathers from the sand — One little heart-flame sheltered in his hand. Yet through thine eyes he grants me clearest cull And veriest touch of powers primordial That any hour-girt life may understand." IX.] ROSSETTI AND THE RELIGION OF BEAUTY. 325 Alas ! this call, by its very nature, is heard in one heart alone ; this " touch of powers primordial " is intransferable to other souls. The eyes which, to the lover's vision, " The sun-gate of the soul unbar, Being of its furthest fires oracular," jan send this message to the world only through sign and symbol ; the " bower of unimagined flower and tree " is fashioned by Love in such hearts only as he has already made his own. And thus it is that so much of Eossetti's art, in speech or colour, spends itself in the effort to com- municate the incommunicable. It is toward "the vale of magical dark mysteries " that those grave low- hanging brows are bent, and " vanished hours and hours eventual " brood in the remorseful gaze of Pandora, the yearning gaze of Proserpine. The pictures that perplex us with their obvious incompleteness, their new and haunting beauty, are not the mere caprices of a richly - dowered but wandering spirit. Eather they may be called (and none the less so for their shortcomings) the sacred pictures of a new reli- gion ; forms and faces which bear the same relation to that mystical worship of Beauty on which we have dwelt so long, as the forms and faces of a Francia or a Leonardo bear to the mediaeval mysteries of the wor- ship of Mary or of Christ. And here it is that in Eossetti's pictures we find ourselves in the midst of a novel symbolism — a symbolism genume and deeply 1/ 326 MODERN ESSAYS. [ix. felt as that of the fifteenth century, and using once more birds and flowers and stars, colours and lights of the evening or the dawn, to tell of beauties impalpable, spaces unfathomed, the setting and resurrection of no measurable or earthly day. It is chiefly in a series of women's faces that these ideas seek expression. All these have something in common, some union of strange and puissant physical loveliness with depth and remoteness of gaze. They range from demon to angel — as such names may be interpreted in a Eeligion of Beauty — from Lilith, whose beauty is destruction, and Astarte, throned between the Sun and Moon in her sinister splendour, to the Blessed Damozel and the " maiden pre-elect," type of the love whose look regenerates and whose assump- tion lifts to heaven. But all have the look — charac- teristic of Kossetti's faces as the mystic smile of Leonardo's — the look which bids the spectator murmur — " What netherworkl gulf-whispers doth she hear, In answering echoes from what planisphere, Along the wind, along the estuary ? " And since these primal impulses, at any rate, will remain to mankind, since Love's patliway will be re- trodden by many a generation, and all of faith or knowledge to wliich that patliway leads will cnduri', it is no small part of the poet's function to show in how great a measure Love does actually pre-'iuppose IX.] ROSSETTI AND THE RELIGION OF BEAUTY. 327 and consist of this exaltation of the mystic element in man ; and liow the sense of unearthly destinies may give dignity to Love's invasion, and steadfastness to his continuance, and surround his vanishing with the mingled e(sstasy of anguish and of hope. Let us trace, with Eossetti, some stages of his onward way. The inexplicable suddenness with which Love will sometimes possess himself of two several hearts — find- ing a secret kinship which, like a common aroma, permeates the whole being of each — has often sug- gested the thought that such companionship is not in reality now first begun ; that it is founded in a pre- natal affection, and is the unconscious prolongation of the emotions of an ideal world — " Even so, when first I saw you, seemed it, love, That among souls allied to mine was yet One nearer kindred then life hinted of. born with me somewhere that men forget, And though in years of sight and sound unmet, Known for my soul's birth-partner well enough ! " It is thus that Eossetti traces backward the kind- ling of the earthly flame. And he feels. also that if love be so pervading, so fateful a thing, the man who takes it upon him has much to fear. He moves among great risks ; " the moon-track of the journeyiug face of Fate " is subject for him to strange perturba- tion^, to terrible eclipse. What if his love be a mis- take ? — if he feels against his will a disenchantment stealing over the enchanted garden, and his new self 328 MODERN ESSAYS. [ix. walking, a ghastly intruder, among scenes vainly con- secrated by an illusive past ? " Whence came his feet into my field, and why 1 How is it that he finds it all so drear ? How do I see his seeing, and how hear * The name his bitter silence knows it by 'i " Or what of him for whom some unforgotten hour has marred his life's best felicity, ct inquinavit aerc tempns aureum ? What of the recollection that chills his freest moments with an inward and icy breath ? " Look in my face, my name is Might-have-been ; I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell." There is no need to invite attention to the lines which thus begin. They will summon their own auditors ; they will not die till that inward Presence dies also, and there sits not at the heart of any man a memory deeper than his joy. But over all lovers, however wisely they may love, and well, there hangs one shadow which no wisdom can avert. To one or other the shock must come, the separation which will make the survivor's after- life seem something posthumous, and its events like the changes in a dream. Without intruding into the private story of a life which has not yet been authoritatively recounted to us, we may recognise that on Kossetti the shock of severance, of bereavement, must have fallen with deso- lating force. In several of his most pregnant poems, — IX.] ROSSETTI AND THE RELIGION OF BEAUTY. 329 in the sonnets entitled Willoiu-wood most of all, — those who know the utmost anguish of yearning have listened to a voice speaking as though from their own hearts. The state of tension, indeed, which finds utter- ance in these sonnets is by its very nature transitory. There comes a time when most men forget. But in some hearts the change which comes over the passion of love is not decay, but transfiguration. That passion is generalised, as Plato desired that it should be gen- eralised, though in a somewhat different way. The Platonic enthusiasm of admiration was to extend itself " from one fair form to all fair forms," and from fair forms to noble and beautiful ideas and actions, and all that is likest God. And something not unlike this takes place when the lover feels that the object of his earthly worship, now removed from his sight, is be- coming identified for him with all else that he has been wont to revere — representative to him, to use Plato's words again, " of those things, by dwelling on which it is that even a god is divine." It is not, indeed, the bereaved lover only who finds in a female figure the ideal recipient of his impulses of adoring love. Of how many creeds has this been the inspiring element ! — from the painter who invokes upon his canvas a Virgin revealed in sleep, to the philosopher who preaches the worship of Humanity in a woman's likeness, to be at once the Mother and the Beloved of all. Yet this ideal will operate most actively in hearts which can give to that celestial vision a remembered 330 MODERN ESSAYS. [ix. reality, whose " memorial threshold " seems visibly to bridge the passage between the transitory and the supernal world. " City, of thine a single simple door, By some new Power reduplicate, must be Even yet my life-porch in eternity, Even with one presence filled, as once of yore ; Or mockiniir winds whirl round a chaff-strewn floor Thee and thy years and these my words and me." And if sometimes this transmuted passion — this re- ligion of beauty spiritualised into a beatific dream — should prompt to quietism rather than to vigorous action, — if sometimes we hear in the mourner's utter- ance a tone as of a man too weak for his destiny — this has its pathos too. For it is a part of the lot of man that the fires which purify should also consume him, and that as the lower things become distasteful the energy which seeks the higher things should fade too often into a sad repose. *' Here with her face doth Memory sit, Meanwhile, and wait the day's decline, Till other eyes shall look from it — Eyes of the spirit's Palestine, Even than the old gaze tenderer ; While ho])es and aims, long lost with her, Stand round her image side by siilc, Like tombs of pilgrims that have died About the Holy Sepulchre." And when the dreani and the legend which inspired IX.] ROSSETTI AND TilE RELIGION OF BEAUTY. 331 Rossetti's boyhood with the vision of the Blessed Damozel — which kindled his early manhood into the sweetest Ave that ever saluted " Mary Virgin, full of grace " — had transformed themselves in his heart into the reality and the recollection ; wlien Love had been made known to him by life itself and death — then he had at least gained power to show how the vaguer worship may become a concentrated expectancy : how one vanished hand may seem to offer the endless wel- come, one name to sjmibolise all heaven, and to be in itself the single hope. " Ah ! when the wan soul in that golden air Between the scriptured petals softly blown Peers breathless for the gift of grace unknown, — Ah ! let none other alien spell soe'er, But only the one Hope's one name be there, — Not less nor more, but e'en that word alone." Enough, perhaps, has been said to indicate not only how superficial is the view which represents Rossetti as a dangerous sensualist, but also how inadequately we shall understand him if we think to find in him only the commonplaces of passion dressed out in fantastic language and Italianised allegory. There is more to be learnt from him than this, though it be too soon, as yet, to discern with exactness his place in the history of our time. Yet we may note that his sensi- tive and reserved individuality ; his life, absorbed in Art, and aloof from — without being below — tlie circles of politics or fashion ; his refinement, created as it 332 MODERN ESSAYS. [ix were from within, and independent of conventional models, point him out as a member of that new aristo- cracy of which we have already spoken, that oi^timcicy of passion and genius (if we may re^dve an obsolete word to express a new shade of meaning) which is coming into existence as a cosmopolitan gentility among the confused and fading class -distinctions of the past. And, further, we may observe in him the reaction of Art against Materialism, which becomes more marked as the dominant tone of science grows more soulless and severe. The instincts which make other men Catholics, Eitualists, Hegelians, have com- pelled him, too, to seek " the meaning of all things that are" elsewhere than in the behaviour of ether and atoms, though we can track his revelation to no source more explicit than the look in a woman's eyes. But if we ask — and it was one of the questions with which we started — what encouragement the moralist can 11 nd in this counter -wave of art and mysticism which meets the materialistic tide, there is no certain or easy answer. The one view of life seems as powerless as the other to sui)ply that antique and manly virtue which civilisation tends to undermine by the lessening effort tliat it exacts of men, the increas- ing enjoyment that it offers to them. " Time has run back and fetched the age of gold," in tlie sense th.'it tlu; opulent can now take life as easily as it was taken in L'aiiidise ; and llossetti's poems, placed beside* Sidney's or Lovelace's, seem the expression of a century IX.] ROSSETTI AND THE RELIGION OF BEAUTY. 333 which is refining itself into quietism and mellowing into decay. Yet thus much we may safely affirm, that if we contrast sestheticism with pure hedonism — the pursuit of pleasure through art with the pursuit of pleasure simply as pleasure — the one has a tendency to quicken and exalt, as the other to deaden and vulgarise, the emotions and appetencies of man. If only the artist can keep clear of the sensual selfishness which will, in its turn, degrade the art which yields to it ; if only he can worship beauty with a strong and single heart, his emotional nature will acquire a grace and elevation which are not, indeed, identical with the elevation of virtue, the grace of holiness, but which are none the less a priceless enrichment of the com- plex life of man. Eossetti could never have summoned us to the clear heights of Wordsworth's Laodamia. Yet who can read the House of Life and not feel that the poet has known Love as Love can be — not an enjoyment only or a triumph, but a worship and a regeneration ; Love not fleeting nor changeful, but " far above all passionate winds of welcome and fare- well;" Love offering to the soul no mere excitation and by -play, but "a heavenly solstice, hushed and halcyon;" Love whose " hours elect in choral consonancy " bear with them nothing that is vain or vulgar, common or unclean. He must have felt as no passing tragedy the long ache of parted pain, " the ground-whirl of the perished leaves of hope," " the sunset's desolate dis- 334 MODERN ESSAYS. fix array," the fruitless striving "to wrest a bond from night's inveteracy," to behold " for once, for once alone," the unforgotten eyes re-risen from the dark of deatli. Love, as Plato said, is the kpfiijvevov kcll hiairop- 6fjL6vov, " the interpreter and mediator " between things human and things divine ; and it may be to Love that we must look to teach the worshipper of Beauty that the highest things are also the loveliest, and that the strongest of moral agencies is also the most pervading and keenest joy. Art and Eeligion, which no compres- sion could amalgamate, may by Love be expanded and interfused ; and thus the poet may not err so wholly who seeks in a woman's eyes " the meaning of all things that are ;" and " the soul's sphere of infinite images " may not be a mere prismatic fringe to reality, but rather those images may be as dark rays made visible by passing through the medium of a mind which is fitted to refract and reflect them. A faint, a fitful reflex ! Whether it be from light of sun or of moon, sole rej^eratssuiii met radiantis iviagitie Innae, — the glimmer of a vivifying or of a phantom day — may scarcely be for us to know. ]>ut never yet has the universe been proved smaller than the con- ceptions of man, whose farthest, deepest speculation has only found within him yet pro founder abysses, — without, a more unfathomable heaven. NOTES. Note A. Since the publication of the first edition of these Essays, an admirable study of French versification has appeared from the pen of M. Guyau, in the Revue Philosophique for 1884, under the title of ' L'Esthetic[ue du vers Moderne.' This paper, far more philosophical than any French writings on the subject which I had previously seen, suggests much which might be added to my discussion, did space permit. Fortunately, however, so far as my own remarks go, they are thoroughly in accordance with M. Guyau's more authoritative opinion. 1885. Note B. The letters of George Eliot which have recently been given to the world confirm the view above expressed as to the pre- dominance in her of the ethical impulse. Not even the one grave moral mistake into which a wave of theoretical opinion rather than of personal jjassion carried her, can seriously interfere with the impression which the records of her whole life produce, — the picture of untiring self-improvement, of strenuous well- doing. The letters are as far removed as possible from either the recklessness or the self-absorption which sometimes accom- pany imaginative genius, leather we find a temper as of one resolved to treat the whole of life scientifically, and not m amateur, — a voice whose stern self-communings seem overheard in the heart's secret chamber, and bid us to redeem the time because the days are evil. 1886. ^be jBvcvbIc>^ Series, Globe 8vo. Cloth, ^s per volume. The Works of Matthew Arnold. 6 vols. ESSAYS IN CRITICISM. First Series. ESSAYS IN CRITICISM. 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