studies in Religion ^ and Literature W.S. Lilly I LIBRARY OF THE University of California. Class U1^ I Studies in Religion and Literature Works by the Same Author ANCIENT RELIGION AND MODERN THOUGHT. {Out of print.) Chapman and Hall. CHAPTERS IN EUROPEAN HISTORY. {Out of print.) Chapman and Hall. A CENTURY OF REVOLUTION. {yd EStion.) Chapman and Hall. ON RIGHT AND WRONG. {Zrd Edition.) Chapman and Hall. ON SHIBBOLETHS. Chapman and Hall. THE CLAIMS OF CHRISTIANITY. Chapman and Hall. ESSAYS AND SPEECHES. Chapman and Hall, CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN CIVI- LIZATION. Chapman and Hall. THE GREAT ENIGMA. {Out of print.) John Murray. FOUR ENGLISH HUMOURISTS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. {Out oj print.) John Murray. FIRST PRINCIPLES IN POLITICS. John Murray. RENAISSANCE TYPES. Fisher Unwin. INDIA AND ITS PROBLEMS. Sands. Studies in Religion and Literature William Samuel Lilly Honorary Fellow of Peterhousc, Cambridge ■ Weite Welt und breites Leben, Langer Jahre redlich Streben, Stets geforscht unH stets gegriinilet, Nie geschlossen, oft geriindet, Altestes bewahrt mit Treue, Freundlich aufgefasst das Neue, Heitren Sinn und reine Zwecke, Nun, man konimt wohl eine Strecke !" GOETHK. London : Chapman & Hall, Ld. 1904 TO Sir HUBERT EDWARD HENRY JERNINGHAM K.C.M.G. My dear Jerningham, With your kind permission, I inscribe your name on the first page of this book, as a tribute to an undimmed friendship extending through all the years in which the papers here brought together were written. I am, my dear Jerningham, Most sincerely yours, W. S. LILLY. ATHEN.tUM Club, October lo, 1904. 219197 Advertisement Of the Studies brought together in this volume, the first, second, fifth, sixth, and ninth appeared originally in the Fortnightly Review, the third in the Pilot, and the eighth in the Nineteenth Centtiry. I now reclaim them by the courteous permission of the proprietors of those publications. The fourth is reprinted from my Chapters in Etiropean History, and the seventh from my Ancient Religion mid Modei'u Thought — works which have been long out of print. All have been carefully revised, and, to some e.xtent, rewritten. Contents I PAGE WHAT WAS SHAKESPEARE'S RELIGION? . . . . i II THE MISSION OF TENNYSON 31 III A GRAND OLD PAGAN 53 IV A FRENCH SHAKESPEARE 82 V A NINETEENTH-CENTURY SAVONAROLA . . . .155 VI CARDINAL WISEMAN'S LIFE AND WORK . • .179 VII THE MEANING OF TRACTARIANISM 218 VIII CONCERNING GHOST STORIES 271 IX THE THEORY OF THE LUDICROUS 285 Summary I WHAT WAS SHAKESPEARE'S RELIGION? PACK Is there any sufficient reason for attributinj^ to Shakespeare orthodox Protestantism? i What " orthodox Protestantism " was in Enghmd in Shakespeare's time 3 That Shakespeare conformed to it, occasionally, is most probable. But what evidence is there that he gave any real assent to it ? . 4 His plays, although assuredly not designed to inculcate the tenets of this or that school in theology, in philosophy, in politics, doubtless reflect, more or less clearly, his mental attitude towards the problems of the day : the times in which he lived mirrored themselves on his translucent and serene intellect . 5 The plays usually cited for Shakespeare's Protestantism are Kiu}^ John, Henry VI., and Henry VHI. The passages so relied on, examined 10 Those passages are really not proofs of Shakespeare's Protestantism, but signs to the contrary 19 His treatment of the Protestant clergy of his time ... 19 His yearning fondness for the Old Faith 20 His mention of Evening Mass 23 His acquaintance with the philosophy of the Catholic school . 26 An ancient tradition that he was " reared up " a Catholic . 28 " Church Papists " 29 Davies's statement, " He dj'ed a Papist," though of small authority, not improbably true 30 II THE MISSION OF TENNYSON Tennyson, //^^ English poet of the nineteenth century . . -31 What was his chief lesson to his generation and to the generations that should come after ? 33 Poetry not merely a pleasing play of fancy : but the most legitimate and the easiest, as well as the most beautiful, instrument of education ■;4 xii Summary Poetical inspiration : the poets of a nation its truest prophets , . 35 Tennyson's acute sensibility to the intellectual and spiritual, the social and political developments of the times in which he lived 37 Tennyson's sympathy with the scientific movement characteristic of his age 38 The vast progress of the physical sciences not unmixed gain. One result of it the effacement, to a very great extent, of the true idea of law from the popular mind 39 A distinctive characteristic of law is necessity : and for the very notion of necessity we must pass to an order of verities transcending the physical 40 Law is of the will and of the intellect : it is a function of reason . 41 Tennyson's witness to the true conception of law : he felt that the mechanical philosophy offered to him in the name of physical science was utterly inadequate to life : he found in the laws of man's spiritual and moral being, the solution of " the riddle of this painful earth" 43 On those laws he based his Theistic belief ... 44 his ethical creed . ... 48 his political principles .... 49 III A GRAND OLD PAGAN Walter Savage Landor : one of the most striking personalities in the literary history of the nineteenth centurv 53 The Man ' 55 The Literary Artist 63 The Literary Critic 71 IV A FRENCH SHAKESPEARE The place of Honord de Balzac in French literature ... 82 He is not only the greatest master of French romantic fiction, but the exponent of French life under the Empire, the Restoration, and the Monarchy of July. He claims to be not a mere teller of stories, but the historian of a civilization. And it is thus that he is considered in this Study 88 Plan of his CoinMie Hiimaiiie ........ 94 His Pire Goriot the best introduction to it 96 His estimate of Parisian life 115 of Provincial life ........ 122 of Country life 128 The picture which he presents sombre and terrible. Is it true ? . 135 Balzac's competency and honesty 135 Balzac's realism . . . ■ '^yi Summary xiii Balzac aspired to do something more than paint the types and conditions of nineteenth-century civilization, and to seize its latent meaning. He sought also to judge it . . . ,141 He finds society sick of egoism : the moi-hianahi the only thing left by the Revolution 142 The course of events since his death in 1850 has gone far to justify his political views .145 His religious views . . . . . . . . . .146 The charge of immorality brought against the Comedie Humaine . 149 Balzac's philosophical views 153 The Comedie Huniainc the true expression of the society in which its author lived, and which found in him " its most original, most appropriate, and most penetrating historian " . . . 153 V A NINETEENTH-CENTURY SAVONAROLA F^licite de Lamennais unquestionably among the great names of the last century . -155 And a true exponent of its Z^//^'r/.v/ 155 His childhood and youth 156 Realizes that his true vocation was to wriie 158 Strained relations between Pope Pius VII. and Napoleon . . 158 Lamennais's first book, L' I^tat de P^glise en France, sounds the noteof opposition to State control of Religion .... i6l The Essay on Indifference 163 His La Religion consideree dans ses Rapports avec POrdre politique et social 164 The true account of the '■ Gallican Liberties " 165 His Des progres de la Revolution et de la o;uerre contre P^glise . 167 The Society of St. Peter . . . '. 168 The Avenir 169 The French Episcopate hostile to Lamennais 170 His journey to Rome with Lacordaire and Montalembert . 171 The Affaires de Rome 171 The Encyclical Mirari Vos 173 Lamennais's last twenty years and death 173 How far time has vindicated, and is vindicating, his views . . 173 His mistakes and their source 176 May be termed the Savonarola of the nineteenth century . . 177 VI CARDINAL WISEMAN'S LIFE AND WORK Merits of Mr. Wilfrid Ward's Life and Times of Cardinal Wiseman 179 Wiseman's boyhood and youth 182 Impressions left on him by his four years of student life in Rome . 184 His leading principles, thoughts, and aims 185 XIV Summary Publishes his Horca Syriaca in 1827, which gives him a European reputation, and is appointed first Professor of Oriental Lan- guages at the Roman University, and then Rector of the English College in Rome . . . . . . .186 The English College under his presidency 187 Is deeply influenced by Father Ignatius Spencer .... i88 His Lectures on the Connexioti between Science and Revealed Religion . 189 Visits England in 1835 190 Condition of Catholics in England at that time . . . .191 Lectures at the Sardinian Chapel and at Moorfields Church . . 193 Abatement of anti-Catholic prejudice brought about by his Lectures 194 Appointed President of Oscott, and consecrated Bishop . . . 195 His influence on the Oxford Movement 195 His devotion to the poetry and symbolism of the Catholic Liturgy . 198 The restoration of the Catholic Hierarchy in England . . . 199 Wiseman created a Cardinal, and appointed Archbishop of West- minster 202 The Pastoral " From without the Flaminian Gate " . . . 202 His career as Archbishop and Metropolitan 203 Dr. Manning's influence with him 206 His estrangement from his Chapter, the great bulk of the clerg}, and most of his brother Bishops, in his declining days . . 208 His death 212 Some observations upon Cardinal Manning 213 VII THE MEANING OF TRACTARIANISM The Tractarian Movement best studied in the person and action of its leader 218 Strong individuality of John Henry Newman's works . .219 Condition of religious thought in England in his early days . 220 John Wesley and his work 222 The Evangelical party 223 Newman's first religious impressions ...... 224 The gradual opening of his mind ... ... 225 The nucleus of the Tractarian party 227 The Intellectual Revolution in England 228 The influence of Coleridge 229 The philosophical basis of the Tractarian Movement 230 John Keble and the Christian Year 231 The Tracts for the Times 234 The idea of the Tractarian Movement 236 The progress of the Tractarian Movement 237 Newman's defence of the Tractarian Movement .... 238 National feeling and the Tractarian Movement .... 239 The Anglican Bishops and the Tractarian Movement . 240 Summary xv PAGE The collapse of the Tractaiian Movement 241 Newman's secession 243 Thomas Arnold 247 What Tractarianism has done for the Church of England . . 248 What it has done for the Catholic Church 250 Newman's work in the Catholic Church 251 Newman's controversial activity 254 His consistency from first to last ....... 256 Tractarianism in relation to the great question of the day . . 262 Newman holds informal inference to be the true method in religious as in other inquiries • 263 Conscience the great internal Prophet of Theism .... 264 The No of the world and human history 265 Difficulties of Theistic belief 266 The probability of a Revelation 267 If there is a Revelation, where should we look for it ? . . . 268 Christianity and the Catholic Church 269 The chief significance of Tractarianism 270 VIII CONCERNING GHOST STORIES Two points to be considered : I. Are not many Ghost Stories true ? II. If they are or may be true, what can be the harm of telling them? 272 It is quite easy to deny tales of apparitions on the a priori ground . 272 But the a priori argument against apparitions of the departed resolves itself into the doctrine " Post mortem nihil est, ipsaque mors nihil" 273 This doctrine is probably not widely held in England. The prc- vaihng opinion in this country is that " the dead, when they depart hence, do not cease to exist : that they remain, but without the /^j/ita/ means of approach towards us and correspon- dence with us," and that the phenomenal universe is but a veil hiding from us spiritual realities 274 The question is. Can any communication reach us from beyond that veil ? 274 The evidence for an afiirmative answer to this question seems overwhelming .......... 274 Schopenhauer's view 277 But allowing that Ghost Stories are, or may be, true, is the telling them to be accounted a harmless amusement ? . . . . 279 To a science of the supernatural we shall never attain by human industry, because the subject is too obscure, the instances are too conflicting and contradictory : the causal tiexics is beyond us 28 1 The mystery of death is impenetrable to us ; and the inference for those who believe in a Divine ordering of the world is that our ignorance is best for us 281 XVI Summary Men's curiosity is insatiable, but it is not always wise : there are things as to which it is better not satisfied .... Christianity has ever reprobated soothsaying, consulting the stars, magic, and similar arts — even though not false — as rash intrusions into the Secret of the King, by-paths to things beyond flesh and blood, avenues to ill, not to good, leading not to sane and safe knowledge, but to bewilderment, illusion, and despair A longing to pry into the mysteries of the grave, a token of in- tellectual and spiritual decay And the subject too full of sacred and solemn mystery to be prostituted to a topic for idle talking 283 IX THE THEORY OF THE LUDICROUS Vast extent of the Ludicrous ; Barrow's account of it . . . 287 Catalogue of the varieties of the Ludicrous 289 Most of the varieties present no special difficulties ; but four, viz. Humour, Wit, Bulls, and Parody, require some consideration. Remarks upon them 290 National characteristics 296 Can we define the Ludicrous ? What Plato, Aristotle, the School- men, Herbert Spencer, and Schopenhauer have written on this subject, considered 299 What is the function of the Ludicrous ? What end does it serve in human life ? 306 Studies in Religion and Literature WHAT WAS Shakespeare's religion ? (I) The question, " What was Shakespeare's religion ? " has been asked by a multitude of critics, and has received widely differing answers. The latest is to be found in Mr. Churton Collins's Studies in Shake- speare, a volume which is assuredly a very important contribution to the subjects with which it deals. On every page of it is evidence of wide and sound scholarship, and of great critical acumen. But its chief value seems to me to lie in the evidence which it offers that Shakespeare "was not merely a fair Latin scholar," but possessed an "extensive knowledge of the classics both of Greece and Rome." Mr. Churton Collins is most felicitous in the arguments with which he supports this hypothesis. I venture to think, however, that he is less happy in the answer which he gives to the question, " What was Shake- speare's religion ? " He tells us that " the attitude of E 2 What was Shakespeare's Religion ? [i-] Sophocles towards the conventional creeds of Athens ' — an attitude which he describes as implying a recog- nition of "the wisdom of orthodoxy" — "is precisely that of Shakespeare towards Protestant Christianity." Again, he parallels "the orthodox Polytheism" of Sophocles with "the equally orthodox Christian Protestantism of Shakespeare," adding, "To Sophocles had descended a religion which, whatever may have been the sentiments of the vulgar, had, as accepted by the more enlightened, been purged of its grosser superstitions : and what preceding poets and philo- sophers had effected for the religion of Sophocles, the Reformation had effected for that of Shakespeare." Once more we read, " Both " [Montaigne and Shake- speare] "are practically theistical agnostics, but both reverence, for the same formal reason, Christianity : the one as embodied in Roman Catholicism, the other as embodied in Protestantism." I am not quite sure that I understand what is meant by " theistical agnos- tics ; " but this is not the point upon which I wish to dwell. I wish rather to inquire whether there exists any sufficient reason for attributing to Shakespeare sympathy with, or reverence for, "orthodox Pro- testantism." (II) Now, it may not be superfluous to consider, at starting, what Mr. Churton Collins means by "ortho- dox" Protestantism. Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Zwinglianism, to mention no other varieties, all [i.] Orthodox Protestantism 3 claimed that adjective. There would seem to be no standard of Protestant orthodoxy. But I suppose we may safely hold that in Mr. Churton Collins's volume, ** orthodox" Protestantism denotes the amalgam of the three forms just mentioned of anti-Catholic Christianity, whereof the Thirty-nine Articles, im- posed the year before Shakespeare was born, and the two Books of Homilies, are a kind of compendium. As a matter of fact, indeed, it is rather to the Homilies than to the Thirty-nine Articles that we should go for a revelation of "the mind of the Church of England" (as the phrase is) in Shakespeare's time. Those documents represent, most accurately, the ethos of the religious innovators, claiming the name of Re- formers, who branded the Catholic Church as the whore of Babylon, and the Pope as antichrist, and claimed for themselves that they were preachers of righteousness to "a world drowned in abominable idolatry " till " Gospel light first dawned from Bullen's eyes" upon the awakened conscience of Henry VHI. And so in the Third Part of the Sermon of Good Works we read, " Honour be to God, who did put light in the heart of His faithful and true minister of most famous memory. King Henry the Eighth, and gave him the knowledge of His Word, and an earnest affection to seek His glory, and to put away all such superstitious and pharisaical sects " (viz. the Religious Orders) "by antichrist invented, and to set up again the true Word of God and glory of His most blessed Name." That was the sum and substance, according to most accredited Anglican Reformers, of the 4 What was Shakespeare's Religion ? [i.] ecclesiastical revolution initiated by Henry VI II., and completed by Elizabeth. Of course, theologically considered, it passed through several phases. Henry VIII. probably continued to hold well-nigh all Catholic doctrines, except the Supremacy of the Pope, after his revolt from Rome. On the death of that Prince, the direction of the movement fell chiefly into the hands of Cranmer, who, whatever his own religious con- victions — if, indeed, he had any^ — favoured first Luther- anism, then Zwinglianism, and, lastly, Calvinism. In the reign of Elizabeth, " Calvinism," as Dean Church observes, " nearly succeeded in making itself master in the English Church ;" ^ and he justly points to Whit- gift's "Lambeth Articles," in 1595, as evidence of this assertion. That is what " orthodox " Protestantism meant in England in the days of Shakespeare ; a Puritan scholasticism of the most arid and arbitrary kind, based on the narrowest interpretation, or rather misinterpretation, of isolated Biblical texts, void of philosophy, void of poetry, void of profundity ; passionate in its hatred of the ancient faith, and prostituting the sanctions of religion to the service of secular tyranny. That Shakespeare outwardly conformed to it, at all events occasionally, is most probable. But what evidence is there for believing that he gave any real assent to it, whether from political or other motives? that he preferred its uncouth superstitions to the charming Aberglaube of medieval piety .^ for holding — to put the point in Archbishop Trench's words — that "he was the child 1 Pascal and other Sermons., p. 76. [i.] The Teaching of the Poets 5 of the English Reformation"? that "he was born of its spirit" ? (Ill) For hght upon this question let us turn to Shake- speare's plays. And here a caveat must first be entered. Shakespeare's plays of course tell us some- thing about himself. How could it be otherwise ? For they are his truest self. But it appears to me that we should be very chary of attempting to draw from them the inference that he desired to inculcate any tenets of this or that school, in theology, in philosophy, in politics. I assuredly do not believe that when he addressed himself to the composition of his dramas, there were present to his mind definite theses, of any kind, which he wished to teach. He was a poet in the strictest sense of the word. And a poet is not a professor veiling his prelections in verse. No doubt every great poet is a great teacher. But his teaching is as the teaching of Nature herself: unpremeditated, unreasoned, undefined : like the sound of the sea, or the* fragrance of flowers, or the sweet influences of the stars. Like Nature, poets — accord- ing to Plato's most true dictum — utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand. The songs of Apollo are as inspired as his oracles. The poet, *' soaring in the high reason of his fancy," \ like the priestess on her tripod, speaks not of himself. i Schelling has put it very well : " The artist, however full of design he is, yet, in respect of that which is the 6 What was Shakespeare's Religion ? [i.] properly objective in his production, seems to stand under the influence of a power which separates him from all other men, and compels him to declare and represent things which he does not himself properly see through." Again. Shakespeare's genius was essen- tially dramatic. It was his function to "hold up the mirror to Nature." His whole mind and thought are merged in his creations. He does not so much speak through them. They speak through him. He surrenders himself to the inspiration of his art. Once more. It is quite certain that he regarded his plays as works to be acted, not to be read. He composed them not for posterity, but for the audiences which should come to see them. It was otherwise with his poems. But I do not believe that when writing his dramas it once crossed his mind that he was making a permanent addition to the literature of his country ; still less that he was enriching it with its greatest treasures. His object was to serve the purpose of the hour, and to produce good acting plays. With what incomparable ability he achieved that object is still evident, vast as is the difference between the con- ditions of dramatic representation in his days and in ours. In the pursuit of it, he used the materials of others with a freedom which in this age would rightly be judged scandalous, and, as Heine ^ puts it, would 1 The passage is well worth quoting : " Und gar Shakespeare selber, wie Viel entlehnte er nicht seiner Vorgangern ! Auch diesem Dichter begegnete es, dass ein sauertopfischer Pamphletist mit der Behauptung gegen ihn auftrat ' das Beste seiner Dramen sei den altern Schriftstellern entwendet.' Shakespeare wird bei dieser lacherlichen Gelegenheit ein Rabe genannt welcher sich mit den fremden Gefieder des Pfauen ge- schmackt habe. Der Schwan von Avon schwieg, und dachte vielleicht [i.] The Charge of Plagiarism 7 have smiled at the charge of plagiarism. Landor well observes : " He is more original than his originals ; he breathed upon dead bodies, and brought them into life." Life ! Yes ; his creative power is like that of Nature herself. He teems with vitality. The pro- digality of his creations, all different, all distinct, all durable, overwhelms us. Not less astonishing is his neglect of them when he had once called them into being. Here, too, it was with him as it is with the Mighty Mother : " I care for nothing ; all may go." He took no part, and apparently no interest, in the publication of such of his plays as were printed in his lifetime. He seems to have been quite unconcerned as to what became of them after his death. They are not so much as mentioned in his Will. It appears to me, therefore, that Mr. Richard Simpson, of whom more presently, greatly errs in crediting Shakespeare with "a design of presenting the great questions of his age with what he conceived to be the best method of their solution ;" and that Mr. Churton Collins is quite without warrant in represent- ing him as "the ally of the Ministers of Elizabeth and James," "employing the drama as a commentary on current State affairs, and a direct means of political education." But no doubt the times in which he lived mirrored themselves on his translucent and serene intellect, and his mental attitude towards the problems of his day is more or less clearly reflected in his dramas. in seinem gottlichen Sinn, ' Ich bin weder Rabe noch Pfau ! ' und weigte sich sorglos auf den blauen Fluthen der .^oesie, manchmal hinauflachelnd zu den Sternen, den goldenen Geda ike i des Himmels." — Shakespeard s Mddchen und Franen : Schlussworf 8 What was Shakespeare's Religion ? [i.] Let us endeavour to see, then, what his plays tell us as to his feelings regarding the great religious question of that age. Were his sympathies — I think that is the right way of putting it — with the old religion of England, or with the new ? In briefly pursuing this inquiry I shall make free use of the materials accumulated by the highly gifted, but little known, scholar mentioned just now, the late Mr. Richard Simpson, concerning whom a word or two must be said in passing. Mr. Simpson devoted his singularly acute and accomplished intellect, for many years, to the study of Elizabethan literature, and attained to a wide and exact knowledge of it not surpassed, probably not equalled, by any of his con- temporaries. This may seem a strong assertion. But I think that his writings published in the Transactions of the New Shakespeare Society in 1874-75, alone sufficiently warrant it. For some years he was editor of a magazine called The Rambler, justly described by a very competent critic in the Times as " one of the most learned and interesting periodicals of the Nineteenth Century ;" and in 1858 he contributed to it three papers, in which he maintained the view that Shakespeare was probably a Catholic. Eight years afterwards, a French writer, M. Rio, well known for his work on Christian Art, took up this theme, and pursued it at great length, and with more enthusiasm than judgment. In January, 1866, an article from the pen of the late Lord Stanhope — then Lord Mahon — appeared in the Edinburgh Review, in which both Mr. Simpson and M. Rio were severely dealt with, [i.] "Angry Zealots" 9 and were characterized as " angry zealots." Lord Mahon apparently was as ill acquainted with the character of those writers as with the subject dis- cussed in his essay. M. Rio, a Liberal Catholic, a friend of Montalembert, with whom he strongly sympathized, most assuredly was not a zealot in the sense meant by Lord Mahon ; moreover, he was a man of peace, a man of mild and benign disposition. Mr. Simpson, if not altogether " slow to wrath " when provoked, most assuredly had not written his Rambler articles in anger. He, too, was a Liberal Catholic — and something more indeed ; " liberalissimus " was an epithet not unjustly appHed to him. We read in Mr. Gillow's very learned Bibliographical Dictionary of English Catholics, "In matters ecclesiastical he was frequently in conflict with the provincial authorities. . . . He helped Mr. Gladstone while writing his treatise on 'Vaticanism,' and the curious leaning of that famous pamphlet is thus largely accounted for." Mr. Simpson was moved by the attack on him in the Edinburgh Reviezv to undertake the composi- tion of a reply, which soon grew into a somewhat bulky treatise. He died in 1876, without having carried into execution his intention of publishing it. Father Sebastian Bowden, of the Oratory, derived largely from his manuscript the materials for a volume entitled The Religion of Shakespeare, which appeared in 1899, and deservedly attracted much notice. I am indebted to the kindness of Abbot Gasquet for the loan of Mr. Simpson's papers, and for permission to use them in pursuing the inquiry which I have undertaken. I o What was Shakespeare's Religion ? [i.] (IV) What warrant, then, is there in Shakespeare's plays — there is admittedly none in his poems — for his alleged Protestantism ? Do they manifest antipathy to the old religion and sympathy with the new ? The plays usually cited in evidence of Shake- speare's Protestantism are King John, Henry VI., and Henry VIII. In King John, that monarch is made to deliver himself as follows to Cardinal Pan- dulph, the Legate of Innocent III., sent to call the King to account for refusing Stephen Langton admission to the See of Canterbury, and for appro- priating its revenues : — " What earthly name to interrogatories Can task the free breath of a sacred king ? Thou canst not, cardinal, devise a name So slight, unworthy, and ridiculous, To charge me to an answer, as the pope. Tell him this tale ; and from the mouth of England, Add thus much more, — That no Italian priest Shall tithe or toll in our dominions ; But as we under Heaven are supreme head. So, under him, that great supremacy, Where we do reign, we will alone uphold, Without the assistance of a mortal hand : So tell the pope ; all reverence set apart. To him, and his usurp'd authority." Now, as Father Sebastian Bowden very justly remarks, there is no warrant for attributing to Shake- speare these opinions, congruous enough in the mouth of a royal villain. " John's anti-Catholic speeches no more prove Shakespeare a Protestant than the fool's [i.] Pandulph 1 1 saying in his heart, * There is no God,' makes David a sceptic." Again, Pandulph's denunciation of the King is to some a conclusive proof of Shakespeare's Protestantism. " And blessdd shall he be, that doth revolt From his allegiance to an heretic ; And meritorious shall that hand be call'd, Canonized and worshipp'd as a saint, That takes away by any secret course Thy hateful life." Father Sebastian Bowden is of opinion that the argument in favour of Shakespeare's Protestantism based on this passage is of some weight — he proceeds to give answers to it, for which I must refer my readers to his own pages — because " Here it is Pandulph, the Legate himself, who is giving utterance to the very doctrines attributed to the Church by its enemies." Attributed to the Church by its enemies! But, as a matter of fact, sentiments not practically distinguishable from those put by Shakespeare into the mouth of Pandulph were professed by devoted friends of the Church, and, what is more, were acted upon by them, as the celebrated royal murders of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries sufficiently show.^ Even the great name of Suarez may be cited ^ It is perhaps hardly necessary to remark that Protestants of all kinds in that age practised and defended the assassination of rulers whom they considered wicked or unjust. Even " the mild Melanchthon " in one of his letters prays God to inspire some valiant man with a resolution to remove Henry VIII. " AngHcus tyrannus CromweUium interfecit et conatur divortium cum Juliacensi puella. Quam vere dixit ille in Tragcedia non gratiorem victimam Deo mactari posse quam tyrannum. Utinam alicui forti vero Deus banc mentem inserat." Quoted by Cardinal Hergenrdther, Catholic Church and Christian State, vol. ii. p. 259 (Eng. Tr.). 1 2 What was Shakespeare's Religion ? [i.] in defence of one species of tyrannicide. We read in that divine's Disputatio de Bello, that the slaying of an unlawful usurper by a private individual is allowable when the conditions of a just warfare are present, when no other means can be found for being rid of him, and when the consequences of his death will not be worse than the tyranny itself — a doctrine surely not in itself unreasonable. A legitimate ruler deposed by the Pope was held by many to be in the like case with an unlawful usurper, on the ground that when so deposed he had ceased to be a legitimate ruler. Suarez, in his Defensio Fidei, applies himself indeed to limit and safeguard this doctrine, and lays it down that a deposed prince may not be killed by any private person, at once [statim), or unless that was specifically provided for in the sentence, or another sentence or command to that effect should be given. But we cannot ignore history, which does not proceed by syllogism. Suarez was not writing in Utopia. Distinctions between legitimate ruler and usurper, " non statim " and the rest, were little regarded in those savage and turbulent times. It is certain that a plot against Elizabeth, in which her death by violence was contemplated, much engaged the attention of Ridolfi, the agent of St. Pius V. And in Gabutio's ^ account of that Pontiff, given by the Bol- landists, we are told that he meditated her " removal." ^ He writes, " Cogitabat illam malorum omnium sentinam, seu ut appellabat ipse flagitiorum servam, de medio tollere, si minus posset ad sanitatem revocari." Gabutio's work is a translation of an earlier Italian Life by Catena, and the word in the original which is rendered by " de medio tollere " is " levare." [i.] King yohn 13 I find no sort of warrant for Shakespeare's alleged Pro- testantism in his depicting this matter truly, as it was, by attributing to Pandulph the sentiments in question. But again. The play of King John, as we have it, is an adaptation by Shakespeare of an earlier drama, The Trotiblesome Reign of King Johi. The authorship of that work is uncertain. Mr. Courthorpe regards it as a juvenile composition of Shakespeare himself. I confess that the arguments by which he supports that view — they will be found in an Appendix to the fourth volume of his admirable History of English Poetry — seem to me quite unconvincing ; and certainly the weight of critical authority is over- whelmingly against him. The question is too long to discuss here ; nor is its discussion necessary for my present point, which is this : The Trotiblesoine Reign of King John — whether composed by Shake- speare himself (which I do not believe) in a youthful fit of Protestantism, or by another — teems with virulent anti-Catholic passion and prejudice. " It was written," as Mr. Simpson succinctly says, "to glorify Protestantism and vilify the ancient faith ; " it is adorned by ribald stories of friars and nuns ; and it puts into John's mouth a prophecy of the coming of Henry VIII., a hero — " Whose arm shall reach unto the gates of Rome, And with his feet tread down the strumpet pride That sits upon the chair of Babylon." All this disappears from the play of King John, as Shakespeare recast it. Mr. Simpson truly remarks, " Every sentence in the old play which reflected upon 14 What was Shakespeare's Rehgion ? [i.] any Catholic doctrine, or misrepresented any Catholic practice, he has swept out." I may observe, in passing, that the anti-Catholic bitterness which in- forms The Troublesome Reign of King John, abun- dantly appears in the works of the English dramatists contemporary with Shakespeare. This surely renders the absence from his writings of abuse and ridicule of the ancient faith all the more remarkable and significant. The next proof of Shakespeare's Protestantism which we have to examine is derived from his picture of Cardinal Beaufort, in Henry VI., and of Cardinal Wolsey, in Henry VIII. First, as to Cardinal Beaufort. I put aside the question how far the First Part of Henry VI. is really Shakespeare's work, and will assume, for my present purpose, that he is fully responsible for it. Cardinal Beaufort, then, is repre- sented in the play — not unjustly, though with many errors of detail — as a wicked and worldly prelate, and is in one passage taunted by Gloucester, who threatens to trample on his Cardinal's hat, with having given to courtesans "indulgences to sin." The phrase, naturally enough, suggests to the Protestant mind the scandals which led to Luther's revolt ; but, as a matter of fact, Cardinal Beaufort's " indulgences " were not ecclesiastical documents at all ; they were merely licences of immunity to certain privileged houses of ill-fame within his jurisdiction. They were not licences to commit sin, as the documents vended by Tetzel are popularly, but erroneously, supposed to have been. There is no trace of Protestantism here. [i.] Cardinal Wolsey's Brown Wench 15 As little Is there in the line in He7iry VIII. referring to the story that Cardinal Wolsey was, upon one occasion, surprised in flagrante delicto with " a brown wench." But here let me quote a vigorous passage, in which Mr. Simpson deals with the charges against the two prelates. " The charges are all personal : there is only one line which seems to give countenance to the prejudice that Catholicism gave indulgences to sin. But this line refers, absolutely and wholly, to certain dens of infamy in Southwark, from licensing which the Bishops of Winchester drew some small part of their income, to the scandal of the age. For Shakespeare to put this reproach into Gloucester's mouth was both historically probable and morally right, even though he were a professed Catholic. For every one must own that it is one thing for a secular government to tolerate, and even to regulate such dens, as Shakespeare might be supposed to recommend by implication, in Measiire for Measure, and another for them to be a source of income to a bishop. " With regard to Wolsey, his faults were really those which English Catholics had most reason to curse, and which they did curse accordingly. It is nonsense to suppose that Shake- speare's feelings must have been opposed to Catholicism because he refers to Wolsey's 'brown wench,' for it was an allusion which all the Catholics of his day permitted them- selves to make. What religion do most of the writers profess who give us the scandalous stories about Mazarin, Richelieu, Retz, and Dubois? Of what religion were the people of France when they drew up the famous supplication against Boniface VIII., wherein they call the Pope by an opprobrious name that a witness in a police court would refuse to utter ? What religion did Cardinal Fisher profess when he granted that the lives of Popes and Cardinals were, possibly, more than diametrically opposed to that of Christ, in their eager- ness for money, their vainglory, their luxury and lust, by 1 6 What was Shakespeare's Religion ? [i.] which the name of Christ is everywhere blasphemed — 'But this,' says he, * only confirms our argument ' (Fisher, 0pp., p. 1370. Ed. Wiceburg, 1597) ; — or More, when he wrote his epigram on Bishop Posthumus — ' Picesul es, et merito prcefectus, Posthume, sacris, Quo magis in toto non fuit orbe sacer ; ' or Petrarch, when he wrote his famous letter about the French Babylon (Avignon), with its scandalous stories of Po7itificalis lascivia, and of the hircina libido of Cardinals (Epist. sine tit. XVI.) ; or Campion, when he spoke of Wolsey as * a man undoubtedly born to honour, I think some prince's bastard, no butcher's son, exceeding wise, fair-spoken, high-minded, full of revenge, vicious of his body, lofty to his enemies . . . thrall to affections, brought-a-bed with flattery, insatiable to get, and more prince-like in bestowing . . . never happy till his overthrow' {Hist, of Ireland, Bk. 2, c. 9, printed in Holin- shed's Chronicles), or as 'vir magnificentissimus, iracundus, confidens, scortator, simulator ' ? " Another proof of Shakespeare's sympathy with the new order in religion, an evidence of his orthodox Protestantism at one time much relied on, is derived from the Fifth Act of King Henry VIII. , where Cranmer is made to prophesy, at the baptism of Elizabeth : " In her days every man shall eat in safety Under his own vine what he plants ; and sing The merry songs of peace to all his neighbours : God shall be truly known " This, as Mr. Simpson correctly observes, ** is the only piece of unquestionable Protestantism in Shake- speare's plays." But there is a general consensus of the most authoritative critics — Mr. Churton Collins is, I think, the only considerable dissentient — that the [i.] A Piece of Unquestionable Protestantism 17 Fifth Act of Henry VIII., with the exception of Scene I., is not Shakespeare's at all ; that it is an addition of Fletcher's. Lord Mahon, indeed, writing in the Edijiburgh Review, lays it down, that the addition "must have been made with Shakespeare's full sanction," that "not a line could have been inserted without Shakespeare's assent." But why ? Here Lord Mahon is "most ignorant of what he's most assured." There is no sort of evidence for the proposition which he so confidently affirms. The presumption is strongly the other way, if we consider that — as has been pointed out in an earlier page — Shakespeare seems not to have troubled himself at all about the fate of his plays when they had once been produced,^ and that Fletcher would have no more scruple in altering his work than he had displayed in altering the work of other playwrights. The genuine- ness of this Act is rejected on the grounds of its metre, style, and evident disconnection with the four preced- ing Acts. Only the last-mentioned of these grounds can be glanced at here : and, in my judgment, it alone is quite conclusive. Pope justly remarks in his Preface, "To the life and variety of character which we find in Shakespeare must be added the wonderful preservation of it, which is such throughout his plays, that had all the speeches been printed without the very names of the persons, I believe we might have supplied them with certainty to every speech." Now, ^ Moreover, the probability is that he had parted with all his theatrical property to Alleyne in April, 1612— a year previously to the representation of Henry VI 11. before King James I. C 1 8 What was Shakespeare's Religion ? [i.] the Fifth Act of Henry VIIT. is informed by a per- fectly different ethos from the rest of the play. In the first four Acts, the afflictions, the virtues, and the patience of Queen Katharine, one of Shakespeare's noblest and most touching types of womanhood, are, as Mr. Spedding observes, "elaborately exhibited." "Our whole sympathy," Father Sebastian Bowden truly points out, " is evoked exclusively on behalf of the deposed Queen, and our indignation is aroused at the shameless wrong done her. Yet Henry, the per- petrator of this iniquity, the ruthless sacrificer of a fine and noble wife for a licentious caprice, euphemistically termed his conscience, Anne, his accomplice in the evil deed, *a spleeny Lutheran,' and Cranmer, the servile minister of their passions, under the cloak of religion, are all three, without explanation, repentance, or any justifying cause, crowned in the Fifth Act with the full blaze of early glory and the promise of happi- ness." "It is," to quote again Mr. Spedding, "as though Nathan's rebuke to David had ended not with the doom of death to the child just born, but with a promise of the felicities of Solomon." I add that Henry VIII., in the first four Acts, is a very different person from the monarch held up to veneration, in the pulpits of the Established Church, by the Book of Homilies; "the faithful and true minister of God," endowed with "knowledge of His Word, and an earnest affection to seek His glory." He is, in Father Sebastian Bowden's well-chosen language, "a melo- dramatic, arrogant, oily hyprocrite, and his perpetual cry almost serves to characterize him — [i.] Henry VIII. 19 " ' Conscience, conscience, Oh, 'tis a tender place ; and I must leave her.' " Mr. Simpson writes : " Dr. Dollinger once told me that he thought the play of Henry VIII. to be a striking evidence of the Catholic opinions of Shake- speare. This, I think, will appear to be a just view to any one who takes the trouble to reflect what kind of a thing Decker, Munday, or Marlowe, or the author of the Troublesome Reign, would have made of it. Any one of them would have made the Reformation the heroic act of his reign; would have made Katharine and her daughter Mary pale before Anne Boleyn and her daughter Elizabeth ; would have glorified the Seymours ; and would have made the drama as tall a bully to the Catholics as the monument on Fish Hill was before its lying inscription was hacked out." (V) Mr. Simpson, then, does not seem to speak too strongly in maintaining that the passages commonly adduced as proofs of Shakespeare's Protestant sym- pathies " are rather signs to the contrary." It should be noted, too, that his treatment of the Protestant clergy of his time is by no means respectful, which, perhaps, is not to be wondered at. But on this subject let us hear Mr. Thornbury — a very strong Protestant — who, in Shakespeare s England, writes as follows : — " The Elizabethan chaplain held an anomalous position : he was respected in the parlour for his mission, and despised 20 What was Shakespeare's Religion ? [i.] in the servants' hall for his slovenliness ; he was often drunken and frequently quarrelsome ; now the butler broke his head in a drinking bout, and now the abigail pinned cards and coney-tails to his cassock. To judge from Sir Oliver Martext and Sir Hugh Evans, the parish priests of Shakespeare's day were no very shining lights, and the poet seems to fall back, as in Romeo and Juliet and The Two Gentlemen of Verona, on the ideal priest of an earlier age. It is indeed true that he always mentions the Old Faith with a certain yearning fondness." ^ Yes ; it is true that Shakespeare " aWays mentions the Old Faith with a certain yearning fondness : " the expression is well chosen. In Henry V. he gives us a well-nigh perfect type of a Catholic hero, all whose public acts bear a religious impress, " who believes in Purgatory ; in alms-deed, prayer, fasting, pious founda- tions, as satisfactory works for the souls detained there ; " and " whose Catholic faith and worship appear like the flowers of true devotion, not the weeds of superstition." In Friar Lawrence, we have "one of his kindliest creations." " In Much Ado About Nothing^' writes Mr. Knight, " it is the Friar who, when Hero is accused, vindicates her reputation with as much sagacity as charitable zeal. ... In Measure for Measure the whole plot is carried on by the Duke assuming the reverend manners and professing the active benevolence of a Friar. In an age when the ^ Vol. i. p. 211. There can be no doubt that the Lollard "martyr," Oldcastle, is satirized in the character of Falstaff, whose name seems to have been substituted, Mr. Courthorpe writes, "in consequence of the protests of the living descendants of Oldcastle, backed, no doubt, by the Puritan faction." — History of English Poetry, vol. iv. p. 113. [i.] Decisive Evidence 21 prejudices of the multitude were flattered and stimu- lated by abuse and ridicule of the ancient ecclesiastical character, Shakespeare always exhibits it so as to command respect and affection." ^ In As You Like It, "an old religious man," a hermit, it is, by whom the usurping Duke "... was converted, Both from his enterprise, and from the world." In AlVs Well that Ends Well^ we find— more daring still — a tribute to one of the most beautiful and touching doctrines of Catholicism in the recognition of the power of the Blessed Virgin's intercession. " What angel shall Bless this unworthy husband ? he cannot thrive, Unless her prayers, whom Heaven delights to hear. And loves to grant, reprieve him from the wrath Of greatest justice." "Whose prayers are these?" Mr. Simpson asks; and he well replies, " Not those of Helen, but of one greater than an angel, whose prayers God delights to hear and loves to grant. This is exactly the way in which Catholics speak of the Blessed Virgin ; and the lines will not apply to any but her. The testimony is brief but decisive ; Shakespeare in these lines affirms distinctly, if not intentionally, one of the most characteristic doctrines that distinguishes the Catholic from the Protestant community." 1 Biography of Shakespeare, p. 183. 2 It is notable, as Mr. Simpson has pointed out, that Shakespeare has with perfect propriety put into the mouth of the Clown — designated by his mistress " a foul-mouthed and calumnious knave " — a few anti-Catholic scurrilities which are found in this play. 22 What was Shakespeare's Religion ? [i.] Again. In Meastire for Measure, the ethos of the play is strikingly Catholic. The whole fable is in- formed by an idea quite alien from the Protestant mind; that idea of the surpassing excellence and sacrosanct character of virginal chastity, which Mr. John Morley calls "the medieval superstition about purity."^ Isabella, the votarist or postulant of St. Clare, is Shakespeare's noblest type of womanhood, commanding the reverence even of the dissolute Lucio, as "a thing ensky'd and sainted," and imposing a bridle on his undisciplined tongue. Though he follows the worse things, he knows and respects the better. Not so that accomplished critic, Hazlitt, looking at the matter from the ordinary Protestant standpoint. His comment is that he is not "greatly enamoured of Isabella's rigid chastity;" that he has not " much confidence in the virtue that is sublimely good at another's expense." And it must be confessed that if judged by the latest — and presumably the most perfect — system of Protestant morals, Isabella s virginal constancy is indefensible. ** Totality of life in self, in offspring, and in fellow-men," is Mr. Herbert Spencer's criterion of most highly evolved conduct ; of conduct superlatively ethical. Such totality Isabella would certainly have achieved by compliance with Angelo's desire ; and therefore, I suppose, her non-compliance stands condemned by the Spencerian rule of right and wrong. In Angelo, I observe, we have a striking example of the type of character too frequently en- gendered by Puritanism, which is merely Protestantism ^ Voltaire, p. 152. [i.] Catholic Imagery 23 turned sour ; of that repulsive amalgam of prudery and profligacy exhibited, from time to time, by chosen vessels of what is now called "the Nonconformist Conscience." But to catalogue the evidence of Shakespeare's ** yearning fondness for the Old Faith," scattered throughout his works, would require a volume. And indeed the task has been excellently accomplished by Mr. Simpson, as may be seen from the pages of Father Sebastian Bowden's work. It well warrants him in saying : " The readiness and aptitude with which Shakespeare avails himself of Catholic imagery are manifested again and again ; he puts before us temples, altars, priests, friars, nuns, the Mass, sacrifices, patens of gold, chalices, incense, relics, holy crosses, the invocation of Saints and Angels, the sign of the Cross, the sacraments of Baptism, Penance, Holy Eucharist, Extreme Unction, details of the ritual, as, for instance, the Benedictio Thalami. All these, and many other Catholic rites and usages, are introduced with a delicacy and fitness possible only for a mind habituated to the Church's tone of thought." ^ And here would seem to be the proper place for remarking upon a passage which many writers have held to be evidence to the contrary : among them Lord Mahon, and a far weightier critic, Edmond Scherer. I mean the line in Romeo and Juliet, where mention is made of evening Mass. " Are you at leisure, holy Father, now, Or shall I come to you at evening Mass ? " ^ Page 12. 24 What was Shakespeare's Religion ? [i.] "Evening Mass!" says Lord Mahon ; "it is as absurd as to talk of evening breakfast." Well, the answer is, that here again Lord Mahon's assurance sprang from ignorance. Evening Mass is now prac- tically unknown in the Catholic Church. In Shake- speare's time it was common enough. To live is to change ; and Catholicism, which has been very much alive during the nineteen centuries of its existence, has given evidence of its vitality by changing a great deal. To mention only two instances. The most popular devotion among Catholics, after the Our Father, is the Hail, Mary. Now, the second part of the Hail, Mary, as it is at present universally said in the Western Church — the precatory part — was added to the Angelic Salutation in the sixteenth century. The rite of Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, which, next to the Mass, is the most popular service, dates from the same period. As to evening Mass, I will quote Father Sebastian Bowden, who, founding himself on Mr. Simpson's learned observations, and supplementing them, writes as follows : — "According to Liturgical writers, there was great latitude in ancient times as to the hour of Mass. The time for celebration changed, Strabo ^ says, with the character of the feast. It might be before noon, about None, sometimes at Vespers, and sometimes at night. And Martene^ gives notice of solemn Masses said on fast days at three o'clock, in Lent in the evening, and at night at Christmas, Easter Eve, St. John Baptist, and days of Ordination. As for low Masses, he says, ' we think they were said at any hour that ^ De Rebus Ecclesiasticis, c. 23. 2 De Antiqnis EcclesicB Ritibus, lib. i. c. 3, art. iii. [i.] Evening Mass 25 did not interfere with the high Mass.' Of this he gives several examples, and then concludes : * This shows that low Mass might be said at any hour — dawn, 8 a.m., noon, after None (3 p.m.), evening, and after Compline (night). Even to this day (1699), in the church of St, Denis, the Bishop says the solemn Mass for the Kings of France in the evening, and in the Church of Rouen, on Ascension Day, Mass is often said in the evening.' "St. Pius V. (1566-72) discountenanced and prohibited afternoon and evening Masses, But the isolation of the English clergy, owing to the then difficulty of communication, might have withheld from them the knowledge of this law for some considerable time.^ It was so slow in penetrating Germany, that it had to be enforced by various councils, e.g. Prague in 1605, Constance in 1609, Salzburg in 1616. Cardinal Bona (1672) seems to say that in his time high Mass was sung in Lent, and on Vigils at 3 p.m. instead of sunset, the ancient time.^ And the remarkable thing is this, that according to the testimony of the Liturgical writer, Friedrich Brenner,^ Verona was one of the places in which the forbidden custom lingered even to our own century. After quoting the precepts against it, he says, ' Notwithstanding, evening Masses are still said in several Italian churches, as at Vercelli on Christmas Eve by the Lateran Canons, at Venice by the same ; moreover, in the Cathedral of Verona, and even in the Papal Chapel at Rome,' Since, then, notwithstanding the Papal prohibition, the custom of having evening Masses lingered in Verona for nearly three centuries after Shake- speare's day, it becomes most probable that in his time it was a usual occurrence in England. But whether it were a usual occurrence in England or not, it was certainly so in Verona. To assert, then, as so many have done, that Shakespeare's mention of an evening Mass argues in him an ignorance of ^ Navarr,, Zz^. de Orat., c. 21, n. 31, et Enchirid. Confess.^ c, 25, n. 85. 2 Rer. Liturg., lib. ii. pp, 182-186 (Paris, 1672). ^ Geschichtliche Darstellung der Verrichtitng der Eticharistie (Bam- berg, 1824), vol, iii, p. 346. 26 What was Shakespeare's Religion ? [i.] Catholic customs, is to convict oneself of the very ignorance falsely ascribed to the poet. Afternoon and evening Masses were, as we have seen, frequently celebrated. It is, however, a remarkable coincidence that in Verona, the scene of Shake- speare's evening Mass, the custom of celebrating late Masses lasted longer than in any other city." (VI) I think I have said enough in support of my con- tention that Shakespeare's sympathies were with the old religion of England, not with the new. Heine's keen intellect does not seem to have been at fault when he reckoned it "a piece of good fortune that Shakespeare came just at the right time," before " the Puritans succeeded in rooting up, flower by flower, the religion of the past;" when "the popular belief of the Middle Ages, Catholicism, destroyed in theory, yet existed in all its enchantment in the feelings {im Gemilthe) of men, and upheld itself in their manners, fashions, and intuitions."^ So Carlyle appears to have been well warranted in accounting Shakespeare " the noblest product of Middle- Age Catholicism."^ It was of course on its sesthetic side that the old religion chiefly appealed to him. What Mr. Courthorpe has truly said of Pope, applies equally to him, that "he shunned the disputatious element in the region of faith." Still, he manifests — as is shown clearly in the volume compiled by Father Sebastian Bowden — a ^ Shakespeare's Miidchen tmd Frauen : Einleitung. ^ Lectures 07i Heroes^ Lect. III. [i.] The Thomist Philosophy 27 very considerable acquaintance with the philosophy of the Catholic school ; nay, not only an acquaintance with it, but a predilection for it. " He is distinctly Thomist," Father Sebastian Bowden points out, "on the following points : his doctrine of the genesis of knowledge and its strictly objective character; the power of reflection as distinctive of rational creatures ; the formation of habits, intellectual and moral ; the whole operation of the imaginative faculty."^ But more. That deep and vivid apprehension of the supremacy of law, which we may call the basis of the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, and which, I may observe, dominated the mind of St. Augustine, is the underlying thought of Shakespeare's dramas. Mr. Churton Collins is assuredly well warranted in attributing to him " the recognition of Universal Law, divinely appointed, immutable, inexorable, and ubiquitous, controlling the physical world, controlling the moral world, vindicating itself in the smallest facts of life, as in the most stupendous convulsions of nature and of society." (VII) And now, if from Shakespeare's works we turn to the little that we know of his life, what does it tell us about his religion ? Not much. It is certain that his youth was passed amid Catholic influences, for there seems no room for reasonable doubt that his father ^ P. 34. I must refer my readers to Father Sebastian Bowden's work for instances. 28 What was Shakespeare's Religion ? [i.] was " a Popish recusant," and suffered many things as such.^ In Mr. Gillow's Bibliographical Dictionary, mention is made of a very ancient CathoHc tradition that he was " reared up " by an old Benedictine monk, Dom Thomas Combe, or Coombes, from 1572. This is the more probable as it would account for the knowledge which he possessed of things Catholic, and especially of Catholic philosophy. That he was married in a Protestant Church, that his children were baptized in a Protestant Church, and that he was buried in a Protestant Church, proves nothing about his religious opinions or practices. There can be no question that those who welcomed the change in religion and those who detested it, earnest Protestants and zealous Catholics, resorted alike to the clergy of the Anglican Establishment, during many years after the accession of Elizabeth, for baptism, marriage, and burial.^ Nor is this surprising. Baptism is held by Catholics to be vaHd, if the matter and form are duly applied, whether administered by lay or cleric, Protes- tant or Papist. In marriage, the parties themselves are the ministers of the Sacrament. The Burial of the Dead is one of the corporal works of mercy which may be performed by any one. There is no evidence that Shakespeare practised the Catholic religion during ' As to this see chapter ii. of Father Sebastian Bowden's work, 2 Dr. A. W. Ward seems, therefore, ill founded when he writes {Hist, of Etiglish Drmnatic Literature, vol. ii. p. 41, note, 2nd Ed.) : " Inas- much as all Shakespeare's children were baptized at the Parish Church, there is at least no doubt as to which form of faith he professed," unless we take the word " professed " in a very restricted sense. Of course, none of Elizabeth's subjects dared openly to practise the rites of the Catholic religion. [i.] "Church Papists" 29 his lifetime. Whatever may have been his private leanings towards it, I think it probable that he occa- sionally attended the Protestant services prescribed by law. *' There was in his days," writes Mr. Simpson, "a. recognized class of Catholics called by Anglicans * Church Papists,' and by their stricter brethren, ' schismatic Catholics,' who were faithful to the Catholic creed, but would not risk absenting them- selves from Protestant worship." We must remember, however, that, as Mr. Simpson quaintly puts it, "the vagabond Bohemian life of the actor removed him from the sphere of ecclesiastical inspection. It was labour in vain to look after his religion. The companies of players were chartered libertines, tolerated panders to sinful cravings, men whose absence from Church was rather desired than disliked. Such was the official view of the stage common to Puritanical beadledom and the Anglican dignitary." The social status of actors at that period was certainly very low. It is notable that Shakespeare, when obtaining a grant of arms, caused it to be made to his father instead of to himself, although he was by far the richer man. " No prosperity," writes Mr. Simpson, "could wash out the taint of the motley ; the actor grown gentleman was still a monstrosity, something unnatural, undefined, outside the beaten track of law and custom." The only positive statement as to Shakespeare's religion that has come down to us is a note added by the Rev. Richard Davies, Rector of Saperton, in Gloucestershire, till 1 708, to the biographical notice of Shakespeare in the collection of the Rev. William 30 What was Shakespeare's Religion ? [i.] Fullman : " He dyed a Papist." The precise date of this note we do not know, but it was written subse- quently to 1688 — more than seventy years after Shakespeare's death. Nor do we know where Davies obtained the information. All we do know is that he had access to some trustworthy traditions, since he was the first to mention the connection between Shakespeare's clodpate Justice and Sir Thomas Lucy. Davies' entry is probably what Mr. Halliwell Phillipps has called it, " the casual note of a provincial hearsay." But Mr. Simpson's contention that Shakespeare's opinions were CathoHc, and " that, with such opinions, he probably would, if he had the opportunity, die a Papist," does not seem excessive. More than that we cannot say. It is to me satisfactory that we can say so much. It is pleasant that there is, at all events, some reason for thinking that he did not set out on his journey to the " undiscovered country," " unhousel'd, disappointed, unanel'd ; " that the ancient faith, whose sweetness and power he had felt and confessed in a day of trouble and of rebuke and of blasphemy, was the minister of God to him for good in his supreme hour, and brought him peace at the last. II THE MISSION OF TENNYSON (I) I PROPOSE to Speak to you this afternoon about a poet who seems to me tJie English poet of this age of ours : the poet who will, in the event, hold much the same predominant position in English literature of the nine- teenth century as Pope holds in English literature of the eighteenth century. There are perhaps only two poets who could dispute that position with Tennyson — Wordsworth and Browning. Wordsworth, I think, soared occasionally to greater heights than Tennyson ever attained — notably in his Ode ojt Immortality, and in his Ode to DtUy. But, on the other hand, he cer- tainly descended often to depths — depths of desultory drivel, I had almost said — to which Tennyson never sank. Nor are his great gifts such as to win for him a very wide circle of readers. A philosophic student of nature and of the human heart, his verse appeals to "fit audience but few." Tennyson's range — I shall have ^ This Lecture, delivered from a few notes at the London Institution on Monday, Dec. 7, 1896, is now printed from the shorthand writer's report, with such corrections as seemed necessary. 32 The Mission of Tennyson [ii.] to speak of this hereafter — was much wider. Brown- ing appears to me to sink, too frequently, much lower than Wordsworth ever sank. And a vast quantity of his poetry is hopelessly marred by want of form. I trust I shall not seem unjust to this highly-endowed man. I yield to no one in admiration of such verse as that which he has given us in Rabbi Ben Ezra and Pippa Passes. But I confess that he often reminds me of Horace's description of Lucilius. That fluent veteran, it appears, would frequently perform the feat of dictating two hundred verses " stans pede in uno," a phrase the precise meaning of which has exercised the critics a great deal, but which we may render with sufficient accuracy ** as fast as he could." And, Horace adds, as the turbid stream flowed along, there was much which one could wish away — " quum flueret lutulentus erat quod tollere velles." I confess — I hope I shall not shock any one here very much — that a good deal of Browning's verse appears to me little better than random doggrel, while the so-called philosophy which it is supposed to set forth is largely mere bombastic rhodomontade on subjects which the poet had never taken the trouble to think out. If ever there was a writer who darkened counsel by words without knowledge, it was Browning. Far otherwise is it with Tennyson. He appears to have laid to heart that most true dictum that poetry is the loftiest expression of the art of writing. " The art of writing," note : which recalls the lines of Pope — " True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, As those move easiest who have learnt to dance." [ii.] Supreme Art 33 There is not a poem of Tennyson's — or there is hardly one — which is not the result of prolonged meditation and prolonged labour : the outcome of the supreme art which veils itself in the achievement. His work is classical in the best sense of the word : classical in its nicety, purity, beauty of expression. If you take up Pope's Essay on Criticism — and I know of no more valuable aid to judgment on the subject with which it deals — and test Tennyson's work by the rules and precepts so admirably given there, you will find that they bear the test singularly well. To give one instance merely, I suppose there is no poet — I, at least, know of none — who has so felicitously carried out the rule, "the sound must seem an echo to the sense." Consider, for example, those lines in the Princess — " Sweeter thy voice ; but every sound is sweet : Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn. The moan of doves in immemorial elms, And murmuring of innumerable bees." So much must suffice to indicate, in the briefest outline, and as if by a few strokes of the pencil, some of the reasons which lead me to think that Tennyson will survive as the English poet of our century. But my concern, this afternoon, is with what he has said rather than with his way of saying it ; with his message rather than with his manner. I wish to put before you what, as it seems to me, was his chief lesson to his generation, and to the generations that should come after. 34 The Mission of Tennyson [n.] For poetry, which is really such, is something more than a pleasing play of fancy, an instrument of high intellectual enjoyment. There appears to be, at the present day, a superstition in certain quarters that poetry has nothing to do with moulding the manners and the morals of human society ; that it has no influence over the religion, the philosophy, the passions of men. That seems to me a great error. I think Joubert uttered a profound truth when he observed that poetry should be the great study of the philosopher who would really know man. Consider the poety of ancient Greece, for example. It contains the thought of a whole people. The soul — yes, and the details of the life — of the Hellenic race are there. Hence it was, I suppose, that Aristotle was led to speak of poetry as "more philosophic and more seriously true than history." It is better fitted for the exposition of the higher verities. There can be no doubt that poetry is not only the most beautiful, but also the most legiti- mate and the easiest instrument of education, in the highest sense of the word. It is the most amiable means of building up character. And this the great poets have ever felt. '* I wish to be considered a teacher or nothing," Wordsworth wrote. And assuredly such was the feeling of Tennyson. That verse of his, " Poets whose thoughts enrich the blood of the world," sums the matter up. But we may go further than that, as, indeed, the [ii.] The Prophetic Vision 35 title which I have given to this Lecture indicates : " The Mission of Tennyson." Yes ; I hold that every great poet has a mission, in the proper sense of the word. He is marked off from his fellows of the race of men by what Cicero calls, " magna et divina bona," great and divine endowments, which are distinct from temperament, from environment, from evolution, from heredity ; which you cannot sum up in a formula, or explain by analysis ; and as the highest and truest of which we must reckon what Krause calls Schauen: vision, intuition. He is a seer ; the man whose eyes are opened ; he speaks that which he knows, he testifies that which he has seen soaring in the high reason of his fancy. He speaks not of himself. Wordsworth has admirably expressed this in some lines of the Prelude — " Poets, even as Prophets, each with each Connected in a mighty scheme of truth, Have each his own peculiar faculty : Heaven's gift." These words seem to me true to the letter, and worthy of being deeply pondered. They might well supply a theme for my whole Lecture. In passing, I may point out that Wordsworth himself affords a striking illustration of them. His divine gift, his peculiar faculty it was to draw out, as no poet had drawn out before, as no poet has drawn out since, the mystic sympathy between external nature and the soul of man ; and to point to that path into the transcen- dental which we may find, by means of this, in the phenomena of the visible universe. There is, indeed, 36 The Mission of Tennyson [11.] as the old Greeks used to say, something inspired in all of us. Even ordinary virtue, which has the praise of men, is of divine inspiration, Plato teaches in the Meno. In all our best thoughts, our best works, surely we must be conscious, if we reflect, of a nonself which works with us and upon us. But it is the privilege and the peril of those gifted souls who alone can be called, in the highest sense, artists, to experience this influence in far ampler measure than the other sons of men. Hence the ancients regarded a kind of posses- sion as their distinctive note. " Divine madness," Plato calls it, and Cicero, " poetic fury." And one of the deepest thinkers of these later times writes : " The artist, however full of design he is, yet, in respect of that which is the properly objective in his production, seems to stand under the influence of a power which separates him from all other men, and compels him to declare or represent things which he himself has not completely seen through, and whose import is infinite." Do you tell me that these words of Schelling are mysticism ? I know they are. But I know, also, that they are true. And they are especially true of the poet. " Poets even as prophets." Yes ; poets are prophets, in the proper sense of the word. " Mes- sengers from the Infinite Unknown, with tidings to us direct from the Inner Fact of things." "We see not our prophets any more," lamented the Hebrew patriot at a dark period of the history of his people. A dark period, indeed : the darkest, surely, when the prophetic vision is quenched ; when the prophetic word is mute ; when not one is there that understandeth any more. [ii.] The Teacher's First Gift 37 Yes : the poets of a nation are its true prophets ; and indeed St. Paul, as you will remember, recognizes this when he speaks of one of the bards of Hellas as a prophet of their own. So a saintly man of these later days, the venerable Keble, in dedicating to Words- worth those charming volumes of Preelections, speaks of him as truly a sacred seer : " viro vere vati sacro." And with reason. Assuredly, Wordsworth is, in some respects, the highest of modern prophets. (Ill) So much may suffice to vindicate the tide of this Lecture, and to indicate the scope of it. I wish to speak this afternoon of the mission of Tennyson to his age. Now, the first gift required in any one who would teach his age is that he should understand it. Perhaps the great reason why the pulpit exercises so little influence, comparatively, among us, is that the vast majority of preachers are out of touch with the age. They occupy themselves Sunday after Sunday — to use a phrase of Kingsley's — in combating extinct Satans. Far otherwise was it with Tennyson. One of his most remarkable gifts was his acute sensibility to the intellectual and spiritual, the social and political developments of the times in which he lived. Words- worth speaks of " the many movements " of the poet's mind. Few minds, perhaps, have moved so quickly, so far, and in so many directions, as Tennyson's. Nothing human was alien from him. It has been 38 The Mission of Tennyson [11.] remarked by one of his critics, " He is at once meta- physician and physicist, sceptic and theologian, demo- crat and aristocrat, radical and royalist, fierce patriot and far-seeing cosmopolitan ; and he has revealed to the age the strange interaction of these varied charac- ters, and how the beliefs and passions of each modify, and are modified by, those of all the others." One of the most striking characteristics of the age has been the stupendous progress achieved by the physical sciences. I need not dwell upon what is so familiar. And, indeed, only an encyclopaedia could deal even with the outlines of so vast a subject. But the spirit in which the physicist works has greatly contributed to our progress in provinces of the human intellect lying outside his domain. It has impressed upon the minds of men this great truth, that every- where the way to knowledge is to go by the facts, testing, verifying, analyzing, comparing, inducting. And in proportion as this lesson has been laid to heart, by investigators of all kinds, have their researches been rich in real results. Now, with this scientific movement, so eminently characteristic of our times, Tennyson was deeply in sympathy. I do not know that he was profoundly versed, as an expert, in any branch of physical science. But he followed from the first, with the closest attention, the achievements of the masters in all its fields. And his verse teems with evidence of the completeness with which he had assimilated their teaching, and made it his own. Thus, to give one example merely, you remember those noble lines in In Memoriam, which so admirably [ii.] Loss and Gain 39 sum up the conclusion of an important chapter in geology— " There rolls the deep where grew the tree ; O Earth, what changes thou hast seen ! There where the long street roars hath been The stillness of the central sea. " The hills like shadows melt, they flow From form to form, and nothing stands ; They fade like mists, the solid lands, Like clouds they shape themselves, and go." But the vast progress of the physical sciences of which I have been speaking, and which appealed to Tennyson so powerfully, has not been unmixed gain — as he well knew. One result of it has been the establishment of a sort of dogmatism of physicists, not less oppressive than the old dogmatism of theologians. There has been a tendency, and more than a tendency, to assert that outside the boundaries of physical science we can know nothing ; that its methods are the only methods of arriving at truth ; a tendency to restrict our ideas to generalizations of phenomena, to erect experimental observation into the one criterion of certitude, to treat mental and moral problems as mere questions of physiology : in a word, to regard the laws of matter as the sole laws. And this has issued in the effacement, to a very great extent, of the true idea of law from the popular mind. Let me explain what I mean. And here I would beg of you to favour me with your closest attention. For what I am immediately about to say — though I shall employ the simplest and least technical language 40 The Mission of Tennyson [n.] that the subject allows — will not be so easy to follow as a leading article in a newspaper, or a page in a novel. If, then, we keep strictly within the domain of physics, we have no right to speak of law at all. The mere physicist cannot get beyond ascertained sequences and co-ordinations of phenomena. A distinctive characteristic of law is necessity. And necessity — the notion we express by the word " must " — has no place in pure physics. Its place is taken by the word ** is." In strictness, what the physicist calls natural laws, are merely hypotheses which have gradually won their way into general credit, by explaining all the facts known to us, by satisfying every test applied to them. They have not the character of absolute certainty. Only those laws are absolutely or metaphysically certain which are stamped upon all being, and there- fore upon the human intellect : which are the very conditions of thought, because they are the conditions under which all things and all beings, even the Being of Beings, the Absolute and Eternal Himself, exist. I am far from denying — indeed, I strenuously affirm — that there is a sense in which necessity may be pre- dicated of physical laws. But for that sense — nay, for the very notion of necessity — we must quit the proper bounds of physical science : we must pass to an order of verities transcending the physical ; to what Aristotle called TO, ixera tol vaLKa, to metaphysics ; that is to say, to supersensuous realities, to the world lying beyond the visible and tangible universe. I need not go further into that now. I have said enough for my present purpose, which is that every physical truth is [ii.] A Dreary Dogmatism 41 necessarily connected with — or rather takes for granted — some metaphysical principle. Law is of the will and of the intellect. And will and intellect are not the objects of the physical sciences. ** That which doth assign unto everything the kind, that which doth moderate the force and power, that which doth appoint the form and measure of working — the same we term, a Law," says Hooker, summing up, in his judicious way, the Aristotelian and scholastic teaching on the matter. But the dreary dogmatism of a certain school of physicists has brought this august conception into discredit. I say " dreary dogmatism," for even the most highly endowed of the school which I have in view are open to this charge. To speak of one of the most considerable of them, for instance ; the late Professor Huxley, so admirably clear and cogent and convincing when dealing with subjects within his own domain, becomes amazingly confused and incoherent and depressing in discussing purely philosophical questions. The general result of this dogmatism has been to diffuse widely a belief that there is nothing in the universe but matter and force, or, at all events, nothing that we can know ; and that ascertained sequences or co-ordinations of phenomena are the only laws we can attain to. Hence it has come to pass that laws which are really such, have, in the eyes of a vast multitude, lost their true character. Thus we are told by a writer much in credit, that the laws of ethics are merely generalizations from experiences of utility : a doctrine the effect of which is to unlaw them — if I may borrow a word from Carlyle — for experiences of utility cannot 42 The Mission of Tennyson [n.] possibly do more than counsel : they can lay no necessity upon us to do what they indicate as desirable. But the essence of a moral law is necessity ; is what Kant calls its categorical imperative, indicated by the word " ought." On the other hand, things are dignified as laws which are not laws at all in the proper sense of the word. For example, what are called laws of political economy are mere statements of probabilities of action by free agents, and imply no necessity. I beg of you not for one moment to imagine that in insisting upon this matter I am indulging in mere logomachy, in unprofitable disputation about words. The question is concerning the idea of law — an idea of the utmost practical importance. The doctrine that ''the universe is governed, in all things great and small, by law, and that law not the edict of mere will, but identical with reason, or its result," is no mere abstract speculation, that men may hold or reject, and be none the better or the worse for holding or rejecting it. It is a doctrine fraught with the most momentous consequences in all relations of human life. And that because of a reason set forth by Euripides more than two thousand years ago : I borrow Bishop Westcott's version of his words — " For 'tis by law we have our faith in Gods, And live with certain rules of right and wrong." Law is, as Aquinas calls it, " a function of reason." Lose the true idea of law, and you derationalize the universe and reduce it to mere senseless mechanism. You lay the axe to the root of man's moral life here. [ii.] The True Conception of Law 43 You shut off the vision of the Great Hereafter of which man's moral Hfe here is the earnest and the pledge. And then is realized the picture which the great ethical poet of the last century has put before us — " Philosophy, that leaned on Heaven before, Shrinks to her second cause and is no more. Religion, blushing, veils her sacred fires, And, unawares, morality expires. Nor public flame, nor private dares to shine, Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine. Lo, thy dread empire, chaos ! is restored ; Light dies before thy uncreating word. Thy hand, great Anarch, lets the curtain fall, And universal darkness buries all. ' (IV) Now, it seems to me to have been Tennyson's mission to meet this tendency of the age of which I have been speaking by witnessing to, by insisting on, the true conception of law. That was the great work given him to do, in his day and generation, and to do in his own manner ; not as a philosopher, not as a critic, not as a preacher, but as a poet. It is the lot of poets " to learn in suffering what they teach in song." Tennyson, as I have said, was emphatically of his age. And the physiological speculations wherewith phy- sicists invaded the province of philosophy, and broke the dogmatic slumber of ancient orthodoxies, at one time troubled and perplexed him. But it may be truly said of him, as he said of his dead friend — 44 The Mission of Tennyson [n.] " He fought his doubts, and gathered strength, He would not make his reason blind, He faced the spectres of the mind, And laid them ; thus, he came at length " To find a firmer faith his own : And Power was with him in the night, Which makes the darkness and the light, And dwells not in the light alone." Let me indicate briefly how he found that firmer faith. Tennyson possessed not only a most keen and sensitive mind, tremulously susceptible to the intel- lectual movements of his age ; he possessed also the piercing vision, the direct intuition of the Prophet into the constitution and needs of human nature. He felt that the mechanical philosophy offered to him in the name of physical science was utterly inadequate to life. And he turned from the macrocosm to the microcosm ; from the universe without him to the universe within him. He found in the laws of man's spiritual and moral being the solution of " the riddle of this painful earth." On those laws he based his Theistic belief, his ethical creed, and his political principles. Let me indicate this in the barest outline — it is all that is possible to me now — leaving you to fill in the details, if you think well to do so, by your own study of his works. (V) First, then, as to Tennyson's Theism. A thinker contemporary with him, but belonging to a very [ii.] Atheism and Agnosticism 45 different school, has remarked, "It is indeed a great question whether Atheism is not as philosophically- consistent with the phenomena of the physical world, taken by themselves, as a doctrine of a creative and governing power." The term " Agnosticism " had not been invented when these words were spoken by John Henry Newman before the University of Oxford more than half a century ago. It appears to me to meet a distinct want. Littr6 defines an Atheist as one who does not believe in God, But the tendency of late years has been to narrow the meaning of the word ; to confine it to those who expressly deny the Theistic conception. The word " Agnosticism " has been coined to describe the mental attitude of doubt, suspension of judgment, nescience regarding that conception. It applies more correctly than the word " Atheism " to a class, considerable not only from their numbers, but for their intellectual endowments and their virtues. It appeared to Tennyson that to shut us up in physical science, to confine our knowledge to matter and force, and ascertained sequences or co-ordinations of phe- nomena, is to doom us to Agnosticism. You remember the verses in which he has told us this. Familiar as they are, I shall venture to quote them. For they are as beautiful as they are familiar. Custom cannot stale them. " That which we dare invoke to bless, Our dearest faith, our ghastliest doubt, He, They, All, One, within, without, The Power in darkness, whom we guess. " I found Him not in world or sun, Or eagle's wing, or insect's eye, 46 The Mission of Tennyson [ir.] Or in the questions men maj'^ try, The petty cobwebs we have spun. " If e'er when faith had fallen asleep, I heard a voice ' Believe no more,' And heard an ever breaking shore, Which tumbled in the godless deep. " A voice within the breast would melt, The freezing reason's colder part, And like a man in wrath, the heart Rise up and answer, ' I have felt.' " You see, he appeals to the laws of man's spiritual nature for light upon this momentous question ; those first great spiritual laws, the denial of which is the essence of Agnosticism. Tennyson discerned with Spinoza that the primordial law of being is being ; that the fundamental want of man is to prove, affirm, augment, his own life. " 'Tis hfe, whereof our nerves scant. Oh, life, not death for which we pant, More life and fuller that I want." Man lives under the law of progress which is the striving after perfection, and of which the highest expression is the quest of the All-Perfect. Hence those " cethereal hopes," as Wordsworth speaks, which are part and parcel of us; "those mighty hopes which make us men," Tennyson calls them, in words which seem to me true to the letter. The intellect, as Plato teaches, testifies that the ideas of truth, goodness, beauty, justice, belong to an order of absolute principles, anterior and superior to man, and is compelled by an architectonic law of its own being, to refer the complete [ii.] The Desire of the Infinite 47 realization of those principles to the Ultimate Reality, which it therefore contemplates as To 'Epwfjievov the Altogether Lovely, the Object of all desire. Towards that Supreme Object, human nature tends ; necessarily tends by virtue of the law written on the fleshly tables of the heart. Despite the limitations of his being, man tends towards the Infinite, because the Infinite is in him. The desire of the Infinite is, I say, a law under which he is born. He may resist, he may violate that law, as he may resist and may violate any other law of his being; for the eternal hands that made and fashioned him, while — "... binding nature fast in fate. Left free the human will." This is his princely and perilous prerogative, the very essence of his personality, in virtue of which he is " man and master of his fate ; " this is — "... that main miracle that thou art thou ; With power on thine own act, and on the world." But the law, whether obeyed or disobeyed, remains — witnessing to the Sovereign Good, the Everlasting Righteousness, the Supreme Object of Rational Desire which is the True End of man. Through " a dust of systems and of creeds," this vision of this Ineffable Reality shone out for Tennyson undimmed ; the light of life to him, without which it were better to — "... drop headlong in the jaws Of vacant darkness, and to cease." 4^ The Mission of Tennyson [n.] (VI) Such was Tennyson's Theism. But it is on this great spiritual law of progress that his ethical creed also rested. The surest law of man's nature we must account it, according to that saying of Plato, " I find nothing more certain than this — that 1 7nust be as good and noble as I can." " Must." Necessity is laid upon us. This is that law of which Butler speaks : *' The law of virtue that we are born under." Tennyson has formulated it in his own way as being to — " Move upward, working out the beast, And let the ape and tiger die." I find Tennyson peculiarly and completely English in his cast of thought. He is distinguished, in the high- est degree, by what I regard as the dominant English characteristic — reverence for duty as the supreme law of life : the subordination of all ideals to the moral ideal. You remember how in one of his earliest poems — Qifione — he tells us — " Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control. These three alone lead life to sovereign power." How he indicates us the rule of life — " . . . to live by law, Acting the law we live by without fear, And because right is right, to follow right." The thought was always with him. But in the Princess, in the Palace of Art, and the Vision of Sin, he brings before us this law of life : a law in the proper [ii.] Conscience made Flesh 49 sense transcendental, as transcending the limits of space and time : a law of absolute universality, as are all moral laws that are strictly such : valid for all rational beings in all worlds. Again, in the Idylls of the King, this law is the dominant thought. Arthur, as I remember a famous German critic once remarked to me, is conscience made flesh and dwelling among us. And the primary precept of the heroic monarch to his glorious fellowship of the Table Round is to "reverence their conscience as their king." And, here I would remark in passing, how finely Tennyson has vindicated that higher law of the relations of the sexes, wrought into our civilization by Christianity, and embellished by chivalry, which contemporary Materialism burns to abrogate. With Tennyson the passion of sexual love, refined and idealized — human- ized in a word — is a chief instrument of our ethical life : its office — ' . . . not only to keep down the base in man, But teach high thoughts and amiable words, And love of truth, and all that makes a man." (VII) Once more. Those great ethical laws which dominate private life should, Tennyson held, be the laws of public life also ; a truth much dimmed just now in the popular mind : nay, may we not say, well- nigh effaced from it } I was mentioning to an accom- plished friend, a short time ago, that I had it in 5© The Mission of Tennyson [ii.] intention^ to write a book on First Principles in Politics: a sort of sketch of, or introduction to, the laws of human society. He replied, " My dear fellow, there are no first principles in politics, there are no laws of human society ; it is all a matter of expediency, of utility, of convention, of self-interest." This is an expression of that lawlessness, that loss of the idea of law, whereof I spoke just now. And its last develop- ment in the public order is the doctrine which substi- tutes the caprice of the multitude for what Shakespeare calls "the moral laws of nature and of nations." Tennyson discerned, clearly enough, that this doctrine of the absolute and indefeasible authority of what is called "the people," that is, of the numerical majority of the adult males of a country, is really a doctrine of anarchy ; that it means the triumph of the passions over the rational will ; whereas the true theory of the state, whatever its form, means the triumph of the rational will over the passions. I cannot go into this matter further on the present occasion. But I may observe that Tennyson's political teaching from first to last seems to me perfectly consistent. I know of no difference of principle between Locksley Hall and Locksley Hall Sixty Years After. At the end as at the beginning of his career, Tennyson was the loyal worshipper of Freedom, which he justly terms — "... leather of the lawless crown As of the lawless crowd." ^ These words were spoken in 1896. The book has since been published, and I may note that some portion of the argument as to the true idea of law pursued in this Lecture finds place in its First Chapter. [ii.] The Special Danger of the Age 5 i Freedom, the very first condition of which is servitude to law. The years as they went by stripped him of many of his illusions, but they strengthened his grasp upon his principles. This then was, as it seems to me, the Mission of Tennyson : to bring home to us the supremacy and universality of law. The exaltation of the materialist and positive element in life, the depreciation of the spiritual and moral element, is the special danger of our age : a danger arising out of its special greatness. There is one and only one antidote to this danger ; the apprehension of law issuing from the nature of things which is rational ; the first fact in the universe, though invisible, impalpable, imponderable : most real, indeed, because most spiritual. It seems to me that Tennyson has given us the groundwork of a philosophy of life which will never be overthrown, because it is based upon this eternal adamant. And his verse is a fitting vehicle for his august message. The dignity of his diction corresponds with the dignity of his doctrine. He possesses, in ample measure, that charm to quell the commonplace which we find in the great classics, and notably in the foremost poets of Greece and Rome. His poetry is a perpetual Sursum Corda — ever lifting up our hearts to what is noble and pure, and to the Eternal Source of all nobleness and all purity. He has told us in lines unsurpassed, as Taine thought, by any writer since Goethe, for calm and majesty, how " The old order changeth, giving place to the new." Yes ; the old order changeth. We live amid "a dust of systems and of creeds." 52 The Mission of Tennyson [n.] Much has gone during the last hundred years which men once thought durable as the world itself. Much more is going. What is the prospect ? To Tennyson one thing at all events was clear : that neither worthy life for the individual, nor social health for the body politic, is possible unless we live by something higher than ascertained sequences or co-ordinations of phe- nomena ; unless we appeal to some holier spring of action than the desire of a remembered pleasure. "This ever changing world of changeless law," he sings in one of his poems. Amid the constant flux of all things, the law of the universe does not change. It is necessary, immutable, absolute, and eternal. Nor does the power of man's will change : " A power to make This ever changing world of circumstance, / In changing, chime with never changing law." Ill A GRAND OLD PAGAN (I) There are few more striking personalities in the literary history of the nineteenth century than Walter Savage Landor. There are few more interesting volumes — to me, at least — than the eight in which Mr. Forster has given us his life and works. Not all his life, indeed. Some of the more disagreeable incidents of it have, very properly, been omitted or attenuated. And not all his works ; for his Latin poems — some of them of extreme beauty — no place has been found in this collected edition, and some English compositions of, at all events, much vigour, are missing. But Mr. Forster, when he published his volumes, more than a quarter of a century ago, doubtless thought he had brought together as much of Landor as the public would want. And the event has proved that he was right. Their purchasers were not very numerous. Their readers were, probably, fewer still. I suppose most people who know anything about Landor owe their knowledge to the little work con- tributed by Mr. Sidney Colvin to the series of English 54 A Grand Old Pagan [m.] Men of Letters. An admirable little work it is, written with the sympathy which is the first condition of success in such an undertaking, and with the scholar- ship of which its accomplished author has made such full proof upon so many other occasions. Admirable, too, is the volume of Selections, also by Mr. Colvin, in the Golden Treasury series. But " melius est petere fontes quam sectari rivulos." And I should be curious to know how many readers there are of Landor's own volumes. Yet Mr. Colvin does not exaggerate when he says, " If there is any English writer who may be compared to Pascal for power and compression, for incisive strength and imamnative breadth too-ether in general reflections, and for the combination of con- ciseness with splendour in their utterance, it is certainly Landor. " True Landorians," he adds, " may be counted on the fingers." I do not know whether I may claim to be numbered among that elect. But I remember vividly how I came under Landor's spell when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge, more years ago than I care to recall ; and whenever I take up a volume of his now — as I frequently do — the spell is upon me as strongly as of old. Hence I am glad of the present opportunity to write something about him. I shall first speak of the Man, Then I shall discuss the claims of the Literary Artist. And lastly I shall endeavour to indicate the singularly high place which, in my judgment, he holds as a Critic. [ill.] Storm and Tempest 55 (II) Landor enjoyed the doubtful blessing of a very long life. Born in 1775, he survived till 1864, wearily enduring, when his fourscore years were passed, the doom which, in his own pathetic words, generally overtakes those who exceed the usual space of existence, "... the loss Of half their faculties, and half their friends." From first to last his life was passed in storm and tempest. He had to leave his school at Rugby for libelling the headmaster in Latin verse. He went to Oxford, where he was known as "the mad Jacobin," and was rusticated for firing a charge of shot — " by way of a practical joke " — into rooms contiguous to his own. Next he quarrelled with his father — a good and indulgent father, apparently — and turned his back upon the paternal abode, as he declared, "for ever." When he came into his fortune, on his father's death in 1805, ^6 purchased the Llanthony estate in Wales, and, in no short time, was engaged in bitter feuds with all his tenantry and all his neighbours, and, as his biographer expresses it, " turned the whole country side into a hostile camp." Then, after being involved in a labyrinth of lawsuits, he had to quit the country, a sadder but not a wiser man, leaving behind him his young bride, whom he had married after a few hours' acquaintance at a ball, and who found him the most trying of spouses. This was in 1814. In a. year 56 A Grand Old Pagan [m.] Mrs. Landor, with a praiseworthy sense of wifely duty, determined to make another trial of conjugal life, and joined her husband at Tours. Then they went to Italy, and dwelt for three years at Como. Their residence there was brought to an end by what Mr. Colvin calls "a characteristic incident." "An Italian poet, one Monti, had written some disparaging verses against England. Landor instantly retorted with his schoolboy weapons, and printed some opprobrious Latin verses on Monti, who summoned him before the local courts on a charge of libel. Thereupon he wrote to threaten the magistrate with a thrashing. For this he was ordered to quit the country." He next estab- lished himself at Pisa, where he abode for three years in comparative peace. Thence he went to Florence. The eight years he spent there were full of quarrels with the British Embassy, the City Magistracy, and indeed with all the people of the place, for whose character and habits he conceived, and liberally ex- pressed, a sovereign contempt. His landlord, a noble- man of ancient lineage, had the misfortune specially to displease him, and was violently expelled from his dwelling. In 1829 he left Florence for Fiesoie, where, through the kindness of a friend of large fortune and literary tastes, he acquired the Villa Gherardesca, in the grounds of which was " The Valley of the Lilies," so pleasantly described by Boccaccio — one of his very favourite authors — in the Decameron. The begrinninof of his residence in this delightful spot was signalized by a violent quarrel with the Tuscan police, whom, on inviting their assistance for the recovery of some lost [hi.] His Last Libel 57 plate, he had assured of his profound conviction that they were radically dishonest and hopelessly incom- petent. It was the beginning of a trouble which ended in a police order expelling him from Tuscany, an order which, however, was practically cancelled through the intervention of the Grand Duke. He then enoraored in a dispute with the owner of the neighbouring property about a right of water, which — a threatened duel being obviated by the judicious intervention of friends — resulted in protracted litigation, " the case being tried and retried in all the courts of Tuscany." In 1837 his home suffered another disruption. His wife, he said, made it unendurable to him. But the testimony of his own brother, who was devoted to him, shows that it was he, rather, who made the home unendurable to his wife. He came to England, and, after wandering about for some time, settled alone at Bath (1837). There "he found friends after his own heart, and lived for twenty years, passing, with little abatement of strength, from elderly to patriarchal age." Legal proceedings consequent upon a libel of a peculiarly atrocious kind, published by him against a lady who had offended him, caused him abruptly to quit that city in 1858. He betook himself to Florence, where he remained till his death in 1864. Among his latest visitors was Mr. Swinburne. Scholars will remember the singularly beautiful Greek verses pre- fixed to Atalanta in Caledon, in which the young poet — whose high gifts were just beginning to receive recognition — celebrated the memory of the deceased master. Hardly less beautiful is the single sentence 58 A Grand Old Pagan [m.] of English prose in which "with equal affection, reverence, and regret " he inscribes in front of his work "the highest of contemporary names." Such, viewed from one side, is the brief epitome of Landor's life. But, curiously enough, it was a side the very existence of which he seemed never to suspect. I know of no more curious exhibition of self-ignorance than that which is afforded by his verses summing up his long career, as he conceived of it, when he was nearing its end — " I strove with none, for none was worth my strife ; Nature I loved ; and next to nature, art. I warmed both hands before the fire of life ; It sinks, and I am ready to depart." " I Strove with none." He strove with every one. From first to last his attitude towards the human race was that of Goliath of Gath : " Give me a man, that we may fight together." I remember a lifelong friend of his, now no more, who said to me, " One of the things I am proudest of is that Landor and I never quarrelled ; it was not for want of readiness on his part." An Achillean man we must account him ; wrath the very essence of him ; impiger^ iracundus, inexorabilis, acer. From this point of view we can hardly regard him as completely sane. But, indeed, is any man completely sane ? Is there not profound truth in the Stoic paradox Omnes insanire f To pursue that inquiry now would take us too far. Certain it is, however, that high intellectual gifts are ever accompanied by some want of intellectual balance. Pope well puts it — [in.] " Das Ewig Weibliche " 59 " Great wits are sure to madness near allied, And thin partitions do their bounds divide." Landor's irascibility was unquestionably abnormal. The Italians used to say of him, " Tutti gV Inglesi sono pazzi ; ma questo poi ! " But beneath this morbid irascibility there lay many noble qualities and the kindest of hearts. The other three lines of his verse which I have just cited paint him veraciously. He was a true lover of Nature, and that in the widest sense. For her inanimate majesty and beauty he had a tender, a sort of personal affection, as his writings supply ample evidence. He delighted in children, and was delightful to them. "His feeling for the feminine," as Mr. Colvin demurely puts it, was ever strong. " My imagination," he wrote to Robert Browning, quite late in life, " has always been with the women, I mean the young, for I cannot separate that adjective from that substantive." I have no doubt that Browning echoed the sentiment, and thought it did his corre- spondent honour. Anyhow, from first to last, Landor fully exemplified the truth of the words, " Das ewig weibliche zeiht uns hinan." To the very end, talking nonsense to a pretty girl seemed to him the most delightful of occupations. Of the lower animals he was a great lover. Cruelty to them was, in his eyes, the chief of sins, if not the only sin. Field sports he gave up early in life. "It is hard to take away what we cannot give," he wrote, "and life is a pleasant thing — at least to birds. No doubt the young ones say tender things to one another, and even the old ones do not dream of death." During his eight sunny 6o A Grand Old Pagan [m.] years at Fiesole we hear much in his letters of "the great housedog Parigi, the cat Cincirillo, and of the difficulty of keeping him from the birds ; of a tame marten, for whom, when he died, his master composed a feeling epitaph ; of a tame leveret, and all manner of other pets." And what Landorian has not pictured to himself Pomero, the small white Pomeranian dog, with the eager bright eyes, who was the cherished com- panion and consoler of the old man's loneliness at Bath ? There are hardly any of his letters written of that period without mention of Pomero. Take as a specimen the following extract from one addressed by him to Mr. Forster, after a brief absence from his house : " At six last night I arrived, and instantly visited Pomero en pension. His joy on seeing me amounted to madness. His bark was a scream of delight. He is now sitting on my head, superintending all I write, and telling me to give his love." "With Pomero," writes Mr. Sidney Colvin, in a charming page — which I must unfortunately abridge — " Landor would prattle in English and Italian, as affectionately as a mother with her child. Pomero was his darling, the wisest and most beautiful of his race. The two together, master and dog, were to be encountered daily on their walks about Bath and its vicinity, and there are many who perfectly well remember them : the majestic old man, looking not a whit the less impressive for his rusty and dusty brown suit, his bulging boots, his rumpled linen, or his battered hat ; and his noisy, soft-haired, quick-glancing, inseparable companion." [in.] Trees and Flowers 6i Hardly less dear to Landor than his animal pets were trees and flowers. One of his earliest projects was to plant two million cedars on his estate at Llan- thony. He would not fell a tree or pluck a flower unnecessarily. " Old trees," he writes, in his grand style, " are the only things that money cannot command. Rivers leave their beds, run into cities, and traverse mountains for it ; obelisks and arches, palaces and temples, amphitheatres and pyramids rise up like ex- halations at its bidding ; even the free spirit of man — the only great thing on earth — crouches and cowers in its presence. It passes away and vanishes before venerable trees." And among his verses there are few more beautiful than those in which he has expressed his feeling about flowers. I agree with Mr. Colvin that their " delicacy and grave unobtrusive sweetness " have seldom been surpassed. Here are a few of them — " 'Tis, and ever was, my wish and way To let all flowers live freely, and all die (Whene'er their Genius bids their souls depart) Among their kindred in their native place. I never pluck the rose : the violet's head Hath shaken with my breath upon its bank And not reproached it : the ever-sacred cup Of the pure lily hath between my hands Felt safe, unsoiled, nor lost one grain of gold. Nor is this mere poetic rhapsody. He meant it. As Charles Dickens observed, "He always said and wrote his mind." There is a story worth recalling in this connection, of his having upon one occasion, at Fiesole, thrown his cook out of window in a paroxysm of wrathful displeasure. The man fell — no great 62 A Grand Old Pagan [m.] distance — upon a flowerbed. " Good God ! " exclaimed Landor, " I forgot the violets ! " There is just one word more which I must say upon Landor's self-portraiture. He describes himself, in the verses quoted above, as loving art next to nature. And this is true. He did love art well — but not wisely. Here, as elsewhere, his practical judgment was at fault. I remember once expressing my admira- tion of a beautiful picture in the collection of that friend of his and mine mentioned just now — the one friend with whom he never quarrelled — who replied, " Yes, it is a charming little bit : Landor gave it to me; it is the only good picture he ever had." He was busy buying pictures all his life. But he seemed quite incapable of distinguishing a daub from a masterpiece. In his dealings with the dealers, as with the rest of the world, he displayed a singular incapacity for seeing facts. He was as far removed as is well conceivable from the Greek conception of the ijypovLixo'; : rather he was what Sophocles calls airopo'i eVl (j>p6viiJia. His claim to have " warmed both hands before the fire of life " may, in a sense, be admitted. But it must be added that he sadly burnt his fingers in the process. And, no doubt, he was ready to depart when he wrote those lines. He confronted the King of Terrors with Stoic fortitude. He, too, had the conviction of the Roman poet, " Non omnis moriar." That the work accomplished by him in his sixty-eight years of literary activity would last as long as the English language, he never doubted. Of that work I go on to speak. [ill.] Time's Balance 63 (III) With his merely critical work I shall deal later on. Just now let us consider his contributions to pure literature. It is a remark of his own : " The balance in which works of the highest merit are weighed, vibrates long before it is finally adjusted : even the most judicious men have formed injudicious opinions of the living." The balance in which Time has been weighing Landor 's works has been vibrating for half a century. Perhaps it is now finally adjusted. At all events, this much is certain — that Landor holds a place assured and unique in English literature ; the place anticipated in his own prophetic words : ** I shall have as many readers as I desire to have in other times than ours : I shall dine late, but the dining-room will be well lighted ; the guests few and select." Landor here displays a self-knowledge in which he was usually wanting, and a sounder judgment than that which was exhibited by many of his saner friends ; a judgment which careful consideration of his writings amply warrants. Take his Imaginary Conversations, the most widely read, as I suppose, of his works during his lifetime. They possess in ample measure that " emphatic and decla- matory eloquence " which Mr. Colvin claims for them. They are lighted up by the coruscations of that non imitabile fulmen which Southey describes Landor as wielding. They abound in passages which are most admirable specimens of majestic and opulent English. 64 A Grand Old Pagan [m.] They are pregnant with thought, clothed in the tersest and most expressive diction. The mellow wisdom of the antique world breathes through them. But all this appeals to the highly cultivated few. Is there in them that creative energy and that vivid picturesque- ness which appeal to the uncultivated and half-cultivated many ? Some of the most considerable critics among his contemporaries thought there was. Thus Julius Hare affirmed that they contain creations comparable only to Sophocles or Shakespeare ; and Hazlitt, that the historical figures they evoked were transformed with nothing short of the very truth and spirit of history itself. Well, we may now confidently say that Julius Hare and Hazlitt were wrong. Landor's genius was not creative, neither was it historical. I remember a highly gifted and highly irreverent undergraduate at Cambridge likening the Imaginary Conversalions to the talk of the ventriloquist who converses with him- self in the Punch and Judy show. It is not a similitude which I should use ; but, at all events, it adumbrates a truth. Landor's speakers all think the same kind of thoughts and employ the same kind of language. There is no real give and take in their utterances ; there is no dramatic element. It could not be otherwise with Landor's intense egoism, or, as Mr. Forster euphemistically puts it, " strong sense of his own individuality." The speaker, whether he bears the name of Cicero or Pericles, of Plato or Diogenes, of Penn or Peterborough, is really Landor, and does but develop the characteristics of Landor's [ill.] The Imaginary Conversations 65 mind. Now, Landor's mind was cast in an antique mould. He was, as I shall have occasion to observe later on, a classic born out of due time ; and hence, no doubt, it is that, as Wordsworth remarked, his classical conversations are the best. The modern ones are inferior just in proportion to their modernity. Take, for example, the conversation between Pitt and Canning, which I could wish, for Landor's sake, had been consigned by his editor to oblivion. Even the conversation between Bossuet and the Duchesse de Fontagnes, one of Louis XIV.'s girl mistresses, which Mr. Forster so much admires, seems to me frigid and forced. How false a note is that which he strikes when he makes her say, " His Majesty held my hand and sat still, when he might have romped with me and kissed me." Romped ! Imagine the Grand Monarque, even in his small clothes and without his periwig, romping ! And that at the mature age which he had attained, when he had made Marie Angelique a Duchess. I freely concede, or, rather, strenuously maintain, that everywhere, or almost everywhere, in the Im- aginary Conversations, there are fine passages. For example, in this of Bossuet and the Duchesse de Fontagnes, now before me, how austerely grand are some sentences which are put into the Bishop's mouth : — " We say that our days are few, and saying it we say too much. Marie Angelique, we have but one ; the past are not ours, and who can promise us the future ? This in which we live is ours only while we live in it. The next moment may F 66 A Grand Old Pagan [m.] strike it from us. The next sentence I would utter may be broken and fall between us. The beauty which has made a thousand hearts to beat at one instant, at the succeeding has been without pulse and colour, without admirer, friend, com- panion, follower. She by whose eyes the march of victory shall have been directed, whose name shall have animated armies at the extremities of the earth, drops into one of its crevices and minsrles with its dust." Very fine indeed is this, though it is not Bossuet. It is then, I think, precisely because Landor's genius is neither creative nor historic, that he will always appeal to a small circle of readers, as he him- self anticipated — " fit audience, but few." I have been speaking specially of his Imaginary Conversations, but the same judgment holds good of all his longer poems. The most considerable of these is Gebir, of which Southey, and, what is more significant, Shelley, were enthusiastic admirers. And so were Words- worth, Charles Lamb, and many other of the greatest of that time. I wonder how many people now admire it as they did, and prove their admiration by perusing it as they did. In such matters one must judge for oneself and think for oneself. The authority of great names avails little. For myself then, I frankly own that, very sensible as I am of the exquisite work- manship in Gebir, I have always found it difficult to read. Nor does the difficulty decrease with every fresh perusal. Lately, I put the poem into the hands of a friend who has a fine taste in English literature, and he read it carefully and conscientiously through. " What do you make of it ? " I asked, when he had [hi.] Nude Statues 67 finished. " I am searching for an epithet," he replied. I suggested " Magniloquent." " Well," he rejoined, " I should rather say stilted ; but it contains noble lines." No doubt it does contain noble lines. " Fine- sounding passages," to quote Charles Lamb, there are in all Landor's longer poems. There are, indeed, many such. But there is no beating pulse of life in them ; there is no strongly impressed and strongly impressing character. Landor's own theory was that in poetry the passions should be " naked, like the heroes and the gods." He has laboured with much skill so to represent them, and, in a way, he has succeeded. But he has given us nude statues. They are most carefully chiselled after the noblest classical originals ; but they are cold, they are colourless, they are not flesh and blood ; and so they appeal only to the few — to those who possess minds cultivated and prepared to appreciate them : who are able to look at them in the same way as that in which trained aesthetic eyes survey and understand the Farnese Hercules or the Belvedere Apollo. But if from Landor's longer poems we turn to the shorter, our judgment, as it seems to me, must be very different. In these less ambitious productions, he has attained a very high degree of excellence ; and it is a kind of excellence which may be appreciated without the special culture needed to appreciate such a work as Gebir. I do not think he has been surpassed by any English poet in what may properly be called eidyllia ; epigrams, the old Greeks termed them ; ** carvings, as it were, on ivory or gems," to use his 68 A Grand Old Pagan [m.] own most happy phrase. I will give a few specimens of them. What can be prettier in its way than this to a child ? — " Pout not, my little Rose, but take With dimpled fingers, cool and soft. This posy when thou art awake. Mama has worn my posies oft. •* This is the first I offer thee, Sweet baby ! Many more shall rise From trembling hands, from bended knee, Mid hopes and fears, mid doubts and sighs. " Before that hour my eyes will close, But grant me, Heaven, this one desire In mercy, may my little Rose Never be grafted on a briar." Great favourites of mine are the following verses on Catullus : — " Tell me not what too well I know About the Bard of Sirmio ; Yes, in Thalia's son. Such strains there are as when a Grace Sprinkles another's laughing face With nectar, and runs on." In a different vein does the muse celebrate the Duke of York's statue : — " Enduring is the bust of bronze. And thine, O flower of George's sons, Stands high above all laws and duns. As honest men as ever cart Conveyed to Tyburn, took thy part. And raised thee up to where thou art." And now I will give four lines which I think Landor never surpassed ; a regal compliment paid in perfect verse : — [ill.] Eidyllia 69 " IVky do I smile ? To hear you say, * Ojie vionth, and theji the shortest day ! ' The shortest, vvhate'er month it be, Is the bright day you pass with me." Regal, too, are the complimentary strains in which he celebrates Lady Hamilton, though they exhibit less completely the ars celare artem : — " Long have the Syrens left their sunny coast, The Muse's voice, heard later, soon was lost. Of all the Graces, one remains alone, Gods call her Emma, mortals Hamilton." I must not omit to cite certain verses on Lord Melville, — they were probably suggested, I may observe, by a saying of *' Touchstone " in As You Like It — which Mr. Colvin considers the most weighty and pointed of all Landor's epigrams : — " God's laws declare Thou shalt not swear, By aught in Heaven above or earth below. ' Upon my honour,' Melville cries. He swears and lies. Does Melville then break God's commandment ? No." I will next quote something of another kind, which may help, so to speak, to take away the taste of this sacra indignatio. Was anything more exquisite in its kind ever written than the following inscription for a statue of Love ? — " Mild may he be, and innocent to view. Yet who on earth can answer for him ? You Who touch the little God, mind what you do. " Say not that none has cautioned you ; although Short be his arrow, slender be his bow. The king Apollo never wrought such woe." 70 A Grand Old Pagan [m.] The last example of Landor's smaller verse which I can give, and I have a special reason for giving it, is a quite perfect translation — so it seems to me — of a well-known passage in Moschus : — " Ah ! when the mallow in the croft dies down, Or the pale parsley or the crisped anise, Again they grow, another year they flourish. But we, the great, the valiant and the wise, Once covered over in the hollow earth. Sleep a long, dreamless, unawakening sleep." I remember a critic who enjoyed a great reputation — he is now no more, and I will not mention his name — complaining of Landor's ** laboured artificiality." It is a most unhappy phrase. Landor's style is in the truest sense natural. It is part and parcel of him ; the expression of the personal qualities specific to him, that is, of his genius. It is his proper Hterary manner : and manner is the transpiration of character. He wrote as he did because he was what he was. Steeped in the literature of Greece and Rome — especially Rome — he thinks after the manner of that antique world, and writes in its manner. It was more real to him than the world in which he lived. In extreme old age, when his memory was failing, he would sometimes be at a loss for an English word, but never for a Latin one. Mr. Forster speaks happily when he says : " In Landor we have antiquity itself rather than the most scholarly and successful presentment of it." I cited, just now, his English rendering of certain very beau- tiful verses of Moschus. I will now ask the reader whose Greek is sufficient for these things, to compare it with the original. [in.] A Faint Possible Theism 71 Ay, aX, Tal fioKaxai fiev iirav Kara Kairov 6\wvTai, "H to x^wpa a4\iua, t6, t' evdaAes ovKov &vriQov, "fffrepov av (iiovTi, Kol els eras aWo (pvovTi' ""AfM/ies S', 01 fMeya.\oi Kal Kaprepol ^ ffo